Thanks to Leticia, Caely, Anjan G., Liz, Bradley K., and Kelsey P. for their patience.  Our SocImages email inbox is a hot mess, and sometimes things fall through the cracks.  This is certainly true for the short video below, one of the responses to the “Shit Girls Say” clip that inspired a round of copycats last December.  We decided to post about it belatedly because it remains a great example of something called a microaggression.

Microaggressions are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative… slights and insults” (source).  These are often subtle.  So the recipient feels badly, but it can be difficult to explain exactly why, especially to someone who isn’t sympathetic to issues of bias.  The Microaggressions Project has hundreds, maybe thousands, of examples.

In this video, Franchesca Leigh poses as a “White girl” and says many of the things that she and other “Black girls” hear routinely.  To Leigh, these are microaggressions.  They variously trivialize and show insensitivity towards race and racism, remind the listener that she is considered different and strange, homogenize and stereotype Black people, and more…

I’ve heard critiques about both the uniforms of the beach volleyball players at this year’s Olympics in London (i.e., bikinis) and the photographic coverage of the athletes (i.e., “butt shots”).  Then yesterday eight readers — Tom Megginson, Cheryl S., Cerberus Xt, Richard D., Anna G., @sphericalfruit, @bfwriter, and @HaphazardSoc — sent us a link to a story that asked the question: “What if every Olympic sport was photographed like beach volleyball?”  More on that later.

First, I wanted to see if the rumors were true, so I googled beach vollyball and three other sports: track, diving, and gymnastics.  All involve relatively skimpy uniforms, but beach volleyball certainly stood out.  The top results included five photographs of just butts in bikini bottoms and four “cheesecake” pictures in which women are posed to look like pin-ups and volleyball is not part of the picture (all images can be clicked to get a closer view).

That may not seem like a lot but, in contrast, none of the top photos for the other three sports included butt shots or pin-up poses (with the exception of one butt shot for track, but it was of a fully-clothed man and used as a photographic device, not a source of titillation).

There’s an interesting lesson here that goes beyond the sexual objectification of women and asks “which women? and why? (because the sport is associated with the beach?) and in response to whose rules? (who is in charge of uniforms?) and to whose benefit? (the photographers, the Olympics, their corporate and media sponsors?).”

Gymnastics: 

Diving:

Track:

Part of the challenge of taking care of a blog involves keeping the archive alive.  One way to do that is to link readers to older posts they they might be interested in.  We do that, in part, with an automated process called Link Within.  When we publish a post, the program searches our archive for similar posts and includes a set of thumbnails at the bottom that readers can click on if they’d like to know more.

At the bottom of a recent post about the role of carrots in World War II, for example, linkwithin offered these options:

There are pitfalls to this type of program that illustrate a bigger problem involved with talking about social inequality.  A reader named Sarah C. emailed us the following observation in response the thumbnails that followed a post about the sexual objectification of women:

I wanted to point out the dissonance I feel when I spend time reading a thoughtful article about gender equality and then when I finish the bottom of the page greets me with a line of 100 x 100 px images of sexualized womens’ bodies.  They are the same kinds of images I would see browsing Cracked or College Humor, or other mainstream sites.  The Huffington Post does it too – sites claiming to be (and often actually are) more or less progressive are using sexist tactics to get people to click, or at least that’s what it seems like…

I think it’s great to include examples of objectification in your posts in order to illustrate your point.  But using those images as a thumbnail gets you the wrong attention.  It feels hypocritical, or at least incongruous with your blog’s goals.

This is what Sarah saw:

Since the thumbnails are automatically generated, we don’t actually know what the thumbnails will be until we see the published post on the site.  So, upon seeing Sarah’s screenshot of the thumbnails, I was taken aback.  I understood immediately why she felt compelled to send us an email.

The phenomenon goes far beyond thumbnails.  Even if we did away with Link Within, our posts on the sexual objectification of women would include images that sexually objectified women.  We are Sociological Images, after all.   So our posts drawing attention to and criticizing the phenomenon also reinforce it.  It’s two steps forward and one step back, plus or minus a step.

But even if we weren’t an image-based blog, even if we simply discussed sexual objectification without an accompanying visual, doing so would remind readers that women are objectified, that they need to worry about how their bodies look, and that they’re being judged by their appearance.  At least one study has demonstrated that simply being exposed to objectifying words, devoid of imagery, can increase the degree to which women self-objectify.

Talking about sexual objectification always threatens to deepen the degree to which people feel sexually objectified, even if that is the opposite of one’s intention.  This phenomenon applies just as well to other forms of oppression.  Talking about the way in which state policies help or hinder Mexican immigrants to the U.S., for example, potentially further entrenches the idea that all Latinos are “illegals.”  Pointing out under-development in parts of Africa potentially affirms the notion that all of Africa is economically backward or politically corrupt.  Referring to women’s lack of representation in math and science may make women even more anxious about pursuing these careers.

