Archive: Jun 2011

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Sometimes public relations efforts are in such extraordinarily poor taste that it’s difficult to tell whether they’re real or a spoof.

In the 1950s, as the evidence on smoking was becoming undeniable, someone suggested that the cigarette companies were about to launch a new ad campaign: “Cancer is good for you.”

It was a joke, of course. But how about “A really bad recession is good for your marriage”? No joke. The National Marriage Project has released a report with a section claiming that the current economic crises has produced “two silver linings” for marriages. (Philip Cohen at Family Inequality eviscerates this report with the level of snark that it deserves.)  A bad recession is good for crime too, or so says the title of James Q. Wilson’s article in last Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, “Hard Times, Fewer Crimes.”*

And now welcome Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, which spends millions each year lobbying against clean-air legislation.  Last month, Peabody was the object of Coal Cares, a clever spoof Website.

(click to enlarge; source: Wired)

It was Peabody’s press release in response that makes them the clear winner of the Cancer-Is-Good-For-You competition.

The United Nations has linked life expectancy, educational attainment and income with per-capita electricity use, and the World Resources Institute found that for every tenfold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer.

The spurious logic — the implied fallacy of composition and the attempt to fob off correlation as cause — is so obvious that it could easily be part of the Coal Cares spoof.  But no, it was for real, at least while it lasted.  Unfortunately, Peabody removed the document before we could award them the CIGFY trophy .

What the UN data actually show is not surprising: Richer countries produce more electricity. They also have better health, education, and income. The message Peabody wants us to get takes the global and misapplies it locally, and it reverses cause and effect: If you want to be long-lived, educated, and rich, live near a coal-driven power plant.  Cancer, asthma, and heart disease are all good for you.

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*I don’t know if Wilson also wrote that title. Unlike the post-hoc logic suggested by the title, Wilson does not argue that the recession caused the decrease. But he does imply that the recession did not exert any upward force on crime.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

I haven’t yet seen any definitive evidence that the recession has had an effect on divorce rates. But if I’m going to pick on other people for this, I should offer a few ideas.

In a previous post I cited a lot of reasons to expect divorce would increase as a result of family stress and instability. Others claim these hard times are bringing couples together in the face of adversity. And either – or both – of these influences is woven into the long term trends in divorce. Here are three graphs looking at the question.

Long-term trends

The overall divorce trend doesn’t seem to be moved much one way or the other by recessions (shown in blue), at least for the last 60 years:

That national data is only available through 2009, so a little early to see a major effect. Still, no disruption of the trend at the national level, just a continuous decline in the divorce rate. (Here’s a great recent Census report on divorce trends.)

State patterns

The official divorce rates are available from 38 states, but they’re only considered reliable through 2008 so far. By putting together two years of changes — 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 — this figure has 76 dots (two for each state), showing whether changes in divorce are related to changes in unemployment rates. This gives a rough idea of the relationship between how hard states were hit by the recession and any changes in divorce:

I made the dots larger according to the population sizes, and weighted the red trend line so that the larger states have more effect (this positive relationship is statistically significant at the 99% confidence level). This is just a start, but it leans in the direction of unemployment increasing divorces. At least it doesn’t look like the recession is driving divorce down.

Google

Finally, what about divorce on the American brain? For a glimpse inside, we turn to Google trends. If it works for the flu, it might work for divorce, too. Here are the trends for “divorce attorney” and “divorce lawyer”:

The trend for both searches looks basically flat except for seasonal variation, and some turbulence in 2008. But nothing to suggest a major trend one way or the other. (You can play with these yourself, starting with mine, here.)

My conclusion so far: no national evidence of a recession effect on divorce yet, but some suggestive hints worth keeping an eye on — leaning in the direction of recession causing more divorces — in opposition to a long-term downward trend. Maybe if and when the housing market loosens up more unhappy spouses will take the plunge and move out. The divorce rate may continue to fall, as it has been since the early 1980s, but that doesn’t mean this recession has a “silver lining” for families.

