Vintage ad?
Nope. This ad for Virgin Active Health Clubs arrived in D’s mailbox this very month.
Credit: “D & T” of “Wish I Were Baking” at Flickr.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
A reader who asked to remain anonymous sent in a video about a recent interview by Star Jones with the lawyer for Kelsey Peterson, a teacher accused in 2007 of fleeing to Mexico in order to live with a 13-year-old student of hers (he was 12 at the time they began having sex together). In the interview, the lawyer for Peterson says he “resents” the boy being referred to as a child because he is a “Latino machismo teenager” (a phrase that doesn’t even make sense) and “manly”:
Notice that the lawyer also argues, at about 1:25, that teen boys have a high sex drive, which somehow excuses an adult woman having sex with a 12-year-old. In addition, at 3:30 in Jones mentions that some individuals have implied the kid couldn’t be a victim because he was physically larger than other kids his age (5′ 6″ in 8th grade, which doesn’t sound super unusual to me); it sounds like Peterson’s defenders have questioned his age because of his size.
Jones calls him out on his implication that Latino teens are hyper-sexual and therefore this boy shouldn’t be seen as a victim. At about 5:45 one of her guests discusses the adultification of non-White children — that is, the way they are often treated as adults, regardless of their age. Ann Arnett Ferguson discusses this process at length in her book, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. This adultification includes assumptions that they are sexual at earlier ages than White children.
From what Jones and one of her guests say, it also appears that the fact that he was an undocumented immigrant has also been used as a way to undermine his ability to claim victim status. At about 7:55 a guest discusses the way that referring to people as “aliens” dehumanizes them, making it easier to deny them equal legal protection. (Side note: Jones mentions the history of immigration in the U.S. and in doing so says everyone in the U.S. is descended from immigrants, something Native Americans might find surprising, though I suppose if you go back a few thousand years to the migration from Asia to North America, technically yes, they are immigrants.)
When I searched for news stories about the case, I came across one at ABC news in which the boy is described as “a sexually-active sixth-grade student with a crush on her,” which seems to me to be reminiscent of the way female rape victims are often asked about their sexual history, as though they cannot be true victims if they have been sexually active.
The ABC story contains this quote from Peterson’s lawyer:
From the beginning, he was trying to entice her. There’s no question about that…He would try to kiss her, he would grab her, he would do these things. She didn’t initiate this relationship. That young man did.
Again the blame is placed not on the adult woman but on a 12-year-old boy. Peterson says she was shocked the first time he kissed her, which was in her kitchen — a place that maybe a thinking person wouldn’t have a 12-year-old student in. She also says his parents knew about and were fine with their sexual interactions; they dispute this.
Perhaps drawing on the stereotype of macho Latino men, her lawyer said,
He used to tell her what she could wear. And whether she could wear makeup and the length of her skirts in terms of where they were gonna go and what they were gonna do…He had a very, very strong influence over her in terms of controlling her behavior.
The comments to the ABC story are pretty fascinating too.
This is a disturbing example of the way that boys, and particularly non-White boys, are generally denied victim status when it comes to sex because our cultural beliefs include the idea that boys want sex and attempt to get it at an early age, and thus can’t really be vulnerable to sexual assault or coercion. For another example, see this post about how Jimmy Kimmel reacts when Lil’ Wayne confirms that he lost his virginity at age 11.
To me this New York Times graphic showing the relationship between gas prices and the average number of miles driven powerfully suggests that gas prices actually have little to do with how much driving Americans do. The vertical axis is gas prices and the horizontal axis is the number of miles driven. The line inside the figure is time.
Basically the illustration shows that the number of miles per year Americans drive has been climbing since 1956. Despite short-term gas price fluctuations, something is driving us to drive more and more every year.
When gas prices do shoot up — such as during the oil embargo, the energy crisis, and the most recent peak — Americans show a modest drop in driving, but it’s not a very large one and we recover rather quickly. During the oil embargo, Americans shaved 210 miles a year off of their driving. During the energy crisis, only 156. The recent reduction in the number of miles driven per year is attributed by the New York Times writer to the fact that so many people are unemployed and, therefore, no longer need to drive to work.
