You know, if we just stopped gendering things in the first place, we wouldn’t have to bend over backwards to get our products sold to the other 50% of humanity.  Case in point…

Lucia M.M. sent in this effort to sell wine to the Monday night football crowd:

Meanwhile, seven of our Readers sent in the new female-branded beer “chick beer” (“just 97 calories and 3.5 carbs”):

Another reader tipped us off that Molson is in on the game too with it’s girly pink brand, Animee:

See also a long list of gendered/sexualized foodstuffs and other things that are gendered for no conceivable reason.

UPDATE: Several readers suggested that the Monday Night Football wine may actually be aimed at women who like football.  There are lots of them.

Thanks to our readers for the submission!: Yvette, Kirsten O’N., Jayna T., Amanda S., Rosemary McM., Caitlin C., Andrew P., Tom Megginson (of Work that Matters), and Kjerstin G. (for About-Face).

There are few social facts that spread themselves out evenly across social class. Most everything — how healthy we are, what we do for leisure, how we dress, etc — is correlated with income.  Twitter, I learned today, is an exception.   According to a Pew study, internet users across a wide array of income brackets are using Twitter at about the same rate.

Income and % of internet users who use Twitter:

When we look at variables that correlate with income, however, such as race and education, we see an uneven distribution.

Race and % of internet users who use Twitter:

Education and % of internet users who use Twitter:

So people with more education are more likely to use Twitter, but Whites (who, on average, get more education than Blacks and Hispanics) are less likely.  There’s something really interesting going on here.  Any idea what?

Mexico filmmaker Pablo Fulgueira happened to be traveling in New York shortly after the attack of 9/11. He took the opportunity to interview people on the streets and turned that footage into this short documentary, “SiNYster,” showing the very first social consequences of the 9/11 attack in New York City.

Part I:

Part II:

Pablo Fulgueira studied filmmaking at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City and graduated in 2006.

In 1922 the American Social Hygiene Association, funded by the American Public Health Service, created a social marketing campaign aimed at American teenagers. While it was predominantly about sexually transmitted infections, it also taught about good health and hygiene in general. And maintaining health, then as now, is not only about health but also about conforming to social norms–especially gender norms.

The posters aimed at boys were titled “Keeping Fit”:

And the girls’ posters were titled “Youth and Life”:

Comparing the boys and girls’ posters, you can see that fitness is not just about physical health; it is also about particular character traits. For boys, those traits are will power, courage, and self-control–traits that are based on a puritan work ethic that we value in a competitive capitalist society.

While courage and endurance were important for both boys and girls, fitness for girls was less about power and self-control, and more about grace, beauty, and friendship.

TEXT:

Paint your cheeks from the inside out. Outdoor exercise, baths, regular meals, and plenty of sleep will help. Most girls could be prettier than they are because most girls could be healthier.

TEXT:

Copy the pose but not the shoes. Correct posture gives attractive figure, straight back, freedom of action for heart and lungs, good muscle tone. Stand tall — chest up, not out — toes straight forward when walking or standing. A well-poised body develops self-respect, and wins the regard of others.

Men were taught how to grow up to be honorable husbands and fathers, while women were taught how to grow up to be good wives and mothers.

For boys:

TEXT:

The youth who achieves self-control can go joyfully and clean into marriage with the one girl he is willing to wait for, and become a husband and father without the danger of causing suffering to wife and child.

For girls:

TEXT:

A woman physician who is also a mother. The girl of today will be the woman of tomorrow. She will need brains, vitality, and sound training, if she is to take her place in the world as a mother and a useful citizen.

It may be tempting to think that we know more now than we did back then and that with progress we make fewer mistakes today than they did in the past. However, controversy surrounding many health topics such as obesity, circumcision, and the way we screen, treat, and fundraise for breast cancer should tell you that we still have many assumptions behind our health recommendations that are based on ideology.

The posters are held at the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota Libraries

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Christina Barmon is a doctoral student at Georgia State University studying sociology and gerontology.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines neurological disorders as physical diseases of the nervous system and psychiatric illnesses as disorders that manifest as abnormalities of thought, feeling, or behaviour. In fact, however, there are longstanding unresolved debates on the exact relationship between neurology and psychiatry, including whether there can be any clear division between the two fields.

