Nicole S. sent in this great example of the way that differences in bodies are used to infer a wide-range of non-anatomical differences between boys and girls (or, in this case, the other way around).
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.
Josh Leo brought our attention to something he started thinking about recently: the use of the word “hobo” among kids. This started when he saw a video of kids reacting to the Ted Williams, the man who became famous after a video of him panhandling at an intersection and displaying his “golden voice” went viral. Josh was struck with the way the kids talk about individuals who become homeless and, in particular, the repeated use of “hobo” to describe him (they discuss Williams in the first 2 minutes):
Since one girl attributed her use of “hobo” to the TV show iCarly, Josh did a little searching and discovered that the show’s official website contains a set of photos of the cast dressed up for a Hobo Party, complete with captions that make fun of or trivialize poverty and homelessness, including this first one that refers to the store “C.J. Penniless”:
A quick google search turns up lots of images of and suggestions for throwing hobo parties (including a video of a “Hobo House Party,” in which four people in costume dance in a cardboard box). Now, my guess is a lot of people would argue that references to hobos today aren’t really about homelessness now, since it’s a term often associated with the Great Depression. Indeed, a lot of the hobo party sites I found referred to the Depression or suggested 1930s-type clothing. But the video of the kids’ reactions certainly shows that they don’t just see it as a term for people in the past; they clearly connect it to homeless people today.
This trivialization of homelessness and poverty isn’t just on kids’ shows, though. It reminded me of a segment The Daily Show did recently about a news affiliate in Indianapolis that decided to see if any local homeless individuals could be the city’s own “golden-voice” (the segment starts at about 1:30 in):
Such a news story could humanize homeless individuals, of course. Instead, the news segment treats the two women as sources of entertainment whose value comes only from the possibility that they might surprise us by having a “hidden talent.” The idea that it would be shocking to find a homeless person with an amazing gift presumes that people who have skills or talents don’t become homeless, while also presenting the solution as very individualistic: if you’re the next Ted Williams, you can have a house and a job too!
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Elisabeth R., Rebecca H., and Kalani R. all sent in a Volkswagen commercial produced for SuperBowl weekend that they found striking, both for the commercial itself and reactions to it. In the commercial, a child dressed up as Darth Vader tries using The Force on various items around the house. What struck all three of the submitters is the ambiguous gendering of the ad:
At no point is the child’s gender made clear. If we just went with the information in the ad, we might conclude the child is a girl, based on scene in the stereotypically super-pink bedroom. But given the usual clear gendering of toys, Elisabeth, Rebecca, and Kalani all enjoyed seeing an ad in which this didn’t occur.
But the possibility that a girl might dress up as Darth Vader seems difficult for a lot of people to grasp. In the pages and pages of comments on the commercial on YouTube, the child is repeatedly referred to as “he” or “the boy.” In one comment thread, when someone brings up the possibility the child is a girl due to the pink bedroom, someone else says no, it was a boy in his sister’s room.
There’s no particular reason to assume this child is a boy except that we associate Star Wars with boys (and generally see males as the default if gender isn’t otherwise specified). I think the reactions to the video are a good example of the power of gendering: because viewers have pre-existing ideas about gender, kids, and what they’d be interested in, they’re likely to apply those assumptions even in the face of potentially contradictory information and to come up with explanations that leave the pre-existing ideas intact.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention when I was writing the post that none of the commenters who saw the child as a boy seemed to think the pink room was his — I read several different comment threads and when it was brought up, people assume it’s a sister’s room. Also, reader Angie thinks the stuff in the pink room looks too old for the child, since the toys look like the type an older kid would collect. I am clueless about that, which is why I struggle to buy gifts for kids: I no longer have a clear sense of what types of things kids are playing with at what age.
UPDATE 2: This is separate from what the gender of the role of the child in the commercial, but VW has confirmed that the actor who played the child is a boy.
On another note, the fact that VW is using Star Wars nostalgia in its ads as a way to appeal to adult customers makes me feel very old for some reason.
Malia Green, taking a writing diagnostic test while enrolled in Junior College, came across the following question:
The question was part of Pearson’s MyWritingLab, self-described as “a complete online learning program [that] provides better practice exercises to developing writers.”
