Search results for rape culture

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post.

Last week I posted about our college President’s suggestion that he is disinclined to believe students who report sexual assault.  In response to this, and a series of other problems with our sexual assault policy, the Occidental Sexual Assault Coalition is filing a federal complaint with the Office for Civil Rights and a Clery Act complaint.  No longer confident that our President and his administration will agree to implement the best practices for reporting and adjudicating sexual assault, faculty and students are turning to external mechanisms.

These seem like extraordinary measures, but I want to be clear that there is nothing extraordinary about the number of sexual assaults or the mishandling of reports by the Occidental administration.  Occidental is no more or less unsafe than the vast majority of residential colleges and universities around the country.  College attendance is a risk factor for sexual assault — it raises the likelihood that a person will be a victim of an attempted or completed assault — and Occidental is no different in that regard.

Instead of a sign that Occidental has a uniquely broken system, the activities on campus reflect a commitment to making the college a nationwide model.   You see, we do believe that Occidental is different than other colleges.  It’s extraordinary.  And we’re committed to holding it to a higher standard.  We want Occidental to usher in a new era of sexual assault policy and improved campus sexual culture.  There will be a day when honest, transparent, and fair reporting and adjudication of sexual assaults will be the norm.  When that happens, the approach we find on essentially all college campuses today — a high rate of non-report, pressure on victims to stay quiet, sloppy and biased adjudication, and suppression of sexual assault data — will be considered backward, inhumane, and unjust.  That day is coming, and we want Oxy to get there first.

Photo credit: Chris Ellis and the Occidental Weekly.

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.

JUST THE HIGHLIGHTS!

• Who Would the World Elect?
• Why Don’t People Vote?
• Who Would Have Won If…
• Climate Denial and American Voluntarism
• Including “God” in Republican and Democratic Platforms (pictured)
• Rape and Other “Gifts” from God
• Mitt Romney and the 47% Meme
• A Century of Voting Patterns
• Religion and Race among Democrats and Republicans
• The Decreasing Significance of Election Day

ALL OUR COVERAGE OF THE 2012 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

History:

• A Century of Voting Patterns
• Trends in the Polarization of U.S. Politics
• The Election and the Economy

Culture and Psychology:

• Who Would the World Elect?
• Climate Denial and American Voluntarism
• Have Obama Conspiracy Theories Lost Traction?
• Words: The Democratic and Republican Conventions
• Abstract Preferences and Real Choices

Religion:

• Including “God” in Republican and Democratic Platforms (pictured)
• Religion and Race among Democrats and Republicans

Media:

• News Media Make Men the Experts on “Women’s Issues”
• Who’s Reporting the News: An Analysis by Race and Ethnicity
• The CNN Opener for the Southern Republican Presidential Debate

Money:

• TV Ad Spending for the Presidential Campaign
• Political Donations: The Name on the Check

Race:

• Voting for a Black President: 2008 and Tomorrow
• This Election’s Deep Racial Divide
• Are All the Racists on the Right?
• Testing the Racializing Influence of Romney’s Welfare Ad
• Race and Politics in Appalachia
• Newt Racism: The Racially-Coded Language of Presidential Candidates

Class:

• How Obama’s Comment about “Bitter” Conservatives is Not the Same as Romney’s Dismissal of the 47%
• Mitt Romney and the 47% Meme
• Shareholders vs. Stakeholders

Sexual Orientation:

• Political Affiliation and Support for Same Sex Marriage
• Presidential Candidates’ Positions on Gay Rights

Gender:

• How are Women Voting? And Why?
• Rape and Other “Gifts” from God
• The Science of Lady Parts and the GOP
• Reifying Gender in Election Coverage
• Paul Ryan Doubles Down on His Popularity Among Young Men
• Election 2012 Sexism Watch

After the Election:

• Who Would Have Won If…
• How Did Latinos Vote?

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.

