gender

Since I’m visiting my family in Oklahoma, and they raise cattle, I thought it was appropriate to post this Campbell’s soup ad from the 1940s (found at Vintage Ads):

Of course, there’s a long history of associating masculinity with meat, with poor families often reserving meat and other foods considered particularly nutritious for men, since they were believed to need it most in order to perform hard physical labor. Writing about the British working class during the late 1800s in his book Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz argues, “…wives and children were systematically undernourished because of a culturally conventionalized stress upon adequate food for the ‘breadwinner'” (p. 130). Men’s privileged access to meat actually spurred the consumption of sugar: “…while the laboring husband got the meat, the wife and children got the sucrose…” (p. 145). Sugar provided a relatively cheap source of calories for women and children’s diets to make up for the fact that they got less of other foods. Of course men also ate sugar, but historical evidence indicates that their diets were made up of more protein and less sugar compared to women and children. Sugar provided an energy boost and source of calories for women and children, but at the cost of providing little nutritional value.

Mintz also describes how cultural beliefs emerged to justify this consumption pattern:

One (male) observer after another displays the curious expectation that women will like sweet things more than men; that they will employ sweet foods to achieve otherwise unattainable objectives; and that sweet things are, in both literal and figurative senses, more the domain of women than of men. (p 150).

And of course this belief that women like sweet things more than men, and use them to “achieve” objectives (say, eating chocolate to soothe a broken heart after a breakup) is still with us today.

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

This vintage add (found here) for Kenwood appliances is a nice example of how the act of preparing food is gendered, and how one side of the gendered dichotomy is valued more than the other. Men are chefs– professionals, with careers. And their wives are cooks– they cook at home. Men have prestige as professional chefs outside the home, and women have value as caregiver cooks inside the home.

I guess that this ad is from the early-1980s. How much of this gendering of cooking changed over the years?

According to the Economist, beauty spending–on make-up, diet and exercise, fragrances, skin care, hair products, and cosmetic surgery–adds up to a $160 billion-a-year worldwide.  To illustrate this, Lauren Greenfield calculated the monthly spending of six women and photographed them undergoing their beauty treatments (slideshow here).  Thanks to Karl B. for sending along the link!

26 year-old, Ginger spends $650 a month on her physical appearance. At Manhattan’s store Sephora, Ginger shops alone for cosmetics because her friends know she will spend hours. She is so obsessed with makeup that she founded her own line of cosmetics, Ginger Luxe.

PR-Company owner, Claudine (29) compares prices at Duane Reade drug store in Upper East Side Manhattan. Claudine spends only $80 each month on her personal grooming. Her philosophy is ‘the less stuff I use, the better I look’.

New York City actress Cameron (25) spends $620 a month on her personal grooming. Cameron reveals that her hair is the key to her personality, ‘I spend so much time with my hair-stylists, they’re like my family’.

New York City hedge-fund exec Suzanne (36) spends $1720 a month on personal grooming.  At ‘Skin & Spa’ cosmetic surgery center, Suzanne receives Botox from Dr. Howard Sobel, a treatment that she receives 3 times a year.

Fashion company spokeswoman, Jennifer, 27 receives a spray tan at a top New York salon. Jennifer spends $865 on personal grooming, ‘My spa time’s not a splurge-it’s a necessity!’

For more on beauty and spending, see our posts on the scientizing of beauty products (here, here, and here), our post on how Dove and Axe are in bed together, and this post on the economics of beauty over a lifetime.

Also see Lauren Greenfield’s work on girl culture and photographs of children at a weight loss camp.

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.

Abby J. sent in some photos she took at Toys ‘R’ Us of a bunch of classic board games that are now marketed specifically to girls. We know they’re for girls because they’re all pink:

Of course the girls’ version of Scrabble would spell “fashion.” I assume the boys’ version spells “motorcycle” or something of the sort…though probably with fewer letters, I guess.

The Monopoly game (called the Boutique Edition) looks like a jewelry box:

I don’t know what Mystery Date is all about–I mean, I can guess, but I’m not familiar with the game, and not actually sure I’d want to encourage kids to go on mystery dates, but whatever. Both Abby and I found the pink Ouija board odd. I didn’t know they really still sold them. My grandma came across an old one when they were cleaning out my great-grandma’s stuff a couple of years back and she took it and gave it to my teen-aged cousin. My aunt took great offense and sent it back. My grandma, who is a devout Christian, took offense at my aunt taking offense (and implying that Grandma was giving her grandchildren satanic toys) and now keeps it around and lets kids play with it at her house. She also declared my aunt “no fun” and “too churchy.” If you knew my grandma, or had ever sat there and watched her call out to Jesus to help her find her missing spatula (he complied and made it appear in the drawer where she always keeps the spatulas), you would understand why I nearly choked on my food when she referred to someone else as “too churchy.” Now she’s decided that the Harry Potter movies are not, as so many people she knows had told her, satanic but are instead quite funny.

Anyway, that’s a long rambling unimportant point for a post that just illustrates how much we identify girlhood today with pink and feel the need to make gender-specific version of games where a single version seemed to work perfectly well in the past.

