gender: masculinity

A recent installment in the Sexist Body Wash Ad category [see any Axe ad for others], Old Spice’s Double Impact body wash uses a centaur [man/horse hybrid] to suggest that the hybrid product will boost users’ sexual potency. The centaur calls himself “two things at once.” The first time, he says he’s “a man AND a smart shopper.” The second time, he says that he’s “a man AND a provider.” The viewer thus easily links the “man” with the human part of the centaur and the “smart shopper,” along with the “provider,” with the equine part by process of elimination. Drawing in the idea of a particularly potent man being “hung like a horse,” the ad implies that users of Old Spice body wash are not only “smart shoppers” and good “providers,” but also that they are heterosexual [notice the woman as prop, signifying the centaur’s heteronormative orientation] dynamos in the sack [stall?] with really big penises! The message, however, is complicated by the fact that the centaur is apparently composited from a male model and a female horse, who is obviously not hung. Hooray for polysemy!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtN9CW01QDM[/youtube]

For further interesting hybrids, you can see video at the product’s Web site shows the same male model combined with different animals, including a slug, an octopus and a snake, as well as non-animal things, such as a tree, a cannon and a fish stick [?]. I’m not sure what to think about them….

Next time you feel all warm and fuzzy about how far we’ve come since the bad ol’ days when men weren’t encouraged to take of of children like they do now (by the way, they largely do not), remember this ad (found here):

I don’t detect a hint of sarcasm here. Do you? Or am I oh-so-not-in-touch with 1940s comedic culture?  I could be wrong.  Am I wrong?

Found here thanks to tmt.

This is a screen shot of McCain’s appearance on The View. I thought it nicely demonstrated both rules of femininity and the breaking of rules.  Notice how all of the women, with the exception of Whoopi, have beautifully crossed legs aimed towards McCain so as to express interest.  Whoopi, in contrast, is resisting conventional expectations by taking a masculine pose (ankle on knee) aimed away from McCain.  (Of course, Whoopi as been seen taking controversial “positions” before.)  Finally, McCain himself appears to be failing to live up to normative standards of masculinity in matching the leg cross of his female hosts.  (See the second video in this post about anxiety over masculine leg crossing.)

I’ll grant that Whoopi doesn’t hold this pose:

Though she appears to be the only one who appears to pose according to comfort:

Still stolen from videos at Perez.

Blanca M. sent in this picture she took here in Las Vegas of a truck advertising Air Conditioning Technical Institute. The truck says “Hot City, Cool Career,” and then had this image on the side.

When you go to the website, you see a video (which I can’t embed, sorry) of a man driving up to a house in a sports car. A blonde woman comes out and gushes over the car. The man then says “Six months ago she wouldn’t have given me a second look. I had no job, no education, I was living with my parents.”

So apparently air conditioning tech school is appropriate only for men, and guarantees that you will make enough money to get the hot women you’ve always wanted. Aside from the clear objectification of women as sexual rewards for men, it reinforces the idea of women as opportunistic gold-diggers. It’s also an interesting perspective on how men should view relationships–that they should be perfectly happy to be with women who don’t like them for who they are, and who would presumably leave them if they lost their job or got a pay cut. As long as the woman’s hot, a guy is apparently supposed to be satisfied with the relationship and not worry about little things like whether his wife actually loves him–we reserve concerns about love and emotional closeness for women only.

Thanks, Blanca!

This commercial I recently saw on Comedy Central for Progene male enhancement supplement warns men who are “not 20 anymore” that, without their product, they won’t be able to satisfy a woman.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tphU_5g1A-w[/youtube]

Here’s a screenshot of a graph from the video which purports to show how men’s sexual performance declines with age:

Of course, we women “know it’s not your fault,” “it’s natural.”

Obviously you could could use this for a discussion of the increasing scrutiny men’s bodies are put under (much as women’s long have). But it’s also a good example of the way sex is often discussed; the implication here is that the only way to satisfy a woman sexually is to be able to have sex like a 20-year-old man, and the emphasis is clearly on penile-vaginal intercourse as the main source of sexual pleasure (though it does come with the handy DVD about the female orgasm). I might also use it when I talk about the ways we construct biology and treat some “natural” processes as inevitable and unalterable while attempting to change others.

For the unbelievers, I know this ad may very well look fake, but I swear to you I saw it on TV. Multiple times, because it was during a show I’d recorded, so I had the opportunity to rewatch it to my heart’s content.

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

Emily Martin, in her article “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” (Signs 16(3), 1991, p. 485-501) critiques the way biological texts generally portray sperm as active, brave adventurers and eggs as passive damsels waiting for a sperm to save her lest she be flushed out as waste during menstruation.

For example, this cartoon was linked in our comments by Noumenon:

As Noumenon notes, the first sperm to arrive is not necessarily the one that “wins” the right to merge with the egg. More often than not, it is not because the necessary chemical reaction that allows fertilization needs many sperm, not just one.

Relatedly, in a comment Ranah pointed out this image (found here), which depicts how the egg plays a much more complex part in guiding some sperm in while limiting access to others than common perceptions of fertilization recognize:

Further, sperm do not swim. They are not making a break for the egg. They do not have brains, desires, or goals. Their “tails” are randomly thrashing around due to the energy provided by the fluid produced by the prostate gland. They go in every direction (not just toward the sperm) and only by random chance do some of them end up at the egg.

Here is a clip from The Family Guy showing Stewie as a sperm or, more accurately, a spermship, competing with other sperm to capture the egg:

Notice also that in both the Phelps and the Stewie examples, the sperm contains all of the future of the identity of the individual.  The contribution of the egg is made invisible.   This is a very old idea.

NEW!  This image is drawing by Dutch physicist and microscopist Nicolas Hartsoekerfrom from 1694.  In the head of the sperm, you can see a tiny, but complete figure sitting with his head down (found here):

ALSO NEW!  Here’s another contemporary image (found here) affirming this idea:

Text:

If you sometimes feel a little useless, offended or depressed… Always remember that YOU were once the fastest and most victorious little sperm out of millions.

ALSO ALSO NEW! Similarly, this condom ad suggests that Hitler was once a sperm (found here):

Martin mentions that one of the few (non-scientific) cultural depictions of sperm that doesn’t draw on this imagery is in Woody Allen’s movie “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* *But Were Afraid to Ask,” where Allen plays the part of a sperm frightened of going out to face contraceptives or the possibility that it’s a false alarm (masturbation, gay sex) that won’t even get him close to an egg.

Here’s a clip from the movie showing that scene:

I’m going to show it the day we discuss Martin’s article in my women’s studies class when we address the way women’s bodies have been historically constructed, both scientifically and non-scientifically.

See also this Viagra ad that shows a sperm exploding an egg open.

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

Lauredhel at Hoyden About Town put up these nice images comparing Australian women’s and men’s athletic uniforms:

As tigtog mentions in another post, if these skimpy uniforms were really about performance, men would be wearing them too.  But that, of course, would look ridiculous:

Tigtog also points out that this degree of sexualization is new.  Here are pictures comparing the men’s and women’s runners uniforms at the 1984 Olympics: