sex

New & Noteworthy

Nicole Schmitgen has a new Discovery on work by Margarita Torre on women and union support. According to her research, 11% of Black women are a part of unions, more than other racial groups of women. Future union participation by women is expected to rise.

Our Clippings Media Report includes The Cut interview with Gretchen Sisson on her new book and the adoption industry, Elijah Anderson on the continued relevance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study to today, Eric Klinenberg in Plain English with Derek Thompson on aloneness and loneliness, and Robert Bullard on Living on Earth about flooding in Alabama and segregation.

From the Archives

Libraries continue to be the site of controversy for groups who feel libraries allow too radical books onto its shelves. Read our Discovery by Nick Matthews, Hotspots in Red-Hot Demand in Rural America, to learn more.

Tax Day is coming quick! Learn about some tax myths from Contexts here.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Contexts latest include:

• Sophie X. Liu writes up study by Nicolo Pinchak and colleagues reveals that the presence of dogs in neighborhoods is related with decreased rates of property and street crimes.
• Jaeun Lim and Benjamin Cornwell‘s latest study challenges the genetic explanation for obesity and detail the importance of social networks on this measure of health, covered by Rose Xueqing Zhang.

Council on Contemporary Families:

• Do I Belong? Isolation and Identity Among Minoritized Youth by Sophia Rodriguez and Gabrielle Cabrera Wy write up their research on minoritized students ‘sense of belonging’ and find they have a weaker ‘sense of belonging’ and more bullying.
• Debby Herbeni covers some findings from her new book, Yes, Your Kid, on today’s teens, sex, and communication.

First Publics has a new Dialogues:

• First Publics talks with Dalton Conley (You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist), Shamus Khan (A Sociology Experiment), Lisa Wade (Terrible Magnificent Sociology), and Kathleen Korgen (Sociology in Action) on writing their Sociology textbooks.

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From racial codes to technology design, “bland erotic pudding,” and why college is still worth the cost (but maybe shouldn’t be)—all that and a bag of weed (well, an article on the uneven policing of possession) on this week’s Friday Roundup! more...

Happy New Year!

Most of our authors and students have been taking much-deserved breaks this week, but here’s a little taste of what we, along with our bloggers, have cooked up since the last Roundup.

The Editors’ Desk:

“What’s On Your List?” by Doug Hartmann. The follow-up to…

“Great Books in Sociology,” by Doug Hartmann. Doug dreams of a class based around the classics and commenters chime in with their own must-read soc books. more...

In the wake of the annual American Sociological Association meetings, it is always interesting to see what (if any) new research and ideas from the field capture media attention. One topic is fairly predictable: sex. Stories about sex and sexuality get the eyeballs, and sociology is no exception. (Uncomfortable point in fact: sex and sexuality are two of the most common search terms new readers use to find The Society Pages.) The most recent example is an article that originally ran in the Los Angeles Times on “hookup culture” on college campuses.

The story, from a writer named Emily Alpert, reports on recently released research from Martin Monto, a sociologist at the University of Portland. The main thrust of the findings is that, while a new form of sexual intimacy has emerged on college campuses in the last decade or so (intimate physical encounters between friends and casual-but-known acquaintances: “hookups”), this does not mean that college students are having more sex than ever before. Indeed, according to Monto’s work, fewer than one third of college students surveyed between 2002 and 2010 had had sex with more than one person in the preceding year—the same level reported in the 1980s and 1990s. (What is new is that 68% of those who were sexually active were involved with a friend, an increase from 56% in previous periods.) As one headline put it: “Sex on campus has changed, [but] not surged.”

Being both a bit titillating (sex on campus!) and yet reassuring (our kids haven’t gone completely wild—whew), the story definitely has legs. Since it originally appeared in the Times over a week ago (I’m actually not sure if it came directly from the meetings in New York, an ASA press release, or coincidental timing ), I’ve seen a number of references, reprints, and reflections—including, as of this morning, in both of the local papers in the Twin Cities. more...