Gender equality has come a long way in recent decades. Yet, as we sociologists know, so much of our binary system of gender--and its many inequalities--remain. But is it that obvious to our students? Usually not! When teaching gender inequality in my Social Problems class this semester, I was struck by how many students could watch a video about gender in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or even more recently, and say "but luckily things have changed so much, its not like that any more." While much has changed, so much remains the same. To document some of the continuities and changes of our gendered system, let's take a 15-minute video tour of gender representations using clips on this site. First, consider a retrospective look at the 1950s. In this clip from the 2003 film, Mona Lisa Smile, Katherine Ann Watson (played by Julia Roberts) is a socially progressive art history instructor. In the film, the tensions between the traditional ideology of a woman’s role in society as a domestic homemaker and the new idea of an educated, autonomous woman are constantly present in Watson’s classroom. Watson strongly encourages her students to be independent women, seeing their potential to be more than subservient accessories to a man’s household. Her advocacy for an uncompromising lifestyle is met with criticism and resentment from conservative students, who argue that it challenges "the roles you were born to fill." This tension reflects the common misconception of gender as a biological, rather than social, construct, and prompts Watson to use a powerful and emotionally-charged slide show critiquing depictions of women in a variety of 1950s advertisements (read more here). Second, let's take a look at a 1963 Disney film that shows that being a socially successful woman is simply a matter of walking, talking and smiling in a feminine way, as well as dressing in equally feminine clothes (read our analysis here). This is where some viewers may say "at least its not like that any more!" So is that true? What is old and new about the way women are depicted in the media today? For example, consider how commercials often depict women in traditional gender roles (read our analysis here; see other traditional gender roles depicted in commercials here and here). How about TV shows focusing on seemingly liberated women (read our analysis here)? What is new here? Finally, consider contemporary music videos and how they portray men and women, in relation to desire, sex, and power (read our analysis here): Like videos from the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary media place men and women into clearly defined gender categories. In the words of Dr. Watson's student in her fictional 1950s class, these media messages encourage women and men to conform to "the roles you were born to fill." But, of course, we are not born that way. Both women and men (see Jackson Katz's video on masculinity) are socialized--through many sources including media--to perform these roles. By watching this group of clips together, students can be encouraged to think about how much has changed? How much remains the same? Where did the changes come from? Why haven't gender representations changed more, and what is the role of power in reproducing gender? Paul Dean
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With the 83rd Academy Awards looming, the celebratory cries of Americans who love their cinema have reached a virtual fever pitch. As a site that celebrates movies, we thought it only appropriate to join in the revelry, albeit in an unconventional way. Rather than endless commentary about who is wearing who, and which star is most deserving of an Oscar, we at The Sociological Cinema would like to offer up a note about the kinds of stories Americans most often celebrate and value. We want to draw attention to the overwhelmingly male-centered narratives and representations emanating from the Hollywood film industry. Lucky for us, feminist cultural critic, Anita Sarkeesian, offers a very succinct analysis on the topic in a five-minute clip. In it, she demonstrates that our most celebrated films in the United States tend to be stories about men. As she explains, one of the consequences of living in a patriarchal society is that stories about men and masculine representations--their trials and transformations, courage and heroism--tend to be valued more than stories about women and feminine representations. Drawing from Sarkeesian's analysis, one can think about the following questions as they pertain to the films being celebrated as cinematic triumphs on Sunday: 1. Who has the most screen time? 2. Whose perspective do we see the story from? 3. Whose story arc does the plot revolve around? 