posted
In the social sciences, "complicated" usually equates to poorly understood. Also, the inclusion of the Dahlgren reading "Mass media: Introduction and schools of thought" on that syllabus suggests that there are competing theories about media influence and no clear front runner (I can't get access to the whole article, unfortunately). That's to be expected, it's true all over the place in sociology. Social science is very hard.
ETA:
quote: They are advertising for a class! That it can be taught, means someone has to understand it, or at least decide they are going to read and write papers on it.
People read and write papers about what might have caused the big bang, but no one knows the answer. There are competing hypotheses. My sense is that that's the case as well with the actual good science surrounding marketing and its causal relationship with culture.
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posted
It really doesn't mean that. Complicated means complicated. It means that there is a lot to understand.
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posted
The company I work for must be one of the most sexist organizations in the US.
Women can wear pant suits, blouses, even T-Shirts. They can also wear dresses, skirts, capries, open toed shoes, and high heels.
The men can only wear a button down shirt/polo shirt and slacks. No open toed shoes, no skirts, hair has to be trimmed above the ears, no tattoos can be visible, and since I meet with clients I can have no facial hair.
It's an outrage. I want to grow out my hair and beard and wear a kilt to my clients to celebrate my heritage for goodness sake!
Seriously though, most marketing is done for demographics. If I sell Barbie dolls, they are going to appeal a whole lot more to little girls than little boys on a statistical level. I've no problem with them showing little boys playing with them in commercials, I just think it is smarter to market to the group that buys the majority of them.
Cell phone companies do the same things. When you see an Iphone commercial, how often do you see people in their late 70's? Nope, you see business men, hipsters, and young people. Where do you see the people in their 70's? On phone commercials marketing old, outdated flip phones with large numbers that are easier to read.
I don't think it has to do with sexism, ageism, or anything like that. Market to your demographic. The majority of women that watch daytime television are stay at home mothers. It's not sexist to market cleaning products during that time, it's smart business sense.
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quote:In the social sciences, "complicated" usually equates to poorly understood.
No, in the social sciences themselves, "poorly understood" equates to poorly understood.
In layman interpretations of social sciences, however, "complicated" is made to mean any one of a number of things at the discretion of an individual's pre-existing confidence in social sciences as an institution.
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quote:Originally posted by Geraine: The company I work for must be one of the most sexist organizations in the US.
Women can wear pant suits, blouses, even T-Shirts. They can also wear dresses, skirts, capries, open toed shoes, and high heels.
The men can only wear a button down shirt/polo shirt and slacks. No open toed shoes, no skirts, hair has to be trimmed above the ears, no tattoos can be visible, and since I meet with clients I can have no facial hair.
It's an outrage. I want to grow out my hair and beard and wear a kilt to my clients to celebrate my heritage for goodness sake!
Seriously though, most marketing is done for demographics. If I sell Barbie dolls, they are going to appeal a whole lot more to little girls than little boys on a statistical level. I've no problem with them showing little boys playing with them in commercials, I just think it is smarter to market to the group that buys the majority of them.
Cell phone companies do the same things. When you see an Iphone commercial, how often do you see people in their late 70's? Nope, you see business men, hipsters, and young people. Where do you see the people in their 70's? On phone commercials marketing old, outdated flip phones with large numbers that are easier to read.
I don't think it has to do with sexism, ageism, or anything like that. Market to your demographic. The majority of women that watch daytime television are stay at home mothers. It's not sexist to market cleaning products during that time, it's smart business sense.
No one is positing that advertisers are mustache-twirling misogynists for whom pink stuff for girls is an end in and of itself. Yes, of course it's good business sense. The question is 'why?' Well, to get more bang for your advertising buck. Why is it more profitable? Might it be because from infancy most people encounter regular gender socialization?
I mean, think about it in the abstract. Is there really any reason men inherently 'should' care less about clothing than women? We all wear clothing. We all spend money on it. It's in contact with our skin. It shows status and tells the rest of the world something about you. It can be helpful (or dismissive) sexually speaking. But for some crazy reason, that's not the way things are marketed. Why is that? Is this just something that somehow happens? Well, maybe. But if that's the case, then frankly the experiment hasn't been run yet, whereas we've got an entire species constantly running a contrary experiment.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: No one is positing that advertisers are mustache-twirling misogynists for whom pink stuff for girls is an end in and of itself. Yes, of course it's good business sense. The question is 'why?' Well, to get more bang for your advertising buck. Why is it more profitable? Might it be because from infancy most people encounter regular gender socialization?
