Sociological Images

Anna sent in another example of a brand marketing itself as for-manly-men-only.  Add this one, featuring McCoy Crisps, to some of our other examples: Dockers, Klondike Bar, Alpo, Oberto beef jerky, and Ketel One.

The first thing that the McCoy Crisps Pub site requires is that you tell it what kind of shoes you’re wearing:

If you answer “incorrectly,” the website says: “No, not right.  Get inside and learn how to be a real man.”

When you enter the online pub, the first thing you see is a woman that you are supposed to be disgusted by.  Immediately a set of beer goggles flies up onto your face (because you wouldn’t want to look at her for more than a split second, apparently):

Then you see this (phew! that was close!):

Alongside playing darts, drinking games, and playing manly trivia, you can get tips on how to be more manly.  Such as “How Not to Look Like a Girl Watching TV” and “How to Get Away with Not Ironing”:

And you can also take a manly quiz to find out how manly you are.  The quiz nicely tells you exactly how you are allowed to behave and what you are allowed to like.  Some examples of questions:

So being a guy means manipulating women with puppies, making fun of your brother-in-law for being a good husband and father, making women cook for you, eschewing personal grooming and healthy eating as much as possible, objectifying women, and enjoying the Pirelli company calender.

Oh, and, if you haven’t seen the Pirelli calendar, you really, really, really don’t want to click here (NSFW; trigger warning).

So there you have it: another marketing campaign that assumes that men are stupid, shallow, sexist, sport-o-holics.  I don’t understand why men tolerate it.

The Marital Bliss Bar, sent in by Chenoa A.:

The description of the candy bar at the source says:

Here’s a sweet way for “soon-to-be-married” or “brand-new” grooms to get used to the fact that they’ll have to re-learn how to calculate percentages once married….talk about new math!

So, just to be clear, the narrative is:

Guys… in marriage, women get more; getting used to it is the only way you’re going to be happy.

Turns out the data suggest otherwise.  The following things are true, on average:

1.  Married men are happier than unmarried men.  But the opposite is true for women.  Unmarried women are happier than married women.

2.  Women are more likely to file for divorce than men and, after divorce, women are happier, while men are less happy.

And yet, time and again, we’re told that getting men hate the idea of getting married and are wives are such a drag (see here and here for examples).

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One of the reasons, by the way, that women are less happy in marriage is because they do a disproportionate amount of housework and childcare.

The data analysis coming out of dating site, OK Cupid, is kind of awesome.  In this iteration, sent in by Claire P. and Jessica Sherwood (of the Sociologists for Women in Society), one of the things they look at is the way that age preferences disadvantage older women on the site.  First, the post’s author, Christian, points out, the distribution of singles is pretty matched by sex at most ages:

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that women and men of the same age are reaching out to one another.

Women at most ages state a preference to date men who are about eight years older or younger:

But men show a decided preference for younger women, especially as the men get older:And, Christian notes, men target their messages to women even younger than their stated preference.  In this figure, the greenest areas represent where men are sending more messages and the red areas are where they are sending less:

So, even though men and women are more-or-less proportionately represented on the site, men’s decided preference for younger women makes for many fewer potential dates for women.

Here’s what the dating pool looks like for 21 year olds (the blue = men seeking women who are 21; the pink = women seeking men who are 21):

For 25 year olds:

For 30 year olds:

Christian offers this summary measuring how a person’s desirability changes over time:

He writes:

…we can see that women have more pursuers than men until age 26, but thereafter a man can expect many more potential dates than a woman of the same age. At the graph’s outer edge, at age 48, men are nearly twice as sought-after as women.

Also from OK Cupid: the racial politics of dating and what women want.

The US Census Bureau put together the map below.  It shows what percentage of households in any given county include a married couple.  In the counties colored with the darkest turquoise, between 59.6 and 79.6% of households consist of a married couple.  In the counties colored white, less than 51.6 do.

I think it’s interesting to speculate as to how the reasons why there are more or less married couple households might vary by place. For example, some places may have disproportionate numbers of gay and lesbian residents who cannot, legally, get married. Others may have higher rates of poverty, which has been shown to decrease relationship stability, leading to less marriage and more divorce.  Still others may have normative or religious pressures in favor of marriage (Utah strongly stands out as the most marriage-prone state).  The racial/ethnic make-up of counties may contribute to marriage rates; we know, for instance, that black women marry at a lesser rate than white women for a whole host of reasons.  Racial/ethnic homogeneity may play a factor too, since interracial marriage is still uncommon and asymmetrical when it does occur.  Some counties have more disproportionate ratios of males and females, which may also shape marriage rates. What do you think?  More hypotheses?  Arguments one way or another?

In the contemporary U.S., individuals choose who to marry based on personal preference, but there is a specific script by which those choices become a wedding day. Not everyone follows the script, but everyone knows it: the man decides to ask the woman to marry him, he buys a ring, he arranges a “special” event, he proposes, and she agrees. Most of us grow up dreaming of a day like this.

But this isn’t the only possible way to decide to marry. A reverse script might involve female choice. We can imagine a world in which, instead of hoping to be chosen, women decide to propose and men can only marry if they get asked. Another alternative script might involve no proposal at all, one in which two people discuss marriage and come to a decision together without the pop question and uncertain answer.

Of course, many couples essentially decide to marry through months or years of discussion, but these couples frequently also go through the script because, well, it’s so romantic and wonderful.

Or is it?

Andre M. sent in a clip of John Preator, a finalist on a previous season of American Idol. In the clip, he proposes to his girlfriend Erica on Main Street at a Disneyland Resort. For Andre, the clip exaggerates the patriarchal underpinnings of both marriage and the marriage proposal.

First, Andre says, the spectacle is a shining testament to our commitment to the idea of marriage as an ideal state. Everyone loves marriage! As Andre writes:

A whole rainbow of characters come out of the shadows to push her towards yes, from the smiling Asian janitor, to the African American guy knighted by our hero and his plastic phallus, to the disabled woman who wishes to trade her fate with the bride-to-be.

We are supposed to think: “How wonderful! How sweet! How perfect!” What is made invisible is the fact that, in addition to a potential site of wedded bliss, marriage is the site of the reproduction of patriarchal privilege (especially through women’s disproportionate responsibility for housework and childcare) and heterosexist (still excluding same sex couples). But the audience knows that they are supposed to feel elated for the couple and privileged to witness their special moment (whether they feel these things or not).

Second, the public nature of the proposal put a lot of pressure on her to say “yes.” The audience is asked to participate in urging her to agree to marry him (“come on folks, how about a little encouragement?!”). And the performers, as well as the performance itself, create conditions that look a lot like coercion. Could she have said “no” if she wanted to? As if breaking his heart wouldn’t have been deterrent enough, saying “no” would have disappointed the onlookers and ruined the performance. He put so much work into scripting the proposal and it was very clear what her line was. How many women, with less pressure, have nonetheless felt it difficult or impossible to say “no”?

Okay, so let’s assume that Erica did want to marry John and that they will live happily ever after. And let’s also assume that most marriage proposals in the U.S. do not come with this degree of pressure. The clip is still a nice reminder of (1) just how taken-for-granted marriage is as an ideal state (can you imagine her saying, “I love you more than life itself and I want to be with you forever, but marriage, no thanks!”) and (2) the way that the proposal script puts men in the position of getting to choose and women in the position of having to agree or go off script.

In her fantastic book, Talk of Love (2001), Ann Swidler investigates how people use cultural narratives to make sense of their marriages.

She describes the “romantic” version of love with which we are all familiar.  In this model, two people fall deeply in love at first sight and live forever and ever in bliss .  We can see this model of love in movies, books, and advertisements:

She finds that, in describing their own marriages, most people reject out-of-hand a romantic model of love.

Instead, people tended to articulate a “practical” model of love.  Maintaining love in marriage, they said requires trust, honesty, respect, self-discipline, and, above all, hard work.  This model manifests in the therapeutic and religious self-help industry and its celebrity manifestations:

But even though most people would reject the romantic model in favor of a more practical model, even the most resolute realist would occasionally fall back on idealist versions of love.  In that sense, most people would articulate contradictory beliefs.  Why?

Swidler noticed that people would draw on the different models when asked different kinds of questions.  When she would ask them “How do you keep love alive from day to day?” they would respond with a practical answer.  When she asked them “Why do you stay married?” or “Why did you get married?” they would respond with a romantic answer.

So, even though most people said that they didn’t believe in the ideal model, they would invoke it.  They did so when talking about the institution of marriage (the why), but not when talking about the relationship they nurtured inside of that marriage (the how).

Swidler concludes that the ideal model of love persists as a cultural trope because marriage, as an institution, requires it.  For example, while people may not believe that there is such a thing as “the one,” marriage laws are written such that you must marry “one.”  She explains:

One is either married or not; one cannot be married to more than one person at a time; marrying someone is a fateful, sometimes life-transforming choice; and despite divorce, marriages are still meant to last (p. 117-118).

