The 2018 General Social Survey data was just recently publicly released. We were eager to see how things shifted, especially for the demographic questions on sexual identity. As of 2018, it has officially been one decade that GSS has been asking respondents to characterize their sexual identity on the survey, you can self-classify as “heterosexual or straight,” “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexual,” “bisexual,” or “don’t know.” This is only one way to measure sexual identity among many,  but the growth in LGB identity has been generally comparable across instruments in the past.

As Tristan has noted before, reporting on shifts in the LGBT population treats the group as homogenous and artificially presents growth in LGBT identity as though it might be equally distributed among the L’s, G’s, B’s, and T’s. But that’s not true. Bisexual women account for the lion’s share on the growth in LGBT identification. And, as Tristan and Mignon Moore showed in 2016, young Black women account for a disproportionate amount of the growth in LGB identification.

Data from GSS shows an increase in LGB identification between 2008 and 2018. Below, we charted shifts in those identifying as lesbian and gay alongside those identifying as bisexual. Consistent with what Tristan showed in 2016, bisexual identification continues to be increasing at a steeper rate.

In fact, when you look at the proportions identifying as lesbian and gay or bisexual in 2008 and compare those with the proportions identifying as lesbian and gay or bisexual in 2018, lesbian and gay identifications have not really moved much. But bisexual identities continue to increase every year.

This is consistent with other national survey work. For example, using the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), Compton, Farris and Chang (2015) found that almost nine percent of women in the sample and about four percent of men in the sample in 2008 and 2002 reported behavior as bisexual; that is, having sex with at least one male and at least one female partner in their lifetime. Rates of self-identification as bisexual were much lower (in 2008 0.43% of women and 0.38% of men). Perhaps with increases in social tolerance people are more likely to claim bisexual identities today, regardless of their participation in the behavior.

Previous work has also suggested that much of the growth in LGB identities is happening among women. The GSS data show that the shift appears to be primarily happening among bisexual women. Indeed, bisexuality continues to be a more popular sexual identity than lesbian among women, but a less popular sexual identity than gay among men, as others have shown. As of 2018, almost 6% of women responding to the survey identified as bisexual compared with 1.5% in 2008. Comparatively, shifts in lesbian identities among women and both gay and bisexual identities among men really haven’t shifted much.

And similar to previous analyses (here, here, and here), this shift is particularly pronounced among the young. The figure below shows changes in lesbian and gay identities alongside shifts in bisexual identities for four separate age cohorts. The real shift in among bisexual identification among 18-34 year-olds. Between 7 and 8% identified as  bisexual on the 2018 GSS survey. This is all the more interesting when you look at the 2008 data on these figures. Bisexuality did not stand out in these data in 2008. In fact, in 2008, more people identified as lesbian and gay than bisexual. This shift has emerged and grown in an incredibly short period of time.

As other data have shown as well (see here and here, for instance), people of color account for a disproportionate amount of this shift. Black bisexuals accounted for almost 7% of Black respondents on the 2018 GSS. That’s a big shift as well. And while bisexual and lesbian/gay identities were moving along similar trajectories for Black Americans through 2016, as of 2018, bisexuality was much more common (as has been true for White respondents and those of other races… yes “other race” is actually the category GSS uses… and no, it’s not a good idea).

So what do we do with all of this? One thing that we ought to take from this is to take scholarship on bisexuality more seriously. As a sexual identity, bisexuality is less studied than it ought to be. But bisexuality has continued to grow and continues to represent a larger number of people’s sexual identities than lesbian and gay combined. This is interesting for a number of reasons, but one is that much of the growth in the LGBT community might actually be the result of changes in the population of bisexual identifying people (and this is a group that is disproportionately composed of women). Whether bisexual identifying people understand themselves as a part of a distinct sexual minority, though, is a question that deserves more scholarship. If we are going to continue to group bisexuals with lesbian women and gay men when we report on shifts in LGB populations, this might be something that deserves better understanding and more attention. Context matters in how we understand identities and how they change or evolve over time.

Originally posted at Inequality by Interior Design. Read more and dive into the details there!

D’Lane R. Compton, PhD is an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Orleans with a background in social psychology, methodology, and a little bit of demography, they are usually thinking about food, country roads, stigma, queer nooks and places, sneakers and hipster subcultures. You can follow them on twitter.

