SOC EXAM 2
Pro-Natal Policy
-A pro-natal policy is a policy that encourages childbearing, whether intentionally or not. -Japan and the United States offer tax credits for every child in the household. -States also make anti-natal policy, which discourages childbearing. -China imposed a "one-child policy" in 1979, which was revised to a "two-child policy" in 2015.
Sexual Scripts
-A sexual script refers to the social rules that guide sexual interaction. -The scripts of both mixed-sex and same-sex couples have a somewhat rigid ascending order of intimacy. -Sexual scripts are also gendered. -The masculine role is assertive. -The feminine role is responsive. -This creates a push-and-resist dynamic, whereby it's normal for men to push for sexual activity and for women to stop or slow it down.
Marriage Prospects
-A young woman in the 1950s might have been seriously concerned about her marriage prospects. -Going steady ensured that a girl would always have a date on important nights and reduced her chances of becoming an "old maid." -Neither the youth or the adults in the 1950s were sexual innocents, but everyone strove to uphold the image of happy families and virginal teens.
Going It Alone, Continued
-About one-third of adults will spend their prime childbearing and childrearing years without a spouse. -Many of these individuals will choose to have and raise children. -Lower-income women both take marriage very seriously and understand its fragility, which makes them less likely to marry before they have a child. -Women at the opposite end of the class spectrum, who have the economic resources, access to technology, and social support to make a family without a husband, increasingly do so.
The Changing Workplace
-After World War II, airlines hired women whom they believed represented ideal femininity to work as airline stewardesses. -By the 1960s, airlines were in the "business of female spectacle," with very strict standards of appearance. -Stewardesses also faced routine sexual harassment while being poorly paid. -In 1964, stewardesses filed a case against the airline industry under the Civil Rights Act. -Companies no longer had the right to pay women less, deny them promotions, or otherwise discriminate based on gender.
Education as an Institution
-American education is an example of what sociologists label an institution, which is a persistent pattern of social interaction aimed at meeting a need of a society that can't easily be met by individuals. -Education is an example of an institution that we support collectively, creating a systematic way to achieve the goal of an educated citizenry. -The institution of education is carefully organized ad controlled, and it dictates the when, where, and how of teaching.
Feminist Politics Today
-Americans coming of age in the 2000s and later show the strongest support for gender equality. -Today's young feminists are also more diverse than those in previous generations. -Today's feminists are up against the same old forces that American feminists have fought for nearly two hundred years.
Institutional Inertia and Change
-As individuals we may wish to change or ignore the institutions we confront, but this is more difficult with institutions than it is with ideas or social interactions. -Institutions are resistant to change and more difficult to ignore. -Doing things differently can be challenging, but it can be done.
Going to Work
-At the same time that the breadwinner/housewife model was becoming the societal ideal, women were leaving home for paid work. -The 1950s version of the traditional marriage was more myth than reality. -Black families struggled since the G.I. Bill was not available to black soldiers, nor were the college loans or mortgages that launched white families into the middle class. -Poor women and women of color entered the wage economy from the beginning and stayed there.
Authoritarianism
-Authoritarianism is a leadership style that celebrates patriarchal power and masculine aggression as national values. -The election of Donald Trump suggests that there is plenty of support among Americans for authoritarian-style leadership.
Gender Segregation in Sports
-Bodies of professional athletes serve as icons of masculine physical achievement. -Their feats of athleticism are used to represent masculinity and male bodies. -In this way, the symbolic link between the male spectator and the male athlete establishes men's supposed superiority over women. -On the assumption that women are lesser athletes than men, the institution of sport segregates women and men in most cases.
Barriers to Equal Sharing
-Both work and family are greedy institutions, ones that take up an incredible amount of time and energy. -High expectations for workers intersect with high expectations for parenting. -It can be difficult to be successful at work and home, and also attend to personal well-being.
Work and Family Today
-By 1980, 51 percent of all women were employed, and married and single women were employed at equal rates. -Marriage was slowly becoming less essential. -The 1972 law against discrimination in schooling opened up a number of professional doors that had been firmly bolted.
Remember, the Mechanisms That Produce Inequality Aren't Simple
-Compared to the average person, you have a much more sophisticated understanding of how gender inequality is maintained. -Use your knowledge to resist the common misperceptions about feminist progress, like the idea that we can proclaim "mission accomplished" once we get a few privileged women into corner offices. -Also use your knowledge to resist the notion that men have nothing to gain from reducing gender inequality.
The Changing Workplace, Revisited
-Compared to the mid-twentieth century, most employees today work harder for less. -Our economy is now characterized by a commitment to the "free market" at the expense of protecting workers, which results in low levels of regulation and the suppression of union activity.
Eroticized Inequality
-Cultural norms dictate that men be taller, stronger, bigger, older, and more educated than their female partners. -Limited research on women seeking women suggests that they have a slight preference for feminine women. -A larger literature on men who seek men has found preferences for "straight-acting" men. -Men often try to advertise their masculine qualities and conceal their feminine ones, which is known as mascing.
Dating versus Calling
-Dating shifted the balance of power. -Because it took place in the home, calling had been an activity over which women had control. -Women decided who came over and when, and how they socialized. Historian Beth Bailey writes that dating "moved courtship out of the home and into the man's sphere." -Dating required that someone pay for the transportation, food, drink, and entertainment that the couple enjoyed, and women had less money than men.
Changes to Divorce
-Divorce laws changed, allowing both men and women to initiate proceedings without proving infidelity, physical abuse, or failure to provide economic support. -More women decided that an uncooperative husband did not support them returning to school or working or sharing the housework—was something they could do without. -Women themselves began some divorce proceedings, even though their living standards fell much more than men's did.
Substantive Representation
-Does symbolic representation, such as women's presence in government, translate into substantive representation, as in policies that are important and helpful to women? -On many issues, such as the economy, religion, and the highly partisan issue of abortion, gender has made little difference. -Female politicians, though, vote differently than men on issues that affect female constituents and are more likely to introduce bills that address women's needs.
Outsourcing Inequalities
-Domestic outsourcing refers to paying nonfamily members to do family-related tasks. -This is especially common among highly educated, career-focused, professional-class couples. -Outsourcing can help couples build and maintain egalitarian relationships, but it does nothing to undermine the devaluation of feminized work.
