gender

Steve Grimes, a once guest blogger who will be starting a sociology PhD program at Rutgers this fall, asked us to comment on the new “man aisle” in a grocery story in one of my old haunts, the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The New York Post reports that the store COO and CEO conceived of the idea after reading a study showing that 31% of men now shop for their families, compared to 14% in the 1980s.  Ironically, the man aisle they designed doesn’t suggest that men are productive and useful members of their families. Instead, it reinforces the notion that men are all about leisure.  The items sold — you already know what they are — include condoms, Ramen noodles, beer, snack foods, and a surprising amount of condiments.
Because women are as likely to work for pay as men are, but continue to be held more responsible for housework and childcare, men do, in fact, enjoy more leisure time than women (in the U.S., almost 40 extra minutes a day).  Media frequently portray women as responsible for families or hard-working careerists and men as eager for nothing but a good time.  We see it in “for him” and “for her” news items and contrasting magazine content, and this idea is part of the message of the man aisle too.

Nothing about the man aisle suggests that he’s buying for anyone but himself, except insofar as  he might be stocking a man cave for his man friends.  This is unfortunate, because many men are productive and useful members of their families.  Also, some men hate beer, are allergic to wheat, are on diets, and think beef jerky is gross.  These men are invisible here too.

Meanwhile, the very presence of a single aisle for men marks the rest of the grocery store — the toilet paper, the diapers, the cleaning products, the greeting card aisle (*shudder*), the baking supplies, and the healthy food that you have to cook — as for women.

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.

Thanks to YetAnotherGirl and Kari B., we can now feast our eyes on this ad from Unik (“unique”) Wax Center.  It’s a promotion offering 50% off hair waxing for girls “15 and younger.”  The Consumerist reports that all procedures are fair game, including bikini waxes.

The usual concerns regarding the sexualization of young girls apply here.  Why do girls this young need to be concerned about how they look in bikinis?

Perhaps more interesting is the frame for why such a girl might want to undergo waxing. According to the 4th of July-themed ad, it’s to “celebrate freedom and independence.”  Implicitly, hers. So, to follow the logic to its endpoint, a girl of 15 or younger can’t feel free unless she’s hairless.

The company, responding to criticism, gave arguments along these lines.  They framed waxing as a “regular activity” and a “process in life” that “goes along with our country.”  Moms are coming in to get waxed (as all women do), explained the corporate offices, they’re dragging their tweens along with them (obviously), and the girls “have questions” and “get bored,” so the next step is to initiate them into the ritual.

So, the whole process is “natural,” as the ad copy specifies.  It is just an inevitable step in a supposedly universal way of (female) life.  And one that liberates women from… um, I don’t know what… embarrassment, I guess.

The ad is reminiscent of many similar campaigns aimed at adult women, ones that frame consumption of clothes, make-up, jewelry, and cosmetic procedures as expression of freedoms.  In this way, it’s a capitalist appropriation of feminism/liberation ideology.  It’s also a naturalization of what is, in reality, a lifetime of compulsory, expensive, and sometimes harmful beauty practices.

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.

Sociologists use the term “stalled revolution” to describe how current state of the feminist movement.  It’s “stalled” in that, while women are (mostly) free to do what men do, men have been much more reluctant to do what women have traditionally done.  This makes sense because masculine things are generally valued and feminine things are not.

Housework is one of these things.  Married women still do twice as much housework and childcare as their husbands, on average.  If you used advertising as your metric, however, you’d think that women did 99%.  Here are three examples and a counter-example:

1.  Monica C. sent in an Olympics-themed content sponsored by Pampers.  It’s called the “Mommy Games,” as if only women parent:

2. Appliance maker Kenmore has a children’s line, sent in by Anna C.  All of the products are in pink:

3. Allison spotted the same phenomenon at Hoover.  They are inviting “real women” to submit vacuum stories:

4.  As a counter-example, Kristie McC. sent in a screenshot of Eco-Me products.  The company  make a point of putting images of both men and women on their cleaning products.

So, there are exceptions, but the overwhelming message is that parenting and childcare is something that women do.  For more, see our gendered housework/parenting page on Pinterest.

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 recent Atlantic article by Anne-Marie Slaughter revived an ongoing conversation about women’s efforts to balance work and family in their lives.  Unfortunately, new data from the Pew Research Center suggests that striking a happy balance is increasingly out of reach.  This is because the value women place on both parenting well and having a successful career is growing.  In other words, women’s expectations are rising.

Interestingly, men’s expectations are rising, too, increasing the degree to which their desires might conflict, but to a somewhat lesser degree.

Let’s look at the data.

Young women between 18 and 34 are more likely to say that a successful career is “very” or “one of the most important things” in their life last year, compared to 1997.  The percentage has gone up 10 percentage points for women, while it went up only one point for men.

Young women are also more likely to say that being a good parent is “one of the most important things.”  Up a whopping 17 percentage points since 1997. This desire has risen significantly for men, too; 47% of men now say that parenting is very important, compared to 39% in 1997.

Since 1997, then, men have revised their expectations for parenting up, while their interest in work has remained more or less steady.  Women have raised their expectations for both and, generally, report higher life expectations than men.  That is, men are less likely than women to be interested in either a family or a career.

It will be interesting to see how public policy responds to these raised expectations, if at all. The U.S. is notoriously stingy when it comes to helping families balance these competing pressures, as this post on paid parental leave illustrates.  The time bind, though, is tightening and something will have to give.

