gender: femininity

Chris S. sent in a link to a post at Korea Beat about a town in South Korea that now has parking spots designated for women only. My first thought was that maybe they were for pregnant women–when I lived in Utah I’d sometimes see parking spots that were reserved for expectant mothers. But no. These are just for women in general. Here’s a photo:

Part of the English translation of the original article, from Korea Beat:

The “pink lines”, painted pink, are 2.5 meters wide rather than the standard 2.3, offering aid to women drivers unskilled at parking.

This in a city chosen by a South Korean official as “the first woman-friendly city.”

I wonder if there’s any evidence that female drivers in South Korea are involved in more accidents or have a harder time parking than men. What, exactly, led to this? I don’t know a ton about South Korean culture; for those of you who do, is there a good reason we’d expect women to be less skilled at driving/parking than men? Are women generally discouraged from driving or something? Insights will be greatly appreciated.

NEW! (July ’10): Majd Al-Shihabi sent us a photo of similar parking spaces in Croatia. They are next to the parking spaces for those with disabilities and are about 50% wider than standard spaces:

When considering which media text I wanted to analyze based on its ideology, I immediately thought about the unsettling yet intriguing relationship between the main characters in one of my favorite TV shows of all time: Mulder and Scully from The X-Files. About a year ago, I began watching the show when a friend bought the entire series on DVD. Despite the fact that I absolutely loved almost every episode, the story arc of these two main characters as co-workers and a couple reinforces tired gender roles.

The below clip is a climactic scene where Mulder and Scully argue about Scully leaving the X-Files in the 1998 film “The X-Files: Fight the Future.” I think this scene exemplifies their basic relationship, and is a good example of what I would like to analyze.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/esJNnh-d2E0[/youtube]

What I like about Scully is that she is intelligent, scientific, and witty. She joins up with Mulder to be the counterpart to his obsessive interest in the paranormal. Since Scully is the fact-spouting hard ass of the two, one might think the character is breaking stereotypes. Unfortunately, she is only obscuring them.

Scully plays a traditional mother figure to Mulder more so than his love interest. She continually questions her work in the FBI duo, but she stays because Mulder needs her. In her, he has found someone who tries to understand his work, someone to care for him, and someone to love him unconditionally. The few times that she has an interest in other men is when she is trying to get over Mulder or get back at him.

Throughout the series, the fact that Mulder is a “typical bachelor” is driven home. He’s quirky and boyish. He never cooks, he’s obsessed with baseball and porn, he can’t keep house, and he usually just sleeps on his couch. Scully is seemingly unconcerned by all this. She laughs it off when he flirts with other women, she rolls her eyes at his housekeeping, and she is always there whenever Mulder decides he needs her.

The video above is an example of a sort of backwards rationale. Yes Mulder is thanking Scully for being there for him, but he’s also pleading with her to continue to deprive her own happiness. Though the scene directly references her giving up her own interests to be with him, it also romanticizes the concept of a woman selflessly caring for her man. The scene resonates with his emotional “thank you” and begs the viewer and Scully to come to his rescue. It reinforces the idea that in order for a woman to be perfect for a man, she must be willing to do anything for him at all costs and should never as for anything in return. If he so much as thanks her for years of servitude, then he’s the knight in shining armor. Read it as: The perfect women are level-headed and enjoy cleaning up the messes that their boy-in-a-man’s-body significant others create without any appreciation.

I think the X-Files is a good example of a show that manages to skirt the issue of gender roles by throwing a few curve balls. In reality though, it’s just more of the same.

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Sarah Mick is a student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.  She is currently double majoring in graphic design and media studies.  She enjoys playing music, writing, and consuming media of various sorts in her spare time.  I found her post here, where students in a Principles of Media Studies class are posting their insights.  Special thanks to the instructor, Michael Newman, for facilitating the blog and allowing all of us to enjoy it!

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

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.

 Here is an ad from the “Most Interesting Man in the World” ad campaign by Dos Equis:

This ad, which is a clear attempt to harken back to the halcyon days of unfettered masculinity, is a cautionary tale against the feminizing effect of men shaving their body hair.  Contrast this message with that of the following ad for the Schick Quattro:

Since the razor is pink, we can safely assume that it’s intended for women to use when converting their spiky brambles into beautiful flowers.

So, men aren’t supposed to shave below the neck, but women are required to.  Specifically, women are supposed to shave their “flowers” (in a nod to vulva-as-flower imagery?).

This may be helpful in discussions about social norms related to the removal of pubic hair. Of particular interest is whether the expectation of women’s pubic hair removal is objectively different from the expectation that they will remove other body hair.  Although pubic hair is considered more “private,” it’s difficult to make the argument that the impact of removing it is more sexual than that of, say, removing armpit hair (given that women’s attractiveness is partially predicated on the illusion of hairlessness).  Also, some men are beginning to remove their pubic hair (and the Most Interesting Man in the World be damned). Is this a positive shift, suggesting some parity in beauty standards, or is it a negative shift, in that superficial cosmetic norms now have the power to leapfrog over the traditional bastion of masculinity?