Dual-Nurturing
-Dual-nurturers turn away from work and toward the home to focus together on the housework and childcare. -The second shift is the priority. -They challenge the sexist idea that women should be held responsible for the undervalued domestic tasks. -The arrangement requires economic sacrifices. -Not everyone has the resources to adopt this strategy. -They are among the happiest of mixed-sex couples.
Love or Lust
-Early feminists thought they could convince their contemporaries that women were men's equals if women were more spiritual. -To attract and support women, Protestant churches repeated these notions. -As this idea spread, women were reimagined as naturally chaste, innocent of the vulgar sexual desires felt by men, and stirred by love, not lust. -Men were believed to be more deeply tied to their bodies and constantly torn between the carnal and the celestial.
Theorizing Gender Equality
-Equal access is an approach to ending sexism focused on dismantling legal barriers and reducing sex discrimination. -The United States is a good example of a society that uses this approach. -An equal value model is designed to tackle the problem of androcentrism by raising the value of the feminine to match the masculine. -The equal sharing approach targets subordination by attempting to ensure that men and women participate equally in positions that are conventionally understood as masculine and feminine.
Protectionist Legislation
-Even as marriage bans were being discarded by most industries, many other policies were more resistant to change. -Protective legislation, are policies designed to protect women and children from exploitation by restricting their workplace participation. -Feminists recognized this legislation as benevolent sexism; the laws used the language of protection to slot young women into dead-end jobs.
Extending Families
-Extended families—families in which married couples live with aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, and other relatives—most resemble the oldest human family form and have persisted across the world. -Polyamory is the open practice and encouragement of long-term intimate relationships with more than one partner at a time. -Polyamorous and other forms of extended families have the advantage of being able to share the burden of the second shift across more than one or two adults. -There is a high probability, though, that it will be women who take primary responsibility for these roles.
Choosing Not to Have Children
-Faced with the challenge of balancing work and family life, some adults choose not to have children at all. -In 2016, the U.S. birthrate was the lowest on record in the last thirty years. -One out of seven Americans between the ages of forty and forty-four is without children.
The Right to Property
-Feminist activists of the 1800s and early 1900s fought to end patriarch/property marriages. -One of the earliest feminist demands was for women to have the legal right to own property rather than be property. -This right would eventually make many other rights possible: to vote and decide one's own citizenship; to work, keep one's own wages, and build financial credit; to have a voice in family decisions; and if divorced, the right to ask for custody of one's children.
Feminist Politics
-Feminist politics are politics involving efforts to make society's gender order less hierarchical and more supportive of the full development of human capacities for everyone. -Feminists have disagreed about what a feminist utopia, or a perfectly gender-egalitarian society, might look like. -Anti-feminist politics is committed to the value of gender difference and hierarchy and aims to prevent feminist change.
Feminist Politics across the Generations
-First wave feminist campaigns began in the mid-1800s, and they won many women suffrage, family rights, and the right to higher education. -In the 1960s and 1970s, the second wave of feminism aimed to end gender segregation in higher education, challenge job and wage discrimination, make marriage and family law gender neutral, and give women control over their own bodies in sex and reproduction.
Sorting by Gender
-First, sorting allows us to require with policies and norms—that men and women play the same sports in different ways. -These differing policies mean that women and men are required to do sports differently and unequally, with women doing a lesser version. Examples: -Tackle football is the province of "real men"; women are allowed to play "flag" (also sometimes called "powder puff") football. -In the case of baseball, women are sorted into a different game, softball, with its own equipment and rules.
Enjoy the Vertigo
-For better or worse, the gender binary offers us a clear path; it helps us make decisions, from the minor to the momentous. -Without gender, we are left to make decisions with fewer guidelines. This can be incredibly disorienting. -Remember that "radical" ideas are only ideas that haven't been accepted yet. So go ahead and imagine the unimaginable!
Women's Suffrage
-For most of modern history, governments did not allow women the right to vote. -In 1848, at the first-ever women's rights convention in the United States, a small group began a movement for women's suffrage—the right for women to vote. -Suffragists faced criticism, ridicule, government repression, and violence. -The fight for suffrage involved both inspiring coalitions and ugly divides. -In 1920, the federal government gave suffrage to white and black women.
Patriarch/Property Marriages
-For the wealthy and middle classes, marriage was important for maintaining and increasing the power of families. The concerns of the working classes were similar, if less grand. -These were patriarch/property marriages with men the heads of households and women as their human property and equal to children and slaves. -A woman was entered into a marriage by her father, who owned her until he "gave her away" at the wedding to her new owner, her husband.
The Evolution of Marriage
-For thousands of years, marriage served economic and political functions unrelated to love, happiness, or personal fulfillment. -Prior to the Victorian era, love was a bad reason to marry. -There were bigger concerns, such as gaining money and resources, building alliances between families, organizing the division of labor, and producing legitimate male heirs. -Marriages were typically arranged by older family members.
Gender Ambiguity and Bathrooms
-Gender ambiguous or nonconforming people may have difficulty in using the "right bathroom." -Eliminating sex- segregated bathrooms or requiring the provision of some gender neutral ones are policies that would help nonbinary people, but they would actually help cis people, too. -Trans, genderqueer or fluid, and ambiguous-appearing individuals can be inconvenienced by sex-segregated bathrooms, but the binary approach to bathrooms can cause everyone problems from time to time.
The Gender of Governance
-Gender of governance addresses who holds political office and whether it matters. -In modern history, it is overwhelmingly men who have been granted the power to govern nations. -To give American women the right to vote and run for office was to give them standing alongside men: the right to represent themselves and others in the decisions being made
The Institutionalization of Gender Difference
-Gendered institutions affirm and enforce both gender difference and inequality. -Gendered institutions matter. -One intimate example is our plumbing. -Since people cannot build and maintain a personal toilet in every location they inhabit, providing a safe and sanitary way to eliminate personal waste is a public service. -Public bathrooms are gendered institutions.
Reflect on Your Relationship with the Institutions around You
-Gendered institutions push us to make gendered decisions while also making these choices seem natural and inevitable. -Use your knowledge to wrest autonomy from the institutions that bear down on you. -You may want to do this to live a life more in tune with who you are. -Or you may choose to resist these pressures because of the way institutions place you in unequal relationships with others.