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 term sexual dimorphism refers to differences between males and females of the same species.  Some animals are highly sexually dimorphic. Male elephant seals outweigh females by more than 2,500 pounds; peacocks put on a color show that peahens couldn’t mimic in their wildest dreams; and a male anglerfish’s whole life involves finding a female, latching on, and dissolving until there’s nothing left but his testicles (yes, really).

On the spectrum of very high to very low dimorphism, humans are on the low end.  We’re just not that kind of species.  Remove the gendered clothing styles, make up, and hair differences and we’d look more alike than we think we do.

Because we’re invested in men and women being different, however, we tend to be pleased by exaggerated portrayals of human sexual dimorphism (for example, in Tangled). Game designer-in-training Andrea Rubenstein has shown us that we extend this ideal to non-human fantasy as well.  She points to a striking dimorphism (mimicking Western ideals) in World of Warcraft creatures:

Annalee Newitz at Wired writes:

[Rubenstein] points out that these female bodies embody the “feminine ideal” of the supermodel, which seems a rather out-of-place aesthetic in a world of monsters. Supermodelly Taurens wouldn’t be so odd if gamers had the choice to make their girl creatures big and muscley, but they don’t. Even if you wanted to have a female troll with tusks, you couldn’t. Which seems especially bizarre given that this game is supposed to be all about fantasy, and turning yourself into whatever you want to be.

It appears that the supermodel-like females weren’t part of the original design of the game.  Instead, the Alpha version included a lot less dimorphism, among the Taurens and the Trolls for example:

Newitz says that the female figures were changed in response to player feedback:

Apparently there were many complaints about the women of both races being “ugly” and so the developers changed them into their current incarnations.

The dimorphism in WoW is a great example of how gender difference is, in part, an ideology.  It’s a desire that we impose onto the world, not reality in itself.  We make even our fantasy selves conform to it.  Interestingly, when people stray from affirming the ideology, they can face pressure to align themselves with its defenders.  It appears that this is exactly what happened in WoW.

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.

Wired describes the new documentary, The Mechanical Bride, as a “moving, weirdly human exploration of artificial companionship.”  Directed by Allison de Fren, explores the range of mechanical brides, from robots to Real Dolls (NSFW), and the “technosexuals who love them.” I can’t wait to see it.

Trailer:

Bonus clip:

The Mechanical Bride will be screened at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal (July 19-August 7).

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.

This is the fourth part in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. See also, parts One, Two, and Three. Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

This post details some daily rituals that help interrupt damaging beauty culture scripts.

1) Start enjoying your body as a physical instrument.

Girls are raised to view their bodies as an thing-to-be-looked-at that they have to constantly work on and perfect for the adoration of others, while boys are raised to think of their bodies as tools to use to master their surroundings. We need to flip the script and enjoy our bodies as the physical marvels they are. We should be thinking of our bodies, as bodies! As a vehicle that moves us through the world; as a site of physical power; as the physical extension of our being in the world. We should be climbing things, leaping over things, pushing and pulling things, shaking things, dancing frantically, even if people are looking. Daily rituals of spontaneous physical activity and thanks for movement are the surest way to bring about a personal paradigm shift from viewing our bodies as objects to viewing our bodies as tools to enact our subjectivity.

Fun Related Activity: Parkour,”the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment,” is an activity that one can do anytime, anywhere. I especially enjoy jumping off bike racks between classes while I’m dressed in a suit.

2) Do at least one “embarrassing” action a day.

Another healthy daily ritual that reinforces the idea that we don’t exist to be pleasing to others is to purposefully do at least one action that violates “ladylike” social norms. Discuss your period in public. Eat sloppily in public, then lounge on your chair and pat your protruding belly. Swing your arms a little too much when you walk. Open doors for everyone. Offer to help men carry things. Skip a lot. Galloping also works. Get comfortable with making others uncomfortable.

3) Focus on personal development that isn’t related to beauty culture.

According to research, women spend over 45 minutes to an hour on body maintenance every day. That’s about 15 more minutes than men each day and about 275 hours a year.

But, since you’ve read Part 3 of this series and given up habitual body monitoring, body hatred, and meaningless beauty rituals, you’ll have more time to develop yourself in meaningful ways. This means more time for education, reading, working out to build muscle and agility, dancing, etc. You’ll become a much more interesting person on the inside if you spend less time worrying about the outside.  The study featured above showed that time spent grooming was inversely related to income for women.

4) Actively forgive yourself.

A lifetime of body hatred and self-objectification is difficult to let go of, and if you find yourself falling into old habits of playing self-hating tapes, seeking male attention, or beating yourself up for not being pleasing, forgive yourself. It’s impossible to fully transcend the beauty culture game since it’s so pervasive. It’s a constant struggle. When we fall into old traps, it’s important to recognize that, but quickly move on through self forgiveness. We need all the cognitive space we can get for the next beauty culture assault on our mental health.

Kevin L. let me know about Independent Woman, a PBS documentary in which a number of TV actresses discuss how their roles reflect the pressures, expectations, and opportunities women face, from the happy housewives of the 1950s to a variety of current shows. I don’t always agree with their interpretations, but if you love pop culture, as I do, it’s worth a watch:

Watch The Independent Woman on PBS. See more from America in Primetime.