Hot enough for you? Your answer might depend on who you’re voting for.
World views affect not just how we interpret what we see; these views influence what we actually experience. That was the point of the previous post.
Do people who reject the idea global warming perceive the weather as being cooler? Gallup just published the results of a poll that asked people if this winter was warmer than usual. Unfortunately, Gallup asked only for political affiliation, but it can stand as a rough proxy for ideas about global warming. So the data are suggestive, not conclusive. But for what it’s worth, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say yes, it’s been a warm winter. Some of the difference can be attributed to geography (Democrats living in places that had a much warmer winter than usual). But I suspect that at least part of the 11-point difference is political.
Republicans reject the idea that the world is getting warmer — that’s a question of science — but they also experience their own immediate environment as cooler, which is a matter of perception.
As the graph shows, Gallup then asked those who did think that the winter was unusually warm what they thought the cause was — global warming or just normal variation.. As you might expect, political affiliation made a difference. Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to cite global warming as the cause.
April 15th was World Art Day. A museum in Stockholm, the Moderna Museet, celebrated with what appears to be a chocolate and red velvet cake in the likeness of a caricature of member of a generic African tribe. The cake was designed by an artist, Makode Aj Linde, who wanted to draw attention to the practice of female genital cutting, which occurs in parts of Africa (and elsewhere). Accordingly, the cake was in the shape of a woman’s shoulders, breasts, belly, and genitals; it was covered in black fondant. The head was the artist himself, painted black with cartoon-ish eyes and mouth reminiscent of American minstrelsy. Neck coils tied it all together.
The Swedish minister of culture, Adelsohn Liljeroth, was asked to cut the cake. Playing along with the “art,” she began at the clitoris. After slicing herself a piece, she fed it to the artist (it’s unclear if that was planned or improvised). Each reveler carved out more and more of the genitals, revealing brown and then red cake inside. With each cut, the artist let out a yell and cried. People attending the exhibit reportedly gawked and generally went along having a good time.
Kitimbwa Sabuni, a spokesperson for the National Afro-Swedish Association, called the cake a “racist caricature of a black woman” and criticized the event, writing:
The “participation [of the minister of culture], as she laughs, drinks, and eats cake, merely adds to the insult against people who suffer from racist taunts and against women affected by circumcision.”
The minister shrugged rhetorically, saying “Art needs to be provocative.” On his Facebook page, the artist was nonchalant, writing about the above photo: “This is After getting my vagaga mutilated by the minister of culture…”
I will go on the record saying that this is obviously racist, trivializes genital cutting, is wildly insensitive to women who have experienced cutting, and fails to accord any respect to members of communities that practice genital cutting. It’s a shameful mockery.
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UPDATE: It occurred to me that it’s possible that the artist intended to trap a mostly white audience into participating in this obviously racist game, all with the intention of revealing that they would. Sort of like Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, where the fictional African American tv writer, asked by his White boss to write something “Black,” wrote the most racist thing he could think of… only to discover that audiences loved it. So perhaps the artist meant to provoke the same sort of horror that Bamboozled provokes in its real audience. And that is provocative indeed. But I’m guessing that this message will be lost on the vast majority of people at the same time it provides a satisfying opportunity to object to something obviously racist (as I did); meanwhile, more subtle discrimination and institutionalized racism remains un-examined.
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One of my main areas of serious academic research involves trying to understand how Westerners think about female genital cutting, and what motivates them to understand it in the way they do. I must say, though, that I am at a loss to explain this. My research on American perceptions of the practice (not Swedish, notably) suggests that we take the practice extremely seriously, framing it as (one of) the worst human rights abuses imaginable. From this perspective, this approach to raising awareness — from the party-atmosphere symbolized by the cake to the almost comical and obviously fake protestations from the artist/actor — takes the issue far too frivolously for comfort.
Caricaturing Africans, however, and seeing them as lesser humans is also part of what drives American condemnation of genital cutting. U.S. discourses often frame Africans as either ignorant or cruel. We routinely dehumanize both women and men in these discourses. They are seen more as objects of intervention than human beings. Accordingly, it doesn’t surprise me too much that the (mostly White, Swedish) people viewing the performance felt enough distance from the practice of genital cutting to enjoy their cake. Nor does it surprise me to hear at least some of them dismiss the concerns of the spokesperson for the National Afro-Swedish Association.
The video, in all its glory:
Thanks to Sharla F., Samira A., and an anonymous reader for sending in the tip to this story!
In my talk about the value of friendship, I discuss the ways that gender inequality makes it difficult for men and women to be friends with each other, for men to be friends with men, and for women to be friends with each other. Regarding the latter, I argue that, in a society that values men and masculinity over women and femininity, everyone values men’s opinions more than women’s. Inevitably, then, women are placed into competition with one another for attention from men. Meanwhile, women’s opinions of them have less value and can’t substitute for men’s, so women can’t hold each other up; they must all turn to men for self-esteem.
