history

Found via Digg. Though I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the letter (found here), it is rather interesting.

Text:

Miss Mary T. Ford
Searcy,
Arkansas

Dear Miss Ford,

Your letter of recent date has been received in the Inking and Painting Department for reply.

Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is performed entirely by young men. For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.

The only work open to women consists of tracing the characters on clear celluloid sheets with India ink and filling in the tracings on the reverse side with paint according to the directions.

In order to apply for a position as “Inker” or “Painter” it is necessary that one appear at the Studio, bringing samples of pen and ink and water color work. It would not be advisable to come to Hollywood with the above specifically in view, as there are really very few openings in comparison with the number of girls who apply.

Yours very truly,

WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS, LTD.

Fabian D. S. sent us this screenshot from a men’s health email he gets:

Along the bottom it reads: “Get the sex you deserve.”

The phrase could be read: “Get the SEX you deserve.”  That is, get sex.  Or it could be read: “Get THE SEX you deserve.”  That is, get awesome mindblowing sex.   The context reveals that it’s the latter meaning and I’ve seen this sentiment (but not the former) in material aimed at women, too.  I wonder when, in American history, we decided we were entitled to awesome sex.  I can’t imagine that pioneer husbands and wives, after spending all day trying to not to die (whether it be that day or that winter), and laying lying on a straw mattress next to their six children in their freezing/sweaty one-room home, felt pouty if their sex wasn’t mindblowing.  The entitlement to great sex, then, must have come later (at least to the regular folk).  I would bet it had something to do with capitalism and the commodification of pleasure, generally, and sex, specifically.  After all, how do you get the sex you deserve?  Well, you buy the right products: whether that be, for example, diet- and exercise-related products, cosmetic surgery, or sex toys.  Ariel Levy said it very well (watch the 2nd video down here especially starting at 1:22… but all the clips are great).

Freud distinguished between a “mature” (vaginal) and “immature” (clitoral) orgasm, telling women that to require clitoral stimulation for orgasm was a psychological problem. Contesting this, in 1970 Anne Koedt wrote The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.  She explains:

Frigidity has generally been defined by men as the failure of women to have vaginal orgasms. Actually the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm. It is the clitoris which is the center of sexual sensitivity and which is the female equivalent of the penis… Rather than tracing female frigidity to the false assumptions about female anatomy, our “experts” have declared frigidity a psychological problem of women.

Indeed, studies show that about 1/3rd of women regularly reach orgasm during penile-vaginal sex.  The rest (that is, the majority) require more direct clitoral stimulation.  Koedt goes on (my emphasis):

All this leads to some interesting questions about conventional sex and our role in it. Men have orgasms essentially by friction with the vagina, not the clitoral area, which is external and not able to cause friction the way penetration does. Women have thus been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men; our own biology has not been properly analyzed. Instead, we are fed the myth of the liberated woman and her vaginal orgasm – an orgasm which in fact does not exist.

Koedt’s article was highly influential and rejecting the notion of the “vaginal orgasm” (both anatomically and functionally) was part of second wave feminism. 

Still, the vaginal orgasm keeps coming back.  During the ’90s, it came back in the form of the G-spot.  You, too, can have a vaginal orgasm if you can just find that totally-orgasmic-pleasure-spot-rich-in-blood-vessels-and-nerve-endings-that-makes-for-wildly-amazing-orgasms-with-ejaculation that you, strangely, never knew was there!  (See what Betty Dodson has to say about the g-spot here.)

Most recently, the vaginal orgasm has come back in the form of orgasmic birth.  The idea is that women can, if they really want to, have an orgasm (or orgasms) during childbirth. 

Now, I don’t want to argue that women never have orgasms from penile-vaginal intercourse.  They do.  I also don’t care to debate whether a g-spot exists.  And I am certainly not going to look a mother in the face and tell her she did not have an orgasm during childbirth.  I am sure some women do.  (And, anyway, I get a kick out of thinking about such a mother telling her teenager the story of his birth, so I’m going to keep believing it is true).

Anyway, what I do want to do is discuss how the video below uses the idea of orgasmic birth to reinscribe the myth of the vaginal orgasm.  The reporter says that orgasmic birth is just “basic science” and then turns to interview an M.D.  The M.D. uses the vaginal orgasm as scientific evidence for the possibility of orgasmic birth.  She says: obviously a baby would cause an orgasm when it comes out the vagina, since a penis causes an orgasm when it goes into the vagina.  But, of course, it usually doesn’t.  That last part isn’t “basic science,” it’s ideology (as Koedt so nicely points out).

