Anna M., Naomi B., Amanda C., Ben Z., and SpeZek sent in a new PETA ad campaign, the latest in a twisted story of objectification metaphor.

Feminists in the ’70s protested the objectification of women by metaphorically linking meat and female bodies (e.g., “we should not be treating women like pieces of meat”).  Meat is meat, so the argument went, but women are human beings and should be treated as such.

In mocking response, in 1978 Larry Flynt put a woman being chewed up by a meat grinder on the cover of Hustler magazine. We will treat women like meat if we want, was the message.  And we did, and we do, seemingly endlessly.

Forty years later, Pamela Anderson submits to being symbolically carved up for butchering by PETA in order to metaphorically link meat and female bodies again.  But this time, in an ironic reversal, it’s designed to condemn the way we treat animals, not the way we treat women.

And, forty years later, feminists are still saying “Please, can we not do the women/meat thing?”

So Canada denies PETA a permit for the launching of this new ad campaign.  An official explains: “…it goes against all principles public organizations are fighting for in the everlasting battle of equality between men and women” (source).  What a nice thing to say, feminists think.

But Anderson fights feminism with feminism:

How sad that a woman would be banned from using her own body in a political protest over the suffering of cows and chickens… In some parts of the world, women are forced to cover their whole bodies with burqas—is that next?

Yes, Pamela, I’m sure that’s next.

But I digress.

So PETA and Anderson must think that Canadians super-super-respect women like totally and never-never-objectify them to the degree that saying that animals are like women will suddenly inspire horror at the prospect of using animals for food?  Or is it that they think men will see the image and be like “oooh I’d really like to rub up against that rump” and then suddenly find cows too sexy to eat?  Or they don’t give a shit about women and are willing to use whatever attention-getting tactic they can to save animals from going under the knife (including using the body of a woman that has, um, gone under the knife)?

I submit this for discussion because I just don’t know.

More from PETA: women packaged like meat, and in cages, women who love animals get naked (men wear clothes), the banned superbowl ad, and a collection of various PETA advertising using (mostly women’s) nudity. See also my post on leftist balkanization, or the way that leftist social movements tend to undermine each other.

If you’re interested further, you may want to read Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat.

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.

Nia A. sent in a chart from an article in the Revista Española de Cardiología about gender in medical schools in Spain. Overall, the medical field is increasingly feminized. In 2008, 73% of new medical school graduates (licenciadas en medicina) were female (note that in Spain they use commas where we would use a decimal in a number in the U.S., so 73,04 = 73.04):

It’s a significant increase, but women also earned a significant majority of medical degrees by 1998, so this isn’t a new phenomenon. Women also earned just over half (52%) of Ph.D.s in 2008 (tesis doctorales aprobadas).

When we look at faculty (docentes en la universidad, total), women are a distinct minority, making up only 20%. This varies quite a bit by position (I’m relying on Nia’s comments and Wikipedia to translate Spain’s academic ranks to the U.S. equivalent; please let me know if I’ve misunderstood a category):

• The percentage of women serving as teaching assistants (profesoras ayudantes) has gone down from 72% in 1998 to 50% in 2008 (the only area where the percentage of women decreased).
• Women make up 22% of lecturers (profesoras asociadas, who may or may not be tenured) and 9% of titulares de universidad (which I think are what we would call associate professors in the U.S.). They make up a sizable minority of contratadas doctoras, a tenured position similar to a professor (42%).
• Women made up a larger percentage of titulares de escuela universitaria (53%), a position at non-Ph.D. granting and technical colleges; however, this position was abolished in some academic restructuring in 2007. Those holding it keep their jobs, but no new hires will be made.
• However, women make up only a tiny portion (4%) of catedráticas de universidad (roughly the same as a full professor — received tenure and then met a number of other requirements for promotion). Only this group is eligible to become a rector (university president)

This pattern is widespread in universities (see our post on engineering and tech faculty), and likely due to a number of factors. There is always lag time between demographic changes in a field and changes in faculty, since unless a lot of new positions are created, potential faculty have to wait until current ones retire. All things being equal, we’d expect the % of women faculty to go up steadily over time as more female Ph.D. candidates apply for positions previously held by men. Of course, women have been earning the majority of medical degrees since before 1998, so there’s been sufficient time for gender changes in the field to affect the composition of faculty.

