Gender and the Media. Weitzer and Kubrin (2009) Misogyny in Rap Music

Theoretical overview.

• Bodies and embodiment cannot be discussed in isolation from emotions, which are experienced through the body and shape the way we experience it. Similarly to the body, emotions “are treated as material things”, as a universal aspect of human experience that is least subjected to social construction.
• However, the historical and cultural variability of emotions suggests that “subjective experiences and emotional beliefs are both socially acquired and socially structured. Emotions can thus be understood as discursive practices, which are “created in, rather than shaped by, speech.

Combat masculinity and the State.

• In militaristic societies, the most significant contribution to the state is participating in the armed forces. This connection between military service and the state is based upon the glorification of militarized masculinity, with the soldier’s body providing its material infrastructure.
• War and routine conflict management have played a central role in shaping Israel’s Jewish community of citizens, a community in which civic virtue is often constructed in terms of military virtue. In this social context, the Jewish combat soldier has achieved the status of hegemonic masculinity which has become synonymous with good citizenship.
• War provides the opportunity to nurture the individual’s ability to endure pain and to control emotion. Any sign of weakness, vulnerability, or even sensitivity can be interpreted in the military as a sign of homosexuality and, hence, of “failed masculinity”.
• The combat soldier—who possesses the perfect body — proves his masculinity through emotional self-control that is attained to cope with stress, anxiety, chaos, and confusion, all of which characterize the battlefield.

My argument is that alongside the discourse of self-control and discipline, an additional discourse of thrill and excitement enacts and shapes the body and emotions of the warrior in different ways. The discourse of thrill is of critical importance, as it is emphasized by soldiers as a major force in mobilizing their motivation and willingness to go to war.

Methods:

• This article is based on interviews with twenty male combat soldiers within one year of their release from army service.
• Body practices and emotional management were not the main focus of the interviews.
• There is no unified and universal version of “Israeli combat masculinity.”

BODILY AND EMOTIONAL SELF-CONTROL

Soldiering the body:

• Having the right body is insufficient; one must also be willing to shape and discipline it so that it meets military objectives. Therefore, the tests for combat units (held a few months before enlistment) examine both the physical abilities of adolescent boys and their willingness to stretch these capacities to the limits.
• Basic training is devoted to forging and strengthening the male body, to taking it to new extremes. At the same time, it inscribes on the body the signs of one’s specific combat role. Through the specific body management of each unit, the soldiers shape a new military identity.
• Physical punishment inscribes on the soldier’s body the fear of military discipline and the dread of authority, until he internalizes military principles and they become a part of who he is.
• The physical transformation bears institutional implications: as the soldier ceases to experience his body’s pain or hunger as his own, soldiering becomes easier and more tolerable. Now, the soldier can better meet the needs of the state.

Bodily masculinity rites (обряды):

• Men’s bodies become visibly different from those of women. In this sense, the soldier’s embodiment plays a central role in the social construction of polarized gender identities and hierarchal gender regimes. While intense physical strain prepares soldiers for combat conditions, it also serves as a selection mechanism and a rite of passage into Israeli hegemonic masculinity.
• The Israeli army is viewed as “a test which allows those who pass it to join an exclusive club, to be initiated into an elite group”. The soldiers are proud of their wounds and scars, which serve as evidence of their willingness to sacrifice their bodies for the good of the collective.
• The literature often specifies female or homosexual bodies as representative of the “wrong” military body. Masculinity is a relational identity that is often constructed in relation to other masculinities.
• Most episodes of major violence are transactions among men, used as a means of drawing boundaries and making exclusions.
• Those who have the wrong body present a threat to the masculinity of the whole group, a threat to social solidarity, and therefore, they constitute a legitimate target for ostracism, ridicule, and abuse. Thus, militarized initiation rites may produce group bonding, solidarity, and coherence, but they also create and maintain hierarchical differences among men.

Emotional control

• Militarized masculinities seem particularly “obsessed” with emotional control. The Israeli combat soldier refers to emotional control or composure as a personal and professional masculine achievement, an ideal that should be adopted by all soldiers.
• Emotional self-control is not a given masculine characteristic. Rather, it as an attribute that one learns, acquires, and perfects as one develops into a more professional soldier.
• It would not be accurate to say that the army forbids all emotional expression. Soldiers are encouraged to feel motivation and ambition; they can express happiness and pride on the day they complete basic training or more advanced courses; they are allowed to feel homesick (but only to a limited degree); and they are expected to feel desire for women.
• First, acquiring emotional self-control facilitates the soldier’s “automatic docility” as it ensures that the soldier will not rebel or be paralyzed by fear in combat.
• The second paradox relates to the fact that although power and control are perceived as central to the definition of combat masculinity, in reality, the combat soldier has only a limited degree of autonomy. To become a combat soldier, one must surrender one’s autonomy and obey one’s commanders for the major part of everyday life.

THRILL

• While militarized masculinity demands emotional control, military life nonetheless provides unique opportunities for experiencing the extraordinarily deep feeling of rigush.
• The major source of rigush is the risk to one’s life involved in being a combat soldier. Israeli culture imparts the heroic notion of self-sacrifice to Israeli males from early childhood. Self-sacrifice is the sign of the hero, he who has the courage to rise above his basic instinct for life and fight for the good of his imagined community. Serving as a combat soldier provides one of the very few chances in life to receive recognition for heroism, which is a source of honor and thrill in itself. Endangering one’s life is seen by soldiers as the ultimate actualization of both masculinity and nationality, and thus, it serves as a criterion in social and military stratification systems
• Second source of militarized thrill lies in having control over weapons and technology. Basic pleasure is gained from the ability to operate complicated technological instruments.
• A third source of excitement was the unique feeling of youthful adventure that characterizes combat life.
• The last source of excitement, albeit an unspoken one, is military homosociality. Military service provides rare legitimacy for physical and emotional intimacy among men, including homoerotic sensations, without the stigma of homosexuality.

Discussion

• Self-control and thrill: this combination creates someone who ostensibly has the agency to take charge of his destiny ⎯ a man who can control his body and emotions ⎯ and dares to take risks and enjoys them. Thus, the combination of self-control and thrill accentuates values of autonomy and self-actualization, which call for an individualistic frame of interpretation.
• The individualization of the soldier’s body can be seen as an expression of the effects of globalization on Israeli society.
• The duality in the perception of the military blurs the boundaries between choice and compulsion, and the coercive nature of military service becomes obscured. This dual nature of military experience enables mandatory conscription to be perceived as voluntary and fulfilling.
• Young men are still willing to kill and be killed for the good of their country but now in the name of individualized dominant masculinity. It is the individual body that functions as the instrument of the militaristic state.
• The soldier’s autonomy and individualism are a kind of illusion, a facade, because as the body of the soldier is transformed, he becomes part of the state. His body is the material superstructure that links the (male) individual to the state.
• Through military body practices, the soldier’s power becomes unique and visible; the body belongs to the order of nation, signifying the link between manhood and nationhood.
• The soldier’s body becomes a focus for public identification, a source of national pride, and a locus of sympathy and support. The signs of the nation are inscribed on the body, and the soldier’s body becomes the symbol of the nation.
• The body of the combat soldier is signified by the mark of the nation and serves as a signifier of the gendered nation-state.

Growing up in the culture of slenderness: Girls’  experiences of body dissatisfaction

S. Grogan and N. Wainwright

In most societies a thin silhouette is considered an ideal, and women are often pressed by people around to meet these expectations. According to Kerr and Charles, based on results of interviews are that almost all women are dissatisfied with their boy shape and weight. The inability of most women to attain ideal body shapes leaves them feeling guilty and dissatisfied with their body shape.  Women are “pressed”  because people often stigmatize those who do not fit this criterion, and, in addition, media is actively promoting anorexic look of women and convincing people that thinness is the norm.

Despite the fact that objectification of male body becomes fashionable the pressure on women are qualitatively and quantitatively different. It seems likely that women will be more resistant to cultural pressures to be slim if we grow up with a reasonably positive image of our body and to maintain it through adolescence and into adulthood.

Method: Participants are four 8-year-old girls and four 13-year-old girls (all white and from middle, working class) chosen on a volunteer basis.

Materials: A set of themes covered body image issues such as weight, appearance, and food.

Procedure: Participants were interviewed in two groups; one for each age. The interview was unstructured to add flexibility and centered on the ideas about body shape.

Results and discussion

The ideal body. The 8-year-olds agreed that they wanted to be thin; both now and when they grow up. They said that they worried about getting fat. This contrasted with 13-year-olds who said that they wanted to be of average size. Both 8 and 13-year old expressed dislike for muscles, which they saw as inappropriate for women. Both groups presented conventional Western societal ideals of what constitutes an attractive and acceptable body shape.

Body dis(satisfaction). The dissatisfaction reported by these young women similar to in kind to that reported by the adult women in Kerr’s study. Two of 8-year-olds felt that they were fat and need to lose weight. Three of 13-year-olds were dissatisfied with their stomachs, which were perceived to be too fat.