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

The “sex wars”  of the 1980s pitted radical feminists, who claimed that female sexual objectification is dehumanizing, against feminists concerned about legal and social efforts to control and repress female sexuality.  Over a decade of research now shows that radical feminists were right to be highly concerned.

Getting back to the “sex wars” and how radical feminists were right, women who grow up in a culture with widespread sexual objectification tend to view themselves as objects of desire for others. This internalized sexual objectification has been linked to problems with mental health (e.g., clinical depression, “habitual body monitoring”), eating disorders, body shame, self-worth and life satisfaction, cognitive functioning, motor functioning, sexual dysfunction, access to leadership, and political efficacy.  Women of all ethnicities internalize objectification, as do men to a lesser extent.

Beyond the internal effects, sexually objectified women are dehumanized by others and seen as less competent and worthy of empathy by both men and women.  Furthermore, exposure to images of sexually objectified women causes male viewers to be more tolerant of sexual harassment and rape myths.  Add to this the countless hours that most girls/women spend primping and competing with one another to garner heterosexual male attention, and the erasure of middle-aged and elderly women who have little value in a society that places women’s primary value on their sexualized bodies.

Theorists have also contributed to understanding the harm of objectification culture by pointing out the difference between sexy and sexual.  If one thinks of the subject/object dichotomy that dominates thinking in Western culture, subjects act and objects are acted upon.  Subjects are sexual, while objects are sexy.

Pop culture sells women and girls a hurtful lie: that their value lies in how sexy they appear to others, and they learn at a very young age that their sexuality is for others.  At the same time, being sexual, is stigmatized in women but encouraged in men. We learn that men want and women want-to-be-wanted. The yard stick for women’s value (sexiness) automatically puts them in a subordinate societal position, regardless of how well they measure up.  Perfectly sexy women are perfectly subordinate.

The documentary Miss Representation has received considerable mainstream attention, one indicator that many are now recognizing the damaging effects of female sexual objectification.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gkIiV6konY]

To sum up, widespread sexual objectification in U.S. popular culture creates a toxic environment for girls and women.  The following posts in this series provide ideas for navigating new objectification culture in personally and politically meaningful ways.

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.Magic Mike is “wildly overperforming” at the box office because women and gay men are going to see it in droves.  Thank you Hollywood executives for finally noticing that there’s plenty of money to be made off of heterosexual female and gay male sexuality.  Magic Mike purports to be a movie that caters to het women, and while it does provide a highly unusual public space for women to objectify men, the movie in fact prioritizes male sexual pleasure in tired, sexist ways.

Watching Magic Mike was an experience.  Many of the female theater-goers around me were hollering demands (e.g., “take it all off, baby!”) and grunting approvingly during dance scenes.  The camera unabashedly focused tight on the dancer’s abs and buttocks, requiring viewers to objectify the male actors.  I’ve written elsewhere that living in a culture that objectifies girls/women is highly damaging, and emerging male objectification is a corporate wet dream to sell products by creating new body dissatisfactions/markets.

Make no bones about it, this movie is all about reinforcing the notion that men are in control and men’s sexuality matters more.  It baffles me that the filmmakers were so effective in conveying these themes in a movie about male strippers that a mostly female audience is eating up.  Have we learned to devalue our own sexual pleasure so thoroughly that the scraps of het female sexual pleasure provided by Magic Mike feel like a full meal?

Aside from the questionably-empowering viewer interaction with the film, the content of Magic Mike is old-school sexism wrapped in a new package.  It reinforces prevailing notions of masculinity where white men are in control, both economically and sexually, and women are secondary characters to be exploited for money and passed around for male sexual pleasure.

Most of the women in the film are audience members portrayed as easily manipulated cash cows to be exploited for money.  In one scene, the club boss, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey) gets his dancers pumped up before a show by asking them, “Who’s got the cock?  You do.  They don’t.”  Dallas has a running commentary that forcefully rejects the idea that female audience members are sexual subjects in the exchange.

