Jezebel recently posted this Australian PSA about the dangers of fast food:
It made me think of this British PSA from 1967 that addressed childhood obesity. Our ideas of what you should be eating may have changed in the past 40 years, but the tendency to rely on individualistic explanations and to blame moms for not providing children better food, as though the food they choose for their kids exists outside of any larger social context, seems to have quite the shelf life.
Cross-posted at Jezebel.
Alicia S. sent in an image of the poster for the movie Life as We Know It, featuring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel. Heigl appears to be in her familiar role as responsible, career-oriented, but uptight and ultimately unfulfilled woman who falls for an irresponsible or immature guy. In the movie, the two main characters end up raising a child together after the death of the baby’s parents. The poster pretty much sums up the messages you’re going to get about gender:
Want more? Here’s the trailer:
So women are responsible — they can even get themselves dressed — and nurturing while men are childish boors. Alicia says,
While Heigl is presented as a warm, caring motherly figure, her male costar is likened to a baby: immature and irresponsible, just another child in the family. He reflects the stereotype represented in so many romantic comedies and Monday night sitcoms alike that men are messy, careless, and juvenile.
They’re repeatedly presented as messy, careless, and juvenile…and yet still ultimately get the mature, caring, nurturing, attractive woman.
These stereotypes are offensive to women and men. Women are supposed to settle — to fall in love with the equivalent of a child, and to find that endearing, as opposed to insulting or creepy. That means, of course, she’ll have to be primarily responsible for childcare and running the household, since you can’t trust an immature, careless person to do important things (think of every sitcom or commercial that shows a hapless man messing everything up when he’s left to care for the house on his own).
And men are depicted as ridiculous oafs. I’m always surprised that more men aren’t offended by this representation of manhood: men as incompetent pigs who treat women badly (setting up another date in front of his current one at the beginning of the trailer) who can barely take care of themselves, much less anyone else. Of course, the stereotype does have benefits from those men willing to draw on it: if you are incapable of taking care of children and doing housework without causing a major disaster, you’re relieved from those tasks, or your partner has to fight constantly to get you to do them. So while the gender stereotypes on display here are insulting to both men and women, they reinforce a gendered division of parenting labor that justifies putting the burden of that labor on women rather than men.
Cross-posted at Jezebel.
Today I have for you a round-up of ads that reinforce gendered expectations about parenting/housework — that women are predominantly responsible for them, and that moms and dads do them differently. Jennifer Thomas sent in this image from Target’s Fall 2010 coupon booklet:
She points out a couple of things. First, apparently moms buy things only for their daughters and dads buy things only for their sons. But even more interesting is what’s inside the baskets. Jennifer sums it up well:
Aside from a lamp and a soft doll, Mom’s basket…contains only domestic and “nurturing” items: detergent for baby’s delicate little clothing, diapers, infant medicine, and what looks like various cleaning sprays. Based on the contents of her basket, Mom’s role here is to care for and clean up after the child. Now take a look at Dad’s basket! I do see two bottles stuck in there [and maybe a blanket?], but more prominently displayed are chips, ice cream, and toys like a guitar and plastic golf clubs. If I had my choice based solely on this picture, I’d much rather be a dad than a mom!
Casey F. sent in an ad for the website Food on the Table, a shopping app, that clearly depicts moms as a family’s shopper:
And Eve P. and Kyle H. let us know about Amazon’s new Amazon Mom program:
Kyle was invited to join because he’d been busy ordering lots of stuff for his new child. Interestingly, despite its name, Amazon stresses that the program is for all parents and caregivers. Here’s a partial screenshot of the info page:
Part of the text:
Amazon Mom is open to anyone who is responsible for caring for a baby or young child–“Amazon Primary Caregiver” just didn’t have the same ring to it. Kidding aside, we chose this name because we noticed moms in social communities (like our Amazon discussion boards) looking to connect and share information about products and problems with other moms. We wanted a name that would let these groups know that this program was created with their unique needs in mind.
I suppose they’re right, “Amazon Primary Caregiver” is a mouthful. But what I find interesting is the way we accept the conflation of “parent” or “caregiver” with “mom” in a way that we don’t do with “dad.”
