(Via John Barr’s Blog.)
Today, in the “blatant objectification of women to sell crap” category, we have this J.C. Penney commercial, sent in by Rachel O. The ad features ESPN journalist Kenny Mayne assuring men that if they’ll just look at the boring ad for Van Heusen shirts, they’ll also be rewarded with actress Phoebe Cates in a bikini, so “everybody wins”:
I’m not sure that quite everybody wins here. No, not quite everybody.
Mexico filmmaker Pablo Fulgueira happened to be traveling in New York shortly after the attack of 9/11. He took the opportunity to interview people on the streets and turned that footage into this short documentary, “SiNYster,” showing the very first social consequences of the 9/11 attack in New York City.
Part I:
Part II:
Pablo Fulgueira studied filmmaking at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City and graduated in 2006.
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.
Cross-posted at Jezebel.
A year ago, I posted about street harassment — specifically, that form of harassment women often experience in which random men “compliment” us and then feel entitled to our gratitude and attention in return, and often lash out with a barrage of misogynistic comments if they don’t get it.
Caitlin Boston recently posted a video at Sweet.Sour.Satire that she made to highlight the specific kinds of comments Asian American women often face from strangers and even acquaintances. These experiences, both on the street and on dates, represent the intersection of generic sexism and the stereotype of the submissive, hyper-feminized Asian woman, plus an added dash of conflating all Asians (and conflating Asians with Asian Americans) and assuming every Asian American woman’s heart will melt at hearing her date can eat with chopsticks.
When I was an undergrad, I remember being assigned the classic article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema,” by Horace Miner. The piece, published in 1956 in American Anthropologist, applies an anthropological lens to an odd culture singularly devoted to intense ritualistic “improvement” of the human body, which its members seemed to find disgusting in its natural state.
I thought of that article when Matt Cornell, of My Own Private Guantanamo, tweeted a link to the 1994 film Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich, or Dark, Mysterious Austria (I’m not. The film, produced for Austria’s SBS-TV, pokes fun at the tone unfortunately common to many documentaries that attempt to explain the oh-so-bizarre customs and beliefs of non-Western societies. According to IMDb, “A team of the All African Television network wanders into the darkest regions of the Eastern Alps. They observe the habits and rituals of the natives and make not one, but two ethnological major break-through discoveries.”
At 5:40, we learn that the team has disproved the theory that Europeans are monogamous; starting at about 7:50, they describe the elaborate costumes and militaristic symbolism of clans of the Tyrol region of Austria; and at 15:00, there’s a great discussion of the curious obsession with “patently useless activities,” such as biking for no other purpose than biking itself:
Aside from the humorous commentary, it’s a great way of illustrating the sociological imagination, which requires us to step out of our own culture and try to look at it through the eyes of an outsider — and, as C. Wright Mills put it, to recapture the ability to be astonished by what we normally take for granted.
In honor of Labor Day here in the U.S., my coworker Pete posted this video someone put together of images from various labor strikes, protests, etc., set to the Dropkick Murphy’s version of “Which Side Are You On?”, originally written by Florence Reece in 1931 in response to intimidation of her family during struggles between workers and coal mine owners in Harlan County, Kentucky:
The Dropkick Murphys’ “Worker’s Song” seems equally apropos:
At his great blog, Work that Matters, Tom Megginson highlighted a pretty stunning commercial. In it, a woman in a dilapidated mansion looks disgustedly at a mildly repulsive carpet covering a giant room. She resigns herself to pulling it up, revealing a smooth hardwood floor beneath. And she hauls the mass of fibers to the street, only to return to a room newly covered again.
It’s a metaphor for the Sisyphean task of hair removal, of course. So what’s the solution? Well, it’s not rejecting the obviously unrealistic task of being female and hair-free. No. The solution is laser hair removal.
*I stole this fantastic title from Tom.
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 video, made as part of a marketing campaign for a new shopping center in East London, is a fun overview of a century of some trends in clothing, music, and dance styles, all in 100 seconds. Enjoy!
Via The Hairpin.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
While America has taken great steps in recent decades toward gender equality, this progress seems lacking in politics. No elected legislative body in the U.S. has ever come close to being half female—the proportion we would expect if it were truly representative of the populace. R.W. Connell argues patriarchy is replicated and reinforced partially through our individual gender practices that cumulatively make social institutions operate. In daily life, all men and women are socially pressured to embody the gender traits prescribed for their sex.
Kathleen Hall Jameson argues the ways we judge others’ masculine and feminine selves creates a double bind dilemma for women in leadership; a problem that is especially salient in politics, where winning is contingent upon candidates being both personally liked and thought of as competent leaders. Men have no problem being respected both personally and as leaders because acting strong, confident, and in-charge is expected of both males and authority figures. However, when women present themselves as leaders by acting dominant, they are likely to be judged as overly harsh, or even “bitchy.” Yet when women act feminine, they are often judged as unfit for authority because they lack leadership qualities. In electoral politics, it is very difficult for women to walk the tightrope between being a competent leader and also connecting with voters personally.
We can see the double-bind at work in Saturday Night Live’s now famous, or infamous, parodies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin during the 2008 Presidential campaigns. Tina Fey’s Grammy-winning depiction of Sarah Palin exaggerates femininity, often portraying the former Alaska governor as if she is competing in a beauty pageant. Amy Poehler’s masculine portrayal of Hillary Clinton as overly-aggressive, combative, and filled with anger exemplifies the other side of the double bind dilemma. One skit bringing these characters together to speak out against sexism in the campaign is especially revealing:
Fey presents Palin as accommodating, saying “I was so excited when I was told Senator Clinton and I would be addressing you tonight,” to which Poehler-as-Clinton uncooperatively says, “I was told I would be addressing you alone.” Similarly, a capitulating Palin says “Hillary and I don’t agree on everything,” to which Clinton combats “we don’t agree on anything.” Later in the skit, Poehler-as-Clinton takes firm policy stances while Fey-as-Palin gives ‘pageant’ answers. After Clinton speaks out against the Bush Doctrine, Fey as Palin claims “I don’t know what that is.” Clinton says “I believe diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy;” Palin responds “and I can see Russia from my house.” In the SNL skit, Palin tells political pundits to quit using words “that diminish us like pretty, attractive, beautiful …” while Clinton interrupts, “harpy, shrew, boner-shrinker.” Throughout the skit Clinton becomes increasingly agitated and then rips apart the podium in anger. Poehler’s masculine portrayal becomes literal when she says “I invite the media to grow a pair, and if you can’t, I will lend you mine.”
The overly-effeminate portrayal of Palin reflects one side of the double-bind where many people judge feminine women as lacking the appropriate characteristics for leadership. On the other side of the double-bind, the unfeminine portrayal of Clinton illustrates how women who act powerful and confident are subject to character attacks. However, because leadership qualities are expected of men, male politicians are not subject to this critique when they act like leaders. For example, Poehler as Clinton describes her “road to the White House” as “I scratched, and I clawed,”—words with negative connotations which would never be used to describe competitive men with ambition.
While political comedy depicting our leaders as inept has been a mainstay of our electoral process since our country’s founding; we should be cognizant that parodies of female politicians often draw upon very real aspects of gender that make it difficult for women to achieve positions of leadership.
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Jason Eastman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Coastal Carolina University who researches how culture and identity influence social inequalities.
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