Tag Archives: Gender

where the boys are

I don’t know if anyone else has heard this report, previously made and today vociferously defended on NPR and perhaps circulating elsewhere, about single moms producing fewer boys than partnered ones.

It seems a boffo exemplar of contemporary kinship anxiety.

The reported facts are as follows:
(1) Boys have always been born in slightly higher numbers than have girls
(2) Boy-baby pregnancies require a slightly higher energy investment on the part of the mother than do girl-baby pregnancies
(3) Recently, the boy/girl discrepancy has been dropping. There are still more boys born than girls, but not as many more
(4) Single moms contribute to this decline in the discrepancy — they are (supposedly) statistically less likely to have boys than are partnered moms.

The currently-circulating explanation is: somehow, humans are rapidly adapting to family instability; women’s bodies can “tell” if they haven’t got a male partner around to help out, they know it’s a big effort to produce a boy baby, and so they refuse to take any chances about male fetuses (or blastocysts, or implantation, or maybe even ovule friendliness toward Y chromosome sperm — the explanation part gets a bit hand-wavey here). To summarize: the bodies of single women are mysteriously inhospitable to male offspring.

The pop-cultural demographic take-home message, but of course, is: get out your tinfoil hats and await the parthenogenetic lesbian apocalypse.

But before we measure our heads for good fit, we might note that there is a gigantic black box in this explanation, capaciously enclosing the whole “how” part of the problem.

If all we need is an explanation that fits the available facts, with mystery clauses thrown in as necessary, I’ve got one, too — but I bet it won’t make the news.

It’s hard to see how energetics would operate any kind of constraining force, given that malnutrition is far less a problem for we moderns than it was for our ancestors. So let’s set the energetics aside. Although boy babies are energetically more difficult to carry to term than girl babies, they must be easier to successfully gestate in some other important ways — otherwise how to explain the ratio of boys to girls at birth, given the objectively 50/50 odds of conception? Working from this premise, one may as easily conclude (since we are unburdened by the need to offer any “how” account) that there is a positive rather than a negative message being received (mysteriously, of course) by single women’s bodies: “psst, you are in a position such that it is worth trying to bring off the rare girl rather than the more usual boy.”

Does this sound like a crackpot theory to you? Keep in mind it has as much to recommend it as does the reverse proposition, merely flipping the evaluative language.

The decline in boy babies is disturbing because of what it probably indicates about environmental contaminants. As for the single-mom part of the story, well — I can’t tell you why it is wrong, but I’ll happily offer a wager of $50 to the first taker that if will be thoroughly debunked within 5 years and probably much sooner. Unless that counts as internet gambling and could get Savage Minds in trouble, in which case I will satisfy myself with shaking my fist and intoning, Mark My Words. 😉

Commodifying Girls, Harajuku Style

I wanted to avoid writing about Japan in my first post on Savage Minds (because I do that all the time at my own blog), but alas I am a creature of habit. But I hope I will be pardoned: I’m reporting about an anthropologist in a major print publication. And this will be sort of a riff on Kerim’s earlier mention of the clever parody on the African village planned at a German zoo.

Anne Allison, a Professor of Anthropology at Duke University, is mentioned in this week’s the New York Times Magazine in an article titled “Love. Angels. Product. Baby.” The piece is written by Rob Walker, who regularly writes for the magazine about consumerism and the money-centric culture of the capitalist society we live in. His column, “Consumed,” is in the “Way We Live Now” section of the NY Times Magazine).

(By the way, here’s another anthro connection: in this interview, Walker describes his endeavor as a “hybrid business-and-anthropology column.” Hmm…)

Walker writes that popstar Gwen Stefani‘s new album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby, and the entire marketing carnivalesque surrounding it (including an HP digicam branded as “Harajuku Lovers“), can be summed up by this neat phrase: “the commodification of commodification.”

Stefani’s latest album prominently figures “The Harajuku Girls” and is a paean to Harajuku, a section of Tokyo known as a neighborhood where hip youngsters come out dressing up in the strangest mixture of goth, tribal, haut-couture, and seemingly every other trend in the world history of fashion. Along with Shibuya, which has more love hotels and generally feels a bit more “adult,” Harajuku is the testing ground for Japanese marketers trying out their ware: they know that if a product catches on among the young hipsters who loiter there, it will sell well and perhaps conquer the world.

To Stefani, Harajuku Girls are hip. Why does she think this? Walker clues us in:

What is unusual is tha Stefani does not seem drawn to this subculture by ideology, rebelliousness or even a dance style. She seems drawn solely to a group’s apparent skill as shoppers. The song “Harajuku Girls” is a cross between a fashion-magazine trend story and an expositional number from a Broadway musical.

So Stefani, whose earlier persona in her band No Doubt was the punked up bad girl who bansheed around and shouted her head off to ska beats, is now all starry-eyed about shopping for the latest trends. Walker continues:

So what we really have here is not just a pop star endorsing a product but a pop star paying tribute to a consumer tribe. The real star behind the camera is not Stefani, but a specific breed of global hyper-consumer — as translated by Stefani. […] It is the commodification of commodification.

At this point Walker cites Anne Allison as a critical observer of the way Japanese subcultural icons have been swept up by the global mediascape (she examines, for example, PokĂ©mon, in an article in this book), and asks a loaded question: “But […] does that mean that Japan has a real currency now? Or is it just a cool brand?”

Walker’s article is insightful in many ways. But I have a few problem with his interpretation of the Harajuku Girls.

For one, I don’t think Walker addresses the fact that these girls are represented in an exploitatively orientalist manner. When Stefani came out with the Harajuku Girls back in April, the blogosphere was flooded with feminist and Asian-American critiques of how these four dolled up cyber-ghetto-geisha girls have become a harem-like accessory piece of a white girl (much of this criticism launched by a Salon article by MiHi Ahn and reproduced here by Howard French). The poster up top is a photoshopped expression of this critical perspective.

Yet there is another set of stereotypes being evoked here by Stefani, which has to do with Japan as somehow beyond the present, without history, and self-absorbingly capitalist in some techno-utopian state of bliss. This kind of thinking has its roots in Alexandre KojĂšve‘s oft-noted declaration that Japan is a post-historical society (retracted I think later in his life) and Roland Barthes‘s otherwise great masterpiece, The Empire of the Sign. (I won’t go into details here, and I know I’m reaching a bit if I claim that the following also applies to the Harajuku Girls, but this line of thinking also resonates with 1. Japan’s wartime fascist ideology, which cast Japan as already beyond the West and” post-modern”, and 2. the contemporary triumphalism of neoliberal economics as in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of the History.)

A few years back Japanese critic Toshiya Ueno, writing about Japanimation, called the representation of a technologically utopic Japan as “Techno-orientalism.” In the case of the Harajuku Girls, some “consumer-orientalism” may be at work: a representation of a nation and its people as serious shopaholics to the point where girls would be willing to “whore up.”

Walker, whose sole criterion for judging good products seems to be “about figuring how to remake a subcultural style into something salable on a mass scale” (from the NYT Mag article), joins Stefani and her marketing team in celebrating this “commodification of commodification.” He understands that commodification involves not only buying (such as the act of girls accessorizing) but also selling. Yet he seems unfazed about what it is that they’re actually selling.

Walter Benjamin, in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” writes of the prostitute as a figure of pure commodity: “a saleswoman and wares in one” (Reflections, p.157). It is difficult for me to not see these Harajuku girls as a similar figure of the prostitute as commodity, one that mixes racism, sexism, and the technologies of consumption into one bold entertainment package.

Now whenever a blogger debunks exploitative images in mass media, someone has to make a comment that is a variation of the following: “this is only a video/movie/pop song, so don’t take it so seriously.” To this I reply: I am not the one who might take this seriously, but rather the little boys and girls watching Stefani videos and taking in all this stereotyping as reality.

I’m usually not one for identity politics. But the Harakuju Girls is just a bit too over the top for me. So what do y’all think, am I just over-reacting?