Tristan Bridges, PhD is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-editor of Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Inequality, and Change with C.J. Pascoe and studies gender and sexual identity and inequality. You can follow him on Twitter here. Tristan also blogs regularly at Inequality by (Interior) Design.

Whether you’re chanting at a protest, partying at a concert, or cheering at a football game, there’s a special kind of excitement that comes from being in a crowd. Émile Durkheim called this “collective effervescence,” and today sociologists use this term to talk about the bubbly emotion that comes from being in the middle of the action.

One of the tricky parts of studying collective effervescence is figuring out what exactly supercharges these social interactions. Does it come from the simple fact that you’re in a crowd, or is it in the way people engage with each other when they get there? If we think about the morning commute or the line at the grocery store, most crowds seem pretty unpleasant and not so effervescent. Recent research published in Sociological Science by Lasse Suonperä Liebst sheds light on the answer with a super fun approach to data collection.

To track collective effervescence, a team of researchers showed up at The Roskilde Festival—one of Europe’s largest music festivals—to survey attendees about whether their camping experiences were “festive, noisy, hectic, boring, or calm.” 

The survey was sampled by a team of 11 university students during the five warm-up days of the festival, which precede the scheduled music program. During this period, tens of thousands of visitors build tent camps and engage in extensive drinking and partying activities. As such, the festival offered a “natural laboratory” (Park 1939) to examine the factors underpinning the collective effervescence that prior studies have identified in this (Pedersen 2014) and similar festival contexts (Niekrenz 2014).

Lasse Suonperä Liebst – “Exploring the Sources of Collective Effervescence: A Multilevel Study.” Sociological Science.

The survey team also collected respondents’ gender, age, previous festival attendance, how much their camp sites were interacting with others, and how much they personally enjoyed the party atmosphere. Then, they used aerial photography to map out how dense the festival crowds were and how close each campsite was to the central stage. 

With all this information collected, statistical models showed that individual preferences for partying did have a positive relationship the with reported level of collective effervescence at their campsite. However, the aerial measure of crowd density was a much stronger predictor of these reports—stronger than attendees’ own accounts of how often their camps were hanging out with others.

These results help us understand how collective effervescence happens, because they show how even just being near a crowd can “sweep people up” into a festive state. We often assume that crowds are stressful unless people choose to be in them or have positive, one-on-one interactions once inside. It is true that context matters—the grocery store queue probably won’t spark a party anytime soon—but this research shows the power of space and place for shaping our social lives.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.

In March, in an Instagram interview with Jameela Jamil, British pop star Sam Smith announced being non-binary in both gender and sexuality, stating “I’m not male or female. I think I float somewhere in between – it’s all on a spectrum” (timestamp 21:50 to 22.10). Smith had made a similar declaration to the Sunday Times in October, 2017, but did not suggest that the media use non-binary gender pronouns at the time. During the interview, Smith also revealed that “the basis of all my sadness” has been body shaming.

This instance of “biography and history” producing a non-binary person haunted by fat-shaming is important to the sociological understanding of gender. It reminds us that gender is lived in the body, not just as an idea but as a “looking-glass self” in which multiple kinds of stigma can simultaneously reduce a person to a “tainted, discounted one”. As culture shapes the way we see ourselves, it can produce an overpowering feeling of what Cooley called “mortification,” because “we always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.” In Mead’s terms, culture produces this in the “generalized other”; how we imagine ourselves as an object in the eyes of the whole society. 

The intersection of body-shaming and transphobia shows us how bullying turns the body into an object. Jamil recounted in the interview that a photographer had called her a “fat c-word.” This can be compared with C.J. Pascoe’s famous study of how the word “fag” is used in bullying to police the gender of boys. Smith concludes the interview with a vow to promote self-forgiveness and the love of the body. This struggle against the gender binary fits within the mission of Jamil’s “I Weigh” instagram series seeking to resist all forms of cultural bullying and policing of bodies, gender expression and sexuality.

Jonathan Harrison, PhD, is an adjunct Professor in Sociology at Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida SouthWestern State College and Hodges University whose PhD was in the field of racism and antisemitism.

SocImages authors and readers love pointing out pointlessly gendered products, especially children’s toys in blue and pink. Since gender is about what we do in the world, all the things we use for work and play can give weight to assumptions about gender differences that aren’t true. Critics of pointlessly gendered products emphasize that small differences in design—from color to function—can ultimately add up to big differences in how people learn to act in the world.

Gendering toys isn’t just about the color, it is also about what we teach kids to do with them. That’s why I got a huge kick out of this video: a compilation of old commercial shots of “white boys winning board games.” Of course, I haven’t done a systemic sampling of old commercials to see if girls win too, but this compilation makes an important point about how we can miss tropes that only show one outcome of social interaction over and over, especially competition.

I remember being a competitive kid when it came to board games. I didn’t like losing at all, and it took quite a few years until I learned to just enjoy playing on its own. After this compilation I look back and wonder whether I just felt bad about losing—as most of us do from time to time—or whether a part of that feeling was also a sense that something was wrong because I was “supposed” to be winning like the other boys. That’s the power of gendered socialization.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.

Black history in Appalachia is largely hidden. Many people think that slavery was largely absent in central and southern Appalachia due to the poverty of the Scots-Irish who frequently settled in the area, and who were purportedly more “ruggedly independent” and pro-abolitionist in their sentiments. Others argue that the mountainous land was not appropriate for plantations, unlike other parts of the South, and so slavery in the area was improbable.

As historian John Inscoe and sociologist Wilma Dunaway show us, this is not the case. According to Inscoe, slavery existed in “every county in Appalachia in 1860.” Dunaway—who collected data from county tax lists, census manuscripts, records from slaveholders, and slave narratives from the area—estimates that 18% of Appalachian households owned slaves, which compares to approximately 29% of Southern families, in general.

While enslaved people in the Appalachian region were less likely to work on large plantations, their experiences were no less harsh. They often tended small farms and livestock, worked in manufacturing and commerce, served tourists, and labored in mining industries. Slave narratives, legal documents, and other records all show that slaves in Appalachia were treated harshly and punitively, despite claims that slavery was more “genteel” in the area than the deep South.

My own research, which focuses on the life experiences of Leslie [“Les”] Whittington, whose grandfather was enslaved, helps to document the presence of slavery in Appalachia and the consequences that exploitative system had for African Americans in the region. Les’s grandfather, John Myra, was owned by Joseph Stepp, who lived in Western North Carolina. Census records show that Joseph Stepp owned seven slaves in 1850, five women and two men, who together ranged from one to 32 years of age. Ten years later, in 1860, schedules show Stepp owned 21 slaves, making him one of the wealthiest property owners in Buncombe County, the county in which he and John Myra lived.

Joseph Stepp was not unique. According to Dunaway, slave owners in Appalachia “monopolized a much higher proportion of their communities’ land and wealth” compared to those outside the area, driving wealth inequality in the region. Part of the legacy of slavery, these inequities remained in place after the Civil War, reinforced by Jim Crow legislation that subjugated African Americans socially, culturally, and politically. Sociologist Karida Brown explains how Jim Crow Laws led approximately six million African Americans to migrate from the South to the North between 1910 and 1970.

Those who stayed in Appalachia, such as John Myra and his descendants, faced continued restrictions, like living in racially segregated neighborhoods, having limited employment opportunities, and not being able to attend racially integrated schools. Such systematic forms of discrimination explain why racial disparities continue to exist today, even within a region where poverty among whites remains above the national average. To understand these existing inequities, we must document the past accurately.

Jacqueline Clark, PhD is a professor of sociology at Ripon College. Her teaching and research interests include social inequalities, the sociology of health and illness, and the sociology of jobs and work. 

The built environment reflects our social world. From urban streets that encourage neighborly relationships, to “hostile design” and policing practices that keep people out of public spaces, the physical structure of a space carries with it a whole set of assumptions about how people should interact in that space.

But social structure isn’t always just imposed on us by architects and city planners. It also invites the opportunity for improvisation and innovation to create new norms. A great example of this is the emergence of “desire paths“—the people-made paths that defy, or improve on, the work of urban design.

Desire paths were the bulk of my commute for years without even realizing it. When you walk a lot, you start to see how much our neighborhoods aren’t built for this most basic kind of travel. It is fun to spot these paths along the way, because they show little pockets of collective action where people have found a better way to get from point A to B. Authors like to highlight how some universities, for example, even wait for desire paths to emerge and then pave them to fit students’ commuting routes.

That said, it is also important to pay attention to the limits that urban design, like all kinds of social structures, continues to impose in our communities. Research shows that walkability may only be weakly related to the social health of a neighborhood, since community cohesion takes more work than just putting people in the same space. Walkable neighborhoods also attract more drivers as people commute in to walk around to shops and restaurants. My alma mater, Michigan State University, paved a ton of desire paths in student neighborhoods across campus. It was great, but if you needed to get to the other side of campus for class in a pinch, there was still the matter of that big stadium complex in the way. Sometimes social improvement still takes a bit more conscious effort.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.

