Archive: May 2011

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to an article by David Leonhardt in the New York Times about differences in income between various religious groups in the U.S. This graph shows the percent of households earning more than $75,000 a year (the numbers along the side; and note that, somewhat counterintuitively, the shade of each color gets lighter as the percentage gets higher), as well as the percent of each group with a college degree (along the top). In order from least to most educated, we have Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, the unaffiliated, Baptists, Muslims, Catholics, Mormons, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, those who identify as secular, Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, and Hindus. Not surprisingly, income is pretty strongly correlated with education:

The data come from a 2007 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey (which we’ve posted on before), though the NYT reports that they did smaller surveys in 2010 and 2011 and found similar patterns.

Also see our posts on the demographics of the non-religious and religion, income, and 2008 Presidential voting behavior.

Kristie V. let us know about a new item in Skechers’ Shape-Ups line of shoes. If you aren’t familiar with Shape-Ups, they’re the sneakers with the specially-shaped soles that supposedly firm your butt as you walk. Now Skechers has introduced a line of Shape-Ups targeted at tween girls (via Shine):

I was particularly struck by the scene at 23 seconds in, where the girl confidently bounces along in her Shape-Up, trailed by exhausted-looking boys dressed up as food:

Apparently Shape-Ups not only firm your butt, they give you the ability to reject food as well.

Though Skechers apparently claims to be targeting childhood obesity, at least two independent studies found that these types of shoes have no benefit in terms of fitness, whether measured by calories burned or level of muscle toning. But as Morning Gloria at Jezebel points out, girls are never too young to be socialized into buying products of questionable effectiveness — and avoiding food — in the hopes of “looking good and having fun,” as the ad put it.

In this 11 minute animated talk, Matthew Taylor argues that scientific study of humans in the tradition of the Enlightenment has taught us, ironically, that Enlightenment values alone cannot be trusted to usher humanity into a better future.

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.

I know a Googler.  Never to let a fleeting inquiry go unGoogled, he recently wondered who was the voice of Hulu.  It turns out to be a man named Dave Fennoy.  Fennoy is a wildly successful voice actor, doing work for McDonalds, KFC, and Chrysler.  He’s also black.  In the 1-1/2 minute clip below, he talks about being teased as a kid for “talk[ing] like a white boy” and how this caused him “identity problems.”  Later he attended Howard University, where he re-thought what it meant to be black, rejecting the idea that he was supposed to talk in any which way. He doesn’t talk about how his success in The Industry (as we call it in Los Angeles) is related to his sound, though I wish he had:

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

In discussing sex work in my Power and Sexuality Course, I often ask students whether sexuality is really absent in work that is not deemed “sex work” (e.g., stripping, prostitution, and pornography).  Students can quickly think of ways in which sex appeal and sexy performances play a role in many, many jobs.  This is obviously true for singers, actresses, models, and dancers.  But it is also true, to some degree, in sales and bar-tending, or working as a lawyer, a flight attendant, or a teaching assistant.  These workers are sometimes called upon to dress to accentuate their sex appeal, move in ways that incite desire, and flirt with customers, clients, or co-workers.  Sex plays a role in most of our jobs, even when they aren’t explicitly called “sex work.”

I thought of this conversation when checking out a submission by artist Costanza Knight. (I’m a fan, especially, of her paintings about slavery and freedom based on the beautiful poem, The People Could Fly.)  Knight’s submission was in regard to a story about a Chinese tea producer hiring busty virgins to pick tea with their mouths.  The method of harvest is in reference to a traditional folktale and is designed to titillate and intrigue buyers willing to pay handsomely for the virgin-kissed, bosom-cradles leaves.

I can’t confirm the veracity of the story, but whether or not it’s true, it helpfully points to the need to deconstruct the notion that some jobs are “sex work” and other jobs are “just work.”  We sell our sexualities in many types of jobs; much of the time, it’s simply a matter of degree.

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.

Cross-posted at OWNI.

Our BoingBoing friend, Cory Doctorow, has a great Ted Talk in which he gives an inspired and radical solution to the lack of privacy on the internet. To begin, he notes that Facebook, as just one example, doesn’t just allow, but incites disclosure by rewarding it, but only intermittently (a la B.F. Skinner and the Skinner box).

Meanwhile, parents try to protect children from disclosure and exposure with surveillance tools that block and report content.  This, Doctorow argues provocatively, only trains kids to accept surveillance as normal and unproblematic.  Instead of spying on our kids, he suggests, we should be teaching them to manipulate and avert involuntary disclosure, such that they grow up learning to question instead of accept the use and abuse of their personal 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.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Drawing on data from the Pew Research Center, I recently wrote a post showing that inter-racial and -ethnic marriages are on the rise.  Not all groups, however, intermarry at the same rate.  Asians are more likely than Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites to marry someone of a different race or ethnicity.  Whites are the least likely to do so:

Gender matters too.  Whereas White and Hispanic men and women tend to outmarry at about the same rate, the outmarriage rates for Blacks and Asians are dramatically different.

The gendered rates of outmarriage likely reflect the way in which we gender race and racialize gender.  I’ve written about this in a previous post:

Consider: according to American cultural stereotypes, black people, both men and women, are more masculine than white people. Black men are seen as, somehow, more masculine than white men: they are, stereotypically, more aggressive, more violent, larger, more sexual, and more athletic. Black women, too, as seen as more masculine than white women: they are louder, bossier, more opinionated and, like men, more sexual and more athletic.

Likewise, Asian people are feminized.  Both Asian men and women are seen as somehow smaller, more passive, the women sweeter, the men less virile.

These are cultural stereotypes derived from the particular history of the U.S.  White elites masculinized Black women in order to justify their hard labor during slavery.  The idea that Black men were hypermasculine emerged after emancipation; the idea that Black men were sexually-vicious brutes was used by some Whites to terrorize Black men into continued subservience.

Asians were feminized after the completion of the transcontinental railroad.  The Chinese immigrants who had labored on the railroad, now out of work, found niches in feminized occupations in the mostly-lady-free American West.  They became cooks, tailors, and launderers, and domestic servants.  The gendered nature of their work contributed to their feminization.

So, race and gender intersect in history, and today, in ways that shape sexual desire and supposed romantic compatibility.  If men are supposed to be sexy by virtue of their masculinity and women sexy by virtue of their femininity, then Black men and Asian women will be seen as more sexually attractive, and as more ideal marital partners, than Asian men and Black women.

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.

When we talk about beauty standards on Soc Images, we’re usually discussing attempts to meet them, and impacts on those who can’t. But what about people who are considered quite attractive by other people? Katherine K. sent in the trailer for the documentary The Art of Seduction: Not Pretty, Really. In it, the director interviews men and women about the impacts of being generally defined as attractive. There are the perks, such as sometimes getting free stuff, but there are downsides, too: jealousy from others, the stereotype that attractive people (especially women) are dumb, and questioning the motives of friends: