Bacon, Beards, and Beer: Feminist Reflections on Hipster Masculinity

Originally posted at Feminist Reflections

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Do you know a hipster when you see one? Have you ever been in the company of a hipster and tried to bring up the subject?

Talking about hipsters in front of hipsters is more taboo than you might think. The term is rarely lobbed in the presence of those who would fit the label. Most often it is used to describe other men in a disparaging way –like calling a guy a “douchebag” or a “fag.” At the same time, hipster has a different ring to it. It is calls the authenticity of one’s masculinity into question.

When I was studying a young, straight, white group of men who frequented the same bar, I regularly encountered the term. I learned quickly that if men found out they’d been “hipster’d” when they weren’t around, they were deeply offended. Part of hipster identity seems to be explicitly about NOT identifying as such. Hipsters have a casual form of detachment about identity and tastes—a gendered nonchalance that I call “practiced indifference.”

Are Class Differences in Parenting Style Disappearing?*

By: Tristan Bridges and Tara Tober

–Reposted at Huffington Post—

An interest in ensuring communities have access to safe areas for children to play has produced a wild array of solutions. One of the solutions in our community is the development of what urban planners call “pocket parks.” These are small, repurposed lots in communities—torn down and built back up again as playgrounds, picnic areas, and small patches of grass on which children might play and families might congregate. Pocket parks increase property values surrounding them and provide more access to public space to spend leisure time. They have the added bonus of offering some infrastructure that might promote community.

When we first moved to Brockport, New York, some of the first friends we met were other parents we navigated on pocket park playgrounds near our home. Our children were around the same age as theirs, we were similarly neurotic about what they were up to on the playground, we seemed to have similar feelings about what other parents ought to be doing with their kids. We didn’t discuss this openly. We didn’t have to. All this is to say that when we met other parents at the park and decided to try to befriend some of those we met, we shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that we shared more in common with them than parenting philosophies. We shared similar upbringings, class backgrounds, levels of education. We even had similar kinds of jobs, politics, aspirations, and hobbies.

Annette Lareau’s ethnography of class reproduction—Unequal Childhoods—tells the story of how U.S. parents from different class backgrounds “parent” in different ways. And it’s not the “better” or “worse” story that gets played out in popular culture. All of the parents Lareau studied want to help their kids find happiness and thrive. They just don’t go about fulfilling these goals in exactly the same ways. Middle-class family life had a qualitatively different flavor for working-class and poor family life. Lareau refers to the parenting that middle-class parents in her study practiced as “concerted cultivation.” As the name suggests, Lareau found that middle-class parents were primarily concerned with cultivating their children’s various talents, helping them find and voice their own opinions, reasoning with them, and were consistently preoccupied with their children’s development. These families were constantly on the go; the children were enrolled in a fantastic array of activities and the families were extremely busy.

By contrast, working-class and poor families had incredibly different daily rhythms associated with their families. Lareau refers to the parenting practiced by working-class and poor families as “the accomplishment of natural growth.” It wasn’t that these families did not set boundaries for their children; they cared deeply about their children, set limits on their activities, and more. But, within these limits, Lareau found that working-class and poor parents provided a lot of room for their children to spontaneously grow. They didn’t have the same schedule of organized activities; their kids played outside a lot with other children (often, though not always, outside the watchful gaze of their parents); and the parents were much more likely to use clear directives when communicating with their children than to reason with their kids in the ways Lareau observed middle-class parents doing.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both styles. Concerted cultivation promotes a sense of entitlement that allows middle-class children to learn to navigate institutions seamlessly (as they simply interact with so many from a young age). But they also learn that they can bend the rules in most institutions, make special requests, and more. The accomplishment of natural growth, by contrast, might afford children greater independence and may be more likely to produce authentic friendship and community. In network terms, you might imagine the accomplishment of natural growth as producing small, but incredibly dense networks—the kinds of networks that might help you get a babysitter last minute, let you borrow a car, or watch your children while you shop for groceries. Concerted cultivation, on the other hand, seems more likely to foster more extensive networks, stretching far beyond your neighborhood and the community physically surrounding your home—but, we’d also imagine, given the hectic schedules, these networks are likely to be less dense and ties between friends and families more weak. This might make it harder to find a sitter, but these networks might be ideally situated to help get your child into the college they want and, later on, these networks have been shown to help people find jobs. So, Lareau’s study illustrates one small, but incredibly important way that class reproduction takes place.

But, here’s the rub: we don’t think middle-class families are satisfied yet. The Atlantic recently published a new article on parenting by Hanna Rosin—“Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone!” Rosin joins a chorus of popular critics, psychologists, and more about the dangers of “over-parenting.” Apparently, parents today are overly worried about their children’s safety, attempting to anticipate and protect children from risks around every imaginable corner. These worries have shifted the landscape of contemporary childhood in a diversity of ways. With Lareau’s study in mind, it’s probably important to say that when Rosin is talking about “parents,” she’s not talking about all parents—just those who practice concerted cultivation.

Rosin writes about a playground’ish area in North Wales that is just shy of an acre of land. Referred to as “The Land,” it’s a bit different from what you might be thinking when you hear “playground.” It’s filled with… well, it’s full of junk as far as we can tell. Children are running around, jumping on, throwing, breaking and playing with all manner of dangerous items. The older children at The Yard light fires in tin drums, listen to music with explicit lyrics, and more. The younger children jump on dirty old mattresses, off of piles of wooden pallets and dirty old car tires, and play in the mud. Rosin refers to the area as an “adventure playground.” There’s an elaborate system of supervision such that very few adults are there. In fact, supervisors are trained to attend to children in the area with a sort of “don’t interact unless you absolutely must” rule guiding most of their interactions with children. The adult “playworkers” in The Yard watch the children, but almost never intervene.

The whole idea behind The Yard and adventure playgrounds is that reasonable risks are an important part of childhood development. And, as you might suspect, parents practicing concerted cultivation might have a different assessment of “reasonable” than the creators of The Yard. There’s a litany of pop psychology written to middle-class parents, not-so-subtly asking them to “back off” a bit and highlighting the benefits for children’s development. Dan Kindlon’s Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children in an Indulgent Age is among the most popular. While he’s not using Lareau’s language, Kindlon and others are basically calling middle-class parents to check the “concerted-ness” of their cultivation a bit. But, based on the story, we gathered that this was an area in which middle-class children were playing. It’s not the U.S., but these are kids who are supposed to be over-scheduled, extremely busy, and “over-parented.” And adventure playgrounds exist in the U.S. as well. Here’s one in Berkeley—if you look them up online, you’ll find most are in affluent cities with liberal and educated reputations and populations. But, are these playgrounds part of some larger cultural trend wherein middle- and upper middle-class parents are turning to accomplishment of natural growth-model parenting?

We don’t think so. We suspect that what might be going on is better termed “the concerted cultivation of natural growth.” A close inspection of the pictures accompanying Rosin’s article show that the boundaries of The Yard are fences. It’s not just unstructured play these children are engaging in. That’s the sort of activity that Lareau found among working-class and poor children. Rather, we suspect that what’s going on here is something more aptly called “structured unstructured play.” Children are engaging in daring activities—the kinds that might foster independence and a sense of self-sufficiency—but this isn’t exactly the same thing. There are adult workers around who are there to make sure that children’s unstructured play follows an elaborate set of rules for unstructured play designed by a team of experts on the topic.

While Lareau discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the two parenting styles, what we’re calling “the concerted cultivation of natural growth” appears to be a style attempting to mitigate the negative side effects of middle-class parenting. For instance, Lareau found that middle-class kids’ schedules are so packed that spontaneity is less possible for them, the fights Lareau witnessed among middle-class siblings were more severe, and many of the children were more disconnected from the communities in which they lived (unless some of their various activities happened very close to home). But, this transformation (if such a transformation is actually underway) produces an interesting question—one that’s unanswered in the research as far as we know. Are the benefits of the accomplishment of natural growth possible if you attempt to achieve such a parenting style in a concerted way? Our suspicion is that the concerted cultivation of natural growth won’t work in precisely the same way as the accomplishment of natural growth. We’re also not certain just how different these practices are from concerted cultivation more generally.