Beyond the foundational theme of male control, many (but not all) of the simulated sex acts the dancers perform in their interactions with female audience members service the male stripper’s pleasure, not hers.  Dancers shove women’s faces into their crotch to simulate fellatio, hump women’s faces, perform faux sex from behind without a nod to clitoral stimulation, etc.  As a culture, we have deprioritized female sexual pleasure to such a great extent that these acts seem normal in a setting where they don’t make sense.While the men in Magic Mike strut their sexual stuff with a plot line that constantly reaffirms their sexual subjectivity, the few supporting female roles show women in surprisingly pornified, objectifying ways.  Magic Mike is pretty tame when it comes to male bodies.  Lots of floor and face humping, but no penis or even close-up penis tease shots through banana hammocks.  In fact, viewers aren’t exposed to any male body part that they wouldn’t see at Venice Beach.  The same cannot be said for women.

The movie features gratuitous breast scenes galore (yes, the breasts are the scene) and full body (side and back) female nudity. One of the male stripper’s wives is reduced to a pair of breasts that are passed around when her husband encourages another male stripper to fondle them because “she loves it.”  The few recurring female roles in the cast are flat with no character development, including the romantic interest, while the white men in the film enjoy extensive character development.

Other disturbing moments are peppered throughout the movie.  Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) makes a thinly veiled rape innuendo when he’s “teaching” a younger guy how to approach a woman at a club: “Look what she’s wearing. She’s asking to be bothered.”  The movie also asks viewers to laugh at a larger woman who hurts a dancer’s back when he picks her up (see photo and trailer below).  And one of the main characters has a homophobic reaction when he’s grossed out that his sister thinks he’s gay.  Also, this is a story about white men where both women and men of color exist at the margins.  The Latino DJ is a drug dealer (how original), and the two Latino dancers barely talk.I was heartened and humored by grandmas and teenage girls asserting their sexual subjectivity in the theater by yelling at the screen.  It is wonderful to see so many women spending money for an experience that purports to cater to our sexual desires.  We want to feel powerful when it comes to our sexuality because we’re constantly robbed of sexual subjectivity through popular culture, pornography, the male gaze, and in the bedroom.  One Sexual Revolution later, men are still twice as likely to achieve orgasm than women during sex.

If Magic Mike is our sexual outlet, we deserve something better.  When women turn around and engage in the same objectification that harms us, is that empowering?  When the men we’re objectifying on the screen are degrading women and prioritizing their own sexual pleasure, and we eroticize this behavior, is that empowering?  And when women eroticize sexual acts that don’t involve the clitoris/orgasm, is that empowering?  I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, but I do know that Magic Mike would have been a radically different film had it truly been about female sexual pleasure.  It’s high time more women were calling the shots in Hollywood and making mainstream movies that feature female sexual pleasure.

Magic Mike trailer.  To see the sexual double standard, note how the trailer frames male stripping as a “fantasy” life, and imagine this term being applied to female strippers in a Hollywood trailer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMU7s6cwxEM]

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

Course Guide for
SOCIOLOGY OF SPORTS
(last updated 4/2012)

Developed by J.A. Carter
University of Cincinnati

 History

• Social Hygiene and the Gender of Health in 1922
• Vintage Women’s Basketball Teams: So Funny!
• Chance, Innovation, and the Evolution of Skateboarding
• Woman Wears Men’s Clothes to a Prizefight World Gasps 1910
• 1927 Wimbledon Ad Using Women’s Progress to Sell

Culture

• Sociologist Doug Hartman on Why We Love Football
• Context: How do you Play Football?
• Brit Hume: Only Christianity Can Save Tiger Woods
• Arizona’s Prayer at the Super Bowl
• What Does it Mean to Believe that a Human Characteristic is Natural?