That “one,” over time, becomes “the one” you married.   “The social organization of marriage makes the mythic image true experientially…” (p. 118, my emphasis).

If a person is going to get married at all, they must have some sort of cultural logic that allows them to choose one person.  Swidler writes:

In order to marry, individuals must develop certain cultural, psychological, and even cognitive equipment.  They must be prepared to feel, or at least convince others that they feel, that one other person is the unique right ‘one.’  They must be prepared to recognize the ‘right person’ when that person comes along.

The idea of romantic love does this for us.  It is functional given the way that contemporary institutions structure love relationships.  And, that, Swidler says, is why it persists:

The culture of [romantic] love flourishes in the gap between the expectation of enduring relationships and the free, individual choice upon which marriage depends… Only if there really is something like love can our relationships be both voluntary and enduring (p. 156-157).

Presumably if marriage laws didn’t exist, or were different, the romantic model of love would disappear because it would no longer be useful. 

The culture of love would die out, lose its plausibility, not if marriages did not last (they don’t) but if people stopped trying to form and sustain lasting marriages (p. 158). 

Even when individuals consciously disbelieve dominant myths [of romantic love], they find themselves engaged with the very myths whose truths they reject—because the institutional dilemmas those myths capture are their dilemmas as well (p. 176).

Cultural tropes, then, don’t persist because we (or some of us) are duped by movies and advertisements, they persist because we need them.

We at Sociological Images are having fun with forms lately (see here and here). This time the fun is thanks to Bri A. who sent us some screen shots from the website Trillian.

Against heteronormativity, you can choose your sexual orientation.  If you choose female and gay, you are represented by two side-by-side female symbols (on the right):

However, if you choose straight, you aren’t represented by a male and female symbol, you’re just represented by a female symbol:

This reveals that straight is the default (without  a male by her side, everyone assumes she’s straight), and gay is the different, odd, marked category.

Bri then added “in a relationship” and noticed that, despite choosing gay and female, the “in a relationship” icon featured a man and a woman:

Oops.  Heteronormatity is back!

And, if she clicked “single,” the icon simply represented her as a man:

Presumably all people are represented by a male figure.  And we can’t even pretend that it’s neutral and supposed to represent “person,” because the “in a relationship icon” clearly includes a male and a female figure.

What’s funny is that these seem like really easy problems to fix, but either no has noticed or no one cares.

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For  more posts on default and marked figures, see our posts on traffic lights with female figures, stick figures and stick figures who parent, and default avatars.

Dmitriy T.M. and Karla K. sent us a link to a story in the New York Times about the increase in the percent of men marrying women who earn more money than they do. A graphic from the Pew Research Center post the NYT article is based on:

While still a minority, there has obviously been a huge jump in the percent of men married to women who make more than them. I found the data on education equally striking, in that the percentages for husbands and wives almost exactly flipped between the two time periods. Scholars have noted for quite a while the increase in the number of women getting college degrees, in particular, such that in many fields more bachelor’s degrees are granted to women each year than to men, with the imbalance getting wider over time (this pattern doesn’t hold as you move up the educational ladder).

This graph shows the median household income, adjusted by family size and scaled to be equivalent for comparison, depending on gender and marital status:

It makes sense that the adjusted household incomes of married men and married women are pretty similar across the time period, since the two groups are pretty much tied to each other, given how recent and still limited legalized gay marriage is. It is interesting that until 1990 unmarried men had higher median household incomes than married men or women but since then have made less, with the gap widening. The Pew report explains part of the cause:

Marriage rates have declined for all adults since 1970 and gone down most sharply for the least educated men and women. As a result, those with more education are far more likely than those with less education to be married, a gap that has widened since 1970.

Aside from education, another major factor in the rise of incomes for married people is that in 1970, for many couples marriage did not mean the creation of a household with two income earners, whereas today most do.

Obviously unmarried women stand out because of their lower median household income relative to any of the other groups. Why would unmarried women have incomes so much lower than unmarried men? A number of possibilities come to mind. Gendered job segregation and the pay gap play a large role in differences in income by gender overall and are surely part of the cause of these disparities. Unmarried women may be more likely to work part-time than unmarried men, and it doesn’t appear that number of hours worked per week is controlled for here. It’s also possible that unmarried men are more likely to be in a household with a partner who earns an income than are unmarried women.

