gender

In a really fantastic post at Shakesville, Time Machine argues that rape jokes are problematic, even when uttered by people who would never assault anyone, because they signal to actual rapists that their behavior is acceptable and normal.

A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?  Rapists do.

So, when someone drops a rape joke and people laugh, the small percent of men who are rapists think that they’re surrounded by like-minded friends.  Speaking to the joke-teller:

That rapists who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side. That rapist knew that you were a rapist like him. And he felt validated, and he felt he was among his comrades.

What’s interesting about this observation is that it reminds us that we need to be more aware of the impact of our words not on victims (as the usual argument against the rape joke goes), but on perpetrators.  This is a much-needed re-framing of the problem that we call, passively, “violence against women,” but should really be called “men’s violence against women and men.”  While both men and women are victims, the vast majority of interpersonal violence is committed by men.

The need for a shift in frame — from the survivor to the perpetrator — is also a theme of this TedTalk by anti-violence educator Jackson Katz. He uses another really interesting way of showing the linguistic erasure of men in this discussion (at 4:08).

He also dismisses “sensitivity training” because it, too, centers the survivor of the violence instead of drawing our attention to the perpetrator (sensitivity to who?).  Instead, Katz argues, men need to step up and be leaders in the fight against men’s violence against women and men.  Because violence is not a “women’s issue,” it’s a men’s issue.

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.

I know this is boring and it should go without saying, but apparently it hasn’t been said enough: this idea that fembots are the perfect women is just wrong.  It suggests that men want someone over which they have perfect control.  And that’s creepy… and boring.

Here’s an example of the phenomenon (via About-Face):

That part where they make eyes at each other, he instructs the GPS to take them home, and she hits the button to heat up her (cold, hard) “seat.”  Just… ew.

Here’s another especially troubling example, sent in by a reader.  It’s some sort of ad for Play Station 3. It features a fembot being assembled and “woken.”  The narration explains that she will “cook, watch the house, take care of the kids” and be “entirely at your disposal as a sexual partner.”

At some point the fembot realizes she is being sold and expresses shock and disappointment.  The man in charge explains, “Of course you’re merchandise, baby.”  When she says that she’d thought she was alive, he labels her “defective.”  That thought was not “part of the protocol,” he says, “You’re not supposed to think at all.”  He then decides to destroy her, but succumbs to her pleas to let her “live” after all.  Again, a super creepy story about the ideal woman.

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.

I live in Los Angeles where saying that you don’t like movies is tantamount to claiming atheism in a church. But I don’t like movies, generally speaking. In contrast, I quite like TV. Does this seem weird?

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media offers a clue as to why I might lean towards television.  The Institute did a content analysis of 11,927 speaking characters in “family films” (G, PG, and PG-13) and prime-time and children’s TV shows (see it here).  They looked at the presence of female and male characters and the jobs those characters were doing.  In almost every instance, women had greater visibility, and better jobs, on prime-time TV than they did in either movies or children’s shows.

Presence

Women are, for example, 39% of characters on prime time, but only 31% of characters on kids’ shows and only 28% in movies.  Casts are twice as likely to be gender-balanced on prime time (45-55% female), compared to movies.   Half of the casts of family films are 75% or more male, compared to only 20% of the casts on TV shows and 39% of children’s shows.

Occupations

Almost half of all American workers are female, but they hold only 20% of the jobs on the big screen and 25% of the jobs on children’s shows. Again, here prime-time does somewhat better: 34% of the jobs on evening TV are held by women.

The next two tables reveal how men and women are distributed among different kinds of occupations in films and on prime time.  Men are over-represented in almost all cases, but the disproportion in movies is almost always significantly worse than it is on TV.

If you’re one of the people that contributed to Star Trek Into Darkness‘ $70.6 million opening weekend this week, this data might not be surprising.  I didn’t count, but I suspect it falls into the 50% of films that has a cast that is at least 75% male.  It certainly didn’t pass the Bechdel Test; the two female speaking characters, if I remember correctly, never spoke to one another at all, and so they couldn’t have spoken to each other about something other than a man (that’s the test).   (Oh wait, I think one of the twins with tails in bed with Kirk said “hey” when he leapt out to go do something important, so that’s three women with speaking roles).

So, like in lots and lots of films, women in Star Trek were woefully under-represented except as love interests for the two protagonists (Uhura in this movie and Carol, it was foreshadowed, in the next).  I’m used to it, so it doesn’t really stir me up, but that doesn’t mean I have to like movies.  I’ll stick to TV, thank you very much. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Hollywood.

