gender

Lordo found the towels below for sale at Imaginarium (a toy store specializing in smart toys)  in Spain.   One towel, pictured with a boy, doubles as a cape; the other, pictured with a girl, allows her to dress up like a mermaid.

This is another example in which children are encouraged to be girls and boys instead of just children and being a boy means doing something active (being a superhero) and being a girl means adopting an attractive and exotic appearance.

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.

This being the opening weekend for Sex and the City 2, it seems like a perfect time for this video of sociologist Tracy Scott, from Emory University, discussing the cultural impact and contradictions of the SATC franchise. Enjoy!

Thanks to Nicole J. for sending it in!

Lukas B.sent in an advertisement from the February 2010 Hemisphere magazine (the in-flight United Airlines mag). The ad is for ANA airlines’ flights to Japan. The target of the ad appears to be business travelers, represented by a White man. And how to show what a great job the airline will do of taking care of you? Surround said male business traveler with ten Japanese women, there to serve and pamper him:

The ad seems to rely to some degree on the stereotype of the submissive Asian woman, or more specifically, the geisha — a Japanese woman trained in the art of serving and pleasing men. There are many ways ANA could advertise, and even lots of ways they could represent good service.The fact that this ad deals with flights to Japan makes a particular racialized idea of service and comfort useful to the company.

At the same time, I’m fascinated by the fact that there are presumably potential customers to whom the idea of being waited on hand and foot while flying would be a major selling point (as opposed to, say, more comfortable seats or tastier food or something).

And, as Lukas points out, they also make sure to throw in the obligatory blossoms that are required in advertising/images related to China or Japan.

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

Stella P. sent in a link to the SIGG water bottle website, pointing to the fact that there are “women’s” and “men’s” collections. What’s interesting about the two collections isn’t just the reproduction of the gender binary and the gendering of water bottles, but the fact that the outcome of this bifurcation is actually less choice for men. There are 77 total water bottles in the women’s collection, but only 58 in the men’s. If you scroll through the options, you’ll see that women basically get to choose among ALL of the bottles, but men are not presented with any that (apparently) appear TOO feminine. This is a great example, then, of the way that patriarchy constrains men by pushing them away from items deemed girly.

Here are some screen shots of the men’s and women’s collections.

Men’s:

Women’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.

Dan S. alerted us to an image, purportedly of an article from the May 13, 1955, episode of Housekeeping Monthly. In it there is a photo of a woman bending over an oven with a list of tips for being a good wife, such as “a good wife always knows her place.” We’ve gotten this image before and never posted on it, much like the list on “How to Be a Good Wife,” attributed around the web to a “1950s home economics textbook.”

So why haven’t we posted the image before? Because it’s a fake. According to Snopes, the list was circulating widely on its own long before it suddenly appeared with the damning image…which is a completely unrelated image from a cover of John Bull magazine (not Housekeeping Monthly) that appeared in 1957, not 1955. Notice the text along the upper right corner of the image–it says “Advertising Archives.” According to Snopes, no one has ever turned up the economics textbook the “How to Be a Good Wife” list supposedly comes from, either.

So what gives? Why do these hoax 1950s-era images/lists keep appearing? I think Snopes makes an interesting case:

It has become fashionable to portray outdated societal behaviors and attitudes — ones we now consider desperately wrongheaded — to be worse than they really were as a way of making a point about how much we’ve improved. When we despair over the human condition and feel the need for a little pat on the back, a few startling comparisons between us modern enlightened folks and those terrible neanderthals of yesteryear give us that. We go away from such readings a bit proud of how we’ve pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and with our halos a bit more brightly burnished.

The juxtaposition of wonderful modernity with a tawdry past also serves to reinforce the ‘rightness’ of current societal stances by  making any other positions appear ludicrous. It reminds folks of the importance of holding on to these newer ways of thinking and to caution them against falling back into older patterns which may be more comfortable but less socially desirable. Such reinforcement works on the principle that if you won’t do a good thing just for its own sake, you’ll surely do it to avoid being laughed at and looked down upon by your peers.

A typical vessel for this sort of comparison is the fabricated or misrepresented bit of text from the “olden days,” some document that purportedly demonstrates how our ancestors endured difficult lives amidst people who once held truly despicable beliefs.

Of course, as the Snopes article goes on to discuss, all kinds of very sexist stuff existed in the ’50s, and there were home-ec textbooks, magazines, etc., that included suggestions along the lines of those listed above.

Given that, it’s not shocking that when we see images of this sort, they immediately seem authentic, and get re-posted around the web despite the sketchy aspects of their origin stories. It’s not like we’ve never posted anything on Soc Images that we later figured out was a hoax (we also get things that we hope, desperately, are hoaxes but turn out to be real).

So there’s a truth behind the general gist of these types of lists, but many of the images themselves are fakes, created to make fun of our hopelessly, and hilariously, sexist past. And given how many real examples of sexist propaganda you could find from the 1950s, it’s worth pondering we find so many fake ones, and how, for some people, they may function to delegitimate concerns about gender inequality or sexism today, because come on, ladies — look how much better we have it than our grandmas did!

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

We’ve posted many times on the way that cleaning is gendered feminine in a way that makes women ultimately responsible for housework.  The Today segment embedded below, however, does not suggest that cleaning is a feminine task. Instead, it turns the tables by arguing that men are better at cleaning and that women need to learn how to “Clean Like a Man.”  Ah-mazing.  The second cleaning is framed as masculine, it becomes a story about men’s superiority over women.

And, of course, for men cleaning is a war (“Gather the troops,” “Establish a plan of attack,” “Plan the victory party”) and women reward themselves by drinking white wine, playing music, and watching a chick flick.

For examples of how women are responsible for the home, see help cleaning, Olympic laundry, this KFC advertisement offering moms a night off, this a commercial montage, Italian dye ad with a twist, women love to clean, homes of the future, what’s for dinner, honey?, who buys for the family, liberation through quick meals, “give it to your wife,” so easy a mom can do it, men are useless, and my husband’s an ass.

See also our historical examples of the social construction of housework: husbands “help” wives by buying machines, gadgets replace slaves, feminism by whirlpool.

Hat tip to Jezebel.

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.

Heather J. sent along a nice illustration of white privilege, courtesy of PostSecret.  PostSecret features anonymous confessions on postcards and, in this confession, a person confesses that being white and female facilitates her shoplifting: The card is a great example of the flip side of racial profiling: those who do not carry the stigmatized features aren’t simply treated fairly, they’re given a benefit of the doubt that allows them to get away with the very thing that others are suspected of doing.

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.

Amanda B. sent in this screencap of the teaser for a story on the Shape magazine website:

That is the image we’re presented as a woman who isn’t “skinny.” This photoshopped picture is, apparently, what counts as being curvy in Shape: a perfectly hour-glass figure with large breasts (that have been contour shaded/highlighted to emphasize their size and roundness).

Just to be sure you don’t think Shape is arguing that you, yourself, should accept your body the way it is, the article includes a link to Kim’s workout routine so you can “get her body.”

It’s another example of articles that pretend to be presenting an alternative to beauty standards/Hollywood ideals (be confident! Even stars have cellulite! So what?!?) but ultimately reinforce them, both by presenting images in which the featured women’s bodies differ little from those seen in the rest of the magazine and by making sure you know how to diet and exercise in order to get  your body to conform.