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*This post is not based on research.  It’s just an idea in which we are interested.  And perhaps there’s some research on this issue of which we are unaware.

Violence and Masculinity Threat

By: Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe

Originally posted at Girl W/ Pen

Just under two weeks ago, in Milford, Connecticut, Chris Plaskon asked Maren Sanchez to attend prom with him at the end of the year at Jonathan Law High School.  They’d known each other since 6^th grade.  Maren said no.  Witnesses told authorities she declined and told Chris she would be attending the dance with her boyfriend (here). Chris knew Maren had a boyfriend and, likely, that she’d be attending with him. After being turned down, Chris threw his hands around Maren’s throat, pushed her down a set of stairs, and cut and stabbed her with a kitchen knife he’d brought to school that day.  It was April 25, 2014.  Maren got to school just a bit after 7:00 that day and before 8:00, she was dead.

This tragic, almost unfathomable violence reminds us of so many stories of adolescent male violence over the past couple decades. Jackson Katz discusses a seeming epidemic of violence among young, white men in his new film, Tough Guise 2.  In analyzing the tragedies of school shootings, Katz tells us that we need to think about these tragedies as contemporary forms of masculinity. When young men have their masculinity sullied, threatened or denied, they respond by reclaiming masculinity through a highly recognizable masculine practice: violence. When events like this happen, it’s easy to paint the young men who perpetuate these crimes as psychologically disturbed, as—importantly—unlike the rest of us.  But, stories like Chris Plaskon follow what has become a predictable pattern.

Sociologists investigating similar phenomena address this as a form of “social identity threat.”  The general idea is that when you threaten someone’s social identity, and they care, they respond by over-demonstrating qualities that illustrate membership in that identity.  Michael Kimmel writes about a classic example:

I have a standing bet with a friend that I can walk onto any playground in America where 6 year-old boys are happily playing and by asking one question, I can provoke a fight.  That question is simple: “Who’s a sissy around here?” (here: 131)

While you might think Kimmel’s offering easy money here, he’s making a larger point.  By asking the question, Kimmel is inviting someone’s masculinity to be threatened and assuming that this will require someone to demonstrate their masculinity in dramatic fashion.  Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon: masculinity threat. New research relying on experimental designs suggests there’s a lot more to these claims than we might have thought.

Colorism, Gender, and School Suspension

By Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe

Originally posted at Girl W/ Pen

Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple, coined the “colorism” term to define: “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on the color of their skin” (here: 290). Colorism occurs when groups of people are discriminated against in systematic ways on the basis of skin color alone.  The differential treatment results not simply from being recognized as belonging to a specific racial category, but from the values associated with the actual color of someone’s skin.  And it is one way that social scientists have looked at inequalities within as well as between racial groups.

Some of the social scientific findings that provoked more research on colorism uncovered skin color-based disparities within the criminal justice system. Research has shown, for example, that skin color affects the length of time people are sentenced to serve in prison, the proportion of their sentences that they do serve, and the likelihood of receiving the death penalty.  This research has less often focused explicitly on intersections with gender inequality.

A recent article in Race and Social Problems by Lance Hannon, Robert DeFina, and Sarah Bruch—“The Relationship Between Skin Tone and School Suspension for African Americans”—addresses these intersections centrally. They analyze the relationship between race, skin color, gender, and the school suspension.  Similar to what research on criminal sentencing has shown, Hannon, DeFina, and Bruch found that darker skin tone was significantly related to the likelihood of being suspended in school.  African American students with darker skin had a higher probability of being suspended than those with lighter skin.  But, upon closer investigation, they discovered that that finding was primarily driven by the fact that skin tone has a much larger impact on African American girls than on African American boys.

