On Masculinity and Home Improvement

— Cross-posted at Femme-O-Nomics

Home improvement stores are gendered spaces.  I know next to nothing about home improvement.  I come from an elite enough background that when something in our home needed improving, we didn’t (for the most part) do the work ourselves.  We hired others (always men) to come in, assess the situation, make a recommendation, and do the work involved.  This weekend, I thought I was faced with having to improve my own home, but thankfully, I found someone to do it for me at Lowe’s–someone who, as it turns out, was a woman.

My family and I got back from a morning outing only to realize that we neglected to bring our house keys.  [We have so many keys at our new house that we keep them on separate sets, though we had a garage key made for our car keys as a result.]  So, we pulled up to our garage, and realized that we had no way of entering our house.  We left a window unlocked, but had to tear a screen to get into the house.  So… short story long, we had to repair a screen—something we know absolutely nothing about.  I brought the whole screen with me thinking I would just get a new one that size.

When we got to Lowe’s, a woman–Carla*–confronted us as we entered asking what we were looking for.  Holding up the screen, I smiled (with a bit of embarrassment) and said, “Screens and keys.”  She said, “I can take care of both of those for you.”  She brought us over to the screen section.  I didn’t even realize we were there.  She asked what kind of screen we wanted.  I considered trying to act knowledgeable, but said, “We want to make this,” gesturing to the broken screen, “look like new for as cheap as possible.”

“Have you ever done a screen?” she asked.  I laughed—but not as hard as she laughed at me after I laughed.  If it’s far beyond hammering something or turning a screw, I’m a bit out of my league.  So, I asked, “Is there any way you could help me with this?”  Excitedly, she said, “Yeah!  I’ve changed tons of these.  I just did my whole house last year.”  I was struck in many ways because I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say this about a residence I’ve lived in.  I’ve never “done” anything to my whole house.

Toward a Spatial and Structural Analysis of Bullying

The Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is the only organizations I know of that sponsors a national study examining the experiences of LGBT youth in American schools.  The findings from the 2011 survey revealed–for the first time since the survey has been in existence–that homophobia, heterosexism, sexual prejudice, and discrimination in America’s schools appear to be declining.  Part of this has to do with an increase in LGBT student resources and support.  This is encouraging as it illustrates that an impact can be made.  The availability of resources and support have a direct relationship with the experiences of students.  So, things like Gay-Straight Alliances, anti-bullying policies, a school staff sensitive to the identities and challenges of LGBT students, and a more inclusive curriculum are changing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender student experiences.

The real challenge, however, is to transform the very cultures within which students interact with each other.  Each of these interventions is associated with school culture, but school cultures are something more as well.  While teachers can monitor a great deal of student interaction, and safe spaces now exist in many schools, more toxic school cultures will continue to support violence and intimidation in spaces we are less capable of monitoring.  Survey results indicated, for instance, that LGBT students feel most threatened in locker rooms (39%), bathrooms (38.8%), and in gym class (32.5%).

Gender and Geography in Mass Shootings

The recent mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012 at the Century movie theater during a showing of the new Batman film–“The Dark Knight Rises”–highlights a number of sociological issues to do with gender and violence (David Brooks’ comments notwithstanding). Sociologists look for patterns in behaviors like this and some of the striking patterns in recent history have to do with the gender, race, class, and lives of the shooters. Hugo Schwyzer draws a number of these connections in his post, “Why Most Mass Murderers Are Privileged White Men.” Michael Kimmel and Matthew Mahler’s (2003) article on random school shootings in recent U.S. history (1982-2001) draws a number of similar conclusions regarding a particularly pathological concoction of masculinity, homophobia, bullying, and entitlement that lie behind a great deal of these and similar incidents.

One issue that is less addressed is the cultural fascination with the geography of these horrific events. I remember seeing the issue of Newsweek that reported on the shootings at Columbine High School. What I remember most was the architectural image that depicted the school, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s paths through the school, and where various attacks occurred (just 15 miles west of Aurora, CO).

