gender

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Most of us are clear on the idea that patriarchies are defined by sexism: the valuing of men over women.  In our American patriarchy, however, this is matched and perhaps even superseded by something called androcentrism: the valuing of all-things-masculine over all-things-feminine.  We know we live in an androcentric society because masculinized things (playing sports, being a doctor, being self-sufficient) are imagined to be good for everyone (we encourage both our sons and daughters to do these things), but feminized things (playing with dolls, being a nurse, and staying at home to raise children) are considered to be good only for women.

This means that men are teased and ostracized for doing feminized things, as we have demonstrated in advertising for McCoy Crisps, Hungry Man, Solo, Chevy, dog food, Miller beer, beef jerky, cell phones, Dockers, the VW Beetle, and alcohol (see here, here, here and here).

This tendency towards androcentrism means, also, that companies can count on both women and men buying masculinized products, but only women buying feminized products.  It’s smart business, then, to masculinize everything.  In a New York Times article, for example, Patton reports that Mercedes masculinized its SLK in response to a finding that “too many” women were buying it, something that threatened to feminize the car:

Mercedes says that 52 percent of the registered owners of first-generation SLK’s are women and 48 percent are men; the company would prefer the figures to be more on the order of 60 percent men and 40 percent women…

The standard thinking in the industry is that lots of women will buy a car that appeals to men, but many men — certainly those who wish to avoid the girlie-men label — won’t buy one associated with women.

This logic helps explain the, admittedly tongue-in-cheek (I think), hyper-masculinization of the Honda Odyssey in this commercial, sent in by Nancy N. She writes:

The choice of the black car, the music, and lighting all direct the viewer to think, “this isn’t just a mini-van, this is a man-van, and you aren’t a pansy if you buy it.”   …[It is] “technology packed “… with distinctly harder edges. Overall, Honda is trying very hard to override the notion of a “mom car” to sell to a broader audience.

See also: “how to give the perfect man hug” and “how I sit on the bus”.  And for more examples of androcentrism, see our posts on the phenomenon in  sports (see here and here), cartoons, schools (see here and here), and Cosmo.

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 polished version of this post was published in Contexts. You can download it here.

Most of our readers are probably familiar  with the now-iconic “We Can Do It!” poster associated with Rosie the Riveter and the movement of women into the paid industrial workforce during World War II:

It is, by this point, so recognizable that it is often parodied or appropriated for a variety of uses (including selling household cleaners). The image is widely seen as a symbol of women’s empowerment and a sign of major gender transformations that occurred during the 1940s.

In their article, “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception in J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster,” James Kimble and Lester Olson argue that our current interpretations of the poster don’t necessarily align with how it was seen at the time.

While the poster is often described as a government recruiting item (Kimble and Olson give many examples in the article of inaccurate attributions from a variety of sources), it was, in fact, created by J. Howard Miller as part of a series of posters for the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company — the Westinghouse logo is clearly visible just under the woman’s arm, and the badge on her shirt collar is the badge employees wore on the plant floor, including an employee number. The War Production Co-ordinating Committee was an internal Westinghouse committee, similar to those created by many companies during the war, not a government entity.

The assumption of current viewers of the image is usually that it was meant to recruit women into the workforce, or to rally women in general — an early example of girl power marketing, if you will — and was widely displayed. But the audience was actually only Westinghouse employees. The company commissioned artists to create posters to be hung in Westinghouse plants for specific periods of time; this poster specifically says, “Post Feb. 15 to Feb. 28” [1943] in small font on the lower left. There’s no evidence that it was ever made available to the public more broadly. For that matter, the poster doesn’t identify her as “Rosie,” and it’s not clear that at the time she would have been immediately identifiable to viewers as “Rosie the Riveter”.

The image that was more widely seen, and is often conflated with the “We Can Do It!” poster, was Norman Rockwell’s May 29, 1943, cover for the Saturday Evening Post:

Here, the woman is clearly linked to the idea of Rosie the Riveter, through both the name on her lunchbox and the  equipment she’s holding. She is more muscular than the woman in Miller’s poster, she’s dirty, and her foot is standing on a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Rockwell’s image presents the woman as a vital part of the war effort; her work helps defeat the Nazis. The image also includes fewer details to make her look conventionally attractive than Miller’s, where the woman has emphasized eyelashes and visibly painted fingernail.

Most interestingly, Kimble and Olson question the female empowerment message presumed to be the point of the “We Can Do It!” poster. We see the poster on its own, through the lens of a narrative about World War II in which housewives left the kitchen in droves to work in factories. But Westinghouse workers would have seen it in a different context, as one of a series of posters displayed in the plant, with similar imagery and text. When seen as just one in a series, rather than a unique image, Kimble and Olson argue that the collective “we” in “We can do it!” wouldn’t have been women, but Westinghouse employees, who were used to seeing such statements posted in employee-access-only areas of the plant.

