Tag Archives: Gender

Why is emergency contraception interesting to think with?

[UPDATE: Formatting issues preventing this article from displaying properly have been fixed! – Ed.]

I promised that the next post would be about emergency contraception in Egypt, but I couldn’t resist first writing about EC more generally and describing debates about EC in the U.S.

From rape treatment to mainstream contraception

For more than four decades, medical researchers have known that there are methods you can use after sex to prevent – not terminate – pregnancy. Emergency contraception (EC) was first researched in the 1960s by physician-researchers trying to find a way to prevent pregnancies in survivors of sexual assault. They experimented in giving rape survivors high doses of regular oral contraceptive pills (OCPs). Later it was established that inserting a copper-bearing IUD after sex was even more effective at reducing pregnancy risk.

Remember that this was during the pre-Roe v. Wade era so there were political reasons for looking for a way of preventing pregnancy, rather than expecting to be able to resort to abortion, for women who got pregnant after sexual assault. But of course there are also enduring religious and public health reasons for wanting to find ways to prevent pregnancy, rather than end it with abortion.

Increasingly, knowledge about this contraceptive technique filtered out to a wider public and in the 1970s through the 1990s, there was an underground movement of women and doctors spreading the word about do-it-yourself emergency contraception. You just take several pills from a regular pack of birth control pills within 5 days after sex.

(There’s a website run by Princeton University’s Office of Population Research that tells you exactly how many pills to take depending on what brand of Pill you’ve got, and as far as I can tell, this website was actually the first health information website on the Internet.)

Even though this form of contraception has been known for decades, it’s only in the past ten years or so that emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) have become more widely known and marketed as a contraceptive option for all women, not just rape survivors. There’s been a global movement to introduce “dedicated products” worldwide and to lobby for them to be made available without prescription. (A “dedicated product” is when emergency contraceptive pills are packaged and marketed specifically for that purpose. Activists have long argued that this is an important improvement on the DIY culture of cutting up packets of pills because it increases awareness of EC and lends the method popular legitimacy.)

Continue reading →

New Reproductive Health Technologies in Egypt

Thanks to Kerim and Savage Minds for inviting me to contribute. I thought I’d write something about a new research project I’ve recently started on new and emerging reproductive health technologies in Egypt. This project looks at Egyptian interpretations of four technologies: emergency contraception, medication abortion, hymenoplasty, and erectile dysfunction drugs.

Some interesting paradoxes to contemplate:

  • Why are there at least a dozen local brands of sildenafil available from Egyptian pharmacies, and “Viagra sandwiches” or “Viagra soup” is on the menu at almost every restaurant that specializes in seafood, but there is only one brand of emergency contraceptive pill in Egypt, which is sold by an NGO because it’s not considered commercially viable enough for the mainstream pharmaceutical companies to bother with it?

The tap in the bathroom of the apartment where I stay when I’m doing research in Egypt. My roommate and I have often wondered where these came from. Was it a marketing campaign by Pfizer during the era when they weren’t allowed to engage in direct-to-consumer advertising for their product? Or did some sink manufacturer just think it would be cool to put Viagra on the handles?

Continue reading →

Arctic Masculinity

The other day I went to the store to buy some deodorant and a new toothbrush. I do not buy these sorts of things often because 1) tooth brushes do not wear out that often and 2) like many people in Hawai’i I but things like deodorant, razors, rice, toilet paper etc. in bulk because of how much they cost. All of which is to say that I basically had little to no agenda re: the style and substance of the items I would be buying except that they would be cheap and make sure I held to the standards of first-world academic hygiene.

When I got to the store I was a little surprised to see how the market in scented men’s deodorant had changed since the last time I had purchased a shrink-wrapped twelve pack at Costco: all of the edgy body sprays with the “buy and wear this product and women will want you to rape them” ad campaigns had gained a scary amount of market share. They were also incredibly expensive. Since I was not looking to spend a lot of money to reinforce my sense of my sexual potency I gave them a pass.

The other options were what got me. Marketers have, somewhere, somehow, decided what men want to smell like. That smell, apparently, is ‘arctic’. There were various scents ranging from ‘artic blast’ to ‘avalanche’ to ‘blizzard’ — all having to do with unstoppable, low-temperature movement.