“The Man Aisle” – On the Masculinization of Grocery Shopping

 — Cross-posted at Femme-O-Nomics

Spatial segregation does a lot of things simultaneously. It physically separates groups while its very existence provides structural (spatial and even architectural) justification for continued separation. Bathrooms are the example that we often use in classrooms to talk about this issue. In Erving Goffman’s work on gender, he found it fascinating that we have designed toilets that make no sense for women to use–urinals. Now, there are plenty of other reasons for bathroom segregation that get brought up when you address that issue in particular, but it’s a great example of how we literally create the infrastructure that perpetuates our belief that men and women must be separated.

A grocery store on the Upper West Side of New York City recently opened a new aisle. It’s just for men, dubbed “the man aisle”–or, as the store prefers “The Man Isle.” The New York Post announced, “Get ready to stock up your man cave!” as the aisle challenges men to consume the right things. I’ve written before about how men were sold the historically feminized activity of consumption by challenging the masculinity of those who failed to consume (here).

Smoking Rooms – Unintentionally Providing Space for Gender Inequality

In Victorian houses, there are simply too many rooms by modern standards.  The idea was to have a separate room for separate activities, replacing the old idea of simply moving furniture around the room to suit various purposes throughout the day.*  One of the rooms I find fascinating is the “smoking room” in Victorian homes.  Tobacco was sort of a fad in England in the 1800’s, but not everyone was a fan.  Smoking rooms emerged for a few reasons.  Initially, the smell of tobacco was thought odious and people smoked outside.  But gradually, people became accustomed and the practice moved indoors.  Inside the house, smoking rooms became assigned, so I’ve read, because women did not want men smoking throughout the house.  It was a room designed to segregate a very specific activity to one room in the home–a room that was not accidentally situated far away from bedrooms, the kitchen, and dining areas.

Smoking rooms were also outfitted with their own specific interior design.  Perhaps most characteristic of the room was the rampant and excessive use of velvet.  Home owners had velvet curtains made, some of the furniture was upholstered with velvet and smoking jackets were routinely made of velvet as well.  The velvet was thought to absorb smoke to rid its odor from the rest of the house.  It’s also true that smoking really ruined rooms, drapes, upholstery, and more.  So, having it relegated to a single room was probably a good idea practically as well.  Dining rooms were actually initially used for similar reasons (we began to use dining rooms right around the same time that we began upholstering furniture en masse).

Smoking rooms were intended to be used after dinner.  The women might gather in the drawing room** and the men would retreat to the smoking room.  As such, it was common practice to decorate the room in a “masculine” style.  Many men displayed gun collections there, decorated the room with Turkish themes (as Turkish tobacco was what they were likely smoking, popularized after the Crimean War), “worldly” books and objects, and more.

The Bachelor Pad: Myths and Reality

There is not actually a great deal of literature on “man caves,” “man dens,” and the like–save for some anthropological and archeological work using the term a bit differently.  There is, however, a substantial body of literature dealing with bachelor pads.  The “bachelor pad” is a term that emerged in the 1960s.  It was a style of masculinizing domestic spaces heavily influenced by “gentlemen’s” magazines like Esquire and Playboy.  Originally referred to as “bachelor apartments,” “bachelor pad” was coined in an article in the Chicago Tribune, and by 1964 it appeared in The New York Times and Playboy as well.

It’s somewhat ironic that the “bachelor pad” came into the American cultural consciousness at a time when the median age at first marriage was at a historic low (20.3 for women and 22.8 for men).  So, the term came into usage at a time when heterosexual marriage was in vogue.  Why then?  Another ironic twist is that while the term has only become more popular since it was introduced, “bachelorette pad” never took off–despite the interesting finding that women live alone in larger numbers than do men.  I think these two paradoxes substantiate a fundamental truth about the bachelor pad–it has always been more myth than reality (see here, here, here, here, and here).

