Emily H. sent in a great example of gendering kids’ products. She looked at kids’ luggage on the Target website and noticed a significant difference in the boys’ and girls’ version of one brand. The boys’ version, in the standard blue, is called “Embark Boy Pattern Pilot”:

The girls’ version is identical in size and construction. The girls’ versions are pink and purple, but that’s not the difference that drew Emily’s attention. Take a look:

Notice the name? Where the boys’ version is for pilots, the girls’ appears to be for the pilot’s assistant. Just a nice little example of the normalization of the idea that girls are supportive helpers to the boys who direct the show.

Cross-posted at Scientopia and Racialicious.

Several years ago I took this photo of the posted dress code for Brothers Bar in Madison, Wisconsin.   As an alumnus, I can tell you that the relationship between the college community and the community at large was strained, as it is in many college towns.  The college community was, on average, better off economically than much of the non-college community, with greater (potential) educational achievement, and overwhelmingly white.  There was less mingling between the “town” and “gown” than we might expect by random chance, and some businesses tried to attract the latter exclusively.

This was the case with Brothers Bar. Brothers sits within a block of campus, they wanted to attract the college students but push away young “townies,” as they were derogatorily called.  Of course, it’s illegal to say “Poor Black people keep out,” so, instead, they use symbolic codes to warn especially Black members of the non-college community that they’re not welcome: no crooked hats, no skullcaps, headbands, or bandanas, and no sports jerseys.

An enterprising journalist sat outside Brothers Bar to see just how the dress code was enforced.  Not “strictly,” it turned out.  The people who were turned away were overwhelmingly Black.  Meanwhile, they let in students wearing UW sports jerseys and other Bucky the Badger-themed “athletic wear.”  So much for color-blindness, this was a racist dress code with no reference to color at all.

I was reminded of this incident when Stephen Wilson sent in photo of a similar dress code taken at Kelly’s in Kansas City.  Again we see racially-coded restrictions: the same no crooked hats rule, doo rags and bandanas are disallowed, as are hoods actually worn on the head (but not the preppy hoodies apparently), and “excessively” baggy clothes.

So, sure, Black people are allowed in these establishments, just not Black people “of a certain type.”  If they want to enter, they have to assimilate to white culture.  These dress codes seem to say:

Turn those hats on straight forward or straight back, pull up those pants, and take off whatever’s on your head!  It’s not that we don’t like Black people, we just prefer our Black people to defer to white standards.  See?  Not racist at all!  Cheers!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

The news each month is usually on unemployment rates, weekly filings of new claims, layoffs and new hiring. And the Pew report on widening race/ethnic wealth gaps was eye-opening. But you can take the measure of the recession overall maybe best with the employment rates — how many people have jobs? By that measure, the news is flat-to-down without letup. The Black-White discrepancy in the trends is increasing.

Here is the employment trend for White and Black women, showing that Black women had higher employment rates before the recession, but they’ve fallen more than twice as much as White women’s (a drop of 5.7% versus 2.4% as of June):

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

For men, the gap is bigger and the lines further apart, so I added a ratio line to help show the gap. Black men’s rate has fallen 5.6%, compared with 3.8% for White men:

The Christian Science Monitor has an article reviewing some of the factors that contribute to the unemployment gap for men, including education, incarceration and discrimination. And the Center for American Progress has more detail in this report, which argues that declines in manufacturing and public employment are increasing the Black-White gaps especially in this recession.

What the broader statistics don’t show as well is the tenuousness of the jobs Black workers have compared to Whites generally — working for weaker firms, in more segregated jobs, as a result of a racialized sorting process, which put them at higher risk of job loss in a recession (even without discrimination in firing decisions, which there is, too).

HAPPY AUGUST!

New Contributor:

First and foremost, Sociological Images is pleased to welcome Marty Hart-Landsberg to our team of Contributors!  Marty is a professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College. He’s been blogging, excellently, at Reports from the Economic Front, and he brings much needed expertise and insight into economic issues. We’re so pleased that he’s joined us!

New Publications and Appearances:

Catch contributor Caroline Heldman talking about the debt ceiling debate on Fox Business Channel’s Follow the Money tonight at 10 p.m. EST.  Heldman appeared on The Factor, Neil Cavuto’s Show, The Hannity Show, Freedomwatch, Bulls & Bears, and Follow the Money 14 times last month.

I’m very excited to have a new publication out in the journal Ethnography. My first using ethnographic methods, the paper is an analysis of lindy hop (a social dance from the 1930s and ’40s) with which I argue that the habitus has liberating as well as conservative potential: The Emancipatory Promise of the Habitus: Lindy Hop, the Body, and Social Change. And there’re pictures!

I also wrote about 500 words on hook up culture on college campuses for the Canadian website, The Mark.  I argue that hook up culture isn’t bad, it’s just-as-bad and no worse than the rest of society.

Gwen and I will both be guest blogging at Scientopia for the next two weeks.  You can catch all the same material here, but check out Scientopia if you’re interested in

Finally, SocImages showed up on TIME and BoingBoing this week. Always a good time…

New Pages:

We’ve added an “Editors’ Pick” tab to our menu. Gwen and I will be slowly culling our favorite posts from the last four years and adding them.  We’re excited to be able to highlight our best and most well-received stuff.

We’ve also added a “For Instructors” tab.  We’ve got some stuff for you there already, but are also asking for volunteers to help make the site more useful to instructors. We’re especially excited about the possibility of putting together Course Guides that collect the best posts for common sociology courses. Check it out!

Party in Las Vegas:

The American Sociological Association is having its annual conference in Las Vegas this year.  We invite all of you to the Blogger Party at 4:30pm on Sunday, August 21st at the Seahorse Lounge at Caesar’s Palace. Come by and say “hello”!

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

This is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter and Facebook.  Learn more about your editors at my website and Gwen’s.  And a bunch of us are on twitter @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

Back in February I went ahead and built myself a website highlighting, well, myself.  And I will admit to, on occasion, indulging my curiosity regarding how often it’s visited and what visitors are looking at.  So yesterday I was browsing the site stats and noticed that there was data on how often each clickable thing was clicked on, including images, tabs, links, and documents I’d uploaded; stuff like that.  I thought, huh, well I wonder?  Are people checking out my classes?  Downloading my journal articles? Are they interested in my public speaking!?  That’d be so cool!

Lo and behold.  The most clicked upon clickable thing on my website is the Sociological Images tab.  Yay!  The second most clicked upon thing?  My photograph.

This is kind of fascinating.  What drives people not just to look at my photograph, but to want to look at it up close?  What kind of information are they trying to glean, not from the articles I’ve written or material I teach, but from the gleam in my eye?  Is it “human nature” to want to see people you’re interacting with, even on the internet?  Is it the cultural imperative to have an opinion on what women look like?  Something else?

And if I’m going to speculate as to the motivations of visitors, I should ask myself the obvious questions.  Why did I upload photographs of myself at all?  Four of them!  Why do I think that it’s important to be embodied on, let’s face it, a website with a great deal of highly abstracted content?  Do I think it looks “professional”?  Do I think photographs make me more relate-able?  Am I bowing to the cultural imperative that women present their bodies for judgment?  I don’t know!

I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

I don’t play video games. The few times I have played a game it involved a furry animal working his way through some kind of tropical forest and the most violent it got was when he hit a villainous turtle on the head with a coconut. So, I am not familiar with Duke Nukem.

Of course, one Google search tells me he is a supremely popular, freakishly over-muscled, machine gun-wielding, hyper-aggressive action “hero” who is described in the Wikipedia entry as “frequently politically incorrect.” His character profile also claims that when he was first introduced, he was a CIA operative hired to save Earth from Dr. Proton. But the current marketing materials make clear what the really important aspects of the game are. Exhibit A is this ad, which greeted me as I came out of the subway this morning:

Duke Nukem is sitting on a throne while two women in schoolgirl outfits sit at his feet. The caption leaves no doubt about the main attractions: “This game has bazookas. Both types.”

The game’s website presents a guy who looks intensely devoted to his steroid regimen, has a penchant for unloading 50 rounds into anything with tentacles, and who appears to live in a post-apocalyptic land which is somehow still able to generously supply women with fetish outfits, bikinis, and manicures. In a video promo for the game on YouTube there are scenes of Duke on a shooting rampage interspersed with what appears to be him walking into a room and seeing a switched-on vibrator skidding around the room. He then encounters two women (the Holsom Twins, Mary and Kate) in schoolgirl outfits who drop their weapons to touch and caress each other in sexually suggestive ways. Duke is watching this while pointing a gun at them, saying, “allll right, time for my reward” (NSFW due to images and language):

Unfortunately for the twins, they later have sex with an alien and get themselves into trouble (thanks to Michael R. for this clip; also NSFW):

Many other reviews of Duke Nukem have also pointed out its violent sexual imagery and encouragement of sexually violent behavior towards women. Just to tally up, we have:

1. Fetishizing and infantilizing women by putting them in outfits associated with children.
2. Referring to their breasts as “bazookas,”  both objectifying women and equating  their bodies with a military weapon.
3. A lesbian encounter presented as titillation for the male viewer.
4. Watching women engage in sexual activity with one another, and even threatening women with weaponry to continue engaging in sexual activity with one another, is your reward. You deserve it – you deserve to be sexually gratified.

People learn by watching. This can be good and bad. It can make us more accepting of others’ opinions and outlooks, and it can also desensitize and normalize harmful opinions and behaviors. In regards to Duke, the latter is where the risk lies — the more one sees images like those presented by Duke Nukem, the more likely they are to be seen as what is acceptable and usual. Normalizing harmful, degrading, and insulting stereotypes of and behavior toward women seems like a high price to pay for a video game’s success.

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Larkin Callaghan is a doctoral student at Columbia University studying health behavior and education. She is particularly concerned with gender disparities in access to healthcare and prevention services, and has done research on adolescent female sexual health, how social media operate as an educational platform, and differences by gender in the effectiveness of brief health interventions. You can follow her on Twitter, Tumblr, and at her blog.

Jennifer F. sent in another example of the emphasis on female athletes’ looks. Here’s a recent screenshot from the Yahoo! Sports website:

So, ok, awesome, we have a featured story about Hope Solo, a member of the U.S. women’s soccer team. Except let’s take a closer look:

Yes, that’s right: the article emphasizes not her recent amazing performance in the World Cup, but rather how her skill and beauty make her marriageable. Sigh.

One thing I like about Anita Sarkeesian’s series, Tropes vs. Women, is that she doesn’t go for the obvious. Instead, she draws our attention to insidious and ubiquitous tropes that many of us have, nonetheless, never quite noticed before, exactly because they’ve simply become the water we swim in (e.g., the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl).

In this episode she reveals the Mystical Pregnancy trope, common in science fiction, in which women are involuntarily impregnated by aliens and monsters for nefarious and frightening purposes.  Following Laura Shapiro, she calls out writers and directors for using pregnancy as a form of “torture porn” and using women’s biological capacity as a plot device, meanwhile ignoring the real, non-fiction threats to women’s reproductive rights.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.