gender: masculinity

I found these ads for Matchbox via Copyranter.  In them, war toys are sold by situating small boys in realistic, not at all playful, conditions.   The blurring of the lines between pretend and real war is really interesting.  Whereas pretend war could be fun, real war is certainly not so.  And, oddly, the facial expressions and postures of the children in the ads do not suggest that they are having fun at all.  The ads seem to reveal, more than most, how play is also socialization.

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

Adam W., at Zoophobia, wrote a post calling out the Gotmilk.com website.  The website features six characters.  Here’s the front page:

Clicking on each character takes you to a page where you can play a game related to a benefit of drinking milk.  As Adam explains, through the characters the website reproduces the idea that “men do things with their bodies and women have things done to theirs; men produce things, women have things produced for them.”  He explains:

Slav, Igor and Sergie work their muscles to solve a puzzle.

Mr. Osseous works the assembly line saving a valuable product, and Chuck assembles cartons for shipment.

On the other hand, Miss Dowdy needs to be *given* a makeover by blasting from a cannon into a pool of milk filled by the truck driver and Mother Hen needs your help because she is “tense and irritable” from her PMS.

Also, Mr. Wyde A. Wake wants to be sleepy:

In sum:

While the male animals are productive laborers, the female animals are either ditsy blonds or cruel old hens not worthy of the same honor, but still customers who need milk.

That is, men produce and consume the milk, while women only consume it.  Which is, of course, where the real craziness comes in.  Adam again:

While the male animals perform all the labor in the games, the literal labor of female cows giving birth in order to begin lactating as well as the exploitation of their bodies’ labor in producing all of the milk is completely absent. It is as Joan Dunayer writes in Animal Equality: within the dairy industry, “Milking is done to her rather than by her.”

Thus the game doesn’t just erase female labor in an ideological sense (as a reproduction of gendered stereotypes), it also erases the literal labor of female animals, without with there would be no milk to get.

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

We’ve posted in the past about how cigarettes have been marketed to women: as ways to lose weight, a form of personal liberation (more examples of this marketing theme here and here) as a way to calm down stressed moms, and doctor-approved methods of clearing up skin problems.

A while back Emily M. sent us a link to an article at the Onion A.V. Club that shows how men have been portrayed in cigarette ads. They provide a nice comparison to female-oriented marketing campaigns.

A recurring theme is that of a men as rugged individualists who go out and explore wild, remote, presumably dangerous places on their own. The Marlboro Man is the most familiar example, but Camel’s “where a man belongs” campaign also stressed this image:

Another major theme we see is cigarettes as facilitators of male bonding:

Other times we see men smoking as they do Really Intense Work:

Also see our post on Tiparillo cigarettes as a way to get hot women and Skoal use as male bonding that will get you out of a speeding ticket.

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

Men and women are often pitted against each other, as if they are naturally and inevitably in opposition. This creates the conditions for a “battle of the sexes.” The implication is, of course, that it’s a zero sum game. When women win, men lose.

We socialize young children into thinking with gender (it’s always, somehow, boys vs. girls) and seeing the other sex as an enemy or competitor. Illustrating this, izhero sent us links to a set of t-shirts for young girls sold at David & Goliath Tees. The message for girls is, essentially, “boys drool, girls rule,” situating women and men in opposition, and setting girls up for a lifetime of battling the “opposite” sex.

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

Jay L. sent in this Brylcreem commercial from the 1950s, in which men are warned that if they don’t have well-styled, healthy hair, they won’t get the girl next door:

Notice the creepy cartoon characters at about 0:48. Jay says,

He is obviously turned on by the girl, so he elbows the tube, which ejaculates a white blob that falls onto his head. The girl returns to run her hands through it.

Here’s another commercial that tells men if they don’t use Brylcreem, they’ll actually disgust women and make them run away:

Also see this Just for Men commercial that tells men grey hair will hurt them on the dating scene, this one about career insecurity, and this one that equates grey hair with a loss of masculine virility.

Tracey at Unapologetically Female reminisces about how some of the gadgets from her youth had the words “man” and “boy” in them (via Feministing). She writes:

Ever notice how gadgets can have the word “boy” or “man” right in the name and they’re still considered universal, but we all know that if they had been given more feminine names, no self-respecting boy would ever use them? A few too many of my favorite pastimes as a kid involved such masculine-named devices.

The Gameboy:

The Discman:

The Walkman:

I’m too tied up with summer projects to go searching for current examples, but if you think of any and post in the comments, I’ll add them.

ADDED!

Abby mentions The Virtual Boy and The Talk Boy:

Tyson mentions Pacman:

Anonymous commenters mentioned the La-Z-boy and Manwich:

Maria, Cycles, and Julie mentioned Craftsman tools, the Ironman Triathlon, and Yardman respectively:

Ryan mentioned Burning Man:

Jo mentioned Hangman:

And Reanimated Horse mentioned The Running Man:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Hh-4fAeBE[/youtube]

There is also some conversation about product mascots named Mr. and Mrs., but I’ll leave that for another post.  I’ll plan another post for products named “girl” and “woman,” too.

If ya’ll think of more, I’ll keep adding them!

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

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.

On this sign, woman = person… and in most places in the world, most of the time, that is weird!

The sign, found here (via), can be found in Haarlem, Netherlands.

UPDATE: In the comments, Tara linked to a BBC story about Fuenlabrada, Spain. They’ve replaced half of all walk/don’t walk signs with figures in skirts.

And Astrid linked to some examples from Germany.

The social construction of female as skirted aside, neat!

Spain:

Germany:

NEW! Pharmacopaeia also linked to a sign from New Zealand:

Also in the comments, Caroline asked us to link to our post where stick figures suddenly sprout skirts when paired with children.

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

As I understand it, the leisure gap between men and women has largely to do with the fact that women spend more time taking care of children and (especially) the home. I don’t know if this applies internationally or not. In any case, here’s a graphic illustrating the leisure gap across 18 different countries (via Jezebel):

UPDATE: In the comments, Elena linked to the original OECD report, if you’d like to explore the methodology etc.

A big thanks to Cycles who went and looked it up.  A summary:

Chapter 2, “Special Focus: Measuring Leisure in OECD Countries,” answers most of the questions posed here about what is considered “leisure” and what is not.

Brief overview:

“The approach taken here is to divide time during the day into five main categories. These five-time categories are 1) Leisure, narrowly defined, 2) Paid work, 3) Unpaid work, 4) Personal care, and 5) Other time (uses of time which are either unaccounted for or undefined).”

and

“‘Paid work’ includes full-time and part-time jobs, breaks in the workplace, commuting to the workplace, time spent looking for work, time spent in school, commuting to and from school, and time spent in paid work at home. “Unpaid work” includes all household work (chores, cooking, cleaning, caring for children and other family and non-family members, volunteering, shopping, etc.). “Personal care” includes sleep, eating and drinking, and other household, medical, and personal services (hygiene, grooming, visits to the doctor, hairdresser etc.). “Leisure” includes hobbies, games, television viewing, computer use, recreational gardening, sports, socialising with friends and family, attending events, and so on. “Other time” includes all activities not elsewhere mentioned.”

… and then it goes into even MORE detail about specific activities within each of those five categories.

I highly recommend reading at least Chapter 2 if you have questions. It includes a fascinating backgrounder on past studies and how they categorized of time-use.

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