prejudice/discrimination

Lately we’ve seen a number of instances in which men are portrayed as babies.  We saw it in a Jack in the Box commercial featuring men being pushed around in a stroller, in the recent advertising for the movie Life as We Know It, and now Australian Ikea has opened Manland, a “day care” for men, a place where women can drop off their husbands while they shop. Thanks to Andri, a brand new student of mine, and readers YetAnotherGirl, Laura E., and LM for sending it in.

The idea that men are like babies is pretty damn obnoxious and should be offensive on the face of it (see especially the Jack in the Box commercial). But this is more insidiously problematic even than that.  It tells women that they can’t expect men to be grown ups.  And if men can’t be grown ups, they we certainly can’t expect them to do their share of the dishes or the hard work of raising families or, for that matter, be a true and equal emotional partner.

We see a similar pattern of insulting men in a way that undermines women  in the new “mediocre man” genre.  As I’ve written elsewhere, the mediocre man (think Judd Apatow movies and Hard Lemonade commercials):

…is a self-deprecating character who undermines idealized masculinity by being likeable despite being decidedly non-ideal…  The viewers are meant to identify with the mediocre men, who revel in each others’ company, happy to be dudes free from the clutches of the women in their lives, even if they aren’t sleeping with supermodels.  The mediocre man may be kind of a loser, indeed, but he can thank God he’s a man.

In both the man-as-child and the mediocre man tropes, then, the portrayals manage to simultaneously mock guys and support patriarchy. Pretty amazing.

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.

As of today, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, the U.S. policy that allowed gays and lesbians to serve in the military only as long as they kept their sexual orientation a secret, is officially over. In honor of this milestone, here’s the official letter from top Army commanders to soldiers announcing the end of the policy:

Via Joe. My. God.

NPR posted interviews with two men who worked hard for repeal, and it’s worth a read.

While America has taken great steps in recent decades toward gender equality, this progress seems lacking in politics. No elected legislative body in the U.S. has ever come close to being half female—the proportion we would expect if it were truly representative of the populace. R.W. Connell argues patriarchy is replicated and reinforced partially through our individual gender practices that cumulatively make social institutions operate.  In daily life, all men and women are socially pressured to embody the gender traits prescribed for their sex.

Kathleen Hall Jameson argues the ways we judge others’ masculine and feminine selves creates a double bind dilemma for women in leadership; a problem that is especially salient in politics, where winning is contingent upon candidates being both personally liked and thought of as competent leaders.  Men have no problem being respected both personally and as leaders because acting strong, confident, and in-charge is expected of both males and authority figures.  However, when women present themselves as leaders by acting dominant, they are likely to be judged as overly harsh, or even “bitchy.”  Yet when women act feminine, they are often judged as unfit for authority because they lack leadership qualities.  In electoral politics, it is very difficult for women to walk the tightrope between being a competent leader and also connecting with voters personally.

We can see the double-bind at work in Saturday Night Live’s now famous, or infamous, parodies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin during the 2008 Presidential campaigns.  Tina Fey’s Grammy-winning depiction of Sarah Palin exaggerates femininity, often portraying the former Alaska governor as if she is competing in a beauty pageant.  Amy Poehler’s masculine portrayal of Hillary Clinton as overly-aggressive, combative, and filled with anger exemplifies the other side of the double bind dilemma.  One skit bringing these characters together to speak out against sexism in the campaign is especially revealing:

Fey presents Palin as accommodating, saying “I was so excited when I was told Senator Clinton and I would be addressing you tonight,” to which Poehler-as-Clinton uncooperatively says, “I was told I would be addressing you alone.” Similarly, a capitulating Palin says “Hillary and I don’t agree on everything,” to which Clinton combats “we don’t agree on anything.” Later in the skit, Poehler-as-Clinton takes firm policy stances while Fey-as-Palin gives ‘pageant’ answers. After Clinton speaks out against the Bush Doctrine, Fey as Palin claims “I don’t know what that is.” Clinton says “I believe diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy;” Palin responds “and I can see Russia from my house.” In the SNL skit, Palin tells political pundits to quit using words “that diminish us like pretty, attractive, beautiful …” while Clinton interrupts, “harpy, shrew, boner-shrinker.” Throughout the skit Clinton becomes increasingly agitated and then rips apart the podium in anger. Poehler’s masculine portrayal becomes literal when she says “I invite the media to grow a pair, and if you can’t, I will lend you mine.”

