Tower Bridge

We’ve had two sightings regarding the participation of women in the upcoming Summer Olympics.  To bring you up to speed, Saudi Arabia had announced that it would be sending female athletes for the first time.  But, this spring, there were many doubts about whether Saudi Arabian women would actually be allowed to participate.

This past Thursday, Saudi Arabia agreed to send two women to compete, making this the first time in Olympic history that every country will be represented by female athletes.  In 1996, 26 teams had no women.  However, that figure dropped to three in Beijing four years ago, where women represented 42% of the athletes.  That percentage is expected to increase in London.

 


Today, people are opting out of parenthood at unprecedented rates.  In 1976, 10% of U.S. women ages 40-44 had never had a child; by 2006, the percentage had doubled.  While some people desire children but are unable to have them, increasing numbers of adults are deciding to form families without children.

In a recent opinion piece, Sociologist Amy Blackstone explained that families that don’t include children still can play an important role in the life of children.

 According to the people I’ve interviewed, child-free adults serve as mentors, role models, back-up parents, playmates, fun aunties, big brothers, partners-in-crime, advisers and buddies to the children in their lives. And, as research conducted for Big Brothers Big Sisters shows, having caring adults who are not their parents involved in their lives improves kids’ confidence, grades and social skills.

Though stereotypes often portray adults without children as self-involved or baby-haters, Blackstone notes that most child-free adults enjoy children.  And, at a time when parents are busier than ever, these child-free individuals are often more available, in terms of money or resources, to take on additional responsibilities.  Apparently, it still takes a village to raise a child.

 Families have changed a lot, but children will always need love and guidance. Whether those raising children are single-parents, heterosexual couples, or gay or lesbian parents, other adults make a positive difference in a child’s life.

one happy family

Earlier this month, Slate published an article by Sociologist Mark Regenerus about the effects of same sex parenting on children.  As part of the New Family Structures Study, Regenerus and his colleagues screened over 15,000 Americans (ages 18-39) and asked them if their biological mother or father ever had a romantic relationship with a member of the same sex.   When comparing children who answered “yes” to children from heterosexual married families, they found children from heterosexual married families fared better in economic, educational, social, and psychological outcomes.

This study has prompted many comments and several other articles.  For example, in another article in Slate, William Saletan says that the findings shouldn’t be surprising, as Regenerus’s study is not a study of gay parents who decided to have kids.  Rather, it’s a study of people who engaged in same sex relationships (and often broke up their families) several decades ago.

 What the study shows, then, is that kids from broken homes headed by gay people develop the same problems as kids from broken homes headed by straight people. But that finding isn’t meaningless. It tells us something important: We need fewer broken homes among gays, just as we do among straights.

Sociologist Debra Umberson also shared reactions, published yesterday in the Huffington Post, to Regenerus’s study.  Specifically, she focused on methodological concerns.

His definition of children raised by lesbian mothers and gay fathers is incredibly broad — anyone whose biological or adopted mother or father had a same-sex relationship that the respondent knew about by age 18. Most of these respondents did not even live with their parent’s same-sex partner; in fact, many did not even live with their gay or lesbian parent at all! Of the 175 adult children Regnerus claims were raised by “lesbian mothers,” only 40 actually lived with their mother and her same-sex partner for at least three years.

Umberson also notes that in order to be considered a child of a heterosexual married family, respondents had to have parents who were continually married from the time of their birth to the time of the survey.  With the wide net cast for same sex relationships, the study likely captured families that had far more stress than average families of that generation, contrasted with very stable heterosexual married families.

What does this tell us?  According to both Saletan and Umberson, it’s a reminder that stress and instability harm children in any family context.

Rwanda Genocide Memorial This week, some soccer players competing in the Euro 2012 (hosted in Poland and Ukraine) have also spent time visiting the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camps.  According to the BBC’s Clare Spencer, this genocide tourism is not a new phenomenon.   In fact, 1.4 million people visited Auschwitz last year.

Other sites of genocides and similar atrocities, such as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia, are also becoming popular destinations for tourists.  The Aegis Trust notes that over 40,000 foreigners visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in 2011.  And, tourists visit the hotel featured in Hotel Rwanda every day to take their pictures by its entrance.

So why do tourists increasingly visit mass graves and memorials? Psychologist Sheila Keegan says that what we want to get out of a vacation has expanded.  In other words, we want to relax, but we also want to broader our horizons.

“People want to be challenged. It may be voyeuristic and macabre but people want to feel those big emotions which they don’t often come across. They want to ask that very basic question about being human – ‘how could we do this?’,” she says.

Keegan also explains that vacations are good talking points. “It’s about creating your own history, reminding yourself how lucky you are.”

(This doesn’t come without controversy, though. For more on that, check out the article.)

 

According to a recent article on treehugger.com, you can spot income inequality from space. Yes, you read that correctly. If you look at the pictures below, you should be able to spot a clear difference between the two neighborhoods.

Piedmont and Oakland, CA (Courtesy Per Square Mile, Public Domain Photos)
Piedmont and Oakland, CA (Courtesy Per Square Mile, Public Domain Photos)

Pictures can say a thousand words, but these can be summed up pretty quickly.  Put simply, more affluent communities can afford more space for trees. They also place more value on growing and maintaining them.

In fact, according to Tim DeChant, Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and creator of Per Square Mile,

for every 1 percent increase in per capita income, demand for forest cover increased by 1.76 percent. But when income dropped by the same amount, demand decreased by 1.26 percent… The researchers reason that wealthier cities can afford more trees, both on private and public property. The well-to-do can afford larger lots, which in turn can support more trees. On the public side, cities with larger tax bases can afford to plant and maintain more trees.

These trees also reinforce inequalities by providing shade, improving the air quality, and even improving the mental health of those around. As the article notes, “[I]t all makes a pretty powerful argument in favor of tree-planting initiatives in lower income neighborhoods.”

Tornado at Mallorca Island

Though I am more than happy to trade in my blue jeans and boots for shorts and flip-flops, not everything warm weather brings is welcome.  As the Bemidji Pioneer reminds us, warm weather also brings tornado season.

For years, weather experts have been working on cutting-edge technology to detect tornados.  But, when city sirens wail and weather warnings flash across the bottom of t.v. screens, people are generally slow to take cover.   In fact, many studies have shown that people often spend time looking for more information about the potential tornado rather than hitting their basements.  According to Dennis Mileti, a sociologist and retired director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder,

“People turn into information vampires when they hear their town and village might be struck by a violent tornado…And if you don’t provide them with the information they need, what you’re actually doing is guaranteeing the time people spend searching is longer rather than shorter.”

In addition, many people get into the mindset that the warning is “just another warning.”  Tornado survivors are an exception, though, as they almost always respond more quickly to severe weather warnings.  But, as Mississippi State University Sociologist Laura Myers explains, the rest of us don’t learn from their experience.

Myers found that about 10 percent of the population are anxious about bad weather and take shelter at the first sign of danger. But, most respond to dangerous situations like a tornado warning with what she calls denial. “They’re sitting there saying, ‘OK, I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to have to worry about it. I want to assume everything is going to be OK.’ That’s why the person will wait for that secondary confirmation. They’ll say, ‘I’ve really gotta know it’s going to hit me.’”

Related, many don’t respond due to the prevalence of false alarms.  According to the National Weather Service, three out of four tornado warnings are false alarms.  Social scientists believe that just explaining that these were false alarms (for example, that a tornado formed but didn’t touch down) would help; otherwise, people often think they are just mistakes.

Because of this, the weather service is making an effort to utilize the knowledge of social scientists in order to understand the impact of warning systems.  This blending of physical and social science, combined with new technology and social media outlets, will change how tornado warnings reach us and, hopefully, save lives.

 

Superhero Grammar
Photo by MrSchuReads via flickr.com

While pronouns may have lost out in the world of School House Rock (can you even compare “Conjunction Junction” or “Unpack Your Adjectives” to the pronoun song?), psychologist James Pennebaker believes it might be possible to predict future romances and analyze power dynamics based on these tiny words.

Pennebaker and his team recorded and transcribed hundreds of speed dating conversations.  After they analyzed words used during the conversations and information about how the speed daters thought their dates went, Pennebaker found that people subconsciously mimic the way others speak when we’re into them.

 “The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context,” Pennebaker says. “And this is even cooler: We can even look at … a young dating couple… [and] the more similar [they] are … using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now.”

Pennebaker also studies pronouns and power dynamics and thinks that it’s possible to tell who holds the power in any situation based on who uses the pronoun “I” more often.

 You’d think it would be the person who thinks he’s [or she’s] more important, but it turns out it’s actually the person who feels more insecure. When we’re fixated on how we’re coming across, our language reflects our self-consciousness.

However, Pennebaker doesn’t think that people can use this research to change themselves.  As he puts it, “The words reflect who we are more than drive who we are.”

P.S. For some interesting examples, check out the full article from Jezebel.  Also check out Pennebaker’s website for tools you can use to analyze your tweets or analyze how two people are paying attention to each other in a conversation.

P.P.S. For those of you who also couldn’t even remember how School House Rock taught us about pronouns, here’s a link to memory lane.

May-Treanor vs Akers AVP Long Beach 2010
Photo by mario_d via flickr.com

As the Summer Olympics draw near, all sorts of messages about women are surfacing.

