gender: prejudice/discrimination

Dmitriy T.M. and Laura McD. sent in this awesome one-minute clip of 1950s commercials in which men insult their wives’ coffee. There’s something just stunning in the nature of the relationships portrayed. The men seem so entitled to their wives’ service, and so disdainful of her genuine efforts to please him. It’s sad.

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.

While America has taken great steps in recent decades toward gender equality, this progress seems lacking in politics. No elected legislative body in the U.S. has ever come close to being half female—the proportion we would expect if it were truly representative of the populace. R.W. Connell argues patriarchy is replicated and reinforced partially through our individual gender practices that cumulatively make social institutions operate.  In daily life, all men and women are socially pressured to embody the gender traits prescribed for their sex.

Kathleen Hall Jameson argues the ways we judge others’ masculine and feminine selves creates a double bind dilemma for women in leadership; a problem that is especially salient in politics, where winning is contingent upon candidates being both personally liked and thought of as competent leaders.  Men have no problem being respected both personally and as leaders because acting strong, confident, and in-charge is expected of both males and authority figures.  However, when women present themselves as leaders by acting dominant, they are likely to be judged as overly harsh, or even “bitchy.”  Yet when women act feminine, they are often judged as unfit for authority because they lack leadership qualities.  In electoral politics, it is very difficult for women to walk the tightrope between being a competent leader and also connecting with voters personally.

We can see the double-bind at work in Saturday Night Live’s now famous, or infamous, parodies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin during the 2008 Presidential campaigns.  Tina Fey’s Grammy-winning depiction of Sarah Palin exaggerates femininity, often portraying the former Alaska governor as if she is competing in a beauty pageant.  Amy Poehler’s masculine portrayal of Hillary Clinton as overly-aggressive, combative, and filled with anger exemplifies the other side of the double bind dilemma.  One skit bringing these characters together to speak out against sexism in the campaign is especially revealing:

Fey presents Palin as accommodating, saying “I was so excited when I was told Senator Clinton and I would be addressing you tonight,” to which Poehler-as-Clinton uncooperatively says, “I was told I would be addressing you alone.” Similarly, a capitulating Palin says “Hillary and I don’t agree on everything,” to which Clinton combats “we don’t agree on anything.” Later in the skit, Poehler-as-Clinton takes firm policy stances while Fey-as-Palin gives ‘pageant’ answers. After Clinton speaks out against the Bush Doctrine, Fey as Palin claims “I don’t know what that is.” Clinton says “I believe diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy;” Palin responds “and I can see Russia from my house.” In the SNL skit, Palin tells political pundits to quit using words “that diminish us like pretty, attractive, beautiful …” while Clinton interrupts, “harpy, shrew, boner-shrinker.” Throughout the skit Clinton becomes increasingly agitated and then rips apart the podium in anger. Poehler’s masculine portrayal becomes literal when she says “I invite the media to grow a pair, and if you can’t, I will lend you mine.”

The overly-effeminate portrayal of Palin reflects one side of the double-bind where many people judge feminine women as lacking the appropriate characteristics for leadership. On the other side of the double-bind, the unfeminine portrayal of Clinton illustrates how women who act powerful and confident are subject to character attacks. However, because leadership qualities are expected of men, male politicians are not subject to this critique when they act like leaders. For example, Poehler as Clinton describes her “road to the White House” as “I scratched, and I clawed,”—words with negative connotations which would never be used to describe competitive men with ambition.

While political comedy depicting our leaders as inept has been a mainstay of our electoral process since our country’s founding; we should be cognizant that parodies of female politicians often draw upon very real aspects of gender that make it difficult for women to achieve positions of leadership.

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Jason Eastman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Coastal Carolina University who researches how culture and identity influence social inequalities.

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Every once in a while we here at SocImages pick a fight and a couple of years ago we sunk our teeth into satire and didn’t let go. Satirical humor is often used to expose prejudice and bigotry and it can be damn effective, as many viewers of The Colbert Report will testify.  But it’s also a risky strategy.  It makes fun of by doing; so, for example, it exposes racism by being extremely, over-the-top, no-one-will-ever-believe-we’re-serious racist. Except for… someone might think you’re being serious.  In fact, a significant proportion of political conservatives viewing The Colbert Report believe that he is conservative like them. They recognize that he’s trying to be funny, but they don’t think he’s joking.

In our effort to think more critically about satire, we covered Amy Sedaris’ hipster racism, Ellen DeGeneres’ CoverGirl commercial, a New Yorker cover depicting Obama as a Muslim, covers of the National Review featuring Bill Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor, and board games.  We also featured Jay Smooth’s commentary on Asher Roth using the phrase “nappy headed hos.”

Now Anita Sarkeesian, of Feminist Frequency, offers another illustration of how satire doesn’t always work the way progressives would like it to.  She takes on TV commercials, arguing that ironic racism and sexism is still racism and sexism. Ironic advertising, she argues, allows marketers to “…use all the racist, sexist, misogynist imagery they want, and simultaneously distance themselves from it with a little wink and a nod.”  You be the judge:

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.

Cross-posted at Ms. and Jezebel.

In a previous post I’ve argued against framing a preference for boy children as “culturally Asian.” New data from Gallup, sent in by Kari B., shows that this preference is alive and well among Americans, at least among young men.  While women are most likely to have no opinion and about equally likely to prefer a girl or boy, men are significantly more likely to prefer a boy.  This preference is strongest among younger men, but still present among men over 50.  Whereas women become increasingly indifferent with age and, secondarily, begin to prefer girls.

The editors at CNN note that, since children are mostly born to young people, and indifferent women may bend to men’s preferences, new sex selection technologies threaten to create a gender imbalance in the U.S.

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.

I recently watched a reading of a play, New Jerusalem, with a cast of five men and two women.  One woman was a love interest, the other was an emotional, screechy brat.  By the end of the play I was so tired of the stereotype, I just wanted the play to end.

Thanks to Kristin, Christine, Amanda, Dolores R., Dmitriy T.M., and Nathan Meltz (whose awesome artwork we’ve previously featured), I am now aware that, coincidentally, this is the week that the California Milk Processor Board decided to roll out its new ad campaign. The campaign suggests that milk can save men from their cyclically bitchy girlfriends and wives.  Milk, the claim is, helps alleviate the symptoms of PMS (but see this take down).  And gawd knows there is nothing more annoying than an emotional, screechy, bitchy brat of a woman.  Their website, Everything I Do is Wrong, asks “Are you a man living with PMS?”   It links likelihood of PMS with the availability of chocolate, silver, and gold:

Tracks the “Global PMS Level”:

It suggests that women irrationally punish men for not knowing answers to trivial questions:

And purports to show men how to enhance their apologies with cheesy imagery and self-flagellation:

It’s overall a nasty soup of derogatory ideas about women and how unbelievably annoying they are to live with.  Though, as Christine wrote, it’s also…

…sexist in the way that they stereotype men as ineffective communicators, who are terrified of emotional women and the “feminine mystique” of menstruation because they (obviously) lack the faculties with which to properly negotiate any disagreements they might have with the women in their lives.

Here are some of the more delightful print ads:

The stereotype is ubiquitous. You can also find it at The Daily Cramp, a website sent in by Janine P. that says it will track your woman’s menstrual cycle and let you know when you can expect her to act crazy:

There’s also an app with the same gimmick.

And it’s been around for a long time.  This vintage ad for Midol, sent in by Jillian Y. and Lexi A.-L., tells women to medicate themselves on behalf of their “guy,” so they can be “good to be around, any day of the month”:

The problem with this stereotype is that it encourages people to see women as periodically irrational and also more generally dismiss-able.  It allows us to conflate screechiness and bitchiness with being female.

The milk board’s commentary on the negative response has been, essentially, “Aw come on, it’s all in good fun! Can’t you take a joke!” I get, milk board, that this is humorous. I totally get that. It’s also an offensive stereotype. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

See also: menstruation masculinizes women, a princess with pms who threatens to drown the land with her tears, delegitimating Hillary Clinton with pms-jokes, and our previous post on gender and the rest of the California Milk Processing Board’s website.

