Both my colleague, my friend, and a reader (that’d be John L, Dmitriy T.M., and Jillian Y.) sent along this month’s cover of Newsweek.  FOX News and Palin both are calling it “sexist” and “demeaning”:

I have to agree with FOX News here.  Sexualizing a woman is a way to make her seem less important.  It’s, literally, to disempower her.  This magazine cover tells us that we shouldn’t take Palin seriously.   With her short shorts, sexy legs, pigtails, and friendly smile, it turns her into a political joke.

But this is about more than gender; it’s about the relationship between power and sex in our society.  Because we so frequently see sex as a power struggle, to be presented as a sexual object is to be presented as passive, consumable, inert (remember, only one person gets “fucked”).  While both men and women can be presented as sexual objects, because of sexism, this particular tool can be used more effectively against women than men.  (And when it is used against a man, it often has the effect of feminizing him, making an association with femininity/sexual subordination the very thing that disempowers him.  Ah the tangled web of sex, sexuality, gender, and power.)

Whether you think Palin should or shouldn’t be taken seriously is irrelevant here.  What is interesting is just how much Newsweek can do to influence the public one way or another, even if all they do is see the cover.

Images matter.

For comparison, I did a quick search for Newsweek covers featuring the last election’s Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates for comparison.  Compare:

For more examples of the sexualization of Palin, see here, here, and here.

And for more on the relationship between sex and power, see these posts: power one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,and, eleven.

(Sources: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Chelsea S. sent in a link to the BVD website and its BVD MANual campaign. BVD is a brand of men’s underwear. The site has several tabs that let you “study” men in various ways. In the Chemistry section we see what men are made up of (larger version here):

So guys are made up of, among other things, obnoxium, machisium, bragnausium, and larcenic.

If you go to the Sociology section you can take two quizzes. The first is about getting dressed (take the quiz here). If at the first step you answer that you are male you are taken to a second step that asks “model or guy?” If you answer model, you are directed to the female category. Once on the female track, you get to go through a series of questions playing on stereotypes of women and, apparently, men who don’t qualify as “guys”:

The second one is on being comfortable (quiz is here). In the second step you have to choose between “sensitive type”  or “guy,” and if you choose “sensitive type,” you go to the female section:

In both cases, at the end of the female path, the last question is “Wouldn’t you rather just be a guy?”

It’s a great example of the association of “real” manliness with obnoxious characteristics, while men who don’t meet the requirements for being real men are feminized. While real guys are stereotyped (they’re self-centered, obnoxious, and braggy), those characteristics are still preferable to being a “sensitive” guy with “feelings” and “needs.” And of course, it also denigrates women when being associated with femininity is a way of ridiculing men.

[I posted this a couple of days ago but accidentally deleted it last night, so I’m reposting it. I apologize for the confusion, and for the loss of all the comments. I’m going to see if I can recover the comments, but I don’t know how it’ll go. Thanks to Dangerous Minds I was able to save my original commentary.]

Our tech wizard, Jon S., and reader Katie C. sent in a link to a Danish campaign by the organization Children Exposed to Violence at Home to raise awareness of domestic violence. The campaign is called “Hit the Bitch!” and features a game where you can smack a woman around using either a mouse or your own hand if you have a web cam:

The game has now been limited to Danish users only.

The woman gets increasingly bruised and bloodied as you hit her.  I forced myself to try the site and hit her twice, and it was honestly sickening to watch her head jerk backward or to the side and hear the sound of the slap and her reacting.  At the top, a counter keeps track; you start out as 100% Pussy, 0% Gangsta, but your Gangsta rating goes up every time you hit her:

Apparently, though, when you get up to where you’d be at 100% Gangsta, it instead says 100% Idiot, as though this is a real put-down that is going to make you think really seriously about domestic violence.  I am trying to think of any context that would make this seem like a good idea, or an effective way to combat domestic violence.  I mean, ok, yeah, I guess people might be made more aware of it after hearing about or playing the game, but is it likely to have any positive effect?

It seems more likely that people who don’t already take domestic violence seriously would either be uncomfortable, leave the site, and never think about it again, or find it funny to play for a few minutes just to see what would happen…and somehow encouraging people to slap around an image of a woman for fun seems like a really weird way to get people to think more seriously about domestic violence.

UPDATE: Comments closed.

The Daily Show calls itself “a fake news show,” but it often does what the “real” news shows won’t. It documents how what people on news shows try to pass off as “spontaneous and unrehearsed” (as the opening of Meet the Press used to put it) is really planned and scripted at Talking Points Central. The Daily Show will give a quick montage of clips in which different people on different shows all use the same unusual word or phrase.