I will posit that women are underrepresented in marketing organizations. Apple would probably not have named their big product with a name similar to something women stick in their underwear if there were more women in upper level management.
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quote:Originally posted by Destineer: In the social sciences, "complicated" usually equates to poorly understood. Also, the inclusion of the Dahlgren reading "Mass media: Introduction and schools of thought" on that syllabus suggests that there are competing theories about media influence and no clear front runner (I can't get access to the whole article, unfortunately). That's to be expected, it's true all over the place in sociology. Social science is very hard.
ETA:
quote: They are advertising for a class! That it can be taught, means someone has to understand it, or at least decide they are going to read and write papers on it.
People read and write papers about what might have caused the big bang, but no one knows the answer. There are competing hypotheses. My sense is that that's the case as well with the actual good science surrounding marketing and its causal relationship with culture.
It's been years since I've taken a cosmology class but 1. I do not recall any alternative hypothesis to the Big Bang that was presented. 2. The reasoning behind the Big Bang is clearly motivated from the expansion of the universe. While everything that came before the Big Bang is not well known, what had to have happened INFINITESIMAL PIECES OF A SECOND after is well understood and model-able, such as how long it took it for atoms to form 3. Science is actually quite comfortable with not knowing the answer to things, but having an explanation that at least matches everything that people can see. 4. There are competing schools of how economics works too. Dos that mean it's completely incomprehensible at the level where no one can say anything concrete about the economy?
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quote:In the social sciences, "complicated" usually equates to poorly understood.
No, in the social sciences themselves, "poorly understood" equates to poorly understood.
In layman interpretations of social sciences, however, "complicated" is made to mean any one of a number of things at the discretion of an individual's pre-existing confidence in social sciences as an institution.
This short review article, although relatively old (1997), also suggests that the evidence is mixed and in particular the arrow of cause and effect has not been well established.
quote:According to Van Evra, Repetti (1984) found no relationship between the amount of viewing time, and the amount of gender stereotyping in children. What Repetti did find, however, was that the amount of viewing was found to be negatively associated with stereotyping. Indeed, the more educational television watched, the lower the gender stereotype score tended to be. This could, however, be reflective of the parents who encourage their children to watch educational television. That is to say that in practice, their behaviours may be less gender stereotyped.
quote:Morgan's results were found to support the view that television does cultivate gender stereotypes, although he found the effects to be mainly in girls. The girls who watched greater amounts of television were found to be more likely to hold the opinion that women are less ambitious than men, and find their happiness among children. It was also reported that for girls, there existed a relationship between the amount of television watched and their subsequent educational aspirations. The ones who watched more television were the ones who, after the two year period, set their sights higher.
This is somewhat surprising given that the majority of women presented on television often tend to be seen in traditional women's occupations. It is possible that the heavy viewers, seeing the fairly limited roles of women, are more encouraged to want better for themselves. However, this is purely speculative, and more information needs to be available.
quote:This study has been criticised for failing to clarify the causal relationship between the amounts of television watched, and its effects. Childrens' television viewing has been found, in other studies, to increase with age, and McGhee and Frueh's study has also demonstrated that with age children tend to develop greater gender role beliefs.
The sources cited are all from good university presses.
As you should know from our previous discussions, I'm not dismissive of social science. I do think its conclusions have been misrepresented as univocal about these sorts of issues, when they are not. Activists who write about this stuff tend to cite one or two studies, leaving out the ones that don't fit their pet theories quite so well.
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quote:4. There are competing schools of how economics works too. Dos that mean it's completely incomprehensible at the level where no one can say anything concrete about the economy?
I think there are many areas of economics where, because of the mixed evidence and competing theories, we don't know much about the best way to set economic policy. That said, it also seems like some of the disagreement in economics is because of unresponsiveness to evidence; the Chicago School guys don't seem interested in empirical data that falsifies some aspects of their approach.
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quote:I mean, think about it in the abstract. Is there really any reason men inherently 'should' care less about clothing than women? We all wear clothing. We all spend money on it. It's in contact with our skin. It shows status and tells the rest of the world something about you. It can be helpful (or dismissive) sexually speaking. But for some crazy reason, that's not the way things are marketed. Why is that? Is this just something that somehow happens?
