Search results for gendering

SocImages News:

We hit milestones on both our Facebook and Twitter pages this month, exceeding 18,000 at the former and 8,000 at the latter.  We also celebrated our 5th birthday and almost 4,500 posts.  Congratulations to us!

And congratulations also to Christina Barmon, Georgia State University.  Barmon has written guest posts for us — on health advice to men and women in the 1920s and, most famously, on sitting, standing, and peeing — but, more importantly, she was awarded the ASA/SAGE Teaching Innovations & Professional Development Award this year! Congratulations Christina!

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.

Newest Pinterest Page:

We now have a Pinterest page featuring our collection of material glamorizing violence in fashion (trigger warning).  It’s a depressing ride, if you want to take it for a spin.  We have 17 other boards, too, if you’d like to check out the list.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

In case you’re new, we’re 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 Very Important News…

We visited a little-known private, non-profit zoo in Moapa, NV called Roos n’ More.  They let us hold and pet monkeys, lemurs, bear cats, zebra, camels, toucans, wallabies, and, kangaroos!  The best part, though, was being swarmed by otters!  Here’s Gwen getting an otter kiss:

And here’s Lisa smiling as an otter goes down her shirt and comes out again.  Rawr!

This experience in no way undermined our belief that animals prefer us above all other humans.

Links and Quotes This Month:

• Gala Darling and Feministing both picked up our article arguing that one way to “have it all” is to not have kids.
• Jezebel linked to our posts about gender, groupies, and musical taste and an old post about the dropping age of first menstruation.
• We were quoted at Disinformation, the Huffington Post, and Boing Boing.
• AdiosBarbie in a post about the absence of the female gaze in fashion, linked to our posts on passive women on Chinese and Japanese book covers, romanticized violence against women, and twisted and warped women’s bodies in fashion editorials.
• Finally, Bitch and Feministing both linked to the first post in our series on sexual objectification; Bitch also linked to Caroline Heldman’s review of Magic Mike, as did The Portland Mercury.

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.

We’ve posted before on the way that kids’ products, and the way they are marketed, often reinforces an active boys/passive-and-pretty girls binary. Rebecca Hains noticed that the Stride Rite store near her, as well as the Stride Right website, does so. For instance, girls can “sparkle” and “shine”:

The descriptions for girls’ sneakers on the website emphasize how they’ll help girls shine:

Boys are encouraged to identify with superheroes:

The descriptions for the boys’ shoes emphasize action and speed, as well as their ability to protect the feet of adventurous boys:

More examples of Stride Right marketing at Rebecca Hains’s blog.

Erica B.-K. found these onesies which, though sold by a site called uncommongoods, reflect rather common gendering:

Hiroshi H. noticed that the website for Specialized Bicycle Components divides bikes into ones for boys and girls, though the only noticeable difference was color:

And finally, Anne R. noticed that there’s a Tinker Toy set that, because it is pink and purple, is thus “designed especially for girls”:

As someone who loved Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs as a kid, I’m all for encouraging as many kids as possible to play with them, yet saddened if we are at a point where parents and/or children cannot imagine Tinker Toys could be for girls unless the package screams it at them. But I would kinda like to build that flamingo.

This is the first part in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. Cross-posted at Ms.,  BroadBlogs, and Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

Around since the 1970s and associated with curmudgeonly second-wave feminists, the phrase “sexual objectification” can inspire eye-rolling. The phenomenon, however, is more rampant than ever in popular culture.  Today women’s sexual objectification is celebrated as a form of female empowerment.  This has enabled a new era of sexual objectification, characterized by greater exposure to advertising in general, and increased sexual explicitness in advertising, magazines, television shows, movies, video games, music videos, television news, and “reality” television.

What is sexual objectification?  If objectification is the process of representing or treating a person like an object (a non-thinking thing that can be used however one likes), then sexual objectification is the process of representing or treating a person like a sex object, one that serves another’s sexual pleasure.

How do we know sexual objectification when we see it?  Building on the work of Nussbaum and Langton, I’ve devised the Sex Object Test (SOT) to measure the presence of sexual objectification in images.  I proprose that sexual objectification is present if the answer to any of the following seven questions is “yes.”