Regardless of the cause(s), it clearly indicates that unmarried women are at a significant disadvantage regarding income compared to every other group. It’s worth noting that the Pew report repeatedly focuses on how men have fared worse than women by comparing the % change in their incomes since 1970. While this is true, it seems somewhat overstated to say they fared worse given that even with smaller % increases, men’s income in general is still significantly higher than women’s.

UPDATE: Reader Philip Cohen adds some more context to this on his blog, Family Inequality:

It’s not clear how to assess the benefits – or losses – that men derive from all this. That recliner-king image assumes that employed wives still do the unpaid work of the household, but the best predictor of how much housework a woman does may be her own income.

That’s why I don’t buy this:

“When you think about it from a guy’s perspective, marriage wasn’t such a great deal,” says Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center. “It raised a household size, but it didn’t bring in a lot more income.”

What about the value of all that work the stay-at-home wife did? Maybe it was more inefficient, but the report also shows with survey data on decision-making, wives get more say-so when they earn more – the price a “recliner king” pays, willingly or not.

Anna sent us links to this 1967 British health awareness film, “A Cruel Kindness,” about children and obesity:

I was really struck by how little mention fresh fruits and vegetables get in the discussion of a balanced diet at the end of the first segment (about 3:45)–you just need a little of them to get the vitamins you need. Today, of course, much more emphasis would be placed on them, and fats would get much less.

Anna points out that the fault for childhood obesity is placed squarely on mothers, either for overindulging their children out of love or being too busy or lazy to get their kids enough exercise and healthy meals.

And oh, poor Valerie! She’s from a broken home. Destined to be handicapped for life, a social outcast who will grow up to be like Mrs. Brown, abandoned by her husband.

Of course, while our attitudes toward foods have changed to focus on more fruits and vegetables and fewer fats, other elements of the film would fit in with anti-obesity campaigns today with a little updating. We still often focus on individualistic causes of obesity over structural ones (what types of foods governments subsidize, for instance), implicitly blame mothers for not taking the time to cook wholesome meals at home, and treat fatness as a social death sentence. We usually try to sound nicer when doing it, though.

The figure below, borrowed from Good via Graphic Sociology, is a great example of the way that social problems are not given or automatic, but must be made.  It shows that, in 1998, gay marriage was not largely a social issue that needed to be addressed at the state level. Only Alaska had taken a stand on gay marriage. 

Somehow gay marriage became a threat. And, by 2004, many states had passed resolutions making it illegal. Note that they needed to do so specifically because the possibility of legal gay marriage had gained support for the first time in (recent?) U.S. history. This was, essentially, a backlash against gay marriage that proved that pro-gay marriage initiatives were gaining ground, even as states moved to counter them.

The backlash continues through 2009, with a handful of states saying “yes” to gay marriage, creating a conflict that simply did not exist in 1998.

This is a great example of how social “problems” are socially constructed. Social processes, like activism and media attention, affect what issues gain the attention of the day, whether that be homelessness, nuclear power, teen pregnancy, global warming, or same-sex commitment. 

The figure also reminds us that all of those anti-gay marriage laws can be interpreted as progress for the pro-gay marriage effort.  The laws prove that gay marriage is on the agenda.

Jillian Y. sent a really interesting example of the gendering of housework. The example comes from a non-profit organization, Cleaning for a Reason, that assists cancer patients with house cleaning. 

The organization is for people struggling with any type of cancer (not just breast cancer, as the pink ribbon suggests), but it still only assists female patients.

Jillian didn’t want to trivialize how useful and important such a service is, and I don’t want to either.  There are reasons why women may need this service more frequently than men.  The first reason is, of course, that women do the majority of housework in the U.S. and most Western countries (see also the links below).  So when a woman gets sick and she can’t do her job anymore, this organization steps in and helps.  When a man gets sick, the housework (apparently) keeps getting done with no problem because it wasn’t his job in the first place.

This, of course, assumes that everyone who gets sick is (heterosexual and) married (and able-bodied to begin with).  What about single people?  Who does their housework?  Much of the time their female relatives do some of it… but let’s assume that single people are especially vulnerable because they have no one to help them do the daily upkeep of the house.

I recently saw a study that stunned me.  It looked at the frequency with which married couples separated or divorced after a cancer diagnosis.  Get this:  If you are a man, the chance that your relationship will break up after diagnosis was three percent.  Three.  If you are a woman, the chance is 21.  Twenty-one.  One out of five women diagnosed with cancer (compared to one out of every thirty men) finds herself single.

