gender

[Note: Trigger warning for sexist, demeaning language and violent imagery.]

If you’re a regular reader of Soc Images, chances are pretty good that you also know about Anita Sarkeesian’s project to look at sexism in video games. Sarkeesian, who runs the fantastic Feminist Frequency site, attracted a large amount of hateful online attacks and harassment after starting a Kickstarter campaign to raise a few thousand dollars for a project looking at sexism in video games. If you aren’t aware of the story, check out any of the many media stories about her experience.

Sarkeesian’s project looks at stereotypes or sexist imagery in the design of the games themselves. My coworker Darren D. let me know about a website that highlights another element of sexism in the gaming community: the demeaning or threatening sexist comments gamers often send to other players, especially those they believe are women. Fat, Ugly or Slutty collects examples of the sexual harassment and sexist attacks that are an unfortunately common part of female gamers’ lives.

Many of the comments sexualize and objectify the women by suggesting they should be sexually available to other players or open to comments on their appearance. Some angrily lash out with hateful sexist attacks and put-downs about physical appearance and sexuality. Others send threats or vivid scenarios of violence.

As one of my female students told me last semester, as a gamer, she has the extra mental and emotional burden of having to decide, every time she considers playing, whether the joy she gets from the game outweighs the likelihood that she’ll be called a whore or a bitch or have to ignore sexual comments as she tries to concentrate on the game.

For more on the topic, check out the BBC’s documentary “Guns, Girls and Games.” Also check out Not in the Kitchen Anymore, where Jenny Haniver posts recordings of the types of sexist comments she has to deal with as a female gamer.

UPDATE: Several commenters have pointed out that men also get comments like at least some of these. That is absolutely true. Insults of a wide and creative variety are thrown around. But these comments, whether targeted at men or women, illustrate a common cost of admission to online gaming: whether a man or a woman, you have to expect sexist, demeaning, violent insults if you want to play. Those are the informal rules of the game.

And yes, both men and women receive these types of objectifying or sexist comments. In a world in which women are more likely to face this type of behavior in their everyday lives outside of gaming, and in which women playing multi-player or FPS games generally find themselves in the minority, the fact that both male and female gamers experience these insults shouldn’t reassure us that the impacts of them are equal and, thus, harmless.

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

Dolores R. sent in a cartoon by rampaige.  It seems unlikely that a man would randomly criticize a woman in a scoop neck t-shirt for the existence of her breasts, but it happens more often than you think.

I’m a bit busty, and a girl, and strangers have occasionally given me “advice” about my breasts.  Once I was told by a man I had just been introduced to that I shouldn’t wear sweaters.  Stumped — and living in Wisconsin — I asked why.  He explained that sweaters have “pile,” by which he meant that the fabric was thick.  The thickness of the fabric, he said, made my boobs look even bigger.  Since that was a bad thing, apparently, he advised me to avoid sweaters.  Weird, I know.  But I’m just saying, this stuff happens.

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.

A new submission from Rucha S. inspires me to bring back our 4-year-old boob products post.  Hers is added last, so enjoy the scroll!

Sent in by Jessica F. and found at Trend de la Creme. Boob hot water bottles:

Boob ice cubes:

A boob/rocket-shaped “stress toy”:

The boob glasses don’t even make sense:

Taylor S. sent us this picture of “boob stress relievers” sold at a flea market:

Pitseleh S. found these boob clogs at boinkology.  You can also get these clogs with piercings or tattoos.

In comments to another post, Tim pointed us to this ad:

Many, many more after the jump.

more...

In a stroke of brilliance, Jessica Valenti has named a new trope: Sad White Babies with Mean Feminist Mommies.   The trope offers a visual “no” to the question that won’t die, “Can women have it all?”  It serves as a cautionary tale to all the ambitious feminist ladies out there: go right ahead, get a good job, but don’t think for a second that you’re doing the right thing for your (future) child.  Thanks to Larry H. and Zeynep A. for sending it in!

TIME has an alternative image of the working mom that I thought was quite cute.

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 Montclair SocioBlog.

The New York Times ran these graphics showing the word frequencies of the Republican and Democratic conventions.  I’ve added underlining on the keywords that seem to differentiate the two conventions. (The data on the Democrats runs only through Sept. 4, but it looks like the themes announced early on will be the ones that are repeated.)

The Republican dictionary falls open to the page with Business – ten times as many mentions as in the Democrats’ concordance.  If you go to the interactive Times graphic, you can click on Business and see examples of the contexts for the word.  Many of these excerpts also contain the word Success.

You can put the large-bubble words in each graphic in a sentence that condenses the party’s message about government, though that word – Government – does not appear in either graphic.   For the Republicans, government should lower Taxes so that Business can Succeed, creating Jobs.