Fans

• Jay Smooth on the Irrationality of Sports Fandom

Stadiums/Economics

• New Sports Stadiums and Economic Development
• The Economic Sociology of Triathlons

Race/Ethnicity

• Distracted by “Linsanity”: Hidden Racism and the Model Minority Stereotype
• Jeremy Lin, ESPN says, has a “Chink in the Armor”
• Racial Stereotyping and Perceptions of Competence
• Tragedy at Red River: Race, Privilege and Learning to Swim
• Racism and Jingoism Among US Soccer Fans
• When Whiteness Matters in Sport
• Media, Race, & Web 2.0
• An Indigenous Olympics
• Russian Ice Skaters Impersonate Aboriginals, Win Gold
• Orientals v. Gauchos: Who are you Rooting for?
• Dutch Soccer Club Nicknamed the Jews
• Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish Mascot
• Some Native American Sports Mascots
• Don’t Olympic Athletes have Other Things They Need to be Doing
• Olympians Making “Chinese Eyes”
• Arab Women and 2008 Olympic Athletes
• “The Angry Black Athlete”
• Race and the King Kong Motif
• Southern Hospitality?
• Corporate Plantation

Gender

• The Manly Origins of Cheerleading
• Women and Exclusion from Long Distance Running
• Policing Gender in Figure Skating
• I Wonder How Much Laundry the Average Team USA Dad will Do
• Happy Super Bowl Day!
• Barbie and GI Joe: Inscribing Gender Norms on Toys
• Which Women Play on the Center Court at Wimbledon?
• Skate Canada gets “Tough”
• Participation in High School Sports by Gender and Sport
• The Sexualization of Female Olympiads
• Breakfast and Lunch and Dinner of Olympic Champions
• “Come to the Ball”: Swiss Soccer Ad
• Valuing Dads in the WNBA
• Blaming Jessica Simpson: Women Sap Men’s Strength
• Pink Sports Team Clothing: Making a Masculine Arenas Safe for Women

Sex Differences in Sports

• Opportunity and Athletic Performance
• Male as the Neutral Default
• The Question of Caster Semenya’s Sex

Equipment differences in sports

• Female Boxers may be Required to Wear Skirts
• Ideology, Safety, and the Lingerie Football League
• The Amazing Disappearing Cheerleading Outfit
• Femininity and the Proposed Badminton Dress Code
• Two Fun Facts About Figure Skating Fashion

Masculinity

• Hegemonic Masculinity in Super Bowl Commercials
• No Man’s Land and the Alice Band
• Mocking Men with Femininity
• The Daintification of Masculinity
• Men without Sports Knowledge/Skills are Inadequate Human Beings
• Energy Drinks and Violent Masculinity
• Crossing Gender Lines: Boys Doing Double Dutch
• A Set of Ads Suggesting that Men must Eschew Femininity or Else
• Social Construction and Hegemonic Masculinity

Sexuality/Homophobia

• Pushing Back Against Homophobia in Sports
• “Powder Blue Faggots”: More Sporting Homophobic Taunts
• Yankee Fans Verbally Assault Teenage Red Sox Fans with Homophobic Taunts
• What Does a “Prehomosexual” Look Like?
• Johnny Weir: That’s Gay
• Pulled Homophobic Nike Ads
• “Homosexual” vs. “Gay”: Discourse in the Culture Wars
• You’re a Quarterback for SC?  That’s So Gay!

Bodies

• Tim Tebow and the Religious Body (Politic)
• Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance
• World Champion Olympic Medalist Reduced to Woman on a Diet
• Objectification of Women = Go Team!
• Idealizing Shawn Johnson
• Re-Framing Menstruation
• Ski Jumping’s Weight Problem
• An Entitlement to the Right to Define and Consume Female Beauty
• Nude Calendar Images of German Paralympic Athletes
• Release the Thin Athletic Body Trapped Inside your Big Fat One
• The Male Gaze Does Not Allow for Boy Nipples
• Men’s Bodies are Allowed to Grow Up