Dieting and Exercise to change body shape and size. The 8-year-olds were clear about the concept of “dieting” . however dieting to lose weight was seen as something that adults (not children) did. None of them had dieted themselves. 13-year-olds reported occasional avoidance of particular foods to try to lose weight but stressed that they were not seriously dieting and had not been able to keep to any strict regime. Again there are similarities to Kerr’s adult respondents who reported feeling fat and guilty after eating food that they thought they should deny themselves.  The interview data presented that ideas around body shape and size may change as children become older.

Food as comfort. Food plays a complex role I these girls’ lives. Unhappiness and situations where they were bored lead them to resort to food as a comfort.

The limitations of this study. The young women who were interviewed were all white and from middle and working class, however these findings may not be relevant to young black women, or those in other social classes. 

Implications of the findings. These findings suggest that that these young women have learned about the acceptability of the slim body in the Western society. By the age of 8 these girls knew about dieting as a means of trying to attain this goal, although they did not use this strategy themselves. These findings have the important implications for the role of body image in women’s lives. Susan Bordo is pessimistic about the possibilities of change , arguing that women are embedded in the culture that oppresses them, and cannot help but collude in it. A replication of this study in (say) 10 years time may then produce very different results because of the cultural shift in the social construction of beauty.

 

 “The performance of sexuality in exotic dance clubs”

By Marry Nell Trautner

Background:

Organizations and occupations are often gendered. Workers on a wide range of occupations and organizations “do gender” in particular ways based on build-in assumptions in society.

Through the continual performance and institutionalization of gendered behaviors, gender and sexuality become central features of organizational culture – shared understandings, beliefs, behaviors, and symbols that emerge through interactions between organizational structures. 

Sexuality and gender are core features of many jobs.

THESIS and MAIN IDEA: Organizations are not only gendered; they are also classed—that is, they articulate ideas and presentations of gender that are mediated by class position.

This article pursues the idea of organizations as gendered and classed by means of a comparative ethnographic analysis of the performance of sexuality in four exotic dance clubs in the Southwestern United States. Strip clubs construct sexuality to be consistent with client class norms and assumptions and with how the clubs and dancers think working-class or middle-class sexuality should be expressed.

Class differences are represented as sexual differences in very concrete ways: the appearance of dancers and other staff, dancing and performance styles, and interactions that take place between dancers and customers.

 

IMPORTANT DEFINITION: Organizational culture refers to the shared understandings and behaviors of a work environment as well as informal or symbolic interpersonal norms such as those that promote or prohibit particular sexual interactions and sexual behaviors.

• The central features of the organizational culture within exotic dance clubs are the commodification and commercialization of women’s sexuality, the clubs are premised on the consumption of women’s bodies and the presence of those bodies in hegemonic male fantasies. Thus, women work not only as women but as sexualized women.
• Those clubs that serve for a middle-class audience present one version of sexuality, while a quite different type of display can be found at working-class clubs. As a result, women in exotic dance clubs work not only as sexualized women but as classed women.

METHODS (note that a researcher is a woman):

• I made a total of five visits each to four exotic dance clubs in Pueblo, resulting in more than 40 hours spent in the field. The advantage of a prolonged direct observation technique in this setting is that I was able to experience the club settings and routines as both a first-time club goer and a more seasoned customer, familiar with the settings, members, and activities. These four clubs, The Oasis, The Hourglass, The Treasure Chest, and Perfections Show club, are the busiest, most well-known, and most popular clubs in town.
• Most clubs in Pueblo allow a woman to enter as a customer only when accompanied by a man. I presented myself not only as a paying customer but also as either the girlfriend or friend of my male escort(s) to observe naturally occurring interactions and club routines.
• I visited each club frequently (five times each) and for long periods of time (at least two hours each visit), which allowed me to blend into the scene and become less conspicuous to those around me.
• This role involves acting naïve, curious, and responsive but very unknowledgeable about the setting, unspoken rules, and activities taking place, which encouraged members to explain and elaborate on the customs and expectations of the club.
• I was interested in learning the extent to which the patterns and trends I observed in the field were reflective of participants’ experiences and actual organizational strategies. Thus, I asked dancers questions about their style of dancing, the dance styles of other dancers, management involvement, how they interact with customers, the kinds of customers that frequent their club, and their perceptions of and experiences with other clubs in town. Interviews were conducted in respondents’ homes and lasted approximately two hours each.

