history

Today marks a celebration of the momentous 1963 march on Washington for Civil Rights.  We’ve linked to a few Civil Rights movement-related posts here and have embedded Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech below.

• “The Protest Psychosis”: How African American Civil Rights Activism Was Framed as Mental Illness
• African American Travel During Jim Crow Segregation
• “Black Power” in Playboy and “Slack Power” in an Ad for Pants
• Media Coverage of Occupy Wall Street: Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement
• “I Am a Man”: Black Men’s Claims to Humanity
• How the Kindness of a Black Man Changed the Mind of a KKK Kingpin

Let us remember:

Sociology major, by the way.

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.

Pink, as we all know, is all about gender – it’s for girls.  And sissies.

The University of Iowa… for decades has painted the locker room used by opponents pink to put them “in a passive mood” with a “sissy color,” in the words of a former head football coach, Hayden Fry.

That’s from Frank Bruni’s NY Times op-ed today.  But not all cultures link pink to femininity.  The Palermo soccer team wears pink uniforms as do other European teams.  In the U.S., it was only in the 1950s that pink took on its “boys keep out” message, and even then, a charcoal gray suit was often matched with a pink shirt or necktie.  In The Great Gatsby, set in 1922, Nick writes of Gatsby:

His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before.

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In the previous chapter, Tom Buchanan says that he has been “making a small investigation” of Gatsby’s past.

“And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully.

“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

Gatsby’s choice of suit colors reveals not his sexuality but his class origins.  An educated, upper-class gentleman – an Oxford man – would not wear a pink suit.  Anna Broadway cites this passage in her Atlantic article and adds,

According to an interview with the costume designer for Baz Luhrmann’s recent film, the color had working-class connotations.

Today, that class connotation is reversed.  It’s the preppie type men at the country club who are wearing pink shirts or even, on the golf course, pants.   That trend may be reinforced by something entirely fortuitous – a name.  The upscale fashion designer Thomas Pink, perhaps because of his name, does not shy away from pink as a color for men’s clothes.

Do you agree that pink still has class connotations?  And how do they intersect with the color’s gendered meaning today?

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

When the airline industry first tried to go commercial after World War I, it needed to convince skeptical customers that air travel was safe.  One strategy was to make passengers feel that the entire crew was able and willing to see to their safety. This included the stewards, the all-male precursors to the stewardess. But which men to hire?

The default employee should have been an African American.  Ocean liners and train cars, air travel’s main competitors and the model on which they built their business, largely employed Black porters and stewards.  But the airlines believed that the overwhelmingly White passengers would not have felt comfortable placing their lives in the hands of Black men.  So they hired White men instead.  Kathleen Barry, who discusses this in her book Femininity in Flight, explains:

Equanimity on aircraft circa 1930 was a tall order for anyone, but stereotypes dictated that it would most likely come from white male attendants. With uniforms that echoed the naval-style garb of pilots, stewards reassured passengers that the white men in the cabin as well as the cockpit were competent and in control.

If stewards were so capable and appreciated, why not offer one’s appreciation in cash?  The answer is, in short, because tips were for Black people.  Black porters on trains and boats were tipped as a matter of course but, according to Barry, tipping a White person would have been equivalent to an insult. A journalist, writing in 1902, captured the thinking of the time when he expressed shock and dismay that “any native-born American could consent” to accepting a tip.  “Tips go with servility,” he said. Accepting one was equivalent to affirming “I am less than you.” This interpretation of the meaning of a gratuity, alongside airlines’ need to inspire confidence and simple racism, is why we don’t tip flight attendants today.

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.

We all know — because we are being constantly reminded — that we are, collectively, getting fat.  Americans are at the forefront of the trend, but it is a transnational one. Apparently, it is also transspecies: pets, wild animals, and laboratory animals are also gaining weight.  Here’s some country-level data from the New York Times:

In an excellent review of the existing literature, David Berreby at Aeon skewers the idea that a simple, victim-blaming “calories in, calories out” model can explain this extraordinary transnational, transspecies rise in overweight and obese individuals.  I won’t summarize his argument here, except to simply list the casual contenders for which there is good evidence:

• Sleeplessness
• Stress
• Viruses
• Bacteria
• Industrial chemicals
• Heavy metals
• Electric lights
• Air conditioning
• Famine in previous generations

If you ever want to have an opinion on fat again, read Berreby now.

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 month I enjoyed a lovely week with my mother and step-father, during which we drove down to Key West, FL.  Flipping through the tourist book in the hotel, I was surprised to see this:

I’ve been writing for Sociological Image for over six years now and, as a result, it takes a lot to shock me.  Well, you got me, Ripley’s!  I did not know that we were still marketing racial or ethnic others as “oddities.”  At least not this blatantly.