Of course, having a woman represent a default factory employee is noteworthy. But our reading of the poster as a feminist emblem partially rests on the idea that this female worker is calling out encouragement to other women. The authors, however, point out a much less empowering interpretation if you think of the poster not in terms of feminism, but in terms of social class and labor relations:

…Westinghouse used “We Can Do It!” and Miller’s other posters to encourage women’s cooperation with the company’s relatively conservative concerns and values at a time when both labor organizing and communism were becoming active controversies for many workers… (p. 537)

…by addressing workers as “we,” the pronoun obfuscated sharp controversies within labor over communism, red-baiting, discrimination, and other heartfelt sources of divisiveness. (p. 550)

One of the major functions of corporate war committees was to manage labor and discourage any type of labor disputes that might disrupt production. From this perspective, images of happy workers expressing support for the war effort and/or workers’ abilities served as propaganda that encouraged workers to identify with one another and management as a team; “patriotism could be invoked to circumvent strikes and characterize workers’ unrest as un-American” (p. 562).

And, as Kimble and Olson illustrate, most of Miller’s posters included no women at all, and when they did, emphasized conventional femininity and the domestic sphere (such as a heavily made-up woman waving to her husband as he left for work).

Of course, today the “We Can Do It!” poster is seen as a feminist icon, adorning coffee cups, t-shirts, calendars, and refrigerator magnets (I have one). Kimble and Olson don’t explain when and how this shift occurred — when the image went from an obscure piece of corporate war-time propaganda, similar to many others, to a widely-recognized pop cultural image of female empowerment. But they make a convincing argument that our current perceptions of the image involve a significant amount of historical myth-making that helps to obscure the discrimination and opposition many women faced in the paid workforce even during the height of the war effort.

[The article appears in Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9(4): 533-570, 2006.]

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

Lester Andrist, at The Sociological Cinema, alerted me to a 9-minute short film revealing “Hollywood’s relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims.”   Created by Jaqueline Salloum and Dr. Jack Shaheen’s book, Reel Bad Arabs, it is a stunning and disturbing collection of clips.  The depictions are grossly prejudiced and relentlessly violent.  Andrist summarizes:

The Media Education Foundation also made a full length documentary based on Shaheen’s book.  The 5-and-a-half-minute trailer is a good indication of its content.  It contains many similar disturbing depiction, including a discussion of Disney’s Aladdin, but also points to how Arabs are frequently shown as buffoons (“rich and stupid,” “oversexed,” and “uncontrollably obsessed with the American woman”).

See also our posts on how Arabs are portrayed in video games and Reel Injun, a documentary about the representation of American Indians in 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.

Cross-posted at Ms. and Family Inequality.

In the early 1990s, Arline Geronimus proposed a simple yet profound explanation for why Black women on average were having children at younger ages than White women, which she called the “weathering hypothesis.”

It goes like this: Racial inequality takes a cumulative toll on Black women, increasing the chance they will have health problems at younger ages. So, early childbearing might pose health risks for White women, but for Black women it makes more sense to start earlier — before their health declines. Although it’s hard to measure the motivations of people having children, her suggestion was that early childbearing reflected a combination of cumulative cultural wisdom and individual adaptation (for example, reacting to the health problems experienced by their 40-something mothers).

She showed the pattern nicely with data from Michigan in 1989, in which the percentage of first births that were “very low birthweight,” increased with the age of Black women, but decreased for White women, through their twenties:

Source: My graph from Geronimus (1996).

If the hypothesis is correct, she reasoned, the pattern would be stronger among poor women, who experience more health problems, which is also what she found.

The most recent national data, for 2007, continue to show Black women have their first children, on average, younger than White women: age 22.7 versus 26.0. And the infant mortality rates, by mothers’ age, also show the lowest risk for White women at older ages than for Black women:

Source: My graph from CDC data.

Note that, for White women, mothers have children in the early thirties face less than half the infant-mortality risk of those having children as teenagers. For Black women, waiting till their lowest-risk age — the late 20s — yields only a 14% reduction in infant mortality risk. So it looks like waiting is much more important for White women, at least as far as health conditions are concerned.

The implications are profound. If you base your perceptions on the White pattern, it makes sense to discourage early childbearing for health reasons. But if you look at the Black pattern, it becomes more important to try to improve health problems at early ages — and all the things that contribute to them — rather than (or in addition to) trying to delay first births.

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Cohen’s previous posts featured on SocImages include ones on the recession and divorce data, the relationship between cell phone use and driving deaths, measuring the number of welfare recipients, delusions of gender dimorphism, and the gender binary in children’s books.

This Tide commercial with Kelly Ripa, sent in by Joyce L., is an excellent example of one of the common themes in the marketing of cleaning products. Of course, cleaning products are almost entirely marketed towards women but, more, women are often portrayed as being absolutely OVERJOYED at the prospect of cleaning.

