Sociological Images

This vintage ad for a cockroach racing game is a great reminder that what seems normal isn’t necessarily natural or inevitable.  Most Americans today would grimace at the idea of playing with cockroaches, as the insect is held up as an icon of filth and disease.  But sometime in the ’40s, someone at the International Mutoscope Reel Company thought this was a good idea!  Or, then again, maybe times haven’t changed so much; the company went bankrupt in 1949.

From Weird Universe.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

In the third stall at a women’s room at the University of Western Ontario, someone had written, “What was the worst day of your life?”

A few responses were humorous, but most were serious.

• Every day, struggling with an eating disorder.
• The day I found out my father was an alcoholic.
• The day I was raped.

One student who saw these took a piece of notebook paper, wrote a sympathetic response to each, and taped it on the wall of the stall (transcript follows):

Transcript (borrowed from The Huffington Post):

To the girl who was raped: You are so strong. I cannot fathom the pain you must have gone through. The fact that you have the bravery to write it (even on a bathroom wall) gives me hope.

To the girl with eating disorders: I promise you, although I don’t know you, you are beautiful, you deserve your health. You deserve freedom from that hell.

To the girl with the alcoholic father: I am so sorry for the agony it must cause. Again, such courage is remarkable you must be such a strong person to see such pain.

To the girl whose father died: Missing them never goes away. The ache of their absence never goes away. But the love they had, the memories you share surely must last. I am sure, out of the bottom of my heart, the people who have left you in this world are exceptionally proud of the person you are.

Everytime(sic) I see these walls, these confessions, I feel so blessed to know I have the priviledge(sic) of seeing them. Your moments, these secrets, are all precious even though they are sad. To all of you (including those I did not mention, and those who have not yet written)

-You are worthy.
-You are strong.
-You are brave.
-You are loved.
-Somebody cares.

It  went viral.  Reddit picked it up, and the story has been in Canadian newspapers.  But this example is not so unusual.  A study of bathroom graffiti at a New Zealand university (unfortunately behind a paywall) found similar themes:

…inscriptions in the women’s toilets were talking about love and romance, soliciting personal advice on health issues and relationships, and discussing what exact act constitutes rape. Women also tried to placate more heated discussions (e.g., “Stop this. There is no reason to say these things. Why so much in-fighting?”).

The men wrote about politics and money (especially taxes and tuition).  Men also posted insults that were far more numerous and aggressive than those in the women’s room.  Only the men wrote racist graffiti.

Drier’s note, then, is a nice example of a documented trend: anonymous women being nice to each other in their bathrooms.

Cross-posted at Girl w/ Pen.

What’s the big deal about uptalk? In The College of William & Mary’s Tom Linneman took a look at how women and men both use uptalk in his new study, “Gender in Jeopardy! Intonation Variation on a Television Game Show” in Gender & Society.

The punchline? Women use uptalk more frequently, but men use it as well. For men, however, uptalk signals something completely different.

What is uptalk?

“Uptalk is the use of a rising, questioning intonation when making a statement, which has become quite prevalent in contemporary American speech,” explains Linneman. Uptalk in the U.S. is reported to have emerged in the 1980s among adolescent women in California, aka “Valley Girls,” and it has become more widely used by men and women since then. Uptalk has been associated with a way of talking that makes women sound less confident Or is it makes people sound more like a girl?

Jeopardy! was Linneman’s clever setting for observing how women and men use the speech pattern. The associate professor of sociology analyzed the use of uptalk by carefully coding 5,500 responses from 300 contestants in 100 episodes of the popular game show. He looked at what happened to speech patterns when contestants — from a variety of backgrounds — gave their answers to host Alex Trebek.  Although the contestants were asked to phrase their response in the form of a question, they used uptalk just over a third of the time.

How do men use uptalk? 

Linneman found that men use uptalk as a way to signal uncertainty.   Linneman explained, “On average, women used uptalk nearly twice as often as men. However, if men responded incorrectly, their intonation betrayed their uncertainty: Their use of uptalk shot up dramatically.”  On average, men who answered correctly used uptalk only 27% of the time. Among incorrect responses, men used uptalk 57% of the time.  In contrast, a woman who answered correctly used uptalk 48% of the time, nearly as often as an incorrect man.