Gendering Sex and Sexual Violence

I never teach my courses on gender and sexuality without this table:

The table comes from Ed Laumann and colleague’s book, The Social Organization of Sexuality (1994).  There’s a variety of fascinating information throughout the text which aims to explore one of the first nationally representative surveys dealing with sexual identities, behaviors, and more.  This table in particular comes from the portion of the text where they describe their findings relative to coercive sex.

When I show this table in classes, I ask the students to tell me what they see.  The first thing students typically mention is the relatively high proportion of men who state that they have never been forced to do something sexual (96.1%).  Others point out the lower proportion of women (77.4%) who say that they have never been sexually forced.  Someone usually says something about this coming close to the “1-in-4” estimate that has become so popular.

Was Masculinity to Blame for the Space Shuttle Challenger?

Most of my knowledge about NASA, astronauts, and outer-space comes from movies.  When I think of the abstract astronaut in my mind, I picture Tom Hanks in Apollo 13.  I was actually only 4 years old when the Challenger disaster happened, but I remember learning about it in high school.  Thanks to the Challenger, we all know – or think we know – something about “O-rings” and how important they are for space travel.

For the uninitiated, here are the facts:

On January 28, 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger for the last time.  One minute and 13 seconds into the flight the shuttle broke apart, and the pieces of the shuttle spread out over the Atlantic Ocean.  Where the crew of the shuttle were was eventually recovered from the bottom of the ocean, but all seven crew members were killed in the crash.  What happened was the subject of intense debate, legal action, and investigation.  What is known is that the O-rings failed.  At a very basic level, O-rings are a part of the shuttle designed to seal the shuttle from the outside.  They have to be flexible and able to withstand intense temperature changes.  It is now known that the O-rings failed to seal the Challenger Shuttle and as a result, pressurized hot gas reached the external fuel tanks and led to the explosion.

James Messerschmidt – a criminologist and scholar of masculinity – investigated this debate and wrote a fascinating article on NASA as a workplace.  Much of the literature on gender in the workplace focuses on relations between men and women.  Joan Acker famously argued that it was not only workers that were gendered, but that the workplace itself and the jobs they were claiming were gendered before they got there.  Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Christine Williams, Patricia Yancey Martin, and more have discussed gender in the workplace.  But the typical conversation addresses relations between men and women.

Could kicking some men out of the gym make it better for the rest of us?

I studied a group of amateur and professional bodybuilders a few years ago.  Calling the gym a gendered space is really nothing new.  Most gyms in America move equipment around such that “feminine” and “masculine” machines are not too close.  But the amount of thought that goes into how the gym is organized is more than you might think.

In many gyms, most of the mirrors located outside of the locker room are located in the “masculine” areas of the gym.  During my study, I asked a gym manager about this.  He laughed at me and said, “Women come to the gym ‘cause they don’t like to look at themselves, men come to the gym ‘cause they do.”  This is obviously a gross generalization, and I immediately thought of lots of counter-examples of both men and women.  But the men to which the gym manager was referring are a pretty specific sub-group.

Gold’s Gym brought Venice Beach bodybuilding culture all around the country for Americans to enjoy.  And in most Gold’s, like other large gym chains, you can find the same group of men about whom the manager was talking.  They’re lumpy, lumbering, and when they work out, they’re loud!

Gyms are interesting spaces to study, because they are frequented by people that might not ever meet outside of this setting.  A new gym – Planet Fitness – has an interesting policy aimed at altering the dynamic of commercial workout space in the US.  Planet Fitness’ policy is to not allow lunks to work out at the gym.  They define a lunk as “lunk (lunk) n. [slang] one who grunts, drops weights, or judges.”  Now, you might think, how do they actually police this?  Each Planet Fitness if equipped with a “lunk alarm” that goes off when anyone begins acting like a lunk.  A gym employee approaches the offender, asks them to leave, and they are not allowed back.