But that’s not all. The toothbrushes were also divided along gendered lines, with various pink and pastel colors for women and for men a variety of light blues. Was this the typical pink-blue gendering of infants expanded to oral hygeine? No, the packaging around the toothbrush informed me, it was not a powder-blue toothbrush, it was an arctic toothbrush.

Clearly we are dealing with specific system of meaning that comprehends the visible spectrum, gender performances, and scent. The system is clearly arbitrary and conventional: how did that chemical deodorant smell come to be associated with a geographical area? And how can a toothbrush, which has little to no scent, be ‘arctic’ at all? Is this simply the pink-blue distinction updated and reframed to be acceptably masculine? Is there something about nurturance/hygiene that goes back to the American male childhood which is still coded blue? I’d be interested in hearing what other people think about this.

Misogyny Vs. The Human Chin

Nicholas Kristof speaks to evolutionary psychologists and decides that misogyny doesn’t exist because there is no evolutionary motive for hatred, only a “desire to control them and impregnate them, so as to pass on one’s genes.”

The idea that something can’t exist because there is no convenient evolutionary just-so story for it is absurd. Kristof should read some Stephen Jay Gould:

Gould’s favorite example is the human chin, whose presence is an incidental consequence of the differential growth rate of two bones in the lower jaw. The dentary bone which carries the teeth elongates more slowly than the jawbone itself, so the chin juts out. In our ape-like ancestors the jawbone grows more slowly so no chin develops. Of course one can always try to invent a story about why having a chin confers more reproductive potential, but that is a parlor game, not science.

If humans can have chins, they can also have misogyny. Maybe even misogynists with chins.

Anthropological Authority and the Marriage Debate

Box Turtle Bulletin, the blog that previously published a letter from Bill Maurer and Tom Boellstorff responding to a statement from Focus on the Family that there is anthropological consensus as to the definition of marriage, is currently hosting a debate about the matter. Patrick Chapman has posted a lengthy response to a ‘white paper‘ by Focus on the Family’s Director of Family Formation Studies Greg Stanton. It’s a fascinating debate to me not necessarily because I am interested in definitions of marriage (though I am) but because of the way that anthropology is invoked by both sides as having authority on the subject. As Chapman writes: “What is particularly important with Stanton’s report is the recognition that anthropologists are the experts when it comes to understanding and defining marriage.” Anthropologists: Do not despair! Someone still cares what we have to say. Anthropologists are seen to have the last word on human nature and therefore as potentially having knowledge that could settle debate on the topic. The typical ‘pro’ gay marriage stance in relation to anthropology is to emphasize the diversity of world cultures and to emphasize that human nature exists in and as this diversity or adaptability. The typical ‘anti’ gay marriage stance emphasizes the fact that nothing quite like gay marriage has really been seen before in the ‘anthropological record.’ To me what’s interesting is how a moral question appears to be disguised in these debates as a ‘scientific’ one, and therefore the real nature of the conflict gets displaced. If in fact some tribe somewhere had/has a custom literally called ‘gay marriage,’ where two men or two women and their families celebrate their union through ritual and exchange, do we imagine that that would convince Focus on the Family of the validity of the institution? I actually think that these arguments are, at the core, about the moral legitimacy of modernity — and I think our very own Oneman has brilliantly guided discussion on this matter previously here at SM.

How it works

Partially in response to a comment on Rex’s last post, and also because I believe this should go up on every anthropologist’s door (alongside that Far Side cartoon):

How it works

Disclaimer: I don’t actually have any cartoons on my office door. I was speaking metaphorically.

He Says, She Says

The Guardian is publishing three excerpts from Deborah Cameron’s new book, The Myth of Mars and Venus, a debunking of myths about language and gender. Not a few of these myths are perpetuated by linguistic anthropologists like bestselling author Deborah Tannen, who is very much in Cameron’s cross hairs as she writes this book. Here is how she concludes the second excerpt:

But the research evidence does not support the claims made by Tannen and others about the nature, the causes, and the prevalence of male-female miscommunication. No doubt some conflicts between individual men and women are caused by misunderstanding: the potential for communication to go awry is latent in every exchange between humans, simply because language is not telepathy. But the idea that men and women have a particular problem because they differ systematically in their ways of using language, and that this is the major source of conflict between them, does not stand up to scrutiny.