I have heard rumor that young people have been adopting shorthand tweet-type language as “standard English,” using it in communications with professors and in their academic papers. The inclusion of this question in Pearson’s test suggests that this may, indeed, be a widespread phenomenon and that young adults may not necessarily know the difference between the English most of their parents grew up with and the English they have encountered in this brave new world.
Despite the fact that each of the answers will make sense to anyone familiar with text-ese, the correct answer on the Pearon’s test is clearly d). So, are the answers a) through c) actually wrong? Who gets to decide what “standard English” is anyway?
The whole thing reminds me of the controversies over African American Vernacular English, better known as “ebonics,” in the 1990s. The idea that some people “talk right” and some people do not is an excellent way to justify prejudice. Perhaps an employer largely chooses not to hire black people, not because they’re black, of course, but because they don’t “talk right.” Is the outcome significantly different? And who decides what “talking right” sounds like anyway? Well, the people who have the power to do so… and they typically side with themselves.
So, is text-ese wrong? Only according to those who are making the rules (and Pearson’s tests). And what do you want to bet that those young people who are taught to differentiate between the kind of English they are allowed to use in texts and the kind they are allowed to use in “proper” communication are class privileged, on average? And disproportionately white, accordingly?
So, who decides the future of English? And will “2” and “u” be words in it, or not?
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.
Yesterday, a woman I know who moved to the U.S. as an adult mentioned that she was struck by portrayals of mother-daughter relationships in the U.S. Representations of such relationships on TV, in movies, and regular conversation indicate that especially when daughters are in their teens and 20s, we practically expect their relationships with their moms to be fraught with conflict and difficulty (and the attendant eye-rolling and yelling), and for teens to be disrespectful and to find their parents intolerable. While she had certainly known individuals in Ecuador who didn’t get along with their parents, she felt that in the U.S. we almost cultivate conflict, making it seem like a normal aspect of child-family relationships in general rather than a characteristic of some individual families and culturally sanctioning the open expression of frustration with one’s parents as acceptable, even healthy.
I thought about that when I saw a commercial sent in by Livia A. for the video game Dead Space 2. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video released as part of the ad campaign; the entire selling point is the idea that your mom will hate it:
It’s a great example of this social construction of child-parent relationships as at least somewhat antagonistic: what kids love, parents hate, and parents hating it proves it’s awesome. Telling young people “your parents will be disgusted by this” becomes an automatic selling point. And this idea of how people relate to their parents (in this case, mothers specifically) is presented as an essential, permanent fact: “A mom’s disapproval has always been an accurate barometer of what is cool.”
But of course, this isn’t an inherent property of family life across human history. It largely rests on the invention of adolescence and young adulthood as distinct life stages in which we expect individuals to act differently than children but not quite like full-fledged adults yet, and the assumption that a normal part of this is to struggle to separate from your parents as you try to establish your own identity. Parenting norms today expect parents to accept teen/young adult rebellion and continue loving (and supporting) their kid anyway; you don’t get to withhold resources and affection if you think they’ve been disrespectful. And with the increased visibility of youth culture, we expect kids will find their parents terribly uncool and will see peers, rather than family members, as the proper judges for what they should like. Together, these cultural norms both make it relatively risk-free to take open joy in horrifying your parents and trivializing their values, since there’s little chance they’ll disown or abandon you for it and make young people who do like the same things as their parents seem weird.
I suspect some of our readers may have an interesting gender analysis, as well, what with the emphasis in this video on moms from “conservative America”, while the entire behind-the-scenes crew is made up of young men. While I can imagine an ad that might say “Your dad will hate it,” I don’t think that would work as well here, given that part of the desired reaction was a disgust at the level of violence and gore, something we assume women are more uncomfortable with than men.
Most Americans, when asked if they are affected by advertising, will say “not really.” They say they skip the print ads in magazine, ignore the ones on the street, mute TV commercials, and are generally too savvy to be swayed by their messages.
Here’s some data illustrating the not-me phenomenon. The Kaiser Family Foundation asked 15- to 17-year-olds whether they and their friends were influenced by sexual content on TV.
Seventy-two percent of teens say that sexual content on TV affects their friends “a lot” or “somewhat”:
But only 22 percent say that sexual content on TV affects them “a lot” or “somewhat”:
Advertisers know that most Americans are wrong about whether advertising affects them. That’s why they spent $117 billion in 2009 trying to convince you to buy their product. It works. So it must be affecting somebody, right?
