discourse/language

I saw this footage of flatworm reproduction years ago on PBS and I was so excited when Robin H. sent it in!

Flatworms are hermaphroditic.  All flatworms can inseminate and be inseminated.  These flatworms also have two penises each. Flatworms are sexual.  That is, they reproduce sexually by finding a partner with which to trade genetic material.  (Asexual creatures do not trade genetic material, they reproduce by making copies of themselves.)

A flatworm reveals its two penises (in white):

What is interesting about this clip sociologically (in case you’re not already intrigued enough) is how the narrator describes what the flatworms are doing.

Let’s first suppose that it makes little sense to attribute human emotions and motivations to flatworms.  Let’s also suppose that narrations of animal behavior are often going to tell us a lot about how we think and only a little, if anything, about what’s going on with the  social lives of invertebrates.

As you watch the clip below, notice that they explain the behavior not descriptively, but metaphorically.  Flatworm mating behavior is like war and wars have winners and losers:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fx-YgcP8Gg[/youtube]

So the narrator explains that flatworm “sex is more like war than love.”  Worms are “swordsmen” who are “penis fencing.” (Mix metaphors much?)  They carry “double daggers” (penises).  And “the first one to make a successful jab, delivers its sperm.”

Notice how the narrator genders the hermaphroditic flatworms.  Because they have penises they are “swordsmen.”  Apparently their equally functional capacity to be inseminated is eclipsed by their dangerous daggers!

And notice, too, how they describe the flatworm who becomes inseminated as the “loser.”  The “losing flatworm,” the narrator explains, “bears the burden of motherhood, committing valuable resources to having offspring.”

Wow.

Sperm on the “loser”:

Now it may be true that being the “mother” involves the use of resources. [Note: And this is a nod to the evolutionary logic involved.]  But even so, we would never call the females of non-hermaphroditic sexual species “losers” would we?  I mean, they both get to pass on their genetic material, and doesn’t that make them both winners from an evolutionary perspective?

No doubt it seems reasonable to call the functional female of the pair a loser in a sexist world in which childbearing is defined as a disability (according to the Americans with Disabilities Act) and childraising is defined as non-productive (it garners no wages or benefits and cannot be put on a resume).  Gosh, being non-hermaphroditic, human females are losers by default.  They don’t even get to play the game.

So sexism is one way to explain the wildly offensive characterization of the inseminated flatworm as a “loser.”  But it also may just be that, in choosing a war/sports metaphor to describe flatworm behavior, they inevitably had to characterize one or the other as a loser.  This is a great example of the folly of metaphor.  Metaphors can be used to make something unfamiliar make sense by comparing it to something familiar, but it also runs the risk of forcing the thing being explained to mirror the thing you use to explain it with.

It’s simply sloppy.  And, all too often, it results in projecting ugly realities with which we are all too familiar onto those things we don’t really understand.

For another example of the projection of socially constructed human relations onto the body, see our post on sperm, eggs, and fertilization.

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. sent us a link to an AdWeek post reporting that Miller Beer began advertising in Vietnam last week with this commercial:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG9H5_oKVd0[/youtube]

Some sociologists who study international relations apply the idea of the brand to nations.  Nations, they argue, can be seen as a product in a global marketplace. Australia, for example, is marketed as a rough and tumble place where we can get back to nature and find our true selves. Insofar as they can can control their brand, countries can draw tourism and increase demand for their exports (see here and here for Australian examples).

The ad above is an excellent example of Miller capitalizing on the American brand: “It’s American Time. It’s Miller Time.” Notice also that the ad is in English and doesn’t feature anyone that looks Vietnamese. The whiteness of the ad is purposeful. Miller is selling a specific version of “America” characterized by white people, urban life, sex-mixed socializing and, also, really bad music.

UPDATE!  In the comments, Adam linked to this ad which ran in the Phillipines:

You can also think of the California happy cows commercials as a form of state branding.

See here, here, and herefor posts showing the social construction of America as white.

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.

Giorgos S. sent us a link to a story in the Guardian about the cover of DVDs of the movie “Lesbian Vampire Killers.” Some stores are carrying censored versions. Giorgos says he’s seen the censored version at Borders stores in the U.K.:

So apparently the phrase “they won’t go down without a bite” is fine, and major cleavage requires just a tad bit of coverage with a sticker that says “Warning: Contains explicitly fit bloodsucking hotties!” The sticker that nearly entirely obscures the word “lesbian” says, “Warning: may display sexually suggestive cover image.”