Gendered Job Segregation
-Gendered job segregation is the practice of filling occupations with mostly male or mostly female workers. -Occupations are socially constructed to suggest that they're best suited for stereotypical women or stereotypical men. -Because jobs are not naturally gendered, we find great variation across cultures.
College Hookup Culture
-Hookup culture dominate most college campuses because the men of wealthy, historically white fraternities have an oversized influence on the college party scene. -They throw parties that facilitate nonromantic, one-time sexual encounters. -These parties resonate with our current definition of sexual liberation.
Gendered Power
-Hookup culture is premised on a stereotypically masculine version of sexuality, which gives men the power in these interactions. -In hookup culture, wanting a romantic relationship is seen as feminine and should be avoided. -What would a hookup culture that embraced the feminine look like?
The Loss of Status and Security
-Housework and childcare are viewed as low-status activities. -Those who specialize in domestic work sometimes feel as though their partners don't value their contributions. -People who specialize in unpaid household labor may also feel they have less of a voice in their relationships.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
-In 1964 this type of discrimination against women became illegal in the United States. -In a effort to ensure that a bill mandating equal treatment of African Americans would fail, Democrat Howard Smith added "sex" to the Civil Rights Act, making discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, and national origin, illegal. -Much to his chagrin and surprise, it passed anyway. -The enforcement of this law, however, was not automatic. Women had to fight to make it happen.
Modern Marriage Laws
-In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial marriage, and in 2015, the Court made same-sex marriage legal in all fifty U.S. states. -A majority of Americans believe that sexual minorities deserve the same rights as heterosexuals. Citizens of many other countries agree. -Despite the ascendance of the partnership model, the degendering of marriage law, and legalization of same-sex marriage, the breadwinner/housewife model is still an American ideal.
Sex: The Near History of Now, Continued
-In 1969, a group of trans, gay, and nonbinary individuals protested police harassment in several nights of protest that became known as the Stonewall Riots. -By 1973, "homosexuality" had been removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders. -Gay men's communities were devastated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
Sex for Love
-In preindustrial agrarian societies most men and women lived and worked at home, on their farms or those of feudal lords. -Industrialization undid all of this, it separated work from the home. -The new industrial economy dramatically changed how people thought about reproduction.
Hostile Sexism
-In some occupations, some men feel strongly that women should stay in the home or shouldn't be doing men's work, so they isolate women or put them in dangerous situations. -Hostile sexism can also be sexual. -Sexual harassment is a reassertion of dominance in response to the entrance of women into jobs to which men feel entitled. -Women are a symbolic threat; their presence potentially degrades the identity of the dominant group.
Sexual Violence
-In the United States, one in three women and one in sex men have experienced sexual violence. -Men are the vast majority of perpetrators, representing 97 percent of people arrested for sexual assault. -Victim blaming is common, and many victims fear coming forward. -Only one out of every three sexual assaults is reported to the police. -Of those reported, only 2 percent will ever lead to a conviction.
Childcare and Housework in Culture
-Individual mothers are the primary caregivers in only 20 percent of cultures, and in most of these, children have considerable independence. -In the 1800s, experts even argued that too much attention paid to children was harmful.
Sexual Freedom
-Industrialization, urbanization, the commercialization of leisure, and new freedom for women all increased the ability of single men and women to meet without supervision. -This freedom altered the environment in which sexuality was experienced, as well as the norms for sexual behavior. -The lifestyle enjoyed by working class youth in cities would become "mainstream" and the expression of same sex desire would become increasingly "normal."
Men in Female-Dominated Occupations
-Instead of facing glass ceilings or cliffs, men in female-dominated occupations are often presented with a glass escalator: an invisible ride to the top offered to men in female-dominated occupations. -Men in female-dominated occupations are advantaged in terms of pay, promotions, and support from colleagues and supervisors.
Small Acts of Defiance
-Institutions often resist change, but they are not unchangeable. -This isn't always easy, but it's always possible. And institutions never change unless people—like you—begin to question them. -Taking chances and bucking expectations may not lead anywhere in your lifetime but, over time, a few rocks can become a landslide. -One never knows what small acts of defiance are making history, but one thing is for sure: history will be made.
Concerted Cultivation
-Intensive mothering is still culturally dominant today in the United States among the middle and upper classes. -Societal messages affirm that it is still a women's responsibility to care for the home and children. -Fathers are often portrayed as reluctant or incompetent parents. -Concerted cultivation refers to the active and organized effort to develop in children a wide range of skills and talents. -Not everyone has the time or money to engage in these types of parenting practices.
How Institutions Effect Our Lives
-It is difficult to get cultural ideas we don't want out of our brains. -We can surround ourselves with people who support our choices and accept whatever consequences come with violating the rules, but it is essentially impossible to avoid institutions. -Institutions impose themselves on our lives.
"Men's Work" Compared to "Women's Work"
-Job segregation contributes to the gender pay gap because we attribute more value to "men's work" than "women's work." -An occupation disproportionately filled by women is seen as legitimately lower paid than an occupation dominated by men. -This means that both men and women can lose prestige and income when they enter a feminine occupation.
Housework and Childcare in Practice
-Many people internalize the idea that housework and childcare are feminized activities. -Studies of male roommates, gay couples, women partnered with trans men, and single dads all support this view. -Family life is very gendered. -Fathers do about two-thirds of the paid work and one-third of the unpaid work. -Mothers do about one-third of the paid work and two-thirds of the unpaid work.
Conclusion (Families)
-Marriage contracts are no longer explicitly gendered, but gender continues to organize family life. -Most men and women want to build egalitarian families, but deep-seated ideological beliefs and coercive institutional forces make sharing difficult. -The continued feminization of housework and childcare contributes to ongoing inequality. -Women are less happy than men in marriage because it is an institution that systematically presses them into doing the low-status domestic work of our society.
Change
-Marriage is a socially constructed and gendered social institution. -We see marriage as a source of love, care, and commitment, but it was, and continues to be, also governed by norms and laws that determine the rights and responsibilities of spouses. -The role and nature of marriage have changed over time and continue to change.
The Heterosexual Male Gaze
-Media privileges male desire and assumes a heterosexual male gaze. -Content is designed to appeal to a hypothetical heterosexual man. -Men undergo a process of sexual subjectification. -They are told what their internal thoughts and feelings should be.
Gender Pay Gap
-Men continue to have substantial advantages in the workplace today. -The most succinct measure of men's advantage is the gender pay gap, which is the difference between the incomes of the average man and woman who work full time. -Full-time working women earned 82 percent of men's wages in 2017. -In other words, women earned $0.82 for every dollar a man made.
Censorship and Discrimination
-Middle-class marriages in the 1950s were weirdly family oriented and sexually conservative compared to the fun and sexy Roaring Twenties. -Cities passed laws preventing the sale of alcohol to gays and lesbians and outlawed same-sex dancing and crossdressing. -The U.S. government and private companies refused to hire men suspected of having sex with other men and fired employees who were discovered to do so.
A Team of Her Own
-Most Americans will agree that men are naturally better athletes by virtue of their size and strength. -However, our culture does not acknowledge most athletic activities where women excel as sports. -Media coverage of sports keeps a bulging, powerful male body front and center in our culture. -Messner argues that the most popular sports in America are ones based on what he terms "the most extreme possibilities of the male body."
Egalitarians
-Most men and women today are neither traditionalists nor neo-traditionalists; they're egalitarians. -They prefer relationships in which both partners do their fair share of breadwinning, housekeeping, and childrearing. -If men and women want egalitarian relationships, why do studies find that couple often specialize in practice?
Who Hooks Up?
-Most students overestimate how often their peers hook up, how far their peers go, and how much they enjoy it. -Fraternity and sorority members hook up twice as much as everyone else. -Students who are nonwhite, poor or working class, and nonheterosexual hook up less frequently. -Men and women hook up at similar rates, but women report higher rates of regret, distress, and lowered self-esteem afterward.
Gender Segregation in Sports, Continued
-Most team sports feature sex-segregated teams, leagues, and games that ensure men and women never compete with or against one another. -Both those on the political left and those on the political right tend to think this is a good way to organize sports, given the assumption that men are stronger, faster, and bigger than women. -Sex-segregated teams are supported by conservatives who think women are weaker than men and liberals who want equal opportunities.
Balancing Work and Family
-Most women, wanted to achieve what came to be called "work-life balance." -Policies were enacted equalizing some of the power in marriage, financial power especially (Social Security, money management, etc.) -Because partnership marriage involves a gender neutral contract, married couples are free to organize their lives however they wish. And they do.
Nationalism
-Nationalism is a belief in the superiority of one's own country, its rightful dominance over others, and exclusionary policies that restrict citizenship by race, ethnicity, or religion. -Nationalists see women as responsible for reproducing the nation that nationalists want. -Nationalist thinking justifies aiming pro-natal policies (like restrictions on abortion) at women seen as legitimate citizens and anti-natal policies (like forced sterilization) toward other women.
Neo-Traditionalists
-Neo-traditionalists believe that a woman should be able to work if she desires, but only if it doesn't interfere with her "real" duty to take care of her husband and children. -These are breadwinner/superspouse marriages where breadwinners focus on work and their spouse both works and takes care of the home. -Superspouses do most of the second shift and the majority of invisible work: the intellectual, mental, and emotional work of parenting and household maintenance.
Sexual Danger
-One in four senior women reports being sexually assaulted in college. -Gay men and bisexual women are more likely than heterosexual women to report being assaulted. -Bisexual men are almost as likely as heterosexual women to be assaulted.
Separating the Men from the Boys
-One of the first recreational physical activities taken up by women was bicycling. -Bicycling changed women's lives because it gave them mobility and some measure of freedom. -Sports are part of a boy's basic "manhood training," and most boys participate in sports at some level.
New Communication Technologies
-Online organizing, around hashtags like #metoo and otherwise, has been an incredible tool in the new millennium. -It supports a sense of community built around norms of gender equality. -Anti-feminists have also used this technology to nurture and strategize around their anger at women, make life uncomfortable for women's advocates online, and potentially radicalize violent misogynists. -Online harassment makes for a hostile environment; women are twice as likely as men to report being sexually harassed online.
The Victorians
-Over the course of the 1800s, Victorians abandoned the idea that sex was only for reproduction, embracing the idea that sex could be an expression of love. -The Victorians introduced the gendered love/sex binary, a projection of the gender binary onto the ideas of love and sex, such that women are believed to be motivated by love and men by sex. -Reversing Puritan beliefs about women's voracious sexuality, the Victorians feminized love and masculinized sex.
Politics
-Politics is the word we use to describe the various activities involved in determining public policies, and electing people to guide this process. -The politics of gender refers to how people change and resist change to the gender order.
Property and Paternity
-Private property and patriarchy consistently emerge together when societies transition from foraging to settled agrarian societies that cultivate crops. -During most of history, the only way to prove paternity was to control women's sexual freedom. -Once communities put down roots, there can be ownership of land and the consolidation of wealth.
Rape Culture
-Rape culture refers to an environment that facilitates sexual assault by justifying, naturalizing, and even glorifying sexual pressure, coercion, and violence. -Rape culture views men as naturally aggressive and women as inherently vulnerable to men. -It encourages, and can even compel, men to enact the push-and-resist dynamic. -The media also reflects rape culture in terms of its programming and coverage of sexual force and sexual assault.
The Funny '50s
-Rosie the Riveter is an iconic representation of the working woman who went to work in factory jobs vacated by men during World War II. -Of course, after the soldiers returned home, companies and husbands wanted their wives to return to the domestic sphere. -Marketers, columnists, scientists, public intellectuals, and the U.S. government all defended gender-specific family roles as natural. -This resulted in the entrenchment of the nuclear family.
Who Loses if Women Compete with Men?
-Sex segregation in sports also protects a belief in the hierarchical gender binary by ensuring that men and women never compete against one another. -Segregation allows the assumption that men outperform women to go untested. -If we integrated sports, this would be put to the test repeatedly.
Gender and Bathrooms Today, Continued
-Sex segregation of bathrooms gives women a sex segregated space in which to do the body work that must remain invisible to men. -Sex segregated bathrooms uphold the gender binary itself. -Providing different bathrooms for men and women also assumes that everyone needs to protect their private parts from the other sex, but not from the same sex.
Gender and Bathrooms Today
-Sex segregation of toilet facilities has become a powerful norm, if an increasingly contested one. -To most of us, using the other gendered bathroom seems wrong. -As in the Victorian era, today's sex-segregated bathrooms serve social, not biological, functions. -Today, every state in the United States requires separate bathrooms for men and women in every public building and private business with a minimum amount of foot traffic.