Related to this, Brandy B. sent us a figure from the blog Neuroskeptic graphing the proportion of journal articles on various disorders included in The American Journal of Psychiatry versus the journal Neurology over the past 20 years. The image is interesting from a sociological standpoint in that, as Brandy writes, “it says far more about the sociology of these fields than about which disorders can be considered neurological or psychiatric.”

While debates regarding the neurological roots of psychiatric illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia are far from settled, the graph shows that the two disciplines have maintained varying levels of intellectual authority over different disorders. Some fall clearly into one domain or the other, while others are covered in both. Depression, for example, receives more attention than mania in Neurology, despite the fact that mania often occurs alongside depression as a symptom of bipolar disorder.

The information in this graph serves as a reminder that what gets published in academic journals, and the topics over which disciplines exercise authority, are the results of social processes. Disciplines are artificial categories of knowledge, solidified through the creation of institutional structures like university departments, degree programs, and academic journals. Psychiatry, for example, didn’t emerge as a discipline until the 19^th century; this emergence was rooted in a social context in Western Europe where rising numbers of people were being institutionalized and attitudes regarding the treatment of mental illness were changing. By claiming membership in disciplines based on common academic backgrounds, research methodologies, and topics of study, scholars contribute to the reproduction of these disciplinary boundaries.

The peer-review process is one facet of this social reproduction of disciplinary boundaries that is particularly relevant to the image above. Research and papers that are submitted, accepted, and funded must appeal to reviewers and conform to the criteria set out by the journal or discipline within which researchers wish to publish. In the case of neurology and psychiatry, it appears based on this graph that the peer-review process may uphold disciplinary boundaries, as reviewers for each discipline’s journal appear to favour articles on certain disorders.

The divisions between neurology and psychiatry suggested in the image above stir up lots of interesting questions not only about what we consider to be “neurological” or “psychiatric”, but more generally about the social production of knowledge.

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Hayley Price has a background in sociology, international development studies, and education. She recently completed her Masters degree in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

The start of the Fall semester has inspired me to re-post this fascinating phenomenon we covered last year.

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Rigby B. sent a link to the Just4Camp website to show us how care package products were gendered for “only” girls and boys. And, indeed, they were (screen shots below). But what is even more fascinating to me about this is the commodification of care.

The term “commodification” refers to the process by which something done for free becomes something done for money. Ever since the institutionalization of the wage, more and more things have become commodified. One particularly interesting category is care or what sociologists like to call “care work.”

Care work includes all of those tasks that involve nurturing and maintaining others: nursing, parenting, teaching, tending a home, etc. At one time in history, none of these things were paid jobs, but we have increasingly commodified them so that now paid nurses staff hospitals, home care workers take care of ailing elders, children spend the day in day care, professional teachers educate them, and housecleaners and gardeners can be paid to tend our homes and yards.

The care package is an example of care work.  I still remember getting care packages in college with my favorite home made cookies and other things my parents thought I would like or needed.  They take a lot of effort: thoughtfulness, shopping, baking, packaging, and mailing.  And, here, we have an example of the commodification of that effort.  The “care” in “care package” has been, well, outsourced.

Gendered care package ingredients:

For more on commodification, peruse our tag by that name.

This seems like a good time to reiterate a simple truth: It can be art/fashion/satire/cutting edge etc. and… and and and it can be offensive, trivializing, and triggering.

Eight readers sent in links to an ad for a hair salon called Fluid. The salon, which has a history of using “shocking” ads (like this one after the Gulf oil spill), is attracting criticism for an ad featuring a woman being offered jewelry by a man; she appears to have a black eye.  Six more sent in a link to a Glee star, Heather Morris, in a photoshoot by Tyler Shields, also with a black eye.

Responding to the criticism, Fluid said it was being “cutting-edge,” “satirical,” “high fashion,” and “editorial,” and “artistic.”  It doesn’t matter what you call it, what tradition it references, or whether you’re trying to get a reaction; your product is still part of a wider cultural context.  Accordingly, you may get called out for being insensitive to other people’s pain. In which case, probably best not to call the critics hypocrites and suggest that there are bigger problems in the world than the trivialization of domestic violence.  Or go right ahead, I guess.

Thanks to Eric S., Kristina V., YetAnotherGirl, Dave S., Caitlin R., @CreativeTweets, Meghan H., Dave S., Judith B., Olivia G., Alexis W., Theresa W., and an anonymous reader for the tips!

Let’s analyze this one to death, shall we?  Comments are open…

It’s after the jump because you can see a woman naked from the waist up.

(source)

Thanks to Sarah F. for the submission!