feminist blogs in english

Please welcome Guest Blogger, Brooke Harrington. Harrington is Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the Copenhagen Business School. She is the author of two books: Pop Finance: Investment Clubs and the New Investor Populism and Deception: From Ancient Empires to Internet Dating.  She is currently doing research on offshore banking and blogs at our fellow Society Pages blog, Economic Sociology.

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The video below is a 7-minute interview with Mark Kleiman, professor of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Choice quotes:

Right now we’re imprisoning people we’re made at; we should only be imprisoning people we’re afraid of.

We should be striving for having as little crime as possible, with as little actual punishment as possible.

Watch:

Via BoingBoing.

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BYU graduate student Krista Frederico sent in a link to the active Dolce & Gabbana website. Like the campaign suggestion that Louis Vuitton handbags are hand-sewn by young beautiful white women, this campaign romanticizes the production of D&G clothing with soft Latin music and slow motion cutting and needlework in the background. Three screen shots (look past the boxes to the background images):

Frederico notes that, at least as of 2007, D&G outsourced its production to China.  But, she continues:

Regardless of whether or not they use sweatshops, I think it’s fascinating to see these close-up images  – scissors, a thimble, and a sewing machine – cast as luxurious.  A wedding band is shown on the hand – therefore, is it the hand of Dominico Dolce or Stefano Gabbana?  Is that why it’s luxurious – because it is a wealthy, highly trained fashion designer – and a man – whose hands are making the clothing rather than an overworked and grossly underpaid working-class seamstress?

Does the D&G imagery violate truth in advertising laws?   Earlier this year the U.K. advertising Standards Agency decided that the Louis Vuitton certainly did.

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In a fascinating essay, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz argues that we do, indeed, play Farmville because we’re polite.  More people in the U.S. play Farmville than any other video game.

…over seventy-three million people play Farmville. Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.

(source)

The game isn’t popular, he argues, because it’s a good game.  In fact, Liszkiewicz thinks it’s a decidedly bad game.

…games offer a break from responsibility and routine, yet Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again…

Farmville is so laborious and tedious, that one of the rewards of playing Farmville is playing less Farmville:

As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks.

(source)

So why the heck is Farmville the most popular video game in America?  Liszkiewicz says, “people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.”

(source)

In other words:

Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

(source)

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* Title borrowed from BoingBoing.

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Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Our intern, Lauren McGuire, found this fat-shaming ad for Mini Mentos.  Text:  “I love hanging out with you.  All the boys keep looking at me.”

The ad uses the same strategy as a previously covered Bacardi campaign in which they encouraged women to “get an ugly girlfriend.” Both suggest that being fat (or ugly, and they’re often conflated) is undesirable.  They also both treat fat people like they’re aren’t deserving of respect and dignity; that is, it’s okay to use them.  In this case, the skinny girl is literally hoisting the fat girl into the air, so aggressively that her shoe is falling off.  The fat girl is like a thing that the skinny girl owns and can pick up and toss about.

Notice also that it’s taken-for-granted as simply true that, if a “boy” were to see these two girls together, he would look at the skinny girl and ignore the fat one.  This is a pathologization of sexual attraction to fat women, the same pathologization that leads us to call it “fat fetishism” or come up with terms like “chubby chasers” to try to explain “weird” sexual proclivities.  It assumes that it’d be unnatural to find the fat woman sexier than the skinny one.

Notice also the stylization of the drawings.  Both the fat and the skinny girl are drawn with wildly exaggerated proportions.  This makes fat and skinny people seem like members of different species, entirely alien to one another.  Skinny people are sticks; fat people are essentially circles.  In reality, fat and skinny people look more alike than this.  They both have human bodies with all the same parts.  Some people just have more fat than others and fat is distributed differently in everyone.  Fat is human, fat is natural, fat is okay. But a fear of fat is stoked when we see images like this that threaten us.  This image says, “if you are/get fat, you will be a downright FREAK; you will be a circle when you should be a stick.  And skinny girls will wave you around to draw attention to themselves.”

The message is pretty clear:

Fat people might as well not be human…

…and skinny women are bitches.

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Sociologist Amy Schalet has done wonderful research comparing American and Dutch approaches to teen sexuality.  Among other fascinating findings, she has shown that, American parents approach their children’s sexual initiation with fear and loathing; while Dutch parents treat sexuality like any other realm of life that a child must learn to manage.  Accordingly, most American teenagers hide their virginity loss from their parents, furtively popping the cherry in risky situations, often without protection against pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections (STIs).  In contrast, most Dutch teenagers lose their virginity in their own bedrooms with their parents approval… and condoms.

This different approach to teen sexuality helps explain the dramatic differences between the U.S. and the Netherlands in rates of contraceptive use, teen pregnancy, abortion, and STI transmission.  Check it this data from Advocates for Youth:

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Our intern, Lauren McGuire, pointed us to a post by Gilligan at Retrospace inspired by a scene in the 1963 Western, McLintock!  The movie included a scene in which George McLintock, played by John Wayne, uses a shovel to spank his estranged wife, played by Maureen O’Hara.

The spanking scene apparent stuck quite the chord, as it was used repeatedly in the promotional materials.

Gilligan suggests that the spanking of adult women by adult men was a midcentury theme, from Kiss me Kate to comic books:

Lady spanking is a manifestation of the infantilization of women.  The idea that they are not men’s equals, but are expected to obey them as subordinates and can be punished when they do not behave.  The spanking of men by adult women is not a humorous trope that was once ubiquitous, it was (and is) considered a weird sexual fetish.  The cultural endorsement of the dominance/subordination relationship, then, is distinctly gendered.

Of course, materials riffing on the spanking adult women today (outside of porn and fetish communities) would probably inspire an outcry, but that leaves open the possibility that the gendered power asymmetry simply manifests in other ways.  Adult women are still infantilized (see posts here, here, and here) and dominance/submission is still sexualized in mainstream materials (consider our post asking what love is supposed to look like).

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Images borrowed from here, here, here, here, here, and the original post at Retrospace.

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Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball, then continue after the jump:

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So, did you see it?

I’m really curious as to how many of you did.

This exercise is designed to illustrate how perception is an active process, driven by what we are primed to pay attention to.  Because we were told to focus on the players in white, we (theoretically) filtered out the players in black and, as a consequence, the black gorilla.

Rachel at The Feminist Agenda, from whom I borrowed this clip and these ideas, argues that this means that:

…there really is no completely neutral stance from which a human can observe the world. We are always everywhere making value judgments about what’s important in our environment, what things mean, how they’re relevant, etc.  And this process of selective, and even normative, perception is inseparable from our deeper thoughts about what it all means. There’s no clear line between perception and cognition.

She continues:

This explains a lot. For instance, it explains why for so many years, male researchers were seemingly blind to whole swaths of female behavior in primates they were studying. After all, in the patriarchal worldview they had inherited from their culture, females were passive, and not agents in any real way. So when the females mated with males who not only not the dominant male of the group, but often not even a part of their group, the human male researchers overlooked it altogether, and thus we have the myth of the dominant male primate who has sole access to all the females in “his” group.

For Rachel, there is a lesson here about how to approach privilege.  She argues that much of the time people who fail to see how a system advantages them and disadvantages others are simply looking through a lens warped by privilege.  They’re truly blind to the inequities in society.  But, she hopes, once you help them see the gorilla in the room, it’s absolutely impossible not to see.

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One of our Readers, Victoria, analyzed ads in 15 editions of two magazines, Parents and Parenting, for a class project. She found that boys and girls are often portrayed as active and passive, respectively, and that girls, even infant girls, were sexualized.  She offered the following examples.

Notice that in this Children’s Place ad, both images with boys and the one with a mixed pair is captioned with activities (“travels,” “campers,” and “sporty favorites for hangin’”).  The caption under the lone girl, however, emphasizes “smiles,” a passive, pleasing appearance.  As Victoria says, “She is there to be cute.”

Similarly, in a three-page Fisher Price ad featuring racially-diverse children, both boys are shown as active learners.  In the first page, the text above a boy putting a train set together reads “Developing his attention span helps him learn to solve problems on his own”:

The text accompanying this child is also implies activity.  It reads, “He’s getting a good grasp of what his little fingers can do”:

But the text that goes along with the girl children playing with dolls only suggests that children, generally, grow:

Victoria also found that girls were sexualized.  In all of the ads featuring girls in bathing suits, she noted, the suit was a two-piece.  Here are two examples of frolicking beach babes:

She found this ad especially troubling.  The girl, she argues, “has been reduced to nothing but buttocks and genitalia”:

Meanwhile, Beth M. sent us these examples from a Land’s End catalog:

For more examples of the gendered active/passive binary, see our posts on the social construction of sperm, a vintage ad, and the binary in kids’ meal toys and Lego advertising.

For more examples of the sexualization of young boys, see our posts on Lil’ Wayne’s virginity loss, the depiction of a 13-year-old boy having a relationship with his teacher, the sexy marketing of both Jaden Smith and Justin Bieber, with a follow up here.

And, finally, for more on the sexualization of young girls, see our posts on sexually suggestive teen brands, adultifying children of color, “trucker girl” baby booties, “future trophy wife” kids’ tee, House of Dereón’s girls’ collection, “is modesty making a comeback?“, more sexualized clothes and toys, sexist kids’ tees, a trifecta of sexualizing girls, a zebra-striped string bikini for infants, a nipple tassle t-shirt, even more icky kids’ t-shirts, “are you tighter than a 5th grader?” t-shirt, the totally gross “I’m tight like spandex” girls’ t-shirt, a Halloween costume post, and girls in the World of Dance tour.

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Please accept this newest edition of violence is sexy, courtesy of Lisa R.  The promo below, designed to advertise two shows about female murderers (Deadly Women and Wicked Attraction), sexualizes murder. The narration goes:

In the heat of summer, temperatures rise, passions erupt, and sometimes, things… turn… deadly.

They “erupt.” Get it? Get it!?

The thing is, these are stories about real women who actually murdered people. Lisa writes:

…the crimes they’re talking about on these shows are not all sex-related, and I’m just going to go out on a limb and say none of them are sexy, either. The only reason I can even fathom for a promo like this is just the notion that women are sex personified, like the green M&M. Even committing horrible, gruesome murders can’t change that.

In other words, if women are involved, best to sexify. If a man murders a man, it’s just violence. But if a man murders a woman or a woman murders a man, it’s sexy, sexy violence. If a woman murders a woman, will the murder be sexualized? I bet it would.

This calls into question the idea that we sexualize violence against women because we find pleasure in harming her. Instead, maybe we sexualize violence against women simply because we sexualize women.

Also in random, bizarre things sold with sex, see our post on using sex to sell the most unlikely things.

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