Katie M. sent in a link to a post at Vast Public Indifference about gender in Pixar films, specifically how they tend to focus on male characters, with female characters in smaller or supporting roles. As Caitlin says in the original post,

The Pixar M.O. is (somewhat) subtler than the old your-stepmom-is-a-witch tropes of Disney past. Instead, Pixar’s continued failure to posit female characters as the central protagonists in their stories contributes to the idea that male is neutral and female is particular. This is not to say that Pixar does not write female characters. What I am taking issue with is the ad-nauseam repetition of female characters as helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives.

Here are some images showing main characters from a number of Pixar films. Clearly there are a lot I left out; I chose these both because they were mentioned in the original post by Caitlin, because I’ve seen them, and because they illustrate the general trend.

From “Cars,” a movie in which almost all the characters are male and female characters are mostly car-groupies who swoon over the main character (though there is a female attorney car who doesn’t fall into that category):

“Monsters, Inc.,” where the two central characters are male:

“Toy Story,” same as above:

“A Bug’s Life,” in which not only is the main character male, the actual behaviors of male and female ants have been switched to fit in with our ideas of appropriate gender roles (for another example of changing the behavior of animals to fit human gender norms, see this post on “Bee Movie”):

We do see a Pixar film with a female main character, however: the upcoming”The Bear and the Bow”:

According to Wikipedia, this is Pixar’s “first fairy tale.” So apparently though we get a female lead here, she’s of the spunky-princess type often found in fairy tales.

I have read, in discussions of gender in children’s films, that there is a general belief in the industry that everyone will watch a movie with a male lead character, but boys will be turned off by movies with a female lead. So we see the pattern Caitlin points out: males are the neutral category that are used when the movie is meant to appeal to a broad audience, while females get the lead mostly when the movie is specifically geared toward girls. The assumption here is that girls learn to look at the world through the male gaze (identifying with and liking the male lead, even though he’s male), while boys aren’t socialized to identify with female characters (or actual girls/women) in a similar manner.

I’m torn as to whether I think boys would avoid movies that had female leads. On the one hand, a big part of masculinity is rejecting all things feminine, so I can imagine boys deciding they hated any movie that seemed to be for or about girls. On the other hand, I wonder what would happen if we had more films aimed at kids that had female leads but didn’t fall into the traditional “girl’s movie” categories (such as fairy tales). If “A Bug’s Life” had a female lead but was otherwise the same type of movie–one aimed at a general audience, not specifically girls–would boys reject it? Most of the animated movies I can think of that had females as the main character were focused around romance and other topics deemed feminine (except maybe “Mulan,” where that’s not the main focus), which obscures the issue of whether boys would watch a movie with a female character if it was treated as a general-audience movie. [Note: See the comments for some other examples of movies with female leads that weren’t necessarily romantic-centered, such as “Lilo & Stitch” and “Alice in Wonderland,” as well as some non-animated ones.]

I dunno. Thoughts?

UPDATE: In the comments, Benjamin L. makes a great point:

Something to consider is that most of the people working on Pixar films are men. It’s possible that they might feel unable to successfully create and write dialog for compelling female characters. Take a look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pixar_films Out of the all the writers and directors of Pixar’s films, one is female–Rita Hsiao. Significantly, the films she has worked on, Mulan and Toy Story 2,  are unique in that they both have prominent female characters.

Amanda M. submitted this commercial for a bikini razor and trimmer. Notice how order, beauty, and civility in horticulture is linked with taking the razor and scissors to your pubic hair. God forbid it be unruly, as bushes are in nature.

I suppose I should be glad that none of the bushes just shriveled up and disappeared entirely. And I am.

We may have flight attendants instead of stewardesses these days, but the call button on this Greyhound bus (on its way from Sioux Falls to Omaha) reminds us that the serving class is figuratively, if not literally, female:

Also see this post on sexism in aviation (then and now) and this contemporary Continental ad with sexual innuendo.

Thanks to Stephen W. for the picture!

Franklin suggested that we post about some points people are making about Dora the Explorer’s makeover.  Originally drawn like this…

…Dora has been re-envisioned and now looks like this:

Wicked Anomie writes:

The producers insist that the new tween Dora will still be like the old one in personality and interests. Just more fashionable, with ballet flats, long hair, jewelry, and makeup. And she wears a dress. Not the choicest attire for galavanting in the woods going on adventures, but hey…

I asked my six-year old daughter what she thought of the new Dora. She likes her better. Why?

“Well, I like that her hair is longer, and she’s wearing a dress. And a necklace. And I like her shoes. And that other one, she’s fat in her belly and her clothes don’t fit right. I don’t like her shoes, either. And her hair’s all short and she doesn’t have a necklace.”

Gwen and I, however, are not surprised at this new feminized Dora.  About a year ago we were in Toys ‘R Us in Henderson, NV, and were so struck by the Dora the Explorer toys that we took pictures of every single one of them.  Almost all of them feature feminized activities such as cooking, taking care of babies, and fashion and accessories.  There are 15 images so I’ve put them after the jump:

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These clothing ads from 1928, featured on Jezebel, portray an ideal female form that is wildly different than the one we have today.  Note the straight lines (no hips or boobs) and very short hair cuts:

I also like how the first image reads “Summer 1928 Apparel.”   Seasonal fashion, it appears, is nothing new.