A Year in Blogging

Well, I’ve been officially blogging for one year.  The goal was to post once a week and I missed the mark by a few posts.  People clicked on my blog just under 30,000 times this year and it been viewed all around the world.   Some months had more posts than others, but it was helpful as I moved to a new college to keep me writing and to help me get started on my new book project on man caves.

Some of the posts have had more to do with man caves and gendering domestic space than others.  But, I’ve also used the blog as a space to post ideas that I’ve come up with while teaching and reading.  I wrote a few posts highlighting some scholars I love (Barrie Thorne, Mike Messner, Ann Arnet Ferguson, Adam Reich, Victor Rios, Erving Goffman, and Laud Humphreys) and those were particularly rewarding.

My post on bachelor pads was cross-posted on Sociological Images and my post on glitter-bombing was posted on Social (In)Queery.  I also got a lot of traffic after a brief interview with Feministing.com.

Taking on Men Who Solicit Sex

“Prostitution” is an unfortunate term that groups together a diverse body of sex work, people, practices, ideas, and ideals.  While a majority of the research and public policy focuses primarily on the (mostly) women who work in this industry, since the 1970’s attention has increasingly started focusing on a different population: the clients.  Using economic metaphor, police and public policy officials often discuss this as getting at “the problem” from the demand side rather than focusing all of their attention on supply.

Collectively, these strategies are referred to as “anti-john” initiatives or tactics, and they actually date back to the early 1900s.  But, feminist critiques in the 1970s that called for equal enforcement laws caused anti-john tactics to be taken more seriously.  There are a variety of methods for countering sexual commerce that fall under the “anti-john” umbrella: use of surveillance cameras, seizing the cars used to solicit sex (sometimes taken and sold at auction as part of the penalty), community service, “John School” educational programs for men arrested for purchasing sex, “Dear John” letters sent to the homes of johns, reverse stings involving the use of women officers posing as sex workers, and public and private shaming (sending letters to registered auto owners and publicizing identities of arrested johns in newspapers, police website, and on billboards).

A Department of Justice assisted research program—DEMANDforum—has mapped where various strategies have been put to use in the U.S. (see left as well).  It’s interesting to see how sex crimes are dealt with differently throughout the U.S.  But, the map is also useful for getting a sense of the states that are making use of these strategies at the greatest rates and where such strategies are less relied upon.  Zooming in on my community, I found that anti-john tactics are employed in both Buffalo (right) and Rochester (left), though Rochester uses more tactics than Buffalo.

PINK Loves Consent–Using Victoria’s Secret to Sexualize Consent?

Bodies are gendered spaces.  The ways we treat, feed, starve, surgically alter, pluck, shave, display, move, conceal, care for, damage, and ignore them in patterned ways that are both gendered and sexualized.  We learn to display gendered and sexualized bodies in many ways, but some voices are louder than others in helping us decide.  If it were possible to measure the relative volumes of gender and sexual socializing forces in our lives, I think it’s safe to say that Victoria’s Secret would measure somewhere between a loud yell and a scream.  Of course, sometimes the most powerful messages come in the form of a whisper, softly suggesting rather than deafeningly demanding.  And Victoria’s Secret works in these more subtle ways as well.

Victoria’s Secret is so pervasive now that it’s easy to forget a time when the store didn’t exist.  Opening in 1986, the chain commanded the market by 1990.  The store is an experience unto itself.  The theme is Victorian, and the chain emerged attempting to revive Victorian women’s undergarment fashion standards such as the corset and the bodysuit.  However, the meanings of these cultural objects has transformed such that the ways they are interpreted and their consequences are different today than they were in the Victorian era (see here).

Recently, Rebecca Nagle and Hannah Brancatto—two sexual violence activists and educators and co-founders of FORCE: upsetting rape culture—started a protest relying on the cultural imagery and power of the Victoria’s Secret empire.  Launching a website, PINK Loves Consent, that uses the same background imagery of the Victoria’s Secret site, Nagle and Brancatto present a series of images of “real women” wearing slinky, sexy lingerie with messages like: “No Means No,” “Let’s Talk about Sex,” “Consent is Sexy,” and “I Love My Body.”

Like Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, the women depicted in these images present a larger diversity of women’s bodies (critiques of Dove’s campaign notwithstanding—see here and here).  Some consumers have been “tricked” by the site, mistakenly believing that Victoria’s Secret sponsored this line.  Victoria’s Secret formally asked for the site to be taken down, though currently, PINK Loves Consent remains online.  With the help of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and more, they’ve successfully started a digital conversation about sexualizing consent that seems to have taken hold.