In a fascinating essay, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz argues that we do, indeed, play Farmville because we’re polite.  More people in the U.S. play Farmville than any other video game.

…over seventy-three million people play Farmville. Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.

(source)

The game isn’t popular, he argues, because it’s a good game.  In fact, Liszkiewicz thinks it’s a decidedly bad game.

…games offer a break from responsibility and routine, yet Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again…

Farmville is so laborious and tedious, that one of the rewards of playing Farmville is playing less Farmville:

As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks.

(source)

So why the heck is Farmville the most popular video game in America?  Liszkiewicz says, “people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.”

(source)

In other words:

Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

(source)

* Title borrowed from BoingBoing.

Sociologist Amy Schalet has done wonderful research comparing American and Dutch approaches to teen sexuality.  Among other fascinating findings, she has shown that, American parents approach their children’s sexual initiation with fear and loathing; while Dutch parents treat sexuality like any other realm of life that a child must learn to manage.  Accordingly, most American teenagers hide their virginity loss from their parents, furtively popping the cherry in risky situations, often without protection against pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections (STIs).  In contrast, most Dutch teenagers lose their virginity in their own bedrooms with their parents approval… and condoms.

This different approach to teen sexuality helps explain the dramatic differences between the U.S. and the Netherlands in rates of contraceptive use, teen pregnancy, abortion, and STI transmission.  Check it this data from Advocates for Youth:

You can read the full report here (thanks to Du Hoang for the specific link!).

Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball, then continue after the jump:

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So, did you see it?

I’m really curious as to how many of you did.

This exercise is designed to illustrate how perception is an active process, driven by what we are primed to pay attention to.  Because we were told to focus on the players in white, we (theoretically) filtered out the players in black and, as a consequence, the black gorilla.

Rachel at The Feminist Agenda, from whom I borrowed this clip and these ideas, argues that this means that:

…there really is no completely neutral stance from which a human can observe the world. We are always everywhere making value judgments about what’s important in our environment, what things mean, how they’re relevant, etc.  And this process of selective, and even normative, perception is inseparable from our deeper thoughts about what it all means. There’s no clear line between perception and cognition.

She continues:

This explains a lot. For instance, it explains why for so many years, male researchers were seemingly blind to whole swaths of female behavior in primates they were studying. After all, in the patriarchal worldview they had inherited from their culture, females were passive, and not agents in any real way. So when the females mated with males who not only not the dominant male of the group, but often not even a part of their group, the human male researchers overlooked it altogether, and thus we have the myth of the dominant male primate who has sole access to all the females in “his” group.

For Rachel, there is a lesson here about how to approach privilege.  She argues that much of the time people who fail to see how a system advantages them and disadvantages others are simply looking through a lens warped by privilege.  They’re truly blind to the inequities in society.  But, she hopes, once you help them see the gorilla in the room, it’s absolutely impossible not to see.

Please accept this newest edition of violence is sexy, courtesy of Lisa R.  The promo below, designed to advertise two shows about female murderers (Deadly Women and Wicked Attraction), sexualizes murder. The narration goes:

In the heat of summer, temperatures rise, passions erupt, and sometimes, things… turn… deadly.

They “erupt.” Get it? Get it!?

The thing is, these are stories about real women who actually murdered people. Lisa writes:

…the crimes they’re talking about on these shows are not all sex-related, and I’m just going to go out on a limb and say none of them are sexy, either. The only reason I can even fathom for a promo like this is just the notion that women are sex personified, like the green M&M. Even committing horrible, gruesome murders can’t change that.

In other words, if women are involved, best to sexify. If a man murders a man, it’s just violence. But if a man murders a woman or a woman murders a man, it’s sexy, sexy violence. If a woman murders a woman, will the murder be sexualized? I bet it would.

This calls into question the idea that we sexualize violence against women because we find pleasure in harming her. Instead, maybe we sexualize violence against women simply because we sexualize women.

Also in random, bizarre things sold with sex, see our post on using sex to sell the most unlikely things.

Rachel O., writing from New Zealand, sent in an interesting example of gendered energy drinks.  Other than their being gendered, I thought there were two things worth noting.

First, the only difference between the male and female version of the drink (other than the marketing, which is downright diametrical) is the number of calories.  The female version, Angel, is low calorie; the male version, Demon, is not.  So dieting, an imperative towards thinness, and femininity (not to mention innocence) are all lumped together in the marketing of the product.

