Sociological Images

From Our Archives: Christmas

Lisa Wade, PhD on December 25, 2012

Christmas Across Cultures

Befana, the Christmas Witch
Christmas Cultures
Santa’s Evil Side Kick
Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
Protestantizing Christmas Gift Giving: The ChristKind
Politics and the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
The Pagan Roots of Christianity
Snegurochka: Santa’s Granddaughter
Global Christmas

The Economics of Christmas

Racializing Christmas

White Privilege and the Snow White Santa (pictured)
New York Times Gift Guide for People of Color
Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
Holiday in the Hood
The Hazards of Historical Amnesia

Christmas and Gender

Gift Guides and the Social Construction of Gender

Sexifiying Christmas

Christmas Marketing

On Discourse:

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 Month in Sociological Images (November 2012)

Lisa Wade, PhD on November 30, 2012

SocImages News:

This month we had the fun of being quoted in news articles on getting girls to embrace science (Voice of America), Sweden’s gender-neutral toy catalog (Wall Street Journal), hook up culture (yes, again) (Brown Daily Herald), and dollhouses (Daily Mail). The latter involved us getting the word “heteronomativity” into the second sentence of a Daily Mail article!
The Daily Mail coverage was prompted by our counterintuitive post suggesting that the toy in question can be a feminist gift, which also appeared at Jezebel.
BoingBoing featured Gwen’s post about different and unequal boy and girl toy laptops.
Finally, we got a few nice link-tos. One from The Atlantic in a piece about why people don’t vote, another from AdWeek about gendered toys, and a third from The Guardian in an article about Gwen Stefani wearing stereotypical “Indian” garb.

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

I’ll be visiting Akron in April and I’d love to schedule a meet up!

University of Akron (Apr. 19): “Anatomy of an Outrage: Female Genital Cutting and the Politics of Acculturation”

I’ll also be giving my hook up culture talk at the college where I collected my data. So, if you’re in the L.A. area, feel free to drop in for the lecture:

Occidental College (Jan. 31): “‘The Night Overall Wasn’t Bad’: Occidental Students on Hooking Up”

Newest Pinterest Page:

Gwen put together a new Pinterest page with products that have been feminized to make them acceptable for women, Feminizing the Masculine in Marketing. Here’s a screenshot:

In other Pinterest news, @sayitaintsho tweeted this in response to us pinning the images from our post about make-up toys for infants. We aim to please, Shohini!

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

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

In Other News…

On Nov. 11th of this month our Facebook page hit 20,000 fans. Then it went back down to 19,999, then it went back to 20,000, and we’ve continued growing ever since. Hello to all of our friends on Facebook!

Teaching Infant and Toddler Girls to Beautify

Lisa Wade, PhD on November 29, 2012

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

I’d love to draw your attention to The Alpha Parent, a blogger who has collected a stunningly large number of toys for infants that socialize girls into preening.

Some of the toys are purses/handbags that include pretend lipsticks, compacts, and related-items. My Pretty Learning Purse includes a toy lipstick and a mirror; the Gund Sesame Street Abbey Purse Playset includes a compact and powder brush; the Lilliputiens Liz Handbag includes an eye shadow compact complete with three shades and an eye shadow applicator.

In case you were wondering if this is a trend, the Alpha Parent post features TWENTY examples of purses filled with such toys.

It also includes examples of toy make-up bags. Going beyond the inclusion of beauty items in infant toys, these make beauty the sole point of the play. Here are just two of the NINE pretend make-up bags she collected, the Oskar & Ellen Beauty Box and the Learn and Go Make-Up and Go:

Since we wouldn’t want a baby to miss the point, companies also produce and sell vanities for infants. The Alpha Parent’s post included FOUR; here’s two, the Perfectly Pink Tummy Time Vanity Mirror and the Fisher Price Laugh and Learn Magical Musical Mirror:

The Alpha Parent goes on to cover real nail polish made for infants, beauty-themed clothes for little girls, and a common category of dress up: beautician outfits. I counted a surprising ELEVEN of these:

The latter reverses into a nurse’s uniform.

The Alpha Parent concludes:

Makeup toys prime girls for a lifetime of chasing rigid norms of physical attractiveness through the consumption of cosmetics and fashionable accessories.

They are also generally non-sex-transferable, meaning that parents are often loath to allow their boys to play with girl toys. Gendered toys, then, increase the rate of toy purchasing, since parents of a boy and a girl have to buy special toys for each.

It’s a win-win for corporate capitalism. Socialize the girls into beauty commodities by buying these toys now, plan on reaping the benefits with the real thing later. Brainwash the boys in an entirely different way (the Alpha Parent notes tools and electronics), do the same with them simultaneously.

Girls vs. Boys “Laptops”: Guess Which Does More?

Gwen Sharp, PhD on November 28, 2012

Back in 2009, Lisa posted about microscopes and telescopes in a Toys’R’Us catalog. In both cases, the pink version was the least powerful option.

Reader Claudia, who lives in Ireland, found a similar example. Back in October, a supermarket outside Dublin sent out a mailer that advertised boys’ and girls’ laptops. The boys’ version has 50 functions; the girls get just half as many:

Also, it looks more like a packet of birth control pills than a laptop.

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

The Gender Politics of the Dollhouse

Lisa Wade, PhD on November 20, 2012

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

This holiday season, a dollhouse may be a feminist gift for a little girl.

A tweet from Natalie Novik inspired me to look into the toy. She had discovered a gender-neutral dollhouse being sold at Etsy. Following up on her lead, I went over the Toys R Us website to see what gender messages dollhouses were sending. Some of the results surprised me.

Among the 22 best selling dollhouses at Toys R Us, four came without people, six came with a preponderance of females, ten came with a male, female, and children, and there were two I couldn’t categorize. (All humans were white — some dollhouses included non-human creatures — and just about everyone appears to be wealthy.)

The majority of dollhouses, then, came in two types. The first was an explicitly family-themed toy. The message of these was heteronormative, for sure, and also pro-coupling and pro-reproduction. The Fisher-Price Loving Family Home for the Holidays Dollhouse is an example:

The second type of house, however, had themes of friendship and, dare I say, female-independence. These houses had only women or, more often, a group of women and one man. They gave the impression of female home-ownership and female-dominated social interaction. The Exclusive Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse is an example:

Interestingly, most of the dollhouses that fell into this second type were Barbie affiliated. People disagree as to whether Barbie is a good role model for young women. She is roundly criticized for upholding a harmful standard of beauty, but she also tells women they can run for President and go to the moon. In this case, Barbie is sending girls the message that they can have fulfilling lives and own homes without a husband.

As if to capture the paradox completely, the dollhouse featured above comes complete with a Barbie in a bikini doing astronomy:

Children, of course, play with toys both creatively and in resistance to the messages they send. We’d be happy to hear your stories and observations in the comments.

Gender in the Hidden Curriculum (UPDATE)

Gwen Sharp, PhD on November 16, 2012

The hidden curriculum refers to the unspoken and unofficial norms, behaviors, and values that kids learn at school in addition to the official curriculum of math, reading, science, and so on. These can include expectations about how to act in public (standing in line), how to interact with non-parental authority figures, patriotism (saying the Pledge of Allegiance each morning), and messages about social hierarchies (who it’s ok to ridicule, what it means to get different grades), and so on.

Gender is an important element of the hidden curriculum. Schools reinforce larger cultural messages about gender, including the idea that gender is an essential characteristic for organizing social life.

Marissa P. sent in a great example of this. Steve Bowler tweeted a photo of an assignment that his 8-year-old daughter’s teacher said she did incorrectly. The homework assignment had a list of toys or activities, and the kids were supposed to categorize them based on whether they were for boys, girls, or both, with equal numbers in each box. The assignment takes for granted the gendering of toys, and that there is a “correct” answer to the question of which gender they are appropriate for.

Bowler’s daughter did the assignment differently. After placing 3 items in the “boys” category and 2 in the “girls” group, she made additional boxes to add more things in the “both” column:

But at the bottom, the teacher notes that the assignment wasn’t done correctly. The point of the assignment is to categorize; the implicit message — that boys and girls are different types of people who like different types of things — isn’t questioned. A child sees this list of items and doesn’t gender them in the way the lesson took for granted; the reaction wasn’t to acknowledge her innovation and perhaps question the gendering, it was simply to say she did it wrong.

It’s one small example of the way that the hidden curriculum reinforces gendered messages, teaching kids expectations for gender and that gender itself is a coherent, meaningful characteristic.

Bowler, for the record, said he was proud his daughter failed the assignment and just wished she’d done even worse on it.

UPDATE: Reader Kama notes that the assignment accompanied a reading about a girl who wasn’t allowed to play basketball. The overall message of that story challenged the idea that girls can’t play basketball, requiring kids to categorize the toys and activities by gender as part of the lesson:

…this was assigned following reading a book about a girl who wanted to play basketball but was told it’s a boy’s sport. She kept at it, got better, and earned the respect of the boys who were telling her off earlier. According to the guy who posted the picture, the teacher was trying to discuss gender bias. Did the teacher go about it the right way? No, not really – especially when your end goal is showing that these biases are wrong. That being said, this particular assignment doesn’t really fit with the idea of a hidden gender curriculum. The teacher wasn’t trying to say that these are boy and girl toys, the teacher was trying (and failing) to point out that we are biased in our thinking about what’s for boys and what’s for girls.

Sorry for the misunderstanding on my part.

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

Mocking the Honda Fit “She’s”

Lisa Wade, PhD on November 15, 2012

The internet is exciting, in part, because it offers people an opportunity to produce as well as consume content. This is why it’s sometimes called “democratizing”; it spreads around the power to influence our collective conversations.

One reaction to the new Honda Fit She’s illustrates a form of resistance through the production of media content. The She’s is a 1950s throwback being marketed to women in Japan. In addition to coming in several shades of pink and the inclusion of a heart in the logo, it has pink stitching inside, windows that cut ultraviolet rays (to prevent wrinkles) and a special air conditioning system designed to improve skin quality (to erase wrinkles).

A website, called IdeasForHonda, has emerged in response. It mocks Honda’s stereotyping of women with satire, offering its own ideas for what women want. Here are some of the entries:

This is just part of a wider internet response to the She’s and this type of reaction has prompted companies to make changes. Recently, for example, Gap pulled a t-shirt with the phrase Manifest Destiny and we’ve posted about successful resistance to the Obama sock monkey, the Pretzel Crisps “You Can Never Be too Thin” ad campaign, Nivea’s “Re-Civilize Yourself” ads, and the Abercrombie push-up bikini for kids. Here’s to democratization.