Search results for sexualization girls

Enjoy our collection of Halloween posts from years past:

Race and Ethnicity

• Dressing your dog up like a racial caricature (pictured).
• Othering of undocumented immigrants with an “alien” costume.
• A collection of racist Halloween costumes.
• Asian hair for Halloween.

Gender

• Men dressing up as fat women, hilarious and disgusting!
• Gender and asymmetry: “beer man and “beer girl.”
• Anna Rexia, the costume (also in plus size!).
• Halloween and the trivializing of women in men’s occupations.
• Girls: mean or queen.
• The difference between boy and girl costumes.
• Women dressing up like girls dressing up like women.
• Even our skeletons have sex.
• In sexy costumes for women and girls: when sexy overtakes all reason, sexy scholar, Harem girl, and the sexy body bag costume.  Compare to sexy Halloween costumes for men and this vintage Halloween-inspired ad that urges women to be bewitching instead of half-naked.

The intersection of Race, Class, and Gender

• Halloween hall of shame: the fat lap dancer costume.
• An overview of raced, gendered, and heteronormative costumes.

Halloween and Politics

• Lynching Palin.
• Obama mask marketed as a “terrorist” costume.
• Marking sex offenders on Halloween.

And, for no conceivable reason…

• Max Weber Jack o’Lantern.

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...

HAPPY SEPTEMBER!

News, Publications, and Appearances:

We are super grateful to Karen McCormack for her positive and insightful review of SocImages in Visual Sociology.  Thanks so much Karen!

We’re pleased to report that our short essay on Banal Nationalism was published in Contexts magazine this month.

Guest Blogger Christina Barmon made a big splash this month with her post, To Sit or Not to Sit: Gendering How We Pee.  Maybe we can get it up to 500 Facebook likes today!  If you’d like to be a part of our Guest Blogger Team, with access to the best reader submissions, send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

Contributor Caroline Heldman made nine appearances on Fox and the Fox Business channel this month, in addition to writing a fantastic series marking the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and kicking off our Election 2012 Sexism Watch.

Lisa was also quoted in an Inside Higher Ed article about the American Sociological Association’s annual conference in Las Vegas.  And she chatted for a few minutes about the sexualization of girls with sexologist Logan Levkoff on CKNW’s Bill Good Show.

Course Guides:

Classes are in full swing for the SocImages team!  Gwen is getting started on a Course Guide for Introduction to Sociology, a list of topic-specific quality SocImages material arranged in a way that we hope instructors will find familiar and convenient.  We’d love to see more!  If you are teaching this semester and would like to be forever inscribed on our pages as a generous soul, check out our Instructors Page for more information.

Featured Reader!

This is a shout out to our long-time reader and prolific idea submitter, Katrin.  Katrin is at the University of Cambridge in Politics, Psychology, Sociology, and International Studies, researching climate change. She stumbled across the blog while searching some OECD statistics… and says she then spent the entire rest of the day flicking through ALL the other posts.  She’s also a Shakesville superfan, as we are.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter and Facebook.  Learn more about your editors at Lisa’s and Gwen’s websites.  And a bunch of us are having fun on twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

Editor’s Note: Christie W.,  Michel E., Andrew S., and an anonymous reader asked us to write about the recent discussion of Thylane Loubry Blondeau.  We’re pleased to feature a guest blogger doing just that.

There is no shortage of sexualized images of girls in American culture.  Shows like TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras frequently contain over-the-top sexualized portrayals of girls.  Images like these are undeniably sexualized.

However, these images of Thylane Loubry Blondeau, a 10-year-old French model making headlines this week, are creating controversy instead of condemnation.  Some argue that, unlike the child beauty queens, the photographs of Blondeau are art.  There is an interesting class effect here; unlike the hypersexualized girls on shows like Toddlers and Tiaras, the photos of Blondeau are high fashion, therefore high class, and therefore acceptable.

I’m no prude.  I think that children are – and have a right to be – sexual beings.  However, there is a difference between sexuality (feeling sexual) and sexualization (being seen as sexy). I (and many other like-minded feminists) believe that girls should be sexual; but, sexualization (and its concomitant focus on appearance instead of desire) is bad because it denies girls’ sexual subjectivity in favor of sexual objectification.