I wonder how many women now feel doubly bad.  Not only can they not have orgasms from penile-vaginal intercourse, they also experienced pain during childbirth!  Bad ladies!  Watch the whole 8-minute clip or start at 3:28 to see the interview with the M.D.:

Via Jezebel.

Naama Nagar sent in these images from a “booklet that was intended to assist male bosses in supervising their new female employees at RCA plants,” according to the National Archives, Southeast Region (found via Michael Zilberman’s history blog; sorry it’s in Hebrew):

Text:

When you supervise a woman…Make clear her part in the process or product on which she works. * Allow for her lack of familiarity with machine processes. * See that her working set-up is comfortable, safe and convenient. * Start her right by kindly and careful supervision. * Avoid horseplay or “kidding”; she may resent it. * Suggest rather than reprimand. * When she does a good job, tell her so. * Listen to and aid her in her work problems.

Text:

Finally–call on a trained woman counselor in your personnel department…to find out what women workers think and want. * To discover personal causes of poor work, absenteeism, turnover.  * To assist women workers in solving personal difficulties. * To interpret women’s attitudes and actions. * To assist in adjusting women to their jobs.

Text:

When you put a woman to work…Have a job breakdown for her job. * Consider her education, work experience and temperament in assigning her to that job. * Have the necessary equipment, tools and supplies ready for her. * Try out her capacity for and familiarity with the work. * Assign her to a shift in accordance with health, home obligations and transportation arrangements. * Place her in a group of workers with similar backgrounds and interests. * Inform her fully on health and safety rules, company policies, company objectives. * Be sure she knows the location of rest-rooms, lunch facilities, dispensaries. * Don’t change her shift too often and never without notice.

These are interesting from a gender perspective, of course, but they’re also sort of fascinating for what they tell us about changing assumptions about what the workplace is (or should be) like. While there were many problems with the World War II (and post-war) workplace, there was also a certain assumption that companies would take care of their employees to some degree in return for employees’ loyalty and hard work. This comes through in instructions such as “Assign her to a shift in accordance with health, home obligations and transportation work” and “Don’t change her shift too often and never without notice.” The idea is that workplaces, including factories, should think about their employees’ lives and how their work schedules fit in with their other obligations, as well as provide things like dispensaries. Now, I’m sure many companies didn’t actually meet these ideals, but this booklet sent out to managers at least acknowledges that they exist. Today, most workplaces don’t even pretend to aspire to such ideals. While some privileged white-collar workers may have options like flexible hours or working from home, many workers find that their hours and schedules change from week to week, making it difficult to arrange child care or work around other obligations. McDonald’s is well known for making workers sign out during slow periods during their shift to keep payroll down (workers are expected to be available, however, should business pick back up) and Wal-Mart has been sued for failing to pay overtime or for asking workers to work off the clock, again to reduce payroll costs.

So these might be useful for a discussion of work and what we expect from the worker-employer relationship. Is it simply a contractual financial exchange? Do workers and employers owe each other anything besides an hour of work and an hour of pay at the agreed-upon price? How have employers pushed concerns about schedule disruptions and payroll reductions off on workers, forcing them to accommodate the company’s needs?

Thanks, Naama!

Recently Lisa posted some photos of what resource extraction looks like. I thought I would show a different side of this phenomenon: what an oil bust looks like. I grew up in the Middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma. The area has been through two oil booms, one in the 1920s and one in the 60s through the 80s.

But with any energy boom eventually comes the energy bust. I took some photos I took showing what communities looks like if their economy is disproportionately based on oil and the oil companies leave, which were reproduced at Business Insider.

Oil wells that have never been installed sit around on empty lots, slowly rusting. Many oil wells that were in use at one time now sit motionless. Because of high oil prices in the last few years, some oil wells have been put back in production; it’s the first time since I was a kid that you can look across pastures and see many of the oil wells actually pumping. Pipes crisscross the landscape, often slowly tumbling downhill from lack of maintenance. When they get old and rusty enough they start breaking apart, leaving jagged edges that occasionally lead to trips to the doctor for a tetanus shot. An old storage tank, long past any usefulness, slowly rusts.

In an energy bust, real estate prices plummet. If there aren’t many other industries in the area, there’s no way to attract buyers, and houses flood the market as people move looking for work. Houses, many of them perfectly serviceable, slowly decay from lack of upkeep. Families that became wealthy from oil lose their fortunes. The house below was owned by a family that became wealthy from the 1920s oil boom. When that oil bust hit, they lost everything. Their house sits far out in the country and slowly crumbles. Downtowns die and the buildings sit empty and deteriorate over time. Towns don’t have enough children to run independent schools, so rural school districts consolidate. This school was sold off and a local resident told me that it has been, at various times, a bed and breakfast, internet cafe, and beer-only bar, between bouts of sitting empty.