The overly-effeminate portrayal of Palin reflects one side of the double-bind where many people judge feminine women as lacking the appropriate characteristics for leadership. On the other side of the double-bind, the unfeminine portrayal of Clinton illustrates how women who act powerful and confident are subject to character attacks. However, because leadership qualities are expected of men, male politicians are not subject to this critique when they act like leaders. For example, Poehler as Clinton describes her “road to the White House” as “I scratched, and I clawed,”—words with negative connotations which would never be used to describe competitive men with ambition.

While political comedy depicting our leaders as inept has been a mainstay of our electoral process since our country’s founding; we should be cognizant that parodies of female politicians often draw upon very real aspects of gender that make it difficult for women to achieve positions of leadership.

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Jason Eastman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Coastal Carolina University who researches how culture and identity influence social inequalities.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s blog.

News media are comparing Hurricane Irene to Hurricane Katrina in ways that allow us to forget that Hurricane Katrina was a humanmade disaster, but in one way, these events are similar – prisoner evacuation. New Orleans officials chose not to evacuate 7,000 inmates, some of whom were trapped in flooded cells and later left on a bridge for days without food and water, as detailed in this post.  Officials in New York have made the same decision with Hurricane Irene.

Elizabeth Furth, a former student who has participated in rebuilding efforts in New Orleans, sent in this map showing that Rikers Island is not part of the City’s evacuation plan:

Riker’s Island is the unzoned white blob in this close up:

Mayor Bloomberg announced that Riker’s Island would not be evacuated at a recent press conference, despite the fact that the island is surrounded by areas with the second highest evacuation rating (Zone B).  Other New York islands on the map are in Zone A (mandatory evacuation) or Zone B, but Riker’s has no evacuating rating, perhaps because the Department of Corrections doesn’t have an evacuation plan.  According to the New York Times blog, “no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another.”

Solitary Watch reports that Rikers Island was built on landfill, which is especially vulnerable to disasters. Rikers Island may weather Hurricane Irene without incident, but this disaster has again revealed how prisoners are considered disposable in times of crisis.

Cross-posted, in Portuguese, at Petiscos de Sociologia.

Noam sent in a link to a website with a post featuring “beautiful” Chinese women who have been executed.  These women are apparently important not because of their sacrifice, or because of what they say about Chinese politics, but because they’re beautiful.  Non-beautiful women who have been executed apparently draw no interest.

Noam’s submission gave me a fantastic excuse to post a video of our very own Gwen Sharp giving a 4-1/2 minute lecture about a similar phenomenon, the Missing White Woman Syndrome (originally posted at the NSC School of Liberal Arts and Sciences; transcript after the jump).

She covers quite a bit of ground.  After introducing the concept, she discusses data on the disproportionate coverage of crimes against white women, and how this shapes perceptions of risk.  In fact, white women are among the least likely type of person to be victimized.  This graph, coincidentally sent in by Grace S., doesn’t break down the data by gender, but it shows a clear pattern by race.

The constant attention to white women’s vulnerability, even though it’s disproportionate, makes it seem as if they are especially likely to be a victim of violent crime.  The risk that women of color will be victimized, then, is underestimated and not taken as seriously as it should be.  Meanwhile, white women may confine themselves to safer-seeming leisure activities and occupational pursuits.

These patterns affirm the role of racism in news making — with violence against women of color apparently less newsworthy — and also shows that white women, though valorized, may self-curtail their lives out of fear that they are, accordingly, the most likely target of violence.

Follow Gwen on Twitter!

References:

Chiricos, T., S. Eschholz, & M. Gertz. (1997). Crime, news and fear of crime: toward an identification of audience effects. Social Problems 44(3), 342-357.

Lundman, R.J. (2003). The newsworthiness and selection bias in news about murder: comparative and relative effects of novelty and race and gender typifications on newspaper coverage of homicide. Sociological Forum, 18(3), 357-386.

Transcript after the jump:

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Every once in a while we here at SocImages pick a fight and a couple of years ago we sunk our teeth into satire and didn’t let go. Satirical humor is often used to expose prejudice and bigotry and it can be damn effective, as many viewers of The Colbert Report will testify.  But it’s also a risky strategy.  It makes fun of by doing; so, for example, it exposes racism by being extremely, over-the-top, no-one-will-ever-believe-we’re-serious racist. Except for… someone might think you’re being serious.  In fact, a significant proportion of political conservatives viewing The Colbert Report believe that he is conservative like them. They recognize that he’s trying to be funny, but they don’t think he’s joking.

