When I teach Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, one thing I have to balance is disclosure of the horrendous history of racism in the U.S. and the risk of further traumatizing students in my classroom for whom these tragedies are not pure abstractions.  One of the these tragedies is lynching.

Lynching, or the killing of individuals targeted by non-police mobs, usually by hanging, became frighteningly common after slavery was ended.  It was a form of terrorism, designed to teach black people, and their white allies, that the end of slavery would not be the end of their subordination. Because a lynching need not be based on evidence that could stand up in court, all anti-racists were at risk of death. Thousands of people — most, but not all of them black — were violently hanged, their bodies often set afire.

Despite the importance of this chapter of American history, I do not show pictures of lynchings in my classroom.  These images are surprisingly easy to come by because the events were often gleefully public and photographs of the murders were sold as postcards. Sometimes, though, I think about showing Billie Holiday singing what is, perhaps, one of the most deeply troubling songs ever written, “Strange Fruit.”  Written by Abel Meeropol and Laura Duncan, it was first performed by Holiday in 1939, almost 30 years before lynching could be called “history.”

Strange Fruit:

Via BoingBoing.

It must be a cliché that American movies are, overwhelmingly, made for 17-year-old white boys.  Goodness knows that there is plenty of evidence on this website to back up the cliché.  In light of this, I am surprising floored by the actual data showing who goes to movies.  It’s not that I didn’t know that women, people of color, and grown-ups went to movies.  It’s just that seeing it in technicolor just drills home the fact that the making of movies to please white male kids is ideological, not capitalist.  And that’s always an interesting observation to make.

55% of tickets sold are sold to not-men:

40% of tickets sold are sold to non-white people:

72% of tickets sold are sold to legal adults (i.e., not-kids, though they may be buying tickets for kids):

Data from the Motion Picture Association of America (via Racialicious).

See also our post on how about 1/3rd of ESPN’s audience are women.

Way back in 2008 Gwen wrote a great post using data showing the ways in which social context influences average age of menstruation.  The average age is, it turns out, different across countries, across different groups within countries, and has been changing throughout history.  In the U.S., it has been dropping and the average age (note: average, not earliest) is now about 12-years-old.

In response, Kotex has now introduced a website and a line of pads and panty liners for girls 8-years-old and up.  Leigh, from Wherapy, sent us a link.

Meant to appeal to tweens, the product is packaged with bright colors, stars, and hearts. It’s decidedly cute and girly:

And also a bit smaller than “regular” products:

I’m not exactly sure what to make of the whole thing.  The age of menarche (first menstruation) is going down.  And girls need (as we called it in my family) “personal products.”  And I’ll give it to Kotex that tweenifying the products with sparkles, stars, and hearts doesn’t just sell them, but may help girls feel better about getting their periods (on the assumption that some have mixed or negative feelings about it).

All that said.  This is a fascinating moment in U.S. history reflecting, simultaneously, capitalism, the social construction of youth, and the circular relationship between biology and society.

Via Jezebel.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in another example, via Jezebel, of the use of hunting as a metaphor for dating/attaining sex with women.  The metaphor portrays men as predators and women as prey,  suggesting that women are inherently unwilling and men inherently deceitful, coercive, and aggressive.  This sets the stage, discursively, for sexual assault.

Throw in a couple men representing a non-specifically “primitive” culture to remind us that such a relationships is “natural,” and you’ve got this Dos Equis ad:

For more of this metaphor, see Sex and Dating as a Hunt, Beer, Sex, and the Hunt, Taxidermied Girl Parts, and Hunting for Bambi.

