gender

While the last fifty years have been characterized by increasing freedoms for women, this has not been true for men to the same degree.  Women have entered masculine arenas throughout society, from where they work to what they wear, but men have not been freed to pursue feminine interests.  Men still face teasing, ridicule, stigma, or even violence for daring to do “girly” things.  Being a dancer or an elementary school teacher comes with raised eyebrows, askew glances, and questions as to one’s sexual orientation; enjoying “chick flicks” or preferring Cosmos to Coronas likely attracts teasing; and wearing a dress or high heels is essentially tolerated only on Halloween.

So girly things are still a no man’s land.

Unless.

Unless a very high status man — a man whose masculinity is undeniable, a leader among men — explores that land and plants a man flag.  If a man is so manly as to have begun to define manliness itself, then that man can change the very definition, thereby de-feminizing, and therefore de-stigmatizing an activity.  What once would have been cause for ridicule suddenly becomes unremarkable, i.e., man-approved.

Marco Roso, of DIS Magazine, sent me an example of such a transformation: the alice band.  Known to Americans as headbands,” an alice band is a loop or horseshoe-shaped hair accessory designed to push hair back away from the face.  It is a distinctly feminine accessory.  Or at least it was.  European footballers have begun wearing them to keep their hair back while playing.  While  a man lower on the masculine social hierarchy may have been teased relentlessly for donning such a girl-associated item, these high-status, wildly-admired men seem to be changing the social construction of the alice band.

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.

Note: Since I posted this, Philip Cohen has brought up concerns about the National Marriage Project’s data and analysis in another study. You might want to take a look at his post.

Patricia P. sent in an infographic illustrating trends in marriage, divorce, and cohabitation over the last several decades, based on data from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. I found several of the images to be a bit cluttered and unclear, but this one neatly summarizes the percent of women over age 15 who were currently married, 1960-2009:

I looked through the full 2010 The State of Our Unions report. This graph, showing the percent of those aged 15 or older who were married from 1960-2009, shows that marriage has become less common for both men and women, Blacks and Whites (based on U.S. Census Data):

Of course, this is in large part because people in the U.S. are getting married later; not only do we not really expect a 15-year-old to be married, we’d be rather horrified if they were. If we look only at adults aged 35-44, we do see a significant decrease in marriage between 1960 and 2009, but still, about 2/3 were married:

The report also includes a graph of the percent chance that a couple will divorce or separate within 10 years, broken down by education, for the early ’70s and the late ’90s (for first-marriage couples only). Least educated is defined as having less than a high school diploma; the moderately educated graduated high school but have less than a 4-year college degree; and the highly educated have a 4-year college degree or more:

Note that for both the least and most educated, the risk of divorce actually went down — though those with the least education are over three times as likely to separate/divorce than the highly educated.

On the other hand, rates of cohabitation have gone up:

Perceptions of marriage, not surprisingly, also vary by educational level, with the highly educated feeling significantly more positively about marriage than the less educated population. Asked if they agreed that marriage hadn’t worked out for “most people” they know, 53% of the least educated and 43% of the moderately educated said yes, while only 17% of those with at least college degrees felt similarly:

So the overall trend appears to be a growing gap between the highly educated and those with less than a 4-year college degree, with the moderately educated looking more similar to those with less than a high school diploma in terms of their marriage, divorce, and cohabitation behaviors. If you’re interested in this topic, check out the full report.

I took this snapshot at a mall in Glendale, CA. I want only to point out the size of the mannequins decorating this store for “Large Size” women.  I am not going to belabor this point.  Just.  Ugh.  This is what we are being told is “so fat we have to have a special store for you.”

See also the bewildering look of “Plus Size” at Frederick’s of Hollywood.

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 have posted before about the ways those who handle the dead may try to humanize themselves so as to avoid the stigmas often associated with their jobs. Individuals who have jobs that require them to touch or be around dead bodies often find they are negatively stereotyped as creepy, gross, or as taking advantage of families in times of pain. They engage in various strategies to try to resist those stereotypes, including redefining the job and attempting to present it as something valuable and respectable (a “funeral director,” after all, sounds much nicer and more professional that “undertaker” or “mortician”).