Masculinity, Gender (Non)Conformity, and Queer Visibility

by Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe

Originally posted at Girl W/ Pen

Coco Layne got a haircut.  She shaved both sides of her head, but left the top at a length that falls roughly to the bottom of her face.  As a feminist fashion, art, and lifestyle blogger, she was quick to recognize the ways that she could subtly re-style her hair and dramatically alter her presentation of gender (here).   So, in classic feminist art blogger style, she produced an art project depicting her experience.  Coco’s project—“Warpaint”—comes on the heels of several other photographic projects dealing critically with gender: JJ Levine’s series of photographs—“Alone Time”—depicting one person posing as both a man and a woman in a single photograph (digitally altered to include both images); the media frenzy over Casey Legler, a woman who garnered attention, recognition and contracts modeling as a man; the Japanese lingerie company that recently went viral by using a man’s body to sell a push-up bra, just to name a few.

Along with these other photographic projects on gender, Warpaint is critical commentary on what gender is, where it comes from, how flexible it is, what this flexibility means, and what gender (non)conformity has to do with sexuality.  Coco’s work provides important lessons about how gender is produced just below the radar of most people most of the time.  These projects all point out the extensive work that goes into doing gender in a way that is recognizable by others. Indeed, recognition by others is key to doing gender “correctly.” It is what scholar Judith Butler calls performativity or the way in which people are compelled to engage in an identifiably gendered performance. When people fail to do this, Butler argues that they are abject, not culturally decipherable and thus subject to all sorts of social sanctions. Butler points out that the performance of gender itself produces a belief that something, someone, or some authentic, inalienable gendered self lies behind the performance.  These photographic projects lay bear the fiction that there is this sort of inevitably gendered self behind the performance of gender.  This is precisely why these projects produce such discussion and, for some, discomfort.  It makes (some of) us uncomfortable by challenging our investments in and folk theories surrounding certain ways of thinking about gender and sexuality.

Much of the commentary the Warpaint project focused on Coco’s ability to get a retail job when she displayed her body in ways depicted on the bottom row.  Indeed her experience reflects research indicates that different workplaces reward particular gender appearances and practices. Kristen Schilt’s research on transmen at work, for instance, highlights the way that performances of masculinity get translated into workplace acceptance for these men. Yet doing gender in a way that calls into question its naturalness can put people (including those who do not identify as gender queer or tans) at risk. In Jespersen v Harrah, the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals held that female employees can be required to wear makeup as a condition of employment (in a workplace where men are not required to wear it).  While recent decisions have been more favorable to trans identified employees, most states do not have employment law or school policies protecting gender non-conforming individuals.  Simply put, most states do not have laws addressing —to use Coco’s language—gender expression.

A Note on Masculinities in Context—Bodybuilders and the Significance of Setting

In my Sociology of Gender course this week, we discussed what it means to talk about gender as subject to variation and why this matters.  I typically go over four kinds of variation to which gender is subject and talk with students about how this helps us begin to understand what it means to talk about gender as “socially constructed.” If it weren’t, then why or how would it be subject to such wild variation?  Gender varies cross-culturally, it varies throughout history, it varies over the course of an individuals’ life, and it also varies contextually.  This last one often requires a bit of explanation.  And I often use my research with bodybuilders as a way to discuss this issue.

I initially started this blog to think more critically about both how social spaces get gendered and sexualized.  But I have also always been interested in tying performances of gender and sexuality to the specific contexts in which those performances emerge.  In graduate school, I studied a group of bodybuilders for about a year.  Much of the existing literature at the time framed male bodybuilders as an insecure population—and indeed, this is how they are culturally portrayed as well.  There’s an excellent ethnography by Alan Klein entitled Little Big Men that helps to bolster this claim.  We like to think of bodybuilders as overcompensating for some other weakness.  And consistent with Klein, I found many bodybuilders insecure—but I became much more interested in where they seemed insecure than with the simple fact that they seemed insecure.

I began my study simply observing them in the gym and gradually began gaining enough confidence to approach them to ask for interviews.  The men are extraordinarily large and many of them emit incredible sounds while working out.  So, it’s easy to get a bit squeamish.  They’re sweaty, they’re enormous, they’re lifting massive objects, grunting and yelling at each other—it’s pretty intense.  So, asking for an interview might seem like an easy task, but it took me a couple weeks to work up to actually approaching one of them.

