gender

In previous posts on Gossip Girl promotions and the New Beverly Hills 90210, we’ve argued that daily life is becoming increasingly pornified.  That is, features of the genre of pornography are being mainstreamed and porn is now, more than ever in modern history, everywhere.

I couldn’t help but this of this concept of pornification when I investigated the Burger King Shower Cam website, sent in by Catrina C.

Text:  “Watch our shower babe shake her bits to the hits every morning.”

Um, yeah, so everyday you can go to the website and watch a girl in a bikini sing a song in the shower (don’t miss the burger boobs).  You can also vote on the song and bikini for the next day, as well as enter into a contest for a date with the girl.  If you don’t win the date, you may still be a lucky runner up and win Burger King “proper man toiletries”:

Yep, Burger King hygiene products.

Word on the street is that the products are a joke; they actually smell like meat.

Has Axe been so successful in using misogyny to pitch its products that Burger King feels that it must sell toiletries to fully get on the pornification bandwagon?  I just don’t know.

In any case, as A Sarah points out at the Shapely Prose, this is insulting to women and men both.  Apparently Burger King presumes men are stupid or shallow enough to be impressed by BKs facilitation of bit-shaking and, therefore, that the campaign will actually translate into a desire to consume their product (as opposed to a desire to avoid it).

The fact that it’s supposed to be funny doesn’t make it better, it makes it worse.  Because, really, this is the kind of humor they think men respond to?  “Hahaha.  She’s wearing a bikini and it looks like there are fried eggs on her boobs!  Hahaha!”  “Hahaha!  I smell like meat!”  Dudes, Burger King thinks you’re stupid.

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.

V. and Anna G. sent in this ad for a LOLCats T-shirt.  Notice that the woman’s t-shirt is for women only, but the man’s t-shirt also doubles as a unisex shirt.

Both Emily W. and Sabine M. sent in this example of the same phenomenon at Mental Floss:

Mindy J. sent us a third example from Secret Society of Vegans:

From Johanna G:

Finally, Jessica S. sent in this example from Kung Fu Nation:

This is just another example of the phenomenon of how we take one half of a (false) binary (such as man vs. woman) and make one generic and the other specific.   Men can be human, but women are always female humans; white people can be just people, but non-white people are always other; Christian symbols are for everyone, but non-Christian symbols are exclusive; and so on and so on.

For more examples, see these posts on how racial and ethnic identity adds spice, Sotomayor’s racial bias, male neutrality in stick figures (here and here), male-default avatars, flesh-colored products, for normal to darker skin, Michelle Obama’s “flesh-colored” gown.

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.

At Weird Universe.

Rachel U. sent us a 1968 American Airlines ad (larger available at Modern Mechanix):

The text:

She only wants what’s best for you.
A cool drink. A good dinner. A soft pillow and a warm blanket.
This is not just maternal instinct. It’s the result of the longest
Stewardess training in the industry.
Training in service, not just a beauty course.
Service, after all, is what makes professional travellers prefer American.
And makes new travellers want to keep on flying with us.
So we see that every passenger gets the same professional treatment.
That’s the American Way.

Rachel says,

Before I read the headline of the ad, my brain registered the woman as a typical “sexy stewardess” image that seems to be standard industry fare when air travel started booming:  knees bent up toward the face, one hand touching her face…extremely focused gaze that seems a bit “come hither.”

Of course, that’s what the pose is. It’s just that being sexually attractive doesn’t mean women weren’t also supposed to also take on a caretaking role. It’s one way we’ve constructed femininity over the years: women were supposed to be nurturing and supportive in a “maternal” way, while also sexually alluring enough to keep their men from wandering (because if he wandered, it was definitely their fault for not keeping him happy at home).

Notice also the implicit denigration of stewardesses in general: at American Airlines they get real training, “not just a beauty course.” At first reading that could seem as though they were saying they emphasize skill, not physical attractiveness, but the image makes it clear you can look forward to getting both.

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

Duplo blocks are made by the Lego company.  They are like legos, but bigger and chunkier (less swallowable).  Like this:

Amanda R. captured this screenshot on the Duplo website:

Apparently, if you’re going to buy Duplos for some little kid, the very most important first piece of most vital information you will ever need before you ever ask anything else is whether or not the kid has a penis or a vagina.

Meanwhile, Elisabeth R. found exactly the same thing at the Toys R Us website:

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.

Elizabeth T., my awesome former student, asked us to write about Taylor Lautner’s Rolling Stone cover.