Demon (don’t click… loud, scary music):

Angel (safe to click):

The second thing I thought was interesting about these two drinks was that it took a lot of digging to find evidence that they were made by the same company (though I finally found it here).  As far as I can tell, neither website admits the existence of the other.  This is a really strong separation of the two products, as if femininity and masculinity threaten to spoil each other, it’s best to keep them as far away from one another as possible.  God forbid we know that the makers of the aggressive Demon drink sissy it up to also make the sweet, low cal Angel drink.  Best to keep our masculinity and femininity pure.

This reminds me of the fact that Dove and Axe are owned by the same company.  The two products are sold with divergent marketing campaigns — the former claims to empower women, the latter produces some of the most sexist advertising on TV — but they are both part of Unilever.  Only our ignorance of this fact makes Dove’s marketing strategy seem earnest.

During the 19th the United States received many new residents from China.  Sometimes they came voluntarily; sometimes they were imported forcibly.  The term “Shanghaied” originally described the forced stealing of Chinese men to come work in America.  Many of them worked on the transcontinental railroad, built between 1863 and 1869.  Ninety percent of the workers on the central Pacific track, for example, were Chinese.

After the railroad was completed, however, many Chinese went to work in industries in which they competed with white American workers, especially mining, and they became scapegoats for white unemployment.  For some examples of anti-Asian propaganda, see our collection of “yellow peril” posters and cartoons.

Animosity towards the Chinese culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.  The Act meant that Chinese in America, most of whom were adult men, had little hope of reuniting with their families if they stayed in the U.S.; it also allowed the U.S. to deny re-entry if a Chinese person already in the U.S. left the country; and it excluded the Chinese in America from getting U.S. citizenship.

The Chinese Exclusion Act is an ugly moment in U.S. history that was supported by many Americans.  But this support wasn’t universal.  The political cartoon below attacks the Act.  “No admittance to Chinamen,” it reads.  But “communist nihilist-socialist fenian & hoodlum [are] welcome.”  The punchline reads, sarcastically, “We must draw the line somewhere, you know.”

(Image from Time.)

The Fenian, by the way, were Irish political groups, suggesting that the embrace of one minority group did not necessarily translate into the embrace of others.   Or maybe the cartoon was meant to go the other way: “If we’re going to exclude the Chinese, let’s exclude others as well.”

UPDATE: Loki offered the following helpful correction to my description of the word “Shanghaid”:

A bit of disagreement: The verb to Shanghai someone was more often used with respect to the practice of crimps or other people to use force, intimidation or outright kidnapping to man merchant ships during the 18th century.

I’m not about to claim that there weren’t cases of people from Shanghai being forcibly relocated to the US to work on the railroad – but the term refers to one of the abuses of common sailors that was considered usual practice in the age of sail.

Wikipedia article here, for some background of the maritime history of the term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing

In 1989 Peggy McIntosh published an essay that is assigned in nearly every Sociology of Race and Ethnicity course in America.  Titled White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, the essay included a list of things that white people, but not others in a white-dominated society, can count on.  Here are a few:

I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

I thought of Peggy McIntosh when I saw this personal confession at PostSecret:

For more on white privilege, see our posts on Colin Powell being called a traitor, Sotomayor’s Supreme Court hearings, the privilege to shoplift, and “flesh” and “nude” colors.

Women’s and men’s washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.

As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.

I present here for your perusal, a typology and analysis of various washroom signs.

[Editor: After the jump because there are dozens of them… which is why Marissa’s post is so awesome…]

The Universal Male

One of the ideas that supports patriarchy is the notion that a man can be representative of all humanity, or “mankind”, while a woman could only be representative of other women. For example, in politics we see “women’s issues” segregated from everybody issues.

Washroom signs illustrate this idea by depicting the male figure simply, and the female as some kind of elaboration on the male figure. This sign expresses in words what many do with images:

The most common type of washroom sign, pictured at the top of this post, is another example. Typically, these signs depict men as people, and women as people in skirts:

In Iran, men are depicted as people, and women are people in skirts and hijabs:

Occasionally, we see that men are people, and women are people with waists:

Which highlights the absurdity of the construction of gendered bodies because, well, men have waists too.

In this sign, we see that men have torsos, and women have floating, disembodied boobs:

Women also sprout tentacles from their heads

Finally, we have a sign that, while patronizingly insulting, is interesting in that it takes the assumption of the universal male to its logical conclusion. That is, if “men” is interchangeable with “people”, and women aren’t men, then women can’t really be considered people at all, can they?

That is, if “men” is interchangeable with “people,” and women aren’t men, then women can’t really be considered people at all. But who wants to be a person when you can be a beautiful, delicate flower instead?

Opposite Sexes

It seems that vaginas are shown attached to women to a far lesser extent than breasts are.

Somewhat related to the last category are the signs that pose the question: do you stand or sit when you pee?

(A note from an anonymous commenter: …the photo of the pointers/setters is from a restaurant in Philadelphia called the White Dog Cafe, where I worked for many years. There are four single bathrooms, all named after types of dogs (punny, I know) – and all explicitly non-gendered. Those bathrooms were designed in part with the West Philadelphia queer community in mind; when I worked there I had many LGBTQ coworkers, including someone who was transitioning, and it was an incredibly supportive environment. Duly noted.)

Other signs use the secondary sex characteristics of animals:

This illustrates the way we assume the universality of the gender binary, when it is not universal. For example, hens have been known to behave like roosters, and then develop male secondary sex characteristics, making the news in Sweden and China.

There was also a rooster in Italy who started to lay eggs after a fox killed all the hens.

This sign is even more essentializing, specifying the chromosome pairs you need to use the washroom:

It also universalizes the gender binary to alien races (whose legs conveniently seem to abstractly represent human sex organs) and robots.

Conflating Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Signs can vary between designating washrooms by sex and by gender because most people assume that they are the same thing.

Her thought bubble: “shopping”; His thought bubble: “football”

This sign covers all the bases. Male as universal/female as variation: He’s a simple egg-shape, she’s wearing a dress and lipstick. Biological sex: He has a minimalist penis, she has minimalist vagina. Gender performance: He’s thinking about football, she’s thinking about shopping. It’s almost funny that the graphic designer felt that so many different elements were necessary. It’s also interesting because it illustrates how total the conflation is and the rigidity of the resulting dichotomy. Women must meet standards of femininity. Men can’t wear lipstick or enjoy shopping. And they certainly can’t have vaginas.

There’s an element of absurdity to it. We don’t segregate washrooms because people have different interests. Nor is it because of people’s wardrobe choices since, obviously, women wear pants. And, as this sign from Utilikilts points out, it’s not unheard of for men to wear skirts.

We segregate washrooms because of sex. Because of  the presumed sexual interest of the opposite sex. That is, because of sexuality.

Specifically, because of male heterosexuality, which is assumed to be predatory. Heck, it’s expected and accepted as predatory, to the extent that it’s joked about.

This is unfair to a lot of men. And it becomes an excuse for those men who are predatory.

The segregation of washrooms is based on an assumption of heterosexuality, predatory in men and passive and vulnerable in women; the association of sexuality with sex, and the conflation of sex and gender. In other words, it is nonsensical. One thing we don’t segregate washrooms by is sexuality.

Uh…?
Finally, here are some signs that I just found confusing. In Germany, women are represented by fire, and men are represented by water.

Whereas in Brazil, fire represents men. Women are
represented by flowers…

This one is from Sangunburi Crater, on Jeju Island in South Korea. I’m assuming there’s an explanation for why the woman has a scuba mask on her head, and why the man is golem, but I don’t know what it is.

UPDATE: Several people responded with explanations on threads where this post has been linked. Here is one of them: The woman diver is a haenyeo, or pearl diver – there is an independent haenyo subculture that is actually pretty kick-ass and unique to Jejudo. Only the women dive. ... The golem male represents a traditional totem of men wishing the pearl-divers good luck and safety on their journeys.

From an Applebee’s in Sao Paulo. The red sign is for the women’s washroom. Obviously.

Photo Sources:
Toilet Signs
because you value your soul
Dark Roasted Blend 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Blogoncherry
Akshay Gandhi’s Blog
Funny Photo Collection
Ahh.. Chewww!
1 Design Per Day

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Marissa has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Toronto, with minors in sociology and history. She is currently finishing law school, and hopes to practice family law. She has been blogging at This Is Hysteria! for two months, where she writes about social justice issues, politics, culture and working in call centres.

Thanks to Lucy for pointing us to her fantastic post.

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