Media

• What’s Important About Female Athletes?
• “Come for the Ladies, Stay for the Legends”
• Serena Williams’ Patriarchal Bargain
• Female Athletes Support the Guys
• His and Hers Sports Illustrated Covers
• SportsCenter, the Predictable Gender Trend
• Cheerleader Dreams at Mattress World
• ESPN Introduces Website for Women
• Women Talk, Eat at Baseball Game; Earth Stands Still
• Welcome, Women to your Special Section
• It’s the Ironman, Not the Ironwoman, so Shut your Cereal Hole
• A Breakdown of Televised Football Broadcasts
• Feminizing Women’s Sports Teams
• It’s so Boring to Wait While your Wife shops for you
• Serena Williams on the Cover of ESPN
• Another Collection of Gender-and-Tech-Related Images
• Female Athletes: Be Pretty, but Not Sexy or Pregnant
• Bringing People Together with Coke
• Marketing Sports Supplement to Men and Women
• Media Portrayals of Female Athletes
• Connecting Golf and Sex
• Score Big at Sports Bar

Violence

• Reception of Rape Victims: Silsbee, TX Edition
• Glorifying Violence in American Football

College Athletics

• In Defiance of Title IX Colleges Report Male Athletes as Women
• College Athletics and Graduate Rates
• College Athletes and their Majors
• Where Sports Scholarships Go

Appearances and Publications:

After I posted about the Jimmy Kimmel prank in which he encouraged parents to film their kids getting “bad” presents, I had the opportunity to inform a New York Times article about the subject.  I discussed the social rules of the Christmas gift-giving (and the importance of teaching kids how to be the butt of a joke).  My first time in the NYT. w00t!

Also, I’m proud to report that a paper I co-wrote with Caroline Heldman has been published in a new book titled Sex For Life: From Virginity to Viagra, How Sexuality Changes Throughout Our Lives (edited by Laura Carpenter and John DeLamater, and published by NYU Press).  Our chapter is about first-year college students experiences with hook up culture.  You can get a sneak peak here.

Pinterest!

Over the holiday I went sort of bonkers and decided to start up a Pinterest site for SocImages.  Pinterest is a virtual “pin board” where people can collect images from around the web.  I uploaded our entire archive to the site: 4,002 posts and 8,040 images.  It will let you peruse our images much more quickly. If anything inspires, you can click through to the blog to read the analysis.  These are the “boards” we have so far:

• All SocImages Content
• Re-Touching and Photoshop
• Vintage Ads and Products
• Racial/Ethnic Objectification
• Sexy Toy Make-Overs
• Gendered Parenting and Housework
• Heteronormativity
• Social Construction
• The Social Construction of Race

They look like this (then you scroll down):

 Best of December:

Meanwhile, our fabulous intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month.  Here’s what she found:

• Jay Livingston, Graphic Design the Fox News Way
• Lisa Wade, Why I’m Not Married
• Gwen Sharp, Example of Socialization: Baby Rapper
• Gwen Sharp, Marketing by Masculinizing the Feminine
• Sophy Bot, A Hipster By Any Other Name
• Lisa Wade, American vs. International News: Time and Newsweek
• Caroline Heldman, Pennsylvania Public Service Announcement Blames Rape Victims
• Lisa Wade, Behind the “Perfect” Body: Models and Bodybuilders
• Lisa Wade, Now You’ll Never Forget What a Venn Diagram Is

Best of 2011:

Gwen and I ran our favorite posts from 2011 over the last five days.  Just in case you missed them, here’s a list:

• The Mental Burden of a Lower Class Background
• Of What are We Capable? Human Echolocation
• A Thoughtful Response to the “Asians in the Library” Rant
• Formula for a Successful American Movie
• Gender, Obentos, and the State in Japan
• Babies Learn How to Have a Conversation
• In Defiance of Title IX: Colleges Report Male Athletes as Women
• Art and Attribution: What is an Artist?
• How to Make an Art: By Hennessey Youngman
• The Innovation Trap: How the iPhone Isn’t Saving America
• Change Blindness
• Cultural Differences in Cognitive Perception
• Luxury and the Consumption of Labor
• Are Game Show Audiences Trustworthy
• Gender, Sexualization, and Rolling Stone
• Best Comic Ever: The Scientific Process
• Cousin Marriage
• The Hidden Beneficiaries of Federal Programs
• A Critique of Capitalism by G.A. Cohen
• What Makes a Body Obscene?

