In the 3 1/2 minute video below, CGP Gray explains the nonsense behind the word “continent.” It’s a cultural construct, with some geological rationale, but not enough to rationalize the seven that we recognize.
Also from CGP Gray: What the Bleep is the United Kingdom?! and The Economics of Royalty.
American Studies professor Jo B. Paoletti has announced the publication of her book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. I’ve been eagerly anticipating getting my hands on a copy. It was from Paoletti that I learned that the idea that pink was a feminine and blue a masculine color was a relatively new invention in American history (one that even now does not necessarily extend to other countries). See, for example, this pink 1920s birthday card for a man (with a pre-Nazi swastika too).
The book asks “When did we startdressing girls in pink and boys in blue?” To answer this question:
She chronicles the decline of the white dress for both boys and girls, the introduction of rompers in the early 20th century, the gendering of pink and blue, the resurgence of unisex fashions, and the origins of today’s highly gender-specific baby and toddler clothing.
As an illustration of the changing color norms, she offered a one-minute video featuring a collection of cards sent to a pair of new parents in the 1960s. She notes that many of the cards are gender-neutral and include both pink and blue, but that even the gender-specific cards (this particular baby was a girl) use both colors. These cards, then, reveal that pink and blue had emerged as recognizable baby colors by the 1960s, but the use of blue in the “for girl” cards and the preponderance of gender-neutral cards suggests that the importance of gender differentiation hadn’t taken hold.
P.S.: At her website Paoletti says she has a book planned on “old lady clothes, mother-of-the-bride dresses, cougars and other age-appropriate nonsense.” I can’t wait.
Katrin sent in a really interesting attempt to disrupt the narrative about the Netherlands that is being told on Fox News. The 3-and-a-half minute video shows Fox anchors and guests calling the Dutch “naive” and the country “out of control,” “a cesspool of corruption and crime,” “a mess,” “anarchy,” and “a Disneyworld for those people,” then counterposes that commentary with images of and statistics about the country.
It’s a fascinating example of two sides contesting over the framing of a nation.
By far, the best part occurs at 2:40. Gretchen Carlson mentions that 40% of Americans in the U.S. report having ingested marijuana, compared to 22% of the Dutch. O’Reilly responds with shocking statistical illiteracy (or a willingness to assume the illiteracy of his viewers). Confusing percentages with whole numbers, he says:
The way they do the statistics in the Netherlands is different, plus its a much smaller country, it’s a much smaller base to do the stats on.
Visit to New Haven:
On Sunday I’ll be hoppin’ a plane to New Haven for Yale’s Sex Week. Monday night I’ll be giving a talk titled A Feminist Defense of Friendship, on Tuesday night I’ll be talking about hook up culture, and on Monday afternoon I’ll be sitting on a panel on body image. I may be able to squeeze in a New Haven SocImages Meet Up, so stay tuned if you’re in the area. (P.S.: If you’re in Boston, I’ll be visiting Harvard and Boston University at the end of March.)
Los Angeles Meet Up:
Plan ahead! We’ve scheduled a SocImages Meet Up for Sunday, March 4th at 6pm (Casey’s Irish Pub in downtown L.A.).
SocImages News:
Amanda Jungels has put together a fantastic SocImages Course Guide for Sexuality and Society. Check out all of our Course Guides here.
We’re having great fun with our Pinterest account; our collection of sexy toy makeovers showed up as a slideshow at the Huffington Post. We’ve also added two new boards:
A super big “thank you” to Ron Anderson! Dr. Anderson notified us that he nominated us for the ASA Section on Communication and Information Technologies Public Sociology Award.
We’re in Portuguese! Thanks to Dr. Claudio Cordovil, some of our posts are appearing at the University of Brazil’s Conhecimento Prudente.
I think this is our first appearance as a source on Wikipedia… on the page about the online game, Evony… of all things.
Are you on Google Plus? So are we!
Authors and Contributors in the News:
Contributor Philip Cohen was discussed in an NPR story about using Google searches as data.
I was quoted in an NPR story about photographer Shelby Lee Adams’ portrayal of Appalachia and I enjoyed a few fun minutes on air with CKNW’s Bill Good talking about the recent trend of sexualizing toys for young girls.
Best of January
Our hard-working intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month. Here’s what she found:
Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:
Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:
You might have heard that, after the birth of his daughter with Beyonce Knowles in January, Jay-Z has sworn off calling women “bitches.”His change of heart is illustrative of a trend among fathers documented by sociologists Emily Shafer and Neil Malhotra. Their article measured the effect of a new baby’s sex on a parent’s gender ideology. Their findings? Men’s support for traditional gender roles weakens after they have a daughter; no similar result was documented for new mothers.
This first graph shows the average change in fathers’ attitudes before and after having a daughter and a son. The authors note that both men who have daughters (solid grey line) and those who have sons (black dotted line) show a decrease in support for traditional gender roles, but that men who have daughters show a much more steep decline in support.
