we interrupt the regular programming for some Glenn Beck style “look, communist nazis!” comparisons (stolen entirely from here)
Exhibit A: the cover of the brandspankin’ new Teabagger Party Review
Exhibits B and C: the Communists and Nazis did it, too!
too bad no one is paying me millions of dollars to do this shit. It’s easy. Especially with a demographic that’s so devoid of self-reflection, they actually do use this sort of old-school emotionally emotive imagery. On purpose.
Once upon a time, Lego’s were a genderneutral toy. Now they are no longer, as exemplified by the fact that Scheels has a set of children’s winter coats, with the “boys” coats having a lego design, while the “girls” coats have a butterfly design; or the fact that Lego now has “girls” sets, that come in pink boxes and have pink bricks, and are designed to make girly things.
And it’s not just Lego. The visit to almost any children’s toy site asks, as the first question before you can see the products, whether you’re shopping for a girl or a boy, or at the very least sorts all its toys into a “boy” and a “girl” category; the categories are usually non-overlapping, too. Because boys and girls are just SO different that they wouldn’t ever play with each other’s toys, and just picking from a general selection of toys might result in buying a toy for the “wrong” gender? And ads are just as bad, as This video explains (And looky there, Sweden comes out as the most progressive country again :-p). I’m sure the banning of ads to kids is helpful, but until stores stop gendering their toy-sections, and adults stop buying such highly gendered toys for their kids, the stupid gender stereotypes will continue, and will give adults an excuse to perpetuate the stereotypes; after all, all little girls naturally like to be told they’re pretty, right? Can’t be that they’ve been socialized from birth into this, right?
*sigh*
***today’s post is almost entirely made up from the gender: children/youth tag as Sociological Images. I encourage everyone to go look through the rest of it, because it’s really a fascinating topic.***
1)since in my last post I declared the internet connection to be good, it of course crapped out (apparently, caine and I used too much broadband watching videos, so we’re locked out of the internet for 4 days), which is why I’m posting this from Barnes & Noble in Bismarck, and why the post I was going to write will have to wait. Instead, some mostly shallow, shortmedium-length thoughts.
2)I thought the Minot Daily was unreadably conservative and stupid, but the Bismarck Tribune has them beat, by publishing Ross DoucheDouthat (of “women on birth-control turn me off” and “straight marriage should be special because I like being special” fame) in their Op/Ed section. I’m thinking the only way to sink lower than that is to let O’Keefe or Breitbart write for your paper. Or, you know, turn into the Whirled Nut Daily.
3)I have found my copy of Yes Means Yes, and as soon as I’m done reading Matt Taibbi’s Great Derangement, I’m going to re-read it and take notes. I’m still not entirely sure how to sum up its awesomeness, but I figure writing general evaluations of their sub-themes, plus highlighting their most personally thought-provoking sections will be the way to go here.
4)I’m reading SKEPTIC right now, and one of the articles was about Public Intellectuals, and whether they’re needed, what their use is supposed to be, and whether the Public Intellectual is in decline in the US right now. Fascinating article, especially because it touches on something that I’ve been talking about for a while now: the need for a well educated and voluntarily/happily self-educating populace. The article itself doesn’t really talk about this, but it mentions on the one hand that the role of the Public Intellectual is to do what the average person doesn’t have the resources, education, and time to do (think deep, long, and hard about all sorts of social issues), and on the other the fact that in the US, the quality of the Public Intellectual has suffered, because who becomes a widely known PI is determined by their entertainment value and how well their messages confirm the opinions and biases of the general population, rather than the thoroughness and quality of their argument/presentation. It also mentions that the role of the PI has shrunk to academia, where it used to include artists and other non-academic professions. All of which, as far as I’m concerned, are consequences of the way universities work in the US. for one, as they become more expensive, fewer people go; two, for the same reason, people treat them like paying tuition is buying a degree, thus causing grade inflation and similar loss of quality; three, people treat them like investments in their career, and therefore become Fachidioten with a very narrow education in only the areas they find directly relevant to their future careers. On the other side of this are free(ish) public universities in Europe, where people study “useless” shit for fun, where a larger percentage of the population goes to university, and where in general consider knowing stuff a positive trait. From a directly, purely economic POW, the US model is certainly more profitable, but OTOH it does result in a country full of teabaggers. So yeah, heavily subsidized universities are good for the health of a country, because it produces more, and better quality, Public Intellectuals. Whole populations of public intellectuals, for that matter.