Reader Rachel sent in this photo she took of Legos being clearly marked as “boys’ toys”:

NEW! Sara P.-S., Liz, and Danielle F. sent us links to the new “girlz” version of the PSP (Playstation Portable) because, as Sarah says, it is apparently so “skewed towards boys that they have to specifically advertise the fact that girls [can] play with it”:

NEW (Apr. ’10)! Sunlight Snow sent in a version of Jenga aimed at girls called “Girl Talk” Jenga. Not stopping at the pinkification of the game, the producers decided to add sharing and gossip to it. Each plank now offers a question that girls are supposed to discuss. Apparently precipitous balancing and impending collapse is not fun enough, girls must add desperate crushes and dreams of becoming a veterinarian!

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

Taylor sent in this ad, found at Blame It on the Voices:

It ran in Esquire in 1959 and our post on the emergence of Playboy Magazine may give the ad some interesting context.

Both Aani B. and Sarah F. sent in a link to a commercial for the new diet Pepsi (Pepsi Max, of course) being aimed at men. 

Also don’t miss this commercial (embedding disabled) in which they describe the ingredients of Pepsi Max as the crushed bones of a Viking, the spit of a rapid Wolverine, pepper spray, and scorpion venom.  The can? Made from the hull of a nuclear submarine.  The crushing of cans on heads ensues.

Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, a reader named Kate sent in a snapshot of some advertising for the product at the intersection of 6th and Anza in San Francisco:

Slogans:

“The first diet cola for men.”

“Save the calories for bacon.”

“0 calories. Great taste. Welded together.”

“No gut. All glory.”

This is, of course, all in jest. Yet is still re-affirms the idea that being this way is the epitome of manhood, if taken to a ridiculous extreme.  Eh, I’ll just let Twisty say it. As usual, she says it better than I:

What’s the big whoop? Well, you can’t have a “soda for men” unless “men” are considered a class unto themselves, defined in terms of the bacon-eating, welding, glorious nukular submarine-squashing aspirations that separate them from dainty vulnerable “women.” These ads are jokey, depicting average-looking dudes, but they tacitly allude to the noxious he-man/fragile damsel dichotomy that’s been chapping actual women’s hides lo these many millennia.

It also, of course, points to the fact that dieting really has been for women all along (see posts here and here for examples). In fact, it denies that diet-soda-for-men is about dieting at all: note the slogan “save the calories for bacon” and the name, Pepsi Max, which implies adding something to the beverage as opposed to taking something out.

See other examples of marketing for diet products aimed at men: Nutrisystem (“get ‘er done!”) and Weight Watchers.

As discussed on Salon.com and Jezebel today, Dell Computers has started to market directly to women with a new website, Della. Joshua and Frederick both told us about it. Here are some images from the site:

Apparently women shopping for computers care about (1) style– whether or not it matches their outfits, (2) how light it is to carry around when they hang out with equally-coordinated friends and their laptops, and (3) the ability to check movie times, and restaurant directions whenever you need to.

It takes 3 clicks to even get to anything about the actual computers’ processor speed, RAM, hard drive capacity etc. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m a proud geek and I want to know all the technical computer specs.

So what is Dell really saying, here, about women’s computer needs? That women care more about the color of their computers than how well it is going to perform for them? That women won’t understand all the tech specs anyway, so why bother? That women don’t use their laptops for work— to run businesses, write papers, network with clients, or design websites?

Instead we get incredibly informative descriptions  like “attractive, clean designs… with everything you want for your everyday needs.”

And content aside, I also take issue with the very existence of a separate website for women computer buyers. The not-so-subtle message is that the Dell website– with all the high speed (plain black) computers, business information, and detailed tech specs– is for men.

Oh, there are some tech tips on the Della site– about how to use your wicked cute laptop to keep in touch with friends and family and to exercise and eat better.

Hoshi sent us concept artwork for some new characters, all set to be musicians, in development for the online game, RuneScape.  Here they are:

Hoshi notes:

1. The caucasians are well dressed and most likely designed for the cities. The people of color are wearing tribal gear. In other words, they fill the “exotic” and “primative” section in the game, while the white people are the “refined” upper class.

2. The women look like they just finished dancing. They both have one hand on their hips (slightly seductive) and the other hand is in a “flowing” movement. Conversely, the men have balled up fists with their arms held slightly apart. They may be smiling, but their body language shows aggression.

Hoshi started a discussion thread with this observation at RuneScape and her comments have been met with significant opposition.  Summarizing the comments, she explains:

One of the most common arguments that it *isn’t* racist is that this game is set in a medieval setting and there wouldn’t be people of color in the cities. Frankly, I think that’s an absurd excuse. This game freely utilizes magic, monsters, gods, and all sorts of unrealistic things. If you follow the players’ logic, that means it’s more believable to have talking cats than to have a person of color dressed nicely in a city. That’s just messed up.

For more examples of race and gender stereotypes in video and online games, see here, here, here, here, and here.