Of course, everyone’s been talking about  It’s either “oh he’s so hot!” or “he’s just seventeen! child pornography!”  But what I think is hilarious is the fact that they had to have him posing with a football.

You see, in this photograph, Lautner is a sex object.  And, as I’ve written before, a “sexual object is to be presented as passive, consumable, inert (remember, only one person gets “fucked”).”  And who does the fucking?  Men.  Real men.  And who gets fucked?  Women and womanly men (you might know them as “fags”).

So Lautner, by virtue of being objectified, threatens to also be seen as gay:

Apparently they’d rather break one of the golden rules of photography (don’t have anything coming out of the subject’s head), than allow Lautner’s sexual objectification call his sexuality into question.

Yes, yes we get it.  Lautner is a guy’s guy.  I mean, wait a second, he’s a girl’s guy.  Wait!  I mean he likes dudes!   No, not that way!  In a bros before hos way.  He likes dudes best, unless it’s for sex, then he likes girls!  He likes girls!  Even though he’s all sexy and wet and objectified, he’s not a fag okay!  We swear!  Look!  THERE’S A FOOTBAAAAAALLLLLLL!

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.

Benno K. sent in a link to some ads he saw in the Netherlands for the Discovery Channel, which Benno describes as “the channel that used to be for science, but is now mostly explosions and motor bikes.” In both posters the men have “women’s” eyes–that is, they appear wide-eyed and long-lashed, with mascara:

The caption says:

Not for women’s eyes. Discovery Channel has television men want to watch. Exciting, smart, interesting, adventurous, and most of all real. Watch for yourself.

I know that as a woman, I hate smart, interesting stuff. It’s just too hard to understand and it makes my brain hurt. I try to only watch TV shows that are dull, dumb, boring, cautious, and totally fake.

I spent a day in Salzburg this September with a man from Dubai.  We had a wonderful time comparing perspectives.

Dubai, he explained, was a wildly modern, multicultural city.  The default language in public was English due to the international population.  He was a stockbroker who had gone to college in London and gone part way through an MBA.

He interacted with veiled, Middle Eastern women and non-veiled Western European women daily.  He seemed to have no qualms with the two styles of presentation, considering them simple choices; they were unpoliticized and carried no deeper meaning.  To him, women who veiled were simply religious, like the men he knew who would not drink alcohol, and himself when he would not eat meat improperly slaughtered.

In any case, women in Dubai, he felt, were liberated.  As an example, he explained how there was now a woman’s taxi service.

“A woman’s taxi service?”

“Yes, with women drivers.”

You see, it is not proper for women to be alone with a non-relative male and, so long as all taxis were driven by men, women (who also do not drive) could not run errands or visit friends.  They were largely neighborhood-bound.  To my friend, a woman’s taxi service was liberation.  And, indeed, from the perspective of their rules, it must have seemed like freedom indeed.

I was reminded of this chat when Happy A. sent in a link to a story about a new women’s taxi service in Mexico.  The taxis, painted pink, are driven by women and only women can hire them. The taxi service isn’t designed to allow women to travel, but to allow them to travel without the threat of harassment and assault.

Women’s groups, however, have called the taxis insulting.  They suggest that the girly pink, the protectionism, and the make-up mirrors in the back seats seem to encourage the very objectification that makes women targets in the first place.

Pink Ladies, in the U.K., rationalizes its service with the same protectionism:

And, in Moscow, they have Ladies Red Taxi:

I think these examples, considered together, do a really good job of undermining any absolutist ideas about what is good for women.

The situations in the different countries are dramatically different.  Women’s taxis improve the quality of life for women in Dubai (who can afford them) much more significantly than the taxis in, say, the U.K.

A radical feminist bent on destroying the system altogether may say that such taxis reinforce a gender binary and are easily co-opted by patriarchy (I wonder whose errands women are doing in those pink taxis?), a reformist feminist may say that the move is a good option for women both there and elsewhere, if not actually an end to male domination.

I think both are good points.

Does the fact that the Mexico service is run by the city and the U.K. service by a private company make a difference?  In the first case it is driven by concern for women’s safety, in the second case it is driven, at least partially, by profit.  Should people be profiting from women’s vulnerability?

Is a woman’s taxi service inherently feminist and liberating?  Or is it always sexist and demeaning?

I’m  not sure what I think about women’s taxis, but I like how cross-cultural comparisons like these remind us that context matters.

Click here for another sociologist’s take on the extent to which the pink taxis should be seen as liberating for women.

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.