Just as “I’m not a racist, but…” is a sure sign that someone is about to say something racist, an essay that begins “I don’t want to trivialize the inhumane horrors that African slaves endured on slave ships destined for the Americas. But…” is certain to do just that.  Indeed, Steven Heller at Imprint began his post this way, going on to suggest that the design of modern airplanes “resemble[s]” that of slave ships.  As evidence, he recalls his own discomfort in coach and compares drawings of slave ships and blueprints of airplanes.

Heller prefaced his observations with a disclaimer because he knew comparing modern air travel to the slave trade was sketchy.  And it is, indeed, sketchy. The descendants of slaves live life with the knowledge that their ancestors were stolen, shackled, beaten, and denied their very humanity; at least they survived the trip across the Atlantic.  Nope, not like air travel one bit.

So, yes, it’s lovely to be clever, but it’s also lovely to be thoughtful and sensitive.  In this case, Heller’s desire to be the former won out over the latter.  Or perhaps he never really thought that anyone would seriously be upset by the comparison.  It’s obviously tongue-in-cheek right?  I mean, slavery has been over for, like, ever.  Or maybe he forgot that descendants of slaves read the freakin’ internet just like everyone else.

Who knows.  In any case, it’s a great example of the trivializing of the histories and traumas of a marginalized population.

Thanks to Dolores R. for the tip.

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.

I recently posted some data revealing the average caloric intake across the globe.  Since then, I’ve learned of a new photo project by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio documenting individuals’ daily meals across many countries.  While the former post gave averages, the photographs in Menzel and D’Aluisio’s new book, What I Eat, offer data points.  What one person reported eating in one day.  They are suggestive of the range of caloric intakes, intersecting with genetics and physical activity, that make each individual body unique.

Menzel and D’Aluisio, through Tawanda Kanhema, gave us permission to share these three examples with you; you can see a larger sample at TIME.

Saleh Abdul Fadlallah (Egypt), 3200 calories:

Caption:

Camel broker Saleh Abdul Fadlallah with his day’s worth of food at the Birqash Camel Market outside Cairo, Egypt. (From the book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.) The caloric value of his day’s worth of food on a typical day in the month of April was 3200 kcals. He is 40 years of age; 5 feet, 8 inches tall; and 165 pounds. Although virtually all of the camels that Saleh Fadlallah sells at the camel market are sold for their meat, he rarely eats this meat himself as it’s too expensive for everyday meals. Contrary to popular belief, camels’ humps don’t store water; they are a reservoir of fatty tissue that minimizes heat-trapping insulation in the rest of their bodies; the dromedary, or Arabian camel, has a single hump, while Asian camels have two. Camels are well suited for desert climes: their long legs and huge, two-toed feet with leathery pads enable them to walk easily in sand, and their eyelids, nostrils, and thick coat protect them from heat and blowing sand. These characteristics, along with their ability to eat thorny vegetation and derive sufficient moisture from tough green herbage, allow camels to survive in very inhospitable terrain.

Rick Bumgardener (Tennessee, USA), 1600 calories:

Caption:

Rick Bumgardener with his recommended daily weight-loss diet at his home in Halls, Tennessee. (From the book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.) The caloric value of his day’s worth of food in the month of February was 1,600 kcals. He is 54 years of age; 5 feet, 9 inches tall; and 468 pounds. Wheelchair-bound outside the house and suffering from a bad back and type 2 diabetes, he needs to lose 100 pounds to be eligible for weight-loss surgery. Rick tries to stick to the low-calorie diet pictured here but admits to lapses of willpower. Before an 18-year career driving a school bus, he delivered milk to stores and schools, and often traded with other delivery drivers for ice cream. School cafeteria staff would feed the charming Southerner at delivery stops, and he gained 100 pounds in one year. The prescription drug fen-phen helped him lose 100 pounds in seven months, but he gained it all back, plus more.

