In a recent editorial in the Huffington Post, Abby Ferber, Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Ethnic Studies, uses the recent coverage of  Arnold Schwarzenegger’s child from an affair and Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a woman in NYC as an opportunity to examine often ignored elements of heterosexual privilege.

As Ferber reminds us, this is not the first time men in positions of power have been accused of sexual activity not befitting a married (or unmarried) man.

Another news cycle focused on powerful men’s inappropriate and abusive sexual behavior…Before Arnold, it was Tiger Woods, and John Edwards, and ______ (fill in the blank with one of the many other names that might pop into your mind at this point).
We have heard it all before. The flurry of newspaper and tabloid articles rehash the same old issues.

However, one accusation that is absent in the glut of sensationalist coverage, is that these men are destroying marriage itself. Instead, Ferber explains, we reserve that accusation for gay and lesbian couples seeking the right to marry.

The actions of individual heterosexual men are never used against all heterosexuals. One of the central benefits of being part of a privileged social identity group is that your own behavior is never taken as representing that of your entire group. No matter how many stories we hear about heterosexual men committing adultery and destroying their marriages, why is it that we continue to hear that it is LGBT people that are the greatest threat to the institution of marriage?

The privilege extends beyond the marital walls to negative stereotypes about deviant sexual desires and lack of self-control.

And what about the stereotypes of gay men as promiscuous, or as pedophiles? Here heterosexual men have gay men beat as well, and there is no dearth of public examples…And yet again it is gay men that our society stereotypes as pedophiles.

Ferber’s brief, but powerful, op-ed shows the importance of not only looking at what is said, but also what is not said. Sometimes it is the questions not asked, and generalizations not made, that reveal the benefits of positions of power.

That is what heterosexual privilege does, it allows individual heterosexual men to behave badly without anyone assuming it says something about all heterosexuals. And the point is not to assume that it does, but to ask why so many are willing to quickly make these assumptions about those who do not share the benefits of heterosexual privilege.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, sociologist Jaye Cee Whitehead shared her thoughts on economic arguments for gay marriage.

In a letter to the New York State Legislature last month, top business executives endorsed same-sex marriage on the ground that “attracting talent is key to our state’s economic future.” The signers — among them the banker Lloyd C. Blankfein, the financier Ronald O. Perelman, the real estate developer Jerry I. Speyer and the publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman — declared that legalizing gay unions would “help maintain our competitive advantage in attracting the best and brightest people the world has to offer.”

This letter is one of many examples of promoting marriage equality as good for business.

States and cities are, as the New York executives pointed out, competing to attract talent in a globally competitive labor market. The wedding industry benefits, of course, when more couples are allowed to marry. And marriage equality is associated with revenue gains from sales taxes and license fees. Backers of gay marriage speak openly of the gains from “marriage tourism” in states that have legalized same-sex marriage.

So why shouldn’t gays and lesbians have equality and bolster the economy at the same time?  In Whitehead’s eyes,

. . . supporting marriage on economic grounds dehumanizes same-sex couples by conflating civil rights with economic perks. Americans should be offended when the value of gays and lesbians is reduced to their buying power as consumers or their human and creative capital as workers. . .Worse yet, this narrative neglects the most economically vulnerable gay and lesbian couples and plays into the inaccurate stereotype of same-sex couples (particularly male couples) as being mostly well-educated and affluent.

Indeed, many proponents of same-sex marriage often point out that legalizing same-sex marriage may reduce spending on welfare programs.  But, Whitehead explains why these and other economic arguments are problematic.

Supporters of same-sex marriage ought to acknowledge that marriage is not just a natural expression of human intimacy or a declaration of personal commitment; it is a form of governance. The vast expansion of the government over the past century has embedded marriage into all areas where the state and the individual intersect, from tax obligations to disability benefits to health care decisions to family law. As with any other structure of governance in a democratic society, we ought to think about its participants as citizens rather than consumers.

So if you support same-sex marriage, do so not because it brings in tax revenue and tourism dollars and prevents people from becoming a burden on the state, but because you value gay men and lesbians as citizens who deserve equal access to the rights and responsibilities of marriage.

On April 21st, 2011, Harold Garfinkel, one of the important figures of the sociological canon and the man responsible for countless ‘face the wrong way in an elevator’ or ‘eat like a dog in a crowded cafateria’ introduction to sociology labs, passed away. He was 93.

The New York Times honored his passing with an account of his importance to the discipline and to broader understandings of the social world. In the article Garfinkel is attributed with the ability to draw out the complexity of even the simplest social interaction. His tendency to match the complexity of the social world with the complexity of his writing is also noted when he is characterized as:

an innovative sociologist who turned the study of common sense into a dense and arcane discipline.

