gender

In the U.S. today we largely accept and encourage girls’ experimentation with boy-coded things, but we are still extremely ambivalent, if not downright condemnatory, of boys experimenting with girl-coded things.

This excerpt from an Ann Landers advice column from 1974 shows that Landers had the same asymmetrical concerns almost 40 years ago.

The parents ask about the sex-crossed play behavior of both their daughter and their son, but Landers fixates on the son, suggesting that if he continues such play he should get checked out.

From Ms.

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.

Leah S. asked us to talk about Beyoncé’s new video, Why Don’t You Love Me, and I think Ann at Feministing had some interesting things to say, so I’m going to borrow her insights.

Noting both Beyoncé’s video and the recently released video for Babyfather by Sade, Ann observes:

…both Sade and Beyonce are cast as “traditional” homemakers in retro-styled videos. Beyonce’s retro romp seemed (at least to me) a bit tongue-in-cheek, whereas Sade pretty earnestly makes Jell-O and keeps house. But regardless, they’re both wearing vintage-looking sexy slips, making dinner, hanging out at home during the day, etc.

But they’re not simply nods to the ’50s.  Because both women are black, the videos also potentially subvert the idea of the perfect housewife of that era.  Ann continues:

I know there were certainly upper-middle-class women of color in the ’50s and ’60s, but this image of the happy-but-secretly-unhappy housewife is stereotypically white. By virtue of race, Beyonce and Sade are twisting that stereotype.

And that twist is very political.  Consider this: In American politics today, the “perfect” mother is one who does not work and stays home with her children.  Unless she’s poor.  Poor women who want to stay home with their children are called lazy, welfare cheats.  If you’re poor, you can only be a good mother by working.

Because race and class are correlated in U.S. society, and the “welfare queen” is a race-specific trope that usually refers to poor, black women, these videos might very well challenge the white-middle/upper-class-homemaker conflation.

Beyoncé, Why Don’t You Love Me:

Sade, Babyfather:

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.

Tanita sent in this funny short video that addresses the sexism female authors have often faced when trying to get their work published or taken seriously in literary circles (some, such as Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, resorted to using male pen names to combat these problems).

What better way for female authors to deal with the situation than use their action-hero superpowers to combat sexist publishers? I present to you the Brontësaurus:

Confession: I know this will make many of you scream in horror, and that the book has all kinds of feminist overtones and is greatly beloved and majorly influenced literature, and I’m showing myself to be a literary heathen with no appreciation for the arts, but I read Jane Eyre once, and I think Charlotte Brontë’s most effective weapon might be her ability to get you bogged down reading lengthy Gothic descriptions of moors and stuff.

Though if you ever need to make me cringe and run, tell me you’re going to make me read Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I tried reading it just for fun once, and I have never been so pained.

Penny R. and p.j. sent in a link to the American Able project. A description from the artist’s website:

‘American Able’ intends to, through spoof, reveal the ways in which women with disabilities are invisibilized in advertising and mass media. I chose American Apparel not just for their notable style, but also for their claims that many of their models are just ‘every day’ women… Women with disabilities go unrepresented…in most of popular culture. Rarely, if ever, are women with disabilities portrayed in anything other than an asexual manner, for ‘disabled’ bodies are largely perceived as ‘undesirable’…

Too often, the pervasive influence of imagery in mass media goes unexamined, consumed en masse by the public. However, this imagery has real, oppressive effects on people who are continuously ‘othered’ by society. The model, Jes Sachse, and I intend to reveal these stories by placing her in a position where women with disabilities are typically excluded.

The goal is admirable. Individuals with disabilities are routinely ignored in pop culture, and if depicted, they are often either mocked or are devoid of sexuality (notable examples being the documentary Murderball and the depiction of a character in a wheelchair on the TV show Friday Night Lights, though both focus solely on men with disabilities who generally have relationships with women who do not).

That said, it brings up the eternal question regarding artistic endeavors, particularly those aimed at undermining prejudices: does it work? The idea here is to show a woman with disabilities in sexualized contexts and use humor to counter popular conceptions of those with disabilities as asexual (and parody American Apparel in the process). As with any use of parody/irony/etc., it poses a dilemma. Will viewers get it? Will they grasp the intent and look at the images through that lens? Will it lead some people to question why they might find these photos shocking, why a woman with a disability shown in sexual situations would be surprising, or the reason for any discomfort they might feel when looking at them?

Or will people respond by ridiculing Jes, or even feeling disgusted? Will they look further into those feelings and why they might have them? Will it change anything?

And how do you decide if it’s worth it? If half of viewers engage in some introspection and examining of their own prejudices, and half don’t, is that a sufficient trade-off? If 90% of people ridiculed the images and it reinforced their belief that bodies of those with disabilities are undesirable, but 10% would think about how women with disabilities are de-sexualized, or that American Apparel presents a very narrow range of body types as “normal,” everyday women, would you feel that you had accomplished something significant? Is it the artist’s responsibility to care?