Gender and the American Presidency, Continued
-Sexism, hostile sexism, and precarious masculinity were all at work in the 2016 presidential election.
Sexual Liberation
-Sexual liberation is viewed as saying "yes," while saying "no" is considered old-fashioned and regressive. -Saying "yes" grew out of the intersection of the women's movement and the sexual revolution. -Feminists wanted to undo: -The sexist idea that women didn't "belong" on the masculine side of the love/sex binary -The androcentric idea that the feminine side of the love/sex binary wasn't valuable and good
Sexual Objectification
-Sexual objectification is the reduction of a person to his or her sex appeal. -Both men and women are objectified in popular culture. -Gay men are objectified more than heterosexual men. -Women overall are objectified much more than men.
Sexual Pleasure
-Sexual pleasure is unevenly distributed in hookups; women hooking up with men report 35 percent as many orgasms as their partners. -Men appear to value girlfriends' pleasure, but not hookup partners' pleasure. -Women don't often put their pleasure first in a hookup.
The Value of Gendered Work
-So many of the skills flight attendants have are invisible to most of us most of the time, both by circumstance and design. -As a result, we tend to dismiss the work we see as unskilled. -Emotion work refers to the act of controlling one's own emotions and managing the emotions of others. -Flight attendants are tasked with seamlessly performing the proper emotions in interaction with an impossibly wide range of people who bring their own emotions to the moment.
Know That Change Is Always Possible
-Social change is about power, and everybody has some. -Individuals work, alone or together, to imagine, enact, and share new ways of doing things.
Social Movements
-Social movements are collective, nongovernmental efforts to change societies. -Feminists have had to fight for rights individually. -They have done so through "regular" politics like voting, supporting legislation, and lobbying. -They have also done so through social movements like protest campaigns, public marches, and demonstrations.
Conclusion (Politics)
-Societies can be changed with passion, commitment, and cooperation. -The best strategies are to get women and feminist-friendly politicians on the "inside" and an intersectional group of feminists and their allies on the "outside" building support for feminist policies through movement activism.
Rules of Attraction
-Some men resented being responsible for the cost of dating. -Men were nostalgic for the days of calling, which had cost them nothing so women tried to make themselves worth it. -This meant being an attractive and pleasing companion. -A slim, attractive, cosmetically enhanced face and body and some sexual accessibility became central to a woman's value. -Cosmetics industry profits increased more than eightfold in just ten years.
Changes to Institutions
-Sometimes change is a result of the collective work of activists and politicians. It was this kind of work that resulted in the passage of Title IX, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. -Passed in 1972, Title IX meant that schools and colleges receiving federal funding could not legally give preference to men. -Instead, they had to allocate their resources to men and women in proportion to their interest and enrollment.
The Institutionalization of Gender Inequality
-Sports are a big part of an institution that shapes our experiences. -Schools, parks and recreation, community organizations, the media, and other institutions bring sports into our lives. -The entire economy benefits from the institution of sport, which is a $500 billion industry. -Sports are an impressive behemoth of institutionalization. -And sports are also strongly gendered, making them an institution that works to establish a hierarchy among men and demonstrate women's supposed inferiority.
Sports and Masculinity
-Sports aren't just about individual accomplishment; they are also about competition: being better than the other guys beating them—that is the key to acceptance. -Sociologist Michael Messner argues that sport "serves partly to socialize boys and young men to hierarchical, competitive, and aggressive values." -While some men excel, others fail and a hierarchy is constructed. -Sports, especially the most masculinized sports, is one way that society affirms the value of masculinity.
The State
-States are institutions entrusted with the power to regulate everyday life on behalf of the group. -States are the dominant way of promoting group welfare. -This is called governance, and it includes the process of making decisions for the nation, enforcing of the laws, and—if the state is a democracy—ensuring the state's accountability to its citizens.
The Mommy Track
-Struggling with work-life balance, mothers may allow themselves to be put on a mommy track, a workplace euphemism that refers to expecting less commitment from mothers. -This comes with the understanding that they're sacrificing the right to expect equal pay, regular raises, or promotions.
The Mommy Tax
-Taking time out of the workforce to raise small children and then reentering it with less momentum means lost wages, benefits, and Social Security contributions. -This is often called a "mommy tax." -One of the functions of marriage is still to transfer economic resources from breadwinners to caregivers.
Sex for Pleasure
-The 1920s was a period of economic prosperity, technological innovation, and artistic experimentation. -The Roaring '20s saw the invention of "sexy," literally; the word was first recorded to mean "sexually attractive" in 1923. -Concentrations of people with money, free time, and the opportunity to socialize inspired the birth of mass entertainment and gave young people the opportunity to meet and flirt.
New Political Opportunities
-The 2017 Women's March on Washington signaled a gain in momentum on new opportunities for feminists to mobilize. -The march had a broad platform that was inclusive toward individuals of all backgrounds. -Crowd estimates ranged from three to five million across the United States, making it the largest protest in American history.
Puritanical
-The Puritans believed women to be a "weaker vessel" and to have less control over their physical and emotional passions. -They believed that sex should be restricted to intercourse in heterosexual marriage with the aim of reproduction. -All nonmarital and nonreproductive sexual activities were forbidden. -Violations of the rules were punished by fines, whipping, public shaming, ostracism, or even death.
All the Children Were Loved
-The Puritans were scandalized by the sexual lives of North America's native residents, who were more open-minded and permissive than the Europeans. -Many tribes accepted intercourse outside committed relationships, monogamy and polygamy, hook-ups, same-sex sex, and gender nonconformity. -Native Americans often didn't care who the biological fathers were. -As one said to a missionary in the early 1600s, "You French people only love your own children, but we all love all the children of our tribe."
Sex for Babies
-The Puritans' sexual repression had practical reasons beyond religion; it was also about group survival. -They were threatened with extinction because of illness, war and starvation, so reproduction was essential to the group's survival. -This motivated the Puritans to channel their sex drive toward the one sexual activity that made babies: penile-vaginal intercourse.
Gender and the American Presidency
-The United States still has yet to elect a woman president. -Since 1960, more than fifty women have served as head of state around the world. -Scholars argue that the U.S. presidency is possibly the most masculine job in the nation. -Candidates' masculinity has long been a central feature in presidential campaigns. -Donald Trump in 2016 performed an "unapologetic masculinity" that at its core was about dominating others.
