Happy Halloween edition
Hello reader friends,
For this edition, I am sharing some seasonally appropriate links, briefly exploring an academic article, and wrapping it all up with the consuming feature.
So let’s get started!
Links
How Halloween is celebrated in different countries around the world, but not all, of course.
Destinations around the world to visit during Halloween. This was written in 2021 during the pandemic hence the mention of things being closed. And on that note, I can’t imagine having to explain the pandemic to students or children in the future.
Day of the Dead celebrations around the world.
How to celebrate Mexico’s Dia del los Muertos.
This Edition’s Article - Gender representation in outdoor recreation
I started with the initial plan of sharing an article about Corporate Social Responsibility in the casino industry and perceptions and I was so bored by it. I could not make sense of it and I didn’t want to suffer through the discussion and tables of boredom. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before but I loathe reading tables and charts or anything that shows me equations in a journal article. My eyeballs skip right past them like they’re not there. I love looking at maps and infographics but dry, two-column charts are a snoozefest. I also don’t like reading or learning from knitting patterns that are charts, I need things written in words. This is just how I learn.
Thus, I had to pick another article.
Instead, I am exploring an article, lightly, because of this last-minute change, titled (In) equality in the outdoors: gender perspective on recreation and tourism media in the Swedish mountains.
The researchers asked three questions concerning outdoor recreation and media representation in Sweden. The researchers noted that Sweden has traditionally been a leader in gender equality.
RQ1. Are there gender differences in outdoor recreation participation in the Swedish mountain region?
RQ2. Are there gender differences in the representations of outdoor recreation on the websites of Sweden’s five largest mountain destinations?
RQ3. Is there a connection between gender differences in outdoor recreation participation and the gender representations of outdoor recreation activities on destinations’ websites?
The literature review for this article brought up interesting points about how women’s roles have not always been shown in the outdoors. “Overall, up until the last few decades, women’s involvement with the outdoors remained complex in theory and largely invisible in practice (Kling, Margaryan, Fuchs, 2017).”
The researchers also pointed out that studies about women in the outdoors brought up other issues “Women express higher concern about their skill levels, body image, fear of harassment, fear of embarrassment and not fitting in (Kling, Margaryan, Fuchs).” It also mentioned that tourism media has not traditionally been great at portraying gender equality in outdoor recreation advertisements and gender stereotypes persist.
Even though Sweden and its Nordic neighbours are global leaders in gender equality, the mountainous regions that the researchers examined for this study were still not so equal:
“In her detailed analysis of the earliest forms of tourism in the Scandinavian wilderness, known as Scandinavian Sporting Tour, Sillanpää (Citation2002) demonstrates how the local tourist place-myths and images were created in response to the desires of male tourists. Previous research on tourist images in the Nordic countries allows suggesting that gender equality is not necessarily evident in the tourism marketing even in the Nordic context” (Kling, Margaryan, Fuchs, 2017)”.
This study consisted of surveys of locals who visited the mountain regions in the study and photos at the sites were taken for analysis of visitors. The photos and the assessments of them are interesting! I am not going to summarize here because it is brief enough that you can read on your own about the differences the researchers found in participation in activities like rafting, canoeing, downhill skiing, snowmobiling, cross-country skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, etc. Click to read them in the Results section of the article.
The discussion of the study reveals that women participate in a more narrow range of outdoor activities and that the traditional gender roles were present in the photos of participants. Researchers noted that mountain resorts, in an effort to market for shoulder and summer season activities, pushed mountain biking and spas/shopping as activities and the media associated with them showed men mountain biking and women shopping. Sigh. Thus, tourism marketing continued to reinforce gender roles at the time of this study and publication in 2017 in Sweden. It was also noted that women seemed more like passive participants than active in the photos of people participating in activities. They do state in their article that “In the context of Sweden, it can be argued that the outdoors remains one of the few spaces where this norm is still visible rather explicitly (Kling, Margaryan, Fuchs, 2017)”.
Why does any of this matter? I think it is best summed up by the researchers:
Limiting women’s participation outdoors or positioning it as something ‘not for women’ might have its effects on the involvement of women in natural sciences, environmental policies and nature-related decision making. On the other hand, proliferation of adrenaline-, skills- and adventure-rich male-oriented activities not only de-normalizes other ways of engagement with nature for men, but also reduces nature to a background setting, thus, discouraging deeper, more mindful and meditative human-nature relationships.
There is always room for improvement.
Consuming:
I watched The Big Vape and wow did it make me angry at e-cigarette makers - they’re not better than big tobacco. I realize that it is a documentary and was created to make me feel that way, probably, but this particular documentary is about JUUL, whose early marketing was very similar to old cigarette ads of the 1970s and 1980s that showed young people having fun and that made cigarettes look “cool”. Thus, lots of teens got hooked on JUUL products, even 12 and 13-year-olds. That is what made me mad. I recommend it and enjoyed it even though I was angry.
I just started a newer release Friday night at bedtime from the library when I got a notification on my Kindle that I could borrow the e-book in their “fast reads” for 7 days. Challenge accepted! It is called Land of Milk and Honey and oh my gosh I’m on page 200 already and have not devoted that much time to reading, it’s consuming and a fast read. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale about a chef who ends up cooking for a newly created Utopia on a mountainside in Italy while the rest of the world is shrouded in an environmental smog that makes life dreary and has decimated food crops.
I am also reading Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein, also from the library. But I am taking a break from it to read Land of Milk and Honey. It is enjoyable historical fiction about Mary Shelley. I will give a full report once completed.
I have been listening to a new podcast called Paul McCartney: A Life in Lyrics. These are short episodes where Sir Paul talks about his songwriting. A recent episode was about Mull of Kintyre, which is a song from his solo career. It features bagpipes, which I love, and on the podcast it is mentioned that the song was one of the top-selling singles in the UK.
The single was Wings' biggest hit in Britain and is one of the best selling singles of all time in the United Kingdom, where it became the 1977 Christmas number one and was the first single to sell over two million copies nationwide.
It has been enjoyable to listen to the podcast but I wish the episodes were longer!
Thanks for subscribing, reading, clicking, sharing, etc. :)
See you next time!
Sonya