What Can Testicles tell us about Dads?

 

Cross-posted at Girl W/ Pen

So… I’m going to go ahead and say that this is the wrong question to be asking. This question proceeds from a belief that testicles CAN tell us something about dads. A new study is making the rounds in the news that addresses the relationship between testicle size and parenting behavior among men (well… 70 men… not randomly sampled…). The paper is entitled “Testicular Volume is Inversely Correlated with Nurturing-Related Brain Activity in Human Fathers” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. I can think of more than a few titles that might have been catchier (and clearly, journalists reporting on the research had a similar idea).

In fairness, I don’t have access to the complete study (though I’ve requested it). But the problem is also in how this study gains attention in the media. It’s a great example of how a correlation combined with cultural stereotypes and assumptions can run wild. When correlations combine with popular stereotypes concerning a particular topic (like, say, the relationship between testosterone and any number of socially undesirable behaviors), questions about the science sometimes get lost because it looks like something was “scientifically proven” that we already wanted to believe anyway.

So, here’s the relationship the researchers found: men with smaller testicles tested more positively for nurturance-related responses in their brains when shown pictures of their children. The study reports that men with smaller testicles had roughly three times the level of brain activity in the area of the brain associated with nurturing. These men (with smaller testicles) were also men with lower levels of testosterone—something that has previously been shown to be associated with nurturing behavior among men.*

On the Significance of Digitally Documenting Zoo Visits

I posted a while ago about our last trip to a zoo (The Denver Zoo, actually—during our trip out for last year’s ASA conference).  Today, we visited the Buffalo Zoo, which is actually one of the oldest zoos in the country.  Zoos are fascinating places.  They still have the stink of empire and colonization to me.  But, I’ve been sociologically interested in zoos ever since seeing Marjorie DeVault present on some of her research concerning zoo visits and family life.  Zoos are an extraordinary example of how families learn to look at the world in similar ways.  Parents teach children how to position themselves to look at something, to be mindful of others (or not), what to look at, what is “important” (animals) and what should be ignored (fences, cages, and plant life), etc.  It is through small practices like this that intimate groups (like families) collectively reaffirm themselves.

For instance, most visitors passed right by a rhinoceros lying down in a pool to cool off.  The rhino was mostly concealed beneath the water.  But, rhinos are my son’s favorite animal of late.  So, while a half-hidden rhino doing nothing but shaking her ears is something many people chose to walk by, our family stopped because it’s significant to Ciaran.  And in stopping, we collaborated in producing a small family ritual—one of those insignificant moments that is part of what makes us “Us.”

A great deal about zoos has changed since I was young.  I remember being able to ride elephants and camels.  I remember exhibits constructed in such a way that animals could not hide from view.  Not today.  Habitats today are more expansive, often permitting animals the ability to put themselves “on display” or out of sight.  Perhaps our understandings of the psychological consequences of captivity on (some) animals have changed.  Or perhaps our collective beliefs about animals themselves have changed.  Either way, exhibits are dramatically different than I remember as a child.

Beyond the spaces themselves, technology has dramatically altered the ways in which people interact with the exhibits.  Witnessing the exhibit often felt secondary to digitally documenting the visit.  So, unable to turn off my inner sociologist, I started documenting the documenters.  I watched a family of four come up to a habitat, each with digital cameras of their own.  They all took pictures, glancing briefly at the pictures each person took, took a few more, and moved on to the next exhibit.  Sometimes, someone took pictures of the signs, too.  Perhaps this was to remember a few facts about the animals they were so busy photographing.  Capturing the animal in an interesting pose (like this shot of my son looking at the otters) was prized.  But, getting the shot was a must.  Groups often didn’t move on until everyone with a camera got a satisfactory shot.

So what?

You Are You – Bending Gender at a Children’s Camp

Slate ran a story last week about a camp for boys who prefer to bend gender.  Photographer Lindsay Morris has created a photo-documentary of the boys at camp.  She gives the camp a pseudonym (for obvious reasons).  She calls it “You Are You.”  I like avoidance of gendered pronouns in the title she selected.  The images are wonderful.  They depict an space in which playing with gender boundaries, meanings, and more is the norm, not the exception.

