The Hunger Games and movie relationships

At NPR, Linda Holmes writes about The Hunger Games, focusing on the way that the movie (and, by extension, the books) subverts normal blockbuster relationships, arguing that Peeta is portrayed as a typical movie girlfriend while Gale plays the part of a typical movie boyfriend:

Don’t get me wrong: In real life, we all know couples of all gender alignments who operate in this way and in lots of other ways, whether they’re male-female or two guys or two women or whatever; there’s absolutely nothing about baking, physical strength, or emotional accessibility that is inherently gendered in real life for real humans with any consistency. But the movies, or at least the big movies, are different. Going by the traditional Hollywood rules, make no mistake: Peeta is a Movie Girlfriend.

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In fact, you could argue that Katniss’ conflict between Peeta and Gale is effectively a choice between a traditional Movie Girlfriend and a traditional Movie Boyfriend. Gale, after all, is the one whose bed she winds up steadfastly sitting beside after she helps bind his wounds. Gale explains the revolution to her. She puts up a plan to run; Gale rebuffs it because he presumes himself to know better. Gale is jealous and brooding about his standing with her; Peeta is just sad and contemplative.

My sense was that there was a lot more kissing between Katniss and Gale in the movie than in the book, so it will be interesting to see how the movie versions of these relationships play out in the two-part Mockingjay.

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The paradox of GoldieBlox

If you have sociologists as Facebook friends you have probably seen this commercial for GoldieBlox, set to a revised version of “Girls” by the Beastie Boys:

Since it debuted on November 17 it has received over 8 million YouTube views and gotten enough attention to be both lauded and lambasted. As summarized by Katy Waldman at Slate:

As GoldieBlox stands to attract even more publicity (it is one of four finalists in a contest for small businesses to air an ad during the Super Bowl), we should ask whether its products live up to the company’s message. Does GoldieBlox actually “disrupt the pink aisle,” inspiring girls to trade in their tiaras for goggles—or is it a cynical attempt to straddle the market by hooking parents on a message of empowerment while enticing kids with the same old glittery crap?

GoldieBlox highlights some of the same difficulties that Lisa Wade discussed in relation to Miley Cyrus. If young girls want pink things, and the products on display in toy aisles suggest that they do, it makes sense that a company would try to profit by giving them what they want. If parents, on the other hand, don’t want to reinforce negative stereotypes, it also makes sense that a company would try to profit by giving them what they want. Wade writes:

That’s how power works. It makes it so that essentially all choices can be absorbed into and mobilized on behalf of the system.  Fighting the system on behalf of the disadvantaged – in this case, women – requires individual sacrifices that are extraordinarily costly.  In Cyrus’ case, perhaps being replaced by another artist who is willing to capitulate to patriarchy with more gusto.  Accepting the rules of the system translates into individual gain, but doesn’t exactly make the world a better place.  In Cyrus’ case, her success is also an affirmation that a woman’s worth is strongly correlated with her willingness to commodify her sexuality.

Despite their interesting commercial, GoldieBlox are a product (is a product? Goldie Blox appears to be the name of a girl in the line of products). No matter how much we want it to be a subversive company that sticks it to The Man for young girls everywhere, its existence and success depends on the same system as every other toy. So we end up with pink building toys with narratives designed to appeal to girls who have already accepted stereotypical notions of femininity whose parents want them to realize that being female does not limit their potential. All in the name of profit.

Update: See also Elline Lipkin’s take at Girl With Pen.

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Questioning statistical significance

When discussing statistical significance in class I always preface my discussion by highlighting the arbitrary nature of accepted p-values. “If you had cancer,” I ask my students, “and a doctor said that there was a 94% chance that a particular treatment would cure you, would you take it?” They would, they assert. But a 94% chance isn’t good enough for social science research. Neither, suggests Valen Johnson, a statistician at Texas A&M, is a 95% chance, or a 98% chance. As discussed by John Timmer at Ars Technica, Johnson mathematically links Bayesian statistics to probabilities:

The math then allows a direct comparison between the probability values. In his comparison, scientific standards seem pretty weak. The 95 percent certainty corresponds to a Bayesian evidence threshold of between three and five, which Johnson notes is typically considered “positive evidence”—but it falls well below the values considered to be “strong evidence.” It takes 99 percent certainty to get there.