Ponca City is centered around the Continental refinery plant. Continental was owned by Conoco until 1984. There used to be a significant Conoco presence in the town, and as with Bartlesville, it has faced hard times since the Conoco-Phillips headquarters moved to Houston. Some neighborhoods were polluted by the refinery, leading the company to buy out homeowners and tear down the houses (some owned by private individuals, others by the Ponca tribe). In one area where this occurred, the land is now a park. Local residents have heard that Conoco is planning to tear down a lot of its old administrative buildings so it doesn’t have to pay insurance or maintenance costs, meaning there will be even more large swaths of empty land scattered around the city.

There’s nothing exceptional about the experience of these communities. They simply represent a story played out in many towns as oil booms fade and corporations move their headquarters to larger cities. Now, as the Keystone XL pipeline project goes forward, many such communities gear up for their next ride on the energy roller coaster.

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

In case you thought the craze for sanitary or anti-bacterial products was new, here’s a Cremo cigar ad from the 1920s (found at the Microfilm Gallery) that scares consumers with the specter of cigars covered in “mites of malice”:

Text:

Just think! On the hands of a cigar-maker may lurk many different kinds of disease germs…crippling ‘mites of malice’ that you may draw into your mouth through hand-made cigars. To awaken men to this invisible danger…I want to tell the truth about Cremo–the only cigar whose purity I can truly certify. Every tobacco leaf entering the Cremo factory is scientifically sterilized by U.S. Government approved methods. Cremo is fit for you mouth, because it is not made in stuffy, dingy lofts and stores…but in air-flooded, sun-bathed, scientifically-clean factories. Not by antiquated methods…but by marvelous inventions that fold, wrap, and tip the cigars with sanitary metal fingers. This scientific, Cremo-method of manufacture guarantees you cigars of the same high health protection that you get in certified milk! What’s more…Cremo purity is quickly sealed in individual sanitary foil. Thus Cremo reaches your lips with a pleasure that you can trust!

What I like here is the total faith in technology and mass production. It’s safer! It’s innovative! It’s sanitary! It’s a striking contrast to the concerns often expressed about scientific innovations and their possible negative effects. It would also be a good example for talking about the way that perceptions of manufacturing methods have changed. In the 1920s, the idea of mass-produced cigars was exciting and modern. The fact that they were made with “metal fingers” was a selling point. Today, on the other hand, the techniques referred to in this ad as “antiquated” might be called “artisanal,” a word that connotes craftsmanship and quality. According to About.com,

The novice smoker may be tempted to start by trying those machine made brands sold in Drug Stores, such as Dutch Masters or El Producto. However, the aspiring connoisseur should consider spending a few more pennies and moving up to hand rolled cigars, which are sold online or at a local tobacconist.

Maybe someday we’ll think of soap that isn’t anti-bacterial as a high-quality, artisanal product.

Aaron B. sent in this 1947 video clip (found here), titled “Are You Popular?”:

Notice the caution to women: if you go “parking with all the boys,” you might think you’re popular, but you’ll ultimately find yourself ostracized and friendless. To be really popular, you need to be well-dressed, have the respect of girls at school, and carefully guard your reputation.

Thanks, Aaron!

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

In my post a few weeks back about stuff kids bring to college, I had a photo of a teddy bear lying atop a pile of belongings that included pink bed linens. Obviously, it belonged to a girl. (There was a purse in the picture, but even without it. . . .)

A couple of days later, Lisa at Sociological Images had a post reminding us that pink was once the color for boys. She linked to an article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian.

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: “If you like the colour note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”

Goldacre uses this bit of history to debunk the claim recently made by evolutionary psychologists that girls’ preference for pink was an outcome of evolution.

But what about the teddy bear? Isn’t there something feminine, a maternal instinct perhaps, that leads girls to keep these soft, childhood objects? It is only girls, right?

Wait, now I remember seeing NYC sanitation trucks with a teddy bear mounted on the grill like a bowsprit mermaid. And Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited who takes his bear Aloysius with him to Oxford.

Now there’s a DVD* about a Teddy bear snapshot exhibition by Canadian Ydessa Hendeles – thousands of photos from the early twentieth century of people posing with their bears. And it’s not just girls.

*The DVD is of a documentary film by Agnès Varda, who interviews the visitors to the exhibit.

Hat tip to Magda

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