The Link Between Slut-Shaming, Bullying, & Femininity

Good clear post that I have reblogged from Gender & Society on the symbolic violence of femininity and its links to bullying. Ties in nicely with a forthcoming podcast I intend to do on links between masculinity, heteronormativity, sexual oppression and symbolic violence.

Gender & Society

by Sarah Miller

Recent reports in both Slate and Time, focus on research (here) that illuminates how young women use slut-shaming to make multi-directional class distinctions. Authors Elizabeth Armstrong, Laura Hamilton and colleagues find that among white college women, those with low status judge high status peers for being “rich, bitchy sluts,” while high status women claim to be “classy” by designating low status peers “trashy.” Ultimately, while slut slander may appear to be equal opportunity, the outcomes are not: slut-shaming has less of a lasting impact on women with more resources. The research adds insight into why the slut remains a persistent threat in young women’s lives- they have something to gain from using this term against one another. However, slut-shaming does not begin in college (nor with girls themselves), and its’ ramifications can be serious, as the rape victim-blaming that generated Slutwalk, and numerous…

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A Ridiculous Juxtaposition: The Contradictions of Sustainability and the ‘Good Life’ of the Wealthy

 

Ah the contradictions of modern living abound! Here’s one such example from Dublin’s D6 Living publication. This is really just a junk-mail circular targeted towards the lifestyles of the rich in wealthy areas such as Rathgar and Ranelagh. It has next to zero reporting on local community activities and politics or when it does it focuses on elite interests such as preserving Georgian Rathgar. It mostly discusses travel, health, interior design and contains interviews with celebrities in the area of upmarket-living such as celebrity chefs. It is interesting when such views of the ‘good life’,  which often carry higher environmental consequences than that of the average Joe, are juxtaposed against what should be a contrary narrative of sustainability. Take a look at the two-page spread above from its most recent edition. The article featured discusses water conservation while around it are pictures touting the ‘good life’ of bathing and showering. There is an advertisement on wet rooms telling you to enjoy every drop. The top right hand corner features a hot-tub which requires far more water than your average tub. And then there are what appears to be ridiculously joyous poses celebrating showering as some form of leisure (as opposed to functional) activity.

From Über-emitters to Street sleepers: Individualising responsibility for climate change

In 2010 as part of my thesis I recorded many discussions on climate change. The discussions involved 64 participants who took part in 11 focus groups; 19 of them also sat for interviews. The total transcribed recordings came to approximately 380,000 words, which is an enormous amount, especially considering Galway University guidelines recommend a maximum of 80,000 words for a PhD thesis. What struck me about those conversations is that during the vast amount of time talking about climate change the role of inequality barely featured. This was despite recruiting very diverse groups (e.g. climate change activists, organic growers, former Steiner students, business persons, farmers). In four groups class emissions appeared indirectly such as in a derogatory comment about a guy driving a big car. These comments were never spontaneous but instead they arrived after I introduced leading cues. Some climate change activists I interviewed produced a broadened global class framing of climate change inequalities using a North-South subtext: the narrative of the developed North having a historically advantageous and exploitative relationship to the global South. For example pseudonymous Sarah recalled meeting campaigners from the developing world who drew her attention to how she benefits “every day from the privilege of [her] carbon intensive society” through “nice clothes” and “warm houses”. Still no references appeared in that focus group, or the accompanying life histories, of the social imbalance in domestic emissions. Broadening class emissions to global dimensions is a narrative that is in danger of mystifying, through this broader frame, the specifics of higher emitters from a country’s upper and middle classes.

For me the relegation of the role of these class emissions to the unsaid points to its diminished salience among my participants. Apologies for not producing a nice sciency content analysis of the media however I have been a voracious reader of English language climate change news over the years and rarely do I find the unequal responsibility for domestic greenhouse gas emissions being addressed. This is not to simplistically equate A with B – media reporting with the words of my respondents – as doubtless other structural factors are also at play such as the depolitization of civil society, the rise of economism, the weakening of unions, the tread softly “appeasement” approach of prominent environmentalist groups http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=full# etc. However evidence from the UK suggests a clear and important class imbalance exists which is worthy of a place in public climate change debate.

An analysis of a 2005 to 2006 survey based on 6,164 UK households examined the total embodied emissions pertaining to household consumption. The direct emissions (from heating fuel or driving a car etc.) – which are normally all that are used in calculating per capita emissions – were included with indirect emissions through the consumption of food, consumer goods and services. Firstly, the authors found that indirect emissions amounted to four fifths of the household emissions, highlighting the enormous importance of including such emissions in studies. Secondly, it was established that with each increase of £5000 in annual equivalised income,^[1] direct greenhouse gas emissions rose by 6.0% and indirect emissions by 6.9%. The study also highlighted the impact of higher carbon prices on the lowest income sectors as the lowest 10% emitted four times the emission rate per income as the highest 10%. This stresses the heightened nature of expenditure inequality over income inequality, an important factor for policy-makers and campaigners to consider. Another examination of the same survey found that the richest 10% had emissions from car usage that were four times that of the bottom 10%. Most of the difference of two and a half times the climate emissions they found across the income range could be attributed to the flying and driving practices of the wealthy.

While the original data source may be old it still highlights the relevance of inequality to the effectiveness of any carbon lowering policy. The role of inequality is hardly going to be confined to some temporal glitch back in 2005 and 2006 nor is it likely to be solely a UK phenomenon, after all Foster (2013) points to how the carbon footprint of the US economy’s top quintile has been estimated as being over triple that of the bottom. This really shouldn’t be too surprising when one thinks of jet-setting elites,[2] all year round outdoor heated swimming pools, or the profligate personal machinery of the very rich such as superyachts that can consume 750, 850 or even as much as 3400 litres of fuel per hour. All this contrasts starkly with figures that estimate one sixth of world’s population producing no significant emissions and street sleepers in India who provide net savings on greenhouse gases through their part in recycling waste.

A growing abundance of campaigns and policies around the world appeal to the public to change their energy-related behaviours as though they are equal individuals and households. Effectively this classes the carbon footprint of a country’s über-emitters – potentially an upper echelon containing holders of private jets; superyachts and colossal mansions – as effectively the same as persons living in the small semi-detached houses of suburbia. Through a focus on social inequalities, analyses of greenhouse gas emissions can drastically deviate from the individualising and obfuscating per capita averages. Policies, news articles, academic studies that fail to address the role of emission inequalities in a society contribute to an individualisation of the decarbonisation debate by concealing a hugely significant part of the public and climate change relationship.

 

[1] Equivalised income is a measure of household income, which is weighted to account for differences in household size and age composition.

[2] Cutting back on flying has been described as an effective way to lower personal carbon emissions and yet in the UK the overwhelming majority of flights have been taken by people in the higher economic bracket.

 

Bibliography

 

Foster J B (2013) James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy. Monthly Review, 9.

Bourdieu on the Economy of Happiness and the Role of Class Interest in Environmental Politics: extract 3 from ‘Sociology is a Martial Art’

A new economy of happiness. It’s an idea that … today it might seem a bit original and even utopian, whereas it’s really quite banal. All it means is that the economy as it now is, according to the dominant definition, takes into account costs and profits, etc. but it erases social costs and social profits, everything that’s not quantifiable, everything that’s not calculable, everything that can’t be anticipated by computation, etc. As a result, we severely underestimate costs and we overestimate the cost-profit ratio. For example, if we really took into account – this is just an example – the cost of urban violence. When European governments or other governments ask sociologists to study violence in schools, in the banlieues, there’s always money for this. What do they want? Recipes to make violence go away. Do we need more policemen, more social workers, more teachers? Does school play a role in the violence? But how do we protect the schools? Those are the questions that are raised. In fact, they systematically exclude the question of whether the causes of violence do not reside outside that universe, in things that are totally obvious, such as the unemployment rate, job insecurity, temporal insecurity, the fact that the future is uncertain, elimination from school, the fact that some children, because of their background,both social and ethnic, the two being often linked, are fated to be eliminated by the school system. The causes of violence reside in the whole structure. What is not perceived is that savings made on one side: as when they say, “let’s cut costs”, “let’s downsize”,”let’s lay-off 2,000 people to cut production costs and be competitive on the world market” the savings made on one end are paid for at the other end. The 2,000 people who are dismissed, especially if they’re young, will take tranquillisers, become alcoholics, take drugs, become dealers and then killers, and keep the police hard at work. If we balance the social costs induced by a purely economic approach to cost-saving, it’s easy to see what bad economics this is. That’s all. What we have is very bad economics, based on the dissociation of the economic and the social. But what’s social is economic. There’s nothing which lies outside of this enlarged economy: sadness, joy, happiness, taking pleasure in life, the pleasure of walking the streets without being attacked, the quality of the air we breathe. All of that pertains to economics.

Another Head Start for the Privileged

The capacity for using language articulately is, according to a study by Hart and Risley (2003), strongly influenced by sufficient conversational immersion  during the first three years of life. After that period it appears to be more difficult to develop that fluency if the conversational groundwork has not been laid out in the preceding years. With humans being inherently dispositional, and coupled with the fact that children absorb so much at that period of their lives, there would seem to be some truth to this.* What interested me the most in the Irish Times article (click link above) was the reference to the following finding:

US researchers have estimated that, by the age of three, children in disadvantaged families may have heard up to 30 million fewer words than their more privileged counterparts.

The US researchers referred to are

Class, Breastfeeding and Parenting Practices: Social Drivers of Childhood Development

Here is another study which supports the position that we are not just automatons of nucleic acid, proteins and chemicals but instead are part of a complex social system, which ultimately has a large effect on our behaviours, capacities and perceptions. Being breastfed has been linked to higher IQ and better school performance; however, scientists have as yet been unable to discover any biologically deterministic reasons as to why. But now through analysing a data set that followed 7,500 mothers and their children from birth to five years of age sociologists at Brigham Young University uncovered social patterns (as good sociologists are wont to do) surrounding mothers who breastfed and those who didn’t. The practice of breastfeeding tended to be accompanied by a series of parental behaviours: breastfeeding mothers were more responsive to their children’s emotional cues. They were also more likely to read to their children at an earlier age. Reading to an infant everyday from an age as early as 9 months, along with the sensitivity to a child’s social interactions are “significant predictors of reading readiness at age 4 years”.

Whether these parental practices were being applied or not turned out to be influenced by class, that great social divider. Being a single mother

Checkout Girl and the Media’s ‘Middle-class Society’

Moffat (2010) writing in Ireland of the Illusions points to an emergent “cultural shift”, accompanying the Celtic Tiger wherein Ireland is increasingly explained as a “middle-class society”. He finds the media is complicit in this privileging of the middle-class experience wherein “what might be seen as exclusively middle-class events or experiences are projected as ‘the normal’ experience of all Irish people” conveniently sidestepping “the issue of structural social exclusion”.  He cites their obsession with university enrolment issues despite the fact that chiefly it is the middle classes who attend university whereas a majority of the overall population do not attend. Therefore “middle-class expectations are being projected onto all people” (Moffat, 2010: 242). Thus they engage in legitimating their own social space while alternative experiences and social spaces are marginalised. In the media there exists no representatives for the builders; cleaners; residents of deprived inner city estates etc.

This is perhaps why I found the Guardian’s What I’m really thinking: the checkout girl article

The Classless View of Cancer in Ireland

A report has been released by the Irish Cancer Registry which predicts a doubling of cancer incidences by 2040. I find it interesting how quickly class invisibility re-emerges in regards to cancer in Ireland. If you remember in September last year the headline to emerge from the annual Irish Cancer Society Charles Cully Lecture in Dublin was that poorer people are up to 70% more likely to get some cancers. This produced a brief ripple with some minor coverage in a few newspapers and featured as a topic in radio one’s Drivetime. As far as I can tell the class aspect of cancer appears to have become lost again from the articles that I have read (a)(b)(c). Additionally, RTE Radio 1 show News at One failed to mention class when discussing the report with Dr Harry Comber from the Irish Cancer Registry.

Of course the media seem merely to be repeating the core predictions of a report in which class does not feature. This behaviour is typical of the journalistic practice of episodic framing: i.e.  “case study or event-oriented” depictions of “public issues in terms of