media

Cross-posted at OWNI.

Something has been nagging me about the Representative Weiner (D-NY) sexting scandal: how would this story would play out differently had the sexting-congressperson been female? I wrote earlier about how differently “sexy” pictures of male and female political candidates are handled.

When Krystal Ball ran for congress, images of a past Halloween party became some of the most Google’d images in the world, unlike male politicians running for office at the same time who were also involved in scandals about images of their past behaviors. The images of women in general, and, in this case, female politicians, become poured over, detailed, dissected, analyzed and obsessed upon to a far greater extent than what is occurring with Rep. Weiner. Yes, the images he sent are being shared on and offline, but had Weiner been female the images might be shown akin to the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction”: the media would scowl at the perversion while simultaneously showing them on a constant loop, dissecting every pixel in detail.

So let’s do quick Google Image searches for Krystal Ball and Anthony Weiner. (In these screenshots I am logged out of Google and “SafeSearch” is off, however, neither of those factors influenced the results much).

Krystal Ball’s results are dominated by the images that caused scandal. You have to scroll through pages of images in Weiner’s results to find the “offending” images. Given that Google’s resultsare based in part on popularity and website inter-linking, we have to wonder how Weiner’s post-scandal online presence would be different had he been female. [We should note that Weiner had a larger online presence before the scandal than did Ball. However, many of the top images in the search are post-scandal, so that is not a complete explanation for the discrepancy]. In fact, it is easier to find women showing skin in Weiner’s results than the so-called “lewd” images themselves.

Even Sarah Palin, who has never tweeted “lewd” photos of herself to all of the Internet, has search results more focused on her body than does Weiner.

Michel Foucault noted that sexual repression is closely related with sexual obsession; and the obsessively prying “gaze” is really the regulation and controlling of ourselves and our sex. The relative lack of obsession of the images in this scandal strikes me as evidence of the weaker regulation of the male body and men’s sex.

How else would this scandal play out differently had Rep. Weiner been female?

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Please welcome guest blogger Nathan Jurgenson.  Jurgenson is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Maryland and co-edits the Cyborgology blog.

Michael M. sent in a news segment from WBTV, a CBS affiliate, about the video game Portal 2. The segment focuses on a scene in which a character is ridiculed for being adopted, with another character saying kids who were adopted suffer from a “lack of parents.” In addition, the game includes the line, “Alright, fatty. Adopted fatty. Fatty, fatty no parents” (at 55 seconds in). The news crew expresses dismay as they introduce the segment (and again at the end), which features a father who was upset when his family, including his adopted daughter, encountered the scene:

What struck Michael was the framing of this story by the news outlet, and the focus on ridiculing adopted children while entirely ignoring the use of “fatty” as a put-down, implying that insults based on body size aren’t problematic or hurtful. As Michael puts it,

In a story entirely about insensitivity, this statement, which is even subtitled on screen, seems to be parsed to only be an insult to the adopted. For some reason the weight-based [insult] is completely ignored…What makes one outrageous and another not even cause us to blink?

We have posted in the past about the controversy surrounding the casting of the movie The Last Airbender. Many fans of the original series were upset that Asian characters were recast as White, with the main cast initially containing no non-White characters at all. This fits in with a more general lack of Asian main characters in Hollywood.

More recently, a different controversy about race and casting emerged when African American British actor Idris Elba was cast as the Norse god Heimdall in Thor, though this character was always White in the comic book series.

Anthony N. sent in a video by MovieBob at The Escapist that discusses concerns over race in casting Thor and why recasting a White character with a non-White actor doesn’t have the same implications as recasting a non-White character with a White actor does:

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Discussing media attention to Donald Trump, Jay Smooth (Ill Doctrine) describes what sociologists call agenda setting.  The phrase refers to the media’s ability to shape what we think about (and what we don’t think about), if not what to think about it.  That is, the media can’t necessarily tell us what to think, but it can certainly keep some issues on-the-agenda while leaving others invisible to us.