Curtis Newcomer (Fort Irwin, California), 4000 calories:

Caption:

Curtis Newcomer, a U.S. Army soldier, with his typical day’s worth of food at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California’s Mojave Desert. (From the book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.) The caloric value of his day’s worth of food in the month of September was 4,000 kcals. He is 20 years old; 6 feet, 5 inches tall; and 195 pounds. During a two-week stint before his second deployment to Iraq, he spends 12-hour shifts manning the radio communication tent (behind him). He eats his morning and evening meals in a mess hall tent, but his lunch consists of a variety of instant meals in the form of MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat). His least favorite is the cheese and veggie omelet. “Everybody hates that one. It’s horrible,” he says. A mile behind him, toward the base of the mountains, is Medina Wasl, a fabricated Iraqi village—one of 13 built for training exercises, with hidden video cameras and microphones linked to the base control center for performance reviews.

For more from Peter Menzel, visit our posts on family food for a week and family belongings across the globe.  And also see Mark Menjivar’s You Are What You Eat.

Visit Menzel’s blog here.

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.

Last week we featured a guest post by Stephen Bridenstine about the invisibility of Native American reservations on Google Maps, and how this affects our awareness of geographic and social realities. The flip side of ignoring some information about our country is what we do choose to draw attention to.

Over a year ago, Charlotte C. sent in a photo of a sign she noticed in downtown Fall City, Washington, about 25 miles east of Seattle. The sign includes several milestones for the area. The first significant event worthy of note is the first time a White person laid eyes on nearby Snoqualmie Falls:

This reminded me of a photo I took of a monument near the Black Hills in South Dakota. The monument is for Anna (or Annie) Tallent, a woman who was a teacher and superintendent of schools for Pennington County. While the monument mentions she was a “teacher and author,” her major claim to fame appears to be that she was the “first White woman to enter the Black Hills”:

Text:

In Memory of Anna Donna Tallent

Teacher and Author

Born in New York State, April 12, 1827.  Died in Sturgis, S. Dakota, February 13, 1901.

The first White woman to enter the Black Hills, arriving in Custer City in December 1874.

This monument is erected by the Society of Black Hills Pioneers and many admirers.

“The world is better because she lived and served in it.”

The monument to her achievements fails to note that in 1874, when she entered the Black Hills, the region was part of the Great Sioux Reservation and were not legally available to Whites for settlement. The U.S. Cavalry removed her entire party for setting up an illegal gold mining encampment on land that was clearly owned by the Sioux, according to an 1868 treaty with the U.S. government…a treaty the government quit honoring soon after Whites found out there was gold in the Black Hills, which the the federal government confiscated in 1877. Tallent discussed the illegal land invasions (including her expedition’s efforts to avoid detection by government officials) in her 1899 book The Black Hills, Or, The Last Hunting Ground of the Dakotahs, in which she laments the “mournful” state of the Sioux nation but rhetorically asks whether it’s appropriate to honor treaties that “arrest the advance of civilization” (p. 3) and, generally, presents a racist, condescending depiction of Native Americans as pathetic, sad “savages” whose displacement in the name of progress and civilization was inevitable.

So what story about our nation do these two monuments tell? The only information contained on the two-sided Fall City monument refers to the activities of Whites; the Native residents were important only when they lost land. For all intents and purposes, the history of the area started only once a White man had set eyes on it. Similarly, Tallent’s arrival in the Black Hills is memorable largely because she was a White woman, whose presence is by definition worthy of note and celebration — imagine, a vulnerable White woman braving the wildness of the Dakota territory! The fact that she was an illegal prospector camping on land she didn’t own while in the pursuit of quick wealth is neither worth mentioning nor a cause to question whether she’s a laudable figure deserving of a monument. Thus, the effect of both of these monuments is to normalize colonization and illegal settlement, and present the arrival of Whites as the beginning of meaningful history.