This is one of the ways that power works.  It  co-opts the strategies available for fighting back.   Power is flexible and accommodating, it controls and convinces through all possible channels, it finds ways to infiltrate all mediums.  This is why it’s so hard, in the first place, to eradicate prejudice and inequality.

Coming to our blog is, for these reasons, a scary proposition.  Because we sometimes talk about ugly things, there will be ugly things here.  Taking out the thumbnails won’t change that; neither would deleting all of the images we reproduce.  Deleting all posts that address inequality would, but then we would be silently complicit with the status quo.  So, we keep blogging, and we keep uploading, and we keep trying to engage our readers further… for better or worse.

SocImages News:

We hit milestones on both our Facebook and Twitter pages this month, exceeding 18,000 at the former and 8,000 at the latter.  We also celebrated our 5th birthday and almost 4,500 posts.  Congratulations to us!

And congratulations also to Christina Barmon, Georgia State University.  Barmon has written guest posts for us — on health advice to men and women in the 1920s and, most famously, on sitting, standing, and peeing — but, more importantly, she was awarded the ASA/SAGE Teaching Innovations & Professional Development Award this year! Congratulations Christina!

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Lisa has started booking talks and lectures for the fall.  Her first talk will be at Indiana State University (Sept. 17th-19th) where she’ll be giving a featured lecture at the International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference.

Newest Pinterest Page:

We now have a Pinterest page featuring our collection of material glamorizing violence in fashion (trigger warning).  It’s a depressing ride, if you want to take it for a spin.  We have 17 other boards, too, if you’d like to check out the list.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

In case you’re new, we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

In Other Very Important News…

We visited a little-known private, non-profit zoo in Moapa, NV called Roos n’ More.  They let us hold and pet monkeys, lemurs, bear cats, zebra, camels, toucans, wallabies, and, kangaroos!  The best part, though, was being swarmed by otters!  Here’s Gwen getting an otter kiss:

And here’s Lisa smiling as an otter goes down her shirt and comes out again.  Rawr!

This experience in no way undermined our belief that animals prefer us above all other humans.

Links and Quotes This Month:

• Gala Darling and Feministing both picked up our article arguing that one way to “have it all” is to not have kids.
• Jezebel linked to our posts about gender, groupies, and musical taste and an old post about the dropping age of first menstruation.
• We were quoted at Disinformation, the Huffington Post, and Boing Boing.
• AdiosBarbie in a post about the absence of the female gaze in fashion, linked to our posts on passive women on Chinese and Japanese book covers, romanticized violence against women, and twisted and warped women’s bodies in fashion editorials.
• Finally, Bitch and Feministing both linked to the first post in our series on sexual objectification; Bitch also linked to Caroline Heldman’s review of Magic Mike, as did The Portland Mercury.

Opponents of abortion have long targeted the “demand side” of abortion by passing legislation aimed at dissuading patients from going through with an abortion. Examples of this type of restriction include parental consent/notification laws, waiting periods, and mandatory counseling. Research shows that targeting patients has had little impact on national abortion rates; they’ve been declining, but several factors are likely contributing to the decrease, including increased accessibility to contraceptives.

New approaches to restricting abortion have focused on the “supply side” of the abortion equation — that is, targeting the doctors and clinics that provide abortions. These regulations often require certain staffing and equipment requirements, resulting in clinics being shut down (often due to the expense of implementing the regulations). Reduced access to clinics often means that women have to travel further for an abortion — increasing costs (the procedure itself, travel, and accommodations), especially when a patient has to navigate waiting periods and counseling requirements.

Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic, for example, the focus of abortion opponents for many years, faced closure recently because of a law that changed licensing procedures. The law now requires all doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals (difficult for the out-of-state doctors to acquire). The clinic was granted an extension to meet the requirements, though the law was allowed to stand.

So, does targeting the supply side of abortion work to reduce the procedure?

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine did a natural experiment to answer this question.  In 2004, Texas passed two new restrictions on abortion, one on each side. The “demand side” legislation required that women receive information about risks at least 24 hours before an abortion can be performed. The “supply side” legislation required that abortions after 16 weeks of gestation be performed in a hospital or an ambulatory surgical center instead of a clinic. At the time the law was passed, none of Texas’ non-hospital based clinics met the legal requirements, and very few abortions were performed in hospitals.

If the “demand side” legislation had an effect, the number of abortions would decrease at all levels of gestation. As Chart A illustrates, there was no change whatsoever in the number of abortions performed before 16 weeks — indicating that the demand side legislation had almost no impact.

If the supply-side legislation had an effect, the number of abortions provided after 16 weeks should have dropped.  In fact, Chart B shows that the number of later abortions performed dropped 88% after the legislation was implemented.

So, targeting the supply side reduced the number of abortions performed in Texas, but did the  women carry their baby to term?

No. Some of these women left the state to receive an abortion; in fact, the number of who received an out-of-state abortion more than quadrupled from 2003 to 2004. Accordingly, the average distance women had to travel to receive an abortion after 16 weeks increased from 33 miles in 2003 to 252 miles in 2004.

As has been noted on this site before, nations that have highly restrictive abortion laws do not have lower abortion rates; in fact, in those countries where abortion is illegal, many of those abortions are unsafe, resulting in high numbers of maternal deaths. Although targeting the supply-side of abortion might be appealing, it will probably not reduce the abortion rate nationwide. Instead, it likely places onerous restrictions on women with fewer resources, since they will be less able to meet the increased costs that result from having to travel for abortions.

Thanks to ­­­Jenna for the submission!

————————

Amanda M. Jungels is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University, focusing on sexuality, gender, and cognitive sociology. Her dissertation focuses on disclosures of private information at in-home sex toy parties. She is the current recipient of the Jacqueline Boles Teaching Fellowship, given to outstanding graduate student instructors.

A while back readers absolutely fell in love with a vintage Lego ad from 1981, featuring a red-headed befreckled girl in pigtails and overalls.  It, and two more in the series, reminded us that advertising doesn’t have to impose rigid gender stereotypes the way that most advertising today and the newest Lego marketing strategy certainly does.

Joanne M. dug up two more examples, both from Family Circle in 1978.  Feast your eyes on these happy children:

David Pickett, by the way, wrote us an amazing four part history of Lego’s (failed) efforts — or lack thereof — to reach out to girls.  It’s a truly comprehensive and fascinating story.

Steve Grimes, a once guest blogger who will be starting a sociology PhD program at Rutgers this fall, asked us to comment on the new “man aisle” in a grocery story in one of my old haunts, the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The New York Post reports that the store COO and CEO conceived of the idea after reading a study showing that 31% of men now shop for their families, compared to 14% in the 1980s.  Ironically, the man aisle they designed doesn’t suggest that men are productive and useful members of their families. Instead, it reinforces the notion that men are all about leisure.  The items sold — you already know what they are — include condoms, Ramen noodles, beer, snack foods, and a surprising amount of condiments.
Because women are as likely to work for pay as men are, but continue to be held more responsible for housework and childcare, men do, in fact, enjoy more leisure time than women (in the U.S., almost 40 extra minutes a day).  Media frequently portray women as responsible for families or hard-working careerists and men as eager for nothing but a good time.  We see it in “for him” and “for her” news items and contrasting magazine content, and this idea is part of the message of the man aisle too.

Nothing about the man aisle suggests that he’s buying for anyone but himself, except insofar as  he might be stocking a man cave for his man friends.  This is unfortunate, because many men are productive and useful members of their families.  Also, some men hate beer, are allergic to wheat, are on diets, and think beef jerky is gross.  These men are invisible here too.

Meanwhile, the very presence of a single aisle for men marks the rest of the grocery store — the toilet paper, the diapers, the cleaning products, the greeting card aisle (*shudder*), the baking supplies, and the healthy food that you have to cook — as for women.

Thanks to YetAnotherGirl and Kari B., we can now feast our eyes on this ad from Unik (“unique”) Wax Center.  It’s a promotion offering 50% off hair waxing for girls “15 and younger.”  The Consumerist reports that all procedures are fair game, including bikini waxes.

The usual concerns regarding the sexualization of young girls apply here.  Why do girls this young need to be concerned about how they look in bikinis?

Perhaps more interesting is the frame for why such a girl might want to undergo waxing. According to the 4th of July-themed ad, it’s to “celebrate freedom and independence.”  Implicitly, hers. So, to follow the logic to its endpoint, a girl of 15 or younger can’t feel free unless she’s hairless.

The company, responding to criticism, gave arguments along these lines.  They framed waxing as a “regular activity” and a “process in life” that “goes along with our country.”  Moms are coming in to get waxed (as all women do), explained the corporate offices, they’re dragging their tweens along with them (obviously), and the girls “have questions” and “get bored,” so the next step is to initiate them into the ritual.

So, the whole process is “natural,” as the ad copy specifies.  It is just an inevitable step in a supposedly universal way of (female) life.  And one that liberates women from… um, I don’t know what… embarrassment, I guess.

The ad is reminiscent of many similar campaigns aimed at adult women, ones that frame consumption of clothes, make-up, jewelry, and cosmetic procedures as expression of freedoms.  In this way, it’s a capitalist appropriation of feminism/liberation ideology.  It’s also a naturalization of what is, in reality, a lifetime of compulsory, expensive, and sometimes harmful beauty practices.