Finally, Kate H. sent in this Clorox ad, which reinforces the idea that women clean while men (are often incompetent fools who) need cleaned up after:
Leigh K., however, found an exception. A recent IKEA catalog included a number of images of men caring for both male and female children. This first one somewhat reinforces the “men can’t parent unsupervised!” trope, what with the kid on the left drawing on the door. Reader Elena says that’s probably meant to be a door painted with the chalkboard paint so it’s totally ok, and I do recall seeing a couple of other pages with kids using chalk, so nevermind my point there:
These two dads seem capable of parenting without any clear signs of disaster:
Leigh suggests that the images of involved, competent fatherhood might be the result of IKEA being a Swedish company. It’s possible that there’s an intentional ideological effort here to present men as caretakers (there is also at least one image of boys and girls playing with toys usually associated with the other gender). But also, IKEA markets itself as a somewhat youthful, hip brand, and showing non-traditional gender roles may fit well with that marketing strategy regardless of whatever larger social commitments to gender equality anyone at the company may or may not have. Whatever the reason behind it, the catalog — from a very large, profitable business (that apparently pays very little in taxes) — indicates that at least some companies think you can choose not to reinforce gendered parenting stereotypes and still manage to sell stuff.
Stephanie L. and Amie A. both sent in screen shots of the MSN tabs “for him” and “for her.” It’s not particularly surprising that MSN segregates its content by sex, but the gendered themes were interesting, especially given that Stephanie and Amie captured two moments in time.
First, notice that the information MSN chose as relevant to him is almost always leisure related:
The two lists above include how to build a man cave (where men escape daily responsibilities), the new Nikes, technological innovation and great inventions to read about, sports news, dating advice, and wacky stories about cocaine, $100,000 dollar bills, catching lobster, and urine. Except for a non-leisure-related, health story, all are either about leisure activities or a way to provide leisure with wacky, weird or fun news.
What about for her?
Her stories are about work (male careers), sexual harassment, babies (breastfeeding and baby talk), teenagers, the economy, and food (superfoods and allergy labels). The video on wildlife, the story about Chelsea Clinton, the piece on Mad Men, the new hospital gown design (???) can be interpreted as leisure-related in that they’d be fun to read.
Overall, then, the material aimed at men is almost entirely related to leisure, whereas the material aimed at women is heavily tilted towards her responsibility for work and the family and serious topics like sexual harassment and the economy. Perhaps MSN knows what it’s doing. In fact, men do have more leisure time than women. So this is a structural problem related to how we organize work and family, as well as a cultural problem in how we represent and relate to men and women.
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.
Notions of how to properly raise children change over time and vary across cultures. In early America, children were necessary labor for struggling farmers trying to survive off the land. They were put to work as soon as they were able, apprenticing their parents and older siblings. After the Industrial Revolution, children went to work in factories; this seemed perfectly normal, considering that they had worked on farms for decades to contribute to the economic well-being of their families.
Today, we think that children should not work, but instead should have a “childhood” full of innocence, play, and imagination. This creates new burdens on parents who can no longer simply have their children work alongside them, but must actively cultivate the ability for their children to do what we believe children are supposed to be doing. This has led to what some sociologists have called “intensive mothering” (as it is usually mothers who do it): constant emotional availability and monitoring of their children’s psychological states, endless activity provision, and high investment in their children’s intellectual development.
Indeed, today some argue that failing to nurture children on every dimension of human capacity or, even, to just let them be, borders on neglect. While others argue that this is a new era of “helicopter parenting” in which parents monitor and control everything in their child’s life because they simply can’t look away or let go.
University of Notre Dame Sociology Professor Jessica Collett drew our attention to a set of cartoons illustrating this new contest over proper parenting at Free Range Kids. The first, by Bill Bramhall, suggests that letting children roam free puts them at risk of homelessness. In it, two homeless-looking men sit on a park bench watching children play by themselves. One says, “My mother took me to the park and left me there, too.”