In my previous post I discussed the Men of Mortuaries calendar, which presented shirtless male funeral directors in hunky poses. Now we have an example of women doing something similar. Christie W. sent in a link to the Funeral Divas website, which clearly tries to present women working in the funeral industry in a positive light:

From the site’s homepage:

A Funeral Diva is a strong, confident and successful woman who works in the funeral industry. She is not ashamed of her career! She is proud to serve hurting families!

So here, women who work in the funeral industry are hip, fun, successful career women — not creepy people who like being around dead bodies, and not individuals who profit from families’ grief.

Of course, in addition to presenting female funeral directors positively, the site also attempts to support women working in a field that has been male-dominated since preparing and burying our dead moved from an informal family activity to a formal business. However, women’s presence in this industry is growing. In 2008, the New York Times reported that women made up 35% of mortuary school students in 1995, while in 2007 60% were female; at some schools women make up nearly 75% of the student body. Interestingly, the article focuses on how the funeral industry has changed to include more concern for handling grieving individuals and, thus, the increased need for “the caring factor” — which presumably makes women seem like a better fit for the job, as they are assumed to be for other types of jobs that require lots of nurturing and emotional work.

Despite this, an article in the Christian Science Monitor discusses the barriers women in the industry continue to face. This year, New York’s Attorney General filed a lawsuit against one mortuary school, the Simmons Institute of Funeral Services, and its CEO, alleging repeated sexual harassment of female student and discrimination against pregnant women, a violation of Title IX.

So women in the funeral industry have to contend with the general negative stigma associated with their job, as well as the usual issues faced by women entering a previously male-dominated field. Funeral Divas is an interesting attempt to address both of these sets of problems at once.

Emma M.H. sent us a commercial for Cougar Life, a dating site that promotes itself as a place to meet older (but still sexy!) women interested in dating younger men. Despite the name, the site actually welcomes women of all ages. When you go to the website, you specify whether you’re looking for a “cub” (women aged 18-35) or a “cougar” (aged 35-65). Similarly, Emma was struck by how young the women in the ad look:

So though the company brands itself as a site about cougars — which would imply an emphasis on middle-aged and older women — here it markets itself almost entirely with women who would fall into no more than into the “cub” category or the very lowest end of 35-65 age range that defines cougars on the site, while the song declares they’re “all cougars.” It’s possible the company thought that women who look older than 40 would be unacceptable even to potential customers of a dating website specifically promising the ability to meet such women. But it also seems like the term “cougar” is being used to apply to a wider array of women than when it first entered pop culture — not just older women who date younger men, but practically any woman past her early 20s who has a voracious sexual appetite. Cougar Life draws on this, assuring us it was recently voted the “wildest dating service in America.” The defining feature may be less age than the idea that a woman is not just sexually available, but almost predatory in her search for sex — that is, that she seeks sex in a way we generally find acceptable only for men.

UPDATE: Reader Anna caught a mistake I made. The “cub” category was for the men seeking women on the site, not for younger women. She explains,

If you look at the site carefully, the “cubs” category means men the ages of 18-35, not women of these ages. Choose “looking for a cub” and the pictures are all male, and that term is often used for the younger male partner of an older women. The only women “available” on the site are 36 years old and over, so the site in effect bans both middle aged men and young-ish women from participating.

Thanks, Anna!

Philip Cohen posted some interesting data at his blog, Family Inequality, that I think will look at first blush, counterintuitive to many.  The figure below shows the percent of men’s income that women bring home, organized by age bracket and level of education.  The top bar, for example, tell us that, among 45-50 year olds with advanced degrees, women make 68% of what men do.

