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Allison K. sent in another example of the sexualization of young girls.  Abercrombie Kids is selling bikinis with “push-up” tops.  According to Wikipedia, the company markets its products at kids age 7-14. The average age of puberty is 12.   So, at what age should girls start trying to enhance their cleavage?  How old is too young?

UPDATE: In the last week this post was shared and tweeted by many of you.  News outlets took up the issue and, in response to the public pressure, Abercrombie first changed the language (taking out the phrase “push up” and just leaving “triangle”), then took the product off the site altogether.  On their Facebook page, they wrote that “We agree with those who say it is best ‘suited’ for girls age 12 and older.”

For more on the sexualization of young girls, see our posts on sexually suggestive teen brands, adultifying children of color, “trucker girl” baby booties, “future trophy wife” kids’ tee, House of Dereón’s girls’ collection, 6-year-olds in French Vogue, “is modesty making a comeback?“, more sexualized clothes and toys, sexist kids’ tees, a trifecta of sexualizing girls, a zebra-striped string bikini for infants, a nipple tassle t-shirt for girls, even more icky kids’ t-shirts, “are you tighter than a 5th grader?” t-shirt, the totally gross “I’m tight like spandex” girls’ t-shirt, a Halloween costume post, Toddlers and Tiaras, and girls in the World of Dance tour.

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.

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Many of you have probably seen the recent anti-Asian rant released by UCLA student Alexandra Wallace. In it, she says that “hordes” of Asians who are admitted to UCLA inappropriately bring their parents along and obnoxiously speak foreign languages in the library (“Oooooooh! Ching chong, ling long, ting tong!? Ooooooh!”). And she compares them to herself, the “polite, nice, American girl that my momma raised me to be.”

Okay so yes, this is what racism looks like. It’s also what sexism looks like. People who objected to Wallace’s video (as they should), often did so with sexist language, including these examples collected by Caroline Heldman for Ms. magazine:

• “I bet her grades match her cup size.”
• “i have big tits and gave the dean a blowjob to get into UCLA is all I hear.”
• “EXCUSE ME WHILE I WHIP MY DICK OUT AND JERK IT TO THOSE TITS.”

But the most interesting thing I’ve heard about Wallace’s video and the response came from What Tami Said.  Tami suggested that all the shock and outrage regarding Wallace’s racism was naive, at best, and delusional, at worst.  Expressing shock, she said, may be a way to spice up a headline.  Or, it might be reflective of a belief among some that this sort of racism doesn’t exist anymore.  Or, she speculates, expressing shock may be a way for people to distance themselves from people like Wallace, a way for them to advertise the notion that they aren’t racist.

Tami’s insight is that the language of shock deserves analysis in itself.  What does it mean that we’re expressing shock when events like this on college campuses are rather routine (e.g., see “Conquistabros and Navajos,” “Compton Cookouts,” and other race-mocking parties).

In any case, she doesn’t think it’s helpful:

I get that few understand “isms” like marginalized people… But, for God’s sake pay attention! You needn’t be victim to oppression to know it exists. I submit that if you are truly shocked in the face of racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and other injustices, then you are as big a problem as the perpetrators of same. Because people who persist in being unaware of “isms” create an environment where ridiculous people like Amanda Wallace and, more importantly, people with far greater power and influence can conduct their bigotry unchallenged.

 

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.

One form of advertising I am excited and interested in “reading” is the emerging practice of ambient advertising.  Where traditional outdoor advertising may be placed on a billboard with a particular message and/or images, ambient advertising may have that same message and/or images but it seeks to have interaction with its environment or given location.

Given ambient advertising’s special characteristics, it provides a great opportunity to “read” what is said on those advertisements culturally when the male and female body is the focal point of the ad.  Consistent with non-ambient advertising, we tend to see representations that ‘naturally’ give the male body strength and power and one which gives the female body as much strength and power as only in relation to how much the male body allows.

When looking at this dynamic realized in ambient advertising we see the female body as one that is to be gazed upon and scrutinized. Furthermore, the female body is not only just scrutinized and gazed upon in these advertisements but also provides its spectators (male or female) authority over that female body; that authority is usually sexually charged. The following are some examples:

This is not to say that the male body is also not put on display in ambient advertisements. However, those bodies are generally treated with sexual ambiguity and where they are displayed sexually the themes are generally different than where they are when a female body is displayed. The following are some examples:

Understanding that advertising, as an institution, has a function of reflecting our societal norms and considering the body as cultural text (a la Susan Bordo) what we can then “read” in ambient advertising is that culturally the male body has a certain power that the female body does not. This then materializes into a reality where the female body is seen as compliant which continues to enforce an environment where a woman’s body is not hers.

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Steve Grimes has his Master of Arts degree in sociology from St. John’s University in New York, is currently seeking a Master of Science degree in media studies from CUNY Brooklyn College, and plans to be enrolled in a Ph.D. program within the next two years.  He is, at the moment, engrossed in all things cultural studies and his blog, TimelyDonut, is an avenue to express that.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Today, most Americans grow up in racially (and economically) segregated communities. When these same students come to college, however, many will live, work, and take courses with individuals who do not share their ethnic and class background. For many of these students, it will be the first time in their life to have any meaningful contact across difference.

