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Cross-posted at OWNI.

Our BoingBoing friend, Cory Doctorow, has a great Ted Talk in which he gives an inspired and radical solution to the lack of privacy on the internet. To begin, he notes that Facebook, as just one example, doesn’t just allow, but incites disclosure by rewarding it, but only intermittently (a la B.F. Skinner and the Skinner box).

Meanwhile, parents try to protect children from disclosure and exposure with surveillance tools that block and report content.  This, Doctorow argues provocatively, only trains kids to accept surveillance as normal and unproblematic.  Instead of spying on our kids, he suggests, we should be teaching them to manipulate and avert involuntary disclosure, such that they grow up learning to question instead of accept the use and abuse of their personal information.

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.

When we talk about beauty standards on Soc Images, we’re usually discussing attempts to meet them, and impacts on those who can’t. But what about people who are considered quite attractive by other people? Katherine K. sent in the trailer for the documentary The Art of Seduction: Not Pretty, Really. In it, the director interviews men and women about the impacts of being generally defined as attractive. There are the perks, such as sometimes getting free stuff, but there are downsides, too: jealousy from others, the stereotype that attractive people (especially women) are dumb, and questioning the motives of friends:

Gregory S. sent in a video that highlights the way that social institutions, including the legal system, are often based on assumptions about gender that make it difficult for men and women who break gender norms. Five years ago, a couple in Nebraska got married and the husband chose to take the wife’s name. He wasn’t trying to make a feminist statement; he just didn’t want her son from a previous relationship to be the only member of the family to have a different last name, and the simplest solution was for the husband to change his instead.

This doesn’t appear to be a difficult change. They weren’t blending their last names to invent a new one; they weren’t even hyphenating both their names. This is exactly the type of change that the legal system allows when women get married and decide to take their husband’s name. But five years after their marriage, the state suddenly seems incapable of dealing with a reversal of the usual gender pattern in name changing.

[Ugh. You’ll have to watch it at KETV or YouTube because they’ve disabled the YouTube embedding. Sorry!]

What strikes me is that officials are pretty openly stating that the problem here is his gender. They admit that women who change their names after marriage are given an exception to the normal name-changing procedures. They don’t appear to dispute that this couple got married. Instead, they seem to be arguing that as a man, he doesn’t qualify for the spousal name-change loophole, and thus allowing him to take his wife’s name using that method was a “mistake.”

Yet it is a “mistake” only because he is a man. The system is set up to facilitate conforming to gender norms: there is (an apparently unofficial) loophole to make it easy for women, and only women, to assume their husbands’ names. That exception to procedure is now being denied, retroactively, to a couple whose use of it defies gender norms. And the fact that five years ago some government official apparently applied the name-change loophole in a gender-neutral manner and allowed Josh to change his name is seen as an incomprehensible error.

Stephen W. sent in this clip of an Iowa news story about interspecies mothering. Always cute, of course. But the narration towards the end contributes to the social construction of mothers as born-to-nurture-and-nurture-only.

The narrator asks: “Why would an animal show such grace?”  And the answer is “obvious.”  He continues:

For most mothers, it’s just what they do. An instinct so deeply wired into them, that often all they know is to love and care for life.

So “most” mothers “just” mother.  They do so instinctively.  “All they know” is mothering.  In fact, hang onto your kiddies people because they might just mother your kids too!

Interesting how this narrative leaves invisible all of the female animals that kill and eat other animals, including other animals’ babies.

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.

I saw this commercial at least a dozen times before I noticed the erasure of any clue that the man’s wife had a career or anything at all to do with herself, other than follow her man. After all, if my partner up and moved to Istanbul, I could just up and go. Couldn’t all wives? What’s the chance that we’re doing anything important, after all?

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.

Leigh S. sent in a link to a story at The Week about a new Budweiser ad depicting a soldier returning home from deployment. It has gotten attention because some viewers interpret it as at least potentially presenting a gay soldier. See for yourself:

So…what do you make of it? I certainly don’t think it’s unambiguously a gay couple — it could be a friend or brother just as well. But it does show him calling that guy instead of, say, his parents (or the woman he hugs when he gets home), and that guy being the first to greet him.

