Archive: 2010

Sorry for the sporadic posting. I’m visiting family in Oklahoma and that means very, very limited internet access.

Zac from Georgia sent in a link to some interesting images that illustrate the mismatch between what the federal government spends money on and what the media cover. This image shows spending only via federal contracts (not all spending) compared to all articles in the New York Times in 2009 (granted, a very small sample of all media coverage, so keep that in mind):

Contract spending data is available here.

This time we have all spending, not just spending through contracts; the Department of Defense has dropped down to 4th place:

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

What happens when huge numbers of people lose their homes?   Hundreds of thousands of Haitians lost their homes in the giant earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince in January.  Six months later, resource-poor and with little help from their government, they remain homeless.  When there are that many displaced people, where do they live?  Apparently, everywhere.  This week NPR reported that about 1,000 people are living in 326 make-shift structures on an 8-foot-wide median dividing one of Haiti’s busiest roads.

If private property is off-limits, public space fills up, and temporary housing isn’t provided, where are people to go?

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

One example of the pervasive sexualization of beer is the ubiquitous personification of “blond” ales as blond women.  Tom Megginson at Change Marketing made this observation and collected a number of examples of this particular example of the gendering and sexualizing of food:

See more at Megginson’s post.  See also our other posts on gender and beer here, here, and here.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

A blog post at Gallup, sent along by Michael Kimmel, discussed nearly 25 years of US opinion on the cause of homosexuality.  The data shows a slow decline in the percent of people who think that people are “made” gay or lesbian by their upbringing or environment (the nurture argument) and a slow rise in the number of people who think they are “made” gay or lesbian by biology (the nature argument).  The two meet in the late 1990s and, throughout the 2000s, they’ve been more-or-less neck-and-neck.

I welcome speculation as to why the trend didn’t continue such that nature ended up beating nurture good by 2010.  I can’t think offhand of a reason why.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Tom Megginson blogged about a billboard advertising Gaylea spreadable butter that made fun of brutality… affixed to the back of a women’s shelter in Ottawa:

See also our post featuring dueling advertising and public service announcements.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

In this video they posted at Feministing, Chloe and Samhita discuss Sex and the City 2. Enjoy!

Nathan Yau, at Flowing Data, calls BP out on a piece of data representation trickery.  In a video on the BP website explaining the progress they were making cleaning up the oil, Kent Wells offered the following graph:

The bars represent oil collected over time.  But, as Yau points out, the data offered by Wells is cumulative.  It’s not the case that each consecutive day (May 16 to May 23) they are collecting more oil.  Instead, each collective day they have collected more oil overall.  If they keep collecting oil, we should expect nothing less.

Instead of showing the data cumulatively, they could have presented how much oil they collected each individual day.  But the data, in that case, doesn’t look as good.  Yau put this together:

This graph suggests that BP’s collection of oil is diminishing and makes viewers want to know why.  The graph they offered, however, hides their decreasing efficacy.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

There are masculine and feminine versions of standing, ones that many adults reproduce rather consistently, and boys and girls must learn which stances are which.  To illustrate this, Miriam H. sent us a photograph of a package of Tinkerbell figurines and a screen shot of a web page selling fairy costumes.  These images — two among many possible examples — nicely show how girls are taught, from a very young age, how to stand.

See also a related post: Male Models Display Clothes; Female Model Display Themselves.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.