But all things aren’t equal in university hiring. Historically women have faced significant gender discrimination, and this continues to occur. However, a large body of evidence indicates that family/work conflicts play a huge role. Because women still, as a group, have primary responsibility for childcare, they are more likely than men to face difficulties balancing family time with work requirements, such that they are less likely to advance to tenure or promotions. They are more likely to opt out of more demanding positions — applying to be Dean, say, or accepting a position at a research-heavy university as opposed to a community college — but also find that they may be “mommy tracked” by hiring committees who assume they’ll be taking too much time out of the paid workforce to raise their kids (and often make these assumption whether or not the woman has or plans to have kids or stay home with them).

I also suspect that if the data were broken down into specialty, we’d see more women earning degrees or teaching in areas associated with women or the family (ob/gyns, for example) as opposed to more masculinized specialties, often perceived as very high-status, like neurosurgery (we see more women than men in pediatrics and ob/gyn in the U.S., for instance).

Will the percent of female med school faculty in Spain and elsewhere increase? Undoubtedly over time it will. But due to factors including those I just discussed, it’s also likely that the increase will lag significantly behind what we’d expect just based on the number of women earning medical degrees.

Dmitriy T.M. sent along a Slate slideshow chock full of interesting information on cigarettes and health warnings internationally. I found this particular tidbit most compelling:

As of June 22, 2010, U.S. cigarette manufacturers are no longer allowed to use the words “light,” “low,” and “mild” to describe their product because it gives the false impression that these cigarettes are better for you than others (source). In place of the words, however, manufacturers are using light and dark colors.  Between 2006 and 2009, for example, Salem cigarettes phased out their packages labeled with words (top) and moved to color based differentiation (bottom):

Marlboro has issued a “cheat sheet,” showing the move from descriptors to colors:

This is a very strategic move on the part of cigarette manufacturers, who know that the colors give consumers the same impression as the words.  At least one study has shown as much:

Scientists at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., studied 197 smokers and 200 nonsmokers who were shown two mock cigarette packs, one light blue and one dark blue.

They were then asked, “Which one would you buy if you were trying to reduce the risks to your health?” Eighty-seven percent of those surveyed selected the lighter-shaded pack, while just 8 percent chose the darker-shaded pack.

The New York City Health Department is trying to combat this new strategy with commercials aimed at exposing it:

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.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Courtesy of Talking Points Memo (via Comics with Problems), I have for you a link to the entire graphic novel (comic book? I’m not sure what to call this thing) Dignity & Respect: A Training Guide on Homosexual Conduct Policy. Here’s the cover:

If the cover hasn’t clued you in yet, this is a book meant to educate soldiers about the U.S. Army’s 1993 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy (which applies to other branches of the military as well). It covers what the policy means, what to do if you have “credible evidence” that someone is engaging in homosexual activities (being gay is ok, you just can’t do anything), the Army’s anti-harassment policy (you know, you can turn someone in for being gay and ruin their military career, but you can’t be rude), and provides scenarios of situations that might occur and how a soldier should react.

Among other things you can learn that it’s not ok to imply a male soldier would go on a date with another man, but apparently it’s ok to say that no man on earth would ever go out with a female soldier in your unit:

I’m not going to put up every page here, since you can easily get them all at the links above, but it’s worth at least skimming. It’s…something. I cannot imagine that any soldier, even ones who cared about the issue a lot one way or the other, took this book seriously.

I will give them credit, though: the characters are extremely diverse in terms of race/ethnicity and gender.

Christina W. alerted us to the availability of the first episode of John Berger’s 1972 BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing.  Berger was is a artist, author, and art critic.  In the first episode of the documentary (in four parts below) he asks how the ease of reproduction made possible by the camera (both still and moving) has changed the meaning of art.  The episode is a bit slow (for my taste), but has some interesting ideas.

First he argues that the ability to reproduce works of art in books, on posters, postcards, and television screens means that art is experienced in a decontextualized way (or in the context of, say, your living room). No longer something we pilgrimage to, to consume in a very specific context, they come to us.  This, he argues, has multiplied a work of art’s possible meanings.

As an aside, he makes an interesting argument that the obsession with authenticity — “usually linked with cash value,” he says, “but also invoked in the name of culture and civilization” — is actually “a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.”

He then talks about how our experience of art is mediated by media (whether it be an art book or a discussion of art in a television program), so that our reaction to it is inevitably shaped by its re-interpretation.  The art critic, for example, tells us what to think about a piece of art. (No doubt, his call for skepticism certainly can be applied to Sociological Images.)

But reproduction and the multiplication of meaning also makes it easier to make connections and have personalized reactions.

(Btw, there is a pretty awesome moment at 4:38 of the third installment.)

Start watching Episode Two here.

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.

Jenny Knopinski snapped these photos of the new Safeway brand of baby care products, Mom to Mom.  The branding of the product as “for moms, by moms” is another great example of the way that mothers are held responsible for childcare, while fathers are simultaneously excluded from the sphere altogether.

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.

Joel S. sent in a link to an article by Gonzalo Frasca at Serious Game Source about a management simulation game the U.K. branch of Intel released back in 2004. It was called The Intel IT Manager Game: The Simulation of an IT Department and was a free promotional program:

The player had to hire IT employees, as well as manage a budget and buy computer equipment, the latter of which was either generic or Intel-branded.

When you started out you selected the sex of your IT manager:

But then, when you went to hire employees…they forgot to include an option to hire any women. You could get a guy with a green mohawk, though:

After a few days the game was taken down and Intel said they were making revisions; it re-launched a month later, this time with  female employee options, including this one, whose hair looks like alien antennae to me:

You can see the current version here.

Frasca argues that such oversights are more important than the lack of female avatars in some video games:

The Intel game is not merely an entertainment product: it is a piece of corporate advertising that simulated an IT workplace for an audience of real IT workers. Unlike what happens in the fantasy world of Fable, gender inequality is a very real problem for IT workers.

The post mentions the National Center for Women and Information Technology, so I went over and looked at some of their data. Gender of students who take the SAT and say they plan on choosing computer/IT majors:

If anything, it looks like the gender segregation of computer/IT occupations is increasing:

Broken down by gender and race/ethnicity:

Asian/Asian American women are actually overrepresented compared to their percentage of the U.S. population (all Asian Americans make up just about 5% of the entire U.S. population, obviously Asian American women make up less than that, though I don’t recall the exact proportion). All other racial/ethnic groups listed here are significantly underrepresented in computing jobs.

The percent of patents in various fields invented by women in the early ’80s and the early…’00s (?):

Frasca suggests that one reason for the Intel snafu might be a lack of women working on the project — if there were women, they might have noticed the lack of female employee options. That’s possible. It’s also likely that having more women in a workplace makes their male colleagues more aware, and thus a guy might think, “hey, maybe we should add some women employees to the game.”

This is totally anecdotal, I know, but forgive me. I have a number of female friends who work in computing jobs; almost all of them have generally found themselves to be the only, or one of just a few, women in their office. And with few exceptions, they say that the men they work with aren’t openly hostile or unfriendly. They don’t deviously exclude them from projects or social events or make lots of sexist remarks. But they forget they exist (for instance, inviting everyone else in the office to lunch where they talk about new project possibilities, and then seeming genuinely sorry later when they realize they left out the only woman in the office…but doing it again anyway).

And things like the Intel game reflect and reinforce the invisibility of women in such fields.

Edna Sednitzer, who blogs at Red Light Politics, sent us in two screencaps of what she came across during a recent search on Thesaurus.com. She searched the word “power” and this is one of the entries that came up, for “related adjectives” (some words I found notable highlighted in red):

Out of curiosity she then searched “weakness,” and here are the suggested adjectives:

At least according to this thesaurus, masculinity is powerful, capable, competent; femininity is weak and incompetent. There’s a sexual component as well — notice that power is associated with being virile, while weakness = lustless. Of course, we also associate men and masculinity with the active pursuit of sex, while women are supposed to be the objects of pursuit, not actively sexual.

Anyway, it’s a great example of how language is gendered in a way that privileges masculinity and men over femininity and women.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.