In the first piece she argues that the literature is biased in favor of research which proves that there is a difference:

In relation to men and women, our most basic stereotypical expectation is simply that they will be different rather than the same. We actively look for differences, and seek out sources that discuss them. Most research studies investigating the behaviour of men and women are designed around the question: is there a difference? And the presumption is usually that there will be. If a study finds a significant difference between male and female subjects, that is considered to be a “positive” finding, and has a good chance of being published. A study that finds no significant differences is less likely to be published.

She includes a chart from one such “negative” study.

While linguistic anthropologists may need to update their course syllabi a bit, I don’t think this is going to have a major impact on the study of language and gender. After all, the very fact that people insist on seeing strong differences where there are none is an important part of the socio-cultural world in which we live. Moreover, these stereotypes about masculine and feminine linguistic styles very much inform our speech practices.
Continue reading →

For every bee there is a flower …

Having recently been scolded for citing survey data on an anthropology blog (mea culpa), I’d like to rectify the situation by referring readers to this fun piece in the NY Times about the myth that men are more promiscuous than women:

In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women.

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

The article offers two explanations. One is that “men exaggerate the number of partners they have and women underestimate.” The other is that “men are going outside the [survey] population to find partners.” For instance, most surveys don’t include paid sex workers. Feministe plays with the idea that promiscuous women “don’t count”:

But I’d say that what we’re seeing here is actually the conventional explanation for the discrepancy: women don’t have much sex compared to men, but supposedly there are some women who “make up for the difference” by having LOTS and LOTS of sex with then menfolk. Furthermore, these women don’t count, at least not for the CDC’s purposes — they’re beyond the pale, outside of society. They’re prostitutes, or as Ms. Aral suggests, they’re foreigners. In the past (of segregation and slavery) and still today in so many cases, they’re women of color. They’re women who have to be left out of the math in order to make the “common sense” 7:4 ratio accurate. They’re the original reference of the shame-word “slut.”

They’re every type of woman who’s been made to to serve as the “whore” of the classic “virgin/whore” dichotomy — to balance this mathematically impossible equation by having all the sex that good marriageable white-wedding girls supposedly don’t. (Even though this is also the survey that pointed out that 89% of Americans have premarital sex.) I could go even further and start talking about how this relates to characterization and exploitation of trans women as sex workers, in the US and around the world, as a kind of ultimate “doesn’t count as a woman” but I’ll save that for another post. You get the idea.

That the press and the public love to see their gender stereotypes reinforced, despite the questionable nature of the data, is something that has also been extensively covered at Language Log in a series of posts on the myth that women talk more than men.