Lest this be mistaken for my view, I would say no, it's not something that just happens. Almost certainly it's socially conditioned by some factors or other. I would just say that it's entirely possible that marketing plays an insignificant role in bringing about this socialization, changing how products are marketed would not fix the problem, and one would have to change other things about the culture in order to fix it.
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I stopped after the second time I read the word "God". Then I remembered why I don't visit Cosmology sites that are .coms. Sorry.
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posted
That didn't take long. He'll probably still win his seat. The knuckleheads who elected him apparently believe raising the debt limit was Cantor's gross capitulation to Obama.
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I stopped after the second time I read the word "God". Then I remembered why I don't visit Cosmology sites that are .coms. Sorry.
The article was written by Sean Carroll, a Caltech physics prof who is an atheist. That section is just about new theories of cosmological origins.
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quote:Originally posted by Geraine: The company I work for must be one of the most sexist organizations in the US.
Women can wear pant suits, blouses, even T-Shirts. They can also wear dresses, skirts, capries, open toed shoes, and high heels.
The men can only wear a button down shirt/polo shirt and slacks. No open toed shoes, no skirts, hair has to be trimmed above the ears, no tattoos can be visible, and since I meet with clients I can have no facial hair.
It's an outrage. I want to grow out my hair and beard and wear a kilt to my clients to celebrate my heritage for goodness sake!
Seriously though, most marketing is done for demographics. If I sell Barbie dolls, they are going to appeal a whole lot more to little girls than little boys on a statistical level. I've no problem with them showing little boys playing with them in commercials, I just think it is smarter to market to the group that buys the majority of them.
Cell phone companies do the same things. When you see an Iphone commercial, how often do you see people in their late 70's? Nope, you see business men, hipsters, and young people. Where do you see the people in their 70's? On phone commercials marketing old, outdated flip phones with large numbers that are easier to read.
I don't think it has to do with sexism, ageism, or anything like that. Market to your demographic. The majority of women that watch daytime television are stay at home mothers. It's not sexist to market cleaning products during that time, it's smart business sense.
No one is positing that advertisers are mustache-twirling misogynists for whom pink stuff for girls is an end in and of itself. Yes, of course it's good business sense. The question is 'why?' Well, to get more bang for your advertising buck. Why is it more profitable? Might it be because from infancy most people encounter regular gender socialization?
I mean, think about it in the abstract. Is there really any reason men inherently 'should' care less about clothing than women? We all wear clothing. We all spend money on it. It's in contact with our skin. It shows status and tells the rest of the world something about you. It can be helpful (or dismissive) sexually speaking. But for some crazy reason, that's not the way things are marketed. Why is that? Is this just something that somehow happens? Well, maybe. But if that's the case, then frankly the experiment hasn't been run yet, whereas we've got an entire species constantly running a contrary experiment.
I'm not sure I agree with your example. In the past (I'd say) 15-20 years, men have become more and more concerned with how they look. During that time, marketing for men's clothing has also increased. 30-40 years ago, men wore Polo shirts, jeans, and suits. That was basically it.
I don't agree with the thought that "gender socialization" is some sort of way to indoctrinate or brain-wash people.
What would you suggest? Have every commercial for dresses show a man and a woman wearing a dress? Have a version of Barbie commercials that show a bunch of little boys playing with life size Barbie and wearing her dress and putting on make up?
Generally speaking boys are wired differently than girls. Blaming it on society saying that they were brainwashed into thinking that way just doesn't make sense. I know there will always be exceptions, but making blanket statements just doesn't make sense.
The whole gender socialization mindset is why I think school age boys are so over diagnosed for ADHD. There is no such thing as "boys are more hyper," or "boys will be boys!" anymore. Now we treat it as a disorder and think we have to medicate.
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posted
Men also didn't buy their own clothing 15-20 years ago. Their mothers did. Then their wives did. My mom buys all my dad's stuff. My older's sister husband wanted to know if my little sister's new job would get him a discount at J. Crew. Hence not a lot of marketing.
Guidos and the late 18th century (dandy) are two fantastic examples of straight men peacocking it up when their society lets them.