The distributors blame stores, saying a number of large retailers requested that they obscure particular parts of the cover. The stores say they didn’t request that the word “lesbian” be hidden. I suppose we’ll never know what happened there. It does crack me up that you’d be willing to sell a movie called “Lesbian Vampire Killers,” but then be worried about the cover.

The issue of censorship leaves aside, of course, the content of the film itself. This may surprise you, but it was apparently widely negatively reviewed. IMDb summarizes the plot thusly:

Their women having been enslaved by the local pack of lesbian vampires thanks to an ancient curse, the remaining menfolk of a rural town send two hapless young lads out onto the moors as a sacrifice.

Here’s the original marketing poster:

I like how her nipples have been photoshopped out (unless lesbian vampires have nipples on the sides of their boobs).

If anyone’s seen it, I’d be interested to know if it portrays lesbians as ridiculously as I suspect it does.

See also: airbrushing out men’s nipples.

In my Intro to Soc course I assign K.R. Thompson’s article “Handling the Stigma of Handling the Dead: Morticians and Funeral Directors” (Deviant Behavior 1991, v. 12, p. 403-429). Thompson looked at how those involved in preparing the dead for burial and planning funerals try to manage the negative perceptions they suspect much of the public has of them. Language was a major way they tried to do this–redefining themselves as “funeral directors” rather than “morticians” or “undertakers,” referring to dead people as “the deceased” rather than “the body” or “the corpse,” “casket” rather than “coffin,” and so on. The point was to try to reduce the association with death–to never blatantly refer to death at all.

They also tried to avoid what they felt were stereotypes of funeral directors. Some mentioned trying not to wear black suits, and one man went so far as to keep hand warmers in his pockets so his hands would be warm when he shook family members’ hands–a reaction to what he said was a belief that funeral directors have cold, clammy hands. Others lived in a different town than where they worked and tried to keep their careers secret.

All of this was an attempt to avoid the stigma often placed on those who handle the dead (found in many cultures). We often suspect those who do so, thinking they must be creepy to be willing to do that kind of work. In addition, funeral directors are often depicted as unethical individuals who profit from a family’s pain and who can manipulate people while they are emotionally vulnerable.

I thought of that article when Lisa sent me a link to an article in Obit Magazine about the 2008 Men of Mortuaries calendar, which raised money for a breast-cancer charity:

The article directly discusses stereotypes:

Aren’t undertakers old, gray of complexion, gaunt and, well, creepy?

Four hundred morticians and funeral directors from across the country who defy that stereotype sent applications to Kenneth McKenzie’s funeral home in Long Beach, Ca., to vie for a month in the calendar…

Also:

McKenzie sees the calendars as a humorous way to dispel the notion that morticians “are gray-haired and hunchbacked with no personality.”

Interestingly, the article does use the word “mortician,” so apparently some in the industry are still comfortable with the term. But overall, I think the calendar and the quotes from the article demonstrate the effort to manage stigma quite well.

CLARIFICATION: In light of a previous post about a calendar featuring nudity, some commenters are conversing about whether this calendar is objectifying or humanizing. That is an interesting, appropriate question and certainly worth discussing. I wanted to clarify, though, that I wasn’t trying to answer that particular question in this post. I only meant to suggest that the calendar was an example of an attempt at humanizing funeral directors in order to manage perceived stigma, which isn’t the same as saying it’s a good or effective attempt (or a bad or ineffective one, for that matter).

Cross-posted at Anglofille.

The Reclusive Leftist wonders why George Sodini’s mass murder of women in an aerobics class in Pennsylvania last week is not receiving more news coverage.  And also, why is the crime not being referred to as a hate crime?

If I want to read about the Pennsylvania shooting, I have to search for it. This evening I typed “George Sodini” (the murderer’s name) into the Google News search box. The stories that came up told me that Sodini was lonely; that he felt rejected by women; that he led a sad, bitter life; that he hadn’t had sex in years; that he longed for women to notice him. Well, isn’t that special.

I looked for the words “hate crime,” but only Ms. Magazine is referring to it that way. Good for them…But Ms. Magazine appears to be alone in its assessment. I can’t find any other media outlets calling the massacre a hate crime. If spraying bullets into a group of female strangers because you hate women isn’t a hate crime, what is?

Her conclusion, which I agree with, is that hatred of women is considered “natural and universal” and so we don’t even give it a thought.