In this case, Smooth points out, the media’s coverage of Trump led to public interest in him; that public interest waned as soon as Trump was out of the news.

See also Agenda Setting and Obama’s Socialist Leanings and Media Reaction to Janet Jackson’s “Wardrobe Malfunction.”

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.

I know a Googler.  Never to let a fleeting inquiry go unGoogled, he recently wondered who was the voice of Hulu.  It turns out to be a man named Dave Fennoy.  Fennoy is a wildly successful voice actor, doing work for McDonalds, KFC, and Chrysler.  He’s also black.  In the 1-1/2 minute clip below, he talks about being teased as a kid for “talk[ing] like a white boy” and how this caused him “identity problems.”  Later he attended Howard University, where he re-thought what it meant to be black, rejecting the idea that he was supposed to talk in any which way. He doesn’t talk about how his success in The Industry (as we call it in Los Angeles) is related to his sound, though I wish he had:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Tim, Cindy S., and Kenny V. sent in an interesting story. The Brooklyn-based newspaper Der Tzitung, which targets the Ultra Orthodox Jewish community, published copies of the now-famous photo of President Obama and his staff in the Situation Room during the Navy SEALs operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Here’s the original (via the New York Daily News):

However, the version of the photo that ran in Der Tzitung had been photoshopped to remove the two women in the room, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (initially posted at Failed Messiah):

We’ve seen this before. Usually the argument for deleting women or girls from photos is that they are sexually suggestive or show women interacting with men in ways that are considered inappropriate by the Ultra Orthodox. Whether that’s the case here, or whether it was discomfort showing a woman in a position of significant political power, the effect is to rewrite history to erase the role of women in political decision-making.

UPDATE: While this post led to a lot of interesting discussions, some individuals also posted problematic and offensive comments about the Orthodox community. Due to a family emergency I was overwhelmed and distracted and did not monitor the comments closely at the time, and thus those comments have remained up for the past week. I am going to delete some offensive or inappropriate comments, but I apologize that they were left up for so long without any response from me.

That said, a lot of readers made really great comments, both about how we go about being culturally respectful/sensitive but also thinking through issues such as public representation, and that the Orthodox Jewish community is quite diverse and that this newspaper, and the policies it espouses, shouldn’t be taken as indicative of the behavior or attitudes of Orthodox Jews more broadly.

Andrew Slater sent in an interesting example of the mocking of rap music.  The mocking occurs in a re-make of Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” about the excitement of going on out Friday night.  Black’s low-budget music video went viral, shooting her into stardom, or at least celebrity.  The song is a standard teeny-bop pop song, complete with rap interlude.

The re-make, produced by the Community Christian Church, features a so-called “Sadie Black” singing about “Sunday” instead of Friday, and extolling the pleasures of worship. Slater noticed, however, that the entire re-make is more-or-less truthful to the original, except for the rap section. In the re-make, “BP” and “Master E” appear to make fun of rappers.  It’s a very different effect when compared to the straightforward mimickry of Sadie B.

Screen shots (original and re-make respectively):

Videos (rap sections starts at 2:30 and, um, 2:30 respectively):

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 Jezebel.

According to The Guttmacher institute, 90% of all abortions occur in the first trimester. According to WebMD, a 12-week old fetus is 2.5 inches long and the typical woman will have gained three to five pounds. Most of these women’s pregnancies are essentially undetectable to an observer.

Most news stories about abortion, however, illustrate their article with an image of a woman with an unambiguously pregnant belly.  The disconnect between the reality (90% of abortions occur in the 1st trimester) and the imagery (of women who are in their 3rd) implies that many abortions are occurring much later than they are.

A reader, Richard, brought our attention to a tumblr blog highlighting this mis-illustration. Preggobelly collects screenshots of abortion stories illustrated by heavily pregnant bellies. Here is a sample:

For another fascinating post on imagery and abortion, see our post on the initiation of fetus imagery.

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.