gender: femininity

As an exercise I sometimes ask the students in my gender class to try on the pants of their friends of the opposite sex. That is, I ask women to try on men’s pants and men to try on women’s pants. They often react with surprise at how effectively the jeans make their bodies look like the bodies of their opposite sex friends. (Women often complain that their guy friends look “better” in their jeans than they do!) This starts a discussion of the many ways that our choices about what to wear make it appear as if our bodies are in fact “opposite” when, in fact, they’re not quite as different as we often believe.

We dress ourselves to emphasize certain beliefs about what men’s and women’s bodies should look like by choice, because not doing so carries some negative consequences, and because doing so is institutionalized. It’s institutionalized insofar as department stores have separate men’s and women’s sections (and no unisex section) and jeans are made for and marketed as men’s and women’s.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and wasn’t always. Check out these ads from the 1960s and ’70s:

Found at Vintage Ads and the Torontoist.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Natasha L. sent in a link to the site The Plunge, a wedding planning site for men. She says,

I’m getting married in a month.  My facebook knows this, and usually gives me wedding-related ads.  Today it had one that said, “Give us your fiance, and we’ll give you a groom.  A wedding site written by men.”

Here’s one page:

The site accepts the whole “wedding planning is women’s responsibility, and your wife is going to turn into an insane bridezilla” and “this is the end of your life, buddy” ideas so popular in our culture at the moment; this isn’t a site advocating for men to really be involved in planning weddings, or interested in them. The tone is of a fellow guy who knows how annoying it is that you have to pretend to go through all this shit and pretend you care:

How do you try to convince men that it’s ok for them to read something as stereotypically feminine as a wedding planning website? By implying that not reading it is unmanly, of course! Notice the last paragraph here:

So it’s actually masculine to read the planning site, because by doing so, you are showing that you are clueless about weddings, unlike women–since our “innate, feminine” selves know immediately how to plan them. That’s why you never see wedding magazines or websites designed for women–we instinctually know how to plan them, so there’s no market.

Well, ok, there is a site for women. Here The Plunge differentiates itself from The Knot:

The site gives you helpful tips for avoiding “emasculation”:

There’s a whole page on tips for convincing a woman to take your last name if she’s reluctant to do so. Of course, since this is an enlightened period, The Plunge first tells you that you should maybe just accept your bride-to-be’s wishes…

…but then provides a whole list of tactics, including playing on her future mom-ness by pointing out the kids will have a different name than her and that will be confusing and weird (who’s ever heard of children with a different name than one of their parents?). If she tries to turn the argument back on you by saying that if it’s no big deal to change last names, why don’t you take hers, then…

What I find tiresome about this site is that it pretends

NOTE: Apparently WordPress didn’t post everything I wrote at the end, which is why the post ends abruptly with the above half-written sentence. I’m sure what I originally wrote was brilliant. I know I mentioned that what I hate is that the site pretends to reject all this traditional wedding stuff, but it really totally buys into the idea that weddings are women’s things, and men should do as little as possible. And it’s pretty selective about what parts of modern weddings and marriage it criticizes–it can point out how absurd some of the prices of things are, but not equally mention that it might be stupid to get hung up on your bride-to-be not wanting to take your name?

I don’t remember what else I said, except pointing out that the site helpfully provides tips for if you sleep with someone else before your wedding. Their advice: do not come clean about it, unless a) it happened repeatedly or b) it was with someone the bride knows and she’s gonna find out. Also, it’s not quite as bad to cheat with a stripper as a “random girl.”

“Pink is for Girls” (found at Vintage Ads):

Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink.

That is 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.

Abby J. sent in some photos she took at Toys ‘R’ Us of a bunch of classic board games that are now marketed specifically to girls. We know they’re for girls because they’re all pink:

Of course the girls’ version of Scrabble would spell “fashion.” I assume the boys’ version spells “motorcycle” or something of the sort…though probably with fewer letters, I guess.

The Monopoly game (called the Boutique Edition) looks like a jewelry box:

I don’t know what Mystery Date is all about–I mean, I can guess, but I’m not familiar with the game, and not actually sure I’d want to encourage kids to go on mystery dates, but whatever. Both Abby and I found the pink Ouija board odd. I didn’t know they really still sold them. My grandma came across an old one when they were cleaning out my great-grandma’s stuff a couple of years back and she took it and gave it to my teen-aged cousin. My aunt took great offense and sent it back. My grandma, who is a devout Christian, took offense at my aunt taking offense (and implying that Grandma was giving her grandchildren satanic toys) and now keeps it around and lets kids play with it at her house. She also declared my aunt “no fun” and “too churchy.” If you knew my grandma, or had ever sat there and watched her call out to Jesus to help her find her missing spatula (he complied and made it appear in the drawer where she always keeps the spatulas), you would understand why I nearly choked on my food when she referred to someone else as “too churchy.” Now she’s decided that the Harry Potter movies are not, as so many people she knows had told her, satanic but are instead quite funny.

