gender: masculinity

Yesterday I posted about some children’s luggage that normalizes gendered occupations. Given that, I thought I’d follow up with several more examples of gendering kids’ stuff that have been sitting in our inbox.

Erin M. saw this image in a Land’s End catalog for kids’ clothing a while back. It draws on the idea that boys and girls are just inherently different, with girls needing things that are “pretty” while boys need stuff that’s “rugged”:

Caspian P. snapped this photo of two video games (by different companies) that efficiently summarize who we assume will be interested in what:

Finally, Cheryl S. noticed that J. Crew decided to market some of their boys’ clothing to girls. Rather than designating the clothes as unisex, or listing them as boys’ items in the boys’ section and girls’ items in the girls’ section, they instead created a section in the girls’ part of the website called Borrowed from My Brother:

As Cheryl points out, there is no “borrowed from my sister” section for boys. We accept the idea of women wearing men’s clothing, even seeing it as potentially sexy, in a way that we don’t tolerate or condone men crossing gender lines to wear women’s items or take on other aspects of femininity. J. Crew simply applies this wider cultural acceptance of women taking on some aspects of masculinity (as long as they balance it with enough signs of femininity), which we see in the marketing of “boyfriend jeans” to women, and applies it to kids.

Anders Behring Breivik has now joined the pantheon of homegrown domestic terrorists who have unleashed horror on their own countrymen. Sixteen years ago, Timothy McVeigh and other members of the Aryan Republican Army blew up the Murrah Office Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 of their own countrymen and women. It was the worst act of domestic terrorism in our history, and, indeed, until 9-11, the worst terrorist attack of any kind in our history. We know what Norwegians are going through; as Bill Clinton said, we “feel your pain.”

As pundits and policymakers search for clues that will help us understand that which cannot be understood, it may be useful to compare a few common elements between McVeigh and Breivik.

Both men saw themselves as motivated by what they viewed as the disastrous consequences of globalization and immigration on their own countries. Breivik’s massive tome, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, paints a bleak picture of intolerant Islamic immigrants engaged in a well-planned takeover of European countries in the fulfillment of their divine mission. His well-planned and coldly executed massacre of 94 of his countrymen was, as he saw it, a blow against the policies promoting social inclusion and a recognition of a diverse multicultural society promoted by the labor-leaning government.

McVeigh also inveighed against both multinational corporate greed and a society that had become too mired in multiculturalism to provide for its entitled native-born “true” Americans. In a letter to the editor of his hometown newspaper, McVeigh, then a returning veteran of the first Gulf War, complained that the birthright of the American middle class had been stolen, handed over by an indifferent government to a bunch of ungrateful immigrants and welfare cheats. “The American dream,” he wrote “has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week’s groceries.”

McVeigh and Breivik both sought to inspire their fellow Aryan countrymen to action. After blowing up the federal building – home of the oppressive and unrepresentative government that had capitulated to the rapacious corporations and banks — McVeigh hoped that others would soon follow suit and return the government to the people. Breivik cared less about government and more about the ruination of the pure Norwegian culture, deliberately diluted in a brackish multiculti sea.

For the past five years, I’ve been researching and writing about the extreme right in both the United States and Scandinavia. I’ve interviewed 45 contemporary American neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, Aryan youth, Patriots, Minutemen, and members of rural militias. I also read documentary materials in the major archival collections at various libraries on the extreme right. I then interviewed 25 ex-neo-Nazis in Sweden. All were participants in a government-funded program called EXIT, which provides support and training for people seeking to leave the movement. (This included twice interviewing “the most hated man in Sweden,” Jackie Arklof, who murdered two police officers during a botched bank robbery. Arklof is currently serving a life sentence at Kumla High Security prison in Orebro. To my knowledge, I’m the only researcher to date to have interviewed him as well as members of EXIT.)

I’ve learned a lot about how the extreme right understands what is happening to their countries, and why they feel called to try and stop it. And one of the key things I’ve found is that the way they believe that global economic changes and immigration patterns have affected them can be understood by looking at gender, especially masculinity. (Don’t misunderstand: it’s not that understanding masculinity and gender replaces the political economy of globalization, the financial crisis, or the perceived corruption of a previously pristine national culture. Not at all. But I do believe that you can’t understand the extreme right without also understanding gender.)

First, they feel that current political and economic conditions have emasculated them, taken away the masculinity to which they feel they are entitled by birth. In the U.S., they feel they’ve been emasculated by the “Nanny State” through taxation, economic policies and political initiatives that demand civil rights and legal protection for everyone. They feel deprived of their entitlement (their ability to make a living, free and independent) by a government that now doles it out to everyone else – non-whites, women, and immigrants. The emasculation of the native-born white man has turned a nation of warriors into a nation of lemmings, or “sheeple” as they often call other white men. In The Turner Diaries, the movement’s most celebrated text, author William Pierce sneers at “the whimpering collapse of the blond male,” as if White men have surrendered, and have thus lost the right to be free. As one of their magazines puts it:

As Northern males have continued to become more wimpish, the result of the media-created image of the ‘new male’ – more pacifist, less authoritarian, more ‘sensitive’, less competitive, more androgynous, less possessive – the controlled media, the homosexual lobby and the feminist movement have cheered… the number of effeminate males has increased greatly…legions of sissies and weaklings, of flabby, limp-wristed, non-aggressive, non-physical, indecisive, slack-jawed, fearful males who, while still heterosexual in theory and practice, have not even a vestige of the old macho spirit, so deprecated today, left in them.

Second, they use gender to problematize the “other” against whom they are fighting. Consistently, the masculinity of native-born white Protestants is set off against the problematized masculinity of various “others” – blacks, Jews, gay men, other non-white immigrants – who are variously depicted as either “too” masculine (rapacious beasts, avariciously cunning, voracious) or not masculine “enough” (feminine, dependent, effeminate). Racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, and homophobia all are expressed through denunciations of the others’ masculinity.

Third, they use it as a recruiting device, promising the restoration of manhood through joining their groups. Real men who join up will simultaneously protect white women from these marauding rapacious beasts, earn those women’s admiration and love, and reclaim their manhood.

American White Supremacists thus offer American men the restoration of their masculinity – a manhood in which individual white men control the fruits of their own labor and are not subject to the emasculation of Jewish-owned finance capital, a black- and feminist-controlled welfare state.

At present, I am working my way through 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, the 1,518 page manifesto written in London by Anders Behring Breivik (under the Anglicized name Andrew Berwick) in the months leading up to his attack. These same themes are immediately evident. (Quotes are from the document.)

(1) Breivik associates feminism with liberal, multicultural societies. He claims that feminism has been responsible for a gender inversion in which, whether in the media or the military, we see the “inferiority of the male and the superiority of the female.” As a result of this widespread inversion, the “man of today” is “expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.”

(2) Breivik spends the bulk of the document playing off two gendered stereotypes of Muslim immigrants in Europe. On the one hand, they are hyper-rational, methodically taking over European societies; on the other hand, they are rapacious religious fanatics, who, with wide-eyed fervor, are utterly out of control. In one moment in the video, he shows a little boy (blond hair indicating his Nordic origins), poised between a thin, bearded hippie, who is dancing with flowers all around him, and a bearded, Muslim terrorist fanatic – two utterly problematized images of masculinity. 3:58 in the video:

(3) In his final “call to arms” and the accompanying video, he offers photos of big-breasted women, in very tight T-shirts, holding assault weapons with the word “infidel” on it and some Arabic writing, a declaration that his Crusader army members are the infidels to the Muslim invaders. 9:02 in the video:

This initial, if sketchy, report from Oslo, and Breivik’s own documents, indicate that in this case, also, it will be impossible to fully understand this horrific act without understanding how gender operates as a rhetorical and political device for domestic terrorists.

These members of the far right consider themselves Christian Crusaders for Aryan Manhood, vowing its rescue from a feminizing welfare state. Theirs is the militarized manhood of the heroic John Rambo – a manhood that celebrates their God-sanctioned right to band together in armed militias if anyone, or any governmental agency, tries to take it away from them. If the state and capital emasculate them, and if the masculinity of the “others” is problematic, then only “real” white men can rescue the American Eden or the bucolic Norwegian countryside from a feminized, multicultural, androgynous immigrant-inspired melting pot.

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Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stonybrook.  He has written or edited over twenty volumes, including Manhood in America: A Cultural History and Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.  You can visit his website here.

For a little dose of vintage sexism, I present to you an old Van Heusen ad, sent in by Leticia (via 22 Words):

I am still trying to figure out what a “man-talking” tie is, exactly, but I am more than happy to cede the “power-packed patterns” on those ties to the world of men.

Megan H. and Ami R. sent in contrasting examples of using gender to market fuel-efficient cars. Megan saw this ad (one in a series that plays on the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” Apple ads) advocating electric cars over gasoline-powered ones. In this ad, femininity is associated with environmental responsibility. The most stereotypically masculine man in the ad — the blue-collar worker in a hard hat and filthy clothes — represents the harmful oil industry. Beneficial, good wind energy, on the other hand, is personified by a pretty woman in a filmy dress. Her beauty renders the bad guys speechless:

Dodge, on the other hand, wants to distance its claims to fuel efficiency from any association with femininity. Ami found this ad for the new Dodge Charger in the magazine for Go! Chapel Hill, an organization that advocates less car use:

So here, fuel efficiency with is also associated with femininity, but in the negative sense of emasculation. The Charger is the one exception to the other fuel efficient cars out there. You can get better gas mileage and still protect your manly reputation.

For other examples of gender representations of the environment or environmental movement, see our previous posts on femininity and benign nature, using PETA tactics to oppose the BP oil spill, nature in vintage men’s magazines, and even girls can drive electric cars!

Jeremiah, Sarah S., Nikki R., and Erin H. sent us a great example of a company trying to make a feminized food safe for men. New Zealand’s Mammoth Supply Co. (a subsidiary of the multinational dairy giant Fonterra) is trying to convince men that yogurt is super manly and tough, “built to tame a man’s hunger.” The ads reinforce a whole range of rules about masculinity, which Erin nicely sums up as “the same old mythbashing that men need things that are big, tough, substantial, strong and rugged, and that coded-feminine activities (crying, being too involved in one’s personal appearance, coming into physical contact with people of the same sex) are inferior and weak”:

Via Copyranter.

The website, which assures the reader that this is “real man food, man,” as well as each carton of yogurt includes additional helpful tips:

Lisa K. recently saw an ad for Billy Tea in a newspaper that implies men and women are no longer sufficiently masculine and feminine, unlike the good old days when the tea was first produced:

Here’s another one of their ads:

Sarah B. sent in this Miller High Life ad (which she blogged about at Adventures in Mediocrity) that makes it clear that the only types of salad men should eat are the type without, you know, girly vegetables:

In another example of gendering foods, Lisa R. pointed out Applebee’s commercials for its set of dishes with under 550 calories. Women love eating low-calorie meals:

The commercial aimed at men, titled “Manly Man,” presents ordering from the 550-calorie menu as something men might be a bit embarrassed about, but don’t worry — once the guys see your huge plate of food, your masculinity will once again be unquestioned:

Quite some time ago, Laura McD. sent us a link to an NPR story about a new ad campaign for baby carrots (which, if you didn’t know, aren’t actually immature carrots; they’re just regular carrots peeled and cut into small pieces). In an effort to appeal to teens, these ads openly satirize marketing tropes used to sell lots of snacks, especially the effort to market junk food as totally extreme! The website self-consciously makes the link to junk food, winking at the audience about the absurdity of EXTREEEEEME!!!!! marketing, yet hoping that rebranding carrots as similar to junk food, and using the marketing tactics they’re laughing at, actually increases sales. So, for instance, they have new packaging that looks like bags of chips:

The ads serve as a great primer on extreme food marketing cliches, complete with associations with violence (and stupidity), the sexualization of women, and the constant reminder via voiceovers and pounding music that this food is freakin’ extreme, ok?!?!

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This one parodies ads that sexualize both women and food and present eating as an indulgence for women:

The ad campaign presents all this with a tongue-in-cheek tone of “isn’t this ridiculous?” But they’re also genuinely trying to rebrand a food product to increase sales, and clearly see the way to do that as downplaying any claims about health and instead using — if mockingly — the same marketing messages advertisers use to sell soda, chips, energy drinks, and other foods aimed at teens (particularly, though not only, teen boys).

As such, they provide a great summary of these marketing techniques and the jesting “Ha ha! We get it! We’re not like the other marketers who try to sell stuff to you! We know this is silly! (Please buy our product, though)” ironic marketing technique.

