gender

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

During a debate this past Tuesday, Indiana Republican senate nominee, Richard Mourdock, made the case against the rape exception for abortions: “I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God, and even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

So according to Mourdock, God intends for rape to happen, and the outcome of rape is a gift from God.

What puzzles me is how Mourdock’s rape enthusiast comments fit with Missouri Republican senate candidate Todd Akin’s recent comments that “legitimate rape” (read“forcible rape”) rarely leads to pregnancy because, ”If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Mourdock and Akin’s beliefs, when considered together, produce a bizarre philosophy. I would like to know: Why would God create female bodies that reject God’s “gifts”? And if women don’t get pregnant from “forcible rape,” does that mean that God doesn’t intend ”forcible rapes”? Put another way, does God only intend certain types of rape, you know, the ones that come with “the gift”?

One-in-five Americans agree with Mourdock and Akin’s abortion stance. Razib Khan’sanalysis of the General Social Survey shows that 20% of Americans think abortion should be illegal in cases of rape. Republicans with lower levels of education who identify as extremely conservative and believe the Bible is the word of God are more likely than other Americans to hold this belief.

For Mourdock, Akin, and more than 50 million other Americans, God truly does work in mysterious ways.

Caroline Heldman is a professor of politics at Occidental College. You can follow her at her blog and on Twitter and Facebook.

On the heels of yesterday’s post, illustrating the gender binary in Halloween costumes, compare the “Toddler Girls” vs “Toddler Boys” Cookie Monster Halloween costumes at Party City:

“We’re not joking when we say gender expectations and sexualization start early,” writes the blogger for Radical Notions.

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 Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

Last Thursday, Republican Representative and Tea Party favorite, Joe Walsh (R-Ill), told reporters that when it comes to abortion, “there’s no such exception as life of the mother” because of “advances in science and technology.” This astounding claim was news to the medical community.

Walsh joins the ranks of some other prominent Republican men who don’t understand basic lady parts science: Representative Todd Akin (R-MO), who claimed that pregnancy from “legitimate rape” is “really rare” because “the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down,” and conservative comedian Rush Limbaugh, who doesn’t understand the basics of birth control pills. (He thinks you take a pill every time you have sex!)

These remarks would be humorous if it weren’t for the fact that these men are part of a broader effort by the extreme wing of the Republican Party to take aim at women’s reproductive health.

At the state level, Republican lawmakers enacted a record number of anti-abortion measures in 2011, four times as many as the previous year. A study from the Guttmacher Institute shows that legislators in 45 state capitals introduced 944 provisions to limit women’s reproductive health and rights in the first three months of 2012. These states are proposing/passing abortion ultrasound requirements, gestational limits, health insurance exemptions for contraception coverage, and stringent limitations on medical abortions.

In the past two years, 19 states have introduced bills modeled on a Nebraska law that bans abortion 20 weeks after fertilization. The Oklahoma State Senate redefined “person” as starting at conception, while the Mississippi House approved a bill requiring women who want an abortion to undergo an examination to determine if there is a fetal heartbeat. Texas and Virginia require women to undergo an ultrasound prior to receiving an abortion, and many other states have similar proposals underway. Texas recently cut reproductive services for 130,000 poor women.  As this chart from NARAL indicates, twice as many states passed anti-choice laws in 2011 than in 2010.

 

Fuck No Sexist Halloween Costumes has started a collection of paired costumes that illustrate an enforcement of the gender binary by the holiday industrial complex (yeah I just made that up).  Pairing matched costumes, she shows how dressing up becomes an opportunity to “do” gender difference.

Lots more at the site.

Ghostbusters costumes sent in by @broshenko.  Thanks!

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.

Dolores R. and Kelly S. alerted us to Ellen Degeneres’ ridiculing of the new Bic product, “Bic for Her” (yes, a real product, if you hadn’t heard).   Gentle but straight up, it’s worth four minutes of your time:

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.

Tricia Mc.T. sent in a video that illustrates the tendency to associate non-White women’s bodies with curves. Fruit of the Loom’s “Flawless” commercial celebrates women’s bodies, offering the message that they’re flawless at any size. But as Tricia points out, though there is variety in the bodies of the women in the commercial, “women of color are the only ones with ‘curves’,” and the woman whose body is farthest from the thinness ideal is an African American woman:

It’s a small example of a larger pattern in which non-White women are associated with curviness and we’re comfortable depicting women of color as larger — think of all the TV shows you’ve seen where the only plump female character is the African American woman.

For more on this pattern, see our post on who has curves in a Levi’s ad, an ad for shapewear to get “Latino curves,” Vogue emphasizes Beyonce’s body, fetishizing African American women’s butts, and conflating “ethnic” with “curvy.“

A while back we featured a guest post by Geoffrey Arnold about discrimination against short men.  He collects examples of heightism at his blog, The Social Complex, and has agreed to let us feature some of his examples here.

Think heightism doesn’t exist? Think again.

Bridesmaids include “Getting put with an usher who is not shorter than you” among good things in life (at 15secs):

Anne Hathaway takes her shoes off when standing next to a shorter guy (just the first 30secs):

Bravo TV executive Andy Cohen talks about being heckled backstage the 2011 Miss Universe pageant by Miss Montenegro and Miss Sri Lanka (unfortunately the clip ends with the host affirming Cohen that he’s not short instead of just condemning the contestants’ behavior):

Better to be tall: “Why be average, when you can XL”?

Short men are ridiculous and laughable, internationally.

American DirectTV commercial:

Chilean (I think) Doritos commercial:

Korean commercial:

American CRV commercial:

This ad, Arnold observes, actually “uses a statistic about heightism in order to justify and encourage the prejudice itself”:

See also Arnold’s guest posts introducing the concept of heightism as a gendered prejudice and discussing heightism (and other icky stuff) at Hooters.

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.

The Washington Post has a post up by Dylan Matthews that looks at the U.S. gender wage gap over time. It has several charts that illustrate trends in pay very clearly. Here’s a breakdown of median income (in constant 2010 dollars) by gender and race/ethnicity, for all workers, both full- and part-time:

The gap remains for full-time, year-round workers, too. Women have gained ground, but within every racial/ethnic category, women’s median income is lower than men’s and every other group earns significantly less than Asian and White men. However, there’s a clear racial earnings hierarchy visible in the chart as well, which isn’t getting nearly the attention that the gender wage gap is:

Moreover, the income bump received from earning a college degree is still higher for men than for women:

There are additional charts further breaking down differences in pay among men and women in the original post. As Matthews argues, and as Philip Cohen has posted about here at Soc Images, the data just don’t support the “impending female economic dominance” narrative that has become popular recently.