I’ve previously posted an amazing clip that illustrates this fantastically, from a show called Battle of the Bods. The “Don’t Hate Me ‘Cause I’m Beautiful” trope is also part of this phenomenon. Bryony W. sent in another example: a cover of Woman’s Day featuring a “bikini war.” The cover implies complicity, including the supposed quotation, “My beach body’s better than hers!”
The cover reveals that agents of the media — in this case, whoever decides what stories to include at Women’s Day — actively try to pit women against one another. This idea comes through loud and clear in this compilation of clips, sent to me by Veronica G. Titled “Divas on Divas,” it features female pop stars being asked to comment about each other and being pushed to say mean things:
Here are some more examples.
“Bathing Suits, Ballgowns, and Bickering,” a story in Marie Claire:
“Physicians Recommend It, Women Fight Over It”:
“90% Best Friend, 10% Bitter Enemy, 100% Genuine”:
By now, you have heard about the killing of Trayvon Martin. But when did you first hear about it? If you’re a news junkie and were watching the national news channels, the answer to that question might well depend on which one you watch. ThinkProgress counted the number of stories about this killing on three cable news outlets in the week following the event.
Megan McCardle interprets the data as an example of “the Availability Heuristic, a rule of thumb that says the frequency of an event should correspond to how quickly you can think of examples of it.” The Availability Heuristic makes us overestimate the risk of shark attacks. The Availability Heuristic is probably behind my students’ writing confidently that teenage pregnancy has been steadily rising (thank you, MTV).
McCardle looks at the graph and sees a reason for different perceptions of racism as a problem:
…the disparity here may have something to do with whether one thinks institutional racism remains a serious problem in the United States. Conservatives often seem to think it isn’t, and that if anything, the real problem is how often spurious charges of white racism are deployed by their political opponents, while liberals more often tend toward the opposite view. Maybe both groups are drawing justified inferences from the data they’re seeing.
Do Fox viewers discount racism because of what they see? Or is the network disparity more an example of another cognitive wiring problem – Confirmation Bias? Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek out and to remember information that fits with our existing ideas. Faced with information that clashes with that world view, we ignore, forget, distort, or misinterpret.
In Foxland — the world of both those who create Fox news and those who consume it — racism is not a real problem. A story of a white Hispanic man armed with a 9mm chasing down and shooting a black teenager armed only with Skittles has no place in that world. The Fox news producers don’t want to tell that story, and the viewers don’t want to hear it. In the days since this graph appeared, the story has become too big for even Fox to ignore. I would imagine that Fox will instead interpret the events so as to fit with the view that McCardle suggests — that whites are the victims. If you watch Fox, get ready to hear a lot about self-defense.
This 48-second ad is a fantastic example of framing, as well as a super-ridiculous blast-from-the-past. Paid for by the movie theater industry, the ad attacks the idea of cable. Cable, of course, was going to deliver more content to television sets and potentially compete for the business movie theaters enjoyed. So they frame cable as “pay tv” and counterpose it to “free tv.” They don’t, you might notice, frame cable as “pay tv” and the movie theaters as “pay movies” because that comparison is not as useful for them. Instead, without drawing attention to the fact that they charge for entertainment, they try to delegitimate the idea of paying for on-screen entertainment at home.
They also try to argue that cable tv will bring scary monsters into your living room. So cute. In an era where millions of instances of pornifed violence are just a click away, it is almost incomprehensible to imagine wanting to make sure that scary movies stayed at the theater.
In a collection of alcohol ads from the 1960s and ’70s, Retronaut included an ad that is a nice example of how marketers sometimes co-opt social movements. In this case, the co-optation works against the movement, sending the opposite message that it intended.
“I never even thought of burning my bra until I discovered Smirnoff,” says a woman with bedroom eyes. The message, of course, is not that a woman who drinks the vodka will become politicized; instead, it is that Smirnoff will “loosen her up” and facilitate seduction.
The bra-burning story, incidentally, is a myth. In 1968 feminists protested outside of the Miss America pageant; they threw many items deemed oppressive into a trash can: bras, yes, as well as cosmetics, high heels, etc. They didn’t light the trash can on fire. The idea that they burned bras was added later, in an effort to link the Women’s Movement to the Anti-War Movement (remember that draftees were burning their draft cards). The Anti-War Movement was, at the time, being taken more seriously, so the link was meant to give feminism more credibility. Instead, the idea of feminists burning bras became a humorous cultural trope, hence the ad above.
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