On January 31, The New York Times responded to a letter from Kimberly Probolus, an American Studies PhD candidate, with a commitment to publish gender parity in their letters to the editor (on a weekly basis) in 2019. This policy comes in the wake of many efforts to change the overwhelming overrepresentation of men in the position of “expert” in the media, from the Op-Ed project to womenalsoknowstuff.com (now with a sociology spinoff!) to #citeblackwomen.

The classic sociology article “Doing Gender,” explains that we repeatedly accomplish gender through consistent, patterned interactions. According to the popular press and imagination — such as Rebecca Solnit’s essay, Men Explain Things to Me — one of these patterns includes men stepping into the role of expert. Within the social sciences, there is research on how gender as a performance can explain gender disparities in knowledge-producing spaces.

Women are less likely to volunteer expertise in a variety of spaces, and researchers often explain this finding as a result of self-esteem or confidence. Julia Bear and Benjamin Collier find that, in 2008 for example, only 13% of contributors to Wikipedia were women. Two reasons cited for this gender disparity were a lack of confidence in their expertise and a discomfort with editing (which involves conflict). Likewise, studies of classroom participation have consistently found that men are more likely than women to talk in class — an unsurprising finding considering that classroom participation studies show that students with higher confidence are more likely to participate. Within academia, research shows that men are much more likely to cite themselves as experts within their own work.

This behavior may continue because both men and women are sanctioned for behavior that falls outside of gender performances. In research on salary negotiation, researchers found that women can face a backlash when they ask for raises because self-promotion goes against female gender norms. Men, on the other hand, may be sanctioned for being too self-effacing.

Knowledge exchange on the Internet may make the sanctions for women in expert roles more plentiful. As demonstrated by the experiences of female journalists, video game enthusiasts, and women in general online, being active on the Internet carries intense risk of exposure to trolling, harassment, abuse, and misogyny. The social science research on online misogyny is also recent and plentiful.

Social media can also be a place to amplify the expertise of women or to respond to particularly egregious examples of mansplaining. And institutions like higher education and the media can continue to intervene to disrupt the social expectation that an expert is always a man. Check out the “Overlooked” obituary project for previously underappreciated scientists and thinkers, including the great sociologist Ida B. Wells.

For more on gendered confidence in specific areas, such as STEM, see more research on Gendering Intelligence.

• Julia B. Bear and Benjamin Collier. 2016. “Where Are the Women in Wikipedia? Understanding the Different Psychological Experiences of Men and Women in Wikipedia.” Sex Roles 74(5–6): 254–65.
• Kelly A. Rocca. 2010. “Student Participation in the College Classroom: An Extended Multidisciplinary Literature Review.” Communication Education 59(2): 185–213.
• Molly M. King, Carl T. Bergstrom, Shelley J. Correll, Jennifer Jacquet, and Jevin D. West. 2017. “Men Set Their Own Cites High: Gender and Self-citation across Fields and over Time” Socius 3: 1-22.
• Linda Babcock, Sara Laschever, Michelle Gelfand, and Deborah Small. 2003. “Nice Girls Don’t Ask.” Harvard Business Review October: 2–5.
• Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, Julie E. Phelan, and Laurie A. Rudman. 2010. “When Men Break the Gender Rules: Status Incongruity and Backlash against Modest Men.” Psychology of Men & Masculinity 11(2): 140–51.
• Mairead Eastin Moloney and Tony P. Love. 2018. “Assessing Online Misogyny: Perspectives from Sociology and Feminist Media Studies.” Sociology Compass 12(5).
• Nicola Henry and Anastasia Powell. 2018. “Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence: A Literature Review of Empirical Research.” Trauma, Violence & Abuse 19(2): 195-208.

Originally Posted at There’s Research On That

Jean Marie Maier is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Minnesota. She completed the Cultural Studies of Sport in Education MA program at the University of California, Berkeley, and looks forward to continuing research on the intersections of education, gender, and sport. Jean Marie has also worked as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Gumi, South Korea and as a research intern at the American Association of University Women. She holds a BA in Political Science from Davidson College.