The Breadwinner/Housewife Marriage
-The breadwinner/housewife marriage is a "separate but equal" model of marriage that defined men's and women's contributions as different but complementary. -Unlike patriarch/property marriage, breadwinner/housewife marriage did not legally subordinate wives to husbands, but it did define rigidly roles. -Women owed men domestic services; in return, men were legally required to support their wives financially. If they failed to play their part, they could be sued for breach of contract.
The Coital Imperative
-The coital imperative is the idea that any couple who are fully sexually active must be having penile-vaginal intercourse. -It reflects our heteronormative and mononormative culture. -It constrains sexual options. -It prioritizes an activity that privileges male orgasms over female orgasms.
The Glass Ceiling
-The costs of hostile and benevolent sexism and the double bind are behind the idea of the glass ceiling, an invisible barrier between women and top positions in masculine occupations. -Most women simply don't get the training, mentorship, or promotions received by many men. -Black and Latina women are even more likely than white and Asian women to encounter glass ceilings.
Care Work
-The devaluation of feminized occupations is especially acute for care work, which involves face-to-face caretaking of the physical, emotional, and educational needs of others: children, the elderly, and the sick. -These jobs are paid even less than other feminized jobs, holding education and training constant.
Aesthetic Expectations
-The different aesthetic expectations for male and female athletes, create sports that reinforce beliefs about men's and women's abilities. -A female skater's best talent is applying the feminine apologetic. This means disguising the incredible athleticism required and making it look effortless. -Male figure skaters are valued for appearing powerful and aggressive on the ice, while female skaters are judged for looking beautiful and graceful.
Institutional Barriers
-The economy can make it difficult for both parents to share. -Real sharing often means both spouses need to retreat into lower-paying, less-demanding occupations or work part-time. -Even if a couple can afford two compromised incomes, marriage and employment law make sharing challenging as well. -Most families access health insurance through a parent's employer, but people typically need to be employed full-time to receive this benefit. -The Social Security tax rewards breadwinner/homemaker families.
The Erotic Marketplace
-The erotic marketplace refers to the ways in which people are organized and ordered according to their perceived sexual desirability. -Racism and colorism play a role in the erotic marketplace, as does the socially constructed gender of race.
Sex: The Near History of Now
-The first birth control pill went on the market in 1960. -In 1960, the Supreme Court granted married people the unrestricted right to use birth control. -The right to use birth control was extended to single people in 1972. -The Supreme Court legalized abortion in the first and second trimesters in 1973.
The Governance of Gender
-The governance of gender is how the gender of residents shapes the way they are regulated. -At the most basic level, states enforce gender ideologies in deciding how many and which gender categories to recognize. -States also decide whether to require the gender binary in spaces (like public restrooms); enforce gendered roles in marriage; and allow trans men and women to modify their names, bodies, and documents.
Self-Objectifying
-The heterosexual male gaze means that women are regularly exposed to idealized images of female bodies. -Many women self-objectify. -They internalize the idea that their physical attractiveness determines their worth. -During sex, worrying about how you look can translate into a process called spectating.
The Ideal Worker Norm
-The ideal worker norm is the idea that an employee should commit their energies to their job without the distraction of family responsibilities. -This norm is especially strong in the United States. -It assumes the workers have homemaker partners or paid help to take care of any family- or house-related demands.
Sexual Freedom
-The imperative to say "yes" replaces old rules with a new set of rules about sex and sexuality. -Real sexual freedom would be the right to have sex or not, however one liked, and for any reason, without social consequences.
Modernized Patriarchy
-The industrialization and capitalism of work changed the nature of relationships and the family. -Now that men had bosses and economic survival depended on an entire family's income, a patriarch's role as head of household could be called into question. -Unionization helped men push back against capitalism, so that working men had the right to be able to support a "home and family" on their wages alone.
The End of Marriage Bans
-The new middle class opened doors for more and more women to work for pay. -By the 1960s, when Betty Friedan challenged the "feminine mystique," women were already deciding they wanted a public as well as a domestic life. -The economy also needed more workers because of the loss of over a quarter million men in World War II and low birthrates between the 1920s and 1930s. -Marriage bans were often discarded.
The Politics of Bathrooms
-The politics of bathrooms have increasingly become a topic of public debate. -Nineteen states have passed laws protecting trans people's right to use the bathroom of their choice in any public place. -Other states, mostly in the South, have passed or considered bills restricting bathroom rights, largely based on the claim that allowing trans people access to women's bathrooms is dangerous (but allowing them access to men's bathrooms is not).
Androcentric Pay Scale
-The prestige and pay associated with jobs tend to follow the sex of the job. -As women enter an occupation, status goes down. -As men enter an occupation, status goes up. -The androcentric pay scale is a strong correlation between wages and the gender composition of the job. -According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the gender composition of a job is the single largest contributor to the gender wage gap.
Industrial Economy and Reproduction
-The process by which goods transition from something a family provided for itself into something bought with a wage is called commodification: the making of something into a commodity. -Kids became a burden in cities, where lodging was expensive and overcrowded. -This made couples want to have fewer children, and because condoms were cheap and effective, they could limit their family size. -Marital fertility rates dropped dramatically between 1800 and 1900 in the United States, England, and Wales.
The Second Shift
-The second shift refers to the childcare, cleaning, feeding, and errand-running that greets us when we return from paid work. -Working two jobs, a paid job at work and an unpaid job at home, can be exhausting. -The second shift isn't gender-neutral. Childcare and housework still carry the gendered meanings they did when the breadwinner/housewife families were considered ideal.
Hookup Culture Is a Rape Culture
-The sexual scripts of hookup culture make coercive behaviors look and feel normal. -It makes a feminized interest in, and concern for, one's partner off-script. -It camouflages the behavior of rapists, and it also puts all students at risk of perpetuating rape. -It makes it difficult for campus activists fighting sexual violence to hold colleges accountable.
Causes of Job Segregation
-The socialization hypothesis suggests that men and women respond to gender stereotypes when planning, training, and applying for jobs. -The employer selection hypothesis proposes that employers tend to prefer men for masculine jobs and women for feminine jobs. -The selective exit hypothesis highlights workers' abandonment of counterstereotypical occupations.