In our effort to think more critically about satire, we covered Amy Sedaris’ hipster racism, Ellen DeGeneres’ CoverGirl commercial, a New Yorker cover depicting Obama as a Muslim, covers of the National Review featuring Bill Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor, and board games.  We also featured Jay Smooth’s commentary on Asher Roth using the phrase “nappy headed hos.”

Now Anita Sarkeesian, of Feminist Frequency, offers another illustration of how satire doesn’t always work the way progressives would like it to.  She takes on TV commercials, arguing that ironic racism and sexism is still racism and sexism. Ironic advertising, she argues, allows marketers to “…use all the racist, sexist, misogynist imagery they want, and simultaneously distance themselves from it with a little wink and a nod.”  You be the judge:

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 Atlantic recently posted an article by Conor Friedersdorf about the results of polls conducted by the Abu Dhabi branch of the Gallup organization, in cooperation with the U.S. branch, on the political attitudes of various religious groups in the U.S., particularly focusing on how Muslim Americans compare to other groups. The respondents were chosen as a subsample of respondents to ongoing Gallup telephone polling of hundreds of thousands of randomly-selected Americans each year. One major caveat: though Gallup reports that the overall sample is representative of the U.S. population as a whole, the response rate for the subsample of 2,482 individuals chosen to investigate these issues in depth was low: 21% for the first wave, 34% for the second (the methodology begins on p. 57 of the full report). The authors argue the data have been weighted to ensure representativeness, but the low response rates require caution.

One set of questions looked at attitudes about violence toward civilians, whether by military or non-military groups. As we see, Muslims were more likely than any other group to say targeting civilians is never justified:

But every group overwhelmingly said it is “never” justified for a non-military group to attack and kill civilians, though Friedersdorf points out that a not insignificant minority of Americans said that targeting civilians is at least somewhat justified — a proportion that might have been lower if the word “terrorism” had been used to describe targeting civilians, I suspect.

However, Americans are much more divided on whether the military is sometimes justified in targeting and killing civilians. Muslim Americans overwhelmingly reported it is “never” justified, but the only other group where over half of respondents held that view was for non-believers/agnostics. A solid majority of Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons, and a slim majority of Jews, said that it is “sometimes” justified for the military to target civilians:

The full report includes data on a wide variety of indicators of political engagement and perceptions of quality of life and the future. Consistent with the graphs above, Muslim Americans have less confidence in the military and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI than all other groups (with non-believers/agnostics have the second-lowest levels of confidence):

One major area of difference is in perceptions of why people in Muslim countries might have unfavorable views of the U.S. Muslims Americans were the only group where a majority (65%) thought that U.S. actions were mostly responsible for such unfavorable views. For every other group, the majority thought that misinformation distribution by media outlets or governments was the major cause of unfavorable views of the U.S.:

Muslim Americans were much more likely than all other groups to believe they have experienced racial or religious discrimination. Interestingly, Muslim Americans were the only group where women were less likely than men to say they are always treated with respect by members of other religious groups:

The report authors suggest this may be partially due to Muslim women who wear hijab being visibly recognizable as Muslims in a way that may lead to negative interactions or comments from others.

However, despite higher levels of perceived discrimination, overall, Muslim Americans had a generally optimistic view of their future in the U.S.; the majority of respondents said they will be thriving in the future, and they were slightly less likely than other groups to believe they will be struggling:

I’ve just posted a few items that stood out to me here. Check out the full report for a much fuller discussion of attitudes toward the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, perceptions about quality of life in the U.S., major sources of self-identification (religion, ethnicity, citizenship, etc.), whether Muslims are loyal Americans, and more.

Cross-posted at Ms. and Jezebel.

In a previous post I’ve argued against framing a preference for boy children as “culturally Asian.” New data from Gallup, sent in by Kari B., shows that this preference is alive and well among Americans, at least among young men.  While women are most likely to have no opinion and about equally likely to prefer a girl or boy, men are significantly more likely to prefer a boy.  This preference is strongest among younger men, but still present among men over 50.  Whereas women become increasingly indifferent with age and, secondarily, begin to prefer girls.

The editors at CNN note that, since children are mostly born to young people, and indifferent women may bend to men’s preferences, new sex selection technologies threaten to create a gender imbalance in the U.S.

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.