Anyway, that’s a long rambling unimportant point for a post that just illustrates how much we identify girlhood today with pink and feel the need to make gender-specific version of games where a single version seemed to work perfectly well in the past.

Reader Rachel sent in this photo she took of Legos being clearly marked as “boys’ toys”:

NEW! Sara P.-S., Liz, and Danielle F. sent us links to the new “girlz” version of the PSP (Playstation Portable) because, as Sarah says, it is apparently so “skewed towards boys that they have to specifically advertise the fact that girls [can] play with it”:

NEW (Apr. ’10)! Sunlight Snow sent in a version of Jenga aimed at girls called “Girl Talk” Jenga. Not stopping at the pinkification of the game, the producers decided to add sharing and gossip to it. Each plank now offers a question that girls are supposed to discuss. Apparently precipitous balancing and impending collapse is not fun enough, girls must add desperate crushes and dreams of becoming a veterinarian!

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

As discussed on Salon.com and Jezebel today, Dell Computers has started to market directly to women with a new website, Della. Joshua and Frederick both told us about it. Here are some images from the site:

Apparently women shopping for computers care about (1) style– whether or not it matches their outfits, (2) how light it is to carry around when they hang out with equally-coordinated friends and their laptops, and (3) the ability to check movie times, and restaurant directions whenever you need to.

It takes 3 clicks to even get to anything about the actual computers’ processor speed, RAM, hard drive capacity etc. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m a proud geek and I want to know all the technical computer specs.

So what is Dell really saying, here, about women’s computer needs? That women care more about the color of their computers than how well it is going to perform for them? That women won’t understand all the tech specs anyway, so why bother? That women don’t use their laptops for work— to run businesses, write papers, network with clients, or design websites?

Instead we get incredibly informative descriptions  like “attractive, clean designs… with everything you want for your everyday needs.”

And content aside, I also take issue with the very existence of a separate website for women computer buyers. The not-so-subtle message is that the Dell website– with all the high speed (plain black) computers, business information, and detailed tech specs– is for men.

Oh, there are some tech tips on the Della site– about how to use your wicked cute laptop to keep in touch with friends and family and to exercise and eat better.

Eric S. drew our attention to an ad campaign for Jawbone, a noise cancelling headset.  Eric was disturbed by the way the women were used in the advertising.  Take a look:

It is interesting that a product that must be actively used (it’s for talking) is advertised with such passive women.

Some scholars, Jean Kilbourne among them, have noted that ads often include women who appear to be dead (see here, here, here, and here).  If these women do not appear to be dead, they at least appear doll-like.  Their eyes are blank, staring at nothing.   It seems to me that one or both of these are going on here… in either case, the strategy dehumanizes the women, making them into objects.

Also in women as racks on which to place product: men’s shoes and accessories.

We recently critiqued Facebook’s “neutral” avatar for appearing both white and male.  Both Abby J. and Noah Brier pointed us to the fact that Rob Walker at Murketing has been collecting default avatars.  His collection is really interesting.  First, it demonstrates that the avatars don’t need to be gendered at all.

Flikr:

Hotmail:

Google:

Vimeo:

My space:

Friendfeed:

Yahoo:

Youtube:

Second, it demonstrates that the avatars don’t have to human at all:

Twitter:

Posterous:

Third, his collection also suggests that, when the avatar is human and discernibly gendered, it usually appears to be male.  There’s the Facebook avatar, as well as…

EBay:

Car Domain:

Topix:

Yammer:

The avatar tends to be male, unless the company produces a default male and a default female.

Blip FM:

Goodreads:

This collection reveals that the appearance of a company’s default avatar is by no means inevitable or accidental.  Companies must make choices and they are, indeed, making choices about what kind of person is the default person.

Check out his whole collection.  It is growing.

Jamie R. sent in a link to a video that presents a lot of attention-grabbing statistics (which may or may not be accurate). At first it appears that the avatar could be unisex, but then at about 1:18, we see the “female” avatar:

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

At no other place in the video do we see the female avatar except when the “neutral” one is presented as married…indicating, from the context of the video, that it is not unisex or neutral, but male.

MORE! You may have noticed that our revamping of the site involved putting our names up.  Lo and behold, these male avatars popped up next to our names.

So we went into the admin page to see if we had some other option, like maybe something non-human or a female avatar if necessary.  These were our options:

First, blank is really the avatar you see in the first screenshot, it’s neutral which, in reality, is male.  So there is no way to opt out of having an avatar (our tech guy, Jon, is still working on it).