This second graph shows the average change in mothers’ attitudes. Notice that mothers start off with a much lower average level of support for traditional gender roles than fathers and appears to decrease over time. These changes, though, are not statistically significant. So this study offers no evidence mothers’ ideologies change the way fathers’ do.
Jay-Z, then, may be experiencing what a lot of fathers experience: a change in their thinking about women inspired by looking into the eyes of their own baby daughter.
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Cite: Shafer, Emily and Neil Malhotra. 2011. The Effect of a Child’s Sex on Support for Traditional Gender Roles. Social Forces 50, 1: 209-222.
Image source:
Originally posted at Religion Bulletin.
Now that Denver has fallen out of the playoffs, I want to write an homage to a figure I, like so many others, find fascinating: Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow. Carter Turner over at Religion Dispatches has suggested that the “real reason” for “Tebow fever” was the theological investment that atheists and theists alike had in watching Tebow succeed or fail. I think that’s absolutely right: Tebow’s body became a sort of theological battleground for broader religious and cultural forces. But I also think there’s an even more elementary reason, one that becomes apparent when we think about Tebow not just as a proxy for doctrine, but as a particular religious body.
Feminism, poststructuralism, and decolonial studies in the humanities have made scholars more and more aware of the importance of bodies. Whereas the logocentric western tradition focused on words — the creations of the intellect — 21st century global scholarship sees words as a secondary function of embodiment. In religious studies, scholars such as Talal Asad, Kimerer LaMothe, and Saba Mahmood have called on us to explore how bodies, through practices, are constituted as religious subjects. Bodies become religious through performance, through embodied exercises that, through repetition, inscribe us with the modalities of a religious “ethics.” But embodiment is more than just practices. I here want to suggest a different direction for understanding the relationship between religion and bodies.
Here’s something I often ask my students to do: Look at this body. How does religion converge on this body?
Let me tell you what I see, using my own bodily practice, martial arts, as a lens. This is a body I would not want to fight. It’s not just about dense muscle lines, the sheer evidence of physical strength, reach, and an intricately arranged posing that suggests bodily self-awareness and sharp muscular intelligence. This body is compelling. It draws the eye. You want to watch it.
This is more dangerous than physical strength — the kind of strength you build on the bench press or the curl. It’s a “presence.” The kind of strength that stops bodies in their tracks without landing a punch. And the kind of strength that draws allies, that rewrites the broader bodily landscape on which conflict happens. This body has what we might call, following Max Weber, “charisma.”
This way of looking at bodies helps us think again about a fact that has become dramatically apparent in the past two years: Tebow is fascinating. People love to talk about him, love to love him, love to hate him. Tebow fever didn’t just happen. It was and is something is felt–viscerally–by millions of bodies around the world.
On the one hand, Tebow is a leader–an emblematic body — for millions of Christians who see in him a dignification of their faith. Faith here is not an abstract personal belief. It is an identity formation, an Us. Tebow is the champion of a certain Christian Us, an embodiment of values and a leader who rallies the believers. As a champion, he doesn’t win through debate, he wins through charisma. He is a hero, resplendent on the battlefield.
At the same time, Tebow is fascinating to other groups — to other bodies — that are frustrated with or skeptical of the Christian Us — and particularly the Christian Us that has managed to insinuate itself into the corridors of power in America through one (but only one) of its instantiations, the Christian Right, a major driver in contemporary Republican politics. These bodies, as Turner pointed out, are interested in Tebow’s failure, the fall of the enemy’s flag.
My argument, however, is this: this profile of the divergent responses to the nexus of religious and cultural forces that converge on the image of Tebow’s body would be irrelevant and unread if Tim Tebow were a schlub–a homely, uninteresting, modest body, the kind of body that bus drivers drive past at the bus stop. It is also an open question to me how we would be responding to Tebow if he were not a white body. Those who want to challenge Tebow, to fight Tebow, to talk about Tebow are drawn in by the seductions of this image–the power of Tebow’s body — no less than those who are so ardently admiring of Tebow that criticism of him becomes a political rallying cry. Tebow’s body is a magnetic body, a charismatic body. It bends other bodies towards it–in both positive and critical ways.
This, then, is one of the main ways that religion happens — how identities, beliefs, and affects form and fuse: not through the advance of doctrine, but through the magnetism of religious bodies.
Thanks to William Eric Pedersen for talking this post out with me and pointing me in the direction of the unanswered question on race.
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Donovan O. Schaefer is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His interests involve the relationship between religion, bodies, and emotion. In his dissertation, Animal Religion: Evolution, Affect, and Radical Embodiment, he argues for understanding religion in terms of a set of affective bodily practices that are shared by human and non-human animals.
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Here’s a fun one for our series on the social construction of flavor!
See also:
And the list wouldn’t be complete without our Jell-O posts:
In this 8 1/2 minute talk, sent in by Dmitriy T.M., AJ Jacobs recounts his efforts to perfectly follow every single piece of health advice he encountered.
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