For the Democrats, government should protect the rights of Women and ensure that everyone has access to Health and Education.

Perhaps the most telling most interesting word in the Democratic cloud is Together.  The Republican story is one of individual success in business, summed up in their repeated phrase, “I built that.”  The Democrats apparently are emphasizing what people can accomplish together.  These different visions are not new.  They go back at least to the nineteenth century.  (Six years ago, I blogged here about these visions as NFL brands — Cowboys and Steelers — and their parallels in US politics.)

(HT: Neal Caren who has posted his own data about the different balance of emotional expression at the two conventions.)

Earlier this month, Lisa posted about the objectification of female beach volleyball players at the Olympics, discussing the types of photos and poses that are used when reporting on different types of sports, including gendered differences.

Autumn B. sent in another over-the-top example of the objectification of female athletes. The commercial is for RoadID, a company that sells “identification gear.” Autumn saw it while watching the Tour de France; she found this shortened version online, which she says actually features less objectification than the original did.

The main focus of the ad is a slow investigation of various aspects of cyclist Jenny Fletcher’s body. The camera travels slowly up her leg, then shows her full profile before zooming in on her breasts as she zips up her shirt:

Jenny Fletcher has no dialogue. She exists as a body to be broken down into eroticized parts for the consumption of the viewer. As Autumn put it, it’s frustrating that, a fan of the “the male-centric Tour de France,” that “when they do FINALLY feature a female cyclist, it is as a sexual object.”

For other posts on this topic, see Serena Williams’ patriarchal bargain, Sports Illustrated covers, feminizing female athletes, Serena Williams in ESPN magazine, and media portrayals of female athletes.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

As I speculated years ago (here and here), it may be hard for Americans to imagine a world where the law guarantees them at least 20 paid vacation days per year.  But such a world exists.  It’s called Europe.*

Americans are the lucky ones.  As Mitt Romney has warned us “European-style benefits” would   “poison the very spirit of America.”  Niall Ferguson, who weighs in frequently on history and economics, contrasts America’s “Protestant work ethic” with what you find in Europe – an “atheist sloth ethic.”

The graph is a bit misleading. It shows only what the law requires of employers.  Americans do get vacations.  But here in America, how much vacation you get, or whether you get any at all, and whether it’s paid – that all depends on what you can negotiate with your employer.

Since American vacations depend on what the boss will grant, some people get more paid vacation, some get less, and some get none.  So it might be useful to ask which sectors of our economy are beehives of the work ethic and which are sloughs of sloth.  (Ferguson’s employer, for example, Harvard University, probably gives him three months off in the summer, plus a week or two or more in the winter between semesters, plus spring break, and maybe a few other days.  I wonder how he would react if Harvard did away with these sloth-inducing policies.)

The Wall Street Journal recently (here) published a graph of BLS data on access to paid vacations; they break it up by industry near the bottom.

Those people who are cleaning your hotel room and serving your meals while you’re on vacation — only about one in four can get any paid vacation days.  And at the other end, which economic sector is most indulgent of sloth among its workforce?  Wall Street.  Four out of five there get paid vacation.

How much paid vacation do we get?  That depends on sector, but it also depends on length of service.  As the Journal says,

Europeans also get more time off: usually a bare minimum of four weeks off a year. Most Americans have to stay in a job for 20 years to get that much, according to BLS data.

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* The graph is from five years ago, but I doubt things have changed much. The US still has no federal or state laws requiring any paid vacation days.

Sociological Images owes a great debt to Jean Kilbourne, a pioneer in the feminist critique of advertising.  She’s most famous, probably, for her video series, Killing Us Softly.

In those videos, she offers a typology of ways that women are subordinated in media content.  One of those is silencing.  Sometimes this means actually covering a woman’s mouth (forcibly, but also playfully), other times copy simply says that she need not (or shouldn’t) speak.  Below are a series of images we’ve collected that illustrate this.  Some of them are dated, but they give you an idea of what the mechanism of silencing looks like.

Canada’s Next Top Model (Cycle 3), sent along by Julie C., included a photoshoot in which the models’ mouths were covered with duct tape.

Erin S. sent in a link to a set of fashion photos in New York Magazine that show faceless women.

Reanimated Horse sent us an American Apparel ad in which the woman’s body is highlighted but her face is obscured:

The next two ads are examples of one’s that suggest that women need not speak, that products can speak for them.

“Eye contact is speaking without words”:

“Make a statement without saying a word”:

Finally, Sarah B. sent along a form of resistance to these kinds of images.  Colin von Heuring, who just started a brand new blog on media subversion, saw an ad with the copy  “You don’t need words to make a statement.”  He decided to “ma[k]e it explicit” (original on the left, modified on the right):

For more on Jean Kilbourne and the subordination of women in advertising, here’s the trailer to Killing Us Softly 4:

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.