Commercials are a useful way of teaching abstract sociological concepts (Irby and Chepp 2010). As alluded to in a previous blog post on this site, instructors can systematically and consciously include commercials into their teaching. Using the commercials archived on The Sociological Cinema, this can be done in the summer when instructors are constructing and restructuring syllabi. Well in advance of the start of the semester, instructors can identify appropriate and powerful commercials useful for sociological critique and analysis.

In a recent article in the Journal of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Irby and Chepp (2010:101) note that “using commercials in the classroom can potentially prompt students to become more media literate outside of the classroom setting.” I suggest two ways to facilitate the transformation of students into critical media viewers. First, instructors can begin by regularly showing commercials in the classroom so that students can become familiar with the exercise of critiquing commercials. Instructors can explain a new sociological concept to students and then use a commercial as a way of showing a visual example of a potentially abstract concept. Essentially, in this first step the instructor connects the commercial to the concept for the students. Second, and perhaps the most effective way to produce critical media viewers is to couple regular commercial viewing in the classroom with the opportunity for students themselves to analyze commercials through a sociological lens. Halfway through the semester as students become accustomed to seeing the application of concepts to commercials, students—rather than the instructor—can become the analyst. This can happen in a variety of ways. If in-class quizzes are a part of classroom assessment, the instructor can show a commercial and ask students to apply the commercial to a sociological concept learned over the past class period or week(s). If an instructor usually incorporates minute responses or short in-class assignments into course evaluation, commercials analysis can be used for these assignments.  

In the second step, the analysis of commercials by students acts as an assignment and an assessment tool. The benefits of using commercials as an assignment or assessment measure are many. For example, it evaluates students’ knowledge of the application of sociological concepts to experiences in their current day-to-day life. This benefits instructors because it allows the instructor to evaluate student learning. Two, if students regularly critique commercials in the classroom, it likely increases the potential for them to become media literate outside of the classroom as they get in the habit of being media conscious. Last, using the analysis of commercials as an assignment might bolster student learning because popular culture appears to quickly and effectively gain student interest and engage students.  

Thanks to The Sociological Cinema, sociology instructors now have a free archive that houses commercials, which are tagged by their sociological theme. This easily allows instructors to find commercials that they want to use for assignments and assessment. I encourage instructors to not only show commercials in their classroom but to also include the analysis of commercials as an assessment measure.

Amy Irby

Stand-up comedians exercise a curious privilege, which allows them to peddle controversial conclusions and uncomfortable insights without suffering the usual scorn and admonishment that comes with challenging systems of power. The comedian's stage seems to be a space that has been engineered for bringing indelicate knowledge about the world to the surface. For instance, the suggestion that Americans are deeply divided by race and class usually causes people to fidget, yet Chris Rock was greeted with laughter and applause when he unabashedly criticized the racialized wealth gap in the United States during one of his performances in Washington DC. Similarly, Louis C.K. received a rousing applause when he discussed his privilege as a white male, and Hari Kondabolu made an entire room burst into laughter by exposing the nonsensical logic underlying stereotypes aimed at Mexican immigrants.

Unfortunately, as with superheroes who use their powers for evil, not all comedians use the stage as a venue for delivering social criticisms aimed at exposing injustice. For instance, comedy is just as likely to reinforce stereotypes as it is to criticize them, or to put it differently, the comedian's stage is just as likely to be a place where knowledge is "indelicate" because it is racist as it to be a place where knowledge is indelicate because it is critical of racism.

Consider Jeff Dunham's ventriloquial act featuring his popular dummy, "Achmed the Dead Terrorist." In the clip below, which is taken from a 2007 performance in Washington DC, Dunham draws upon a number of stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, many of which have been around since well before the attacks on September 11th, 2001. Dunham is not deploying social criticism, but is instead uncritically drawing on racist representations for laughs. He is also reasserting and promoting what is by now a worn panoply of orientalist associations. Arabs and Muslims, like the Achmed character, are typically portrayed as religious fanatics. They are often depicted as irrationally angry, and many are self-proclaimed terrorists. But if they are dangerous, they are dangerous buffoons and are often too incompetent to pull off their own deadly plots.

In this way, stand-up comedians can be understood as articulators of knowledge about the world. As I have argued, they contribute to the persistence of stereotypes at times, but they can also articulate convincing arguments against stereotypes. But what is true of stand-up comedy seems to hold for other types of comedic performance as well. Political cartoons, comedy sketches, and even situation comedies all peddle this indelicate knowledge about the racialized other. In "Ali-Baba Bound," a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1940, Porky Pig runs up against Ali-Baba and his "Dirty Sleeves." The humor is constructed around a basic scaffolding of the Arab as dirty and sneaky. Ali-Baba's Arab underlings in the cartoon are depicted as too primitive to competently use rockets and must must run as suicide bombers toward a colonial fort with explosives strapped to their heads.

