gender

Feminist scholars argue that patriarchy relies not just on a hierarchy that places men above women, but a hierarchy of men that punishes men who don’t obey rules of masculinity.

An advertising campaign for Oberto Beef Jerky, sent in by Kate S., nicely illustrates the threat to men if they don’t comply with patriarchy.

The threat is: If you’re not an “Alpha,” then you’re a “Sidekick.”

The Alpha is first; the Sidekick is second. The Alpha gets served; the Sidekick serves. The Alpha gets the hot chick; the Sidekick gets the “ugly friend.” The Alpha makes the decisions; the Sidekick takes them.

In one part of the website, it actually encourages you to “establish your dominance.”   It features taunting emails and cards that you can send to your friends to trick them into looking like idiots/being your sidekick.

UPDATE: In the comments thread, Toban B. (T B) had a really nice observation:

As Murray Bookchin has written, language about ‘alpha males’ naturalizes hierarchy.

Bookchin highlights how people have conflated animal and insect interactions (e.g. ‘queen’ bees) with societal structures created by humans — as opposed to the far more instinctual of relations of non-human creatures.  (For Bookchin, there is a continuum between humans and other life forms, so these distinctions aren’t binaries.)  Basically, the point here is that if human hierarchies are the same as instinctual hierarchies (e.g. interactions with a lion ‘king’), then the human hierarchies must be just as natural and inevitable — which just isn’t the case.

Joanne suggests, further, that humans, invested in patriarchy and hierarchy, actually project it onto the natural world:

Using the terms “alpha” and “dominance” just reinforces the belief that nature exists within a patriarchal, hierarchical model.  It actually doesn’t.  I do a lot of work with horses, researching and observing the horse-human relationship, and this whole idea of “dominance” is one that has started with and is kept alive by the patriarchal worldview of Western culture.  Many observers of animal behavior are brought up in and continue to live in that worldview, so they impose it on animals and the natural world.  If you step outside of that worldview, what you find in the natural world is something entirely different.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

Stephen W. sent us a photograph of a billboard in Rock Valley, IA.  It suggests that keeping your baby, instead of having an abortion, is good for the economy:

Sociologists talk about how nations are invested in reproduction.  Without babies, nations literally disappear; too many babies and nations collapse under the strain of a population they cannot support.  Because nations need babies (but not too many babies), states adopt pro- and anti-natal policies (e.g., the one child rule or medals for mothers) that encourage or discourage childbearing.  This billboard is an interesting example of a call to women to have children so as to help the nation (though it is sponsored by a pro-life organization, not the state).  Women, in this argument, have a responsibility to the nation (perhaps equivalent to military service?) that transcends their individual reproductive preferences.

(See this related post on making babies for the military.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Andrea G. alerted us to a Fisher-Price toy, called My Pretty Learning Purse, for children aged 6 to 36 months. Behold:

The purse comes with a dollar bill, a bracelet, a mirror, and a set of keys.  It also sings songs about purple and pink.

Andrea writes:

With these props, a one year old can properly play “woman.”  I felt this is an example of how we do gender and teach it to children, as young as a year old.

At least they’re admitting that femininity must be “learn[ed]?”

UPDATE: Jane, in the comments, linked to a Fisher Price product for boys that is very similar:

Get it!  It’s a tool box and it includes keys, a screwdriver, a hammer, and a saw.

The play involved in each product is essentially identical (e.g., music, putting things in and taking them out), but the theme of the play is gendered.  Do you think this is to please the parents or the kids?

NEW (Dec. ’09)! Monica C. sent along this page from a Target catalog featuring a girl playing with a kitchen and a boy playing with a tool set:

Also in teaching young children femininity and masculinity, see our posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for sending this speech by Joss Whedon (responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer) at an Equality Now event. His comments begin at 2:00 (after an introduction by Meryl Streep):

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Kristin W., Brad W., and Deb G. sent us the Bacardi Breezers “Get an Ugly Girlfriend” ad campaign, discussed over at Jezebel. The message? Ladies, if you want to look better, get an ugly female friend to stand next to:

There are profiles of the various ugly girlfriends you can get:

Of course this ad campaign suggests to women that the most important thing about them is how they look. But, more insidiously, as Sweet Machine points out, it places women “in competition with other women for male attention” in a world where “self-esteem is a zero-sum game.”

This is how patriarchy creates in-fighting among women: If men have the power, and the only way to get power is to get men, then women feel compelled to try to get (the attention of) a man (or men).  Other women are their competition.

Women are stereotyped as bitchy and catty as if it is an inherent feature of femininity when, in fact, women’s subordination to men creates the conditions that force them into competition.

We see it happen live in this horrendous clip from Battle of the Bods.

More examples of cultural endorsements of the idea that women and girls are always in competition with one another here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Commenter Joanne pointed out an update, via Shapely Prose:

Sean-Patrick Hillman of bacardi.com comments below:

June 21, 2009

Thank you for taking the time to post your story regarding Bacardi Breezer.

The campaign you are referring to ran in 2008 for two months in Israel. Even though Bacardi Breezer is not sold or distributed in the United States, we immediately notified the appropriate Bacardi affiliate and had this website shut down.

Bacardi proudly celebrates diversity and we do not endorse the views of this site.

We sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended by this site and thank you for bringing it to our attention.

I’m a bit confused, though–I did a quick google search, and Bacardi Breezer seems to be sold in a lot of places, including Canada and the U.S., but maybe they’re imported by a third party and not directly by Bacardi? I know I’d heard the name Bacardi Breezer before I saw these ads. Apparently I’m going to have to go on a tour of local liquor stores to see. What a horrible life I lead.

And I also agree with several of the other commenters–how awful must it be to be cast as an “ugly” person?

Because meat is what men eat…

See also this BEEF! BEEF! BEEF! Campbell’s Soup ad.

From MultiCultClassics.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Matthew Yglesias featured two figures from the Pew Economic Mobility project.  They show how long different types of people tend to take to recover from income loss (within 1 year, 2-4 years, or 5-10 years).

This figure shows that people who are older, have more education, or are poor, working, or middle class have a harder time recovering from tough economic times:

This figure shows how marital status is related to recovery.  Most dramatically, people who get married before recovering financially (especially men), women who split with a partner, and women who are single have a more difficult time recovering.

Something to consider: As several commenters noted, I’m not sure how they defined “recovery” from income loss.  If you never made a lot of money to begin with, does recovery simply mean returning to a state of low income?  Then, does the income for an initially high income person need to return to its high state for it be counted as a “recovery”?

(Just FYI: I revised my interpretation of these figures.  Thanks to the early commenters who noticed I’d misinterpreted.  It was really late at night when I wrote this post!)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Are sounds gendered? Yes. Does the gender of sounds change over time?

From the surprisingly interesting blog of Laura Wattenberg comes these graphs showing that popular masculine endings to names has changed over time.

1906:

1956:

No dramatic changes from 1906 to 1956, but then, in 2006, n is triumphant!

2006:

Laura also offers some data showing how boy and girl name endings have shifted since the 1880s:

This figure, relatedly, shows trends in the endings of girl babies’ names in France:

Graphs from here, here, and here. Hat tip to Montclair Socioblog.

UPDATE: In the comment thread, Sator Arepo notes:

Sounds are not equal to letters. The graphs are misleading in that they (with exception of the French language spectrograph-like pictures) they equate the sound of the end of the name with the appearance of the letter in the written word.

Commenter pfctdayelise notes something similar, above. However, it’s even more misleading in the tables, and would depend widely on the origin of a name whether and how certain letters were pronounced.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.