Archive: Jul 2011

Dolores R. sent us this Saturday Morning Breakfast cartoon commenting on conspicuous consumption.  The phenomenon is often described with things like Hummers and high-priced purses.  The cartoon, though, suggests that intellectuals have their own breed of conspicuous consumption, even as they criticize the Hummer drivers: the conspicuous consumption of intellectual products, the more obscure and dense the better.

It reminds me of this hilarious clip from the sketch comedy show Portlandia in which friends end up in an inadvertent competition over who is more informed/has read more of the right stuff lately.

See also: conspicuous conservation.

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.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a New York Times slideshow of the contents of “MREs” from different countries.   MREs stands for “Meals Ready to Eat”; they are combat rations for soldiers. The rations are each some combination of comfort food, nutrition, and necessity.  And the different contents across countries reveal some interesting similarities and differences.

All MREs include some sort of meat, but the type and form of the meat vary, from meatballs to paté.  Meanwhile, almost all of the MREs include candy; it’s probably cheap, in the big scheme of things, to throw a few skittles, m&ms, or squares of chocolate, but what a treat it must be.  Likewise, the fruit-flavored beverages and tea must be a taste of home.  As for practicality, countries vary in whether they provide moist towelettes, toothpicks, tooth brushes.   Most offer matches; the U.S. includes toilet paper.

That said, the content of rations are also strikingly consistent.  I’ve love to see a flow chart tracing the development of MREs.  Were the logics for these rations developed in isolation?  Or were some countries influential over others?

These are my uneducated observations.  Feel free to offer more informed thoughts in the comments.

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.

Comedians exercise a curious privilege, which allows them to peddle controversial conclusions and uncomfortable insights without suffering the usual scorn and admonishment that comes with challenging systems of power or bringing indelicate knowledge about the world to the surface. For instance, the suggestion that Americans are deeply divided by race and class usually causes people to fidget, yet Chris Rock was greeted with laughter and applause when he unabashedly criticized the racialized wealth gap in the United States. Similarly, Louis C.K. received a rousing applause when he discussed his privilege as a white male, and Hari Kondabolu made an entire room burst into laughter by exposing the nonsensical logic underlying stereotypes aimed at Mexican immigrants.

But comedy is just as likely to reinforce stereotypes as it is to criticize them. Consider Jeff Dunham’s act featuring his popular dummy, “Achmed the Dead Terrorist.” In the clip below, from a 2007 performance, Dunham draws upon a number of stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, many of which have been around since well before the attacks on September 11th, 2001:

Dunham is not deploying social criticism, but is instead uncritically drawing on racist representations for laughs. Arabs and Muslims, like the Achmed character, are typically portrayed as religious fanatics. They are often depicted as irrationally angry, even as self-proclaimed terrorists. But if they are dangerous, they are dangerous buffoons and are often too incompetent to pull off their own deadly plots.

Comedians can be understood as articulators of knowledge about the world. They contribute to the persistence of stereotypes at times, but can also articulate convincing arguments against them. This holds for other types of comedic performance as well. Political cartoons, comedy sketches, and even situation comedies all peddle indelicate knowledge about the racialized Other. For instance, in “Ali-Baba Bound,” a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1940, Porky Pig runs up against Ali-Baba and his “Dirty Sleeves.” The humor is constructed around a basic scaffolding of the Arab as dirty and sneaky. They are too primitive to competently use rockets and must strap explosives to their heads:

The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor the following year ignited a discursive explosion surrounding the Japanese, those living in America and abroad; for a time Arabs and Muslims occupied a relatively small sliver of American concern. It is striking how eerily similar representations of Japanese persons were to those of Arabs and Muslims. However, fed by photographic evidence of the destruction of Pearl Harbor and the tangible realities associated with the American war machine, dominant representations of the treacherous Japanese Other went further and faster. Each representation of the “Jap” became more and more fanciful, each illustration seemingly emboldened by the last to push the caricature even further.

Celebrated children’s author Dr. Seuss published a cartoon only weeks before the United States would forcibly relocate 120,000 ethnic Japanese persons living in the United States to internment camps. The cartoon depicts a buck-toothed, fifth column of Japanese Americans lining up from Washington to California for their very own box of TNT. A man scales the rooftop of the explosives depot “waiting for the signal from home.”