5)So… purely hypothetically… what are the prognoses for Hawaii, in re AGW? Is it still going to be a livable place some 15-25 years from now? For that matter, is much of it still going to exist by then…?
Pandagon has been doing Mad Men Mondays, which is how I got into watching that show. And OMFG, is it ever an awesome show. But lately it feels like the Mad Men Monday threads don’t address the stuff that goes thru my mind when I watch the show, so I think I’m going to occasionally blog about it too. And I’m going to start with Sunday’s episode, because it was one of the best ones so far. It was called “The Suitcase”, because superficially it was about trying to create an ad for Samsonite suitcases (and because all the characters in the episode unload fucktons of “baggage” on each other), but it might as well have been titled “All Peggy’s Men”, since it revolved around her, and three men with which she had three different kinds of relationships: her bland-ass, family-picked fiance who doesn’t have his own internet page and whose name I don’t remember; Duck, her former lover, who is still (literally) insanely in love with her and who is a relapsed alcoholic; and her boss Don Draper, a slightly stereotypical “asshole with a heart of gold” who is recently divorced, lonely, and as a result on his best way to become an alcoholic, as well, and who has throughout the show been sort of a mentor to Peggy.
The episode takes place on Peggy’s birthday, and the three guys manage to show themselves from their least pleasant sides: her fiance invites her whole family (with whom she doesn’t get along well at all) to what was supposed to be a romantic candle-light dinner as a “surprise”, then throws a fit over her having to work late, and they actually break up; Duck starts out ok, by sending her flowers and a gift which is the offer to become a partner in an ad agency he wants to create, except then it turns out that he’s drunk, doesn’t really have the funding for this, and actually got his ass fired from his previous job. And then he shows up at her work, sobbing about how he can’t go on without her, but ending up calling her a whore when he thinks she slept with her boss. Draper himself comes off least bad of the three, and that’s saying a lot considering he starts out by taking her apart for an ad idea he didn’t like, and then making her work late (probably because he’s lonely and dealing with a fuckton of emotional issues in that episode especially), and then getting drunk and throwing up. But at least he doesn’t insult her, apologizes for fucking up her birthday after finding out it was her birthday, buying her for food and drinks for that, and actually having a halfway sane, caring personal conversation with her (while the other dudes made their relationships with her mostly about themselves).
Anyway, somewhere halfway through this episode there’s a scene shortly after the break-up (by phone) with the lame fiance who doesn’t really know shit about her, when she drags her boss to the bathroom where he proceeds to throw up a lot, and her ex-lover shows up to make a scene. At that point, Peggy gets this really weird expression on her face… and for a moment I got this impression that if this were me in that situation, I’d be thinking that if this was my choice of men, becoming a spinster/crazy catlady would suddenly seem far more appealing. As a matter of fact, almost none of the men in the show make very good husbands: if they’re not lying, cheating, divorcing-for-a-younger-model assholes, they’re paternalistic and condescending.
So there you have it… patriarchy makes men unappealing.
Pandagon has an article about high-heels, and I’ve got to say I very much agree that this is a severely under-discussed issue. Especially the point about how shaving and make-up are freely and commonly decried, despite the fact that neither poses even remotely the same health-hazard high-heeled shoes do.