1) Does the image show only part(s) of a sexualized person’s body?
Headless women, for example, make it easy to see her as only a body by erasing the individuality communicated through faces, eyes, and eye contact:
We get the same effect when we show women from behind, with an added layer of sexual violability. American Apparel seems to be a particular fan of this approach:

2) Does the image present a sexualized person as a stand-in for an object?

The breasts of the woman in this beer ad, for example, are conflated with the cans:

Likewise, the woman in this fashion spread in Details in which a woman becomes a table upon which things are perched. She is reduced to an inanimate object, a useful tool for the assumed heterosexual male viewer:
Or sometimes objects themselves are made to look like women, like this series of sinks and urinals shaped like women’s bodies and mouths and these everyday items, like pencil sharpeners.

3) Does the image show a sexualized person as interchangeable? 
Interchangeability is a common advertising theme that reinforces the idea that women, like objects, are fungible. And like objects, “more is better,” a market sentiment that erases the worth of individual women. The image below advertising Mercedes-Benz presents just part of a woman’s body (breasts) as interchangeable and additive:

This image of a set of Victoria’s Secret models, borrowed from a previous SocImages post, has a similar effect. Their hair and skin color varies slightly, but they are also presented as all of a kind:

4) Does the image affirm the idea of violating the bodily integrity of a sexualized person that can’t consent?

This ad, for example, shows an incapacitated woman in a sexualized positionwith a male protagonist holding her on a leash. It glamorizes the possibility that he has attacked and subdued her:

5) Does the image suggest that sexual availability is the defining characteristic of the person? 

This ad, with the copy “now open,” sends the message that this woman is for sex.  If she is open for business, then she presumably can be had by anyone.

6) Does the image show a sexualized person as a commodity (something that can be bought and sold)?

By definition, objects can be bought and sold, but some images portray women as everyday commodities.  Conflating women with food is a common sub-category.  As an example, Meredith Bean, Ph.D., sent in this photo of a Massive Melons “energy” drink sold in New Zealand:
In the ad below for Red Tape shoes, women are literally for sale:

7) Does the image treat a sexualized person’s body as a canvas?

In the two images below, women’s bodies are presented as a particular type of object: a canvas that is marked up or drawn upon.

——————

The damage caused by widespread female objectification in popular culture is not just theoretical.  We now have over ten years of research showing that living in an objectifying society is highly toxic for girls and women, as is described in Part 2 of this series.

Caroline Heldman is a professor of politics at Occidental College. You can follow her at her blog and on Twitter and Facebook.

Annie C. and another reader sent us a link to a post by Ryan North at what are the haps about a set of gendered “survival guides” for kids published by Scholastic (and which the publisher now says it won’t continue printing). Boys and girls apparently need very different survival skills, which the other sex shouldn’t know anything about:

In his post, Ryan provides the table of contents for each. What do boys and girls need to be able to survive? For boys, no big surprises — forest fire, earthquake, quicksand, your average zombie or vampire attack, that type of thing, many including, according to teen librarian Jackie Parker, practical and useful tips:

How to Survive a shark attack
How to Survive in a Forest
How to Survive Frostbite
How to Survive a Plane Crash
How to Survive in the Desert
How to Survive a Polar Bear Attack
How to Survive a Flash Flood
How to Survive a Broken Leg
How to Survive an Earthquake
How to Survive a Forest Fire
How to Survive in a Whiteout
How to Survive a Zombie Invasion
How to Survive a Snakebite
How to Survive if Your Parachute Fails
How to Survive a Croc Attack
How to Survive a Lightning Strike
How to Survive a T-Rex
How to Survive Whitewater Rapids
How to Survive a Sinking Ship
How to Survive a Vampire Attack
How to Survive an Avalanche
How to Survive a Tornado
How to Survive Quicksand
How to Survive a Fall
How to Survive a Swarm of Bees
How to Survive in Space

Girls seem to require a very different set of survival skills. Like how to survive a breakout — a skill boys don’t apparently need, though they also get acne. Other handy tips are how to deal with becoming rich or a superstar, how to ensure you get the “perfect school photo,” surviving a crush, whatever turning “a no into a yes” is (persuasiveness, I suppose), picking good sunglasses, dealing with a bad fashion day, and of course “how to spot a frenemy”:

How to survive a BFF Fight
How to Survive Soccer Tryouts
How to Survive a Breakout
How to Show You’re Sorry
How to Have the Best Sleepover Ever
How to Take the Perfect School Photo
How to Survive Brothers
Scary Survival Dos and Don’ts
How to Handle Becoming Rich
How to Keep Stuff Secret
How to Survive Tests
How to Survive Shyness
How to Handle Sudden Stardom
More Stardom Survival Tips
How to Survive a Camping Trip
How to Survive a Fashion Disaster
How to Teach Your Cat to Sit
How to Turn a No Into a Yes
Top Tips for Speechmaking
How to Survive Embarrassment
How to Be a Mind Reader
How to Survive a Crush
Seaside Survival
How to Soothe Sunburn
How to Pick Perfect Sunglasses
Surviving a Zombie Attack
How to Spot a Frenemy
Brilliant Boredom Busters
How to Survive Truth or Dare
How to Beat Bullies
How to be an Amazing Babysitter

Aside from the multiple items clearly focused on appearances, Ryan points out that several others emphasize looks. Camping is “excellent for the skin,” while the seaside survival chapter provides a lot of fashion tips.

Many of the girls’ tips are about surviving social situations or dealing with emotions — embarrassment, keeping a secret, dealing with bullies. These are all probably more useful to kids than knowing how to survive quicksand, and tips for handling stardom are statistically more likely to be useful at some point than dealing with a T-Rex. So the issue here isn’t that the boys’ guide is inherently more useful or smarter or better; probably all kids should be issued a guide to surviving Truth or Dare (also, dodgeball). But the clear gendering of the guides, with only girls getting tips about dealing with social interactions, emotions, and looks, while outdoorsy injury/natural disaster survival tips are sufficient for boys, illustrates broader assumptions about gender and how we construct femininity and masculinity.

SocImages Updates:

The University of Cinncinati’s J.A. Carter has put together a fabulous resource: a Course Guide for Sociology of Sport classes.

Gwen has put together a new Pinterest page.  This is our 16th and it covers various attempts by marketers to Masculinize Femininized Products in order to sell them to men.

An article tracing the history and philosophy of SocImages is now in pre-publication.  Feel free to email socimages@thesocietypages.org for a copy if you’d like one.

In the News:

Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter and other books, offered a blush-inducing review of SocImages at her website.

Peg Streep discussed Lisa’s research on hook up culture in Psychology Today: Finding Anastasia Steele and Looking for Christian Grey.

Matt Cornell’s fantastic post on his “man-boobs” was featured, in French, at Rue89.

Our fabulous four-part series on LEGO’s history of marketing (and not marketing) to girls, by David Pickett, was featured at Boing Boing, Neatorama, and HuffPo Parents.

Finally, this month we enjoyed being linked from sites the likes of Cracked, Kotaku, Utne Reader, TVTropes, Good, Gamasutra, AdWeek, and Business Insider.

Most Popular in May:

• Student’s Brain Flatlines During Class
• The Story of My Man-Boobs
• The Difference Between “i.e.” and “e.g.”
• Holes in the Social Fabric: An Artist Quilts the Foreclosure Crisis
• Depp’s “Tonto” Costume Based on a Non-Native’s Wild Imagination
• “Nude,” Racial Marginalization and the Wedding Industry
• Support for Gay Marriage Rising in Every Demographic
• Equal Opportunity for Idealized Employees
• The “Motherhood Penalty”
• The U.S. #1 in Health Costs
• Framing North Carolina’s Amendment One
• Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap

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.

We’ve had a number of submissions of examples of gendering food, so I thought I’d post a few that illustrate connections between food and masculinity. Edd T. saw this commercial from New Zealand that presents wine as an insufficiently manly drink which all men should reject as a matter of course:

Even beer isn’t without risk, though; a man must choose carefully. Roger B. sent in several Miller Lite commercials that connect masculinity to drinking the right beer. Men in these ads are ridiculed for wearing tight jeans and singing the wrong songs at karaoke:

As Roger points out, “the female bartender is implied to have a masculinity that the man in the commercial doesn’t possess (due to her knowledge of beer and, presumably, her policing of masculinity), and…this is treated as part of the joke (as if a woman possessing more masculine traits were inherently absurd).”

