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talitha78 for the holiday card!
Via Naked Capitalism:
Adrian Johns, Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age: Johns has an abiding interest in “piracy,” broadly defined. This book, though opening with a violent death in a dispute between pirate radio entrepreneurs in 1966, is really about how intellectual history (featuring Coase and Hayek, who both spent time analyzing British radio in particular) becomes political history. Here, changes in British radio listening practices, aided by cheap transistor radios, changed the social meaning of listening and therefore of broadcasting, opening a path for commercial radio. Johns argues that the “moral philosophy of digital libertarianism,” though often associated primarily with 1960s American counterculture, also derives from the politics and history of British radio. The idea of offshore data havens, after all, comes from offshore radio pirates (and indeed physically overlaps—Seahaven was a pirate radio station before it was part of a grand, failed data haven scheme). Johns chronicles not just lawlessness, though the violence isn’t surprising, but also the deep entanglement with the law that these pirates always had—they created corporate structures and called the police because they wanted and even needed to live in a jurisdiction with a functioning government, even as they wanted to escape those constraints as it suited them. This is Johns’ least theory-intensive book, and it sits not quite comfortably between narrative and theory, but I enjoyed it.
Ashley Mears, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model: Mears did her sociology dissertation as a participant-observer, or observing participant, in the modeling industry in London and New York. She discusses the divide between “commercial” modeling, where conventional beauty rules (and there’s more diversity in terms of race and body size), and “editorial” modeling, which has higher status but generally a lot worse pay unless you become a superstar. Participants disclaim any control over who becomes a star, or even who gets cast in an average show, and yet they also work together to construct a market in which success is attributed to a magic something that just happens to favor thinness and whiteness (and femaleness: men are paid much worse). Bookers and clients claim color-blindness, but then they just can’t find models of color who match their desires. Mears collected a lot of revealing quotes, including one who said that the ideal model of color would be white except for her skin. “[T]here just aren’t enough really good models of color, just as there are no ‘fierce’ size 12 girls, because with tacitly racist, sexist assumptions, they do not fit the bill.”
Gender assumptions mean that men get paid an order of magnitude less than women—but white models make the same amount as models of color, despite the lesser “demand,” because that pay disparity would seem racist instead of natural and justified. Male modeling occurs under gender threat because male models are doing something that women are supposed to do: exist to be looked at. As a result, bookers tend to view male models as less professional or serious, less able to learn modeling as a “craft” of bodily control and display. Thus bookers accept lower rates for men because they think men have less to offer. Since modeling is less of a culturally acceptable aspiration for men than for women, it seems to attract men who don’t need to be taken as seriously. Agencies therefore invest less in developing men’s careers. Clients think there must be something wrong with men willing to “debase their masculinity and career options for a shot at modeling, which is … a very long shot for a viable career for men.” They expect less from men, “because men’s looks are not something to be perfected and played with like women’s.” So it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it all looks natural. Male models manage these difficulties by devaluing their own contributions and claiming to be in the profession just to have money to travel, etc. They positioned women’s better pay as a kind of revenge or justice for pay inequities in men’s favor elsewhere. “[Women are] the ones who should be doing it,” as one male model said. Or, as Mears concludes, modeling is a safe place for women to “rule” because it proves that they aren’t a real threat to men’s structural dominance: they only win when the contest is whose bodies are more highly valued as objects of the gaze. Then the participants use the reified construct of “the market” to explain the value systems they’ve created.
Male models also got used to flirting with the large number of gay men on the production side of the fashion industry, even though they mostly identified as heterosexual. Male models reported a lot more sexual harassment to Mears than female models did (though it’s not clear to me that she pursued the question with women).
talitha78 for the holiday card!Via Naked Capitalism:
Nietzsche… has a description… of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. … When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he… has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905)
Adrian Johns, Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age: Johns has an abiding interest in “piracy,” broadly defined. This book, though opening with a violent death in a dispute between pirate radio entrepreneurs in 1966, is really about how intellectual history (featuring Coase and Hayek, who both spent time analyzing British radio in particular) becomes political history. Here, changes in British radio listening practices, aided by cheap transistor radios, changed the social meaning of listening and therefore of broadcasting, opening a path for commercial radio. Johns argues that the “moral philosophy of digital libertarianism,” though often associated primarily with 1960s American counterculture, also derives from the politics and history of British radio. The idea of offshore data havens, after all, comes from offshore radio pirates (and indeed physically overlaps—Seahaven was a pirate radio station before it was part of a grand, failed data haven scheme). Johns chronicles not just lawlessness, though the violence isn’t surprising, but also the deep entanglement with the law that these pirates always had—they created corporate structures and called the police because they wanted and even needed to live in a jurisdiction with a functioning government, even as they wanted to escape those constraints as it suited them. This is Johns’ least theory-intensive book, and it sits not quite comfortably between narrative and theory, but I enjoyed it.
Ashley Mears, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model: Mears did her sociology dissertation as a participant-observer, or observing participant, in the modeling industry in London and New York. She discusses the divide between “commercial” modeling, where conventional beauty rules (and there’s more diversity in terms of race and body size), and “editorial” modeling, which has higher status but generally a lot worse pay unless you become a superstar. Participants disclaim any control over who becomes a star, or even who gets cast in an average show, and yet they also work together to construct a market in which success is attributed to a magic something that just happens to favor thinness and whiteness (and femaleness: men are paid much worse). Bookers and clients claim color-blindness, but then they just can’t find models of color who match their desires. Mears collected a lot of revealing quotes, including one who said that the ideal model of color would be white except for her skin. “[T]here just aren’t enough really good models of color, just as there are no ‘fierce’ size 12 girls, because with tacitly racist, sexist assumptions, they do not fit the bill.”
Gender assumptions mean that men get paid an order of magnitude less than women—but white models make the same amount as models of color, despite the lesser “demand,” because that pay disparity would seem racist instead of natural and justified. Male modeling occurs under gender threat because male models are doing something that women are supposed to do: exist to be looked at. As a result, bookers tend to view male models as less professional or serious, less able to learn modeling as a “craft” of bodily control and display. Thus bookers accept lower rates for men because they think men have less to offer. Since modeling is less of a culturally acceptable aspiration for men than for women, it seems to attract men who don’t need to be taken as seriously. Agencies therefore invest less in developing men’s careers. Clients think there must be something wrong with men willing to “debase their masculinity and career options for a shot at modeling, which is … a very long shot for a viable career for men.” They expect less from men, “because men’s looks are not something to be perfected and played with like women’s.” So it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it all looks natural. Male models manage these difficulties by devaluing their own contributions and claiming to be in the profession just to have money to travel, etc. They positioned women’s better pay as a kind of revenge or justice for pay inequities in men’s favor elsewhere. “[Women are] the ones who should be doing it,” as one male model said. Or, as Mears concludes, modeling is a safe place for women to “rule” because it proves that they aren’t a real threat to men’s structural dominance: they only win when the contest is whose bodies are more highly valued as objects of the gaze. Then the participants use the reified construct of “the market” to explain the value systems they’ve created.
Male models also got used to flirting with the large number of gay men on the production side of the fashion industry, even though they mostly identified as heterosexual. Male models reported a lot more sexual harassment to Mears than female models did (though it’s not clear to me that she pursued the question with women).
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