Missing Women Found

In two recent posts I referenced the use of life expectancy statistics by economist Amartya Sen to highlight social inequality. So I feel compelled to report on a new paper which is critical of another set of data used by Sen: the gender gap in birth rates.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, have an article in Slate on Emily Oster’s work (PDF) which establishes a link between hepatitis B and birth gender.

This is an important link because it goes a long way towards explaining the 100 million “missing women” Amartya Sen had noticed when examining statistics on childbirth in Asia. In fact, it seems to account for about half of them; although primarily in China, not India. Basically, pregnant women with hepatitis B are much less likely to give birth to boys than the general population. Hepatitis B can account for “roughly 75 percent of the missing women in China,” but “less than 20 percent of the boy-girl gap” in India.

The article is also worth reading for a nice coda regarding Emily Oster’s contribution to the study of child language acquisition.

Between Sex and Power

Tak brings our attention to a Perry Anderson review of a new book on the history of the family: Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900-2000. Here is how Anderson characterizes the central focus of the book:

All traditional family systems, Therborn argues, have comprised three regimes: of patriarchy, marriage and fertility (crudely summarized–who calls the shots in the family, how people hitch up, how many kids result). Between Sex and Power sets out to trace the modern history of each.

Patriarchy is defined as male power within the family, not necessarily broader discrimination against women – although that might be part of it.

What particularly caught my eye (perhaps because of the discussion over my use of life expectancy statistics to discuss inequality) was this line:

Harshest of all was the Hindu system of North India, in a league of its own for repression. As Therborn notes, this is one of the very few parts of the world where men live longer than women, even today.

It is interesting to note that Sen makes much of the high life expectancy (and literacy) of women in Kerala, in southern India. Last winter break I was traveling in India and was struck by the tremendous regional variation in the degree to which women were free to walk the streets. Taking a trip from Delhi to Gujarat we drove through Rajasthan. When we were in Jaipur I was surprised at how few women were out on the street, or driving scooters. (I wrote about the trip here.) It was like taking a trip from New York to Washington DC and suddenly realizing that there are no women walking the streets in Philadelphia.

Calling the Hindu system in North India one of the harshest against women ignores the complexity of regional variation. And yet, the same data – life expectancy – can give us a rough account of some of that regional variation. It isn’t a substitute for detailed local analysis, but it can point the way, telling us where to look. If women generally outlive men, then it is something to notice if women in a particular region have unusually high, or unusually low life expectancies.

Finally, one last thing struck me about the review. From Anderson’s account (glowing as it is) it sounds as if it reproduces many of the myths about the liberated Western woman vs. the oppressed women of the East. It is one thing to talk about women getting more sexual pleasure in Norther Europe in the 1960s, but one should remember that much of the Kama Sutra is about a woman’s pleasure:

It may be said that, if the ways of working in men and women are different, why should not there be a difference, even in the pleasure they feel, and which is the result of those ways.

But this objection is groundless, for, the person acting and the person acted upon being of different kinds, there is a reason for the difference in their ways of working; but there is no reason for any difference in the pleasure they feel, because they both naturally derive pleasure from the act they perform.

One thing that struck me about being in India was how many women hold positions of real power. I’m not just talking about political dynasties, but at all levels of society.

There is also tremendous variation by class, and it isn’t necessarily the poor women who are the most powerless. Far from it. As I wrote elsewhere:

it is arguable that much of the most visible violence against women in India (such as “kitchen fires”) occurs in lower-middle-class homes, in families struggling to live a lifestyle beyond that which their limited means can afford them.

It seems like this is a book that is worth reading, but I am always worried when such far reaching studies adopt a teleological narrative in which the whole world is seen as moving inextricably towards a society that looks very much like that of Sweden. In his classic study of the family Engels drew on the work of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan who proposed exactly such a teleological schema of the family. From the review, it isn’t clear to me that this book is much different.

NOTE: Since I mentioned sexual pleasure, I should also link to this recent article in the New York Times, which says:

that female orgasms are simply artifacts – a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.