Or consider a Looney Tunes cartoon from the period, “Tokio Jokio,” which similarly presents Japanese people with buck teeth and buffoonish behavior:

Whereas the Seuss cartoon presents extant fears about a treacherous Japanese enemy living among us, the Looney Tunes cartoon lampoons them as bumbling idiots. In the Seuss cartoon, their tribal-like loyalties to the Emperor mean they are capable of doing just about anything, but in the Looney Tunes cartoon they are too incompetent to prevent their own Fire Prevention Headquarters from burning to the ground. Such seemingly contradictory representations permeated the American imagination of the time, alternately stoking anxieties while assuring Americans of their national and even racial superiority.

These racist representations aimed at the Japanese were not buried by the detonation of two atomic bombs over Japanese cities; they have proven to be free-floating and transferable to our emergent enemies. Today, Arabs and Muslims are routinely depicted in comedy as incompetent. They are again the bumbling idiots, simultaneously too stupid to successfully perpetrate an attack and just stupid enough to commit truly heinous crimes. The imagined fifth column has become the terrorist sleeper cell. In 1942 we feared Japanese Americans were blindly loyal to “their” Emperor. Today we are bombarded with ideas about the tribal loyalties of American Muslims. So powerful are these loyalties, it is often suggested, Muslims would happily kill themselves to bring about the demise of Western civilization. The fanatical Middle Eastern suicide bomber is the new banzai charger and Japanese Kamikazi pilot.

A joke making the rounds of the internet goes something like this: “A friend of mine has started a new business. He’s manufacturing land mines that look like prayer mats. It’s doing well. He says prophets are going through the roof.” This joke, Dunham’s comedy sketch, and the Looney Tunes cartoons all mark historical moments when the racialized Other became so thoroughly demonized and devalued in the public consciousness, our undifferentiated “enemies” became so feared for their treachery and immorality, that it became possible to make light of hypothetical and real violence perpetrated against them. One might speculate that it is strangely intoxicating to spot the boogieman tripping on his shoelaces, embarrassing himself, or dying by his own venom. The Achmed character’s tired threat, “I kill you!” is funny, perhaps, because his voice cracks like a thirteen-year-old boy, and we are entertained by the irony that someone so evil could appear so weak.

This comedy, which uncritically trades in the negative stereotypes aimed at Arabs and Muslims and is able to make an audience laugh at references to suicide bombing, is only possible because Arabs and Muslims have been successfully demonized and devalued. Comedians write jokes to get laughs, but they also operate from a space which grants them temporary license to openly discuss controversial ideas. Comedians contribute to the discourse, just as readily they respond to it, and their sets are just as capable of exposing hidden discrimination as reinforcing it.

Lester Andrist is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in the role of social capital and personal networks in finding jobs in India and Taiwan and cultural representations of groups in indefinite detention. He is a co-editor of the website The Sociological Cinema, where a longer version of this post first appeared.

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

Jeremiah, Sarah S., Nikki R., and Erin H. sent us a great example of a company trying to make a feminized food safe for men. New Zealand’s Mammoth Supply Co. (a subsidiary of the multinational dairy giant Fonterra) is trying to convince men that yogurt is super manly and tough, “built to tame a man’s hunger.” The ads reinforce a whole range of rules about masculinity, which Erin nicely sums up as “the same old mythbashing that men need things that are big, tough, substantial, strong and rugged, and that coded-feminine activities (crying, being too involved in one’s personal appearance, coming into physical contact with people of the same sex) are inferior and weak”:

Via Copyranter.