Over at his blog, Family Inequality, SocImages Contributor Philip Cohen made a list of his best liked posts from 2011 too.  Check them out here.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

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

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

In this ten-minute video, Feminist Frequency‘s Anita Sarkeesian does a great job of discussing the problem with “straw feminists,” overtly feminist characters who are made to look bitchy, ridiculous, or just plain wrong… even when they’re describing forms of gender inequality that really exist.  More, they’re used to suggest that feminism places men and women in opposition when, in fact, gendered expectations and institutions are oppressive to men as well.

By demonizing these characters, Sarkeesian concludes, the straw feminist leads real women to disassociate from feminism, even when they believe in the equal rights of men and women.

Transcript after the jump:

more...

HAPPY October! Here are some highlights from last month…

New Contributor:

We’re pleased to announce that Wendy Christensen, visiting Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College, has joined us as a regular contributor. She studies the families of men and women in the armed forces, especially the ways that the military “recruits” family members into support roles.  Her first post on war-themed advertisingwas picked up by BoingBoing! Keep your eye out for posts or follow her on twitter.

News, Publications, and Appearances:

Thanks to Rebecca Pardo and the team at Impact,  I had the super fun experience of talking about hook up culture on MTV Canada last week.  That’s a first for me!

I also got to play a part in a CNN story about the difference between nerds and hipsters. Great idea for a story and well written by Aaron Sagers.

Contributor Caroline Heldman continues to report on the cheerleader who was forced to cheer for the man who she alleges sexually assaulted her.  After losing a court case against the school, she was required to pay the school’s $35,000 in legal fees.  An outcry led to an overturning of that requirement.  More at Ms. magazine.

I’m looking forward to visiting Pacific Lutheran University this month (October 25-26). I’ll be talking about both hook up culture and my research about U.S. discourses on “female genital mutilation.” I’d love to see you there!

I’ve also just scheduled talks at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and Harvard in March.  More on those later!

We were also linked from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Feministing, The Frisky, and BoingBoing (as mentioned above).  We bask in the attention.

Progress on Course Guides:

Mary Nell Trautner — University at Buffalo, SUNY — has developed a fantastic new Course Guide for instructors teaching Sociology of Gender. We hope you think it’s as awesome as we do!

Gwen is also hard at work on her Introduction to Sociology Course Guide and I’m working on a Research Methods guide that’ll be ready soon.

We’d like to collect as many Course Guides as we can, even different takes on the same course.  So, if you’re interested in writing on, please see our Instructors Page. There’s other good stuff for instructors there too.

Best of September:

Our fabulous intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from last month.  Here’s what she found:

• Christie Barcelos, Exclusion and American Yoga
• Margo DeMello, Capitalism, Animals, and the Ownership of Icons (with Toucan Sam!)
• Dave Paul Strohecker and David Banks, QR Codes and Digital Exclusivity
• Martin Hart-Landsberg, The Innovation Trap: How the iPhone Isn’t Saving America
• Wendy Christensen, United We Buy: Using Patriotism and War to Sell Products
• Gwen Sharp, How to Avoid Harassing Asian Women
• Gwen Sharp, Openly Breastfeeding on Sesame Street
• Lisa Wade, Exposing the Artificiality of Women in Fashion
• Lisa Wade, Race-Themed Events at Colleges (trigger warning)

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

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

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