Enjoy a new round-up of examples in which men = people and women = women.  The tendency to include women as a special type of human being, alongside men who get to be regular people, is a specific example of a more general phenomenon in which some people, but not others, are marked as a specific kind.  We see this with race, routinely, in cases where there are “people” and “black people,” “families” and “ethnic families,” or when the skin tone of white people is substituted for the very idea of “skin” tone.  And we’ve covered many examples of this in regards to gender; see our posts on the Body Worlds exhibits, avatars, fitness equipment, rulers, and this collection of many additional examples.  Here is a new set of instances submitted by our Readers:

Michelle P. took this photo of two card games in Salem, MA at The House of the Seven Gables gift shop:

Jennifer discovered that her local zoo was selling “binoculars” and “girly girl binoculars”:

froodian sent along a set of guitar straps for sale.  There are “guitar straps,” “giggin for god guitar straps,” “kids guitar straps,” and “girls’ guitar straps” in pink, purple, and baby blue:

Sarah J. noted that the website www.healthcare.gov features sections (along the bottom) for “healthy individuals,” “individuals with health conditions,” and “women”:

Finally, Leigh sent along Technorati’s odd effort to appeal to women. Their main site has a highlighted yellow tab to press if you’re female, labeled “women.”  And, if you do, you get girly content, plus pretty flowers!

The main site:

The woman site:

A new publication from the CDC, sent along by sociology professor Sangyoub Park, reports that only 13% of households in the U.S. are still cell phone-free; meanwhile, 27% of households have now abandoned their landline telephone altogether.  The data, however, varies pretty tremendously by state.  Rhode Island and New Jersey have the lowest proportion of wireless-only households at 13%, while Arkansas leads with 35%:

For more detail, here are the states in order:

Dr. Park wondered if part of what was driving the state-by-state difference was levels of poverty.  Perhaps poorer families can’t afford both a landline and a cell phone and so they drop the former.  A rough comparison of the data with rates of poverty in various states is suggestive (source):

So that’s interesting.  But why does the CDC care?  One way to collect survey data is to get a random selection of Americans (or some subset) through random digit dialings. These, however, tend to exclude cell phones.  So the technological change is creating a methodological challenge.  Now scholars using random digit dialing have to consider how the exclusion of 27% of households with cell phones only skews their data, perhaps by disproportionately excluding the poor.  It’s a much more difficult case to make than when such methods excluded only the 2% of households with no phone service at all.

The new “manned-up” VW Beetle is in the news again and J. Dawn Carlson, a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley, asked us to write about it.  We covered it in July of 2010, but figured this was a good excuse to revisit the post.

The VW Bug was introduced in 1938 for economical, powerful, fast, and sustained driving on the German Autobahn.  Later it jumped shores and became an icon of the California surfer lifestyle:

The New Beetle, however, introduced in 1998, quickly became associated with women because of its bubbly body and pastel colors. Feminized products, however, don’t sell well with men (or some women) because femininity is stigmatizing.  Accordingly, the Beetle is re-vamping its image; it’s getting a “sex change” for 2011.  Brit S. pointed us to a story in the Anaheim Examiner detailing this surgery.  Jim Cherry writes:

New Beetle is about to get a testosterone injection. A mean-looking chopped top, 200 H.P. motor, widened stance, and a larger interior will transform the quintessential chick car into a rock-hard rock star.

So being mean-looking, wider, and larger (with a Porsche engine) are all equated with masculinity, a characteristic that will supposedly improve the cars appeal to men (and non-girly women).  Here’s what the new testosterone-injected Beetle will look like (in red, of course):

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Oh how I love a good example of our tendency to gender cats and dogs.  See, for example, my cat person/dog person rant and our post about an adoption campaign arguing that it can be manly to own a cat.

Josh Pearson sent in another colorful example from The Blue Buffalo Trading Co., a company that makes pet foods.  The company subtly genders dogs and cats with blue and pink, respectively:

More, the language on the site sexes the animals themselves. They consistently refer to cats as “she” and “her” and dogs as “he” and “him.”  For example, the text reads:

I hope everyone recognizes this as bizarre.  Dogs and cats come in both hes and shes (that how there are more cats and dogs every year).  And notice that we tend to stereotype dogs as more like the stereotypical woman (dependent, passive, and happily subordinated) and cats like stereotypical men (independent, self-serving hunters), even as we masculinize dogs and feminize cats.  So there is some serious contradiction going on here.  We gender everythingthough, so why not dogs and cats!