Last month, Green Book won Best Picture at the 91^st Academy Awards. The movie tells the based-on-a-true-story of Tony Lip, a white working-class bouncer from the Bronx, who is hired to drive world-class classical pianist Dr. Don Shirley on a tour of performances in the early-1960s Deep South. Shirley and Lip butt heads over their differences, encounter Jim Crow-era racism, and, ultimately, form an unlikely friendship. With period-perfect art direction and top-notch actors in Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, the movie is competently-crafted and performed fairly well at the box office.

Still, the movie has also been controversial for at least two reasons. First, many critics have pointed out that the movie paints a too simple account of racism and racial inequality and positions them as problem in a long ago past. New York Times movie critic Wesley Morris has called Green Book the latest in a long line of “racial reconciliation fantasy” films that have gone on to be honored at the Oscars.

But Green Book stands out for another reason. It’s an unlikely movie to win the Best Picture because, well, it’s just not very good.

Sociologists have long been interested in how Hollywood movies represent society and which types of movies the Academy does and doesn’t reward. Matthew Hughey, for example, has noted the overwhelming whiteness of Oscar award winners at the Oscars, despite the Oscars A2020 initiative aimed at improving the diversity of the Academy by 2020. But, as Maryann Erigha shows, the limited number of people of color winning at the Oscars reflects, in part, the broader under-representation and exclusion of people of color in Hollywood.

Apart from race, past research by Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke has found that the Oscars tend to favor certain genres like dramas, period pieces, and movies about media workers (e.g., artists, journalists, musicians). Most winners are released in the final few months of the year and have actors or directors with multiple prior nominations. According to these considerations, Green Book had a lot going for it. Released during the holiday season, it is a historical movie about a musician, co-starring a prior Oscar winner and a prior multiple time Oscar nominee. Sounds like perfect Oscar bait.

And, yet, quality matters, too. It’s supposed to be the Best Picture after all. The problem is what makes a movie “good” is both socially-constructed and a matter of opinion. Most studies that examine questions related to movies measure quality using the average of film critics’ reviews. Sites like Metacritic compile these reviews and produce composite scores on a scale from 0 (the worst reviewed movie) to 100 (the best reviewed movie). Of course, critics’ preferences sometimes diverge from popular tastes (see: the ongoing box office success of the Transformers movies, despite being vigorously panned by critics). Still, movies with higher Metacritic scores tend to do better at the box office, holding all else constant.

If more critically-acclaimed movies do better at the box office, how does quality (or at least the average of critical opinion) translate into Academy Awards? It is certainly true that Oscar nominees tend to have higher Metacritic scores than the wider population of award-eligible movies. But the nominees are certainly not just a list of the most critically-acclaimed movies of the year. Among the films eligible for this year’s awards, movies like The Rider, Cold War, Eight Grade, The Death of Stalin, and even Paddington 2 all had higher Metacritic scores than most of the Best Picture nominees. So, while nominated movies tend to be better than most movies, they are not necessarily the “best” in the eyes of the critics.

Even among the nominees, it is not the case that the most critically-acclaimed movie always wins. In the plot below, I chart the range of Metacritic scores of the Oscars nominees since the Academy Awards reinvented the category in 2009 (by expanding the number of nominees and changing the voting method). The top of the golden area represents the highest-rated movie in the pool of nominees and the bottom represents the worst-rated film. The line captures the average of the pool of nominees and the dots point out each year’s winner.

As we can see, the most critically-acclaimed movie doesn’t always win, but the Best Picture is usually above the average of the pool of nominees. What makes Green Book really unusual as a Best Picture winner is that it’s well below the average of this year’s pool and the worst winner since 2009. Moreover, according to MetaCritic (and LA Times’ film critic Justin Chang), Green Book is the worst winner since Crash in 2005.

Green Book’s Best Picture win has led to some renewed calls to reconsider the Academy’s ranked choice voting system in which voters indicate the order of preferences rather than voting for a single movie. The irony is that when Moonlight, a highly critically-acclaimed movie with an all-black cast, won in 2016, that win was seen as a victory made possible by ranked choice voting. Now, in 2019, we have a racially-controversial and unusually weak Best Picture winner that took home the award because it appears to have been the “least disliked” movie in the pool.

The debate over ranked choice voting for the Academy Awards may ultimately end in further voting rule changes. Until then, we should regard a relatively weak movie like Green Book winning Best Picture as the exception to the rule.   

Andrew M. Lindner is an Associate Professor at Skidmore College. His research interests include media sociology, political sociology, and sociology of sport.