Images borrowed from Strasburger’s Children, Adolescents, and the Media.
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.
Kari B. sent in an example of the sexualization of teen boys, found at Evil Slutopia. Justin Bieber appears on the cover of the February 2011 Vanity Fair covered in lipstick, with a hand grabbing him by his necktie:
An image from the article:
Justin Bieber is 16 years old — just a year older than Miley Cyrus was when there was a scandal about her photoshoot for Vanity Fair, such that it appeared to potentially threaten her career at Disney by ruining her safe, clean-cut image. I think it’s safe to say that if Miley Cyrus, or another female teen star, posed in photos that showed evidence of being kissed or grabbed by male fans, people would be up in arms about the sexualization of girls. But as we often see, there’s a double-standard, based on the idea that boys are naturally sexual at earlier ages and that boys are sexually invincible. While we might see a teen girl surrounded by men as being in danger, we don’t think of girls as being sexually threatening to boys, or of male teen celebrities’ sexuality being as open to exploitation by publicists, photographers, or other members of the media. And thus, these types of images of Justin Bieber don’t lead to the same outcry as similar images of female teen stars, and don’t cause concern that his career as a teen idol is over.
We’ve discussed the adultification of Justin Bieber before, here and here; you might also check out our post on the sexualization of Jaden Smith.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Nils G. drew my attention to a fascinating now-abandoned America educational practice that nicely illustrates how ideas about ideal parenting shift over time. Between 1919 and 1969, the Home Economics departments of about 50 colleges and universities served as foster homes for orphans. Writes Emily Anthes at Wonderland:
During this time, homemaking… was considered to be something that could be conquered by science. Running a home based on instinct was considered to be woefully old-fashioned; the idea that raising a child and maintaining a home could be optimized by following a set of scientific rules was gaining currency.
Accordingly, getting a degree in Home Economics included a labratory set up exactly like a home: “practice apartments.” And what better to fill these homes with than “practice babies!” Students would practice applying the latest science-endorsed parenting techniques on orphans. An article published in the Journal of Home Economics in 1920, by Elizabeth Vermilye, explained the rotation of care:
Each girl, in rotation, carried the work of “baby manager” for one week… The “baby manager” assumed the entire responsibility for the care of the child during her period. She herself did the actual work of caring for him between the hours of 6.00 to 8.00 a.m. and from 4.30 to 6.00 p.m. During the day the child was in the care of three or four other students during the time they were not in class, the manager making the program for this care, giving instructions regarding food and other matters needing attention. The baby manager did the baby’s laundry work.
A student taking care of a practice baby:
Far from being exploited, it was believed that these babies would get not just excellent, attentive care, but the best, most scientifically-valid care. Vermilye claims that the examining physician was highly impressed with the children’s development during their stay with the students. She quotes him saying, “The improvement in the condition of these children speaks highly for your cooperative motherhood.”
These pictures of orphan and practice baby Bobby Domecon (surnamed after his role in the Domestic Economics department) reveal his chubbification.
A skinny 6 pounds at 2 months old:
Perking up at age 10 months:
Nice and chubby 5 months later:
Because these children were believed to be benefiting from the latest science of parenting, they were highly adoptable; many couples were eager to get their hands on a child that had such a good start in life (source).
Eventually, however, ideas about mothering began to change. In particular, scholars began to talk about Attachment Disorder and argue that a child’s development required that it strongly bond to one unique person. In 1954, a short Time magazine article on the subject included experts suggesting that the program was harmful. Starting with the Superintendent of the Illinois State Child Welfare Division, the author writes:
“It is not a normal family setting,” said he. “There are just too many persons involved in the handling of that child.” Heaven only knows, added the superintendent, how many neuroses little David might develop. Other officials seemed to agree. “Imagine.” cried Mrs. Babette Penner, director of the Women’s Services Division of United Charities, “what anxieties there are in a child who is given a bottle in twelve or more pairs of arms.”
The scientific consensus eventually changed and, as a result, by 1969, then, “practice babies” were a thing of the past.
In this video from ABC Doris Mitchell, Cornell University graduate and Home Economics major, sweetly remembers her experience helping raise a practice baby at Cornell University:
For another fantastic example of historic management of children without parents, see our post on the Orphan Trains.
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.