Through development of the sociological approach known as ethnomethodology, Garfinkel went against the grain of the discipline by focusing on how members of society worked together to create social order rather than focusing on how the social rules determined the behaviors of individual members of society.

Mr. Garfinkel was sometimes likened to a quantum physicist because, in effect, he suggested that the fundamental building blocks of a social order were much smaller and much harder to observe than had been previously believed. Rules were not the smallest particles of social order, he found; rather, the rules themselves would be impossible without the bits of knowledge, the gestures and the methods of reasoning that allow people to communicate.

John Heritage, a professor of sociology at U.C.L.A., explains,

“His point of view wasn’t that rules aren’t important, but that how they get interpreted and applied is a matter of mutual negotiation. We have to have common resources for any form of coordinated action of human beings, and we use these common resources just to exist in a shared world. It’s a fundamental part of the human condition.”

In Garfinkel’s seminal work, Studies in Ethnomethodology, published in 1967, he introduced sociologists to so-called “breaching” experiments:

in which the subjects’ expectations of social behavior were violated; for example, a subject playing tic tac toe was confronted with an opponent who made his marks on the lines dividing the spaces on the game board instead of in the spaces themselves. Their reactions — outrage, anger, puzzlement, etc. — helped demonstrate the existence of underlying presumptions that constitute social life.

As Professor Heritage explains, the book had influence beyond disciplinary walls.

“Not only did it deal with rules and language, which are fundamental elements of sociological study, but it reached across many fields: cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy. You wouldn’t get any argument if you said it was among the 10 most important books in sociology in the 20th century.”

After Sunday’s announcement that bin Laden had been killed, people gathered in front of the White House and Ground Zero in what many social scientists say was a rare moment of American unity. The Christian Science Monitor turned to social scientists to reflect upon these celebrations.

“It’s one of those things that is as close to what passes for a day of national unity in the U.S. as we can get these days,” said Peter Ditto, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine who studies politics and judgment.

But, debates are already in full swing, as people consider whether flag-waving and chanting were appropriate ways to respond to a death.

At times, the scene seemed like that of a sporting event, with people climbing lamp posts and singing “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye),” a song more associated with losing basketball teams than the war on terror. That’s not a surprising dynamic, according to Francesco Duina, a sociologist at Bates College in Maine and author of “Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession” (Princeton University Press, 2011). American culture is particularly competitive, Duina said.

“The percentage of Americans who embrace competition is higher than the percentage in any other industrialized country in the world,” Duina told LiveScience.

Duina also shared that to many people, bin Laden’s death is a confirmation that our approach to life is superior to his.  “That’s what’s being celebrated, and that’s why you see the flags.”

Political differences likely explain some differences in opinion regarding the appropriate way to respond to this death.  But, sociologists point out another—generational differences.  Many people in the crowds were college students, who often don’t have to work early in the morning.

But young people also experienced 9/11 differently than those in older age cohorts, said Andrew Perrin, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied the cultural aftereffects of 9/11.

“If you were 8 or 9 at the time, by the time you began thinking about world politics, 9/11 was a thoroughly interpreted, thoroughly understood, if you will, cultural event,” Perrin told LiveScience. “So you didn’t go through the same level of experiencing this unsettled time and doing the work of interpreting it. You experienced it as something that was thoroughly understood before it was presented to you.”

In a recent opinion column in the Star Tribune, John Rash points to the absence of religion as a major theme in shows on the national television networks.

The absence is all the more surprising considering that 80% of Americans reported to Gallup that religion plays a ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ important role in their lives.

And as Rash reminds readers, religion continues to maintain a very visible presence in other popular culture:

Topping the bestseller list is “Heaven is for Real,” about a boy witnessing the afterlife following a near-death experience.
The hottest Broadway show is “The Book of Mormon,” a satire (and grudging admiration) of the faith from the creators of “South Park.”
The highest-grossing R-rated film ever isn’t a gross-out comedy, Quentin Tarantino-style nihilistic violence, or even a sexual coming-of-age story, but “The Passion of the Christ.”

To help understand the absence, Rash turns to academia. Professor Jeanne Halgren Kilde, director of religious studies at the University of Minnesota, explains that even though network television rarely features explicitly religious themes, it is engaging in many of the same debates.

“Questions about good and evil, justice, personal destiny, love, about relationships — these are the narratives we see on TV that are the same questions religion has been asking, and answering, forever. So TV becomes in some senses a kind of superseding of what had been the religious context of discussing, to a more secular context of answering these questions.”

And, while the major religions are rarely a central theme in popular television, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of shows with spiritual and paranormal themes.