Social Structure (continued)
-The stability of institutions, and the relationships between them, provide a framework to help us make rational decisions. -Structures are helpful because they help us know what we wish to accomplish, as well as how. -Institutions both enable and constrain our lives, but there is no opting out. -We live in, through, and with institutions and, by shaping our opportunities, they shape our lives
Feminist Politics across the Generations 2
-The third wave started in the mid-1990s, after Anita Hill's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. -The third wave took an even broader view of what was needed to end patriarchy: attacking gender norms, including the gender binary and heteronormativity, and reaffirming its concern with peace, environmental protection, child health, and public education.
Conclusion (Sexualities)
-The women's movement, gay liberation, and the sexual revolution established a new set of rules for sexuality, including an imperative to say yes to sex. -Sex reflects our cultural values and is shaped by interactional and institutional forces. -Though it can feel deeply personal, in many ways it's not
Individualism
-There's been a rise in individualism in the United States, a focus on the individual over the group. -Individualism can lead people to assume that gender inequality is an individual problem that requires only individual solutions. -In a corporate co-optation of feminism, companies use feminist-sounding language and imagery for marketing purposes. -This marketing reduces feminism to individual empowerment to a product the company has for sale.
Separate Spheres
-They eventually succeeded in institutionalizing a family wage: an income paid to one male earner that was large enough to support a home, a wife, and children. -Home was farther from work than ever, and the growing distance between the two cemented the separate spheres, a masculinized work world and a feminized home life.
Divided Desire
-To be sexy is to be an object of desire. -Women are sexy; women are desired. -To be sexual is to have the capacity to experience sexual desire. -Men are sexual; men desire.
Universal Suffrage
-Today, universal suffrage, the right of all citizens to vote, is the very definition of democracy. -In the 1800s, it was a radical claim—an idea that didn't yet resonate with most members of a population. -Universal suffrage is evidence that change—even radical change—is possible.
Traditionalists
-Traditionalists believe men should be responsible for earning income and women should be responsible for housework and childcare. -They advocate for specialization: splitting unpaid and paid work so that each partner does more of one than the other -These traditional breadwinner/homemaker marriages are seen mostly at the highest and lowest family income levels.
A Room of Her Own
-U.S. sanitation policies ensure public bathroom facilities in workplaces, schools, restaurants, government buildings, airports, etc. -The Department of Labor reported in 1913 that a "woman's body is unable to withstand strains, fatigues, and [de]privations as well as a man's." -Restrooms, were small private rooms with a bed or chair available to women workers struck by some sudden feminine malady.
Sports Bonding
-Via the hegemonic man, even the most unimpressive couch potato can point to the game and claim they share something important and meaningful. -It's a culture-wide, feel-good, male-bonding extravaganza, one that retains a competitive aspect as fans jostle for dominance. -This is then used to further distance women from this dominance. -Men who aren't interested in sports suffer many of the same disadvantages as men who don't play well.
Ideology of Intensive Motherhood
-Wealthy white Victorian wives claimed that mothering was an essential, delicate, and time-consuming enterprise. -The ideology of intensive motherhood is the idea that: -Childrearing should include copious amounts of time, energy, and material resources. -Giving children these things takes priority over all other interests, desires, and demands. -It should be mothers who do this work.
Gender Competition
-What does sex segregation in sports do? It protects boys and men. -As one mother of a boy wrestler put it: It's "unfair for girls to compete against boys. . . . [It puts boys] in a no-win situation. . . . If he wins, it's just a girl, and if he loses, his life is over." -It's extra humiliating to lose to a girl only because we've already decided that women should lose. -Gender is neither a necessary nor logical way to organize sports and make competitions fair.
Benevolent Sexism
-When asked, 22 percent of men and 42 percent of women reported being the victim of gender discrimination at work, with women in male-dominated workplaces the most likely to say so. -Benevolent sexism is discrimination in the form of chivalry. -Men attempt to protect women from unpleasant, dirty, confrontational, dangerous, or otherwise unfeminine activities, and, in doing so, end up undermining women's career trajectories.
Institutional Barriers, Continued
-When couples realize that specialization is necessary, they often focus on the career of the partner who has a higher salary and greater opportunities for advancement. -Especially after the birth of a child, it often makes economic sense to prioritize a husband's career over a wife's.
The Care Chain
-When families outsource childrearing and domestic work, they typically hire more disadvantaged women. -This creates a care chain: a series of nurturing relationships in which the care of children, the disabled, or the elderly is displaced onto increasingly disadvantaged or unpaid caregivers.
Different and Unequal
-When men were hired as flight attendants, stewards embodied professionalism and dignity, but when flight attendants were overwhelmingly women, the role was reimagined. -The seriousness of the job was downplayed and the subordinate role of supportive and sometimes sexually playful service was played up.
Conclusion (Change)
-When people defend the idea of "traditional marriage," you should ask which one they mean. -The patriarch/property model of marriage reigned for thousands of years, while the breadwinner/housewife model was a blip on the historical timeline. -Today's marriage contract reflects a partnership model that facilitates personalization. -All our social institutions are changing, including our sexual lives.
The Glass Cliff
-When women do break through a ceiling, they often encounter a glass cliff, a heightened risk of failing, compared to similar men. -Women tend to be promoted during times of crisis and given jobs with a higher risk of failure.
Think About How You Want to Interact with Others
-When you're policed for breaking gender rules, remember, there are three options: -Obey and refrain from breaking the rule. -Break the rule but offer an account that affirms it. -Renounce the rule as arbitrary and unnecessary. -You can also choose to personally opt out of gender policing. -Opting out means not reacting to gender performances at all; it means refraining from making comments aimed at endorsing, questioning, or attacking someone's choices.
Consider Tossing Your Gender Binary Glasses
-With your glasses off, you can see the gender binary for what it really is—a social construction—but you'll still encounter the idea that men and women are "opposite" sexes every day. -Try to be skeptical. -Don't forget the basics: All differences are average differences with a great deal of overlap. -Science shows that we are more alike than different.
Ideological Barriers
-Within American culture, the messages that men are breadwinners and women are homemakers still resonates among both men and women. -Among men, 70 percent of those who desired an egalitarian relationship would desire a neo-traditional arrangement if equal sharing didn't work. -Many women ascribe to the ideology of intensive motherhood and wish to put their children at the center of their lives.
