"Thus far in American history, the fact that men have escaped an onslaught of advertising for beauty products is a triumph of gender ideology over capitalism," wrote Sociological Images blogger Lisa Wade in a 2008 post. "Companies, after all, could double their market if they could convince men that they, too, were unsightly without make-up." The post examined a few attempting to market make-up for men  and left the matter alone until this week when she discovered a vintage ad by Mennen. Ah, the humiliation of "face shine."

Source: Sociological Images

On the vaunted social networking site Twitter, users—both male and female—are more likely to follow men than women, according to a study from Harvard Business Publishing. On average, men have 15 percent more followers than women, even though they follow roughly the same number of people.

According to the study:
We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman.

Twitter’s gender divide stands in stark contrast to most social networking sites, according to the study, where “most of the activity is focused around women.” The lack of photos and detailed biographies are offered as possible reasons for the discrepancy.

(Thanks, Marginal Revolution.)

Source: Harvard Business Publishing

If you spend much time in office meetings or college classrooms, you’ve likely run into Gender Guy. He’s an alpha male and a liberal, and he likes to talk about gender issues—in the workplace, in society, in the book you’re reading, wherever. He pontificates and patronizes; he interrupts and shouts down. He makes the rest of the room endure his pissing matches with men less enlightened, or with those who share his general opinions but oblige his desire to quibble over details, loudly and at length.

Gender Guy’s assumed expertise might come from overly simplified connections he makes between gender and race, or class, or sexual identity, or religion. It might be based on the fact that, as an intelligent and well-spoken man, he’s by definition an expert on everything. Or perhaps he thinks he understands gender because the word—unlike, say, “women”—suggests a subject that deals not with one gender’s concrete realities so much as, more abstractly, with the relationship between two.

This last point in particular interests historian Alice Kessler-Harris. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kessler-Harris considers the consequences for her own discipline when, starting in the early 1990s, gender history began to take over the ground previously held by women’s history (subscription required). She allows that “gender is a tempting and powerful framework”:

Far more inclusive than the category of women, [gender] raises questions not so much about what women did or did not do, but about how the organization or relationships between men and women established priorities and motivates social and political action. While the history of women can be accused of lacking objectivity—of having a feminist purpose—that of gender suggests a more distanced stance… The idea of “gender” frees young scholars (male and female) to seek out the ways that historical change is related to the shape and deployment of male/female relations.

And yet, something is lost:

Gender obscures as much as it reveals… [I suspect] that in seeing the experiences of men and women as relational, we overlook the particular ways in which women—immigrants, African-Americans, Asians, Chicanas—engaged their worlds… We lose the power of the individual to shed a different light—sometimes a liminal light—on historical processes.

In short, Kessler-Harris worries that abstracting “women” into “gender” can have the effect of silencing the voices of actual women—a danger not limited to the rarefied world of historians. The tension between analyzing gender relations and highlighting female voices is an old one, and it’s as broadly relevant as ever. While Gender Guy’s opinions may be impeccably feminist, how helpful is this if the abstraction “gender” gives him cover to go on and on, preventing the women in the room from getting a word in?

—Steve Thorngate 

Saudi clerics deemed bicycles “The Horse of Satan” in the 1960s. Now with similar logic they refer to the popular Arab reality TV show Star Academy as Satan Academy. The common evil they see, asserts global communications scholar Marwan Kraidy, is the threat of women’s public presence.

The controversy in Saudi Arabia surrounding Star Academy has provided years of research material for Kraidy, a University of Pennsylvania professor who spoke last week at the University of Minnesota. The show, which Kraidy describes as a hybrid of Big Brother and American Idol, is produced in Lebanon, but it provokes the most heated controversy in Saudi Arabia, the Arab world’s most important media market. Even though Star Academy allows no swearing, alcohol, or sex, the visibility of women on the show draws ire from conservative Saudis and clerics.

“It’s really about keeping women under control in public space,” Kraidy says. Portraying women as sexual objects is one thing, but Kraidy points out that Saudi media policy doesn’t stop at banning indecently dressed women. Women engaged in sports are also banned from the airwaves. “The concern here,” Kraidy says, “is about women being social agents.”

Such policies square with the ubiquitous American perception of oppressed Arab women. But the reality is more complex. Saudi women hold positions of power in business and medicine, Kraidy notes. And they're winning reality TV shows, even more often than in the West, Kraidy says. (An Iraqi woman, Shatha Hassoun, won the fourth season of Star Academy with the help of 8 million Iraqis who paid to vote for her victory. She's now a national symbol, says Kraidy, in the state's public service announcements.) 

What's more, ordinary Saudis have fairly liberal views about women’s rights. A 2007 Gallup poll showed that a majority of Saudis support women having the right to drive, work, and lead in government. Reality TV shows might irk conservative Saudis, but they may reflect the reality of prevailing attitudes in the society.

Dismissing reality shows as mindless and inconsequential is an easy reflex. But Kraidy makes a convincing argument for reality TV’s ability to upset preconceptions about women in the Arab world, for Westerners and conservative Saudis alike.

—Lisa Gulya

Briarpatch magazine sheds its Canadian cocoon to burst into borderless territory—“life beyond the sexual binary”—in its gender-themed March-April issue. Becky Ellis casts off home-schooling stereotypes in a discussion of feminist home-schooling, describing the progressive “community-based” learning style she’s adopted and exploring approaches favored by other progressive home-schoolers. Calvin Sandborn’s essay bombards the reader with a long list of harms traditional masculinity wreaks upon men, provocatively illustrated by Daryl Vocat’s series of found and manipulated Boy Scout drawings. And Chanelle Gallant, founder of the Feminist Porn Awards, sasses about feminism, anti-racism, and porn in a quick Q&A. “I can’t believe that feminism wasted a whole decade fighting about porn instead of fighting about things like child care and reproductive justice,” she says. “I mean, really?”

—Lisa Gulya