And now, I highly recommend you go watch the satire of energy drink commercials Lisa posted way back in 2007. It never gets old.

What makes top news today: a Southwest pilot’s homophobic, sexist, and vulgar commentary; it was kept quiet for some three months.  This happened on March 25th, 2011, broadcast accidentally over the air route traffic control frequency during the flight.  It’s now almost July.  The FAA, the pilot community and Southwest Airlines kept this under wraps for eighty-nine days.  Amazing.

Here’s the transcript of exactly what was said (trigger warning):

Southwest Pilot: “Well, I had Tucson to Indy all four weeks and, uh, Chicago crews…11 out of 12 …there’s 12 flight attendants, individual, never the same flight attendant twice.

“Eleven fucking over the top fucking, ass-fucking homosexuals and a granny.” (silence)

“Eleven. I mean, think of the odds of that. I thought I was in Chicago, which was party-land.”

“After that, it was just a continuous stream of gays and grannies and grandes…”

“Well I don’t give a fuck. I hate 100 percent of their asses.”

“So, six months, I went to the bar three times. In six months, three times.”

“Once with the granny and the fag, and I wish I hadn’t gone.”

“At the very end with two girls, one of them that was part do-able, but we ended up going to the bar and then to the crew at St. Louis, and all these two women wanted to do was, one wanted to berate her sister and the other wanted to bitch about her husband.”

“Literally, for three hours, me and the F.O. (First officer). When that was done, got back to my room, I’m like why the fuck did I stay up?”

ATC: “OK, whoever is, uh, transmitting, better watch what you’re saying.”

Southwest Pilot continues: “They’re still both (inaudible), you know what I mean? I still wouldn’t want anyone to know if I had banged them.”

“So, I mean it was a complete disaster for six months.”

“Now I’m back in Houston, which is easily where the ugliest bases. I mean it’s all these fucking old dudes and grannies and there’s like maybe a handful of cute chicks.”

In interview with Tom Costello on the NBC Today Show this morning, Aviation Analyst, John Cox defended the airline industry, saying the pilot’s comments are a throw-back to a different age in the cockpit: “It was more common in the past, but in today’s environment you see a lot more focus on the professionalism and you don’t hear these kinds of things very often anymore.”

Really?  Mr. Cox, you don’t hear these kinds of things often, anymore?  Spend one moment to Google “Southwest stuck mic”; you will find pilot aviation forums yucking it up already in defense of the pilot saying, “Well, at least he was honest!”

Is it any wonder only six percent of all commercial pilots are women?  The cockpit is not a place of equal opportunity.  Never was.  Isn’t today.  What’s more, there’s a cover-up.  Outside of what airlines now call a “flight deck”, the pilot fraternity defends itself saying, “yeah it used to be like that, we’re more professional now.”

Try to find the pilot’s name.  You can’t.  Southwest will not identify the pilot.  He was initially suspended without pay, but is now back in the cockpit under the good-‘ol-boy protection program and after involuntary “diversity” training.

Aviation market studies indicate women make up 26% of the prospective pilot population.  Only 7% of all pilots are female.  Unless serious action is taken, I doubt anything will change soon.

Audio:

More on the subject here: Sexism in Aviation, Then and Now.

Stephen Wilson is an aircraft salesperson, flight instructor, and former air safety investigator who takes interest in his profession from a sociological viewpoint.  He posts aviation and personal commentary on his blog, from where we borrowed this post.

Over the past few months, a number of readers have sent in examples of college-related advertising with a distinctly sexual theme.  There’s something interesting here. College pursuit, preparation, and achievement are being conflated with sexual prowess (the size of one’s dick, no less).  I suppose it was never was really about smarts.  Still, the overt conflation of (masculine) sexual superiority with academic achievement seems new to me. Am I wrong?

Scott M. and Ed A-N. sent in which penis size is used as a proxy for preparedness for the LSAT:

Stephanie A. sent in this ad for MyEdu, a college management site (whatever that is) that makes an obvious reference to Viagra (the little blue pill that makes for not-so-little erections):

Last but not least, Becky E. and Monica Y. sent in this facebook ad encouraging women to apply to a school loan by suggesting that very-sexy-ladies do the same:

See also our post: using sex to sell the most unlikely things (like organ donation!).

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.