Conclusion (Work)
-Women are less successful for a complex set of reasons: -About 10% of the pay gap is explained by differences in job experience due to time spent in and out of the workforce. -Almost half (49%) is explained by job segregation and the devaluation of women's work. -The remaining 41% is likely due to discrimination.
The Feminization of Poverty
-Women are more likely to specialize in domestic work, more likely to end up as single parents, and more likely to work in underpaid industries. -This has led to a feminization of poverty, a trend in which the poor are increasingly women and their children. -Becoming a mother has been identified as the single strongest predictor of bankruptcy in middle age and poverty in old age.
The Double Bind
-Women face a double bind in masculine occupations: -To be successful at her job, a woman needs to do masculinity, but to be accepted by her boss, colleagues, and clients, she needs to do femininity. -Feminine women are seen as likeable but incompetent, while women who do masculinity are seen as competent but not likeable.
The Ideal Worker Norm, Continued
-Women with children bear the brunt of straining to live up to the ideal worker norm. -Mothers often suffer a motherhood penalty, a loss in wages per hour on the job associated with becoming a mother. -Fathers receive a fatherhood premium, a wage increase that accrues to married men who become fathers.
Freedom and Danger
-Women's growing freedom meant that men and women could mix socially and hold intimate conversations. -Women and men had more sexual freedom. -These changes paved the way for more gender-egalitarian relationships. -Sex remained dangerous for women since birth control was limited by law and condemned by most churches, so they took the risk of pregnancy.
Prudish Times
-World War II was so conducive to exploring same-sex attraction that it's been called "a nationwide 'coming out' experience." -Some men's same-sex experiences during World War II changed their sense of themselves and resulted in the appearance of the first gay bars and advocacy for gay rights. -Gay women were less visible to the public and each other for a while longer. -Women in same-sex relationships were still often read by others as "celibate" spinsters.
Institution
A persistent pattern of social interaction aimed at meeting a need of a society that can't easily be met by individuals alone.
Puritan Punishment
Adherence to the Puritan moral code was often enforced by stringent punishments, such as being locked in stocks for the purpose of public humiliation.
Same-Sex Marriage
After the Defense of Marriage Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2013, same-sex couples in many states have exercised their right to marry.
A National Institution
American high school students toss their caps to celebrate completing one stage of education as it is institutionalized in the United States.
Norms
Are beliefs and practices that are well known, widely followed, and culturally approved (like back-to-school shopping trips).
Policies
Are explicit and codified expectations, often with stated consequences for deviance (like rules related to attendance).
Sexual Double Standard
Different rules for the sexual behavior of men and women.
Gender-Aware Policymaking
Gender-aware policymaking is a practice of carefully considering the likely effects of policy on both men and women, as well as different kinds of men and women.
The Playboy
Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, exemplifies a new ideal of masculinity that was becoming hegemonic in the supposedly staid 1950s.
Introduction (Institutions)
I. Ideas about gender shape the environments in which we live and influence our lives, despite our beliefs, personalities, and interactions. II. We do not have the ability to simply reject the gender binary as individuals and refuse to let others police us. III. Gender and gender inequality are part of the fabric of our lives.
Different but Equal?
In bodybuilding competitions, rules constrain women's muscular development, rewarding women who display sculpted but not overly muscled bodies. Long hair, heavy makeup, and sparkly bikinis act as a further feminine apologetic.
Going Steady
In the 1950s, the custom of going steady among teenagers guaranteed that girls would have companions to institutionally organized events, such as the senior prom, and facilitated both romantic and sexual experimentation.
Toddlers in Cages
In the era of tenement housing, large families in cramped quarters often necessitated the storage of toddlers in wire cages attached to the windows.
Subjectivity
Internal thoughts and feelings
Intersectional Feminist Activism
Intersectional feminist activism is one that attends to the lived experiences of different kinds of women and men.
Sexual objectification
Is the reduction of a person to his or her sex appeal. It's not the same thing as finding someone's body desirable; it's attraction to a body in the absence of an acknowledgement of the internal life of the person desired.
Difference between norms and policies
Many policies elaborate on and reinforce norms, transforming common sense into regulations (like no cheating on tests); some policies explicitly are intended to override and change beliefs and practices that have become the norm (like texting in class). Some norms and policies are strongly enforced while others are enforced only weakly.
Little League Shutout
Mo'ne Davis made the cover of Sports Illustrated for her Little League World Series shutout. Seen in the middle of what might be a 70 mph pitch, Davis is an example of what girls and women can do when they are given the opportunity.
Beliefs about Moms and Dads
Research shows that many employers see mothers as less-than-ideal employees and fathers as especially ideal ones, regardless of how much talent and effort women and men display at work.
An "Inferior" Sport?
Rhythmic gymnastics is exceptionally athletic and offers feats of strength and skill to admire, but it is not a prized and well-rewarded part of U.S. sports culture.
Dance Equals
The Charleston, a jaunty dance invented during the 1920s, allowed men and women to dance side by side as equals instead of together as a lead and follow.
Roaring Twenties
The Roaring Twenties provided ample opportunity for working-class men and women to mingle and play out from under the watchful eyes of their parents.
Good Girl/ Bad Girl Dichotomy
The idea that women who behave themselves sexually are worthy of respect and women who don't are not.
Medical Schools
Until quite recently, medical schools limited the number of women they allowed to enter degree programs in any given year.
Hookup culture
a norm on many American residential colleges in which casual sexual contact is held up as ideal, encouraged with rules for interaction, and institutionalized in much of higher education. All told, 70 percent of students will hookup at least once before graduation.
Gendered Institution
is one in which gender is used as an organizing principle. In a gendered institution, men and women are channeled into different, and often differently valued, social spaces or activities and their choices have different and often unequal consequences.
Hookups
one-time nonromantic sexual encounters, making out, or maybe having sex
Social Stucture
the entire set of interlocked institutions within which we live our lives. We call it a "structure" because institutions, in concert, create a relatively stable scaffolding. If we want to be a doctor, for instance, we know we have to go to college and then medical school. The path, or structure, already exists.
sexual subjectification
the process by which people are told what their internal thoughts and feelings should be
Gender Salience
the relevance of gender across contexts, activities, and space-rises and falls across the different parts of the institutional landscape.
sexual scripts
the social rules that guide sexual interaction.