viz. - popular culture

“Kids These Days”: The Not-at-all New Phenomenon of Fashionable Childhood Sexualization

Aubri Plourde — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 17:00:06 +0000

Last year, when Miley Cyrus gave us this delight:

Image Credit: Mirror

the interwebs exploded with home critics—often sloppy analyses of Cyrus’s performance, rife with moral judgment and fear for the future. The outrage regards not whether the singer is talented, or whether her show was successful, but over her behavior, and, especially, her clothing.

Of course, a large part of this reaction to the VMA show was due to the “weirdness” of Cyrus’s dances-with-bears schtick. Still, we’d be naive to overlook the role of her clothes in this kind of backseat judgment. Many of the blog posts, op-eds, and social media comments linked the VMA performance with Cyrus’s then-new video, “Wrecking Ball,” pointing out the “provocative” dress as a sign of the girl’s unstable nature or corrupted innocence. “Where is Hannah Montana?” these articles bemoaned. The issue seems to be not only the amount of skin shown, but that Cyrus is a girl dressed too maturely.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

I don’t want to reduce all the pushback here to Cyrus’s age. Of course, this little blowup raises interesting questions about the public performance of one’s sexuality, about an artist’s attempt to transition from child to adult, about the public’s need to police her body. All of those concerns, I take as the given subtext of this kind of event. I’d like to focus, specifically, on the way that this issue has been framed as a kind of violation of maturity, wherein the clothes represent a certain age category, one many audiences see as inconsistent with the performer’s actual—or “appropriate”—level of maturity.

Actually, this kind of link between clothing and age is a strange inverse of what M. Gigi Durham calls the “Lolita Effect,” “a construction of sexuality that both exploits and limits sexual expression and agency, and is deliberately focused on young girls.” Here, sex is associated with youth, and young bodies are then co-opted both to support the demands of sexual management and to mobilize standards for older women as well. We see this effect both in the way the Toddlers in Tiaras are dressed as much older, hyper sexualized women and in the way older women are then infantilized. For example:

Image Credit: Oh No They Didn't

Image Credit: Stop Toddlers and Tiaras

Here, we’re outraged because these toddlers are dressed up as women. We cannot tolerate the concept of child sexuality—despite the fact that every solid study on childhood development acknowledges it. On the other hand, these:

Image Credit: Steven Meisel

Madonna did this photoshoot for Vanity Fair in 1992. The public seems to have a love-hate relationship with these images. They serve up female bodies; fashion facilitates the role of the viewer as couch critic, so that we can all bemoan the downhill spiral of the way “Society” is going these days. I think it’s important to include Madonna in this discussion not only because these images offer a counterpart to Toddlers & Tiaras, but also because they remind us that this phenomenon is not in any way new. Durham, for example, charts a whole series of sexualized girls (JonBenet Ramsey, Brooke Shields, The Little Mermaid...). Here, more than two decades ago, we have Madonna performing hyper sexualized girlhood through a fashion shoot. The adult female is sexy because she’s childish. So all of these panicked responses to Miley, the fear-mongering that suggests we have somehow crossed a threshold in the female sex/fashion industry, might do well to remember, as Don Draper tells us in another blithely misogynist episode (s01e04) of Mad Men: “Maybe every generation thinks the next one is the end of it all. Bet there are people in the Bible walking around, complaining about kids today."

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Visual Rhetoric

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And Now, A Reading from The Book of Bro

wiedner — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 00:56:26 +0000

Image Source: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bro

Brainstorming with my fellow viz. writers on matters related to book covers and the rhetoric thereof, I mentioned my interest in the Chick Lit phenomenon. After politely listening to the sound of a dead horse being dug up from its grave and beat relentlessly, there was a collective eye roll and sigh. For more reasons than I have time to list at the moment, I realized very quickly that the nonplussed reception was more than justified. We kept bouncing around ideas, and touched upon the question of whether there was a male equivalent of Chick Lit. Or, to use the term that our editor Rhiannon invented, is there such a thing as “Bro Books?”

It was an awesome idea, and what follows is my attempt to run with it.

So, let's talk Bro Books.

Before we can define what, exactly, constitutes a “bro book,” we need to define what, exactly, constitutes a “bro.” Derived from the word “brother,” people have been employing the term “bro” as far back as the 1600s; it was in the early 1900s that the term gained specificity and began being used to address someone (generally male) whom one was close with and fond of. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bro. More recently, however, the referent of the term “bro” has increased in specificity, losing some of its positive connotations. So we need to parse this out a bit more if we want to arrive at a solid working definition.

But where to begin?

“Bro-ness” is one of those you-know-it-when-you-see-it kind of things. In his excellent posting on the blog “codeswitch,” entitled “Jeah! We Mapped Out The 4 Basic Aspects Of Being A 'Bro,”’ author Gene Demby provides a great example of bros via gif:

"Y’all know who we mean. These cats right here:”

Image Source: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/185wsu7f62b33gif/k-bigpic.gif

But Demby’s “Y’all know who we mean” is about as productive as the “you know it when you see it” that I spit out above as far as articulating a definition of a bro is concerned. Thankfully, Demby digs deeper for us, using a Venn Diagram to illustrate his definition of the quintessential bro as being equal parts (1) Jockish, (2) Stoner-ish, (3) Preppy, and (4) (my favorite) “Dude-ly.” http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch. Demby also provides some examples of bro behavior to fill out the picture, such as fist-bumping, posting pics with other bros doing “bro-ass things,” and “juggl[ing] a sporting life and [a] salubrious appetite for alcohol.” (Id.)

While this is all helpful, I feel as though Dembly misses the two most critical criteria of being a bro. For one thing, he doesn’t seem to account for the most “bro-ass” activity of them all: seeking out members of the opposite sex for romantic dalliances (read: bar hopping in search of drunken casual sex). He seems to forget that, even among bros that are “super tight,” there’s no bromance strong enough to completely supersede a bro’s fundamental desire to hit the bars and “chase some tail.” Put simply, while it is irrefutablely true that bros like watching a football game together, there’s a reason that they’re frequently doing so at Hooter’s that deserves consideration.

I would also humbly suggest that Demby also gives short shrift to what I see as the second definitive characteristic of bro-ness. Specifically, a bro is always conscious of whether they’re “looking the part,” regardless of whether they acknowledge that “the part” is that of a bro (I would describe this to my undergraduates as the bro’s ethos). The aim is to present one’s self as the guy who’s “cool” enough to afford his $65 pair of J. Crew cargo shorts, but “chill” enough not to notice that they don’t match the throwback Chicago Cubs jersey that he’s rocking on top. (After all, what could possibly be more un-bro than worrying about stuff like whether your hat looks cooler forwards or backwards or slightly askew when there’s a cooler full of brew-dogs that need a poundin’! Am I right, Bro?! Fist-bumps!!)

We can further refine out definition by looking at what a bro is not. As I am defining a bro for present purposes, age is of little relevance. While the definition we’ve been refining has probably painted a picture of a young individual, you can be a bro at any age whatsoever. Replace the J. Crew cargos and Cubs jersey mentioned above with Dockers and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, and you’ve got the same bro, except with several more decades of bro-ing it out under his belt. It would appear Demby agrees with me on the (in)significance of age in defining “bro,” given that age is not at all invoked in his comprehensive “4 Pillars” theory and accompanying diagram (see above). Demby and I also seem to agree that the propriety of using race as a defining characteristic of a bro is troubled, at best. Demby set out to determine whether the term “bro” had a racial component to it, his research did not show that any such component existed, at least not one that’s consistently agreed upon. (Id.)

Now that we have put together a working definition of “bro,” can we finally define the term “bro books?”

Well, kinda.

Remaining consistent with the mode of analysis we’ve been employing thusfar, let’s illuminate via illustration what we mean when we talk about “bro books.” Below is the quintessence of a bro book collection.

Image Source: The Private Collection of viz.'s Resident Dude

Because the totality of a collection of bro books is as important as the presence of any particular book, it is important to look at the collection as a whole. For the bro, the physicality of his books (individually and collectively) is the first and foremost consideration. Just as was the case with bro clothing, bro books need to look as though they were simply “thrown together” by the bro in question. A neatly organized shelf of books would be anything but “chill.” Further, having many books of the same genre, author, historical period, etc. might appear as though there’s a particular topic that a bro cares deeply about, which is not at all in keeping with the bro’s MO. So, each book is carefully chosen in and of itself and in its relation to the collection as a whole. Almost invariably, the “audiences” the bro has in mind are (1) fellow bros who have come over for a bro-ass activity, or (2) a woman the bro would like to impress. Let's look at a sample from the above collection of bro books:

1. Anything by Chuck Palahniuk. Preferably “Fight Club,” but any of his others will do. This one’s aimed at the audience of fellow bros more than the female object of his desire.

2. Anything by Hemingway. Preferably more than one title.

3. “The Complete Guitarist.” It says that you have other interests and skills, and playing the most bro-ass instrument of them all is one of those pastimes.

4. A law textbook. In this case, “Torts,” by Richard Wright. An impressive looking law-related book is an absolute must for any collection deserving of the name “bro books.” I mean, just look at it! Heavy. Dense. The no-nonsense cover is supposed to be taken as representative of the nature of its contents, as well as the contents of the bro's character.

5. “100 Love Sonnets,” by Pablo Neruda. He may seem like just another beer-chugging jock, but he appreciates perusing poetry as much as he does “whaling on his pecs at the gym.” This suggests that that the lucky lady surveying this collection might even have some poetry read to her! (Fingers crossed!)

6. Collections of articles from “The Onion.” Guaranteed to get serious bro-grabs (excessively masculine versions of hugs).

Obviously, there’s much more that could be said about this bro book collection, but you get the idea.

In the end, then, the answer to this posting's original question would be in the affirmative, but in very different ways than are generally considered when seeking to identify categories of readers and/or reading. There are most certainly individual books as well as personal collections of books that could properly be called “bro books.” However, since one of their unifying characteristics is the attempt to have no unifying characteristics, it is hard to define bro books as a genre, per se. It would appear as though a book’s physical appearance, along with the cultural cache of title or author are the aspects of what gives a book its bro-ness. In creating and/or identifying a bro book collection, the actual words on any of the pages between those covers is an ancillary concern at best.

All of this should be taken with a grain of salt, of course. I am by no means the bro-thority on the nuances of bro-dome.

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If the Hipsters Don’t Die, the Dive Bar WIll

wiedner — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 22:52:37 +0000

Image credit: thefrisky.com

I would wager that any statement I might make maligning the seemingly-growing group of people known as Hipsters would be met with nearly unanimous approbation. Which works out well for my present purposes, as I’d like to state from the outset that I cannot stand Hipsters. I’ve spent lots of time trying to figure out what it is about this group of people that could evoke such an impassioned response in an otherwise even-keeled individual.

And while a commentary on a group of people of any sort would come with a caveat that you are speaking generally, and that there are, of course, many exceptions to these stereotypes, I don’t think such a caveat is necessary- or even appropriate- when talking about the Hipster. If there were a club restricted to individuals who always wore blue shirts, you wouldn’t be making an unfair overgeneralization by saying that everyone in that club wears blue shirts, right? In other words, the Hipster defines his/herself by embracing the external trappings of a Hipster. Hipsters have no soul or inherent being, they are simply the sum total of the Hipster activities and artifacts that they embrace and appropriate.

Normally, this Hipster nonsense is no big deal to me. I mean, I get a little bummed out when I see some dude wearing a wool hat when it’s in the 90s because he thinks it completes the Hipster ensemble. And I feel more pity than contempt when I see the gut of a guy in his mid-30s wearing an ironic Girl Scout t-shirt and talking about how there haven’t been any good bands since Joy Division. If they care enough about their outward appearance to spend copious time making it look like they couldn’t care less about their outward appearance, that’s fine by me. Every minute that Tristan spends trying to pick out the appropriately ironic cigarette holder is another minute that I don’t have to worry about him treating me like a superficial conformist while he makes my latte (for the moment, we’ll table the irony implicit in a guy who spent 30 minutes assembling his ensemble in order to look like every other Hipster treating someone else as a mindless drone simply because they tucked their shirt in).

But, like I said, I’ve never really been terribly bothered by the guy on the single-gear bike with the huge beard and resale-shop clothes. They’re just searching for something, anything, that will make them feel like they have more to them than what they can see under their skinny jeans and 80s halter. In other words, this culture defined by the appropriation of other cultures has always seemed more lame than harmful.

Until they decided to mess with my bars.

Personally, I’ve never felt particularly comfortable at the “classy” bars that my contemporaries frequent. I prefer cans of beer to $7.00 cocktails with things like orange zest as an ingredient. I’ve never had a romantic relationship that began in a bar end well, so the groups of attractive girls looking for guys to flirt with and pilfer drinks from doesn’t really compel me to frequent such places, either. Never mind the fact that I’d generally rather wear what I happen to have on when I go out, rather than spend time engaged in a one-man wardrobe consult.

I’ve found a pleasant alternative to these places in the form of what would generally be referred to as a dive bar.

Let’s talk about the term “dive bar.” For some, the term conjures up images of heath code nightmares wherein a sideways glance at the wrong person means a shiv to the ribs. And, of course, such places are easy enough to find, and I suppose it be appropriate to place them in the “dive bar” category. But those places are far from typical. A dive bar is simply a pretension-free space where people are free to socialize (most dive bars can also be characterized by a group of hard-drinking regulars), or to sit alone at the bar without anybody bothering them or assuming the worst of them for being in a bar by themselves. The clientele is predominantly male (as it tends to be at drinking establishments of all stripes). Women who do come to such places can expect to be approached and hit on, but they can also generally tell a would-be suitor to go shove their proffered beer where the sun doesn’t shine, and they’ll be left alone from there. These bars generally aren’t destination bars, they’re just around the corner from your place. If your taking a taxi to a place that touts itself as a dive bar, you’re not going to a dive bar.

Are the men’s rooms less-than-savory? Absolutely. Are the laws regulating smoking indoors enforced on a selective basis? Probably. Are there a group of regulars making all kinds of noise and cussing a blue streak over at the pool table, not acknowledging your presence one way or the other? I’d have to answer in the affirmative. Is it possible that the gal behind the bar might not greet you with an ear-to-ear fake smile the first time you come in the joint? You bet.

But are those rowdy dudes going to call you by your name to come share their pitcher after you’ve spent a few evenings at the place. It’s a sure bet. Is that same bartender going to greet you with a sincere smile with your drink in hand before you have a chance to order it once you’ve been there a few times and demonstrated that you’re a normal human being on the same page as everybody else in the place. You better believe it. The true dive bar is no-frills and judgment-free. It is unapologetic in its “diveness.” If you want cleaner bathrooms, there are plenty of places in town that can accommodate you. There is no pretension; what you see is what you get. It is for all of these reasons that I feel so comfortable at most dive bars; it seems as though they’re one of the last remaining traces of authenticity in the culture in which we presently find ourselves.

It is also for all of these reasons that the Hipster invasion of such bars is so…distressing [I’m presently working hard to hold back the string of expletives that this subject makes me want to yell]. Hipsters are everything that a dive bar is not. They lack substance and exude pretension. Here’s the real rub: when a group of Hipsters minces into a dive bar, it’s not to “join the party.” Instead, they see it as a chance to wallow with the unwashed masses. They think it’s “quaint” that people could be so simple in their living that they would spend a Sunday afternoon watching a silly game of football. They sip ironically at their PBR’s and survey the scene from an elevated distance, real cultural anthropologists “getting their hands dirty.”

Next week, they’ll come back with more of their Parliament-smoking friends, seeking their biggest appropriation of all. They want the dive bar to be added to the list of external things of which their existence consists. The dive bar has all of the true, unforced authenticity that they Hipsters try so hard to recreate (and, ironically, destroy in the process).

So, what’s a dive bar to do? If it abides by its general modus operandi and treats the Hipsters just like anybody else, will it just be a matter of time before its soul is eviscerated by those who have no soul of their own? If it throws them out upon their entry, are they not acting in a manner contrary to all of the tenants that have made them an authentic, judgment-free zone? If they remove mainstream music from the jukebox, is that only going to add fuel to the Hipster fire (“I’m telling you Finley, this place was hilarious! It was a bunch of rednecks drinking cheap beer and listening to crappy country music!”)?

I don’t know the answer. All I do know is that it has become increasingly hard to abide by a dive bar code wherein books aren’t judged by their hipper-than-thou covers.

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