Unfortunately, the racial harmony presented in recruitment materials is usually greatly exaggerated. Students of color experience daily racial microaggressions. Campus Safety officers often mistake them for non-students (at best) and trespassing criminals (at worst). Professors butcher their names and ignore them during most of the term (excluding the few days when the discussion shifts to hip-hop or colonization). White students dress up as People of Color for Halloween and numerous “themed” social gatherings (e.g., “Conquistabros and Navajos,” “Compton Cookouts,” and other race-mocking parties). Residence halls and bathroom stalls are consistently vandalized with racial epithets.

Unlike their homogeneous neighborhoods, then, college students are confronted with the reality of race every day.  Suddenly the myths of racial harmony and colorblindness are whisked away by institutional inequity, intergroup conflict, and hostile campus climates.

And on those campuses in which university leaders fail to think proactively about race, the inevitable dynamics of racism are left to be tackled by 18-24 year olds; the same 18-24 year olds who are encountering racial difference for the first time in their lives.  As the great drama of race plays out in campus newspapers, dorm rooms, classrooms, and off-campus parties. Racial identity, values, and beliefs take center stage in the minds of most students, often for the first time.

(confession borrowed from PostSecret)

Kenjus Watson is the Assistant Director of the Intergroup Dialogue Program and teaches courses in the Psychology Department at Occidental College.  He received a Masters of Education from Penn State University with an emphasis in diversity and social justice-oriented Student Affairs.  He writes about issues of race, gender, and sexuality in higher education.

Leslee Beldotti sent in this 7-minute video from The Escapist that discusses female characters in video games and how game developers could incorporate women as complex characters rather than stereotypes. Leslee points out that the video somewhat conflates sex with gender in the discussion of biological vs. social behaviors, but it highlights the outcomes of making video games through a gendered lens (sorry about the 30-second intro ad):

On this topic, also see Lisa’s recent post on boob inflation in video games.

There is something so damn ironic about this pair of greeting cards photographed by Julie Becker from Lansing, Mich.   The cards, designed to congratulate new parents on the birth of their child, reveal a (perceived) desire to gender our infants from Day One. It is important to identify this child’s gender; it must be noted and color-coded that it is a “he” or a “she.” But the card company finds no irony in using exactly the same baby on each card:

In fact, gendering infants is a rather new phenomenon in Western history and not cross-culturally consistent. Some cultures, and in Western culture previously, the sex of children was considered rather irrelevant until puberty.

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.

Lindsey V., who recently sent in the excellent film clip in which “scientists” “tested” gendered battle gear, also sent us a link to images showing that the breast size of two video game characters — “Ivy” from “Soul Caliber” and, to a lesser extent, Lara Croft from “Tomb Raider” — have increased over time (source).

Ivy:

Lara Croft:

What might drive their ever-inflating breasts?

Speaking in terms of advertising, Sut Jhally wrote that advertisers must:

…now worry about clutter and noise. That is, how do you make your ads stand out from the [5,000] commercial impressions that people are exposed to [every day].  So if you’re Pepsi, you’re not just competing with Coke anymore. You’re competing with every other advertiser who wants our attention. As advertising takes over more and more space in the culture, the job of the individual advertiser gets harder and harder.

Martin Barron and Michael Kimmel make a similar argument about the rise of “extreme” and violent sexual acts in pornography.  The increase in the sheer amount of porn that emerged with the Internet has created a competitive market in which “sexual victimization of women is a currency” (p. 350).  You have to get noticed somehow.

So, insofar as this boob inflation is a trend, we may be able to explain it, at least in part, with the greater number of cultural products.  Proliferation creates conditions in which each one has to up the ante to “stand out” against the “clutter and noise.”

Sources:

• Barron, M., & Kimmel, M.S. (2010).  Sexual violence in three pornographic media. Journal of Sex Research, 37, 161-169.
• Jhally, S. (2000). Advertising at the edge of the apocalypse. In Anderson, R., & Strate, L., Eds. Critical studies in media commercialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 27-39.

Thanks also to Caroline Heldman; I borrowed some of the text in this post from a forthcoming co-authored essay.

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.

One of my colleagues, Kate Hahn, sent me a link to an interactive map at The Chronicle of Higher Education website that presents data on the proportion of U.S. adults with a bachelor’s degree over time. In 1940, in the vast majority of counties no more than 10% of the population had graduated from college (the national average was 4.6%):

Now the national average is 27.5%:

You can also compare counties to the national average. Green counties are above the national average, brown ones are below and, not surprisingly, we see clear regional variations in rates of college education, with Colorado and the Northeast doing particularly well and the South and Appalachian regions lagging:

Wealthy counties (those with a median income of $60,000+) in general have higher than average rates of bachelor’s degrees, with the exception of a few counties in the Mountain West, Alaska, and a few scattered areas:

We see the opposite with poor counties (median income under $30,000):

You can break down any of the comparisons by sex or race/ethnicity, and/or look only at  counties with 20% or more Hispanic or Black residents.  You can also select a particular county for more detailed information. For instance, here’s the info on Clark County, Nevada, where I live:

By comparing the maps over time, you can easily track a number of changes: the increase in college degrees overall, of course, but also changes in education such as the dramatic gains women have made in earning college degrees in the past few decades — the gender gap in college degrees was over 7 percentage points in 1980 but only about 1.5 points today.