prejudice/discrimination

A post for Love Your Body Day.

Krista, Debbie, and Diego sent in the following commercial for FreeScore. It nicely illustrates our bias against men who don’t live up to idealized standards of masculinity.  That is, men who are short, bald, and soft.

Like a bad credit score, men who aren’t young and handsome are a total drag. Klutzy, a potential serial killer, afraid to stand up for himself… his pain is our last laugh.  Disgusting.

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.

Katrin sent in a link to a series of ads created by an organization called Stepping Stone Nova Scotia. Their mission is to advocate on behalf of, and offer resources and services to, prostitutes in the Maritime Provinces of Canada.

The ads, as you can see, depict quotes by friends or family members of prostitutes (“I’m proud of my tramp, raising two kids on her own”) which are intended to humanize sex workers; the bottom of each ad reads “Sex workers are brothers/daughters/mothers too.” They’re also intended to shock the reader into really thinking about prostitutes. The juxtaposition of words like “tramp” and “hooker” with the white middle-class faces of the speakers makes the viewer question our culture’s ease with using those terms, and forces us to see the person behind the prostitute.

Stepping Stone’s executive director, Rene Ross, points out that every time a prostitute is killed—sex workers have a mortality rate 40 times higher than the Canadian national average—media accounts emphasize that the victim was a prostitute, but not that she (or he) was also a mother, daughter, friend or, for example, animal lover. By thinking of sex workers only in terms of their stigmatized occupation, we don’t have to care about them as people.

In New Mexico, where I live, the remains of eleven women (and the unborn fetus of one) were found buried on a mesa outside of Albuquerque in 2009. The women had disappeared between 2003 and 2005, and most, according to police, were involved with drugs and/or prostitution. Why did it take the police so long to find the bodies of these women, and why do their murders still remain unsolved? Some observers have suggested that because the women were—or were alleged to be—prostitutes, there was less pressure to find them after they went missing, or to solve their murders once their bodies were found. As long as the victims were sex workers, then the non-sex worker public can feel safe in the knowledge that they are not at risk. We know that prostitution is dangerous, so it’s expected that some of them will die grisly deaths, and be buried like trash on a mesa outside of town.

I love the motivation behind the ads, and they do make me smile. I hope they have the effect that Stepping Stone intends—making people think of prostitutes as people, not trash. But they’re also funny, and I wonder if they won’t also have an unintended effect, of making prostitutes seem like a joke.

This week I watched the Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen. During the roast, most of the jokes dealt with his well-known history with drug use and prostitution, and “prostitute,” “hooker” and “whore” were used as punch lines in the majority of the jokes, and each “whore” reference incited additional laughter. Sure, many of the women that Sheen paid to have sex were doubtless “high class” call girls, paid well, and not living on the street. But we also know that at least some of these women, as well as the non-prostitute females in his life, were subject to violence and threats of violence. He is alleged to have beaten, shot, shoved, and thrown to the floor a number of women over the years, but because many of these women were sex workers (or porn stars, which is the next best thing), the women were “asking for it.”

Let’s hope that Stepping Stone’s campaign does some good, making us think about sex workers as people, rather than punch lines and faceless victims.

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Margo DeMello has a PhD in cultural anthropology and teaches anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology at Central New Mexico Community College. Her research areas include body modification and adornment and human-animal studies.

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In this ten-minute video, Feminist Frequency‘s Anita Sarkeesian does a great job of discussing the problem with “straw feminists,” overtly feminist characters who are made to look bitchy, ridiculous, or just plain wrong… even when they’re describing forms of gender inequality that really exist.  More, they’re used to suggest that feminism places men and women in opposition when, in fact, gendered expectations and institutions are oppressive to men as well.

By demonizing these characters, Sarkeesian concludes, the straw feminist leads real women to disassociate from feminism, even when they believe in the equal rights of men and women.

Transcript after the jump:

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Post under “No comment” by Sarah Richardson at Ms.:

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.

Affirmative action policies in higher education help mediate the real race-based disadvantages that some minorities face, above and beyond class-based disadvantages that are faced by people of color and whites alike.  They have a nefarious dark side, though; a dark side that causes even people who otherwise support affirmative action to question the approach to alleviating racial inequality.  They sometimes undermine the self-confidence of minorities admitted into college, as this PostSecret confession suggests:

College students often have a pretty poor understanding of admissions processes.  In the absence of any real information, it’s easy to let stereotypes and biases inform beliefs about how any individual student got into college.  A student of color, then, may be viewed as less-deserving of admission regardless of their grades, test scores, and extra-curricular activities.

More perniciously, they may question their own qualifications for admission, even when they have significantly out-performed their white peers.

A simple message to college students of color, for what it’s worth:

Your institution accepted you because they thought you could succeed.  Period.  You belong in college.

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.

Eve P. and Will LeS. suggested that we write about the window decals that have popped up on the back windows of cars in the last couple years.  The decals supposedly list the members of the car owner’s immediate family, sometimes including pets.  They also, though, tend to reproduce some interesting ideas about families.  Here’s what Eve had to say:

• The figures are almost always placed on the left side of the car, so that the figures (usually placed from tallest to shortest) strongly give the impression of a visual hierarchy or ranking.
• A “dad” figure is first in line, before a “mom” figure, and the adult figures come before the child figures (boy children before girl children, unless the boy is younger child), and the child figures come before any animal figures…
• This ranking seems to suggest that men take precedence over women, adults take precedence over children, and all humans take precedence over animals.
• I don’t think I’ve ever seen a two woman or two man setup (or any other set of adults besides one man and one woman)…
• The “dad” figure is taller than the “mom” figure…

So the stickers tend to reproduce the normalness of (1) being paired up with (2) someone of the other sex, (3) having children, (4) a gender hierarchy, and (5) the imperative that men be taller than 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.

Dmitriy T.M. and Laura McD. sent in this awesome one-minute clip of 1950s commercials in which men insult their wives’ coffee. There’s something just stunning in the nature of the relationships portrayed. The men seem so entitled to their wives’ service, and so disdainful of her genuine efforts to please him. It’s sad.

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 chart below summarizes the position on 12 rights for gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans held by Barack Obama and 12 candidates for the Republican Presidential Election:

Data collected by Ned Flaherty for Marriage Equality USA.

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.