Driving, then, shows only a modest response to high prices. Perhaps the jumps in prices during these peaks — 43 and 106 cents per gallon respectively — weren’t really worth slowing down for? Or perhaps driving is so culturally meaningful that Americans are willing to pay to stay in their cars regardless? Or maybe driving, and driving farther, has become increasingly important over time such that people can’t reasonably reduce the amount of driving they do?
It seems to me that the problem is at least partly infrastructural. I wonder how average miles driven responds, or would respond, to enhancing and investing in public transportation? If we started building denser neighborhoods and got rid of suburbs?
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
In “Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: Are New Stadiums Worth the Cost?”, Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist question whether athletic stadiums are a useful or effective means of economic development for communities.* When new stadiums are built, they are often heavily subsidized by taxpayers, particularly by issuing state or city bonds.
Cities do this in the hopes of improving the economy. They argue that new arenas directly create construction jobs and indirectly create more employment opportunities by bringing in fans who patronize local businesses. They also often hope that the prestige of having a new stadium will make the city more attractive to companies looking to relocate, as well as tourists.
Noll and Zimbalist looked at the effects of stadium construction in a number of cities, as have others. They conclude,
In every case, the conclusions are the same. A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. (p. 249)
However, cities continue to subsidize stadiums, despite the evidence that they aren’t economically practical, as well as frequent public opposition. Among other things, they often face a form of economic blackmail: teams threaten to move to another city that will build them an updated facility, with fancier concessions, luxury seats, club boxes, and the like, if their host city won’t. While the benefit to cities is doubtful, the additional revenue brought in by these luxuries definitely benefits the teams.
I thought of their findings when I saw a video over at Jay Smooth’s blog about the new stadiums built for the Yankees and the Mets. It’s 18 minutes long, but it’s pretty funny and also highlights some of the issues Noll and Zimbalist bring up (particularly why teams want updated stadiums, effects on the local economy, fans’ differing reactions to new facilities, and teams’ threats to move if they didn’t get what they wanted). You might want to skip the intro, which is about 40 seconds long.
Stadium Status from Internets Celebrities on Vimeo.
* Source: Sport in Contemporary Society, 6th edition, edited by D. Stanley Eitzen. 2001. P. 248-255.
Jessica F. and Dmitriy T.M. alerted us to a really interesting photo project by Duncan McNicholl, a member of Engineers Without Borders Canada. Frustrated with the portrayals of “poor Africans” he saw at home in Canada, he decided to take pictures of his acquaintances in Malawi “dressed to kill” and “dressed very poorly.” He explains his motivation:
We’ve all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out. Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things.
I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008. I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to. How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people?
The truth is that the development sector, just like any other business, needs revenue to survive. Too frequently, this quest for funding uses these kind of dehumanizing images to draw pity, charity, and eventually donations from a largely unsuspecting public…
This is not to say that people do not struggle, far from it, but the photos I was seeing only told part of the story… [To contribute to correcting this,] I am taking two photos of the same person; one photo with the typical symbols of poverty (dejected look, ripped clothes, etc.), and another of this person looking their very finest, to show how an image can be carefully constructed to present the same person in very different ways.
McNicholl asked his acquaintances to participate and to choose their own clothes and pose as they like. Here are two examples of the result:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
The image above, of a bird rescued from the gulf and cleaned of oil, may ease the ache in our hearts, but research suggests that euthanizing the birds would be more humane.
Environmental biologist and expert on oil clean-up, Silvia Gaus, explained that:
Catching and cleaning oil-soaked birds oftentimes leads to fatal amounts of stress for the animals… Furthermore, forcing the birds to ingest coal solutions — or Pepto Bismol, as animal-rescue workers are doing along the Gulf Coast — in an attempt to prevent the poisonous effects of the oil is ineffective… The birds will eventually perish anyway from kidney and liver damage (paraphrased at Speigel).
Further, birds who are relocated are often so disoriented that they die anyway, not able to re-establish survival routines in their new environment.