Last night it was “dithering.” A series of right-wingers, culminating in Dick Cheney, all accuse President Obama of “dithering” on Afghanistan.

Slide to 3:37:

It was just like the old days, when The Daily Show would string together clips from Bush Administration figures and right-wing commentators all using the same key words. But then, the statements all came on the same day, so the central direction was obvious. (I mean, it was obvious to Daily Show viewers, not to viewers of “real” news programs.)

The popularity of dithering may be more a case of contagion than planning. Note the dates of the O’Reilly and Cheney clips, more than two weeks apart.

Dithering is not a frequently used word. Lexis-Nexis shows only 27 instances in TV news transcripts for the first nine months of the year. The first use in connection with Afghanistan comes on September 24 – on Australian ABC, but the speaker was from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. So it’s likely that dithering represented one idea of how to attack Obama. That idea took hold.

Over the course of the next month, dithering begins to reverberate. Republican senators use it in hearings in early October, TV news people bounce it back, and right-wing commentators start yodeling it loudly.

They are changing the rationale for why we are in Afghanistan. What’s really going on here is a dither, a big dither, indecisiveness. (William Bennett on CNN, Oct. 18)

And finally the Cheney quote on Oct. 21 that is echoed in every news story about that speech.

The White House must stop dithering while America’s forces are in danger.

Quite possibly, Cheney’s speech was written by someone at the American Enterprise Institute or someone else in that neo-con circle. Still, I don’t see the dithering as a matter of “talking points” distributed by the RNC. Instead, it’s an example of what I mentioned in another post – a word (dithering, issues) that spreads because it just sounds “right,” at least to certain people.

I expect that the dithering life cycle will be mayfly brief. Issues to mean problems was slower to catch on, and it may hang around for a good while.

Shirley A. sent in a Zellers sale flyer that is really interesting in light of the recent post we did on a Best Buy promotion. Whereas the Best Buy promotion was aimed directly at men, you’ll see that this flyer, for a store that sells household items instead of fancy gadgets, is aimed staunchly at women… who have to buy for their whole family and their home as well as themselves.

For more on gender and responsibility for the home:

First, check out this longitudinal data on how much housework wives and husbands do.

Then, for more examples of how women are responsible for the home, see this KFC advertisement offering moms a night off, this a commercial montage, Italian dye ad with a twist, women love to clean, homes of the future, what’s for dinner, honey?, liberation through quick meals, and my husband’s an ass.

See also these humorous illustrations: I love it when you talk clean to me, men do housework fantasy calendar, the househusbands of Hollywood, and porn for new moms.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

In this 20 minute video, novelist Chimamanda Adichie describes, with insight and grace, the problem of the “single story.”  She says, “Show a people as one thing, and only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”  Focusing on her experience as an “African” in the U.S. (she is from Nigeria), she also describes her own experiences with realizing that she has heard only a single story, whether of rural Nigerians or Mexicans.

Highly recommended (or read the transcript here):

Via Stuff White People Do.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

Amanda C. caught John McCain with some interesting presumptions! The contact part of his webpage has a drop down menu for the senders’ honorific(s) (see a close up below):

Close up:

So, the list is heteronormative (no “Mr. and Mr.” or “Ms. and Ms.”).

Further, because no write-ins are allowed, it also forces people who aren’t gender-typical to choose a gender if they want to send McCain a note.

And it bizarrely erases women doctors (no “Mr. and Dr.” or “Dr. and Mr.”).

Nice catch, Amanda!

UPDATE: After seeing this, Danielle F. sent in a screenshot of the honorifics choices that came up when she ordered tickets to “The Nutcracker” at the Detroit Opera House:

So you could theoretically be a single female Rev., Col., Capt., and so on, but the married versions of those all assume a female spouse. Notice they also have a listing for King, but not Queen.  I guess they get a lot of male royalty at the Detroit Opera House.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The Economic Policy Institute defines a “good” job as “one that pays at least 60% of the median household income and also provides health care and retirement benefits.” Based on that definition, here is a breakdown of men holding good jobs in 1979 and 2008, broken down by race/ethnicity (with Native Americans and Asians unfortunately absent):

Notice the clear decrease in the % of men in each group in good jobs between 1979 to 2008. The racial pattern is also striking, if not surprising, with Black and Hispanic men being significantly less likely to have a good job than White men in both 1979 and 2008. Notice the particularly large gap between White and Hispanic men in 2008–over 20 percentage points.