Children become socialized into the world we know in various ways.  And I believe that if we want the boys, girls, and more from our children’s generation to live in a world with less gender and sexual inequality, we have to not only teach them to question and push boundaries, we have to be willing to let them teach us.  Children still ask questions about things that we might have learned to accept without thinking.  And we can learn a great deal about gender and the potential for change from examining the aspects of life they might be better positioned to question than we are.

In a recent post with D’Lane Compton, I shared a story of a young girl coming up and pointing at my son in the grocery store, asking her mother a series of questions about him that ended with, “Will he always be a boy?”  The mother assured her daughter that he would, and I couldn’t help but think, “Well, with repeated acts like that over the course of his life, he’d certainly think twice before deciding otherwise.”  I didn’t share these thoughts with her or her child, but it was an experience that left a mark (on me anyway).  At You Are You, it seems as though that’s not a question considered worthy of asking or answering—at least when they’re at camp.

Beyond Dollars and Cents—A Cultural Supplement to the “Breadwinner Moms” Debate

Heterosexual married women with children are out-earning their husbands in record numbers. Philip Cohen calculated that about 23% of such couples are those in which women earn more income than their husbands. This may sound like a small proportion. Yet, as Cohen notes, “it’s an increase from 4% half a century ago.” So, before I question the debate, I just want to note that some significant shifts in gender relations and household earnings have taken place, likely exacerbated in recent years by the toll of the recent recession.

Yet, discussions of “breadwinner moms” are also part of the so-called “end of men” debate, wherein men are seen as being out-earned, out-educated, and out-done by women in all of the formerly male historical preserves. Framing women as “the richer sex” or transitions as somehow evidence of “the end of men” is premature and inaccurate.* Though women’s wages have increased in recent years while men’s have declined, focusing solely on these two facts fails to take into account where men’s and women’s wages started. The wage gap has reduced, but most estimates find that the gender wage gap is still somewhere between 77 and 81 cents on the dollar. Women’s salaries, on average, have remained lower than men’s (despite the closing gap from both directions). Beyond this, women remain disproportionately more likely to be poor. Coontz presents this as – at best – “a convergence of economic fortunes” rather than something like “female ascendance” (here).

Although it’s premature to claim that women are somehow replacing men atop the economic food chain, as I said before, some significant changes have occurred. A recent Pew Report on Breadwinner Moms documents that in just over 40% of households with children under the age of 18, women are either the sole or primary breadwinners. Including single mothers in this category might seem a bit unfair as these women are sole breadwinners by default. But, Philip Cohen compares married heterosexual households with children under 18 (here) to discuss the trend. Cohen’s big critique–and I agree with him–is how we’re classifying “breadwinner moms” and what this classification conceals. The way it’s measured classifies any woman in a heterosexual couple who out-earns her husband by $1 a year as a “breadwinner mom.” This stretches the meaning of breadwinner just a bit. As Cohen documents, in about 38% of married couples in which wives out-earn their husbands, they’re only bringing in between 50 and 60% of the household income. That is, for women, the most common way that they occupy the status of “breadwinner.” And if we add in those couples in which wives are earning 50-70% of the income, that accounts for about 62% of “breadwinner moms.” Cohen suggests that the vast majority of this shift in household earnings is better understood as “breadsharing” than “breadwinning.” Conversely, the most common way men occupy the breadwinner status remains earning 100% of the household income.

So, the discussion of “breadwinner moms” as 23% of heterosexual, married couple households with children under 18 conceals the fact that while this number does show considerable change, breadwinner moms and breadwinner dads exhibit remarkable differences–not least of which is the relative amount of bread they are “winning.”

So, what’s missing? I was struck by another thought that’s a bit more challenging to make sense of with quantitative data: how are husbands and wives making sense of their two incomes in these dual-earner families in which women are earning more than their husbands, but not by leaps and bounds? Do these women understand themselves as “breadwinner moms”? Do they benefit in some measurable way from this status?