Strip clubs	“Perfections Show” and “The Oasis”	“The Hourglass” and “The Treasure Chest”
Audience	Middle- and business-class clientele	Working-class and military audiences
Differences:     Physical characteristics           Atmosphere         Performances	Prices are higher	Prices are lower
	Cigars, gourmet meals, soundproof phone booths and plush, relaxing arm chairs make the club going experience about more than just sex, more than just viewing unclothed women.	NO amenities, high-quality equipment, and soft, comfortable furniture.   Conducive to pure physical pleasure and lust.
	A safe haven in which they can desire and appreciate women and act and be treated like “gentlemen”	A haven for the viewing of women as sex objects, for the imagining of these women as sexual partners, and for the enactment of male power.
	Performances of desire and gazing at the female form from a distance, constructed to appear as admiration and respect. It is called “voyeuristic sexuality.”	Sexuality that is on display is often more interactive than is seen at middle-class clubs.   It is “cheap thrills” sexuality.
Images of attractiveness       Composition       Hairstyle                     Makeup         Wearing                   Conclusion	Dancers conform much more closely to the hegemonic cultural ideals of attractiveness	A wider array of images of women’s sexuality and appearance
	Very few overweight dancers, women with short hair, older women, women with strong musculature, or nonwhite women.	Several overweight women, a few older women working at each club (40-ish), and a greater diversity of dancers in terms of race.
	Wear their hair loose, flowing down their shoulders and back.	Tend to have long hair, however women are more creative with their hairstyles.
	Wear makeup, and the majority of the dancers heavily accentuate their eyes with glitter, eyeliner, or eye shadows.       Drawing attention to their eyes suggests an invitation to look and an aura of mystery—they are meant to see and be seen.	Apply heavy makeup that accentuates their mouths, rather than their eyes. Most wear dark or bright red lipstick and paint their long fingernails to match, styles typically associated with working-class women.   The red lipstick that accentuates the lips of the dancers at the working-class clubs oozes sensuality, fire, and excitement.
	Tend to wear outfits— dominatrix or a Catholic schoolgirl outfit, etc. Wear more jewelry than seen at other places, even wear wristwatches	Few of the dancers wear costumes or anything that could be dubbed an outfit. Most of the dancers wear a bra-like top and their G-string, with nothing else.
	A heavy emphasis on conforming to middle-class cultural ideals.   They have the money to also take care of themselves. This symbolizes doing class as well, as the dancers distance themselves from women who are “ghetto looking.”	A wider array of images of women’s sexuality and appearance in the working-class clubs.
	The good girl (who looks but does not touch, “innocent” in her sexualized schoolgirl outfit)	The bad girl (who falls outside the hegemonic beauty ideals and flaunts her exaggerated sexuality)
Stage performances:   Styles of music                   Control             Movements	Generally contemporary pop music. The songs are for the most part slower, with lyrics that are decipherable. Most of the songs feature male vocalists, some instrumental techno songs, some music by Madonna and Janet Jackson. No rap.	Most of the songs played are rap songs, heavy metal, and classic rock. There are very few pop songs played, and even fewer songs with women vocalists. The music is fast.
	The dancers take a very passive approach to their stage performances, meaning that the dances are non-interactive.	Dancers exercise social control over each other, DJs, and managers by not dancing to songs that fall outside the club’s regular style of music.
	Slow and non-active movements. Few actual dance moves, and even fewer attempt to move to the rhythm of the music. The focus appears to be on showing off, presenting a sensual and delicate image of sexuality, and making sure that all eyes follow her as she strolls around the stage (creating an audience of voyeurs).	The dancers are very active and somewhat rowdy during their performances.   Most of the dancers use the poles on stage. Many of the dancers also display their flexibility by performing the splits on stage. Many of the women in these clubs dance as if they are having sex without a partner, inviting looks of lust and desire rather than cool contemplation and distanced admiration.
Tipping	Accept tips without permitting any sort of touching between themselves and the customers, consistent with the passive dancing style. Instead of touching or allowing contact, they will perform a “mini-show” for the tipping customer to view. Table dances are typically characterized by slow sensuality and distance between dancers and customers. They do so in ways that encourage voyeuristic sexuality.	Stage tips and table dances appear to be driven by the desire to give a “cheap thrill” a term that merges sexuality and social class. Table dances simulate sex and sexual acts in dramatic ways.  The working class clubs are marked with explicit allusions to sex and sexuality, physical activity and exertion, and contact between patron and dancer.
Staff Attire (одеяние)	The managers and bouncers at the middle-class clubs dress in what might be perceived as a more inaccessible and intimidating manner. The outfits send a signal of restraint, distance, and formality to the patrons of the club.   The waitresses have the choice of wearing either black shorts or black pants, with a white shirt of any style.	The managers dress in polo-style shirts with khaki pants, while the bouncers dress in jeans and T-shirts. They seem both casual and approachable, signaling an easygoing, “anything goes” attitude.         The waitresses and bartenders wear like the performers. All the women employees are available to give table dances, All the women present are legitimate and permissible sex objects, that there are no boundaries placed on men’s desires and curiosities.