For that matter, is the fact that a beer company would make an ad where they didn’t go to great lengths to make it 100% clear that he’s not gay itself a step forward?

Abby W. let us know about a disturbing scene in this week’s episode of the TV show Gossip Girl. The scene depicts an interaction between two individuals, Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf, who have turned into one of the show’s anchor couples that fans root for, always ending up together again despite their on-again off-again nature. In this episode, they’re off again and Blair has been dating someone else (a prince, of course). According to Zap 2 It, earlier in the episode, Chuck apparently humiliated Blair by talking about their prior sexual escapades in front of her boyfriend’s mother. She then goes to Chuck’s penthouse to tell him that her boyfriend has proposed to her, leading to this scene (warning: though he doesn’t hit her, if you’re sensitive to images of violence, you may want to skip the video):

So after publicly humiliating her by referring to her sexual past, Chuck tells Blair “you’re mine” and that she can’t be with anyone else, grabs her and throws her onto the sofa, and when she reiterates that it’s over, he ends up punching a window and injuring her with flying glass. And yet, in an interview with E!, one of Gossip Girl‘s executive producers says that this shouldn’t been seen as abusive behavior. In fact, if there’s anyone to be worried about, it’s Chuck:

I think it’s very clear that Blair is not afraid in those moments, for herself. They have a volatile relationship, they always have, but I do not believe—or I should say we do not believe—that it is abuse when it’s the two of them. Chuck does not try to hurt Blair. He punches the glass because he has rage, but he has never, and will never, hurt Blair. He knows it and she knows it, and I feel it’s very important to know that she is not scared—if anything, she is scared for Chuck—and what he might do to himself, but she is never afraid of what he might do to her.

Ah, Chuck…He’s such a classic romantic hero, like Rhett Butler, sort of strong enough that you can stretch him pretty far.

…

He’s always had that Gothic thing, and those guys are always imbued with a dark side in addition to their vulnerability about their girlfriends.

It’s a disturbing example of the way that controlling and violent behavior by men toward the women in their lives is often depicted as evidence of passion that the female character totally accepts (they just “have a volatile relationship,” so it’s “not abuse when it’s the two of them”). Chuck’s repeated mistreatment of Blair (apparently last season he promised his uncle he could have sex with Blair as part of a business deal) is excused (he’s drunk, and really upset about whatever he learned about his family!), and in fact, his inappropriate behavior is romanticized by the executive producer and the interviewer. A man who publicly humiliates his girlfriend, uses her sexuality as a pawn in business deals, and leaves her injured from flying glass when he finds out he’s losing control over her (not to mention tried to force a 14-year-old girl to have sex with him in the very first episode of the show, back before we were supposed to find him lovable) is still referred to as a “classic romantic hero” who should not be seen as abusive or scary.

In fact, the promo for next week’s episode reinforces the message that Chuck is acting like this because he needs Blair so much that he falls apart without her, and individuals with nefarious plans are intentionally using this knowledge to get to him. So Chuck isn’t abusive; he’s a fragile victim who just loves Blair too much for his own good:

This is particularly disturbing given that the show is popular among teens, many of whom experience abuse in their relationships but are unsure how to deal with it or whether it “counts” as abuse. These types of representations of normalize such behavior, excusing the men who engage in it and giving the message to women that being treated in such a way isn’t a major warning sign but, rather, evidence of a man’s deep passion and vulnerability.

Gwen says that y’all are gonna think I’m going too far, but I can’t resist posting this. More, readers often think we post things because they make us mad grrrr, but we usually post stuff just because we think it’s interesting or illustrative. This is a case of the latter.

Jordan G. sent me this clip of a young bobcat captured on a balcony near his house in Irvine (LA Times). They released it into the wild, but not before a news crew came by and filmed the intrepid hunters with their catch. Enter my amusement: I just love how two of them at some point feel the need to place their foot on the cage, like in a victory pose. This is recognizably masculine body language, a dominance gesture, and kind of silly. Maybe you’ll think I’m silly too, but there it is:

Also posing with your kill: Taming Nature (a personal favorite).

And, in body language, Whoopi sits, sitting like a man, and gendered anatomy.

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.