Some messages pertain to female participation.  In March, we cited an article that noted this year might be the first time each country sends female athletes to participate in the Summer Olympics.  However, a recent New York Times article explained that Saudi Arabian women may not be allowed to participate after all.

Other messages are about what women will wear or how they will behave rather than if or how they will perform.  For example, officials of the International Amateur Boxing Association suggested that women try wearing skirts in competition.

The man in charge of the association—they are always men—said he had received complaints that spectators could not tell women from men beneath the protective headgear. Instead of referring these spectators to optometrists, he referred the boxers to the Ring Magazine spring collection.

Skirts will be optional, not mandatory, as women’s boxing makes its debut in London, though.

“It’s an interesting time for women,” said Janice Forsyth, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario. “The more they become involved in sport, the more it seems people feel the need to market female sexuality. It’s a tough bind for women—they have to look good and be attractive to the public, presumably a heterosexual male public, and be good athletes. That same standard doesn’t necessarily apply to men.”

Women’s athletic gear is being reconsidered on other fronts as well.  The International Volleyball Federation will permit more conservative outfits for beach volleyball, including shorts and sleeved tops, due to cultural and religious sensitivities.  FIFA (soccer’s governing body) is also reconsidering its ban on the hijab.

However, it remains to be seen whether Saudi Arabia will also reconsider the messages it’s sending by continuing to disallow women participants, something some defend by claiming that sports lead to immoral behavior and that virgin girls are too affected by jumping required by sports.

“That women in vigorous activities will upset their wombs, reproductive activity and menstrual cycle—it’s amazing they can put forth these arguments and be accepted with the science we have,” said Forsyth, the Olympic scholar. “My students laughed at that. They were shocked. That’s something we saw a hundred years ago.”

Photo taken from the Sociological Images Blog

I never thought I’d be writing the words “fellatio” or “cunnilingus” for an academic purpose (or frankly ever), but here I find myself exploring recent musing on the decline of the, ahem, blow job. Near the end of March, Esquire’s Geoff Dyer reported that the act has fallen on hard times: in an informal survey of 10 of his male friends, 8 preferred pleasing their partners to receiving oral sex.

It’s easy for sociologists to pooh-pooh the methodologies of this “survey,” as surveying 10 friends is hardly scientific.  Further, an increase in cunnilingus does not necessarily signal a decrease in fellatio.  But still, several intellectuals have recently explained why they think Dyer’s article might be on to something.  In an essay on his own website, Pasadena City College history and gender studies professor Hugo Schwyzer explained,

In an era of rising male body dysmorphia, we know that more men than ever before are self-conscious about their appearance; it’s conceivable that anxiety about their size (driven by comparison to well-hung porn stars) or even how their penises’ smell has some guys anxious to avoid the intense focus that comes with a woman’s mouth on their manparts.

In essence, Schwyzer thinks that cunnilingus has become a new way for men to demonstrate sexual competence and deal with performance anxieties.

Sociologist Michael Kimmel also believes that Dyer may be on to something, though he finds some fault with an assumption in Schwyzer’s article: that giving and receiving head mean the same thing.  In fact, sexuality research suggests that the meaning of the act may not be symmetrical.

When straight men describe their experiences with oral sex, they talk about power. This holds whether receiving fellatio: “I feel so powerful when I see her kneeling in front of me,” or performing cunnilingus: “Being able to get her off with my tongue makes me feel so powerful.” Heterosexual men tend to experience the giving and receiving of oral sex as an expression of their power. By contrast, straight women perceive both giving and receiving oral sex from the position of powerlessness—not necessarily because they are forced into these acts, but because “it makes him happy” to receive oral sex and to perform it. So oral sex, like intercourse, allows him to feel “like a man,” regardless of who does what to whom.

So what happens to men’s sexual experience when women desire reciprocity and actually want to perform oral sex?  According to Kimmel, in a traditional sense, sex was a conquest for men.  But is there still victory if women like the “conquering”?

It’s difficult to say, though if the answer is “no,” perhaps we need to rethink what sex means to straight men.  Kimmel asks,

Can we both conquer and surrender to pleasure? Or can we dispense with martial metaphors… entirely, and simply pleasure and be pleasured? In other words, can heterosexual men embrace the liberatory promise of queer sex—the freeing of sexual pleasure from gender inequality?

As Kimmel puts it, can there really be anything sexier than equality?

 

The Social States of America, 2010
For the first time ever, the National Archives and Records Administration is making the 1940 census public.   Scholars planning to use the data for research, citizens hoping to track down their ancestors, and many others are excited about the release.  In fact, after nearly 37 million hits in 8 hours, the website crashed.  For more, including how the Minnesota Population Center is helping to make the information easier to access, click here!