Men’s uptalk increased when they were less confident, and also when they were correcting women — but not men. When a man corrected another man — that is, following a man’s incorrect answer with a correct one — he used uptalk 22% of the time. When a man corrected another woman, though, he used uptalk 53% of the time. Linneman speculates that men are engaging in a kind of chivalry: men can be blunt with another man in public, but feel obliged to use a softer edge with a woman.

How do women use uptalk?

As Linneman explains, “One of the most interesting findings coming out of the project is that success has an opposite effect on men and women on the show.”  Linneman measured success in two ways: He compared challengers to returning champions, and he tracked how far ahead or behind contestants were when they responded.  Linneman found that, “The more successful a man is on the show, the less he uses uptalk. The opposite is true for women… the more successful a woman is on the show, the more she uses uptalk.” Linneman suspects that this is “because women continue to feel they must apologize for their success.”

Probabilities of Uptalk by Certainty, Age, Race, and Gender

Virginia Rutter is a professor of sociology at Framingham State University.  She is the author, with Pepper Schwartz, of The Gender of Sexuality and The Love Test.  You can follow her on Twitter and at Girl w/Pen.

CollegeHumor posted a set of fake Puritan-themed Valentine’s Day cards.  They’re a humorous way of reminding us that our intensive focus on romantic love as a driving force for sex and marriage is, in fact, quite new.

When the Puritans landed on the rocky east coast of America in the 1600s, they brought with them the belief that sex should be restricted to intercourse in marriage, hence the sentiment on the left. All non-marital and non-reproductive sexual activities were forbidden, including pre- and extra-marital sex, homosexual sex, masturbation, and oral or anal sex (even if married).   Violations of the rules were punished by fines, whipping, public shaming (yes, with “scarlet letters”), ostracism, or even death.

Alongside religion, there were practical reasons why the Puritans were so darn puritanical.  Colonizing the U.S. was a dangerous job; lots of people were dying from exposure, starvation, illness, and war.  Babies replenished the labor supply, motivating the Puritans to channel the sex drive towards the one sexual activity that made babies: intercourse. Accordingly, having intercourse with your spouse wasn’t only allowed, it was essential; women could divorce men who had proven impotent.  

The Puritans also married primarily to form practical partnerships for bearing children and mutual survival, hence the sentiment in the card on the right.

The idea that love should be the basis for marriage didn’t take hold until the Victorian era, when industrialization was changing the value of children.  Useful on the farm, children were suddenly became a burden in expensive and overcrowded lodgings.  This gave couples a new reason to limit the number of children they had and, because industrial production had made condoms increasingly cheap and effective, they could.  Marital fertility rates dropped precipitously between 1800 and 1900: from 6+ children/woman to 3 1/2 in the U.S., England, and Wales.

In this context, a Puritan sexual ethic that restricted sex to efforts to make babies just didn’t make sense. People needed a new logic to guide sexual activity: the answer was love. Over the course of the 1800s, Victorians slowly abandoned the Puritan idea that sex was only for reproduction, embracing instead the now familiar idea that sex could be an expression of love and a source of pleasure, an idea that still resonates strongly today.

That’s at least part of the story anyway.

Sources:

Bremer, Francis J., and Tom Webster.  2006. Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia. SantaBarbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc.

D’Emilio, John & Estelle Freedman. 1997. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freedman, Estelle. 1982. Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics. Reviews in American History 10, 4: 196-215.

For 100 years Valentine’s Day was not only associated with sweet sentiments, but was an occasion to send a cruel and biting message to someone you didn’t like.  These cards — called “vinegar valentines” — were popular from 1840 to 1940 in both America and the U.K.

Annebella Pollen, an art and design historian who talks about the valentine’s at Collector’s Weekly, explains that there was a valentine for many types of people and occasions:

 You could send them to your neighbors, friends, or enemies. You could send them to your schoolteacher, your boss, or people whose advances you wanted to dismiss. You could send them to people you thought were too ugly or fat, who drank too much, or people acting above their station. There was a card for pretty much every social ailment.

Pollen insists that people did send them to one another, albeit anonymously, and they were not meant to be jokes. Instead, they were meant to say: “Your behavior is unacceptable.”  For much of the 1800s there was no such thing as a pre-paid stamp, so the person who got the mail paid for it, so often they were forced to buy their own insults, a twist of the knife from the sender.