4. Who is depicted as making consequential decisions in the story? and 5. Who do we most identify with? More often than not, the award is given to a movie about a man, told from his perspective. In fact, As Sarkeesian shows, a sweeping majority of the last 50 films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture were films about men and masculinity. For those fans of American film who have no patience for Sarkeesian's sound reasoning and...umm...systematic use of data, we submit a second short clip for your consideration. This clip comes from The Girls on Film (TGOF), who describe their film blog as "a commentary with the objective of stimulating thought around the art of storytelling through film." The creators of the blog seek to challenge the audience through their "exploration of archetypal energies that are typically portrayed by men." To this end, the blog features scenes from mainstream blockbuster films that were originally performed by men but recreates them with women actors. In my favorite clip of theirs, Ashleigh Harrington and Katerina Taxia (directed by Jeff Hammond) reenact the recruiting scene from J.J. Abrams' Star Trek (2009). While Harrington and Taxia do a superb acting job, I think many people are dumbstruck when they first encounter the recreated scene. The masculine repartee between these two women and Harrington's bloody nose challenge the idea that masculinity can only be enacted by men. Performances of female masculinity tend to be rare in Hollywood films and are therefore surprising, but more germane to Sarkeesian's point above, The Girls on Film scene might also be surprising because it uses a woman to play the kind of role we have come to expect a man to play. We have been primed to see such important and consequential dialogue between men, so when women do it, it feels somehow disorienting. Hollywood didn't invent patriarchy, but that doesn't preclude it from being implicated in reproducing it. The cultural critic, Stuart Hall, once observed that the people who work in creating media stand in a different relationship to ideology than the rest of us. That is to say, those who produce, direct, and act in films have at their disposal a powerful tool, which can be used to transform how people come to understand the world in which they live. Movies--especially the ones the Academy deems worthy of its coveted Oscar--pose answers to questions many people never asked, such as, "whose story is likely to matter most?" or just, "who matters?" As evidenced from the list of nominated films this year, those who were hoping for a revolution in the kinds of stories Hollywood tells may be disappointed. For now, a critical awareness of the men and masculinity America is (also) celebrating on Sunday may have to suffice. Lester Andrist The Super Bowl is around the corner and millions of spectators across the country will be congregating in living rooms, dens and bars to watch one of the biggest events in American sports. However, this sporting spectacle is famous not only for televising the battle for the much-coveted Lombardi Trophy, but also for its commercials. Airing a thirty second spot during a Super Bowl XLV time slot will cost about three million dollars this year. Given the highly gendered nature of sports, and American football in particular, as well as the high stakes and costs of Super Bowl commercials, the event this Sunday is a unique and significant cultural site to explore representations of gender, and specifically, those pertaining to masculinity. Not surprisingly, we are not the first sociologists to recognize the value of exploring gender representations in popular media, and others have fruitfully examined masculinity in mega sports media events like the Super Bowl in the past (Messner and Montez de Oca 2005). Still we were struck by the commercials that aired during last year’s Super Bowl, perhaps because they seemed unusually brazen in exploring representations of men, namely themes of emasculation via relationships with women and calls for men to overcome this emasculation and reclaim their rightful positions of authority. Seen from a slightly different vantage point, many of these ads seemed almost tongue-in-cheek, as though poking fun at the kind of masculinity that was celebrated without qualification not so long ago. When the commercials first aired we were both teaching classes on the Sociology of Gender, and soon thereafter found ourselves agreeing that the masculinities explored in these commercials were far more complex than they first appeared. And so, we set about trying to decipher the broader social and historical trends that might have led to these particular representations of masculinity. Namely, we have tried to make sense of a new crop of ads, which seem to promote an atavistic, hypermasculinity, while at the same time suggesting that such a masculinity is absurd and even laughable. Many of these commercials feature unmistakably alpha males, but the masculinity is overplayed almost as satire. While these ads first grabbed our attention last year, this new trope of masculinity predates the 2010 Super Bowl (consider, for example, the Dos Equis ads) and continues to flourish. If what we lose in reality (social structure), we recreate in fantasy (culture), then as Michael Kimmel suggests, advertising can be seen as a rear-guard action, which aims to recapture what has already been lost. In this light, the exaggerated masculinity of the 1980s—the decade which celebrated action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris—can be understood as a rear-guard action or a backlash against the urgings of Second Wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s (Jackson Katz makes a similar point in his documentary on masculinity). At the same time, the masculinity of the 1980s can be seen as a backlash against larger structural economic changes, which cannot be exhaustively explained as the result of the feminist agenda. A generation of boys aspired to be men in the face of an economy that was surrendering blue-collar jobs to cheaper labor elsewhere in the world. Thus the characteristically tough, unionized, and well-compensated blue-collar work became increasingly scarce, while at the same time pink-collar jobs of the service industry became ever more abundant. Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, and numerous depictions of blue-collar workers were a fantasy that could recapture a traditional image of manhood, which was very much a fixture of the popular imagination but was becoming increasingly difficult to uphold in the material world. At the start of the new millennium an emergent strain of masculinity appeared, which seemed to cross itself by celebrating “mediocre men.” Michael Messner and Jeffrey Montez de Oca (2005) found that by 2002, the advertisements of mega media sports events began to construct “a white male ‘loser’…who hangs out with his male buddies, is self-mocking and ironic about his loser status” (1882). This shift was less about a newfound humility than the concerted efforts of marketers to encourage a rearticulation of the white male subject as vulnerable to humiliation, lest he enthusiastically consumes alcoholic beverages with his male buddies. We argue that the resonance of this emergent form was also built on the shortcomings of the masculine projects of the 1980s. While the appeal of characters like John Rambo stemmed from a fantasy to realize an unadulterated masculine prowess, the downside of this fantasy was that it was largely unattainable. It was, then, the inability to identify with the hypermasculine media representations of 1980s that paved the way for the popularity of more attainable and mediocre representations of men in the early 2000s. We still see the mediocre man trope identified by Messner and Montez de Oca in the ads of mega sports media events such as the Super Bowl. For instance, one of a handful of highly discussed ads from Super Bowl XLIV featured a series of young, seemingly emasculated “average” men staring blankly into a camera, narrating a list of humiliations they endure for their wives and girlfriends. In exchange for tolerating such defeats, they conclude: “I will carry your lip balm, and because I do this, I will drive the car I want to drive.” While the mediocre man is alive and well, we highlight a new development in American masculinity evident in recent commercials. A new character has burst onto the scene and his presence confounds previous analyses that point to the ubiquity of mediocre men in contemporary advertising. There is nothing mediocre about this latest iteration. He represents a return to the hypermasculinity of the 1980s, but not perfectly. There is a twist, for this new iteration is intended to be humorous. For the most part, the men of this new trope come with chiseled bodies, baritone voices, and full beards; they are understood to be the objects of women’s fantasies. Unlike the beer and liquor ads analyzed by Messner and Montez de Oca (2005), this new masculinity features men who are islands unto themselves. They don’t seek refuge among male buddies, as it might somehow dilute their potent manhood. Yet this performance of masculine idealism is done tongue-in-cheek. By 2005, the undaunted heroism and uncommon strength of the Chuck Norris persona no longer resonated as it once did. What was cool was not Chuck’s masculine prowess, but being aware of why such exaggerations of manhood were ridiculous. So-called “facts” about Chuck Norris—such as “Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits”—became an Internet sensation, and in 2007 a book was even published on the topic. Old Spice appeared to tap into this more ironic take on contemporary masculinity when they hired Isaiah Mustafa to step from a bathrobe to a horse in the span of thirty seconds. How do we make sense of this? We argue that despite appearances, the self-mocking irony of the mediocre man is still relevant; however, rather than encouraging the viewer to identify with the excessively mediocre characters on screen, these new tongue-in-cheek ads work from the premise that the viewer is the mediocre man. Like the Old Spice guy’s pitch about how to smell and what women desire, “the most interesting man in the world” from the Dos Equis commercials does not address or humiliate average men. Instead, he talks directly to us, providing counsel to mediocre men from an idealized masculine perspective about topics ranging from “manscaping” to “rollerblading.” These new ads make fun of that unattainable hegemonic masculinity of decades past, but does this mean these ads are genuinely subversive? In short, we don’t think the new, self-mocking masculinity in these commercials and popular culture is all that subversive. First, in laughing at these characters, white men are able to telegraph to the world the rather privileged assertion that they do not take themselves all that seriously. It follows then that when feminists offer critical insights about the embedded assumptions of heteronormativity in these commercials, or when they ask whether part of the joke is also the assumption that all women are seduced by diamonds, they are admonished as failing to have a sense of humor. As in the mega sports media ads analyzed by Messner and Montez de Oca (2005), the irony can and does work effectively as a means of deflecting charges of