Cross-posted at BlogHer, Pacific Standard, and The Huffington Post.

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.

Cross-posted at The Atlantic and Family Inequality.

The Census Bureau has a new report on nonmarital births. Based on the American Community Survey — the largest survey of its kind, and the only one big enough to track all states — the report shows that 35.7 percent of births in 2011 were to unmarried mothers.

Beneath the headline number, two patterns in the data will receive a lot of attention: education and race/ethnicity. I have a brief comment on both patterns.

Education

The education patterns show a very steep dropoff in nonmarital births as women’s education increases. From 57 percent unmarried among those who didn’t finish high school to just nine percent among those who have graduated college.

Given the hardships faced by single mothers (especially in the United States), it looks like women with more education are making the more rational decision to avoid childbearing when they’re not married. And I don’t doubt that’s partly the explanation. But we need to think about marriage, education and childbearing as linked events that unfold over time. The average high-school dropout mother was 26, while the average college-graduate mother was 33. Delaying childbearing and continuing education are decisions that are made together, based on the opportunities people have. And completing more education increases both the likelihood of marriage and the earning potential of one’s spouse.

So I think you could tell the story like this: Women with better educational opportunities delay childbearing, which increases their marriage prospects, and makes it more likely they will be married and financially better off when they have children in their 30s.

Race/Ethnicity

The differences in nonmarital birth rates between race/ethnic groups in the U.S. are shocking, from about two-thirds for black and American Indian women to 29 percent for whites and 11 percent for Asians.

This pattern is related to the education trend, naturally, but that’s not the whole story. One aspect of the story is race/ethnic geography of opportunity in this country. I’ve written before about the shortage of employed men available for women to marry, a particular expression of racial disparity first popularized by sociologist William Julius Wilson a quarter century ago.

Using the new numbers on nonmarital birth rates for each state from the Census report, I compared them to the male non-employment rate — specifically, the percentage of unmarried men ages 22-50 that are not currently employed. Here’s the relationship:

The states with more single men out of work have higher rates of nonmarital births. Single mother, meet jobless man.

My conclusion from these patterns is that unmarried parenthood is primarily a symptom of lack of opportunity, especially for education and employment. Surely that’s not the whole story. Maybe we should be persuading people to marry younger or shaming them into avoiding parenthood. But I think those approaches increase stigma more than they change behavior or improve wellbeing — Pew surveys show that 77 percent of people already say raising a family is easier if you’re married and only 12 percent of single people say they don’t want to marry. So who needs convincing? Meanwhile, if we addressed the problems of education and employment, is there any doubt family security and stability would improve, and with it the wellbeing of children and their parents?

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Dieting is for women.

I mean we all know that dieting and women go together like peas and carrots.  We know this — collectively and together, even if we don’t agree that it should be this way — not because it’s inevitable or natural, but because we constantly get reminded that women should be on diets and dieting is a feminine activity.

@msmely tweeted us a fabulous example of this type of reminder.  It’s a reduced fat block of Monterey Jack cheese, re-named “Monterey Jill.”  There’s curvy purple font and a cow in pearls with a flower, in case you missed the message.  And, oh, on the odd chance you thought that this was about health and not weight, there’s a little sign there with a message to keep you on track: “Meet Jack’s lighter companion.”

So now we’ve gendered cheese and managed to affirm both the gender binary  (heavy vs. light), heterocentrism (Jack’s companion Jill), and the diet imperative for women.  And it’s just cheese people!  Cheese!

That is all.

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.

Cross-posted at VitaminW.

In 2006, The Walt Disney Company bought the computer-animated feature film powerhouse Pixar.  This makes the lead of their most recent movie, Brave (2012), not just a princess, but a Disney Princess.  Merida is having a royal coronation at the Magic Kingdom this morning.

For her coronation, the princess has gotten a good ol’ Disney makeover. On the left is the new Merida (“after”) and on the right is the old Merida (“before”).  Notice any differences?

Here are the ones that I see:

• Sleeker, longer hair with more body
• Larger eyes and more arched eyebrows
• Plumper lips
• A thinner waist
• More obvious breasts
• An overall more adult and less adolescent appearance
• Lighter colored and more ornate gown
• A lower cut neckline that also shows more shoulder
• Perhaps most symbolically, her bow and arrows have disappeared in favor of a fashionable belt

We’ll add the new Merida to our always-growing collection of toys and logos that have received sexy make-overs.  You’ll love this Pinterest page, featuring a surprising set of newly sexy characters, including Care Bears, Polly Pockets, Holly Hobbie, Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, Cabbage Patch Kids, Dora the Explorer, and the Trollz.