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

Adrienne H. sent along two print advertisements for Hospitality Staffing Solutions, a company that is hired by hotels and restaurants to provide service-level hospitality workers: janitors, maids, cooks, servers, and others.  The ads position this type of worker as inherently problematic.  The first suggests that there is a pressing need to ensure that they don’t have criminal backgrounds.  The second, with the byline “you shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality for price,” suggests that low-wage employees are typically of poor-quality — interchangeable, metaphorically junk, like junk food — but that a company should have the right to pay the bare minimum and still retain excellent workers.

Hospitality Staffing Solutions clearly believes that employers have a very low opinion of the workers to whom they pay the lowest wages.  I imagine it must be unpleasant to be a working class person employed by someone so inclined to think the worst about you, all while paying you as little as possible and monitoring you for the slightest infractions.  Many middle- and upper-class people are privileged to escape this kind of scrutiny — a scrutiny under which many of them would look quite imperfect; they are generally considered worthy of respect and their skills deserving of a living wage.  These ads suggest that working class people are not given such privileges.

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 couple of months back, Lisa posted about a push-up bikini top sold by Abercrombie Kids, a store that targets kids ages 7-14. It led to a lively discussion, here and elsewhere, about the sexualization of young girls as well as socialization into beauty standards from a young age; eventually Abercrombie pulled the product from their website.

Leontine G. sent in a link to an image of a dress from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website that puts that debate into some historical context. While you might expect this to be a woman’s formal ball gown, they believe it was actually for a young girl:

From the description (which seems to focus on the U.S. and Europe, though this isn’t specified):

Until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, children were dressed as miniature adults, with girls being put into corseted bodices from about three years of age, graduating to adult dress when they reached twelve or thirteen.

…

When a boy reached four years of age, he was…dressed in a replica of a man’s three-piece suit, consisting of coat, waistcoat, and breeches reaching to the knee…Girls were dressed in the adult style of clothing from about the age of two. They would wear a tight-fitting boned bodice laced at the back, with a long full skirt over a petticoat; at twelve they would change to fashionable dress, with the bodice being replaced by stays (a corset) over which was worn a robe, petticoat, and stomacher.

This portrait of Daniel Crommelin Verplanck, painted by John Singleton Copley in 1771, shows the then 9-year-old boy in adult-style clothing:

Starting in the late 1770s, new, looser clothing styles for children became popular, along with new ideas about childhood innocence and the necessity of separating children from the cares of the adult world. The Met provides a link to the 1796 painting The Sackville Children, by John Hoppner, as an example of the new style:

As the Met’s discussion of the formal child’s dress explains, adult fashions eventually followed the trend in children’s clothing, leading to looser, less constricting clothing with fewer layers.

As Leontine notes, it’s an “interesting reminder that from an historical perspective, our society is the anomaly in *not* dressing children the same way we dress ourselves.”

Yesterday, I was at the grocery store in the checkout line, when I saw a Disney book about how Tinkerbell and her fairy friends “Nature’s Little Helpers.”  Intended to interest small children in being environmentally conscious, the fairies, all female, help nature go about its daily tasks.  The connection to the nymphs of Greek mythology at once is evident.  Nymphs were essentially fairies that embodied parts of nature: water, trees, etc. They were almost always female, and often played the role of temptress to the male gods.  These Disney fairies play on the same idea; they tend to nature and are connected with nature because of their being female.

(source)

Why is this a problem?  First, the book connects women to nature on the basis of biology, the idea that women are naturally nurturing.  This suggests that only women can really take care of nature, because they are better suited for it than men.  Second, by linking women and nature, they suggest that being Green is ‘girly,’ when in fact being Green should be gender-neutral.

“Nature’s Little Helpers” ties women and nature together in harmful ways: it assumes that women are caretakers of nature because of an inherent nurturing ability and it feminizes the teaching of environmental studies, even interest in nature.  I have no doubt that Disney intended for this book to up its Green profile, but its message is as harmful as the Disney princess line. We should be teaching children about nature without gendering the process.

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Lisa Seyfried is recent graduate of the George Washington University Women’s Studies Master’s Program.  Her interest is in the intersection of women and the environment, and generally helping the world to become a more just and sustainable place.  She is also a blogger at Silence is Complicit.

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