gender

Emily H. sent in a great example of gendering kids’ products. She looked at kids’ luggage on the Target website and noticed a significant difference in the boys’ and girls’ version of one brand. The boys’ version, in the standard blue, is called “Embark Boy Pattern Pilot”:

The girls’ version is identical in size and construction. The girls’ versions are pink and purple, but that’s not the difference that drew Emily’s attention. Take a look:

Notice the name? Where the boys’ version is for pilots, the girls’ appears to be for the pilot’s assistant. Just a nice little example of the normalization of the idea that girls are supportive helpers to the boys who direct the show.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

The news each month is usually on unemployment rates, weekly filings of new claims, layoffs and new hiring. And the Pew report on widening race/ethnic wealth gaps was eye-opening. But you can take the measure of the recession overall maybe best with the employment rates — how many people have jobs? By that measure, the news is flat-to-down without letup. The Black-White discrepancy in the trends is increasing.

Here is the employment trend for White and Black women, showing that Black women had higher employment rates before the recession, but they’ve fallen more than twice as much as White women’s (a drop of 5.7% versus 2.4% as of June):

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

For men, the gap is bigger and the lines further apart, so I added a ratio line to help show the gap. Black men’s rate has fallen 5.6%, compared with 3.8% for White men:

The Christian Science Monitor has an article reviewing some of the factors that contribute to the unemployment gap for men, including education, incarceration and discrimination. And the Center for American Progress has more detail in this report, which argues that declines in manufacturing and public employment are increasing the Black-White gaps especially in this recession.

What the broader statistics don’t show as well is the tenuousness of the jobs Black workers have compared to Whites generally — working for weaker firms, in more segregated jobs, as a result of a racialized sorting process, which put them at higher risk of job loss in a recession (even without discrimination in firing decisions, which there is, too).

Back in February I went ahead and built myself a website highlighting, well, myself.  And I will admit to, on occasion, indulging my curiosity regarding how often it’s visited and what visitors are looking at.  So yesterday I was browsing the site stats and noticed that there was data on how often each clickable thing was clicked on, including images, tabs, links, and documents I’d uploaded; stuff like that.  I thought, huh, well I wonder?  Are people checking out my classes?  Downloading my journal articles? Are they interested in my public speaking!?  That’d be so cool!

Lo and behold.  The most clicked upon clickable thing on my website is the Sociological Images tab.  Yay!  The second most clicked upon thing?  My photograph.

This is kind of fascinating.  What drives people not just to look at my photograph, but to want to look at it up close?  What kind of information are they trying to glean, not from the articles I’ve written or material I teach, but from the gleam in my eye?  Is it “human nature” to want to see people you’re interacting with, even on the internet?  Is it the cultural imperative to have an opinion on what women look like?  Something else?

And if I’m going to speculate as to the motivations of visitors, I should ask myself the obvious questions.  Why did I upload photographs of myself at all?  Four of them!  Why do I think that it’s important to be embodied on, let’s face it, a website with a great deal of highly abstracted content?  Do I think it looks “professional”?  Do I think photographs make me more relate-able?  Am I bowing to the cultural imperative that women present their bodies for judgment?  I don’t know!

I didn’t think much of it at the time.

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 don’t play video games. The few times I have played a game it involved a furry animal working his way through some kind of tropical forest and the most violent it got was when he hit a villainous turtle on the head with a coconut. So, I am not familiar with Duke Nukem.

Of course, one Google search tells me he is a supremely popular, freakishly over-muscled, machine gun-wielding, hyper-aggressive action “hero” who is described in the Wikipedia entry as “frequently politically incorrect.” His character profile also claims that when he was first introduced, he was a CIA operative hired to save Earth from Dr. Proton. But the current marketing materials make clear what the really important aspects of the game are. Exhibit A is this ad, which greeted me as I came out of the subway this morning:

Duke Nukem is sitting on a throne while two women in schoolgirl outfits sit at his feet. The caption leaves no doubt about the main attractions: “This game has bazookas. Both types.”

