Posing
There’s this:
And there’s this:
Notice anything?
The male figure is standing straight, hands in fists.
The female figure is at an angle, head tilted, one foot partly off the floor, one knee bent, palms outward.
Now this – a photo of women scientists who are spending eight days in an experimental capsule at Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems,
the latest in a lengthy series of tests carried out by institute specialists studying the effects on human physiology and emotions during life among the stars.
Well no, not among the stars. Outside earth’s atmosphere, but still 93 million miles from the nearest star. Anyway, the photo:
What on earth? They’re adult scientists, not teenage cheerleaders. Why are they bending their knees and pointing their toes and tilting their heads and simpering?
They did press conferences at which people asked them how they would survive eight days without makeup.
The wacky world of gender.
Perhaps they should ask Sylvia Earle how she and her colleagues dealt with spending up to 20 days stuck in a similar environment on the sea floor for 20 days, presumably without makeup.
There was a series on women’s history on the Beeb, The Ascent of Woman.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0693dsh
It covered women from various ages and places. There were shots of women from these places holding up a picture of a famous woman leader or warrior or intellectual. The women all stood up straight with serious faces. They looked astonishing – and beautiful too – and you realise how seldom you see women posing without looking ingratiating except for phony moody aggression from models.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?safe=active&hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=643&q=the+ascent+of+woman+bbc&oq=the+ascent+of+woman&gs_l=img.1.1.0l3j0i10i24l2j0i24l2j0i10i24j0i24l2.1256.6749.0.9019.21.15.1.5.5.0.133.1139.14j1.15.0….0…1ac.1.64.img..1.20.1115.SpBQEuOdVu8
I heard about that series (on Saturday Review) – written by Amanda Foreman. It sounds brilliant.
Frankly, the male muscular system should have had an asymmetric, dynamic pose more like the female muscular system. Isn’t it more informative to show contraction and extension?
I’m surprised there’s enough difference to justify separate posters, but I suppose there are situations where nuances matter.
What a boring bit of lens flare.
Well, I didn’t notice the fist and the bent knee. But I did notice the male muscular chart was labeled “The Muscular System” and the female one was labeled “The Female Muscular System”.
@Woozy – was just checking to see if anyone else spotted this. Funny, once one becomes aware of this pernicious it starts showing up everywhere.
I was just listening to an NPR program about cognitive psychology in humans compared to Baboons (or might’ve been chimps). It was talking about abstract thinking related to colors (or some such… I tuned in mid-program), and the guest decided to illustrate the concept with an example. “Imagine you’re a chimpanzee, swinging through the forest. You swing on a vine up next to a female chimp with a bright red behind and immediately you want to mate with her…” The show went on to compare the experience to seeing a bright red apple, but I’d already lost the train of thought with, “Wait – when the @!$ did you say to imagine I was a male chimpan…. oh, of course. Default setting.”
@ 5 tiggerthewing
(pedant)
Technically, that’s not a lens flare. It’s a specular reflection.
(/pedant)
(I just can’t help myself. ;-) )
@Kevin Kirkpatrick–that was Radiolab, on a show they did years ago, and I wrote to them about it. Radiolab is usually a wonderfully immersive show; I used to enjoy just lying in bed with my eyes closed and headphones on listening to it, but like you that particular sentence just threw me completely out of the story. I got the usual wishywashy response; I don’t think they actually understood what I was trying to explain to them.
@OB – it was good, with plenty of colour & variance & periods of history & cultures & women I’d never heard of. Overwhelming message – women’s rights fluctuate, always, going up, in, say, Sumeria and down in Periclean Athens.
“Why are they bending their knees and pointing their toes and tilting their heads and simpering?”
Perhaps a more interesting question than “Why are they bending….?” is “Do they realise they are bending….?”
I’ve noticed lately the tendency for my female students (who are women, not girls – this is college) to walk with one toe pointed in, with an almost “baby-walk” sort of movement. It makes them look much younger than they really are – and 18-20 year old women aren’t so old that looking younger than you are is an obsession, so I presume it’s some sort of hyper-feminine thing. I don’t know if they realize they’re doing it; I first noticed it on a young woman on stage playing a much younger girl (a prepubescent girl), and assumed it was deliberate to express the youth of the character played by someone several years older. Then I started noticing it in my students, not onstage, not playing younger women, but often posing (and wearing lots of pink). Is this a new thing? Does anyone know?
woozy @ 6 – and I didn’t spot it. I’m always griping about examples of that, but I missed this one.
Kevin K @ 7 – yes exactly. Things like that drive me nuts…no doubt partly because they fly under most people’s radar. (I know this because of all the rolled eyes I’ve seen when I point it out.) That “you [assumed male]” is just so stinking rude…
omfsm, iknklst. I’m on a college campus and I haven’t noticed this– yet. I hope it doesn’t spread here.
On the walking with one (sometimes both) toes pointing in. I have a podiatrist friend in the office next door. He provides custom orthotics to alleviate the consequential symptoms arising from that. While some women/girls might train themselves to walk that way it’s his opinion that it is the result of structural misalignment, not social conditioning. It’s common in children, most of whome grow out of it without treatment). He says more common in (adult) women than men, and in fact very common once you notice it and look closely at people. The reverse (toes pointing excessively outward) is even more common in adults, usually combined with pronation.
In short, we are evolved to walk upright, but not actually very well. Our bodies are poorly cobbled together in many ways. Proof there is no grand designer (or he/she/it is shit if there is).
I’m going to be a bit contrary about the chimp example. that is quite specific to a species where the female has bright red buttocks when sexually receptive and they are far more likely to be mated by a male than not. So, reality trumps. That said, was it the best example to give related to colour and abstract thinking? Almost certainly not. I suspect the interviewee gave it because it is and example of colour signalling/thinking that nearly everyone has heard of.
Rob, you TOTALLY MISSED THE POINT.
“Imagine you’re a chimpanzee” asks the reader to imagine *themselves* as a chimp. NOT specifically a male chimp. So women readers imagined themselves as a FEMALE chimp up until they were suddenly told they want to mate with the female. It’s jarring. We look back and see that, no, we didn’t miss that we were supposed to be male. It’s that the writer, like you, ASSUMED every reader would automatically imagine themselves as a male chimp, because he was male and male was his default. Whereas for women, female is the default when given “Imagine you are…”. We ended up getting slapped in the face with the fact that the writer either assumed only men would read his article, or that women would expect male to be the default.
Rob @ 15 – I’m glad to hear it’s common. I noticed comparatively recently (somewhere in the past few years) that I walk with the left foot pointing in just a tiny bit. I experimented with consciously correcting it but it was decidedly uncomfortable – it pulled on the inside of the knee.
SV @ 17, Yes you are quite right I did. I guess I subconsciously glossed the first sentence and paid attention to the second. Mostly, that’s because when writers use the ‘imagine you’re…’ device I ignore that part completely and look for the argument that follows. I ignore the first part because how the fuck could I imagine myself to be a chimp (or whatever). I’m not a chimp and never have been. The most I can do is imagine what a chimp might experience life as. A waste of time frankly.
Well at least it wasn’t “imagine you’re a woodlouse / a rock on Mars / a Cheerio in a box of Cheerios in a warehouse.”
The way I feel half the time being a rock on Mars would be a relief frankly. Funny thing, but I don’t know what a Cheerio is, so I’d really struggle with that one!
The ‘imagine you’re’ structure, both explicitly and implicitly, is pretty common, and often very alienating–aside from my email to Radiolab I’ve occasionally pointed that out to writers/poets/spoken word performers when they’ve explicitly or implicitly used the inclusive ‘you’ in a way that excludes me as a woman, or used examples of an ‘ordinary person’s’ experiences that are for men only, or only ‘ordinary’ for men. Some dude just did it the other day in a training I (and a few other women in a male-dominated space) attended–‘you know, we want to attract people to our display, so we figured we’d have videos, and stuff to give away, and a pretty girl’.
@Samantha Vimes–I’ve always wanted to do an experiment based on this–ask men and women to imagine they’re something, as part of a larger exercise, then interrupt the exercise to ask what gender they (as the imagined thing) are. My hypothesis, based on a few tries, is that most men would say ‘male, of course’, and most women would say ‘hm, I hadn’t actually thought about it.’
One thing I want to point out to people who may be reading about this and thinking ‘what’s the big deal?’ is that sure, it’s not that big a deal. Here are a few excerpts from something I wrote a while back:
An example in a math class: Who can tell how much the cumulative effects of such trivial turns of phrase have contributed to keeping me and other women from being as enthusiastic about or successful at math as we otherwise might have been?
An example in an engineering safety training: Is it likely that someone who categorises humans into ‘humans’ and ‘women’ will think of female people as people when interacting with us, in the most trivial to the most serious situations?
The Radiolab example: This particular incident obviously didn’t have any serious consequences, but what if my focus and attention had been necessary for my success in some endeavour that mattered to me?
None of these examples is particularly earthshaking or emotionally damaging; none could be considered discriminatory, and there was certainly no conscious intent on the part of the men in question to harm me personally or women in general. Yet these kinds of daily interactions have the effect of keeping us off balance, out of synch, off our game, and can cumulatively make the difference between success and failure, achievement and discouragement.
Anatomical diagrams that try to be ‘interesting’ tend to end up being mostly terribly sexist; in part I blame attempts to emphasize any average differences between the sexes to an extreme that’s easy to spot, instead of emphasizing the degree of overlap between the sexes, but that’s no excuse for posing the bodies differently.
Maybe there’s hope, because although still not perfect, this pair also exists:
http://www.universalmedicalinc.com/male-muscular-system-chart.html
http://www.universalmedicalinc.com/female-muscular-system-chart.html
…although of course those are still titled “The Muscular System” and “The Female Muscular System” :/
@KB Player–thanks for linking to that series; I just watched the first one and it’s great.
Rob – I am aware that it can be the result of structural misalignment. I believe what I am seeing is at least somewhat (though possibly unconsciously) deliberate, because for many of these women, it only seems to occur when there are men present. When it is just the women present, they walk normally, without pointing in the toes. I don’t think a person can turn structural misalignment on and off like that.
I don’t think the women are doing it consciously; I think it’s possibly the result of social conditioning, and the idea that we (women) are not fully mature compared to men. I don’t know that. It may be a very deliberate attempt at putting on a little girl mode when men are present. I haven’t asked.
iknklast – Hey, you’re the one who can see the behaviour not me. You may well be right. All I know is that achieving a change in your gait is really really hard when you are consciously trying to. Slipping into a different and quite awkward gait unconsciously in response to a social trigger seems unlikely based on my experience. Then again I’ve not been exposed to the particular sub-culture you are observing. It’s a big world full of possibilities.
@ guest. You’re welcome!