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posted
If anything, schools were more strict, not less strict back in the day. ... teachers also could hit kids who were out of line. Not advocating that, but I don't think the requirements for good behavior in school have become more stringent.
And if you think 6 year old girls don't like to run around in circles like maniacs the very second they have nothing to do, you have never been to visit a Brownie troop.
quote:Generally speaking boys are wired differently than girls.
What do you mean, "generally speaking?" Do you think this accounts for things like the ratio of men to women in mathematics or engineering? ADDITIONAL to answering that question, what DO you think women's 'different wiring' represents itself as?
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quote:I'm not sure I agree with your example. In the past (I'd say) 15-20 years, men have become more and more concerned with how they look. During that time, marketing for men's clothing has also increased. 30-40 years ago, men wore Polo shirts, jeans, and suits. That was basically it.
Is this anywhere even remotely close to the focus women place on clothing (are taught, marketed to, and discouraged from not)? Of course it's not. Strangely, though, clothing focus on the genders has started to move more towards equivalence...with the gradual shifting of gender roles. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but the timing is peculiar.
I'm also not saying I think this is some heinous injustice, either. I'm just remarking on something that is peculiar-we all wear clothes.
quote:I don't agree with the thought that "gender socialization" is some sort of way to indoctrinate or brain-wash people.
You can disagree all you like, but gender socialization is unquestionably a form of indoctrination. It's just that word has some negative connotations.
quote:What would you suggest? Have every commercial for dresses show a man and a woman wearing a dress? Have a version of Barbie commercials that show a bunch of little boys playing with life size Barbie and wearing her dress and putting on make up?
Because absolutely what I was discussing was an argument for an immediate and absurd shift right this moment, Geraine. C'mon.
quote:Generally speaking boys are wired differently than girls. Blaming it on society saying that they were brainwashed into thinking that way just doesn't make sense. I know there will always be exceptions, but making blanket statements just doesn't make sense.
You lose a little something from your argument when you use a blanket statement such as 'generally speaking boys are wired differently than girls' to attack a blanket statement, Geraine. Anyway, I have really no doubt that there are many behaviors and ways of thinking that are, intrinsically, more likely in one gender than another. We see that in more or less all animals (in fact I don't know of any that don't, but then that doesn't mean much), so why should humans be any different?
But it's hard to take seriously a statement casually dismissing the role socialization plays when as a society and throughout history we have spent a great deal of effort, sacrifice, time, and money in not only continuing such socialization (that supposedly is just innate, right?) but often times in quite ruthlessly suppressing those who step outside them. How long was it before women could vote, own property, have a right before the law not to be raped or sold, so on and so forth? On the other hand, to get very modern, how much longer will it be before no one sneers at a man who stays home and raises the family's children?
If we are simply wired differently, what's with all the effort into reinforcing this stuff?
quote:The whole gender socialization mindset is why I think school age boys are so over diagnosed for ADHD. There is no such thing as "boys are more hyper," or "boys will be boys!" anymore. Now we treat it as a disorder and think we have to medicate.
Is this a serious statement? Because I don't think either of us are anywhere near well informed enough at all to be talking credibly about if and why ADHD is overdiagnosed among anyone, much less a particular gender.
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posted
not to mention that "boys will be boys" is a classic example of an awful and fully gendered excuse for behavior, and part of the continued cycle of excusing or permitting aggressive and unacceptable behavior in boys from an early age
when a parent is saying "boys will be boys" they're essentially saying "he gets to do that because he's a boy."
kids on both sides understand that lesson all too well, and that's the problem.
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posted
Yeah, even supposing that to some extent aggression or bad behavior comes naturally, that's no reason to accommodate it (indeed, no reason not to treat it like a disorder if medication will help--cancer comes naturally too).
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posted
Most of the times I've heard "boys will be boys" my first response was too interpret it as an insult, as a child or adult.
It clearly can be applicable to what Sam is saying, and I think its a dumb thing to ever say. But I think there are examples where its communicating something less harmful.
You can read it as "Look, this isnt the first time this has ever happened with him/them--it wont be the last. It's a problem. But if I get too frustrated with it now, I'm going to want to kill myself later."
Basically a gendered version of "shit happens" I'm being a little meticulous but i think thats different.
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The article was written by Sean Carroll, a Caltech physics prof who is an atheist. That section is just about new theories of cosmological origins.
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