Search results for rape culture

SocImages’ Pinterest Pages

Lisa Wade, PhD on May 16, 2013

SocImages maintains an active Pinterest Account featuring over 25 boards.  The site allows you to browse through over 12,000 images and videos without any text.  You can borrow the material directly, or click through to the blog to read the analysis.

On this page, we direct your attention to our boards featuring social construction as well as those with content related to media and marketing, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, violence, economics, and other fun stuff.
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Social Construction

25Social Construction
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Sexual Orientation
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2Before Homosexuality
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16Heteronormativity
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Race and Ethnicity
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5What Color is Flesh?
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10Racial Objectification
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15Race as a Social Construction
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1aRacist Antics at High Schools and Colleges
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Gender
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9Gendered Housework and Parenting
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12The Tyranny of Pink and Blue
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17Gendered and Sexualized Food
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20Pointlessly Gendered Products
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23Women vs. People
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Screenshot_1The Mean Girls Meme
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Violence
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21Violence in Fashion (Trigger Warning)
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24Rape Culture (Trigger Warning)
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Media and Marketing
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6Photoshop and Re-Touching
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7 Sexually-Suggestive Advertising
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3Sexy Toy and Logo Make-Overs
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PinterestMarketing Feminism
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8 Deconstructing Disney
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1Mostly Misguided Safer Sex PSAs
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13Masculinizing the Feminine
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1 (3)Pinkwashing
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1 (4)Sexy What!?
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19Feminizing the Masculine




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Economics
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18The Great Recession
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Just for Fun
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4Vintage Ads, Products, and Stuff
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11Comics and Cartoons
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22Halloween
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14The Social Construction of Flavor

This Month in Sociological Images (April 2013)

Lisa Wade, PhD on May 1, 2013

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:

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!):

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Elsewhere on the Net:

This month SocImages or its authors were quoted in…

Cross-post highlights…

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:

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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:
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Ohio:

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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 Sexuality & Society

Lisa Wade, PhD on January 12, 2012

Course Guide for
SEXUALITY AND SOCIETY
(last updated 01/2012)


Developed by Amanda M. Jungels
Georgia State University

 

Integrating/Interrogating Biological and Social Views of Sexuality

Challenging Evolutionary Perspectives on Sex/Sexuality

Social Construction of (Biological) Sex


Social Construction: Changing Views on Sexuality

 

Sexuality and Social Categories

Social Construction of Gender

Transgender/Third Gender/Gender Queer

Social Construction of Sexual Orientation

 

Learning about Sex/Sex Education           

Sex Education

Abstinence vs. Comprehensive Sex Ed

Sexual Practices

 

The Sexual Body

The Female Body

Menstruation

 

Presenting the Female Body as Unclean: Removing Body Hair

 

Presenting the Female Body as Unclean: Douching

Bodily Modification and Female Genital Cutting

 

Social Construction of the Male Body/Male Sexuality

Presenting the Penis as a Dangerous Weapon

 

Representing Sex

Sexualization of Children’s Products

Sex in the Media

Ejaculation and Phallic Imagery

Sex and Violence

Objectification

Infantilization of Women

Forced/Coerced Sex

Sexual Script

Rape Culture

Use of Alcohol as a Tool for Coercive Sex

Sexual Assault Prevention Campaigns

 

Commercial Sex

Pornography

Contemporary Views on Prostitution

Historical Perspectives on Prostitution

Sex Trafficking

Other Forms of Sex Work

Social Control of Sex Work

 

Reproduction/Abortion

Reproduction

Abortion

 

Sterilization

 

Contemporary GLBT Issues

Gay Rights Movement

GLBT Parenting

Same-Sex Marriage

GLBT-Related Legislation

Course Guide for Sociology of Gender

Lisa Wade, PhD on September 16, 2011

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

Intersexuality

 

Patriarchy / Oppression

Patriarchy as Male Dominated

Patriarchy as Male Identified

Patriarchy as Male Centered

 

“Doing Gender,” Gender as Performance

 

Intersectionality

White privilege

 

Childhood Gender Socialization

 

Gender & Language

 

Gender & Mass Media

 

Gender & Work

The Wage Gap

 

Gender & Sports

 

Sexuality: Homophobia

 

Sexuality: Sexual Behavior

 

Gender & the Body

Physical appearance and beauty work

Obesity and overweight


Gender and Family

 

Hegemonic Masculinity

 

Intimate Partner Violence

 

Sexual Harassment

 

Forced Sex & Sexual Assault

Anti-Rape Campaigns

 

Visions for the Future

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

Reactions to the Case of Lara Logan

Guest Blogger Matt Cornell on February 23, 2011

The sexual assault of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square last week has resulted in two predictable, but utterly depressing types of commentary.

Muslims are backwards

On the one hand are the anti-Islam culture warriors, eager to find in this incident proof of how degenerate Muslims (and Arabs) are. This, despite the fact that there’s no proof the assailants were Muslims, nor that they had any connection to the overwhelmingly peaceful and harassment-free demonstrations. In fact, there’s reason to believe that Logan’s attackers may have been pro-Mubarak thugs or apolitical opportunists. The right wing response to this story was inevitable, but liberal response was also problematic. Film critic and outspoken liberal Roger Ebert tweeted this today:

“The attack on Lara Logan brings Middle East attitudes toward women into sad focus.”

Oy.

I’d like to call Roger Ebert’s attention to the case of Roman Polanski, who has enjoyed a long and celebrated movie career, in spite of his status as a fugitive child rapist. When Polanski was arrested in September of 2009, while attempting to accept an award at a film festival in Switzerland, supporters circulated a petition on his behalf. Over a hundred people in the film industry signed that petition which gratuitously called Polanski’s crime “a case of morals.” Some weeks later, Gore Vidal went so far as to smear Polanski’s 13 year old victim as “a young hooker.”

Has Ebert ever decried the Polanski case for the way it “brings Hollywood’s attitudes towards women into sad focus?” Has he ever criticized Polanski, Vidal, David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, Harvey Weinstein or any of the dozens of cinematic luminaries who signed off on this petition? Nope. On the contrary, he gave a big thumbs up to a documentary which argued Polanski should be given a pass for his crime.

I hardly expected Russ Meyers’ former writing pal to be an exemplar of feminist discourse, but his tweet yesterday was especially myopic. Does he really believe that the West is so much more enlightened about rape and sexual violence than those primitive, backwards Middle Easterners?

The opportunistic use of feminism is a common feature of the “liberal” discourse in the culture war against Islam. Just look at how Ayaan Hirsi Ali is trotted out by the media (especially Bill Maher and Steven Colbert) to justify imperialist wars and burqa bans, all in the name of protecting Arab and Muslim women from their own cultures. Meanwhile, many of these same commentators ignore the fact that rape and misogyny are also endemic to our own culture. (And that includes our movies, Roger.)

Rape is sexy

The other type of response to Logan’s assault was the usual victim blaming, made extra creepy by the focus on Logan’s good looks and alleged sexual history. The worst offender was LA Weekly blogger Simone Wilson, who, in an extraordinarily trashy piece of writing had this to say:

Logan was in Tahrir Square with her “60 Minutes” news team when Mubarak’s announcement broke. Then, in a rush of frenzied excitement, some Egyptian protesters apparently consummated their newfound independence by sexually assaulting the blonde reporter.

Wilson conflates the historic Egyptian revolution with gang rape. Classy stuff. But she’s not through. In addition to “blonde reporter” we’re also treated to these descriptors of Logan:

“it girl”
“firecracker”
“shocking good looks”
“Hollywood good looks”
“gutsy stunner”
“homewrecker” (this courtesy of a NY Post article from 2008)

As has already been noted, focusing on a sexual assault victim’s good looks and allegedly dubious sexual character amounts to victim blaming. But it also does something even more insidious. It makes rape sexy.

This is par for the course at the LA Weekly, where almost anything can be sexed up. LA Weekly‘s cover art department in the last couple of years has managed to make nearly every topic sexy, from murder to toxic mold and overpopulation.

Murder is sexy:

Toxic mold is sexy:

Overpopulation is sexy:

Rarely do the sexy women adorning the covers of the LA Weekly figure as the subjects of these stories. They’re splayed on the cover to boost circulation, because sex sells and, after all, “what’s wrong with being sexy?” (This isn’t even to mention the content of the Weekly– its abundance of ads for plastic surgery, or its routine back page ads from American Apparel– subjects for a longer post.)

Given this particular aesthetic, it is not at all surprising that an LA Weekly blogger would choose to play up the sexy side of the Logan assault story, taking extra pains to emphasize her “Hollywood good looks.” Even an “alternative” newspaper upholds the local value system. Arab Muslim rapists are bad. Sexy women make great victims. And cinematic geniuses should get a pass.

UPDATE, after the jump:

more...

Yale Frat Pledges Chant “No Means Yes, Yes Means Anal”

Lisa Wade, PhD on October 17, 2010


Lest you think that rape culture is confined to simply excellent institutions of higher education, Salon reports that Yale students pledging the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity were marched by women’s dorms marching “no means yes, yes means anal.”  Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory writes:

Now, DKE President Jordan Forney has been forced to apologize for this blatant sexual intimidation by calling it “a serious lapse in judgment by the fraternity and in very poor taste.” But this sort of hateful crap isn’t a “lapse in judgment.” It doesn’t innocently happen that you’re guiding male pledges by young women’s dorms in the dark of night chanting about anal rape. It isn’t a forehead-slapping slip-up, it’s a sign that you need major reprogramming as a human being.

UPDATE: Sociologist Michael Kimmel has a fantastic analysis of the second half of the chant:

This chant assumes that anal sex is not pleasurable for women; that if she says yes to intercourse, you have to go further to an activity that you experience as degrading to her, dominating to her, not pleasurable to her. This second chant is a necessary corollary to the first.

Thanks to feminism, women have claimed the ability to say both “no” and “yes.” Not only have women come to believe that “No Means No,” that they have a right to not be assaulted and raped, but also that they have a right to say “yes” to their own desires, their own sexual agency. Feminism enabled women to find their own sexual voice.

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This is confusing to many men, who see sex not as mutual pleasuring, but about the “girl hunt,” a chase, a conquest. She says no, he breaks down her resistance. Sex is a zero-sum game. He wins if she puts out; she loses.

That women can like sex, and especially like good sex, and are capable of evaluating their partners changes the landscape. If women say “yes,” where’s the conquest, where’s the chase, where’s the pleasure? And where’s the feeling that your victory is her defeat? What if she is doing the scoring, not you?

Thus the “Yes Means Anal” part of the chant. Sex has become unsafe for men–women are agentic and evaluate our performances. So if “No Means Yes” attempts to make what is safe for women unsafe, then “Yes Means Anal” makes what is experienced as unsafe for men again safe–back in that comfort zone of conquest and victory. Back to something that is assumed could not possibly be pleasurable for her. It makes the unsafe safe–for men.

In this way, we can see the men of DKE at Yale not as a bunch of angry predators, asserting their dominance, but as a more pathetic bunch of guys who see themselves as powerless losers, trying to re-establish a sexual landscape which they feel has been thrown terribly off its axis.

For more indications that we live in a rape culture, see our posts on media coverage of a rape video game and the George Sodini murders, rapists as hyperconformists to ideal masculinity, the rape scene in Observe and Report, t-shirts endorsing sex with “drunk girls”, and, of course, the Purdue Exponent’s sex position of the week.

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.

Rapists as Hyper-Conformists

Lisa Wade, PhD on December 19, 2008

Norms of masculinity include prescriptions to pursue sex. Taught to expect women to resist, “real” men supposedly work around refusals instead of taking them at face value.

In light of this, some sociologists argue that rapists are not non-conformists (somehow deviant), but hyper-conformists. Rapist are men who take rules of masculinity to their logical conclusion.

When I discuss this in class, I show this Gucci ad:

The clean-cut, clear-headed, well-dressed, all-American young man looks calmly and confidently into the camera, while the woman looks as if she is drunk, or drugged, or both.  Barely able to stand, holding onto her shoes, her dress falling off… Has she just been raped or is the rape yet to occur?

And does the imagery in this ad suggest that a (potential) rape scenario is mainstream in America, un-remarkable, even fashionable?  If so, what does that say about the depth of our rape culture?

Survivors or Victims?

Andrew Messamore and Pamela Paxton on September 21, 2020

The #MeToo movement that began in 2017 has reignited a long debate about how to name people who have had traumatic experiences. Do we call individuals who have experienced war, cancer, crime, or sexual violence “victims”? Or should we call them “survivor,” as recent activists like #MeToo founder Tarana Burke have advocated?

Strong arguments can be raised for both sides. In the sexual violence debate, advocates of “survivor” argue the term places women at the center of their own narrative of recovery and growth. Defenders of victim language, meanwhile, argue that victim better describes the harm and seriousness of violence against women and identifies the source of violence in systemic misogyny and cultures of patriarchy.

Unfortunately, while there has been much debate about the use of these terms, there has been little documentation of how service and advocacy organizations that work with individuals who have experienced trauma actually use these terms. Understanding the use of survivor and victim is important because it tells us what these terms to mean in practice and where barriers to change are. 

We sought to remedy this problem in a recent paper published in Social Currents.  We used data from nonprofit mission statements to track language change among 3,756 nonprofits that once talked about victims in the 1990s.  We found, in general, that relatively few organizations adopted survivor as a way to talk about trauma even as some organizations have moved away from talking about victims.  However, we also found that, increasingly, organizations that focus on issues related to women tend to use victim and survivor interchangeably. In contrast, organizations that do not work with women appear be moving away from both terms.

These findings contradict the way we usually think about “survivor” and “victim” as opposing terms. Does this mean that survivor and victim are becoming the “extremely reduced form” through which women are able to enter the public sphere? Or does it mean that feminist service providers are avoiding binary thinking? These questions, as well as questions about the strategic, linguistic, and contextual reasons that organizations choose victim- or survivor-based language give advocates and scholars of language plenty to re-examine.  

Andrew Messamore is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Andrew studies changing modes of local organizing at work and in neighborhoods and how the ways people associate shapes community, public discourse, and economic inequality in the United States.

Pamela Paxton is the Linda K. George and John Wilson Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. With Melanie Hughes and Tiffany Barnes, she is the co-author of the 2020 book, Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective.

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    Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more…

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