social construction

The idea that young people take a decade to grow up, in the meantime inhabiting a space called “young adulthood,” is rather new in American culture.  A bit older is the idea of “adolescence,” the idea that there is a stage between childhood and (young) adulthood that is characterized by immaturity and capriciousness: the teenage years.  Before these ideas were invented, children were expected to take on adult roles as soon as they were able, apprenticing their parents and transitioning to adulthood with puberty.  Shifts in ideas about life stages is a wonderful example of the social constructedness of age.

Documenting the rise of the notion of adolescence, Philip Cohen searched Google Books for the term, tracing its rise at the turn of the 20th century till today:

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.

Carey Faulkner, a visiting Assistant Professor at Franklin & Marshall, asked us to post about a blog that has recently gotten quite a bit of attention: Born this Way.  The site posts photographs of gay-identified adults as children.  Submitters argue that the photographs are proof that they were born gay.

Perusing the photographs tells an interesting story: being gay — that is, being sexually sexually or romantically attracted to members of the same sex — is conflated with being gender non-conformist — adopting the mannerisms and interests of the other sex.  This is the argument made in the vast majority of posts: it’s obvious I was gay because I broke rules of masculinity/femininity by doing things like sniffing flowers, posing jauntily, liking Snow White, and playing with Barbie.

It is a specifically American belief that gay men act feminine and lesbians act masculine.  But, in fact, gay men and lesbians have a wide range of gender performances, as do straight and bisexual people.  In fact, most of us could probably find a picture or two in our histories showing gender non-conformity.  Meanwhile, most gay men and lesbians could probably find pictures of themselves conforming.  That gender performance is associated with sexual orientation in our society is a belief in U.S. culture, but it’s not somehow inevitable or biological.

Nevertheless, the site perpetuates this conflation in an effort to support the notion that being gay is biological.  In contrast to this assertion, however, excellent research has shown that there is no trans-cultural, trans-historical gay identity and interpretations of same-sex sexual behavior vary wildly (see, for example, Herdt’s Same Sex, Different Cultures, DeEmilio’s Capitalism and Gay Identity, and Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality).  And genetic, hormonal, and neurological research has thus far failed to show conclusively that being gay is biological, let alone that it is biologically determined or that it manifests in gender non-conformity.

Still, many gay men, lesbians, and their allies desperately want to prove that being gay is biological on the assumption that showing so will mean that intolerant people will be forced to accept them.  But this simply isn’t true.  People who are against homosexuality will likely just re-define their opposition.  Instead of saying that being gay is a sinful choice, they could simply argue that it is a disease, like cancer, or a deformity, like a cleft palate.  They say so already:

When an individual is not drawn to a member of the opposite sex, in biology that’s called an error.

– Dr. Laura Schlessinger

Homosexuality is a disability and if people wish to have it eliminated before they have children—because they wish to have grandchildren or for other reasons—I do not see any moral objection for using genetic engineering to limit this particular trend. It would be like correcting many other conditions such as infertility or multiple sclerosis.

– Former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Lord Jakobovits

I appreciate what Born This Way is trying to accomplish, but I don’t think that convincing people that homosexuality is biological will have the effect many hope for.  In the meantime, they’re doing everyone a disservice by perpetuating the stereotype of sissy gay men and butchy lesbians.

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 enjoy opportunities to link back to my dog person/cat person rant.  In it, I point out how pet ownership can be gendered.  In this case, owning a dog is masculine and owning a cat is feminine. Anna sent in an image demonstrating just this, noting that the dog products at her vet are blue and the cat products pink:

More, and importantly, because we also tend to value men and masculinity over women and femininity, it is somehow “cool” to own a dog, especially a big dog.  This is true for both men and women.  But it isn’t really cool to own a cat.  We accept it in women because cats enhance her femininity (for better or worse), but when men do it.  Well, as I say in my previous post on the topic, “we think men with cats are a little femmy or, at minimum, sweeter than most… even, maybe, gay.”

This was not lost on the folks at Much Love Animal Rescue.  Visiting the site, Squee noticed that they had a page aimed at men that attempted to convince them that owning a cat could be manly indeed. Their commercials feature extra-super-manly-men with grease ‘n stuff talking about punching things and loving their cat. This is nice in that it challenges the social construction that owning cats is feminine, but notice that it leaves intact the idea that men-should-be-men and avoid all things feminine.

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.

Nicole S. sent in this great example of the way that differences in bodies are used to infer a wide-range of non-anatomical differences between boys and girls (or, in this case, the other way around).

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.

Yesterday, a woman I know who moved to the U.S. as an adult mentioned that she was struck by portrayals of mother-daughter relationships in the U.S.  Representations of such relationships on TV, in movies, and regular conversation indicate that especially when daughters are in their teens and 20s, we practically expect their relationships with their moms to be fraught with conflict and difficulty (and the attendant eye-rolling and yelling), and for teens to be disrespectful and to find their parents intolerable. While she had certainly known individuals in Ecuador who didn’t get along with their parents, she felt that in the U.S. we almost cultivate conflict, making it seem like a normal aspect of child-family relationships in general rather than a characteristic of some individual families and culturally sanctioning the open expression of frustration with one’s parents as acceptable, even healthy.

I thought about that when I saw a commercial sent in by Livia A. for the video game Dead Space 2. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video released as part of the ad campaign; the entire selling point is the idea that your mom will hate it:

It’s a great example of this social construction of child-parent relationships as at least somewhat antagonistic: what kids love, parents hate, and parents hating it proves it’s awesome. Telling young people “your parents will be disgusted by this” becomes an automatic selling point. And this idea of how people relate to their parents (in this case, mothers specifically) is presented as an essential, permanent fact: “A mom’s disapproval has always been an accurate barometer of what is cool.”

But of course, this isn’t an inherent property of family life across human history. It largely rests on the invention of adolescence and young adulthood as distinct life stages in which we expect individuals to act differently than children but not quite like full-fledged adults yet, and the assumption that a normal part of this is to struggle to separate from your parents as you try to establish your own identity. Parenting norms today expect parents to accept teen/young adult rebellion and continue loving (and supporting) their kid anyway; you don’t get to withhold resources and affection if you think they’ve been disrespectful. And with the increased visibility of youth culture, we expect kids will find their parents terribly uncool and will see peers, rather than family members, as the proper judges for what they should like. Together, these cultural norms both make it relatively risk-free to take open joy in horrifying your parents and trivializing their values, since there’s little chance they’ll disown or abandon you for it and make young people who do like the same things as their parents seem weird.

I suspect some of our readers may have an interesting gender analysis, as well, what with the emphasis in this video on moms from “conservative America”, while the entire behind-the-scenes crew is made up of young men. While I can imagine an ad that might say “Your dad will hate it,” I don’t think that would work as well here, given that part of the desired reaction was a disgust at the level of violence and gore, something we assume women are more uncomfortable with than men.

Iconic Photos documents at least two instances in which the U.S. postal service rewrote history, so to speak, taking smoking out of the stamp:

Pollack and Johnson are important figures in American history, who smoked before it carried the stigma it carries today, and whose smoking represents the time and culture that inspired their genius.  How do you balance the desire to be historically accurate and true to the individual, with the desire to avoid endorsing a habit newly framed as a social problem?

Via BoingBoing.

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 love how these two vintage ads reveal that colors are experienced differently across time and cultures.  Both ads feature color schemes that, today, seem outrageous, even hideous.  Yet, at the time, they must have been cutting edge and quite fashionable.

Both images from Vintage Ads (here and here).

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.

Five readers sent along gendered gift guides.  These are interesting only in their ubiquitousness.  Let us begin:

What do women want? According to an email from Chapters.Indigo, sent in by Rajan P., they want candy, wine, fictional romance and, um, blankets (for coziness?):

Liz from Minneapolis got an email from Amazon.com with ideas “For Him” and “For Her.” Liz writes:

The gift ideas for him are manly things like a coffee mug (but described as a vacuum sealed tumbler) and barbeque tools, while gifts for her include a hideous Precious Moments figurine and a super handy plant care sensor.

Eileen B. sent a link to the gendered gift guide at gifts.com.  Apparently women want wine, love, coziness (sweaters, hot baths, and aromatherapy), cooking stuff, anything-Oprah, and men who clean (are we seeing a trend yet?):

While men want beer, golf-related items, and a giant plastic nose that snorts out your shower gel:

Both want grown-up mobiles, tiny-sauruses, and a baby book, so there’s that.

Another reader, “a reader,” sent in links to the site Shapeways which thinks women want decorations (for their bodies and their homes), but figures men want stuff to do (“gadgets” and “hobbies,” with a few hard core accessories thrown in):

Had enough?  There’s more!

Apocalyptopia sent screen shots of the gendered gift guide from Zazzle.  She writes:

We have the old, tired “only guys like History and video games” trope. I also noticed that there’s an “Animal Lovers” category under Women, but the only similar category to be found under Men is “Outdoorsman” (if you don’t count Party Animal) which deals more with killing animals than loving them. Chicks are just so sentimental, right? (Gag!) I also can’t understand why “Traveling” is found under Men but not Women.

The thing that disturbed me the most about this, though, was that for Men they have a “Veterans” category while for Women they have a “Support Our Troops” category. As the daughter of a retired female veteran of two wars, I was a bit offended. I’m sure my mother would be offended as well that they think watching her friends get blown up still doesn’t make her qualify as a real veteran and that she’s relegated to simply supporting those who are (i.e.: men).

Finally, Michelle Y. alerted us to a gendered game at the Karmaloop website. Men are told to search for a sexy lady; and ladies? A Pomeranian.

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.