The articulation and reinforcement of Arabs as buffoons or Muslims as extremists, the elevation of these images above others as iconic representations ironically limits the field of vision. But shortly after 1940, events would transpire so that for a time Arabs and Muslims occupied a relatively small sliver of American concern. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor the following year ignited a discursive explosion surrounding the Japanese, both those living in American neighborhoods and abroad. It is striking how eerily similar representations of Japanese persons were to those claimed for Arabs and Muslims. However, fed by photographed destruction of Pearl Harbor and the tangible realities associated with the American war machine shifted back into high gear, dominant representations of the treacherous Japanese other went further and faster. Each representation of the "Jap" became more and more fanciful; each illustration seemingly emboldened by the last to push the caricature even further.

Celebrated children's author, Dr. Seuss, published a cartoon only weeks before the United States would forcibly relocate 120,000 ethnic Japanese persons living in the United States to internment camps. The cartoon depicts a buck-toothed, fifth column of Japanese Americans lining up from Washington to California for their very own box of TNT. A man with a monocular scales the rooftop of the explosives depot "waiting for the signal from home." Or consider a Looney Tunes cartoon from the period, which is named "Tokio Jokio" and similarly claims buck teeth and buffoonish behavior for all Japanese persons on the planet.

The cartoon elaborates upon many of the typical stereotypes associated with Japanese persons but unlike the Dr. Seuss cartoon, the attempt at humor is harder to miss. Whereas the Seuss cartoon reverberates extant fears about a treacherous Japanese enemy living among us, the Looney Tunes cartoon lampoons them as bumbling idiots. In the Seuss cartoon, their tribal-like loyalties to the Emperor mean they are capable of doing just about anything, but in the Looney Tunes cartoon they are too incompetent to prevent their own Fire Prevention Headquarters from burning to the ground. Such seemingly contradictory representations permeated the American imagination of the time, alternately stoking anxieties while assuring Americans of their national and even racial superiority.

These racist representations aimed at the Japanese were not buried by the detonation of two atomic bombs over Japanese cities. Just as before the Second World War, they have proven to be free-floating to a degree and transferable to our emergent enemies. Today, Arabs and Muslims are routinely depicted in popular cinema as incompetent. In our comedy, they are again the bumbling idiots, simultaneously too stupid to successfully perpetrate an attack against us and just stupid enough to commit truly heinous crimes. What was an imagined fifth column, has become the terrorist sleeper cell. In 1942 we feared Japanese Americans were blindly loyal to "their" Emperor. Today we are bombarded with ideas about the tribal loyalties of American Muslims. So powerful are these loyalties, it is often suggested, Muslims would happily kill themselves to bring about the demise of Western civilization. The fanatical Middle Eastern suicide bomber is the new banzai charger and Japanese Kamikazi pilot.

There is a joke that is now getting tossed around the internet, and it goes something like this, "A friend of mine has started a new business. He is manufacturing land mines that look like prayer mats. It's doing well. He says prophets are going through the roof." What this joke, Dunham's comedy sketch, and the Looney Tunes cartoon all share is that they mark historical moments when the racialized other became so thoroughly demonized and devalued in the public consciousness, our undifferentiated Arab "enemies" became so feared for their treachery and immorality that it became possible to make light of hypothetical and real violence perpetrated against them. What does it say about a people when they find it possible to laugh at a joke about a human detonating a bomb which is strapped to his body? One might speculate that it is strangely intoxicating to spot the boogieman tripping on his shoelaces, embarrassing himself, or dying by his own venom. The Achmed character's tired threat, "I kill you!" is funny, perhaps because his voice cracks like a thirteen-year-old boy, and we are entertained by the irony that someone so evil could appear so weak. "Look at the Muslim boogieman acting so foolishly!" we seem to be saying through our laughter.

Of course Arabs and Muslims are not born evil; the boogieman is a creature that gets created in the accounts of what might happen if the nation ceases being vigilant. But the larger point I am arguing is that comedy, which uncritically trades in the negative stereotypes aimed at Arabs and Muslims and is able to make an audience pop with laughter with references to suicide bombing, is only possible because Arabs and Muslims have been successfully demonized and devalued. Comedians write jokes to get laughs, but as I mentioned at the outset, they also operate from a space which grants them temporary license to openly discuss controversial ideas. Comedians contribute to the discourse, just as readily they respond to it, and their sets are just as capable of exposing hidden discrimination as reinforcing it. This is important to consider because what is at stake here is the differential valuing of human life, and the way representations are organized to aid in that horrific project.

Perhaps five hundred years from now, when historians are able to look back on this moment, freed from the myopic principles of vision and division that currently ensnare us, I wonder if they will find it ironic that during this zenith of global information flows, a time when information about the intimate lives of people in distant lands so easily zipped across the planet, Americans persisted in holding fast to such gross generalizations. And if those historians archive the media which depicts the moral panic of these decades, they would do well to note what made us laugh.

Lester Andrist

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

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

Originally published by RH Reality Check.

I saw this video Tuesday evening when a friend posted it on her tumblr page. There was a trigger warning regarding suicide, violence, and bullying. I wanted to share this video because I did not know what to expect while watching and when the video was over I was stunned. Not just with the messaging and representations, but in the possibilities of using this video in a classroom or youth group. Please watch the video below. I’ve posted  a few ideas I have on how to use this video, please share some ideas and suggestions you may have!

There are so many ways to use this video with youth. I wanted to share and hope others want to add how they may use this video as well or what discussions you may envision having. 

I’d first start by introducing the video. This may require some background of the artist Marsha Ambrosius, who is the other half of the R&B duo Floetry. They reached a height in mainstream popularity in 2002-2003. This is important to keep in mind, as some youth may not know who the artist is because of this time period.

Discussions of Bullying

I’m not sure if the concept of “bullying” would connect clearly with some viewers. It may be that some youth and other folks may view the experiences presented as intra-racial violence and not only bullying. There may also be a connection between bullying and age. Some may view the men in the video as adult males who may be too old to experience bullying in the ways we’ve heard about it in the past several months. This may lead to some interesting dialogue about how bullying can be considered an age-specific experience.

Conversations about masculinity and how it is connected to gender, race, ethnicity, age, geographic location, and ability (to name a few) will also be important. How are racially Black men living in the US expected to present themselves? How was Black masculinity represented in this video (make a list of all the forms of masculinity and Blackness seen, for example clothing, forms of affection, solidarity, etc.).  Were there attempts at defending masculinity? How is intra-racial violence affecting our community? (this may be a good opportunity to have information about intra-racial violence as connected to various forms of violence from rape to murder). What could some community responses to violence look like in this situation/scenario?

Discussions on Men of Color & Same Gender Relationships

I’d make it clear that this is NOT a “down low” relationship. Both men have publicly been together and showing affection for and with one another. Living in NYC where the anti-homophobia campaign “I Love My Boo” began in October 2010, representations of men of Color in same gender relationships remain limited (see some of the images here).  I have not seen in mainstream popular culture such images since Noah’s Arc (which I’m still recovering from it’s absence in my life) and the film that was released in select theaters in 2008, Noah’s Arc: Jumping the Broom.

The phrase “alternative Lifestyles” is the one thing I have an issue with in this video. My opinion is that this term assumes there is a choice in how people are living and I believe that we do not choose our sexual orientation. I came to this space while working as an intern at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) over a decade ago. GLAAD has a great Media Reference Guide that has a section on offensive and problematic phrases/words to avoid and “lifestyle” is included with this discussion:

                        “
                                    Offensive: "gay lifestyle" or "homosexual lifestyle"

                                    Preferred: "gay lives," "gay and lesbian lives"

                                    There is no single lesbian, gay or bisexual lifestyle. Lesbians, gay men
                                    and bisexuals are diverse in the ways they lead their lives. The phrase
                                    "gay lifestyle" is used to denigrate lesbians and gay men, suggesting that
                                    their orientation is a choice and therefore can and should be "cured"
                                                                                                                                                                        ”

Heterosexual Privilege

In the beginning of the video the viewer may assume that there is a heterosexual relationship until there is affection in a specific way shown among two men of Color. This would be a useful time to discuss how we assume heterosexuality often, how heterosexuality is seen as a “norm” in our society, and what that does to all of us, not just people who do not identify as heterosexual. Here is a good article about heterosexual privilege and a checklist that may be useful for this conversation.

These are a few things that immediately come to mind and I’m hoping that others will share some of their own. I know over the next several days as I think about this video I’ll come up with more ideas and possibilities. Thanks in advance for all of you who share!

Bianca I. Laureano