In this 9-minute GRIT TV video, Kimberle Crenshaw, a law professor who coined the term “intersectionality,” discusses what’s wrong with a “color-blind” approach to politics:
Via Racialicious.
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.
In Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School C.J. Pascoe explains that taunts of “fag” aren’t really about homosexuality at all, but instead about policing the boundaries of masculinity:
For a pretty scary example, see our recent post in which Yankees fans ganged up on two teenage Red Sox fans using homophobic language.
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.
How ironic that so many women are telling men to “man up.” Enjoy:
Thanks Dmitriy T.M.
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.
Alex C. sent in an example of the belittling of men by men in the context of sport. Two teenager fans of the Red Sox found themselves verbally assaulted by Yankee fans for the sin of sitting amongst them. They surround the boys and sing, aggressively, to the tune of YMCA, after a mostly indecipherable lead in:
Why are you gay!
I saw you suckin’ it, D-I-C-K.
They have every size, you’re about to enjoy.
You can hang out with all the boys!
Why are you gay!
I saw you suckin’ some D-I-C-K.
It should be clear to everyone that this behavior represents a sick society. Team affiliation follows the rules of the minimal group paradigm: humans appear to be willing to form meaningful groups based on just about anything. Sports just happens to be an arena in which hypermasculinity is rewarded, even demanded. This makes it acceptable to be cruel to one another and makes it inevitable that that cruelty will take the form of hatred towards gay men (deemed masculine failures) in the form of homophobic slurs. It’s not even that they think the kids are gay, but calling them gay is good for a laugh and a great insult.
This is what it’s like to be a man under patriarchy: moments of inhumanity in which men accept and reproduce hatred against others and moments of victimization when other men aim that hatred at you.
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.
In a society in which masculinity is valued over femininity, like the U.S., the words “woman” and “girl” (not to mention words like “pussy,” “bitch,” and “cocksucker”) are effective slurs against both men and women. The flipside of this, of course, is that acting like a man is considered good. Acting like a man means being powerful, assertive, and effective. In masculinized arenas, like politics, both men and women are expected to act like men and being accused of being a woman is an effective slur against any politician.
Case in point: Dmitriy T.M. sent a 30-sec Politico video in which Sharron Angle tells Harry Reid to “man up.”
Politico reports five other instances in which candidates of both sexes delivered this chide to opponents. The fact that both men and women find this insult useful suggests that everyone has accepted sexism in politics and is willing to endorse and manipulate it to win. But, while the slur may help individual women and men win races, it ultimately affirms the idea that politics is no place for a woman.
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.
Michelle N. sent us a video by the ever-fabulous Sarah Haskins, this time on the use of scientific imagery and language in skin care commercials. Michelle says,
In these advertisements, complex, scientific-sounding language is used to obscure the actual simplicity of the beauty product and the “conditions” they aim to correct (body-aging anyone?)…Since when do we refer to lotion as a “serum”?
According to a story on NPR, Asian Americans are less likely to be unemployed than White, Black, and Hispanic Americans. But, when they do lose a job, they remain unemployed significantly longer.
Jobless Rates by Race:
Length of Unemployment:
Why might Asians have a more difficult time finding work? Kent Wong of UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education explains that their extended length of unemployment can be attributed to a confluence of two realities that make their situation unique. First,about 70% of Asian Americans are foreign born and these immigrants often live in ethnic enclaves (e.g., Chinatowns) that focus on a single industry. So long as there is work in that industry, Asians can find work. But, if that industry goes south, their limited network outside of those enclaves becomes a hindrance. Meanwhile, Asians (unlike Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks) tend to be segregated by language. Wong explains that, with about a dozen languages spoken widely in the Asian American community, pan-ethnic networks can be difficult to build and maintain. This leads to extra difficulty finding a new job:
If you have a Vietnamese employee working for a Vietnamese employer in Little Saigon in Orange County, that does not transfer to an ability to get a job in Koreatown in Los Angeles…
Both residential and linguistic segregation, then, contribute to long periods of unemployment for Asian Americans.
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.
Lest you think that rape culture is confined to simply excellent institutions of higher education, Salon reports that Yale students pledging the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity were marched by women’s dorms marching “no means yes, yes means anal.” Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory writes:
Now, DKE President Jordan Forney has been forced to apologize for this blatant sexual intimidation by calling it “a serious lapse in judgment by the fraternity and in very poor taste.” But this sort of hateful crap isn’t a “lapse in judgment.” It doesn’t innocently happen that you’re guiding male pledges by young women’s dorms in the dark of night chanting about anal rape. It isn’t a forehead-slapping slip-up, it’s a sign that you need major reprogramming as a human being.
UPDATE: Sociologist Michael Kimmel has a fantastic analysis of the second half of the chant:
This chant assumes that anal sex is not pleasurable for women; that if she says yes to intercourse, you have to go further to an activity that you experience as degrading to her, dominating to her, not pleasurable to her. This second chant is a necessary corollary to the first.
Thanks to feminism, women have claimed the ability to say both “no” and “yes.” Not only have women come to believe that “No Means No,” that they have a right to not be assaulted and raped, but also that they have a right to say “yes” to their own desires, their own sexual agency. Feminism enabled women to find their own sexual voice.
…
This is confusing to many men, who see sex not as mutual pleasuring, but about the “girl hunt,” a chase, a conquest. She says no, he breaks down her resistance. Sex is a zero-sum game. He wins if she puts out; she loses.
That women can like sex, and especially like good sex, and are capable of evaluating their partners changes the landscape. If women say “yes,” where’s the conquest, where’s the chase, where’s the pleasure? And where’s the feeling that your victory is her defeat? What if she is doing the scoring, not you?
Thus the “Yes Means Anal” part of the chant. Sex has become unsafe for men–women are agentic and evaluate our performances. So if “No Means Yes” attempts to make what is safe for women unsafe, then “Yes Means Anal” makes what is experienced as unsafe for men again safe–back in that comfort zone of conquest and victory. Back to something that is assumed could not possibly be pleasurable for her. It makes the unsafe safe–for men.
In this way, we can see the men of DKE at Yale not as a bunch of angry predators, asserting their dominance, but as a more pathetic bunch of guys who see themselves as powerless losers, trying to re-establish a sexual landscape which they feel has been thrown terribly off its axis.
For more indications that we live in a rape culture, see our posts on media coverage of a rape video game and the George Sodini murders, rapists as hyperconformists to ideal masculinity, the rape scene in Observe and Report, t-shirts endorsing sex with “drunk girls”, and, of course, the Purdue Exponent’s sex position of the week.
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.