Two observations:

First, notice that women with more education (the lighter bars in each age bracket) do worse compared to men than women with less education.  That is, the gender inequity is worse in the upper classes than it is in the lower classes.   Why?  Well, people tend to marry other with similar class and education backgrounds.  Accordingly, women with more education may be married to men with higher earning potential than women with less education. Those women are more able to make work-related choices that don’t foreground economics, since their income is less central to the financial health of the couple.  They are also more likely to take substantial amounts of time out of the workforce when they have kids (working class women can’t afford to do so as easily), and we know that doing so makes a real dent in career advancement.  So, perhaps ironically, women who are “richer” educationally may marry economically richer men who then allow them to deprioritize their careers.

Second, notice that the most equal incomes (where women make 85% of men’s salaries) occurs among the youngest and least educated group: 25-34 year old high school drop outs.  Why would younger women do better relative to men than older women?  Some of this may be due to a decrease in gender-based discrimination.  But it also likely has something to do with the devaluation and disappearance of traditionally working-class men’s work.  Most of the narrowing of the gender wage gap, in fact, has to do with the lowering of men’s earning power to meet women’s, not vice versa.  As the industrial base in the U.S. has been collapsing, the number of historically-male blue collar jobs have been shrinking.  Meanwhile, our industrial economy has been replaced by one split between (well compensated) information/technology and (poorly compensated) service jobs.  Those service jobs are going disproportionately to women.  So, while men still dominate (especially the most well-regarded and well-compensated) upper class professions, their dominance in the lower rungs of the economic ladder is waning.

Thanks again to Philip Cohen for the data!

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.

A year ago we posted a photo of a children’s t-shirt, found at Goodwill, that claimed the wearer is “Too pretty to do math.” We were relieved to know the shirt had been destroyed, in the interests of children and appreciators of the fine field of mathematics.

But sadly, Ingrid P. informs us that a magnet with the same slogan is now for sale at youth-oriented clothing store Forever 21:

So the message to girls is that, first, math is something to be avoided if possible; only girls who aren’t pretty enough to get out of it would bother to take it seriously. And, second, being attractive should get you out of doing things you might find difficult or unpleasant.

There do not appear to be “I’m too handsome to do math” or, say, “I’m too pretty to do English literature” versions, because the magnet relies on two notions that preclude those options: that girls, specifically, either can’t or don’t want to master difficult academic subjects, and that math is inherently, and almost uniquely, difficult to learn — a cultural trope my friends who teach math often find exasperating, as it means they have to battle years of socialization that teaches students to be intimidated and convinced they’re likely to fail before they even start.

Kelebek and Laurie L. both let us know about a recent example of the use of images of dead or brutalized women in fashion advertising. A recent catalog, titled “Deadly Deals,” from the Australian clothing chain Rivers, included this image (via The Age):

And way back in July of last year, Caroline submitted an article from Amazing Women Rock about an ad for Beymen Blender, an upscale clothing boutique in Istanbul. The ad shows a woman’s dismembered body hanging from meat hooks; it and the rest of the photos below may be triggering for those sensitive to images of violence toward people, so I’m putting it after the jump.

However, Dmitriy T.M., Melissa F., and Noelle S. found an example from the October 2010 issue of Interview magazine that inverts the usual gender pattern by showing a woman with brutalized men. The photo shoot was apparently supposed to evoke the types of torture and murder used by organized crime in Russia.

In this case, Naomi Campbell is shown in positions of dominance over an extremely pale-skinned, and clearly badly injured, man. So those images reverse not just the usual gender dynamic in images of violence and brutality in fashion photos, but also the frequent pattern of seeing naked or partially-naked Black bodies displayed as props around more fully-clothed White bodies (though Campbell is certainly scantily clad and sexualized). I suppose you could see this as undermining or commenting on the images we often see of violence toward women in fashion. Yet we could also argue that it does so by reinforcing the association of Blackness, in particular, with violence and aggression. And the photo shoot includes the same sexualization of violence seen so often in the fashion industry.

Thoughts?

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