Indeed, Ripa is thrilled at the fact that a man spilled red wine on her white table cloth.  She is so pumped that he has given her an opportunity to use her washing machine, that she cannot wait. She literally sweeps the table cloth out from under the party so that she can wash it immediately.  And she is so excited that she invites the entire dinner party to partake, managing to communicate, in the process, her absolute adoration for Tide.  I don’t know about you, but this is what it’s like at my house.

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.

In another example of masculinizing items associated with women to make it ok for men to use them, Hope H. let us know about Hardware, a line of vegan hair and body products. The company seems to have taken Hyperbole and a Half’s satire seriously:

All the elements are there: images of tools to make sure it’s clear these are hard-working manly products, the association of men with toughness, and product names that reference hard physical labor. The different product lines include Impact Wrench, Angle Grinder, Jack Hammer, and Tool Belts (aka, gift certificates). The descriptions also refer to tools and cars:

Every perfectly balanced machine needs maintenance. No this is not a sales pitch mate. You would not skip an oil change or two in a 67 Shelby Mustang now would you.

Thus, using these non-animal-ingredient-based products isn’t about being girly. It’s about maintenance, which all machines need!

For more examples, see our posts on hair products labeled things like “maneuver,” “retaliate,” “stand tough,” “work hard,” and “bulk up”; make-up for men named with terms like“power face mask,” “confidence corrector,” “mission balm,” “battle scars repair cream,” “cream me face base,” and “blo-job bronzing powder.”; and shaving your pubes marketed with the suggestion that it will make your penis look bigger.

Anna J., a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, sent in this vintage ad for Spirella girdles that provides a good reminder of how women are repeatedly told that our bodies are never, ever acceptable as they are, but are always in need of “improvement” through the use of products (found at The Great Fitness Experiment):

But hey, if you don’t feel like wearing a girdle, perhaps some tapeworms are your solution:

UPDATE: Reader Syd says the tapeworm ad is a hoax, though other readers disagree, and the practice itself definitely occurred. I don’t know how to find out, but since there’s at least some question about it, I’d take it with caution. However, commenter Angela pointed out that Tyra Banks recently had a story on tapeworms on her show:

As Anna points out, “It’s really interesting how ads have changed over time, but the expectation of culture that women be dieting has remained the same.”  Certainly more people wouldn’t tell women to eat a tapeworm — sanitized or not — these days, but plenty of questionable products out there still promise weight loss with “no diet” and “no exercise,” and my bet is you could pick up any women’s magazine currently on the shelf and get a range of advice on how to make sure you lose any weight you might have gained over the holiday season.

Five readers sent along gendered gift guides.  These are interesting only in their ubiquitousness.  Let us begin:

What do women want? According to an email from Chapters.Indigo, sent in by Rajan P., they want candy, wine, fictional romance and, um, blankets (for coziness?):

Liz from Minneapolis got an email from Amazon.com with ideas “For Him” and “For Her.” Liz writes:

The gift ideas for him are manly things like a coffee mug (but described as a vacuum sealed tumbler) and barbeque tools, while gifts for her include a hideous Precious Moments figurine and a super handy plant care sensor.

Eileen B. sent a link to the gendered gift guide at gifts.com.  Apparently women want wine, love, coziness (sweaters, hot baths, and aromatherapy), cooking stuff, anything-Oprah, and men who clean (are we seeing a trend yet?):

While men want beer, golf-related items, and a giant plastic nose that snorts out your shower gel:

Both want grown-up mobiles, tiny-sauruses, and a baby book, so there’s that.

Another reader, “a reader,” sent in links to the site Shapeways which thinks women want decorations (for their bodies and their homes), but figures men want stuff to do (“gadgets” and “hobbies,” with a few hard core accessories thrown in):

Had enough?  There’s more!

Apocalyptopia sent screen shots of the gendered gift guide from Zazzle.  She writes:

We have the old, tired “only guys like History and video games” trope. I also noticed that there’s an “Animal Lovers” category under Women, but the only similar category to be found under Men is “Outdoorsman” (if you don’t count Party Animal) which deals more with killing animals than loving them. Chicks are just so sentimental, right? (Gag!) I also can’t understand why “Traveling” is found under Men but not Women.

The thing that disturbed me the most about this, though, was that for Men they have a “Veterans” category while for Women they have a “Support Our Troops” category. As the daughter of a retired female veteran of two wars, I was a bit offended. I’m sure my mother would be offended as well that they think watching her friends get blown up still doesn’t make her qualify as a real veteran and that she’s relegated to simply supporting those who are (i.e.: men).

Finally, Michelle Y. alerted us to a gendered game at the Karmaloop website. Men are told to search for a sexy lady; and ladies? A Pomeranian.

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.