Second, there is no female avatar option.

Third, though there is no female avatar, there is a Monster and a Wavatar option, whatever the hell that is.   So WordPress is allowing you to represent yourself as a Wavatar, but you’re not allowed to be a chick.

Amazing.

NEW (Apr. ’10)! Keri sent a screenshot of her WordPress menu which, she noted, represents the users with two different skin colors.  It’s a nice counterpoint to much of what we see above:

For more on how certain kinds of people get imagined as just people, while others get imagined as certain kinds of people, visit our posts on the Body Worlds exhibit, “flesh” colored products, Pixar films, gender and clothes, and Plan and Playmobile toys.

In the spirit of “Obese blamed for world’s ills” comes this little ad video that shows what happens if you fail to shave your legs to absolute smoothness every single day: utter chaos. Not only will dudes be grossed out, but they could DIE!

Look, ladies, here’s how it is: even if you’re white and thin and traditionally feminine, and you wore your sandals and your cute sundress with the cleavage and you have no problem with your boyfriend groping you on public transit, if you forgot or, heaven forfend, chose not to shave the invisible stubble from your legs, YOU HAVE DOOMED ALL AROUND YOU TO MISERY. A woman may be pinned on her back under a stranger (god, it’s almost like you WANT her to be assaulted), and a perfectly innocent man who just wants to enjoy his perfectly healthy apple despite the fact that you’re not really supposed to eat on the bus will choke almost to death AND THEN EVERYONE WILL GLARE AT YOU AND YOU WILL GET A TEXT MESSAGE FROM YOUR FUTURE SELF OR SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW.

Here’s the thing: this ad would be kinda cute, in its Rube Goldberg-esque way, if it didn’t start from the premise that all women should be available to groping by men at all times. No matter how much you doll yourself up, if there is any part of you that is not sufficiently hairless and smooth, you are persona non grata in terms of beauty. Stubble turns you from a hot chick into a chick so disgusting that men actually leap away from you. You’ve ruined everything by failing to meet the endlessly exacting standards of beauty, which you can only hope to meet by buying our extra-fancy new razor or beauty creme or undergarment.

And remember, even if you look hairless, since your body is available to be groped at any time, your True Hairlessness is subject to scrutiny. If you are cursed with thick body hair, or dark hair against pale skin, you should probably just carry your fancy-ass razor along with you at all times, since your stubble might be noticeable under fluorescent light or when caressed by a (male) baby.

Because I am, as you know, a humorless feminist and a noted misanthropist, I am about to do something that is so dangerous to the fate of dudes everywhere, it will probably cause the dystopian women-only future that right-wingers have nightmares about. I live in Chicago, where it fucking snowed this morning, which should give you a sense of how many months it’s been since I showed my bare legs in public. Also, I am a very pale white woman with dark, thick hair. By now, you’ve sensed what’s coming: tell the menfolk to hide in the storm cellar lest they catch a glimpse of this, my real leg:

Behold: My hairy damn leg

I have not shaved in WEEKS. Sometime I go the whole winter without shaving at all, and then I have what I think of as a Deforestation Session in March or April. It’s odd; I’ve lived with a man for six years, but he’s never mentioned the horrible chains of events that must happen to him every day because of my hirsute natural state. He must be suffering in silence, the poor thing.

This is what the beauty ideal is designed to erase: the reality of our bodies. This is what is so scary to proponents of fancy razors, diet pills, fake tans, and all that bullshit: the fact that women have hair on their bodies, just like they’re people or something. Some women are fat and some are thin. Some women have straight swingy hair and some have kinky hair and some have frizzy hair and some just stick what they’ve got in a damn ponytail. Some women have big pillowy lips and some don’t. Some women have curves and some have rolls and some have both and some have neither. Women, just like men, live in human bodies, and human bodies are incredibly diverse. We all know that, even the most brainwashed of us: but we also know we’re not supposed to know it. If we all just said that women are real people — if we said that out loud — what on earth might happen?

Chaos would ensue. Dudes might be harmed.

(Via Feministing.)

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Sweet Machine is a twentysomething queer grad student in Chicagoland, where she studies too much and fails to dress appropriately for the weather.  She has been a fat kid, a thin teen, a chubby teen, a fat adult, a thin adult, and an in-between adult. She is particularly interested in the grad school-y aspects of fat, such as its intersections with gender and disability.”

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

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For more body hair confessions from Shapely Prose, visit their posts on women having hair where they “shouldn’t” and not having hair where they “should.”

And for more from Sociological Images on the hairlessness norm for women, visit our posts on shaving the hair down there (here, here, here, and especially here) and our post on early marketing of armpit shaving.