Archive: Jul 2011

Cross-posted from Family Inequality.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dukes v. Wal-Mart case, Justice Scalia acknowledged that Wal-Mart’s many local managers had a lot of discretion in their personnel decisions, even though the company had a written policy against gender discrimination (who doesn’t?). But he gave the company credit for a vague policy and let it off the hook for a systematic pattern of disparity between men and women. So, when does a toothless, vague policy with wide discretion lead to a bad outcome, and is failing to prevent it the same as causing it?

A path-breaking sociological analysis of organizational affirmative action outcomes has shown that the companies that successfully diversify their management are most likely to have policies with teeth – where accountability is built into the diversity goal. In light of the Wal-Mart case, this led to a rollicking debate about how to think about “corporate culture” versus policies, and when to blame whom, legally or otherwise – which even divided sociologists.

Smoking in the movies

Here’s an interesting, at-least-vaguely related case. Positive depictions of smoking in the movies are widely understood to be harmful. Yet, smoking is also glamorous, artistic, and popular – representing both anti-adult rebellion and maturity. So, what to do? The Centers for Disease Control, in the always-riveting Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, has published a fascinating report on this topic. They report the number of tobacco incidents* in top-grossing, youth-rated (G, PG, PG-13) movies, and divide them between those that implemented an anti-tobacco policy and those that didn’t — helpfully cutting the movie industry roughly in half — and provide a simple before-and-after tabulation:

From 2005 to 2010, among the three major motion picture companies (half of the six members of the Motion Picture Association of America [MPAA]) with policies aimed at reducing tobacco use in their movies, the number of tobacco incidents per youth-rated movie decreased 95.8%, from an average of 23.1 incidents per movie to an average of 1.0 incident. For independent companies (which are not MPAA members) and the three MPAA members with no antitobacco policies, tobacco incidents decreased 41.7%, from an average of 17.9 incidents per youth-rated movie in 2005 to 10.4 in 2010, a 10-fold higher rate than the rate for the companies with policies. Among the three companies with antitobacco policies, 88.2% of their top-grossing movies had no tobacco incidents, compared with 57.4% of movies among companies without policies.

The difference is dramatic, as indicated by this image about the images. (Because I turned the columns into cigarettes, this is not just a graph, but an infographic):

The policies provide what may be an ideal mix of accountability and responsibility, short of a simplistic ban.

[The policies] provide for review of scripts, story boards, daily footage, rough cuts, and the final edited film by managers in each studio with the authority to implement the policies. However, although the three companies have eliminated depictions of tobacco use almost entirely from their G, PG, and PG-13 movies, as of June 2011 none of the three policies completely banned smoking or other tobacco imagery in the youth-rated films that they produced or distributed.

Maybe this formula is effective because there already has been a strong cultural shift against smoking — as strong, even, as the shift against excluding women from management positions?

Graphic addendum (disturbing image below)

Whether smoking in movies actually encourages young people to take up smoking is of course a not a settled issue — especially on websites sponsored by tobacco sellers, as seen in this ironic screen-shot from Smokers News:

One reason to have an explicit policy is that it’s easy to assume viewers will see through the glamour to the negative outcomes. “Surely no one will want to be like that character…” But people – maybe especially young people? – have an amazing capacity to celebrate selectively from the characters they see. I have learned from experience that, in children’s stories, even those who get their comeuppance in the end still manage to emerge as role models for their bad behavior. So maybe some people want to relive this from Pulp Fiction…

…and aren’t put off by this:

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* “A new incident occurred each time 1) a tobacco product went off screen and then back on screen, 2) a different actor was shown with a tobacco product, or 3) a scene changed, and the new scene contained the use or implied off-screen use of a tobacco product.”

Tijana Mamula has put together a 50-minute video presenting all of the portrayals of gays and lesbians in ten seasons of the sitcom Friends. Her aim is to illustrate not just the homophobia, but the ease with which gently homophobic humor pervades the series. She writes:

The homophobic jokes, as they appear in the original series, are never violent and most often are not even openly denigratory; rather, they purport to offer an honest and “good-humored” representation of a common, socially sanctioned stance towards homosexuality. Situated within the wide array of jokes in any single episode, this homophobia tends to avoid provoking either aversion or anger, and instead prompts the viewer to be swept away by the hilarity of the situations.

It’s worth watching at least a few minutes:

Via Political Remix Video.

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.

Societies are permeated with visual images. This means that images dominate our lives. However, no other images confront us so frequently as advertising images. They belong to the moment. We see them as we turn a magazine page, as we drive past a billboard, and as we visit a website.  However fleeting, they are powerful agents of socialization.

Sociologist Erving Goffman described and exhibited subtle features of gender displays in his book Gender Advertisements. One significant feature that he noted was the ritualization of subordination in which women are portrayed in clowning and costume-like characters. This still rears its ugly head in today’s advertisements.

According to Goffman, “the use of entire body as a playful gesticulative device, a sort of body clowning” is commonly used in advertisements to indicate lack of seriousness struck by a childlike pose (p. 50).

Images reproduced in Gender Advertisements (Goffman, 1979, p.50)

Advertisement found in a file-hosting web site:

The clownish poses represent in these images clearly remind us some photos of female hysterics taken by Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893) who was not only a neurologist but also an artist.

Charcot was the inventor/discoverer of the female psychic affliction of “hysteria” at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris that confined four thousand incurable or mad women. For delving into the nature of hysteria, Charcot armed himself with photography. He extensively photographed the different stages and forms of hysteria and calibrated them into a general type called “the great hysterical attack.” Charcot believed that this attack proceeds in four phases, the second of which is called clownism or so-called illogical movements.

Image taken by Charcot and reproduced in Invention of Hysteria (Didi-Huberman, 2003, p.147)

Charcot used the clowning to delegitimate so-called hysterical women, and Goffman saw such representations for what they are, a way to portray women as inferior, emotionally childlike, unserious.  Over 100 years later, images of clowning women are still used to reinforce gender discrimination and position females as inferior.

References:

Didi-Huberman, G. (2003). Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Goffman, E. (1979). Gender advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Zahra Kordjazi earned her M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, with a special interest in social semiotics, gender, visual literacy, and sociolinguistics. This post is based on her thesis, Images Matter: Gender Positioning in Contemporary English-Learning Software Applications, a semiological content analysis of gender positioning.

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Recently I posted about the loss of genetic diversity in industrial agriculture, partially due to increasing concentration at every link in food commodity chains, from the farm to the grocery store. This image from the Centre for Research on Globalization, sent in by Rick T. of the University of Western Ontario, illustrates the process of concentration at the farm level. In the U.S., the total number of farms has fallen from an all-time high of over 6.3 million to just over 2.2 million. Meanwhile, the average size per farm nearly tripled between 1900 and 2007, from 147 to 418 acres.

A 2010 USDA report provides detailed information about the structure of U.S. agriculture. For instance, overall, average farm household income is higher than the U.S. average, though I’d rather see the median income to reduce the impact of outliers on the calculation. But as the bottom line shows, farm households are highly dependent on non-farm income for their survival. Overall, farm income accounts for less than 20% of the total income of farming families:

And as we saw recently with the mortgage interest deduction program, the benefits of farm subsidies are unevenly distribution. Small-scale family farms (defined as operator-owned farms with less than $250,000 in sales — which does not mean $250,000 in profit, of course) make up 88.3% of all farms in the U.S., while large-scale family farms (operator-owned farms with sales over $250,000) are 9.3%:

While small-scale family farmers receive the majority of land-retirement payments — that is, subsidies in return for taking land out of agricultural production — large-scale family farms are the major beneficiaries of commodity payments such as price supports that subsidize the cost of production:

Of course, that doesn’t mean that small-scale producers don’t benefit from farm subsidy programs, but as with the mortgage interest tax deduction, they are set up to reward size — the more you have, the more you get. Whether farm subsidies are essential to preserving small family farms or actually hurt them by artificially supporting capital-intensive large-scale production is a topic of much debate within agricultural circles.

In Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are, Rob Walker discusses one of the central dilemmas facing marketers: they are trying to get large numbers of people to buy the same thing, while convincing them that doing so in no way makes them conformists. How do you “keep it real” (a phrase repeated ad nauseam by the marketers Walker interviewed) and appear authentic and non-conformist while trying to get as many people as possible to buy the same product?

One solution is to frame buying your product not as a boring act of conformity, but instead as a way of expressing your own unique personal identity. Buying a product you’ve seen advertised doesn’t detract from your authenticity, it enhances it — even if you’re buying a mass-produced product that thousands or even millions of other people purchased identical copies of.

Bec G. sent in this an ad from Jeanswest Australia that illustrates this, asserting that their jeans are “as unique as you”:

Of course, as Bec pointed out, the models they chose to represent how unique Jeanswest customers are are all pretty uniformly thin, even the pregnant woman.

Sarah F. sent in another example. The Australian website for the sandwich chain Subway asks customers whether their preferred sandwich is unique:

I filled out the quiz, creating the only thing I ever get if I eat at Subway: a standard veggie sandwich, no tomatoes. I was then asked to give this amazing item its very own name, to be saved for posterity on the Subway website (if they approve the name): “You’ve just created a Sub that is a reflection of you, so let’s give it a name. Feel free to be creative, after all this is YOUR creation!”

Then it was time for the big reveal. The webpage reinforced the message that designing my very own personalized sandwich from their relatively limited stock list of ingredients is an important expression of my inner being:

I was so nervous! What if my sandwich wasn’t special? Was the honey oat bread too mainstream a choice? Oh, why didn’t I go with the chipotle sauce?!

But it all turned out ok!

In Australia, at least, I now know that my Subway sandwich choice separates me from the masses. What a relief!

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Changes in language seem to just happen. Nobody sets out to introduce a change, but suddenly people are saying “groovy” or “my bad.” And then they’re not. Even written language changes, though the evolution is slower.

Last weekend, I saw this sign at a goat farm on Long Island.

WER’E ??

I used to care about the apostrophe, but after years of reading student papers about “different society’s,” I have long accepted that the tide is against me. The apostrophe today is where spelling was a few hundred years ago – you can pretty much make up your own rules.

Sometimes the rule is fairly clear: use an apostrophe in plurals when leaving it out makes the word look like a different word rather than a plural form of the original. Change the “y” in “society” to “ies” and it looks too different. “Of all the cafe’s, I like the one with lime martini’s.” The “correct” version is cafes and martinis. but I think they take a nanosecond or two longer to mentally process.

Or these

Technically, it should be “ON DVDS.” But DVDS looks like it’s some government agency (I gotta go down to the DVDS tomorrow) or maybe a disease.

It’s not always easy to figure out what rule or logic the writer is following. The little apostrophe seems to be plunked in almost at random. Not random, really. It’s usually before an “s.” But why does Old Navy say, “Nobody get’s hurt”?

There’s a prescriptivist Website, ApostropheAbuse.com, that collects these (that’s where I found the DVDS and Old Navy pictures). They’re fighting a losing battle.

Technology matters – I guess that’s the sociological point here. The invention of print and then the widespread dissemination of identical texts herded us towards standardization. Printers became a separate professional group (not part of the church or state), and most of them were in the same place (London). They had a stranglehold on published spelling.

For the last few decades, anyone could be a printer. The page you are now reading might harbor countless errors in punctuation and spelling (though spell-checkers greatly reduce misspellings), but it looks just as good as an online article in the Times, and it’s published in a similar way to potentially as many readers. And now there’s texting. It’s already pushing upper case letters off the screen, and the apostrophe forecast doesn’t look so good either. But what will still be interesting is not the missing apostrophe but the apostrophe added where, by traditional rules, it doesn’t belong.

I still can’t figure out WER’E.

Mandi B. sent in this straightforward example of the way that women are positioned as commodities in advertising.  The email ad for Spirit Airlines reads “Trade Up for a Better Flight Awards Card” and illustrates that trade with a new car, a younger look, and a lady in red.  What does the lady have to do with it? Absolutely nothing. But it works because we’re accustomed to thinking of sexy women as prizes for men’s success.

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.

Deeb Kitchen sent in an essay at The Brookings Institution with a graph comparing the number of hours worked and earnings in middle-class, two-parent households (the 10% of households that are in the very middle of the income distribution).   Controlling for inflation (results are in 2009 dollars), we see that these households are earning more, for sure, but also working more.  In other words, they’re getting about as much buck for their bang as they were in 1975.

The authors of the post argue that the 26% increase in the number of hours worked is due mostly to mothers increasing their work hours.  Wages, as you can see below, have been stagnant for fathers, but gone up for mothers:

See also: more men and less women earning poverty wages and why did married mothers go to work.

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.