gender

Homefront war support is a critical part of war; care packages, letters, emails, and phone calls greatly increase troop morale. Typically homefront war support is gendered. In the U.S., women are usually the ones at home providing support to the men serving. During various wars the military has encouraged women to support male troops. It’s patriotic, as this WWII poster notes:

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have altered our images of the gendered make up of the homefront and warfront. Today 16% of the military is female, and even though women are not officially allowed in combat positions, they are often in combat situations in the current wars, where the lines of combat are blurred. As a result, over 115 women have been killed in combat. We’re still used to seeing these kinds of images:

Embed from Getty Images

But images such as this are becoming more common:

Embed from Getty Images

But a student of mine brought me the following ad from the most recent issue of Cosmopolitan:

Main text:

Cosmo and Maybelline New York are collecting ‘kisses’ for our brave armed forces overseas. For each ‘kiss’ you send, we’ll donate $1 to the USO.* Detach a postcard from the previous page, write a note of thanks with our Color Sensational kiss, add a stamp and drop it in the mail. *Up to $20,000

So Maybelline has teamed up with the USO (United Service Organization- a private, non-profit organization) to send support, in the form of “kisses,” and up to $20,000, to the troops overseas.

The assumption here is that armed service members are male and need the support of “kisses” from the homefront—a homefront that is comprised of women. The campaign is also an example of heteronormativity (the often unnoticed ways that heterosexuality is normalized and privileged) because it assumes that (men) serving overseas are heterosexual and will want to receive lipstick kisses from (presumably heterosexual) women. While women service members have been more visible during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this campaign reminds me that war is still largely gendered in a heteronormative fashion. The warfront is still thought of as men’s domain, the homefront women’s domain, and war support relies on heterosexual relationships.

Cross-posted at Ms.

According to a BBC News story sent in by Leiana S. and Kinesiology professor Mary Louise Adams, the International Boxing Association may soon require female boxers to wear skirts.  The President of the Association, Dr. Ching-Kuo Wu, argues that it will allow viewers to tell the difference between the men and the women who currently wear the same uniforms, including headgear.  Right now the skirt is an optional variation on the official uniform but, Dr. Wu says, “After we hear about its comfort and how easy it is to compete in the uniform, it may be compulsory.”

At the European Championships in Rotterdam last week, female boxers from Poland and Romania adopted the new uniform.  A coach of the Poland team said: “By wearing skirts, in my opinion, it gives a good impression, a womanly impression.”

This might be an example of officials assuming that (1) men are the main audience for boxing and that (2) men will watch women’s boxing more if they differentiate/sexualize women.

It might also, however, be an example of an attempt to retrench difference between men and women exactly when those differences start to dissolve.  Discomfort with the lack of actual differences between men and women sometimes leads individuals to encourage or enforce artificial ones.  I would say that this is one of the main functions of clothes today. Yeah, I said it. I think exaggerating what are actually rather weak and strongly overlapping differences between men and women is one of the primary functions of clothes.

In any case, it’s probably a combination of both.

Earlier this year they tried this with Badminton, but it didn’t take.

The idea that female athletes aren’t sufficiently feminine has been around as long as sports have been around.  Today, the feminizing of athletes is ubiquitous.  See our posts on Serena Williams’s ESPN cover, Candace Parker “is pretty, which helps,” press photos of female athletes in dresses, groundbreaking female sailor is also pretty, sexualizing female Olympic athletes, diets of champions, media portrayals of female athletes, and valuing dads in the WNBA.

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.

Today cheerleading can be an incredibly athletic and risky sport. Because it is associated with women, though, and serves a sideline function for football and other male-dominated sports, cheerleading is often not considered a sport at all. Less than half of U.S. high school athletic associations define high school cheerleading as a sport and neither the U.S. Education Department or the National Collegiate Athletic Association categorize it as one.

Instead, cheerleading is frequently labeled an “activity,” akin to the chess club.  Accordingly, cheerleading remains unregulated by organizations responsible for ensuring the safety of athletes, leading to rates of injury among cheerleaders higher than even those among American football players.

A similar logic appears to be at play regarding the Lingerie Football League, 12 teams of women that play live tackle football in underwear.  Here are some highlights from a game:

So, here’s the thing.    Last month 16 of the 26 players on the Triumph, a team in Toronto, resigned over safety concerns. From a story at the Toronto Star sent in by Emily M.:

…four players described the ill-fitting hockey helmets and one-size-fits-all shoulder pads designed for young males that they had to wear.