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Johnson concludes that if we assume that only one-half of the hypotheses should give us a positive result, then “these results suggest that between 17 percent and 25 percent of marginally significant scientific findings are false.” If we assume the proportion of correct hypotheses is larger—which we might, given that scientists are usually pretty clever about the hypotheses they choose to test—then the problem gets even more pronounced. Overall, Johnson’s suggestion is simple: raise the statistical rigor all around. Demand that experiments produce a p value of 0.005 or smaller. And be even pickier about results that we consider highly significant. There is a cost to this, in that you need bigger samples to achieve the higher statistical rigor. In his example, you’d have to double the sample size. That’s no problem if you’re breeding bacteria and fruit flies, but it will add a lot of time and expense if your project involves mice.

Or, of course, humans. One implication that Timmer notes for increased significance thresholds is that those with small sample sizes would have to consider discussing non-significant results, potentially undermining our blind faith in statistical significance. While that would be nice, in the world we actually live in the more likely outcome is that individual or small-scale research would be even more difficult to conduct successfully. Good luck getting that NSF grant!

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Lily Allen attacks tropes, others attack Lily Allen

Over at Sociological Images Lisa Wade breaks down Lily Allen’s new video for “Hard Out Here,” in which she mocks the tropes associated with some recent music videos, particularly Miley Cyrus’s. You can see the video here:

As I watched the video, my first thought was, “Oh, she is making fun of the expectations that women face in the music industry.” My second thought, though, was, “Isn’t she using these black women as props in the same way that Miley Cyrus used them?” Mia McKenzie at Black Girl Dangerous was better able to turn these thoughts into words, writing:

Satire works best when you are flipping the script on the oppressor, on the system. When you are calling attention to the ways that the system is jacked by amplifying the absurdity of that system. Not caricaturing and otherwise disrespecting the people who are oppressed by that system.

In general, I think that music that challenges listeners to question the stereotypes associated with pop culture is a good thing, so I don’t fault Lily Allen for writing this song or wanting to make a video playing with these ideas (though Lisa points out that the only reason a song like this can get recorded is because somebody thought that it would be successful at making money). I wish, though, that she had found a more clever way to play with these ideas than simply appropriating them for her own purposes.

The lesson learned here, I think, is that we have set the bar so low for thoughtful dialog about race, gender, inequality, and sexuality in popular music that just pointing out how stupid we are about these things is seen as a thoughtful critique. Everybody can do better.

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What does it mean to be an ally?

Mia McKenzie at Black Girl Dangerous has an important post about what it means to be an ally, brought on by people who claim to be allies for various groups but do not always behave in ways that are supportive. Instead of defining people as “allies,” she suggests “currently operating in solidarity with” because of the focus it places on current behavior. Of course, “currently operating in solidarity with” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue (which McKenzie acknowledges) but that is actually in keeping with her concluding point that being supportive is not supposed to be easy. She writes:

Sounds like a lot of work, huh? Sounds exhausting. Well, yeah, it ought to. Because the people who experience racism, misogyny, ableism, queerphobia, transphobia, classism, etc. are exhausted. So, why shouldn’t their “allies” be?

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The lack of diversity on TV as a self-fulfilling prophecy

Shonda Rhimes, creator of TV shows Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, recently talked to NPR. According to Amanda Hess at Slate, one of the things she discussed was the challenge of getting Grey’s Anatomy on the air:

When NPR asked Rhimes if she helped “create the change” in representing complicated and diverse women on screen, Rhimes told the story of pitching the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy to ABC in 2005. Rhimes conceived of Grey’s as a racially diverse show featuring “smart women competing against one another” that she’d actually watch. But higher-ups at ABC had different ideas about what women really wanted. “A bunch of older guys told me that nobody was going to watch a show about a woman who had casual sex and threw a guy out the night before her first day of work—that that was completely unrealistic and that nobody wanted to know that woman,” Rhimes told NPR. “I remember sitting in that meeting and thinking, ‘Wow they don’t know anything about what’s going on in the world right now.’ ”

I’m not sure how the show was allowed to move forward at ABC without changes, but it apparently was and is now in its tenth season. Rimes doesn’t think those views would be expressed today, partly because of the success of Grey’s Anatomy:

“That kind of conversation would never happen now,” Rhimes told NPR. Executives are “no longer worried about whether or not the women are likeable.” It used to be that if you pitched a show with a female lead, “it was so rare [that] everyone wanted that person to be perfect, because she had to represent everybody.” White female characters, at least, are now allowed to be complex. Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, however, “is very rare because she’s an African-American woman,” Rhimes told NPR, “and everyone wants her to be perfect because she has to represent everyone.” The good news is that Rhimes now has the clout to reject that premise: “There’s a box you get put in. My goal is to blow that box wide open.”

Rhimes is speaking to a central challenge of breaking gender and race barriers on television: Because nonwhite, non-male leads represents a risk for a network, producers can put pressure on writers to play it safe in other ways. But characters that are designed to “represent” all women, or all black women, are guaranteed to be boring to pretty much everyone. Rhimes is successful enough now that she can call the shots. I’d be interested to hear how these diversity and likability conversations go with television creators who are not established powerhouses.

As Hess points out, it is great that Rhimes has enough clout to  do what she wants, but the underlying fear on the part of executives likely remains. As long as diversity on TV is rare there will be pressure to make diverse characters bland. When these shows fail the executives will likely point to the fact that the shows featured diverse characters, not their blandness, as the reason for this failure, reinforcing the idea that audiences don’t connect with diverse characters. Hopefully, shows like Scandal and Orange is the New Black will help break this cycle rather than remaining aberrations.

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Unisexing city restrooms in Philadelphia

Back in May, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter signed legislation requiring that “new or renovated city-owned buildings include gender-neutral bathrooms in addition to traditional men’s and women’s restrooms.” It is nice to see steps being taken to promote equality and I hope that other new buildings will follow suit. The Sheraton in New York, where this year’s ASA was held, demonstrated how effective this can be.

 

 

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Posts on quitting academia

In times of rampant academic false consciousness, it is no surprise that some people choose to leave academia. Rebecca Shuman at Slate provides a roundup of what she calls “an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays,” focusing on Zachary Ernst’s “Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower.” Some of his reasons involve the corporatization of higher education. As Shuman writes:

His essay has ignited academic Facebook, and may be pilloried by those who find his departing huff to be immature, ungrateful or unprofessional. But even to his detractors, his climactic critique of the “corporatization” of the American university should be unassailable (at least until the end). As has become common in higher education, the University of Missouri system now hires former multinational CEOs as presidents, on the basis of what Ernst criticizes as nebulous and irrelevant “business experience”—but not because Ernst is himself “anti-business.” Rather, he explains, a multinational CEO focuses on “marketing, cutting costs, and improving outcomes that are based on short-term economic measures. This means serving more customers with a smaller number of employees while cutting costs.” This actually makes no business sense in the university world.

I suspect that the hiring of CEOs as university presidents will lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, trustees may see the failure of a president/CEO as a sign that a better, more experienced CEO should be hired since the first obviously didn’t have enough business experience to run a university…

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SNL discusses race

Last night, Kerry Washington was the host of Saturday Night Live. Since Washington is a black female and was hosting a show that currently has no black female cast members, the topic of race made a few appearances. The first was in the opening sketch, where Washington was asked to play Michelle Obama, Oprah, and Beyonce.

Race also played a major part in a sketch about Obama’s approval rating among black voters, with a special focus on The Wire (examples: “Personally I thought white people would be more excited about their lines being tapped, considering how much they like The Wire” and “Have you even been at a party and a white person approaches you with a smile and you just know they’re going to want to talk about The Wire?”

These examples highlight the way that humor can be used to discuss race. Unfortunately, discussing race is not the same as doing something about it (just like watching The Wire isn’t the same as volunteering at a school…) As Al Sharpton said, “What have we learned from this…as usual, nothing.”

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