Search results for Violence in sport

On October 28th, Miami Dolphins offensive lineman Jonathan Martin left the National Football League citing emotional distress as a result of abuse at the hands of his teammate Richie Incognito.  Incognito admits to having sent Martin racist, homophobic, and threatening text messages and voicemails but argues that rather than hazing or bullying, this was merely an instance of miscommunication between the two men.

While a great deal of media attention has questioned the behavior of Richie Incognito, a disproportionate amount of attention has also been given to Martin’s choice to report the abuse.  Why has Martin’s choice to report the abuse received so much attention?  What has been the main theme of those critiquing Martin’s choice?  And, what does this discussion mean for our national discourse on bullying and hazing?  The answers to these questions, I argue, are all linked to masculinity.

The media talks about Martin’s choice to report because his decision violated accepted cultural norms of masculinity.  Some may call these norms, more colloquially, the “bro code,” “guy code,” or “man code.”  Whatever we choose to call it, there are accepted ways in which men and boys are expected to conduct ourselves and our relationships to other men.  Martin stands accused, especially within the athletic community, of having broken the code.

In a very telling interview, Channing Crowder, a former teammate of Incognito, made it clear that this conversation is really about masculinity.  According to Crowder, Incognito tests his teammates.  He “tests you to see if you have enough manhood or enough testosterone” (even though this type of bullying is just as much about the perpetrator’s masculinity as it is the victim’s).

In this case Martin’s masculinity is under attack on two fronts.  First, it is under attack because he failed Incognito’s “test” of his manhood.  Second, he is under attack because his solution to Incognito’s bullying violated guy code.  According to the code, real men solve their problems with one another through violence.

Sports Illustrated reported that many NFL personnel consider Martin to be a coward or a wimp for reporting the abuse.  One NFL informant was even quoted saying “I think Jonathan Martin is a weak person.  If Incognito did offend him racially, that’s something you have to handle as a man.”  Others said it would have been preferable for Martin to “go down swinging” or to “fight.”  Even NPR ran a piece in which a regular guest argued:

Martin should have taken that dude outside and put his lights out.  I do not – I absolutely do not believe in a society where we run to the principal’s office every time these petty tyrants make a threat… Only power dispatches bullies… Jonathan Martin is a grown man and you can’t bully a grown man.

To be fair, in that same NPR piece, another interviewee stated that “not everybody resorts to violence in response to bullying and I applaud him for that.”

Nevertheless, by reporting the abuse rather than physically confronting Incognito, Jonathan Martin has been publicly stripped of his “man card.”

But, so what?  Why should we care about how grown men address bullying?  We should care because just as Jonathan Martin is being told to “man up,” so are young boys all over the country when they are bullied.  Boys are told that when they cannot physically confront a bully they are inadequate and unworthy.  They are taught to remain silent in the face of insurmountable violence because speaking out is a sign of weakness, or worse, femininity.  Too many boys are left with nowhere to turn when bullying makes trauma a daily experience.  In this sort of environment can we really be surprised that boys are committing suicide, developing depression, and lashing out violently at incredibly high rates?

Incognito on film:

Cliff Leek is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Stony Brook University.  He is a News Editor for Sociology Lens, co-founder of Masculinities 101, a Program Director for the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities and a Research Assistant to TrueChild.  

Cross-posted at Sociology Lens and The Good Men Project.

SocImages News:

Updates on Image Guides

We are super excited to have a new Image Guide!  UCLA graduate student Calvin N. Ho has collected and organized our posts on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.  His excellent guide joins our others:

• Introduction to Sociology, by Gwen Sharp
• Sociology of Gender, by Mary Nell Trautner
• Sociology of Sport, by J.A. Carter
• Sexuality and Society, by Amanda Jungels
• Women and History, by Lisa Wade
• Sociological Research Methods, by Lisa Wade

If you’d be interested in writing a guide on one of the other racial/ethnic groups — or on anything at all! — we’d be glad to make it available.  We’re even happy to have duplicate Guides, since every instructor is different.  Analytics show that thousands of professors visit these guides every year, so we’re eager to be able to offer more.

New Pinterest Board

We also have a new Pinterest page: the social construction of flavor.  If you’ve never heard of cucumber Pepsi, celery-flavored JELL-O, seaweed Pringles, whiskey toothpaste, or the delicious combination of ham and jelly, then this board is for you!

We’ve got 24 Pinterest boards, including sexy toy make-overs, what color is flesh?, gendered housework and parenting, “subliminal” sexual symbolism, and violence in fashion.  Maggie particularly likes “Women vs. People,” which collects images that expose the fact that men are usually the default human (thanks Maggie!):

Elsewhere on the Net:

This month SocImages or its authors were quoted in…

• Slate, Abstinence is not the Solution to Hook Up Culture
• The Tampa Bay Times, Hooking Up Isn’t Hot or Bothering
• Boing Boing, Why the Majority of People Now Favor Marriage Equality

Cross-post highlights…

• Ms., Occidental College Takes on Rape Culture
• Racialicious, The Stigma of Immigrant Languages
• PolicyMic, 100 Iconic American Companies Exploiting Prisoners for Profits
• Huffington Post, Law & Order Episode Quotes Rape Survivors, Calls Itself Fiction
• Pacific Standard, The Manly Origins of Cheerleading
• BlogHer, Why Have 16% of Americans Changed Their Minds About Same-Sex Marriage

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

I go on sabbatical next year to write in earnest, but I’d love to use my flexible schedule to do lots of public speaking as well.  Visit my website if you’d be interested in having me.  I have great talks on the value of friendship, the biology of sex differences, the politics of genital cutting and, of course, hook up culture.  And I do a pretty decent AKD induction ceremony/commencement speech.

I’ve already scheduled my first talk for next year; I’ll be part of the Bastian Diversity Lecture Series at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.  Looking forward to it already!

Tweets of the Month:

Aw shucks.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

In Other News…

I want to send a shout out to all the great people I met at the University of Akron this month!  Here are two pictures: one of my ascent out of Los Angeles and the other from the airport on my way home, waiting for the white-out to clear.  Oh earth, you play such tricks!

Los Angeles:

Ohio:

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.

Re-posted in honor of Roger Ebert’s passing. Cross-posted at BlogHer.

University of Minnesota doctoral candidate Chris Miller sent in a fascinating episode of Siskel and Ebert, a long-lasting TV show devoted to reviewing movies.  What is amazing about this episode is the frankness with which the movie critics — Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert — articulate a feminist analysis of a group of slasher movies.

The year? 1980.

First they describe the typical movie:

A woman or young girl is shown alone and isolated and defenseless… a crazy killer springs out of the shadows and attacks her and frequently the killer sadistically threatens the victims before he strikes.

They pull no punches in talking about the problem with the films:

These films hate women.

They go on to suggest that the films are a backlash against the women’s movement:

I’m convinced it has to do with the growth of the woman’s movement in America in the last decade. I think that these films are some sort of primordial response by some very sick people… of men saying “get back in your place, women.”

…

One thing that most of the victims have in common is that they do act independently… They are liberated women who act on their own. When a woman makes a decision for herself, you can almost bet she will pay with her life.

They note, too, that the violence is sexualized:

The nudity is always gratuitous. It is put in to titillate the audience and women who dress this way or merely uncover their bodies are somehow asking for trouble and somehow deserve the trouble they get. That’s a sick idea.

And they’re not just being anti-horror movie.  They conclude:

[There are] good old fashioned horror films… [but] there is a difference between good and scary movies and movies that systematically demean half the human race.

It’s refreshing to hear a straightforward unapologetic feminist analysis outside of a feminist space.  Their analysis, however, isn’t as sophisticated as it could be.

In doing research for a podcast about sex and violence against women in horror films (Sounds Familiar), I came across the keen analysis of Carol Clover, who wrote a book called Men, Women, and Chainsaws.

Clover admitted that most horror films of the time sexualized violence against women — meditating on the torture and terrorizing of beautiful female victims — but she also pointed out that the person who ultimately vanquished the murderer was almost always also female. She called this person the “final girl.”

The final girl was different than the rest of the women in the film: she was less sexually active, more androgynous, and smarter.  You could pick her out, Clover argued, from the very beginning of the movie.  She was always the first to notice that something frightening might be going on.

Boys and men watching horror films, then (and that is the main audience for this genre), were encouraged to “get off” on the murder of women, but they were also encouraged to identify with a female heroine in the end.  How many other genres routinely ask men to identify with a female character?  Almost none.

In this sense, Clover argues, horror films don’t “hate women.”   Instead, they hate a particular kind of woman. They reproduce a Madonna/whore dichotomy in which the whores are dispatched with pleasure, but the Madonna rises to save us all in the end.

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

Siskel and Ebert full episode:

———————–

Full transcript after the jump:

more...

Cross-posted at CNN.

For the past few days, Americans have been weeping together and wringing our hands once again at the senseless tragedy of a mass murder inside a school. The horrific scene in Newtown, Connecticut, is now seared permanently in our collective conscience, as we search for answers. We’ll look at the photograph of Adam Lanza and ask over and over again how he could have come to such a deadly crossroads.

We still know nothing about his motives, only the devastating carnage he wrought. And yet we’ve already heard from experts who talk about mental illness, Asperger’s syndrome, depression, and autism. The chorus of gun boosters has defensively chimed in about how gun control would not have prevented this.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee offered the theory that since “we have systematically removed God from our schools, should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?” (As if those heathen children deserved it?)

All the while, we continue to miss other crucial variables — even though they are staring right back at us when we look at that photograph. Adam Lanza was a middle class white guy.

If the shooter were black and the school urban, we’d hear about the culture of poverty; about how inner-city life breeds crime and violence; perhaps even some theories about a purported tendency among blacks towards violence.

As we’ve seen in the past week, it’s not only those living on the fringes of society who express anger through gun violence.

Yet the obvious fact that Lanza — and nearly all the recent mass murderers who targeted non-work settings — were middle class white boys seems to barely register. Look again at the pictures of Jared Lee Loughner (Tucson), James Eagan Holmes (Aurora) and Wade Michael Page (Oak Creek) — a few of the mass killers of the past couple of years. (Yes, the case of Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator at Virginia Tech, the worst school shooting in our history, stands out as the exception. And worth discussing.)

Why are angry young men setting out to kill entire crowds of strangers?

Motivations are hard to pin down, but gender is the single most obvious and intractable variable when it comes to violence in America. Men and boys are responsible for 95% of all violent crimes in this country. “Male criminal participation in serious crimes at any age greatly exceeds that of females, regardless of source of data, crime type, level of involvement, or measure of participation” is how the National Academy of Sciences summed up the extant research.

How does masculinity figure into this? From an early age, boys learn that violence is not only an acceptable form of conflict resolution, but one that is admired. However the belief that violence is an inherently male characteristic is a fallacy. Most boys don’t carry weapons, and almost all don’t kill: are they not boys? Boys learn it.

They learn it from their fathers. They learn it from a media that glorifies it, from sports heroes who commit felonies and get big contracts, from a culture saturated in images of heroic and redemptive violence. They learn it from each other.

In talking to more than 400 young men for my book, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, I heard over and over again what they learn about violence. They learn that if they are crossed, they have the manly obligation to fight back. They learn that they are entitled to feel like a real man, and that they have the right to annihilate anyone who challenges that sense of entitlement.

This sense of entitlement is part of the package deal of American manhood — the culture that doesn’t start the fight, as Margaret Mead pointed out in her analysis of American military history, but retaliates far out of proportion to the initial grievance. They learn that “aggrieved entitlement” is a legitimate justification for violent explosion.

The easy availability of guns is another crucial variable. After the terrible school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, Great Britain enacted several laws that effectively made owning handguns illegal in that country. The murder rate in the U.S. is more than three times higher than Britain.

And yes, boys have resorted to violence for a long time, but sticks and fists and even the occasional switchblade do not create the bloodbaths of the past few years. In 2011, more than 80% of all homicides among boys aged 15 to 19 were firearm related.

We need a conversation about gun control laws. And far more sweeping — and necessary — is a national meditation on how our ideals of manhood became so entangled with violence.

It’s also worth discussing why so many of these young mass murderers are white. Surely boys of color have that same need to prove their masculinity, and a similar sense of entitlement to annihilate those who threaten it. Perhaps the only difference is that it seems to be nearly the exclusive province of white boys to so dramatically expand the range of their revenge and seek to destroy the entire world, not simply the person or group that committed the supposed offense. Perhaps. It’s a conversation worth having.

I am not for a moment suggesting we substitute race or gender for the other proximate causes of this tragedy: lax gun laws, mental illness. I am arguing only that we can never fully understand it, unless we also add these elements to our equation. Without them, the story is entirely about him, the shooter. But the bigger story is also about us.

In the coming weeks, we’ll learn more about Adam Lanza, his motives, his particular madness. We’ll hear how he “snapped” or that he was seriously mentally ill. We’ll try to explain it by setting him apart, by distancing him from the rest of us.

And we’ll continue to miss the point. Not only are those children at Sandy Hook Elementary School our children. Adam Lanza is our child also. Of course, he was mad — as were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Lee Loughner, James Eagan Holmes, and Wade Michael Page — and the ever-longer list of boys and young men who have exploded in a paroxysm of vengeful violence in recent years. In a sense, they weren’t deviants, but over-conformists to norms of masculinity that prescribe violence as a solution. Like real men, they didn’t just get mad, they got even. Until we transform that definition of manhood, this terrible equation of masculinity and violence will continue to produce such horrific sums.

————————

Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stonybrook.  He has written or edited over twenty volumes, including Manhood in America: A Cultural History and Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.  You can visit his website here.

Tip: This may look like a boring update post, but you really, really, really want to scroll down to the bottom.

SocImages News

• Gwen was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition this week!  She had the pleasure of talking about one of SocImages Readers’ favorite topics: pointlessly gendered products.  In this interview, she discusses reactions to the new “Bic for Her.”
• Lisa appeared on the Everyday Sociology blog talking about what is and isn’t wrong with hook up culture (in all of two minutes).
• We were quoted twice in Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast column, the Dish.  Once drawing attention to our post on the social construction of color (Is the Sky Blue?) and again in response to the New York Times article about gender diversity in boys.

Resources for Instructors (and Other Curious Types)

If you haven’t yet, please visit our For Instructors page.  Here are some highlights:

Course Guides

As you begin the Fall semester, don’t forget about our amazing Course Guides!  These organize SocImages posts in a way that follows standard syllabi for frequently-taught sociology courses.  We currently feature the following:

• Introduction to Sociology, by Gwen Sharp (Nevada State College)
• Sociology of Gender, by Mary Nell Trautner (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
• Sociology of Sport, by J.A. Carter (University of Cincinnati)
• Sexuality and Society, by Amanda Jungels (Georgia State University)
• Sociological Research Methods, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)

For those of you that already use them.  Thank you so much!  Our guides have been visited, collectively, 43,000 times.  We’re thrilled.

Have a Guide you might like to put together?  We’re looking for volunteers — sociology professors or graduate students — who are willing to browse our archives, pull out the most compelling posts, and arrange them in ways other instructors would find familiar and convenient.  The Guides can cover entire courses or be designed to help illustrate a theory, article, or book.  (We’re even happy to have duplicate Guides, since every instructor is different.)  Send us an email at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

Pinterest Pages

Our Pinterest pages are fun for everyone, but they’re useful for professors looking for just the right image to illustrate an idea.  We currently have one page with all SocImages material (over 9,000 pins!) and 17 pages on specific topics.  Please feel free to browse!

• Social Construction
• Re-Touching and Photoshop
• Sexually Suggestive Advertising
• The Great Recession
• Vintage Ads and Products
• Comics and Cartoons
• Deconstructing Disney
• Sexy Toy Make-Overs
• Racial/Ethnic Objectification
• What Color is “Flesh”?
• The Social Construction of Race
• Heteronormativity
• Gendered Parenting and Housework
• Sexualized/Gendered Food
• The Tyranny of Pink and Blue
• Glamorizing Violence in Fashion

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Lisa has started booking talks and lectures for the fall.  Her first talk will be at Indiana State University (Sept. 17th-19th) where she’ll be giving a featured lecture at the International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

In Other News…

We totally went to an aerobics class taught by Richard Simmons! It was every bit as wacky and amazing as you would think it would be. He even took a  photo with us. If you’re in L.A., you can take a class with him for only $12, and we highly recommend it. Here we are with Richard in all our post-workout glory:

Cross-posted at Sociology in Focus.

Back in 1987, Raewyn Connell coined the term hegemonic masculinity in a seminal text, Gender & Power. Hegemonic masculinity refers to the dominant form of masculinity that exists within a particular culture. Relative to this ever changing, idealized form of masculinity are different subordinated masculinities – those within a culture that do not live up to the so-called masculine gold standard. Put simply, there are “real men” and then there are all other men.

In watching the 2012 Super Bowl commercials, we can see versions of hegemonic masculinity demonstrated. Perhaps the most vivid version was seen in H&M’s Super Bowl ad, utilizing soccer (futbol) star, David Beckham:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjd6i0S67HQ[/youtube]

Tattooed, rugged, athletic, showcasing a lean musculature and menacing glare, Beckham embodies a hegemonic masculinity that would surely resonate with sporting audiences. And while not presented in this commercial, it is important to also note that Beckham carries other cultural traits that ad to his hegemonic masculine status – he is globally recognized, financially wealthy, and married to a woman who also holds currency in popular culture. This last point is critical. By being married, Beckham confirms his heterosexuality, and her extraordinary beauty and international popularity raise his standing as a “real man”.

In contrast to Beckham, other males were presented in this year’s Super Bowl commercials, who represent a marginal masculinity, meaning they would love to hold hegemonic masculine status and are pursuing such an identity, but for any number of reasons are unable to achieve it. You could say these are the “wannabe real men”. A good example of marginal masculinity is presented in the following commercial for FIAT:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxQsLdwCtMU[/youtube]

In contrast to the commercial with Beckham, the male in this commercial lacks qualities that would otherwise provide him with a sense of hegemonic masculinity. Although he appears to be employed (wearing business attire), he is relatively short in comparison to the woman in the ad, cast as nerdy and lacking confidence. Given the fantasy he has with the female actor, we can see he desires hegemonic masculine status. But because he lacks a kind of physical prowess, he is marginalized.

Of even greater importance here, the concept of hegemonic masculinity is not only about men and their relation to one another. Hegemonic masculinity also represents a cultural system that dominates women. Thus, the FIAT commercial is also useful because it illustrates women’s overall subordination. Connell also defined the term “emphasized femininity”, which refers to women’s “compliance with this subordination… oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men” (p. 183).

When women emphasize their femininity – or are coerced to emphasize their femininity – they are often times objectified. Objectification refers to the depersonalization of someone, such that her/his humanity is stripped and the person(s) is turned into an inanimate object. Sociologists have argued that when humans are objectified, they tend to be “seen as less sensitive to pain,” and, “we care less about their suffering” (Loughnan et al., 2010, p. 716). In other words, when we turn people into object, we remove their humanity, and it is easier to commit violence against them. Feminists commonly argue the objectification of women in the media facilitates women’s ongoing victimization in society at large.

In the FIAT commercial, the woman “emphasizes her femininity” by catering to the male’s sexual desires. She is also objectified – likened to an inanimate car that would lack human feelings and emotion. Go Daddy also aired a commercial clearly objectifying women, where female celebrities paint another female, who is used as an inanimate, sexualized prop to promote the Go Daddy company.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ucBY_2WEA[/youtube]

While the Super Bowl is known primarily as a sporting event where millions of Americans tune in each year to watch men engage in athletic competition, the event also includes advertising content that is highly gendered. With so much attention attention directed to this advertising, it is important to dissect it through a gendered framework.

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David Mayeda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at Hawaii Pacific University.  His recent book publications include Celluloid Dreams: How Film Shapes America and Fighting for Acceptance: Mixed Martial Artists and Violence in American Society.  He also blogs at The Grumpy Sociologist.

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.

Course Guide for
SOCIOLOGY OF GENDER
(last updated 09/2011)

Developed by Mary Nell Trautner, PhD
University at Buffalo, SUNY

Social Construction of Sex & Gender

• Changing age at first menstruation
• The social construction of sperm
• Overlap between male and female bodies: Infants’ gazes
• Overlap between male and female bodies: Breast reductions for men
• Gender ambiguity
• Third gender in Oaxaca

Intersexuality

• Sexual differentiation
• The Phall-o-Meter
• Caster Semenya

Patriarchy / Oppression

• Negative portrayals of men perpetuate patriarchy
• Oppression as a double bind: Women in politics

Patriarchy as Male Dominated

• Women in the Fortune 500
• Women in government
• Managing images of powerful women

Patriarchy as Male Identified

• Men as default category
• Men are “people,” women are “women”
• Example of “heroism” equated with men
• “Power” associated with masculinity

Patriarchy as Male Centered

• Looking for women’s presence in movies: The Smurfette Principle
• Looking for women’s presence in movies: The Bechdel Test
• Database of Bechdel Test movies

“Doing Gender,” Gender as Performance

• Using sex differences to infer gender differences
• Sex, gender, and toilet signs
• Learning how to stand like a girl
• When men stand like women
• Child pageants and the performance of gender
• Babies perform gender, too
• Where gender stereotypes come from

Intersectionality

• Social construction of race (“A Girl Like Me” video)
• Race, gender, and “good hair” (“Good Hair” trailer)
• Race, class, and gender
• Preference for light skinned women

White privilege

• White privilege
• White privilege as flip side of racial profiling
• Whites as default category (skin colors)
• Whites as default category (hair colors)

Childhood Gender Socialization

• Gendered language in TV toy commercials
• Kids’ rooms
• Barbie and math scores
• Barbie’s proportions
• Job segregation seen in gendered toys 1
• Job segregation seen in gendered toys 2
• Domestic toys for girls
• Breastfeeding dolls
• Save up for breast enhancement surgery
• Dora the Explorer makeover
• Learning to be a bride
• Gender roles hurt boys too

Gender & Language

• Changes in use of male/female pronouns
• Stereotypes of men’s and women’s language
• Smurfette and sexist language
• Ad—“If only men and women spoke the same language”

Gender & Mass Media

• Gendered body postures
• Sexism in hip hop
• Photoshopping 1
• Photoshopping 2
• Photoshopping 3
• Women of color in advertising
• Women of color associated with animals
• “You can never be too thin” ad
• Breast products
• Sexualization of violence: Dreamworlds 3 and Lady Gaga
• Dead-looking women in fashion
• Ads showing women dominating men
• Increasing sexualization of online video game ads
• Sexualizing and gendering food
• Comparing covers of Maxim and Cosmo

Gender & Work

• Data behind the Wal-Mart lawsuit
• Women in the Fortune 500
• Underrepresentation of women in Hollywood
• Gender gap in science and tech jobs
• Toys and career interests: Science and tech jobs

The Wage Gap

• Lifetime earnings by sex and race/ethnicity
• Earnings and hours worked, 1975-2009
• Earnings by education and age
• Occupational wage gap, 2010
• Job segregation and wages
• Wage gap by age, 1979 and 2008
• Comparing the wage gap across countries

Gender & Sports

• Participation in sports – high school
• Gendered organization of sport: Ski jumping for men only
• Images of women in sports: College teams
• Images of women in sports: Hope Solo
• Images of women in sports: Serena Williams
• Images of women in sports: Candace Parker
• Women bodybuilders
• Women collegiate athletes support the men’s teams
• Gender in figure skating
• Costume requirements in figure skating

Sexuality: Homophobia

• CJ Pascoe discusses homophobia as gender policing
• Example of gender policing: A boy’s pink toenails in the J. Crew catalog
• Example of gender policing: Yankee fans verbally assault Red Sox fans
• Attitudes towards gays and lesbians
• How terminology affects acceptance: “homosexual” versus “gay”

Sexuality: Sexual Behavior

• Orgasm for women
• Social desirability in online dating profiles
• Hook-up culture
• How porn is shaping our sex lives

Gender & the Body

• The Breast Portrait Project
• Asian eyelid cosmetic surgery
• Gendered reactions to male and female nudity
• Making bodies conform: Gymnast Shawn Johnson

Physical appearance and beauty work

• Physical attractiveness bias: Susan Boyle example
• Beauty work: Lifetime spending of men and women
• Beauty work: Routines and spending
• Trends in cosmetic procedures, 2000-2009
• The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolf

Obesity and overweight

• Invisibility of “plus-sized” women
• Lane Bryant’s lingerie ad
• Can you be fit and fat? Health at Every Size
• Fighting the obesity “epidemic”
• Fatness as a shield from unwanted attention
• Can a feminist diet?

Gender and Family

• Gender and interracial marriage
• Gender gap in leisure time
• Housework
• Housework, international comparisons
• Gender non-conformity in kids
• Shared parenting as class privilege
• Nanny chain
• Gendered parenting in ads

Hegemonic Masculinity

• Changing images of masculinity
• Masculinity and violence
• Violent masculinity in energy drinks
• Masculinity and food marketing
• Men talk about their masculinity
• Comedic take on masculinity
• Satirizing men’s hygiene products

Intimate Partner Violence

• When do we intervene?
• Victim blaming: Headlines
• Percent of women who think DV is okay, by country

Sexual Harassment

• Who’s responsible for sexual harassment?
• The Toronto Slutwalk
• Women’s taxis as a response to harassment

Forced Sex & Sexual Assault

• Rape culture: Rape simulator game
• Rape culture: Celebrating incapacitated women
• Rape culture: T-shirts
• “No” doesn’t really mean “no”
• Yale fraternity: “No means yes, yes means anal”
• What counts as “real” rape: Polanski

Anti-Rape Campaigns

• UK campaign telling men not to rape
• Scottish campaign: Effective or sensationalist?
• Women don’t “ask for it”

Visions for the Future

• Degendering dance
• Positive portrayal of transgendered people
• Resistance to objectifying advertising
• Signs that show women as people
• Media showing range of women’s bodies
• Belly activism

If you would like to write a Course Guide for Sociological Images, please email us at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

This Course Guide is in progress and will be updated as I have time.

Disclaimer: If you’re thinking about writing a course guide.  I totally overdid it on this one!  It doesn’t have to be nearly this extensive.

Course Guide for
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY
(last updated 5/2012)

Developed by Gwen Sharp
Nevada State College

C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination

Intersection of biography and history as illustrated by:

• Year of birth and life success
• Kids’ exposure to technology
• Baby naming practices and media trends
• Other historical trends in baby names

“the capacity for astonishment is made lively again”

• The background of “Scotch” tape
• Applying the anthropological lens to “dark, mysterious Austria”

Karl Marx/Marxist analysis

• Marxist analysis of current economic crisis
• Invisibility of workers

Emile Durkheim

• The dangers of the ecological fallacy: measuring “sin” statistically

[Because the course guide has gotten to be so long, I’m putting the rest of it after the jump.]

more...