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.

I traveled to Silsbee, Texas five times in the past six months, with conservative blogger Brandon Darby, to investigate why, despite the volume of evidence, a grand jury did not indict two football players accused of raping a high school cheerleader (who was later kicked off the squad for refusing to cheer for one of them).  The case is a troubling example of what many victims experience when they dare to report their rape and proceed with a prosecution.  In this post, I’d like to highlight the community reaction.

Hillaire was found half-clothed and crying under the pool table, saying she’d been raped.  She reported that Rakheem Bolton, a star high school football player, raped her while another football player, Christian Rountree, held her down. Three students outside the room heard her cries of “stop” and broke through the door, only to find that three of the four athletes in the room had fled out the window, breaking it in the process.

As Bolton ran off, Stacy Riley, the homeowner, heard him yell:

I didn’t rape no white girl.  I wouldn’t use anyone else’s dick to fuck her. I didn’t put my dick up inside her. I don’t know if she has AIDS. I don’t even know that girl.

Bolton would later admit to penetrating Hillaire.

This was not a he said/she said situation and you can read the evidence in more detail in the full report at my blog. Suffice to say: Witness statements from the police report confirm that Hillaire was raped. An inexperienced drinker, Hillaire was exceedingly intoxicated after drinking a beer and six shots and could not legally consent. Before her friends cut her off, Hillaire made out with a guy in the living room and was egged on to kiss a female friend by a group of ogling young men. Bolton and his friends arrived late to the party, and, seeing an intoxicated and flirtatious Hillaire, isolated her in the pool room.

Hillaire spent the early morning hours after the rape at the police station and at a nearby clinic.  Of the four guys in the room, Bolton and Rountree were charged with “child sexual assault” (because Hillaire was a minor and they were “of age”) which carries a prison term of two to twenty years.

Hillaire assumed this crime would be fairly prosecuted. Instead, she faced intense mistreatment from her peers, many residents of Silsbee, school officials, public officials prosecuting the case, and the local press.  When she returned to school she faced a chilly environment from her peers and school administrators. School officials urged her to take a low profile, and the cheer squad wanted Hillaire to skip homecoming because, according to a fellow cheerleader, “Someone from another city had called and threatened her. If she cheered at another game, they were going to shoot her.” Hillaire went anyway, and some students painted Bolton’s and Rountree’s jersey numbers on their faces to protest their removal from the football team. Students also chanted “free tree” (referring to Rountree) at the homecoming bonfire within earshot of Hillaire.

Many in Silsbee bought the “slut” defense – that Hillaire was to blame for what happened that night because she made out with several people at the party. Describing Hillaire’s sexual behavior at the party, Sarah [name changed], a fellow student and cheerleader, told me that she believe Hillaire was raped and that “a majority of the school felt this way.”  Hillaire was called a “slut” several times to her face.

An anonymous letter to Hillaire’s family laid bare the “slut” defense that so many in Silsbee seem to hold:

These boys are nice respectable boys and you can’t tell me that there were no other girls that wanted to be with them so they raped your daughter (please).  Just think how you have ruined these children [sic] lives and your daughter gets to carry on and be a cheerleader after drinkingherself and going against your family values… This makes your daughter [sic] reputation look very bad and if you think people will forget, remember we live in Silsbee. Someone will always remember!  (Don’t think she won’t be talked about).

A toddler approached Hillaire at a town parade shortly after the rape and called her a “bitch.”

Hillaire’s status as a popular cheerleader at the high school couldn’t compete with the popularity of high school sports that grants the best male players special privileges. The high school stadium seats 7,000—equal to the town’s population—and it’s full on game days. Celebrating high school sports is ingrained in Southeast Texas cultures, so it’s no wonder that many in Silsbee rallied behind Bolton and Rountree.  A common argument, articulated to me by one student, is that Bolton wouldn’t rape anyone because “he was popular. A lot of girls wanted to be with him.”