sexism away from white males. Second, this emergent masculinity is further problematic in that while it is self-mocking, it is not self-ridiculing. The representations of these men cause us to smirk because they are improbable, in part due to the social and cultural changes men perceive to be threatening their survival. However, while this masculinity may be deemed improbable, it is not undesirable. In this way the propagation of this new masculinity is not ultimately subversive because it does not fundamentally offer or even necessarily encourage a critique of hegemonic masculinity. It is as though the culture has found a way to reignite the hypermasculine fantasies of the 1980s. Furthermore, the fact that this trope of masculinity is recognized as fantasy does not undermine the ideal of masculinity (Connell 2005). As such, the ideal still serves to organize patterns, performances, and policing of everyday masculinities. We see this in the current Miller Lite commercials that command mediocre men to “man up” and, ostensibly, do a better job living up to the hegemonic ideal. Third, laughable representations of the hegemonic ideal do little to challenge characterizations of women, who continue to be depicted as reliably heterosexual and predictably susceptible to these hegemonic seductions. That is, even while we shake our heads about the implausibility of men in these ads, characterizations of women are largely taken at face value. Women want their men to give them diamonds and build them a dream kitchen. Such messages continue to organize interactive patterns between men and women, and as is evident from the retorts of our Sociology of Gender students, the messages about women remain effective. Students often make the strongest arguments in favor of a hegemonic masculinity when they attempt to refute it: “But that’s what girls naturally want! They’re looking for strong, hot, rich guys.” The millions of fans watching the Super Bowl and its commercials on Sunday will undoubtedly be treated to a virtual deluge of messages about masculinity. If previous years are any indication, a good number of the commercials will promote images of hypermasculine men proudly proving to be irresistible to women and capable of herculean feats of strength. Steelers and Packers fans alike will watch these clever commercials and revel in their self-awareness of the absurdity of it all. But although they will smirk and wink to their couch-mates, they would do well to wonder whether a hegemonic masculinity is being reinforced and promoted even as they mock it. We will be watching the game on Sunday to see what else becomes of the mediocre man. ***Join the conversation! If you have analysis to provide on Super Bowl commercials from this Sunday’s game, please consider submitting a video and your accompanying thoughts to The Sociological Cinema. We seek video submissions that instructors of sociology can use in the classroom. Lester Andrist and Valerie Chepp Originally posted on Skepchick Like many another crime fiction junkie, I’m mildly obsessed with Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. I pounced on the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, when it first appeared in the States, and was rather thrilled to discover a good crime story with a startling unique and complex female character at its heart – an unfortunately rare occurrence. All too often, especially historically, women only occupy the backdrops of noir genre tales. But beyond the story itself, the (anti-)heroine Lisbeth Salander has also seemed to find herself in the middle of a popular criticism debate about women, violence and the representation of both in art. The graphic depiction of both the violence – extremely sexual in nature – she is subject to and the violence she delivers in return has been the justification for critics to discuss whether or not her story deserves to be taken seriously or if it’s nothing but salacious drama only befitting the pulp from which tradition it springs. There are spoilers galore in this, so if you’re worried about that sort of thing, you might want to flee now. Let’s say this immediately and clearly – misogynist imagery does not equal a misogynist work of art. That’s a lazy correlation too many readers, watchers and reviewers currently make about books, films and the like, and it’s simplistic and shallow. Rape scenes do not automatically mean sexual content is being using gratuitously. Descriptions of women being victimized do not immediately point to exploitation. The impulse to label it as such is of course well-intended, and sometimes well-suited. It’s a sign of progress and, in general, a step in the right direction. But it’s not truly progress if it’s only an impulsive leap to the opposite end of the spectrum instead of a carefully considered conclusion about a terribly complicated and nuanced topic. Let’s also be clear about this – it’s entirely possible for a book to be feminist without featuring a single feminist in it. Lisbeth Salander, for example, is not a feminist. She’s an extremely emotionally damaged individual focused on survival, although she seems to be at least on the path to improvement by the close of the trilogy. She’s a victim of systematic abuse and torture, and she’s committed to self-preservation and revenge by any means possible. She’s not a necessarily noble figure. She doesn’t have to be to prove Larsson’s point. The fact that she isn’t proves it even more successfully. The same thing that many dislike (and understandably so) about the Millennium trilogy – its terse, journalist style, or, as some would have it, lack thereof – is what lends it its relevancy. The situations in this book are fictional, yes. But the entire tapestry is woven from Larsson’s journalistic observations and research of Swedish society, which, in many ways, does not differ much from other Western modern societies. There’s a reason each part in the book begins with statistics on violence against women in Sweden. It’s the same reason the Swedish title of the published book has nothing to do with dragon tattoos, but is simply, “Men Who Hate Women.” The book supports this thesis in numerous way, both obvious and so subtle that people seem to miss them completely. In the first book, the killer Martin Vanger quite evidently hates women, and deliberately picks as his victims prostitutes, because he doesn’t even see them as people and believes no one cares about their safety. The truly horrifying part about this is that he’s right. Not just in the book’s world, but our own. As the plot thickens to include Zalenchenko, we learn Salander’s father not only regularly beat her mother to the point where the elder woman sustained permanent brain damage and had to move to a nursing home to live, he is a sex trafficker who sells women like cattle. But the most subtle condemnation of the way some men treat women is Blomvikst himself, who, while ostensibly the hero and clearly a good man, nonetheless is freewheeling and often careless with the women he creates relationships with. His marriage deteriorated because he continued his open affair with Erika Berger – the same affair that makes Lisbeth realize he’s not worth pursuing romantically. Blomvikst’s own sister, a domestic violence lawyer who represents Salander in the latter’s trial, states this matter-of-factly at the end of the third book, as a way of warning to Lisbeth. But Lisbeth, of course, already knew. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a fictionalized journalistic expose of a modern, industrialized, progressive society’s complicity in systematic abusive treatment of women. From an epidemic of sex trafficking to rape used as a tool of control to the media panic over Salander’s bisexuality to random, sexually charged attacks on the street to Salander’s own insecurity about her body which leads her to breast implants. These books paint a portrait of every subtle and overt challenge women in civilized societies still have to face down. We praise violent and gory war movies that celebrate male sacrifice, pain and torture. Those are considered profound, and the willingness to graphically depict violence is lauded as bold and courageous. Rough and tumble gangsters and cowboys are treasured antiheroes. But when we see a book and/or movie that does the same for women, then it seems to become gratuitous. Men caught in a violent battle against larger forces are heroes. Are women in less-defined but no less violent battles simply victims? After all, the third book of the Millennium trilogy begins each chapter with a historical anecdote about the role of women in wars. All three books are about a female warrior in an urban battleground where women are physical and emotional casualties of men’s business and desires, and just because the war she fights is ambiguous, it’s no less real. Paradoxically, it seems those express concern about how women are being depicted are the ones drawing these unfortunate lines and missing the point entirely. Essentially, I think much of the criticism leveled against Dragon Tattoo based on misogynist grounds is even more misogynist itself. Dismissing graphic depiction of this sort of violence once again marginalizes the importance of highlighting and talking about it, and covers this marginalization in a nice sheen of concern for the poor women. Which means they also don’t get the first thing about why a character such as Lisbeth Salander is at the center of this tale. She doesn’t want your fucking concern. When it comes to my reading or viewing preferences, neither do I. I appreciate the fact there are so many people worried about these implications. But they don’t have the right to dismiss those, and further, implications because it’s distasteful to them, or deny the positive implications of talking about how women have to deal with them. What I think people aren’t getting about the evolving depictions about women in popular literature and on screen is that the goal is not to have nothing but perfect women in perfect situations. What I want to see is complex and complicated women in complex and complicated lives. It’s not always going to be pretty. It shouldn’t be, if it has any truth in it, and the more important the truth, the messier it’s probably going to be. The whole idea is learning to see it all in a new perspective. A perspective in which women, including their challenges, failings and endurance, are taken seriously, both inside and outside the story. When it comes to the Millennium trilogy, there is something here, and whatever crime story wrappings it comes in is not justification for denying it. Maybe, instead of looking away, it’s time to look even closer. Jen Myers |
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