So, yeah, maybe it makes sense to be especially aware that female cancer patients have a burden that many male cancer patients do not (whether by virtue of the fact that housework is gendered or the fact that female cancer patients are more likely to end up single). 

That said, I don’t appreciate that the organization reinforces the idea that housework is women’s work; nor do I like that it excludes men who need help (largely by making single men or men with partners who cannot do housework invisible).

See also our post on how health-related activism is sometimes for women only.

For examples of how women are responsible for the home, see this KFC advertisement offering moms a night off, this a commercial montage, Italian dye ad with a twist, women love to clean, homes of the future, what’s for dinner, honey?, who buys for the family, liberation through quick meals, “give it to your wife,” so easy a mom can do it, men are useless, and my husband’s an ass. 

Historical examples of the social construction of housework: husbands “help” wives by buying machines, gadgets replace slaves, feminism by whirlpool.

And, of course, it’s hilariously funny to think that men would actually do housework:  see our posts on “porn” for new moms (also here), the househusbands of Hollywood, and calendar with images of sexy men doing housework.

Please welcome Guest Blogger Philip Cohen.  Cohen is a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he specializes in studying the family.  We are pleased to reproduce a post from his own blog, Family Inequality, about (how statistics lie and) the recent media hype about the decrease in the divorce rate.

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Delivering some “good news for Christmas,” The National Marriage Project, under the editorship of the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, has released a report titled The State of Our Unions, 2009: Money and Marriage. It has a lot of useful information on marriage and families, with some editorial bending in the pro-marriage-and-family direction.

My beef here is with the chapter titled “The Great Recession’s Silver Lining?” In it, Wilcox writes:

judging by divorce trends, many couples appear to be developing a new appreciation for the economic and social support that marriage can provide in tough times. Thus, one piece of good news emerging from the last two years is that marital stability is up.

That line was quoted by Ross Douthat at the New York Times, which is a shame, because there is no evidence about anyone’s appreciation for marriage in the chapter. Instead, the evidence for this assertion is presented in a graph that shows three data points in the divorce-rate trend:

The figure shows a decline in the divorce rate from 2007 to 2008. In the press release he calls that drop “the first annual dip since 2005.” (The rate shown here is divorces in a given year per 1,000 married women in the population that year.) Couple things:

1. There is no data point for 2006, so for all we know the divorce rate actually rose higher than it was in 2007, and started falling before the recession, which officially began in December 2007.

2. Despite the dramatic turnaround apparent in this graph, it’s really not enough to go on to draw the kind of conclusion he draws.

The second point is more important, because there really is a lot of research that shows job loss increases the odds of divorce. So why should this recession be different? It’s possible it is, but there’s no evidence – in this report or elsewhere that I’ve seen – of such a change.

In fairness, Wilcox wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that musters some anecdotal evidence for his theory. But nothing to get him this far: “For most married Americans, the Great Recession seems to be solidifying, not eroding, the marital bond.” Even if the divorce did drop a little in one year – that doesn’t say anything about “most married Americans.”

That three-point graph is especially unfortunate because it leads to interpretations like this: “The divorce rate … had previously been on an upward path, rising from 16.4 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2005 to 17.5 in 2007.” That seriously misstates the real trend in divorce rates, which have actually been falling since 1981. And there is nothing in the trend to suggest that recessions teach couples a “new appreciation for the economic and social support that marriage can provide in tough times.” In the appendix, Wilcox presents that longer trend, which makes his previous figure seem much less dramatic.

(The graph seems a little off to me – notice how 10.6 is closer to the line for 10 than 14.9 is to the line for 15 – but I’ll work from his numbers below anyway.)

I think the story of a turnaround in divorce rates has traction because, like crime, divorce is one of those things many people assume is always getting worse (I see this in student papers frequently). So any decline in divorce rates looks like an important change.

What is recession’s effect?

I previously speculated that, because this recession was costing so many men their jobs, more men were likely to be become primary caregivers, and do more housework. The downside – I speculated – was that “maybe men getting ’stuck’ with childcare doesn’t bode well for marriages.” To support that speculation, I showed a graph of divorce rates that had little upward spikes during some recent recessions. The graph was not the real evidence for the argument – which was here:

We already know that economic hard times contribute to marital instability and divorce. Studyafter study after study have found that losing a job increases the likelihood of divorce, with some evidence that husbands’ losses matter more.

Here is a new graph I made, with the “crude divorce rate” (divorces per 1,000 people in the population) in blue, superimposed over Wilcox’s calculations in red. (His takes more work, which is probably why he doesn’t have it for every year. But they track quite well, with some pulling apart some after 1980, which has to do with changes in the population composition that probably aren’t important.) I also put the recessions on there, roughly, by hand with purple bars.

Source: Divorce rates from 2010 Statistical Abstract and various prior years; business cycles from 2010 Statistical Abstract.

Two things here:

1. Over the longer run, there is no obvious relationship between recessions and the divorce rate. There are big social forces at work here (like the rise of the legal practice of no-fault divorce, the increase in women’s education and employment, the growing tendency of men and women of similar education levels to marry, later age at marriage, more cohabitation and unmarried childbearing, etc.). But on the surface – which is where the Wilcox conclusion is drawn – there is not much to go on.

2. The crude divorce rate I got from the Statistical Abstracts shows a little peak in 2006 – not 2007 – followed by two consecutive years of decline, beginning before the recession. So rather than talk about the reason for the decline in the last year – which really just fits in with the falling divorce rates since 1981 – the anomaly is 2006. I have no explanation for that, but in the long run it probably doesn’t matter much.

On the other hand, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers has surveyed its members twice since the recession started. In the first release last fall, they said 37% expected a drop in divorce filings, compared with 19% who usually see an increase during recessions. This fall they report that 57% of their members experienced a drop in filings, with just 14% seeing an increase. There are no details or methods reported in these releases, so it’s hard to evaluate. But if it’s true – along with the previous evidence that unemployment increases divorce – then it maybe that recessions delay the timing of divorce filings while increasing the divorce rate for those affected in the long run.

On the third hand, Jay Livingston at Montclair State points out that the NY Times reports that, in New York’s recession-year court backlog,  ”Cases involving charges like assault by family members were up 18 percent statewide.”

Whether delayed divorce filings contribute to family violence is a question someone might be able to answer when they put all this together. But I doubt the final word will end up as simple as, “Couples too broke to bicker,” as heartwarming as that is. There may be something to the speculation that falling home prices are stalling some divorce plans, but that is not quite the same as developing a newfound appreciation for the benefits of marriage.

I’m sticking with this: in hard times, families are a big part of how people make it through, but hard times are also hard for a lot of marriages. If it’s true that the husband’s job loss especially increases stress on a marriage – as previous research suggests – we may yet see that emerge for the current crisis. If not, maybe something has changed.

Over Thanksgiving we posted a Bed, Bath, and Beyond ad that illustrated the fact that women, overwhelmingly, take responsibility for the work involved with holidays.  Victoria S. sent us a U.K. website illustrating the same idea.  The website, for a shopping center, is using the slogan, the 12 Mums of Christmas.

Victoria writes:

…it assumes that the mum of the family does EVERYTHING for the family/friends.  It also forgets about people who therefore don’t have children, or people who are on their own, or those that don’t have a mum-type figure in their lives etc…

The site even nicely describes the various tasks that “mums” are responsible for.

The shopper:

The planner:

The wrapper:

The party girl:

Mums!  Do all the work!  Look great!  And have a good time, too!  Or else you fail as a mother.  Just sayin’.

Please welcome Guest Blogger, Monica.  Monica is teaches ethnic studies and works with survivors of interpersonal violence.  She blogs at The Woes of a Barren Lesbo and recently wrote an irreverent take-down of the cover of a Target holiday catalog.  We thought you’d enjoy her humor and creativity.

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My besties gave me a copy of the target toy catalog for 2009 and pointed out the front cover.

At first i thought it was just your typical run of the mill gender socialization propaganda…

White girl on the cover? Check.
Is she wearing pink? Check.
Is she wearing a tiara? Check.
Is she wearing a tutu? Check.
Is the tutu pink? Check.
Is she smiling? Check.
Is she playing with barbie? Check.
Is there a little boy in the image? Check.
Is he doing one of the following: making a mess, eating something or expressing anger? Check.

Ok, the basics are covered.

But upon further inspection, I realize that the barbie is holding Lego flowers…. and… wait a minute… are those church bells I see?!  …

That little boy isn’t just upset because she is playing with his (read: a boy’s) toy… He is mad because she is marrying them!

So not only do we have an image of a smiling white girl wearing a pink tutu and tiara playing with barbie while a little boy is expressing anger… but we can add heteronormative relationships and male aversion to marriage to the list.  Yay!  The only things missing are caption bubbles:

As a silver lining I like to look at this image and imagine that the little boy is upset for other reasons…

Or maybe the little boy is a radical activist: