Sociological Images

Energy drinks and the glorification of violent masculinity.

By Lisa Wade, PhD

Toban B. sent in some photographs and a discussion of how energy drinks are gendered.

Energy drinks are already gendered to begin with in a couple of different ways at least: (1) they are marketed as hydration for athletes and sports is a masculine arena and (2) women aren’t usually encouraged to consume “extra” calories. But, in addition to being seen as somehow for men, Toban shows how a particularly violent and aggressive kind of masculinity is reproduced in the marketing, even across different companies.

Monster energy drinks include slashes on the packaging that look like a vicious scratch and what appears to be a crosshair and bullet holes (bad aim?):

Notice that the “flavor” in the picture above is “Sniper.”  Toban notes that “Assault” and “M-80″ are also flavors:

The can for the Assault-flavored drink also features a camouflage design, invoking militarism. They call their “shooters” “Hitman” (photo above).

Both Monster and Guru link their product directly to (extreme) sports:

Full Throttle and Amp (“Overdrive”) go for a connection to aggressive driving:

Full Throttle energy drinks make it explicit with the tagline, “Let Your Man Out.”

Toban notes that it’s ironic that a lot of these products are marketed as health drinks when, in fact, internalizing an aggressive form of masculinity is associated with taking health risks (e.g., refusing to wear seat belts or hard hats, drinking hard). “In any case,” Toban concludes, “this marketing normalizes and makes light of a lot of aggression and danger that we should be opposing.” And which, I will add, isn’t good for men or women.

See also our post with hilarious fake commercials making fun of energy drinks and hypermasculinity.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

A SocImages collection: White men and their violence.

Overviews of white, male violence

• White masculinity and guns: A lethal equation?
• (White) men and the glorification of violence (on the Sociology of Gender Pinterest board)

On white men’s anger and sense of persecution

• America’s angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage, and Southern supremacy
• Conspicuous pollution: Rural, white men rollin’ coal

“Benevolent sexism”: Protecting white women as an excuse for white, male violence

• White women and the defense of lynching
• I am a white woman. No more murder in my name.
• Race and the King Kong motif
• High school yearbook cover presents female vulnerability to men of color

The invisibility of (white) men in the problem of (white) male violence

• Naming the perpetrator: Language and “violence against women”

Teaching (white) men to embrace a violent masculinity

• On Tough Guise 2 and the ongoing crisis of violent masculinity
• “Consider Your Man Card Re-Issued,” says the maker of semiautomatic weapon
• Bullying, the “fag,” and the problem with grown-ups
• Energy drinks and violent masculinity
• Tony Porter: “A Call to Men”
• “The Mask You Live In” (documentary trailer)
• Clips from Wrestling with Manhood and Tough Guise I

What predicts NFL arrests? Position or disposition?

By Jay Livingston, PhD

When sports stories wind up in the headlines and network news, something’s usually very wrong. The news biz, whether print of TV, usually keeps athletes confined in the sports section.  So now we have the network anchors talking about Adrian Peterson leaving welts on the flesh of his son, age four, or showing us the video of Ray Rice coldcocking his fiancee in the elevator. Other NFL domestic violence stories, previously ignored (no superstar players, no video), are now mentioned since they fit the news theme.

These incidents all suggest that maybe football players are just violent people – men with a streak of violence in their dispositions. This personality trait that allows them to flourish on the field, but too often it gets them in trouble after they leave the stadium.

This is the kind of psychological “kinds of people” explanation that I ask students to avoid or at least question, and to question it with data. Conveniently, we have some data. USA Today has the entire NFL rap sheet, and it looks like a long one – more than 700 arrests since 2000.  Nearly 100 arrests for assault, another 85 or so for domestic violence. And those are just the arrests. No doubt many battered wives or girlfriends and many bruised bodies in bars didn’t make it into these statistics. Are football players simply violent people – violent off the field as well as on?

Well, no. The largest category of arrests is drunk driving  – potentially very harmful, but not what most people would call violent.  And besides, NFL players are arrested at a lower rate than are their uncleated counterparts – men in their late twenties.

This suggests that the violence we see in the stadiums on Sunday is situational (perhaps like the piety and moral rectitude we encounter elsewhere on Sunday).  The violence resides not in the players but in the game.  On every down, players must be willing to use violence against another person. Few off-the-field situations call for violence, so we shouldn’t be surprised that these same men have a relatively low rate of arrest (low relative to other young men).

But let’s not discard the personal angle completely. If we look at arrests within the NFL, we see two things that suggest there might be something to this idea that violence, or at least a lack of restraint, might have an individual component as well.  First, although NFL arrests are lower for all crimes, they are much, much lower for non-violent offenses like theft. But for domestic violence, the rate is closer that of non-footballers.  The NFL rate for domestic violence is still substantially lower than the national average – 55 NFL arrests for every 100 among non-NFL men. But for theft, the ratio is one-tenth of that – 5.5 NFL arrests per 100 non-NFL. Also on the higher side are other offenses against a person (murder, sex offenses) and offenses that might indicate a careless attitude toward danger – DUI, guns.

Second, some positions have a disproportionate number of offenders. The graphs below show the percent of all arrests accounted for by each position and also the percent the position represents of the total NFL roster.  For example, cornerbacks make up about 10% of all players, but they accounted for about 14% of all arrests. (The difference is not huge, but it’s something; there would be a very slight overlap in the error bars if my version of Excel made it easy to include them.)

The positions disproportionately likely to be arrested are wide receivers and defensive tackles. Those most under-represented in arrests are the offensive linemen.

This fits with my own image of these positions. The wide-outs seem to have more than their share of free-spirits – players who care little for convention or rules. Some are just oddball amusing, like Chad Ochocinco formerly of the Bengals. Others are trouble and get traded from team to team despite their abilities, like Terrell Owens of the 49ers, Eagles, Cowboys, Bills, and Bengals.

As for the linemen, the arrest differential down in the trenches also might be expected.  Back in the 1970s, a psychiatrist hired by the San Diego Chargers noted this difference on his first visit to the locker room. It wasn’t the players – the offensive and defensive lineman themselves looked about the same (huge, strong guys) – it was their lockers. They were a metaphor for on-the-field play.  Defensive linemen charge, push, pull, slap – whatever they can do to knock over opponents, especially the one holding the ball. Their lockers were messy, clothes and equipment thrown about carelessly. Offensive lineman, by contrast, are more restricted. Even on a run play, their movements are carefully co-ordinated, almost choreographed. Watch a slo-mo of the offensive line on a sweep, and you’ll see legs moving in chorus-line unison.  Correspondingly, their lockers were models of organization and restraint.

Maybe these same personal qualities prevail off the field as well. Those offensive lineman get arrested at a rate only half of what we would expect from their numbers in the NFL population. Arrests of defensive linemen and wide receivers are 50% more likely than their proportion on the rosters. That can’t be the entire explanation of course. Running counter to this “kinds of people” approach are the other hard-hitting defensive players – defensive ends and linebackers. According to the principle of violent people in violent positions, they should be over-represented in arrest figures just like the  defensive tackles and cornerbacks. But they are not.

If this were a real article, a journal article, this final paragraph would be where the author calls for more data. But the trend in NFL arrests has been downward, and if fewer arrests means less data but also less domestic violence, that’s fine with me.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

From our archives: Hurricane Katrina.

August 29th is the anniversary of the day that Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and side-swiped New Orleans, breaching the levees.  These posts are from our archives:

Was Hurricane Katrina a “Natural” Disaster?

• Profits Over People: The Human Cause of the Katrina Disaster
• An Iconic Image of Government Failure: Empty, Flooded School Buses

Racism and Neglect

• Racial Violence in Algiers Point
• African-American Men and Fear of Violence in the Aftermath
• Hurricane Katrina and the Demographics of Death
• The Fate of Prisoners During Hurricane Katrina

Disaster and Discourse

• “Finders” vs “Looters” at the Associated Press
• Disaster Tourism
• The Politics of Hurricane Humor

Devastation and Rebuilding

• Slow Recovery on the Gulf Coast (pre-oil spill)
• Population Recovery in New Orleans
• Rebuilding in the Lower 9th Ward (pictured)

What words do NFL scouts use to describe white vs. black players?

In case you were wondering, race is still important in the U.S., including in American sports. Deadspin put out a neat tool just in time for NFL draft weekend, allowing readers to see for themselves just how often different words are used to describe white and black athletes in draft scouting reports.  It turns out, for example, that a black prospect’s report is more likely to mention his “motor,” while the typical white player is more likely to be called a “worker.” “Freakish” shows up five times in black reports, and never in a white player’s. Black players are also more likely to be called “coachable.”

I downloaded the data to find out just what the “blackest” and “whitest’ words were. I then drew out the 50 words most likely associated with black and white athletes, respectively. The words are all vaguely football-ish, but upon reflection distinctive patterns emerge.

Some words leap out immediately. Reports on black athletes are far more likely to include the word “mother.” Conversely, white athletes’ reports mention “brothers” more often.  Black players’ reports more often include “driving”; reports on white athletes mention “drive.”

I was quite surprised just how pervasive the old tropes of the smart white leader athletes, and the talent and physical black athletes remain. The word “accuracy” is more than twelve times more likely to be associated with a white player than his black counterpart. Likewise, the words “understands,”(3.9 times) “intelligence” (3.0 times), and the sneaky “intangibles” (3.9 times) are all far more likely to be associated with white athletes.

Conversely, reports on black athletes are more likely to include “leaping” (6.3 times), “upright” (10.4 times), and “violent” (5.1 times). They comparatively rarely include words associated with quarterbacking, intelligence, or leadership.

What the numbers can’t tell us is how much of the difference can be ascribed to the scouts themselves allowing biases to creep in, and how much reflects ways in which athletes have been shaped to this point (i.e., coached to be violent,  encouraged to become leaders, etc). This is obviously an important question, but either way it is clear that race remains a hugely important filter affecting life chances, even in something as supposedly meritocratic as professional and near-professional sports.

A longer version of this post, with more details on methods, can be found at Politics All the Way Down.  Photo credit: Ron Almog, via wikimedia commons.

Stewart Prest is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  You can follow him at his blog, Politics All the Way Down, and on Twitter.

Transcending the nature/nurture debate

The phrase “nature/nurture debate” refers to an old competition between those who think that human behavior and psychology is determined by biology (that is, genetics, both evolutionary and individual, hormones, neurology, etc) and those who believe that it is determined by environment (that is, socialization, cultural context, experiences in childhood, etc).  While the nature/nurture debate rages in the mass media, most scholars reject it altogether.  Instead, social scientists and biologists alike recognize that our behavior and psychology is the result of an interaction between nature and nurture (yep, even sociologists like myself).

A recent story on NPR illustrates this beautifully.  James Fallon, a neuroscientist specializing in sociopaths, had been scanning the brains of murderers for 20 years.  His research had demonstrated that sociopath brains have a distinct appearance: dark patches in the orbital cortex, the part of the brain responsible for moral thinking and controlling impulses.

You can see the dark patches in the brain on the right, the brain on the left is a “normal” brain.

At a family gathering one day, Fallon’s mom mentions that there were some pretty violent types in Fallon’s own family history (it apparently didn’t come up anytime in the previous 20 years !!!) and, so, he investigates. It turns out that there were eight proven and alleged murders in his ancestral line, including Lizzy Borden, one of the most famous murderers in history. 

Because Fallon knows that the atypical neurology associated with sociopaths runs in families, he decided to scan the brains of all his family members.  No one had the dark patches.

Except him. 

Fallon had the dark patches.  In fact, that brain on the right: that’s him.

Not only did he have the neurology of a typical sociopath, he also carried a genetic determinant known to be associated with extreme violence.

Fallon doesn’t have the answer to why he’s not a sociopath, but scientists think that a person needs to have some sort of experiential trigger, like abuse as a child, in addition to a biological predisposition.

Significantly, [Fallon] says this journey through his brain has changed the way he thinks about nature and nurture. He once believed that genes and brain function could determine everything about us. But now he thinks his childhood [and his awesome mom] may have made all the difference.

For related examples, see our posts on the response of testosterone levels to political victories and the historical shift in the average age of menstruation.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.