The game’s website presents a guy who looks intensely devoted to his steroid regimen, has a penchant for unloading 50 rounds into anything with tentacles, and who appears to live in a post-apocalyptic land which is somehow still able to generously supply women with fetish outfits, bikinis, and manicures. In a video promo for the game on YouTube there are scenes of Duke on a shooting rampage interspersed with what appears to be him walking into a room and seeing a switched-on vibrator skidding around the room. He then encounters two women (the Holsom Twins, Mary and Kate) in schoolgirl outfits who drop their weapons to touch and caress each other in sexually suggestive ways. Duke is watching this while pointing a gun at them, saying, “allll right, time for my reward” (NSFW due to images and language):

Unfortunately for the twins, they later have sex with an alien and get themselves into trouble (thanks to Michael R. for this clip; also NSFW):

Many other reviews of Duke Nukem have also pointed out its violent sexual imagery and encouragement of sexually violent behavior towards women. Just to tally up, we have:

1. Fetishizing and infantilizing women by putting them in outfits associated with children.
2. Referring to their breasts as “bazookas,”  both objectifying women and equating  their bodies with a military weapon.
3. A lesbian encounter presented as titillation for the male viewer.
4. Watching women engage in sexual activity with one another, and even threatening women with weaponry to continue engaging in sexual activity with one another, is your reward. You deserve it – you deserve to be sexually gratified.

People learn by watching. This can be good and bad. It can make us more accepting of others’ opinions and outlooks, and it can also desensitize and normalize harmful opinions and behaviors. In regards to Duke, the latter is where the risk lies — the more one sees images like those presented by Duke Nukem, the more likely they are to be seen as what is acceptable and usual. Normalizing harmful, degrading, and insulting stereotypes of and behavior toward women seems like a high price to pay for a video game’s success.

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Larkin Callaghan is a doctoral student at Columbia University studying health behavior and education. She is particularly concerned with gender disparities in access to healthcare and prevention services, and has done research on adolescent female sexual health, how social media operate as an educational platform, and differences by gender in the effectiveness of brief health interventions. You can follow her on Twitter, Tumblr, and at her blog.

Jennifer F. sent in another example of the emphasis on female athletes’ looks. Here’s a recent screenshot from the Yahoo! Sports website:

So, ok, awesome, we have a featured story about Hope Solo, a member of the U.S. women’s soccer team. Except let’s take a closer look:

Yes, that’s right: the article emphasizes not her recent amazing performance in the World Cup, but rather how her skill and beauty make her marriageable. Sigh.

One thing I like about Anita Sarkeesian’s series, Tropes vs. Women, is that she doesn’t go for the obvious. Instead, she draws our attention to insidious and ubiquitous tropes that many of us have, nonetheless, never quite noticed before, exactly because they’ve simply become the water we swim in (e.g., the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl).

In this episode she reveals the Mystical Pregnancy trope, common in science fiction, in which women are involuntarily impregnated by aliens and monsters for nefarious and frightening purposes.  Following Laura Shapiro, she calls out writers and directors for using pregnancy as a form of “torture porn” and using women’s biological capacity as a plot device, meanwhile ignoring the real, non-fiction threats to women’s reproductive rights.

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.

Today, the field of computer science is heavily male-dominated — men earn the vast majority of undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in the field. But this wasn’t always true. When computers were first developed, we weren’t sure what kind of job programming was, whether a highly technical scientific occupation or a more secretarial-type one akin to being a typist. The fluidity of the developing field initially attracted significant numbers of women.

Anjan G. sent in an example of the normalization of computer programming as a female occupation, posted at Fog Creek. This article appeared in a 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan and quotes computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field, discussing why programming is a perfect fit for women — by drawing partly on gender stereotypes by assuming women are “naturals” at programming because they’re patient and pay attention to details:

You can find a larger image here.

Also, if you’re interested, Fog Creek, a software company, looked at their own data to see if male and female job applicants have equal chances of getting hired, and they posted an interview with the only woman working on their technical staff, an intern.

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.