The women who have historically practiced this neck lengthening illusion (what you are seeing is a depressed collar bone, not a longer neck) are a Burmese ethnic minority called Kayan or Padaung.  As late as the early 1900s, Europeans and Americans were kidnapping “Giraffe-necked women” and forcing them to be exhibits in zoos and circuses.  Promotional materials from that era look similar. Here’s an example:

By the way, Kayan women weren’t the only humans kept in zoos.

I knew that Westerners still traveled to the communities where Kayan people live to see them “in their natural habitat” (sarcasm) and I’ve argued previously that this is a case of racial objectification.  I had no idea, however, that we still featured them as grotesque curiosities.  Ripley’s Believe It or Not!: “Proudly freaking out families for over 90 years.” Taking that tradition thing really seriously, I guess.

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.

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The Smurfs, originating as they did in mid-century Europe, exhibit the quaint sexism in which boys or men are generic people – with their unique qualities and abilities – while girls and women are primarily identified by their femininity. The sequel doesn’t upend the premise of Smurfette.

In the original graphic novels, Smurfette (or La Schtroumpfette in French) was the creation of the evil Gargamel, who made her to sow chaos among the all-male Smurf society. His recipe for femininity included coquetry, crocodile tears, lies, gluttony, pride, envy, sentimentality, and cunning.

In the Smurfs 2, there are a lot of Smurfs. And they all have names based on their unique qualities. According to the cast list, the male ones are Papa, Grouchy, Clumsy, Vanity, Narrator, Brainy, Handy, Gutsy, Hefty, Panicky, Farmer, Greedy, Party Planner, Jokey, Smooth, Baker, Passive-Aggressive, Clueless, Social, and Crazy. And the female one is Smurfette–because being female is enough for her. There is no boy Smurf whose identifying quality is his gender, of course, because that would seem hopelessly limited and boring as a character.

Here are the Smurf characters McDonald’s is using for their Happy Meals:

When you buy a Happy Meal at McDonald’s, the cashier asks if it’s for a boy or a girl. In my experience, which is admittedly limited to my daughters, girls get Smurfette. I guess boys get any of the others.

The Way It’s Never Been

Identifying male characters by their non-gender qualities and females by their femininity is just one part of the broader pattern of gender differentiation, or what you might call gendering.

There are two common misconceptions about gendering children. One is that it has always been this way – with boys and girls so different naturally that all products and parenting practices have always differentiated them. This is easily disproved in the history of clothing, which shows that American parents mostly dressed their boys and girls the same a century ago. In fact, boys and girls were often indistinguishable, as evident in this 1905 Ladies’ Home Journal contest in which readers were asked to guess the sex of the babies (no one got them all right):

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The other common perception is that our culture is actually eliminating gender distinctions, as feminism tears down the natural differences that make gender work. In the anti-feminist dystopian mind, this amounts to feminizing boys and men. This perspective gained momentum during the three decades after 1960, when women entered previously male-dominated occupations in large numbers (a movement that has largely stalled).

However, despite some barrier-crossing, we do more to gender-differentiate now than we did during the heyday of the 1970s unisex fashion craze (the subject of Jo Paoletti’s forthcoming book, Sex and Unisex). On her Tumblr, Paoletti has a great collection of unisex advertising, such as this 1975 Garanimals clothing ad, which would be unthinkable for a major clothier today:

And these clothing catalog images from 1972 (left) and 1974 (right):

Today, the genders are not so easily interchangeable. Quick check: Google image search for “girls clothes” (left) vs. “boys clothes” (right):

Today, a blockbuster children’s movie can invoke 50-year-old gender stereotypes with little fear of a powerful feminist backlash. In fact, even the words “sexism” and “sexist,” which rose to prominence in the 1970s and peaked in the 1990s, have once again become less common than, say, the word “bacon”:

And the gender differentiation of childhood is perhaps stronger than it has ever been. Not all differences are bad, of course. But what Katha Pollitt called “the Smurfette principle” — in which “boys are the norm, girls the variation” — is not a difference between equals.

Cross-posted at The Atlantic and Family Inequality. 

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.

In survey questions, the result you get might depend on the choices you offer.

An article at The Atlantic explains “Why Americans All Believe They’re Middle Class.”  But is that what we all believe?  The author, Anat Shenker-Osorio, started with from these figure from a September 2012 Pew report.

Only 8-9% of Americans put themselves in the lower or upper class.  The other 91% say that they are “middle class,” some with a modifier (upper or lower), some without.  Shenker-Osorio continues:

Researching how people’s unconscious assumptions affect their perception of economic issues, I explored the linguistic dynamics behind the term “middle class,” especially in comparison to other economic groupings.