“We would have headaches during practice… They made a hockey helmet a football helmet, and that’s not what it’s for.”

…

Sprained ankles, concussions and pulled hamstrings were among the injuries sustained by Triumph players in their first game… their team had no medical staff.

One of the players reported that, when they brought their concerns to the coach, he shrugged and said: “You know, it is what it is.”

“You know, it is what it is.”  In other words, “You’re women in underwear. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re not really playing football.”  Ideology triumphing over reality.

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.

With all the emphasis on Halloween, you may or may not have heard that this year, October 31st was noteworthy for another reason: according to the United Nations, that’s the day the global population hit 7 billion. The UN has set up a website to provide information about population trends and estimates for the future. Here’s the current world population, by region:

The map is interactive, so you can click on a region to find out its population, as well as its percentage of the total world population.

You can also estimate the population through 2100 based on various fertility scenarios. In the default medium scenario, fertility is expected to follow past trends, leveling out at a little over 10 billion by 2100:

On the other hand, if we saw no further reductions in global fertility, the 2100 population would be over 26.8 billion:

There’s an enormous amount of data available at the site. For instance, if you select the Births tab, you can click on either a region or a specific country and find out what percent of births are to women in different age groups. Here’s the % of all births to women aged 15-19, by country:

And the chart showing the total age breakdown for Finland (at the site you can hover over the graph to get the actual %):

A chart of deaths by age and sex, illustrating the continued high mortality in infancy and early childhood:

There’s also a section of the site where you can enter information about your own date and place of birth and then get a snapshot of what the global population was when you were born. Since I entered the world:

Overall, it’s a pretty great resource, and another one of those websites that can easily eat up a significant amount of your time without you realizing it.

Would you like to buy your little girl a costume that suggests that she has gone through puberty and is attempting to attract the sexual attention of adult men?  Who wouldn’t!?  Not an ounce of subtlety here:

At Fail Blog, sent in by Laura.

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.

“Just another example of how children are placed into gender roles,” writes Belinda, who sent in this page from an Australian Kmart catalog:

The girls are, of course, dressed in “pretty” costumes, such as a fairy, a ballerina, or a ladybug. Or they placed in a “domestic” role, such as the cook. The boys however get to be a pirate, a police officer, a doctor or a firefighter. Unsurprisingly, the boys are mainly dressed in costumes that are actually plausible career options, the girls however are placed in the domestic sphere or the realm of fantasy.

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.

Bemoaning how Halloween has turned into an opportunity/requirement for women and girls to dress sexy is nothing new.  The trend isn’t just about Halloween, however, it reflects an everyday expectation for women.  Women are expected to dress in ways that reveal their body and please a hypothetical male gaze daily.  Men just aren’t.

University of Akron sociology graduate student Will LeSuer took some great photographs illustrating the different expectations for men and women.  The same idea for a costume is sexualized when it’s a woman in it and not-at-all sexualized when it’s a man.  Notice, too, that the sizing is different.  The costumes for women come in three sizes, while the men’s is usually just one size.  This is because women are expected to wear clothes that reveal the shape of her body, so the exact size is more important.

You might have observed, also, that the costumes aren’t called “men’s” and “women’s.”  They’re all just “adult.”  So women could, if they wanted to, buy and wear the non-sexy version of the costume, and vice versa for men.   And we might imagine a woman doing that.  But would a guy do that?  Probably only as a joke (unless they’re in a queer-safe space).

This pattern — women can dress like men, but men don’t dress like women — suggests that there is, in fact, something demeaning, ridiculous, or subordinating about presenting oneself to the male gaze.  Most men feel stupid, gross, or vulnerable when they do it.  This isn’t just about conformity to different gendered expectations.  If it were just about difference women would feel equally weird dressing in men’s clothes.  Instead, when women adopt masculine ways of dressing and moving, they often feel empowered.

So, when men do femininity they feel ridiculous and when women do masculinity they feel awesome. This is what gender inequality looks like.

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.

At the intersection of the trivializing of horrific violence aimed at ethnic/religious groups and the pornification of American culture, comes this “Anne Skank” costume:

[APOLOGIES: We were asked to remove the photograph and complied.]

Yes that is, indeed, a woman dressed up like Anne Frank, the Jewish child who hid from the Nazis for two years, only to be discovered and moved to a concentration camp where she died from Typhus.  Her companions are dressed up like Nazi soldiers.  The Halloween revelers who made the choice to sexualize and laugh at this 15-year-old victim of the holocaust are graduate students in a Creative Writing program.

UPDATE: Comments thread closed.

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.