Sports as Embodied Culture

With the centrality of athletes’ bodies in competition, sports provide a unique perspective in understanding what Susan Brownell refers to as body culture, “a broad term that includes daily practices of health, hygiene, fitness, beauty, dress and decoration, as well as gestures, postures, manners, ways of speaking and eating, … the way these practices are trained into the body, the way the body is publicly displayed, and the lifestyle that is expressed in that display” (from Susan Brownell’s 1995 book
Training the Body for China Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic, pp.10-11). In her ethnographic study of Chinese women track and field athletes, Brownell develops the concept of body culture by combining Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus and Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary technologies together, showing how objective structures such as the nation-state and everyday practices inscribe a particular cultural discipline onto the bodies of Chinese women. Western political and social leaders from the late 19th and early 20th century such as Theodore Roosevelt and Sir Robert Baden-Powell (founder of scouting) understood how sports could be used to instill a particular set of values on citizens, presenting sports as essential to building character for citizens of a vibrant civilization in what has been called “muscular Christianity.” Sports were an integral part of the “civilizing mission” of Westerners in their efforts to transform non-Western societies into colonial subjects. Of course such efforts could be turned on its head, as the other made sports their own. I’m sure this is a familiar theme — what would introductory anthropology classes be like without the classic film Trobriand Cricket? At a more theoretical level, Arjun Appadurai makes this precise argument about Indian cricket as well.
I think looking at sports as embodied culture is particularly useful in two areas – gender and childhood/education. Children have become a particular target for cultural politics, as competing groups seek to implement their visions of the future by shaping education and other childhood experiences (for more on this, see the volumes edited by Sharon Stephens or Nancy Sheperer-Hughes; I have written an essay on children myself in a study of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beijing, and a full-length ethnography on Chinese children has been written by Charles Stafford). Pierre Bourdieu emphasized the role of sports in education as a specific site for the imprinting of political philosophies through embodied culture in France. The importance of college sports in the United States, an athletic system that is quite different from university-level education in other societies, has also been the subject of intense study and debate. Noel Dyck therefore concludes that parents and local communities invest significant time and money in childhood sports because of the rationale that sports are essential in instilling cultural values deemed positive such as high self-esteem, hard work, team play, and playing by the rules.
In terms of gender, the implications of sports in defining masculinity and femininity are clear; but different studies have reached surprising conclusions. In the United States, sports and gender issues are also highly politicized, largely because of debates over Title IX, a federal law requiring equal opportunities for boys and girls in educational institutions, including school sports (and of course, there is the continuing legacy of Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King). There are so many works out there on women and sports; one that I would recommend is Laura Spielvogel’s Working Out in Japan.
From my own work, I am making a case that Sherry Ortner’s classic dictum “female is to male as nature is to culture” should be reversed in our contemporary globalized environment of commodification and consumption. I am sure I do not need to fully summarize Ortner’s classic work, but I would like to point out that her argument is based on three lines of argument: 1) a woman’s body and its function (especially reproduction) place her closer to nature; 2) a woman’s social roles are of a lower order of culture than a man’s; and 3) a woman’s traditional social roles creates a psychological structure that is seen as closer to nature. Without going into the messy ethnographic data (OK, I am still editing all of that), looking at sports in popular culture today reveals that the reverse seems to hold today. First, the emphasis on athleticism as a measure of masculinity (size, speed, agility, dexterity) makes men’s bodies and its functions more important, and closer to nature (think of the media coverage on sports injury reports). Second, this emphasis on sports and athleticism stresses the more natural aspect of masculinity, instead of the more cultural aspects of femininity; the growing gender imbalance in American higher education, as well as the wider culture of anti-intellectualism, is an outgrowth of this. Think of the more widely held meaning of academic, as in “it’s only academic” (a useless, after-the-fact exercise). Third, this makes men rely on psychological perspectives that are seen as more natural, instinctive, aggressive. I would like to take this argument further into a theoretical exploration of the cultural underpinnings of globalization. I believe that a Hayekian free market ideology rewards such gender roles, and helps to explain why men are increasingly judged by their bodies. I obviously have a lot to work to do to make such an argument, but that’s at least where my thinking is headed. As an aside, this same argument can be made through an analysis of Harry Potter, focusing on the three main protagonists: Harry, Ron, and Hermione!

Are our best students dropping out?

Alton Thompson has an interesting blog post about dropout rates in Ph.D. programs. It seems that while most faculty (and, I would add, many students) assume that people drop out because they aren’t up to snuff, it may in fact be that the best students are finding that it is graduate school which isn’t up to snuff. Especially women. Thompson quotes a report by Barbara Lovitts and Cary Nelson:

Everything about the way students depart reinforces this conviction. Most leave silently; they simply disappear, without communicating any reservations about the program to faculty or administrators. Exit interviews or follow-up contacts with departing students are rare. Moreover, students are effectively discouraged from voicing complaints while they are still actively enrolled. The ‘successful’ student is ‘happy’ and compliant; such a student is more likely to receive financial support, good teaching assignments, and strong letters of recommendation. A student who criticizes the program is a problem. Of course this reasoning is circular and self-fulfilling, since complaining students may well be turned into problem students by neglect or discrimination. Meanwhile, the accumulated silence of previous ‘dropouts’ reinforces the view faculty prefer to hold: the problem is with the student, not the program.

Many faculty thus conclude that the way to improve student success is to admit better students. Yet our evidence and that from other studies suggest that students who persist and students who leave are equally well qualified. The Lovitts survey found no meaningful difference between the undergraduate grade point averages of the students who did complete the Ph.D. and those who did not. The only notable difference in grade point averages surfaces when the students are separated by gender: female-completer, 3.57; noncompleter, 3.62; male-completer, 3.52; noncompleter, 3.49. In other words, women who abandoned graduate study had a somewhat higher undergraduate grade point average than those who stayed. What’s more, women leave in higher numbers, thus suggesting once again that attrition is due to something other than ability.

This is certainly true of what I observed among my cohort at Temple, where a large number of very talented women never finished. Its true that if the 50% of people who seem to drop out of Ph.D. programs all decided to stay, the already glutted job market would be twice as bad as it is, but if there is something about graduate student culture which is driving women out at a higher rate then men it needs to be investigated. Thompson also links to this piece in Inside Higher Education about the Council of Graduate Schools’ Ph.D. Completion Project, which emphases the importance of funding for allowing students to complete their degrees. Unfortunately, this data isn’t yet broken down by gender, so we can’t see if financial support is disproportionately affecting female students.

(via Michael Turton)

What F(l)ags Engender

bush.jpgWould it be unfair to say that this image basically sums up the content of mainstream U.S. politics and culture since “9/11”? Where does this picture fit amidst arguments about the clash of civilizations, the politics of oil, the legality of torture, secularism, multiculturalism, or the exercise of sovereign power? Does the image of George W. Bush as a roided-out Uncle Sam basically iconize the post-millenial U.S. zeitgeist?

I have felt since 9/11 that the U.S. is best understood through the psychology manifested in this image, a psychology dominated by the fragile and wounded ego of a national subject understood as ‘white’ and ‘male.’ I see U.S. politics as dominated by the mentality of the grade school playground, where argument takes the form of “I know you are but what am I?” and the insecure bully goes around whopping on whimps because he is afraid that no one loves him. I see U.S. culture in the last several years as fundamentally authoritarian. It doesn’t take a professor of anthropology to argue that “9/11” has catalyzed a backlash against all that ails the modern white male ego. U.S. culture appears fundamentally motivated by a need to build up and defend the poor, damaged male self after decades of onslaught by the feminists and the gays, the intellectuals, the Europeans, the immigrants, whatever. Though the wound that motivated much of the defensive political posturing and putsches of the last several years resulted from the spectacular humiliation of “9/11,” the abject failure of the Iraq war as a demonstration of U.S. prowess has only deepened the cut. The prospects are frightening.

Countless moments in recent memory have contributed to my gut feeling that the whole U.S. thing can best be explained as a Tough Guy response to the sucker punch on 9/11, but none to me revealed the basic psychology underlying U.S. political ideology better than when Ann Coulter called U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards a fag. Continue reading →

Is motherhood natural?

Following Kerim’s excellent post regarding the sex/gender system and new efforts to bring an ethic of ‘self determination’ into the legal recognition of sexed and/or gendered bodies, a point about motherhood. As I have already written on this site, I have been teaching a course on kinship this term. The course is going well — I hope — and we are now moving from the classic ‘kinship and social structure’ type of analysis to the ‘cultures of relatedness’ stuff. Two segues: one, new reproductive technologies, which (again) may or may not animate ‘choice’/’self-determination’ in the context of the putatively natural realm of kinship. It’s almost as though laws in New York state and technologies everywhere are catching up to the radical feminist program of the 1970s: to undo compulsory systems of sex/gender domination by making them subject to individual negotiation (read: agency). Second, the history of marriage in Europe and the prohibition on incest. We have been reading Ariès’s contested thesis about the invention of childhood, Goody’s brilliant and contested argument about property and the church in the creation of modern marriage, and Duby’s sensitive ‘ethnographic’ portraits of kinship among the ruling classes of medieval Europe. It’s funny that the historians in this instance end up sounding more anthropological than the anthropologist: Goody reading Europe through the prism of inheritance/property flattens the cultural dynamics involved in church prescriptions regarding marriage (as N Z Davis, among others, has pointed out). So Duby’s histoire du mentalité ends up seeming rather like something that a cultural anthropologist would write. Which of course makes sense, given the intellectual background of these folks.