In his NYT column, Bob Herbert nails it.  He refers to another mass murder of females in Pennsylvania, when in the autumn of 2006 a man went into an Amish school, separated the girls from the boys, then shot all the girls.  Herbert writes:

I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar…We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected. We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment. The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

Sadly, Bob Herbert is in the extreme minority with his coverage of the Sodini story.  Instead, for most of the media, Sodini himself is the real victim – a victim of women.  This Boston Globe editorial is a perfect example.  According to the Globe, Sodini fits the “typical profile of an American psychopath: He was a loner who lamented his failure with women. His online diary was filled with fury over his sexual frustrations – claiming at one point to have been rejected by ‘30 million’ women. There are, of course, millions of frustrated men who don’t open fire on innocent civilians, so there’s a danger in making too much of his loser profile.”

Sodini is first described as a “psychopath” by the Globe but then by the end of the passage he’s just one of “millions of frustrated men” who are rejected by women.  What is implied here is that while most rejected men don’t commit mass murder, it’s understandable why George Sodini – or any man – could snap.  He was lonely!  Them bitches rejected him! Sodini, a psychopathic multiple murderer, is merely a victim of selfish, shallow females.

Imagine that instead of hating women, George Sodini hated and murdered Jews.  Imagine the Boston Globe writing this: “George Sodini tried to befriend many of the Jews in his town, but they rejected him.  Last week, he went down to the local synagogue and sprayed bullets everywhere.  There are, of course, millions of people around the world who are frustrated by Jews, but most of them don’t actually go out and kill, so there’s a danger of making too much of the fact that Jewish people had rejected Sodini in the past.”

This would be outrageous, of course.  Any attempt to rationalize murderous behavior and hatred like this is indefensible.  Yet female victims, when targeted because of their femaleness, aren’t accorded this kind of dignity and respect.  Instead, women are blamed.

I should point out that the main focus of the Globe’s editorial on Sodini is his racist blog posts against Obama.  A lot of other media have also made this the focus of the story, making racist blog posts against Obama equal in significance to mass murder of females. Because, you know, the Obama angle is more interesting and, let’s face it, more important.

The coverage of this case is, across the board, sickening.  Here are a few headlines:

The Huffington Post

The Telegraph U.K.

Associated Press (via Yahoo News)

The Times

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

And the list goes on.  In each case, we see that Sodini is the victim.  Nowhere do we see a headline like this: Misogynist Commits Mass Murder or Three Women Murdered in Hate Crime. The articles are clear that Sodini hated women, which of course he did, but for the media, if Sodini hated women, then there must be a reason for it.  A good reason. If George Sodini, a proven racist, had murdered African-Americans simply because of their race, would we be asking why George Sodini hated African-Americans?  No, because what possible legitimate reason could he have?  There isn’t one.  He’s a racist asshole and that’s the end of it.  But apparently, there are legitimate reasons to hate all women.  The articles try to explain, in rational terms, why Sodini hated women, thus making his rampage seem like the next logical step given his mental instability.  If women hadn’t deprived him of sex, none of this would have happened.

Here’s the opening of the story from the last headline above, from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

“George Sodini couldn’t find love. He tanned, worked out at the gym, held a steady job and still went nearly two decades without the loving touch of a woman, according to his online blog begun in November. He wrote that he felt totally alone — isolated — and estimated that 30 million desirable women rejected him in the last 30 years. Enraged, he hatched a heinous plan to make some of those pretty young women pay for his misery. The price would be their lives.”

This is just sick.  It’s beyond sick.  It reaches new levels of vileness.  You’ll notice that this, like a lot of the other coverage, is not written as a news report, but almost as entertainment.  Whoever wrote this seems to be taking some vicarious pleasure in the actions of Sodini.

Sodini worked out “and still went nearly two decades without the loving touch of a woman” [italics mine].  Poor George.  He did everything right, yet these cruel women rejected him.  What’s wrong with women?   When confronted with a vicious, hate-filled psychopath, they just ran in the other direction, without even considering his good qualities at all.  Typical!

For a moment, just imagine if George Sodini had had a girlfriend.  There can be virtually no doubt that she would have been physically and emotionally abused during the relationship, because George Sodini hated women.  If the woman had tried to escape from him, she would have been stalked and likely murdered.  And after he killed her, he would have probably committed a mass murder of women anyway.  The headline: Heartbroken Man Goes on Rampage After Being Dumped.