Bolton and Rountree did not receive the same chilly treatment as Hillaire. In a taped interview with The Silsbee Bee, Rountree’s mother thanked “all the members of the Silsbee community that have supported us; all the love and prayers that have been sent out. We’ve had a tremendous, just a tremendous outpouring of support and we just appreciate everyone and thank you for believing in these boys.”

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The local paper, The Silsbee Bee, favorably covered the accused, even publishing an article titled, “Sexual Assault Prosecutions Cost County Nearly $20,000.” It was hard to miss the implication that this was money ill spent.

Later the editor of the Silsbee Bee would resign.

In many ways Hillaire was the perfect victim.  She’s pretty, white, and underage; a cheerleader in a football-loving town. She went to the police and the health clinic immediately after her assault. In addition to the physical evidence that was collected, she brought into court the testimony of witnesses and a threat from her rapist.  Detective Dennis Hughes, the officer assigned to the case, told Hillaire’s father that, given his four decades of police experience, “This is a slam dunk case. There’s more evidence than we see in most sexual assault cases, and we’ve got lots of witnesses.”

Still, despite all of this, the community turned against her. It’s no wonder that rape victims are reluctant to report their assaults; how much evidence, and how much privilege, does one need to get justice?  Three months after the rape, a grand jury dismissed the case.  Later Bolton would plea guilty to assault, a misdemeanor.

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For more — including ways to help Hillaire and protest her treatment, as well as details about the role of the NAACP and highly suspicious ties between Bolton’s family, the police, and the district attorney – see the unabridged reporting on this story here.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

I have criticized sloppy statistical work by some international feminist organizations, so I’m glad to have a chance to point out a useful new report and website.

The Progress of the World’s Women is from the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. The full-blown site has an executive summary, a long report, and a statistics index page with a download of the complete spreadsheet. I selected a few of the interesting graphics.

Skewed sex ratios (which I’ve written about here and here) are in the news, with the publication of Unnatural Selection, by Mara Hvistendahl. The report shows some of the countries with the most skewed sex ratios, reflecting the practice of parents aborting female fetuses (Vietnam and Taiwan should  be in there, too). With the exception of Korea, they’ve all gotten more skewed since the 1990s, when ultrasounds became more widely available, allowing parents to find out the sex of the fetus early in the pregnancy.

The most egregious inequality between women of the world is probably in maternal mortality. This chart shows, for example, that the chance of a woman dying during pregnancy or birth is about 100- 39-times higher in Africa than Europe. The chart also shows how many of those deaths are from unsafe abortions.

Finally, I made this one myself, showing women as a percentage of parliament in most of the world’s rich countries (the spreadsheet has the whole list). The USA, with 90 women out of 535 members of Congress, comes in at 17%.

The report focuses on law and justice issues, including rape and violence against women, as well as reparations, property rights, and judicial reform. They boil down their conclusions to: “Ten proven approaches to make justice systems work for women“:

1. Support women’s legal organizations

2. Support one-stop shops and specialized services to reduce attrition in the justice chain [that refers to rape cases, for example, not making their way from charge to conviction -pnc]

3. Implement gender-sensitive law reform

4. Use quotas to boost the number of women legislators

5. Put women on the front line of law enforcement

6. Train judges and monitor decisions

7. Increase women’s access to courts and truth commissions in conflict and post-conflict contexts.

8. Implement gender-responsive reparations programmes

9. Invest in women’s access to justice

10. Put gender equality at the heart of the Millennium Development Goals

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

“Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” the third installment in this $1.5 billion franchise that just set a new record for a Fourth of July weekend opening, follows what has become a Hollywood action movie tradition of virtually erasing women, despite the fact that women buy 55% of movie tickets and market research shows that films with female protagonists or prominent female characters in ensemble casts garner similar box office numbers to movies featuring men.

Only two featured characters in the large ensemble Transformers cast are women, and none of the Transformers (alien robots, for the uninitiated) are female. And the two female humans consist of an unmitigated sexual object and a caricatured mockery of female leadership.

Let’s start with “the object,” Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), the one-dimensional, highly sexualized damsel-in-distress girlfriend of protagonist Sam Wikwiki (Shia LaBouef). Carly wears stiletto heels, even when running from murderous machines (except when the filmmakers slip up and her flats are visible), and she is pristine in her white jacket after an hour-long battle that leaves the men filthy.

The movie opens with a tight shot of Carly’s nearly bare ass as she walks up the stairs:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC32Bw9uYho]

In a later scene, Carly is reduced to an object as her boss (Patrick Demsey) compares her to an automobile in a conversation with Sam:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2WI7f9eeUM]

And in case the audience doesn’t know to leer at Carly, they get constant instruction from a duo of small robots that look up her skirt and Sam’s boss (John Malkovich) who cocks his head to stare at her ass:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byC8cmWg6K8]

Sam’s “friend,” Agent Simmons (John Turturro), also ogles Carly and suggests she be frisked against her will:

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In a disturbing scene of sexualized violence, Carly’s (robot) car sprouts “arms” and threatens to violate her:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-yEghxhpMk]

Normalization of female objectification causes girls/women to think of themselves as objects, which has been linked to higher rates of depression and eating disorders, compromised cognitive and sexual function, decreased self-esteem, and decreased personal and political efficacy. Ubiquitous female sexual objectification also harms men by increasing men’s body consciousness, and causes both men and women to be less concerned about pain experienced by sex objects.

Transformers 3 is pitched as a “family movie” and the film studio carefully disguises it as such with misleading movie trailers showing a story about kid’s toys. (Okay, I still have an Optimus Prime robot…) Young kids were abundant at both screenings I attended, taking in the images with little ability to filter the message.

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It would have been easy for Michael Bay to positively present the second female character, Director of National Intelligence Charlotte Mearing (Frances McDormand). Instead, she is a tool to openly mock female leadership and promote female competition.

McDormand does her best to breathe some realism into Director Mearing, but the script calls for a caricature with “masculine” leadership traits – arrogance, assertiveness, stubborness, etc. – who is ultimately “put in her place” at the end of the movie with a forced kiss. Women continue to be vastly under-represented in positions of corporate and political leadership, partially due to the double-bind of women’s leadership where, in order to be considered acceptable leaders, women have to project a “masculine” image for which they are then criticized.

Director Mearing’s authority is challenged by virtually everyone she encounters in a way that simply wouldn’t make sense for a male character in her position. Sam openly challenges her in this scene:

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

Director Mearing’s authority evaporates when Agent Simmons comments, “moving up in the world, and your booty looks excellent”:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb4m0JuROnU]

Director Mearing is even challenged by a transformer. [SPOILER ALERT: Director Mearing is the only one to challenge this transformer’s intentions, and she gets no credit when it turns out she was right.]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEz8DOa9I78]

This Transformer again puts her in her place with the dual meaning of “I am a prime. I do not take orders from you”:

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Director Mearing also has a running theme of not wanting to be called “ma’am.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srsWDT6w8HI]

The “ma’am” theme doesn’t readily make sense since Director Mearing isn’t young and doesn’t appear to be trying to look young. But it does make sense when viewed through the lens of director Michael Bay intentionally mocking women’s leadership. Remember the flap when Senator Barbara Boxer at a hearing requested that a general use her professional title instead of “ma’am”?:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0CprVYsG0k]

The “ma’am” theme resurfaces in a particularly troubling scene where Director Mearing meets with Sam and Carly, who, in good double-bind fashion, challenges whether she is even a woman:

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

Bay does include a few minor female characters with lines – Sam’s mother, the nagging mother/wife; Director Mearing’s subservient Asian assistant; a scene with both the “Olga” and “Petra” Russian woman stereotypes; and a Latina with a bare midriff who has a “Latin meltdown”:

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If Michael Bay can buy off the most accomplished actors and even musician/social activist Bono to participate in such harmful media, what hope is there in the war that pits girls/women (the Autobots) against unrepentantly sexist movies makers (the Deceptacons)?