There is ample psychological research to support this notion that sexualization is bad.  An American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls reported in 2007 that sexualization is linked with negative consequences such as disordered eating, low self-esteem, and deficits in cognitive and physical functioning.  These links have been identified in both girls and women – some as young as Blondeau.

Sexualized images like these are troublesome at the societal level as well.  They encourage others to view young girls as objects of sexiness.  Additionally, these images are hugely problematic for girls and women with body image issues.  The fashion industry already promotes the thin ideal.  These pictures of Blondeau push the envelope by explicitly promoting the prepubescent thin ideal, a body type that is wholly unattainable for women.  The normalization of beautifying a 10-year-old’s body type can have potentially disastrous consequences for women’s body image.

It is dangerous to assume that “high fashion” sexualization is “art” and therefore less of an issue than lower class sexualization.  I do not take the paternalistic view that girls should be “protected” against sexualization. Instead, we should work with girls (and boys) to discourage sexualization and to encourage strength, intelligence, and sexual agency.

Images from tvtropes, Jezebel, and Snob.

Sarah McKenney is a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin where she studies gender development and the sexualization of girls.

A couple of months back, Lisa posted about a push-up bikini top sold by Abercrombie Kids, a store that targets kids ages 7-14. It led to a lively discussion, here and elsewhere, about the sexualization of young girls as well as socialization into beauty standards from a young age; eventually Abercrombie pulled the product from their website.

Leontine G. sent in a link to an image of a dress from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website that puts that debate into some historical context. While you might expect this to be a woman’s formal ball gown, they believe it was actually for a young girl:

From the description (which seems to focus on the U.S. and Europe, though this isn’t specified):

Until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, children were dressed as miniature adults, with girls being put into corseted bodices from about three years of age, graduating to adult dress when they reached twelve or thirteen.

…

When a boy reached four years of age, he was…dressed in a replica of a man’s three-piece suit, consisting of coat, waistcoat, and breeches reaching to the knee…Girls were dressed in the adult style of clothing from about the age of two. They would wear a tight-fitting boned bodice laced at the back, with a long full skirt over a petticoat; at twelve they would change to fashionable dress, with the bodice being replaced by stays (a corset) over which was worn a robe, petticoat, and stomacher.

This portrait of Daniel Crommelin Verplanck, painted by John Singleton Copley in 1771, shows the then 9-year-old boy in adult-style clothing:

Starting in the late 1770s, new, looser clothing styles for children became popular, along with new ideas about childhood innocence and the necessity of separating children from the cares of the adult world. The Met provides a link to the 1796 painting The Sackville Children, by John Hoppner, as an example of the new style:

As the Met’s discussion of the formal child’s dress explains, adult fashions eventually followed the trend in children’s clothing, leading to looser, less constricting clothing with fewer layers.

As Leontine notes, it’s an “interesting reminder that from an historical perspective, our society is the anomaly in *not* dressing children the same way we dress ourselves.”

NEWS:

We have lots of fun stuff to report this month!

First, please join us in thanking Jon Smajda for re-designing our website!  In addition to the aesthetic changes (always keeping us looking fresh, he is), he’s given us power over TABS.  We have lots of plans for these tabs, so keep an eye out and please be patient with our experimenting.

Second, SocImages sparked the outcry that led to Abercrombie Kids removing a product from their website.  Reader Allison K. sent in the tip, we put up a short post about the push-up bikini tops and the sexualization of young girls (Abercrombie Kids is for ages 7-14), the story went viral, and Abercrombie eventually folded.  All in all, a fun week. Plus I had the distinct pleasure of being quoted using the phrase “perverted uncle.”

Alongside the Abercrombie story, Gwen and I were interviewed by Tom Megginson for Change Marketing, my discussion of the blog Born This Way was picked up by ABC News, and we received a generous review at Shinpai Deshou.

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

Oh, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that Sociological Images has been purchased by AOL!  The editors of The Society Pages have agreed to turn over editorial control to the mega-corporation in exchange for a principle-collapsing $315 million dollars.  Gwen and I must admit that we’re a bit confused by the whole thing.  Somehow we thought our 3,419 free posts were for something bigger than Chris and Doug’s pocketbook.  But, looking back, we have to admit that we were, um, tragically and enormously naive.  Hind-sight is 20/20 I guess; c’est la vie.

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.