Gaus claims that 99% of the rescued and cleaned birds will die, usually within about seven days, and it will be a more painful death that takes longer than if they’d just been left alone. As a consequence, many recommend quick and painless euthanization. A National Geographic article complicates the story, reporting that survival rates depend on characteristics of the spill, but still reports that scientists largely have little hope that many birds rescued from the Gulf will survive. A better strategy for saving birds, they say, is trying to keep them out of the oil in the first place.
If cleaning birds is unlikely to save them, and euthanizing them ultimately more humane, why are we cleaning birds?
The obvious answer is that it is good for BP’s public relations. We feel better when we see the shiny oil-free feathers; those images make us feel like there is hope for the animals caught in the spill. It makes it look as if BP is really doing something good. In this case, why would BP care if the de-oiling worked? They benefit whether the birds die (a slower, more painful) death or not. It costs about $700 to clean an oiled pelican, but that may be money well spent.
There may be an even more nefarious reason. There are fines and penalties for killing wildlife that can be levied against corporations. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, for example, specifies that corporations can be fined up to $500,000 if responsible for the death of a brown pelican. Perhaps if the bird dies after release, without direct evidence that its death was caused by oil ingestion (without an expensive autopsy), then BP will not be vulnerable to those fines. Further, the total number of dead birds attributed to their spill be lower; those numbers, instead, will be in the column marked “saved.”
UPDATE: Jay Holcomb at the International Bird Rescue Research Center disagrees with Gaus and other pessimistic scientists. (Thanks to Paul for the link.) It may also be that techniques for cleaning the birds have improved over time. So the 1% number is probably wrong, or at least needs to be qualified. Still, I think BP’s interests still apply, but it’s overstating it to say that de-oiling is bad for birds. Thanks to everyone in the comments who added contrasting information!
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
While most people look at the Gulf of Mexico and see seafood and beaches, oil executives see the Gulf differently. They see a giant grid containing thousands of squares of possibility, each potentially yielding billions of dollars.
You see this:
(photo credit: Dmitriy Pritykin)
They see this, a grid of the entire gulf representing regions available for lease (click to enlarge):
(source)
This is a close up off the Louisiana coast (green lines and regions are oil pipelines and fields, the pink are the same for gas):
(source)
There are 6,652 leased squares, amounting to 22 percent of the lease-able Gulf (click to enlarge) and approximately 4,000 oil production platforms in the Gulf:
(source)
I offer this only as an illustration of the degree to which the Gulf has been commodified. The Gulf is big, big, big business:
(source)
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
While I was at my grandma’s house this week I read Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are, a fascinating book by Rob Walker. There will be more posts to come in the next few weeks, but for starters, I was struck by the results of a 2006 survey Walker mentions by the Pew Research Center. The survey asked people if various items were luxuries or necessities. Here are the results from 2006 and 1996:
Clearly, over time we’re defining more and more items as necessities rather than luxuries:
A breakdown of some results by age:
If I had to guess, I’d think the fact that younger people are less likely to say a TV is a necessity than older people is due not to less concern about TV but more willingness to watch content online. Does that seem reasonable? Other explanations?
The survey found that the higher a person’s income, the more items they define as a necessity:
The biggest differences by income were for dishwashers, cell phones, computers, and high-speed internet, which are more likely to be defined as a necessity as income increases.
The Pew Center’s website has links to more detailed breakdowns, as well as full info on the question wording, methodology, etc. And as the authors say in the summary, the results show only a one-way change: in no case did they find that the overall percent defining something as a necessity decreased between 1996 and 2006. As they put it,
The old adage proclaims that “necessity is the mother of invention.” These findings serve as a reminder that the opposite is also true: invention is the mother of necessity. Throughout human history, from the wheel to the computer, previously unimaginable inventions have created their own demand, and eventually their own need.
The income data would seem to back this up: what we have, we often come to define as necessities.
I would love to see an international comparison of some sort. I’ll see what I can find.
UPDATE: I haven’t found an international comparison yet, but I discovered that the Pew Research Center conducted the survey again in 2009 to see if attitudes had changed during the recession. Quite a striking change for several items:
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