That would be fine, except that both she and Pew made one huge omission.  The Pew survey didn’t include “working class” as an option.  Out of sight, out of unconscious assumptions.

Language and Surveys

How big an omission is this?  Since 1972, the GSS has asked a similar question to tap “subjective social class” (i.e., what class people think they are regardless of their objective circumstances).  But the GSS includes “working” along with the upper, middle, and lower.

Like the Pew survey, the GSS finds less than 10% putting themselves in the upper or lower class.  But for the past forty years, the remaining nine-tenths of the population have been evenly split between “working” and “middle.”

Shenker-Osorio’s linguistic analysis runs into other data conflicts.  It’s not always easy to know what Americans mean by upper, lower, or middle class because:

Americans are relatively skittish about mentioning class. Contrasting databases of text from U.S. and UK sources, we find that Brits use “upper class” and “lower class” more readily; we prefer “wealthy” and “poor.”

But another database, the books in Google nGrams, shows something much different.

Contrasting Data

I constructed a ratio of American to British for the terms “upper class” and “lower class.”  A ratio of more than 100% means that the term appeared more frequently in American books.

Ratio for “upper class”:

Ratio for “lower class”:

In general, since 1900, US and UK books used these terms at about the same frequency.  But from 1955-1965, the US heard a crescendo in class talk.  By 1965, US books mentioned the “lower class” four times as often as did UK books.  Since then class talk in the US declined as rapidly as it had increased. (For some reason, Shenker-Osorio was unaware of my earlier post on these matters.)

The real US-UK difference is in “working class,” a term that Shenker-Osorio ignores. Since 1935, it has appeared less frequently in US books.  For the last 30 years, British books have mentioned the working class twice as often.

Ratio for “working class”:

It may be that the databases Shenker-Osorio used are better than nGrams, and it’s frustrating to find different sources of data pointing in different directions.  More important, we still don’t know what people mean when they say they are middle class.  Shenker-Osorio sees it as a category of exclusion.  The images we have of upper and lower are so extreme as to apply to almost nobody.

Not finding popular depictions of wealth and poverty similar to our own lived experiences, we determine we must be whatever’s left over.

True perhaps, but it tells only what people think middle class is not. I’m not familiar with the research on subjective social class, but it seems that we still don’t know what people think “middle class” actually is.  Nor do we know what they have in mind when they say they are working class.  I have my own hunches, but I will leave them for a later post.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

Here and there the media becomes interested in the sexualization of little girls and, when they do, I often get a call from a reporter or two.  I’ve yet to see any of them pick up on what I think is the really interesting story.  They want to talk about child models, little girls in beauty pageants, and the transitional tween years for Disney star prodigies, but I always want to add into the mix the infantilization of adult women.

The sexualization of girls and the infantilization of adult women are two sides of the same coin.  They both tell us that we should find youth, inexperience, and naivete sexy in women, but not in men.  This reinforces a power and status difference between men and women, where vulnerability, weakness, and dependency and their opposites are gendered traits: desirable in one sex but not the other.

Now, thanks to @BonneZ, I know that this has something interesting to do with Mickey Mouse.

The original Mouse, Stephen Jay Gould has observed, was a kind of nasty character.  But, as he has evolved into the “cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom,” he has appeared increasingly childlike. This six figures below indicate Mickey’s evolution over time:

Childlike features, Gould argues, inspire a need to nurture: “When we see a living creature with babyish features,” he writes, “we feel an automatic surge of disarming tenderness.”   Allison Guy observes that we see a similar trend in recent toy makeovers — larger eyes, bigger heads, fatter stumpier limbs — but we see this primarily in toys aimed at infants and girls, not boys:

Guy interprets this trend as the “result of a cultural imperative for women to embody both the cute and the sexual.”  So, women don “cute” clothes with colorful patterns associated with children and wear “flippy skirts” and “baby doll” t-shirts. They wear eyeliner to give the illusion of the large eyes of childhood, foundation to hide the marks of aging on the face, and pink on their cheeks to mimic the blush of youth.  They are taught these imperatives from an early age.

What does it mean that feminine beauty is conflated with youthfulness, but masculine beauty is not — that we want women to be both cute and sexual?  It means that we feel comfortable with women who seem helpless and require taking care of, perhaps we even encourage or demand these traits from women.  Perhaps these childlike characteristics are most comforting in women who are, in fact, the least needy; I submit that we are more accepting of powerful women when they perform girlish beauty.  When they don’t, they are often perceived as threatening or unlikable.

So, yes, the sexualization of girls is interesting — and no doubt it’s no good for girls and likely contributes to older men’s sexual interest in young women — but it’s not just about sexualizing kids early.  It’s about infantilizing adult women, too, as a way to remind women of their prescribed social position relative to men.

Cross-posted at Jezebel and Pacific Standard.

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.