The second, by artist Richard Estell, is in direct response to the first, arguing that parents are acting out of fear and that over-supervised children are more likely to experience mental and physical health problems. The men read newspapers with headlines that read “Parents see only danger” and “Helicopter parents’ kids depressed.”
What we have here, then, is a new social contest. Changes in ideas about who children are (kids vs. small adults), why people have them (as a personal indulgence or an additional laborer), and what good parenting looks like (intensive or functional) has created a new type of parenting.
As this new type has become the dominant idea of what good parenting looks like, a backlash has evolved that critiques it. And thus we have an excellent example of historical change and the social construction of social problems.
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.
Nicole S. sent us screenshots of two sets of books she saw for sale online at Barnes & Noble. They provide us with some very important information about how men and women differ, as well as the types of things/activities/emotions that have been masculinized or feminized. Not sure if you’re speaking to a man or a woman? Check to see what pet they have with them:
And don’t be fooled into thinking parents are interchangeable. They serve very different roles. Dads are for playing with. Moms need to stay in the house and bake while you’re out playing catch with Dad, and then console you when you get hit in the face with the baseball:
I would provide some more sociological analysis here, but I’m distressed to realize I’m not fitting into appropriate gender roles, so I need to run to the animal shelter and trade in my dogs for a couple more cats to go with the one I ended up with when an ex-boyfriend abandoned her, which he must have done after realizing owning her was feminizing him.
As for understanding me through my cat, the other day I was ignoring her while I read a book so she came up and bit me on the nose hard enough to draw blood, so apparently I’m either a masochist or an aggressive self-involved brat, depending on whether you judge me by my cat, or by what I put up with from her.
Danielle Q. sent us this gem, a 1980s commercial for a doll called My Child. It teaches girls all the important parts of being a mom:
Here you go:
Two friends of mine recently had a baby and the hospital sent home all kinds of instructional packets, all of which included product sample, advertising materials, etc. One item they found was this advertisement for the U.S. Career Institute’s program to become a medical claims processor who works from home. The ad plays on the guilt mothers often still have about working outside the home:
I don’t have a problem, in and of itself, with suggesting that a job provides options for parents who want to be home full-time but also work. Given the fact that women still bear the primary responsibility for childcare even though most want or need to provide financial support to the family, I’m sure many women (and for that matter, a lot of men) would find them appealing (in theory, anyway; I have my doubts about a lot of the “work at home and make a gazillion dollars a week!” pitches, but I have no knowledge of this one in particular).
What bothers me is the way the ad is written to not just say, “Hey, if you are staying home with the kids but would like to work for pay as well, this is a great opportunity.” Instead, the blaring headline “I’m glad you work at home Mommy” ties into the idea that children desperately want their moms (but apparently not dads) to stay home with them, and moms who do so are being the best moms. Even among women who value their careers and always planned to return to the paid workforce, many are surprised by how much guilt they feel when they do so. They may feel guilty for leaving their child with another childcare provider, but if they actually look forward to going back to work and are excited or relieved to be there, they often feel guilty for that, too. This is a burden of guilt that new fathers do not generally share; while they may wish they could be home more with their children, they usually don’t express guilt for not doing so, largely because by working outside the home, they are actually fulfilling the normative role of what a good father does, whereas working outside the home, particularly when children are young, it incompatible with ideals of good mothering.
On the very bottom of pg. 2 it does say, “USCI is nationally accredited and approved for veterans’ education benefits!” That’s an interesting line, since the majority of people would would qualify for veterans’ educational benefits would be men (for instance, women currently make up only 15.5% of the U.S. Army). There are other elements on the brochure that seem gender-neutral — being your own boss, setting your own hours, increasing job opportunities in the field — but that line seems to be the one part that is more tailored to a male audience.
On an unrelated topic, I love the totally meaningless graph at the top right of the 2nd page: look! This one column is way bigger than the others! It is entirely lacking in any useful information — how are they defining “growth”? What is 0% referring to? What level of growth are we talking about here? For all we know, the health/medical services bar could indicated 0.000001% growth.
And just out of interest, do any of you have any experience with these types of jobs? Did it live up to the claims (particularly flexibility and the amount of money you can make)?