The real story here is not lonely men (there are plenty of lonely women as well), but instead, the real story is male violence against women and girls, which occurs every second of every day in the form of domestic abuse, molestation, harassment, rape and murder. There is no rational, legitimate reason for this hatred of women, yet it is widespread in our culture and everyday, women die as a result. Writes Herbert:

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female. A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem. We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

This is the conversation we should be having.  Instead, the media is legitimizing Sodini’s misogyny and giving him the exact platform he craved – he’s gone out in a blaze of glory, with everyone dissecting his blog posts and commenting on his mistreatment and loneliness.

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Anglofille is the nom de blog of an American ex-pat living in London.  She is finishing up a PhD in English and writing a novel with feminist themes.   She has previously written for Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as numerous consumer magazines.

Mary M., of Cooking with the Junior League (go read it now! It’s awesome!) sent in photos she took of several pages from House Dressing, a cookbook published by the Windsor Square-Hancock Park Historical Society in 1978 (Hancock Park is a wealthy section of L.A.). The cookbook contains a section called “Kitchen Spanish,” which, as Mary says, “pretty much amounts to phrases you can use to boss around your help.” They are quite thorough, providing terms not just for cooking but for many other household tasks, and specific terms for wool vs. silk clothing. Here are images of a couple of the pages:

And here we have my favorites, “This is still dirty” and “Do it very thoroughly this time”:

And to think, when I first read the phrase “Kitchen Spanish” I assumed it was a geographically confused title for the Tex-Mex recipe section. Also, given that the pronunciation guides don’t include instructions on which syllable to emphasize, I can only imagine what kind of directions the employees actually received.

It made me think of the book Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. She discusses the tensions and conflicts that often arise between immigrant (largely Latina) housekeepers/nannies and their (mostly White and female) wealthy employers over how tasks should be done. Domestic workers generally expressed a wish to be told what to do, but not how to do it (and not watched while they worked), while employers felt they had to provide a lot of micromanagement if they wanted tasks done to their standards. Many instances where employees quit or employers fired them resulted from the conflict over this issue.

My guess would also be that many of the individuals contributing to and buying this cookbook would not be cooking anything from it themselves. The cookbook probably served as a form of symbolic domesticity for wealthy women to share recipes, while the women doing much of the actual cooking and cleaning in their households were present only implicitly as the recipients of the instructions on these pages. As Mary pointed out, something similar was probably true of all the “signature recipes” of First Ladies are often shown serving in photo ops–it seems likely that many of them had nothing to do with the preparation and may not have even supplied the recipe. Didn’t John McCain’s wife (I know, not a First Lady, but she was a hopeful) post a recipe on the campaign website that turned out to be taken from another cooking website?

NEW! (July ’10): Jason K. sent in another example, this one published in 1976:

The Wall Street Journal published an article about “cankles” (sent in by Dmitriy T.M.). It begins: “This summer women have a new body part to obsess about.”

There’s a gender-specific warning (men apparently need not worry about cankles) and passive language. “Women” simply “have” a new insecurity. It’s not as if, maybe, perhaps, the Wall Street Journal is actively telling women they must worry about cankles.

They offered an illustration:

(As an aside, can you imagine being the illustrator who got this assignment? Like, do you think he drew the cankles and then went home and made himself a stiff drink, stared at his art degree diploma, and wondered what had become of his dreams?)

And!

In the guise of a history lesson, they offer a whole bunch more nasty euphemisms for body parts that you (and by “you” I mean ladies) “have” to worry about:

Via Jezebel.

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

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.

Are sounds gendered? Yes. Does the gender of sounds change over time?

From the surprisingly interesting blog of Laura Wattenberg comes these graphs showing that popular masculine endings to names has changed over time.

1906:

1956:

No dramatic changes from 1906 to 1956, but then, in 2006, n is triumphant!

2006:

Laura also offers some data showing how boy and girl name endings have shifted since the 1880s:

This figure, relatedly, shows trends in the endings of girl babies’ names in France:

Graphs from here, here, and here. Hat tip to Montclair Socioblog.

UPDATE: In the comment thread, Sator Arepo notes:

Sounds are not equal to letters. The graphs are misleading in that they (with exception of the French language spectrograph-like pictures) they equate the sound of the end of the name with the appearance of the letter in the written word.

Commenter pfctdayelise notes something similar, above. However, it’s even more misleading in the tables, and would depend widely on the origin of a name whether and how certain letters were pronounced.

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