One thing that has come up over and over again in our course, and that I think I will consider the next time I teach it, is the putative naturalness of the mother-child relation. Many introductory kinship texts begin by pointing out that while fatherhood is frequently non-obvious, motherhood never is. The obviousness of motherhood makes theories of primitive promiscuity in relation to classificatory kinship terminology problematic (extension of the term ‘mother’ to cover over possibly previous promiscuity really doesn’t make sense). And the problem of motherhood and nurture also gets built into mid/late-20th-century accounts of gender assymetry, as in critiques of the public/private or political/domestic divide. My students ask: how can motherhood be culturally constructed? I now realize that when I next use materials from medieval Europe in my kinship course, I will also want to teach Bynum’s “Jesus as Mother.”

There are abundant materials for prying apart the supposed univerality (or ‘obviousness’) of the mother-child relation. Melanesia offers some, and I would just point to Marilyn Strathern’s claim, on re-reading Kelly’s analysis of Etoro: “Put simply, I cannot find any Etoro mothers — analytically speaking, they offer no starting point for analysis.” (See, Gregor and Tuzin.) We have also visited Middleton’s account of ‘how Karembola men become mothers.’

Another potential source is Scheper-Hughes’ powerful stories of the choices that poor women in NE Brazil are forced to make with regard to their children. Scheper-Hughes talks about her work in a video interview available here.

Examples can of course be multiplied. Suggestions?

Sex vs. Gender in New York

That sex and gender are two very different things has long been a truism proclaimed in university classrooms; but it still surprised me to learn that New York’s courts will be allowing people to change the gender on their birth certificates without even having to have a sex change operation.

“Surgery versus nonsurgery can be arbitrary,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner. “Somebody with a beard may have had breast-implant surgery. It’s the permanence of the transition that matters most.”

If approved, the new rule would put New York at the forefront of efforts to redefine gender. A handful of states do not require surgery for such birth certificate changes, but in some of those cases patients are still not allowed to make the change without showing a physiological shift to the opposite gender.

In New York, the proposed change comes after four years of discussion among health officials, an eight-member panel of transgender experts and vital records offices nationwide. It is an outgrowth of the transgender community’s push to recognize that some people may not have money to get a sex-change operation, while others may not feel the need to undergo the procedure and are simply defining themselves as members of the opposite sex. While it may be a radical notion elsewhere, New York City has often tolerated such blurring of the lines of gender identity.

Interestingly however, while surgery is optional, one is required to have undergone a name change!

Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements.

What’s up with that? It creates additional obstacles, as can be seen by this case where a judge refused to allow Sarah to change his name to Evan. And what about people with gender neutral names? (I see that some groups object to the legislation for this reason.) I looked around, but couldn’t find any explanation for having such a requirement.

The new policy seems in line with a general trend towards allowing people to define their own identity in a more flexible way. In 2001 the census changed its policy, allowing people to identify more than one race. However, I suspect that while switching genders may be come acceptable, identifying yourself as more than one gender will not be. Nobody wants to have to build extra bathrooms…

(via BoingBoing)

Women Missing Again!

Last May I thought I had found “75 percent of the missing women in China,” but new research done by Ming-Jen Lin and Ming-Ching Luoh at National Taiwan University seems to have cast serious doubt on Emily Oster’s work. As a result, those women are now missing again.

Here is the abstract of Lin and Luoh’s paper:

Using novel data from the National Hepatitis B Immunization Program in Taiwan, this study attempts to contribute to this issue by investigating three million births in Taiwan and the HBsAg status of the mothers at the time of the pregnancy. We demonstrate that the marginal probability of an HBsAg(+) mother having a male birth is only 0.0025. … Given that 15 percent of all mothers are infected with HBV, the disease can only raise the sex ratio from a baseline of 105 to 105.165. We therefore conclude that the effect of HBV mothers on sex ratio among their offspring is minimal, and hence can account for only a small portion of the case of missing women.

Ming-Jen Lin was a student of Freakonomics author Steven Levitt at Chicago.