So what can men eat and drink? Well, apparently fried chicken is so masculine it can even compensate for a pink sweater, according to this Australian KFC ad sent in by Katrin:

And anything that includes lots and lots and lots of food is inherently for men. Tyler R. saw a notice for a buffet on a BC Ferries vessel that travels between Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia. Women apparently need to know about the ingredients and dishes. Men just need to know food is available, in unlimited quantities:

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.
American Studies professor Jo B. Paoletti has announced the publication of her book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America.  I’ve been eagerly anticipating getting my hands on a copy. It was from Paoletti that I learned that the idea that pink was a feminine and blue a masculine color was a relatively new invention in American history (one that even now does not necessarily extend to other countries).  See, for example, this pink 1920s birthday card for a man (with a pre-Nazi swastika too).

The book asks “When did we startdressing girls in pink and boys in blue?”  To answer this question:

She chronicles the decline of the white dress for both boys and girls, the introduction of rompers in the early 20th century, the gendering of pink and blue, the resurgence of unisex fashions, and the origins of today’s highly gender-specific baby and toddler clothing.

In an analysis of baby cards from the 1960s, she notes that many of the cards are gender-neutral and include both pink and blue, but that even the gender-specific cards (this particular baby was a girl) use both colors. These cards, then, reveal that pink and blue had emerged as recognizable baby colors by the 1960s, but the use of blue in the “for girl” cards and the preponderance of gender-neutral cards suggests that the importance of gender differentiation hadn’t taken hold.

She has a large collection of examples.

At her website Paoletti says she has a book planned on “old lady clothes, mother-of-the-bride dresses, cougars and other age-appropriate nonsense.” I can’t wait.

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.

Los Angeles Meet Up:

Plan ahead! We’ve scheduled a SocImages Meet Up for March.  Please join us The Escondite (downtown L.A.) on Sunday, March 4th.  All ages.  Food and drink.  Great company guaranteed.

(P.S.: If you’re in Boston, I’ll be visiting Harvard and Boston University at the end of March. Will try to schedule a meet up then as well.)

SocImages News:

Amanda Jungels has put together a fantastic SocImages Course Guide for Sexuality and Society.  Check out all of our Course Guides here.

We’re having great fun with our Pinterest account; our collection of sexy toy makeovers showed up as a slideshow at the Huffington Post.  We’ve also added two new boards:

• what color is flesh?
• sexualized/gendered food

A super big “thank you” to Ron Anderson!  Dr. Anderson notified us that he nominated us for the ASA Section on Communication and Information Technologies Public Sociology Award.

We’re in Portuguese!  Thanks to Dr. Claudio Cordovil, some of our posts are appearing at the University of Brazil’s Conhecimento Prudente.

I think this is our first appearance as a source on Wikipedia… on the page about the online game, Evony… of all things.

Are you on Google Plus? So are we!

Authors and Contributors in the News:

Contributor Philip Cohen was discussed in an NPR story about using Google searches as data.

I was quoted in an NPR story about photographer Shelby Lee Adams’ portrayal of Appalachia and I enjoyed a few fun minutes on air with CKNW’s Bill Good talking about the recent trend of sexualizing toys for young girls.

Best of January

Our hard-working intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month.  Here’s what she found:

• Heather Cromarty, The Marilyn Meme
• Lisa Wade, Beauty and the New Lego Line
• Caroline Heldman, Voter Suppression: The New Disenfranchisement
• Jason Eastman, Newt Racism: The Racially-Coded Language of Presidential Candidates
• Lisa Wade, Income Ineqaulity is Bad for Society
• Gwen Sharp, National Geographic Genders Animal Sexuality
• Sarah Wanenchak, Disabled Bodies and Ablest Acceptance
• Gwen Sharp, Fotoshop by Adobé
• Lisa Wade, 125 Years of Holding Women Responsible for Laundry
• Lisa Wade, Mariah Careys All I Want for Christmas Is You: 1994 vs 2011

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:

• @lisadwade
• @gwensharpnv
• @familyunequal
• @carolineheldman
• @jaylivingston
• @wendyphd