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.

In this Jell-O ad, a perfectly manicured woman’s hand is holding a tiiiiiiiiiiny ice cream cone, suggesting that women are better off eating sugar-free pudding as a dessert. Below, I argue that this ad, far from promoting “decadence,” is actually a form of social control.

The words “60 Calories of Denial” imply that eating ice cream requires self-denial because a normal portion would be too high in calories.  In contrast, the large bowl of Jell-O pudding is labeled “60 Calories of Decadence.”  The fine print specifies that the pudding is “loved by lips and hips alike.”

To put it plainly, this ad for dessert tells women to be ashamed of wanting dessert.  It says, “You are a woman, so you are stressed about calories (and you should be). But we’re here to save the day. We can give you permission to have a little bit of dessert, but you will do so on our terms.”

So, while the ad suggests that Jell-O is offering women freedom, the converse of self-denial, in fact it is reminding women of the rule that they be calorie-conscious.  In other words, it reinforces the notion that every woman should be unhappy with or fearful of her body, always striving to attain or maintain thinness.

Camilla Bennett is a sophomore at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California where she is a Cognitive Science major with an emphasis in computation. 

Cross-posted at PolicyMic.

Let me ask you a question: Do you have a good friend of the opposite sex?

Odds are you do. In fact, the odds are overwhelming.

When I first began teaching, 25 or so years ago, I asked my students how many of them had a good friend of the opposite sex. About 10% said they did. The rest were from what I called the When Harry Met Sally generation. You’ll remember the scene, early in the film, when Harry asserts that women and men can’t be friends because “sex always gets in the way.”  Sally is sure he’s wrong. They fight about it. Then, thinking she has the clincher for her position, she says, confidently, “So that means that you can be friends with them if you’re not attracted to them!”

“Ah,” says Harry, “you pretty much want to nail them too.”

Young people today have utterly and completely repudiated this idea. These days, when I ask my students, I’ve had to revise the question: “Is there anyone here who does not have a friend of the opposite sex?” A few hands perhaps, in the more than 400 students in the class.

But let’s think, for a moment, about the “politics” of friendship. With whom do you make friends? With your peers. Not your supervisor or boss. Not your subordinate. Your equal.  More than romance, and surely more than workplace relationships, friendships are the relationships with the least amount of inequality.

This changes how we can engage men in the efforts to end sexual assault, because there are three elements to sexual assault that can be discussed and disentangled.

First is m en’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, to sex. This sense of entitlement dissolves in the face of an encounter with your friends. After all, entitlement is premised on inequality. The more equal women are, the less entitlement men may feel. (Entitlement is not to be confused with resentment; equality often breeds resentment in the privileged group. The privileged rarely support equality because they fear they have something to lose.) Entitlement leads men to think that they can do whatever they want.

Second, the Bro Code tells those guys that they’re right – that they can get away with it because their bros won’t challenge or confront them. The bonds of brotherhood demand men’s silent complicity with predatory and potentially assaultive behavior. One never rats out the brotherhood. But if we see our female friends as our equals, then we might be more likely to act ethically to intervene and resist being a passive bystander. (And, of course, we rescue our male friends from doing something that could land him in jail for a very long time.)

Men’s silence is what perpetuates the culture of sexual assault; many of the excellent programs that work to engage men suggest that men start making some noise. We know the women, or know people who know them. This is personal.

Finally, we’re better than that – and we know it.

Sexual assault is often seen as an abstraction, a “bad” thing that happens to other people: Bad people do bad things to people who weren’t careful, were drunk or compromised. But, as I said, it’s personal. And besides, this framing puts all the responsibility on women to monitor their activities, alcohol consumption, and environments; if they don’t, whose fault is it?

This sets the bar far too low to men. It assumes that unless women monitor and police everything they do, drink, say, wear etc., we men are wild, out of control animals and we cannot be held responsible for our actions.

Surely we can do better than this. Surely we can be the good and decent and ethical men we say we are. Surely we can promise, publicly and loudly, the pledge of the White Ribbon Campaign (the world’s largest effort to engage men to end men’s violence against women): I pledge never to commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women and girls.

Our friends – both women and men – deserve and expect no less of us.

Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stonybrook.  He has written or edited over twenty volumes, including Manhood in America: A Cultural History and Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.  You can visit his website here.