Many, many more vinegar valentine’s at Collector’s Weekly, where I also stole this great title.  Via BoingBoing.

Cross-posted at Hawkblocker.This Dove commercial for hair dye is just fascinating.  It features a woman talking about what color means to her.  She observes that color is sensual, drawing connections between certain colors and the feeling of a cool breeze, the sun on one’s skin, a taste on one’s tongue, and more.  She says colors are moods: blonde is bubbly, red is passionate. The voice-over explains that dying her hair makes life “more vivid” and makes her want to laugh and dance.  She does it to invoke these characteristics.

She then explains that she’s blind.  The commercial uses her blindness to suggest that hair dye isn’t about color at all.  It’s about the feeling having dyed hair gives you, even if you can’t see the color.  ”I don’t need to see it,” she says, “I can feel it.”

By using a woman who is (supposedly) blind, the commercial for hair dye uses the element of surprise to detach the product from the promise.  The sole purpose of hair dye is changing how something looks, but this ad claims that the change in appearance is entirely incidental.  Instead, dying one’s hair is supposed to make all of life more vibrant, every moment incredibly special, every pleasure more intense, and fill you to the brim with happy emotions.  It’s completely absurd.  Fantastically absurd. Insult-our-intelligence absurd.

And yet, it’s also exactly what nearly every other commercial and print ad does.  Most ads promise — in one way or another — that their product will make you happier, your life brighter, and your relationships more magical.  The product is positioned as the means, but not an end.   Most hair dye commercials, for example, promise that (1) if your hair is dyed to be more conventionally beautiful, (2) you will feel better/people will treat you better and, so, (3) your life will be improved.  This ad just skips the middle step, suggesting that chemicals in hair dye do this directly.

So, I’m glad to come across this utterly absurd commercial. It’s a good reminder to be suspicious of this message in all advertising.

Cross-posted at Montclair Socioblog.

In the New York Times, Arthur Brooks argues that conservatives are happier than liberals.

Brooks starts with a reference to Barack Obama’s remark four years ago  about “bitter” blue-collar Whites who “cling to guns or religion.” Misleading, says Brooks.  So is a large body of research showing conservatives as “authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking.”

Despite that research, it’s conservatives, not liberals, who identify themselves as happy.  And, Brooks adds, the farther right you go on the political spectrum, the more happy campers you find.

Brooks cites a couple of surveys that support this view.  I was a bit skeptical, so I went to the GSS.

Sure enough, by about 10 percentage points, more conservatives identify themselves as “very happy” than do liberals.  The difference is even higher among the extreme conservatives.   As Brooks says, “none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers, many of whom cling to guns and faith with great tenacity.”

Brooks cites two important factors linking political views and happiness: marriage (with children) and religion.

Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don’t depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.*

I still found it hard to reconcile these sunny right-wingers with the image of bitter and angry Tea Partiers.  Then I remembered that the Tea Party is a very recent phenomenon.  To a great extent, it’s a reaction to the election of President Obama.    But Brooks is looking at pre-Obama studies of happiness.  The most recent one he cites is from 2006.  As the GSS graph above shows, Brooks is correct when he says, “This pattern has persisted for decades.”  But those decades don’t include the Tea Party.

Maybe conservatives were happy because until recently, they didn’t have much to be bitter about.  The US was their country, and they knew it.   Then Obama was elected, and ever since November 2008 conservatives have kept talking about “taking back our country.” (See my “Repo Men” post from 2 1/2 years ago.)

What if we look at the data from the Obama years?

Maybe that bitter Tea Party image isn’t such a distortion.  The GSS does not offer “bitter” or “Tea Party”  as choices, but those who identify themselves as “extreme conservative” are nearly three times as likely as others to be “not too happy.”  And overall, the happiness gap between conservatives and liberals is hard to find.

For all I know, Brooks’s general conclusion may be correct, but the recent data do at least raise some questions and suggest that the political context is itself a relevant variable.

Nearly eighty years ago, Harold Lasswell said that politics is about “who gets what, when, and how.”  Maybe the lesson here is that if you are going to study the connection between political views and happiness, you should take account of who is getting what, and when.

*That’s a bit misleading.  Happiness is in fact related to income, race, and education in exactly the ways you would expect, though for some reason Brooks does not include those variables in his analysis.  What Brooks means is that the religion effect holds even when you control for those variables. 

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Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University.  You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.