Hitting its peak around 2006, this trend inverted media maven Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: This time, the message was the mediums — as well as the psychics, ghost hunters and clairvoyant crimefighters who populated prime-time in shows like “Medium,” “Supernatural” and “Ghost Whisperer.”

Penny Edgell, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota provides context to the rise.

“Network prime time is responding to a trend,” said Penny Edgell “And thus it’s perpetuating and popularizing that trend of people thinking about spiritual things, but drawing on a different kind of repertoire that’s more about relationships and flexible personal contacts that might shape your own life that don’t have anything to do with a doctrine or a church. There’s a lot of the supernatural on TV, but not a lot of organized religion. And that mirrors trends in how people are thinking about their spirituality; it mirrors a rise of a discourse that emphasized spirituality of something that’s distinct from, but not always in opposition to, organized religion.”

Rash does make note of one of the few shows where religion is discussed – America’s longest running cartoon, The Simpsons.

Even the Catholic Church’s official newspaper, Osservatore Ramono, honed in on Homer, saying he “finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong.”

Whether or not the misadventures of America’s favorite animated family is the appropriate venue for a national discussion of religion remains up for debate.

If anything positive came from the debacle that surrounded the International Association of Athletics
Federation’s attempts to ‘determine’ South African runner Caster Semenya’s sex, it is that it brought to light the crude methods that were being used to enforce the male/female binary in sports (See David Zirin and Sherry Wolf’s article in the Nation for critical coverage of the initial controversy).

Two years later the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federation, the governing body for track and field, have released a new policy to regulate athletes whose sex development is considered unusual to avoid a repeat of the nightmare that Semenya faced.

In a recent editorial in the The New York Times, Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, provides a critical read of the new policy. Dreger explains that initially the policy seems like an improvement because:

The new policy no longer allows any room for a simplistic “I know it when I see it” approach to who counts as a female athlete.

The new system relies on setting the ‘appropriate’ levels of functional testosterone a female athlete should have. However, as Dregger argues, this policy is fundamentally sexist. Both men and women naturally produce testosterone.

Yet despite the fact that testosterone belongs to women, too, the I.O.C. and the I.A.A.F. are basically saying it is really a manly thing: “You can have functional testosterone, but if you make too much, you’re out of the game because you’re not a real woman.”

Dregger explains that men are free of any equivalent biochemical policing and can take full advantage of any ‘mutation’ that gives him an advantage. In efforts to create ‘the mythical level playing field’ the committee has taken another step in a now rich history of controlling and categorizing women’s bodies. For women athletes who have more functional testosterone than is considered appropriate for a female the only option is to “submit to being made sexually ‘normal’ through hormone treatments” or they cannot compete.

While Dregger is sympathetic to the difficulties that I.O.C. and I.A.A.F. face, she finds little progress in the decision

this newly proposed biological reduction of women to a hormonally disadvantaged class of people — one medically made disadvantaged, if necessary — struck many of us as regressive from the standpoint of women’s rights. Indeed, it reminds me of those itty-bitty shorts that college women’s volleyball players must wear. They each sexualize the bodies of female athletes as a requirement of play. They each insist that a woman never be manly.

Perhaps the biggest take away point from Dregger’s article and the debates surrounding how to define and separate male from female in the sporting arena is that:

There is no perfect solution, one that is reasonably objective, universally applicable and universally satisfying.

According to a recent New York Times article, white children will soon be in the minority in the United States.  In fact, a new report based on Census 2010 data showed that the population of white children fell by 4.3 million (10%) in the last decade, while the population of  Hispanic and Asian children grew by 5.5 million (38%).

The Census Bureau had originally forecast that 2023 would be the tipping point for the minority population under the age of 18. But rapid growth among Latinos, Asians and people of more than one race has pushed it earlier, to 2019, according to William Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who wrote the report about the shift, which has far-reaching political and policy implications.

The largest increase was among Hispanics, whose birth rates are much higher than non-Hispanic whites, in large part because the U.S. white population is aging.

As a result, America’s future will include a far more diverse young population, and a largely white older generation. The contrast raises important policy questions. Will the older generation pay for educating a younger generation that looks less like itself? And while the young population is a potential engine of growth for the economy, will it be a burden if it does not have access to adequate education?

As the Supreme Court considers a case regarding discrimination at Wal-Mart, a key issue is sociologist William Bielby’s research.

Plaintiffs in the class-action suit, who claim that Wal-Mart owes billions of dollars to as many as 1.5 million women who they say were unfairly treated on pay and promotions, enlisted the support of William T. Bielby, an academic specializing in “social framework analysis.”

Bielby concluded that two aspects of Wal-Mart’s culture might be behind pay and other disparities.