Similar questions have been posed about photos of individuals from Appalachia: do they humanize people often depicted as backward “hillbillies,” or do they actually reinforce perceptions that everyone living in the area is poor and rural?

How do you negotiate the use of art to make social statements (whether questioning prejudices, pointing out inequalities, or humanizing stigmatized groups), considering that once you put something out in the public domain, you have little control over how people interpret it and whether they take from it the opposite message you intended, perhaps even ridiculing your subjects as a result of your project?

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

Snehata K. sent in two commercials for Miller Lite that reproduce ideas of masculinity while encouraging men to do something usually seen as feminine: care about calories. In the commercials we see that it’s ok to drink beer with fewer calories than the regular, as long as you do it in a manly way:

What’s a feminine way of drinking light beer? Prioritizing calorie content over the taste. If you’re a guy, you can care about health/diet and thus want a lower-calorie beer, but only if you show you still care about beer the way men are supposed to: you appreciate the taste and won’t sacrifice it for anything.

Guys who forget that are embarrassingly girly. And being feminized is clearly stigmatizing, worthy of ridicule. Even women are disgusted by feminized men. So not only will men who fail to adequately perform masculinity be ridiculed by men, they’ll lose any chance with hot chicks, too. As they do so often, men are receiving a clear message: be sure you’re masculine in every way, all the time, or you risk losing any claim you have to a respected version of manhood.

Of course, if you really want to be manly, you need to stop caring about silly things like your health altogether and drink Miller High Life.

Cross-posted at Ms. magazine.

Full-time women workers earn 80.2% of what full-time men workers earn.  One of the primary reasons that women earn less is job segregation by sex.  Jobs themselves are gendered, such that women have a tendency to enter feminized occupations and men have a tendency to enter masculinized occupations.  How severe is job segregation by sex?  A new report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, newly updated for 2009, reports that about four in ten women and men work in jobs that are 75% female and male respectively.

Overall, masculinized occupations pay more.  (This is a different kind of sexism, a sexism against feminine-coded things instead of against women, but sexism nonetheless… for example.)  Job segregation, then, contributes to the pay gap between men and women.

The figure below shows how this has changed over time.  The y axis is an “Index of Dissimilarity.”  Basically, a score of one indicates complete segregation and a score of zero means that the job is 50/50 male and female.

The white line, labeled “civilian labor force” shows that, overall, sex segregation has been going down over time.  It also shows, however, that most of the decrease occurred in the ’70s and ’80s.  It has changed little since then.

The lines above and below the white line show that sex segregation correlates with education level.  People who have at least a bachelors degree are in less sex segregated jobs, while people who did not attend or finish college tend to be in more segregated jobs.  This means that, insofar as sex segregation at work contributes to a wage gap, it is more extreme for working class people than for others.

Via Family Inequality.

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.

Asa D. sent in an animated 1958 Disney segment titled “Magic Highway USA.” The cartoon extols the virtues of the highway system of the future (the interstate highway system was authorized by President Eisenhower in 1956). Apparently it is farther into the future than 2010, as my windshield does not have a radar, and road construction around here doesn’t seem to be instantaneous:

The segment of course illustrates gender expectations of the time — dad goes off to work while mom and the kid(s) go shopping. But as Asa points out, this example of the “techno-utopianism” of the post-World War II era, with faith that modern technologies will lead to a happy future that increasingly frees us from unpleasant work, boredom, wasted time, and so on, is truly fascinating.

Providing a nice contrast to that earlier vision, Dmitriy T.M. let us know about the stop-motion short video Metropolis by Rob Carter. The entire video, which is 9 1/2 minutes long, gives an abridged history of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Here are the last 3 minutes (you can see the entire video here). In this segment, we see the unfolding of a large highway system and urban construction/destruction/reconstruction. At about a minute in, “the video continues the city development into an imagined hubristic future, of more and more skyscrapers and sports arenas and into a bleak environmental future” (quote found here):

Metropolis by Rob Carter – Last 3 minutes from Rob Carter on Vimeo.

NEW! (May ’10): Kris H. sent in another example of envisioning the future. The Futurama, an exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, promised a future in which interstate highways will allow people to bypass slums, relieving us of the work of fixing them (found at Neatorama):

Amanda brought our attention to a photo project by L. Weingarten called “A Series of Questions.” The ongoing project is designed to draw our attention to how the kinds of questions we ask transgender people makes them feel like inexplicable Others. From a description of the project:

The subjects, self-identified people of transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, gender-variant, or gender non-conforming experience, hold signs depicting questions that each has had posed to them personally — some by strangers, others by loved ones, friends, or colleagues. Presented on white wooden boards, the questions are turned on the viewer, shifting the dynamics under which they were originally asked, and prompting the viewer to cast a reflective, self-critical eye upon him or herself, revealing how invasive this frame of reference can be.

In other words, these questions get asked not only because transgender people break the rules, they get asked because the rest of us can be so inflexible, utterly confounded when other around us challenge our assumptions about the world.

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.