Especially nasty in this context is that apparently a lot of workplaces have high-heels as part of the dress-code, either directly or indirectly (i.e. the dress-code says “professional and elegant”, but the only soe that would pass that muster would be a heeled one). I guess I’ve been lucky that so far, that shit hasn’t been a problem. I do know what a massive pain in the ass that would be, though, because for 6 months I wore heels voluntarily to work, because the dress-code said “elegant”, and the only thing even close to that that I already had was a pair of winter boots with 2-inch heels, and I refused to buy new shoes for a minimum-wage job that I knew I was only going to have for a few months. For that reason, I was pretty frustrated when I read (via that thread on pandagon) an attempt by some unions in the U.K. to pass a motion that would make it possible for women in jobs where heels would be a health-hazard (i.e. those that involve lots of standing and/or walking around) to opt out of heels. It sparked a shitload of controversy and headlines along the lines of “unions want to ban high-heels”; which, as far as I can tell, wasn’t the case at all. Fucking frustrating that it fell flat, and now health-damaging dress-codes continue on. And feminists don’t even talk about this issue, so it’s not likely that another such attempt will be made anytime soon, nevermind succeed.
If I ever end up having to take an office job, I will move back to the PNW, since people there even to to the opera in jeans, fleece, and sandals. I don’t remember what the dress-codes in Germany are… my mom works in IT so they don’t have a dress-code at all, and I don’t know what my aunts wear to work. I shall have to ask my cousin when I get back, to ask if the women in the banking industry wear heels… maybe he’s been staring at their legs often and long enough to remember.
Over at pandagon there’s yet another conversation about women taking their husband’s name when getting married. In general, I support their effort at making it socially acceptable and common for women to keep their own names, but I think going to the point of claiming that women must keep their name is compete bullshit. The current discussion started with a post that made fun of women who claim that they made the change because they either had difficult to spell/pronounce names, or because they want to distance themselves from their own families, because 85% of women change their name, while virtually no men do (hence the “only women have hard to pronounce names and horrible families?!” joke), thus making it look like a mere excuse. The argument at one point went so far as to support the banning of name-changing upon marriage (based on a slight misrepresentation of the law in Quebec, which bans immediate name changes, but allows one to change their name if they’ve used a name different from their birth-name for 5 years or more IIRC), which in my opinion goes way too far and qualifies this as a minor version of the “let’s tell women what to wear” idiocy.
So, here’s my detailed opinion on this name-changing issue.
As a tradition, it’s completely stupid and patriarchal, and I have personally experienced that taking a husband’s name can lead to feelings of having your own identity erased. The social pressure on women to take their husband’s name can be overwhelming, as well, and for women who marry when they’ve already have a professional record established under their birth-name, the name-change can cause career problems. For that reason, I very strongly support the movement to abolish the tradition and let women keep their names easily, without pressure to do otherwise.
But I also support the movement to make it easier for men to be able to adopt their wife’s name, and generally make name-changing easier for everyone, at any point. Why? Because I don’t really feel like one’s birth-name is one’s own name: the last name is usually the father’s name and the tradition of taking it is just as patriarchal as taking the husband’s name. And the first name is whatever one’s parents liked, and can feel entirely wrong for oneself. And then there’s the fact that indeed some people have names that are a pain in the ass to them, some people have horrible families that they want to dissociate themselves from, and some people are just weird and OCD and want to be able to have a name that, for them, is aesthetically pleasing and fitting. And all of those are perfectly good reasons to change one’s name, but it can be a massive pain in the ass to do so (or even impossible, if the bureaucracy decides your reason just isn’t good enough) in all but that one instance.
And so, women who for some reason or another aren’t that thrilled with their name, use that one instance when it’s easy to make a change, because all people are, at heart, lazy :-p . And they get lambasted for it because men don’t do it just as often. This ignores that men who might not like their name for the same reasons have a completely different social conditioning (being told they should be proud of their name, that they’re responsible for continuing the family, etc blah blah) that for one may result in a name-change not even occurring to them as an option, and two making it more difficult for them to go through with it: getting married doesn’t make name-changing easier for a man the way it does for a woman, so there isn’t really this opportunity to get it done easily.
So anyway, in Jadehawkworld, everybody would get a naming ceremony at some point of their choosing in their 20′s to chose “their” name themselves, and for married couples I’d adopt a version of the Peruvian (and Spanish?) naming tradition, in which a married woman would add a usage-optional “de [husbandslastname]” to her own; except I’d have husbands do the same, and adopt a “de [wifeslastname]“; children would get a hyphenated name until their naming ceremony.
The phenomenon of victim-blaming in cases of rape is pretty well known, but apparently the same thing happens in cases of domestic violence:
part 1, part2.
The difference between the two videos is fucking huge. People immediately help both the white and the black woman in the first video. It’s especially striking that the black woman is helped by two women, who aggressively go against a Big Black Dude who looks like he could knock them across the room, too (and has clearly no compunctions in doing so, judging from his girlfriend’s face). This makes the excuses from the 2nd video look pretty unconvincing. Alternatively, it can be seen as the man being judged by the appearance of the woman he’s with, i.e. a man with a “slut” at his side is judged more likely to pull a weapon than a man with a “nice woman”.
Also striking is that in the 2nd video, you can clearly see the blame shifting, when a dude at a neighboring table says that “they” are making a scene and embarrassing themselves “as a couple”: the situation is now both the man’s and the woman’s fault, something completely absent from the first video.
There’s a whole bunch of interesting things going on in the videos, like the fact that men act against the skinny white dude, but women act against the black dude (though obviously with such a tiny sample size, that might just be coincidence), and that in both these cases, the helpers are willing to physically defend the women, while physical harm is used as an excuse to do nothing in the second video. The clothes and statures they put the men in are also interesting, since the white skinny guy is wearing a suit, while the big black guy is dressed more casually, which looks to me like they’re projecting different, somewhat racially stereotypical, forms of power.
So anyway, the blond, white, conservatively dressed woman gets the most and most immediate help, by the most people (both men and women). The black “slut” gets the least, and is accused of being a prostitute and of being partially responsible for the situation. It seems then that there’s both positive and negative gender (and race) stereotypes involved 1: the former is the best fit for the “damsel in distress”, while the latter is the best fit for the “trashy slut”. Also, the black conservative woman and the white “slutty “woman are helped only by women (the former directly, the latter indirectly via a phonecall to the cops); this might be because women are less likely to attribute blame for domestic violence to the victim than men are2, i.e. the “innocent victim” signal seems to disappear sooner for men than for women.
Now, the connection between dress and morality is pretty obvious from the videos, but I’m thinking class enters into it too. The women in the black minidress are judged as lower-class (all the way down to prostitute), and like I said, this seem to transfer onto the man at least in the case of the black couple, who is also judged as lower class, and therefore possibly more likely to become violent on the spot; they also are judged as “trashy”, and therefore the situation isn’t perceived as domestic violence, but as one of those stereotypical “embarrassing” arguments that “trashy” couples have in public. The case of the white couple probably has different class dynamics since they dressed the guy in a fancy suit, but even so, the other people in the restaurant fail to identify with the “trashy” woman and therefore don’t bother acting. I’d have loved to see them attempting to dress the women in a sexually revealing but high-class outfit, to see if the change in perceived class would have made a difference. The reason I’m thinking it might have (thought not necessarily so) is because of stronger empathy by middle-class people for middle-class people, and because the Western Cultural tradition attaches morality stronger to the choices of the poor than to the choices of the rich, especially in terms of women’s clothing.3.
All in all, a pretty fucked up situation, but apparently quite typical for our society (though… I’m mildly concerned that all the studies I found were done on undergrads. I know they’re easy to get a hold of when you’re a scientist, but I have my doubts about just how representative they are of society as a whole)
still having brain-freeze, despite David’s accusations of lying, so I’m posting images. Those don’t require much thinking.
first, an old picture from when I was doing a lot of photo-manipulation(in case you’re wondering, yes, that’s a photo of me):
second, an extremely fitting snapshot found on the internet:
and last, something sciency on interconnectivity:
1) “success oriented planning”, Big Oil edition: remote shut-off? we don’t need no stinkin’ remote shut-off!
2)The Arizonan immigration-law is sparking calls for boycotts on multiple fronts: baseball, businesses, other cities, foreign countries
3)random obligatory anti-corporate link: two simple statistics