One was a centralized personnel policy. The other was allowing subjective decisions by managers in the field. Together, he said, those factors allowed stereotypes to infect personnel choices, making “decisions about compensation and promotion vulnerable to gender bias

Now, a main question in the case is whether Bielby should have been allowed to use general research to draw specific conclusions in the preliminary proceedings.

“Bielby made a conclusion that he had no basis to make,” said Laurens Walker, one of two University of Virginia professors who coined the term for the analysis almost 25 years ago. “He hasn’t done the research.”

But a brief supporting the plaintiffs from the American Sociological Association said that Professor Bielby’s work explaining how Wal-Mart’s policies may have led to discrimination “is well within our discipline’s accepted methods.”

Click here for the full story from the New York Times.

Last fall, 27-year-old Ohad Ben-Yaakov was injured in an accident at his part-time job, and he died after two weeks in a coma. Ben-Yaakov wasn’t married, nor was he in a relationship. No woman was pregnant with his child. Nevertheless, his devastated parents believe it’s not too late for them to become the grandparents of his offspring. And because they live in Israel, the world capital of in-vitro fertilization and a country that regularly pushes the envelope on reproductive technologies, they might get their wish.

No, this isn’t science fiction.  It’s reality in Israeli, and  Tablet recently explored an Israeli court’s consideration of whether parents have the right to use their dead son’s frozen sperm to create a grandchild.

It’s not surprising that Israel, a society that is at once rooted in ancient faith and deeply invested in cutting-edge technology, has pioneered futuristic forms of procreation. The biblical emphasis on fruitfulness, when compounded by the legacy of the Holocaust and the demographic issues shaping the Middle East, have made Israeli society and public policy exceptionally pro-natalist. The country is aggressive in pushing the boundaries of reproductive technology.

Some scholars worry about how these boundaries are being pushed, though.

“It used to be, God forbid you were infertile, it was sad and terrible and tragic, but you came to terms with it,” says Susan Martha Kahn, a Harvard anthropologist and author of Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. “Now you can never come to terms with it. There’s no resolution. Some of these women go through round after round, 12, 15 rounds of IVF, and it doesn’t work. That is the eclipse of an entire young life spent trying to get pregnant.

Vardit Ravitsky, a professor in the Bioethics Programs at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Medicine, adds:

“Where we are with reproductive technologies is a result of the fact that we have refused to accept infertility as a fact . . . Today, the idea that I have a right to have a genetic child is much more accepted than in the past. To extend that one generation to genetic grandchildren maybe is not that farfetched.”

As the author of the article thoughtfully asks, when should a tragedy be accepted rather than combated with technology? Who gets to decide?  For more questions and discussion, see the full article.

Judging by the popularity of cat and dog videos on the Internet, it seems safe to say that pets have assumed an important role in our society.

However, as Benedict Carey explores in a recent NY Times article, the pet’s position within the family can be a contentious topic.

“The big bone of contention was that my mom and my sister thought that he was too smart to be treated like a dog; they thought he was a person and should be treated as such — well, spoiled,” said Danielle, a Florida woman who asked that her last name not be published to avoid more family pet strife. “The dog remains to this day, 10 years later, a source of contention and anger.”

To understand human pet relationships, Carey turns to the field of sociology. David Blouin, a sociologist at Indiana University, explains that there are three basic categories of belief concerning pets.  “Dominionists” who see pets as a useful, and beloved, but ranked below humans and replaceable. “Humanists,” who cherish their pets and raise them to the same status as a favored child. And, “protectionists,” who base their views on what they think is “best” for the animal.

“These are ideologies, and so protectionists are very critical of humanists, who are very critical of dominionists, and so on,” Dr. Blouin said. “You can see where this can create problems if people in a family have different orientations. Every little decision about the pet is loaded.”

And, whether you believe Fido should be in the yard or snuggling under the down comforter at night may not simply be a matter of personal preference. Rather, as sociologist Elizabeth Terrien helps us understand, views vary by class, ethnicity and geographic location.

One clear trend that has emerged is that people from rural backgrounds tend to see their dogs as guardians to be kept outside, whereas middle-class couples typically treat their hounds as children, often having them sleep in the master bedroom, or a special bed.

Terrien explains, the cultural and class-based differences in understanding how a pet should be treated can lead to groups judging each other negatively.

In neighborhoods with a larger Latino immigrant population, owners were more likely to say “protector,” or even “toy for the children,” she found. “In those neighborhoods you’ll sometimes see kids yanking around a dog on the leash, pushing and playing, the sort of behavior that some middle-class owners would think of as abuse” she said.

Carey’s article provides an important reminder that sometimes even the most personal – for instance, family arguments over whether the dog is included in the will – is linked to larger social forces. Also, Carey confirms yet again that class matters, even for dogs and cats.