The website, which assures the reader that this is “real man food, man,” as well as each carton of yogurt includes additional helpful tips:

Lisa K. recently saw an ad for Billy Tea in a newspaper that implies men and women are no longer sufficiently masculine and feminine, unlike the good old days when the tea was first produced:

Here’s another one of their ads:

Sarah B. sent in this Miller High Life ad (which she blogged about at Adventures in Mediocrity) that makes it clear that the only types of salad men should eat are the type without, you know, girly vegetables:

In another example of gendering foods, Lisa R. pointed out Applebee’s commercials for its set of dishes with under 550 calories. Women love eating low-calorie meals:

The commercial aimed at men, titled “Manly Man,” presents ordering from the 550-calorie menu as something men might be a bit embarrassed about, but don’t worry — once the guys see your huge plate of food, your masculinity will once again be unquestioned:

Are you confused about what “Great Britain” really is?  Do you become perplexed when asked to discern the difference between Britain, England, and the U.K.?  And what the heck is Wales!?  (Apologies to Wales.)  You are not alone!  CGP Grey offers an entertaining explanation that both clears up the questions, and makes us feel less stupid for not understanding them in the first place.  And you’ll learn some stunning facts about the residuals of empire.  Enjoy:

And if that wasn’t enough, here’s Grey’s historical rendering of how Scotland became a part of Great Britain.

Via Blame it on the Voices.

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 Montclair SocioBlog.

Is the SAT biased?  If so, against who is it biased?

It has long been part of the leftist creed that the SAT and other standardized tests are biased against the culturally disadvantaged – racial minorities, the poor, etc.  Those kids may be just as academically capable as more privileged kids, but the tests don’t show it.

But maybe SATs are biased against privileged kids.  That’s the implication in a blog post by Greg Mankiw.  Mankiw is not a liberal.  In the Bush-Cheney first term, he was the head of the Council of Economic Advisors.  He is also a Harvard professor and the author of a best-selling economics text book.  Back in May he had a blog post called “A Regression I’d Like to See.” If tests are biased in the way liberals say they are, says Mankiw, let’s regress GPA on SAT scores and family income.  The correlation with family income should be negative.

…a lower-income student should do better in college, holding reported SAT score constant, because he managed to get that SAT score without all those extra benefits.

In fact, the regression had been done, and Mankiw added this update:

Todd Stinebrickner, an economist at The University of Western Ontario, emails me this comment:

“Regardless, within the income groups we examine, students from higher income backgrounds have significantly higher grades throughout college conditional on college entrance exam . . . scores.” [Mankiw added the boldface]

What this means is that if you are a college admissions officer trying to identify the students who will do best in college, as measured by grades, you would give positive rather than negative weight on family income.

Not to give positive weight to income, therefore, is bias against those with higher incomes.

To see what Mankiw means, look at some made-up data on two groups.  To keep things civil, I’m just going to call them Group One and Group Two.  (You might imagine them as White and Black, Richer and Poorer, or whatever your preferred categories of injustice are.  I’m sticking with One and Two.)  Following Mankiw, we regress GPA on SAT scores.  That is, we use SAT scores as our predictor and we measure how well they predict students’ performance in college (their GPA).

In both groups, the higher the SAT, the higher the GPA.  As the regression line shows, the test is a good predictor of performance.  But you can also see that the Group One students are higher on both.  If we put the two groups together we get this.

Just as Mankiw says, if you’re a college admissions director and you want the students who do best, at any level of SAT score, you should give preference to Group One.  For example, look at all the students who scored 500 on the SAT (i.e., holding SAT constant at 500).  The Group One kids got better grades than did the Group Two kids.  So just using the SATs, without taking the Group factor (e..g., income ) into account, biases things against Group One.  The Group One students can complain: “the SAT underestimates our abilities, so the SAT is biased against us.”

Case closed?  Not yet.  I hesitate to go up against an academic superstar like Mankiw, and I don’t want to insult him (I’ll leave that to Paul Krugman).  But there are two ways to regress the data.  So there’s another regression, maybe one that Mankiw does not want to see.

What happens if we take the same data and regress SAT scores on GPA?  Now GPA is our predictor variable.  In effect, we’re using it as an indicator of how smart the student really is, the same way we used the SAT in the first graph.

Let’s hold GPA constant at 3.0.  The Group One students at that GPA have, on average, higher SAT scores.  So the Group Two students can legitimately say, “We’re just as smart as the Group One kids; we have the same GPA.  But the SAT gives the impression that we’re less smart.  So the SAT is biased against us.”

So where are we?

• The test makers say that it’s a good test – it predicts who will do well in college.
• The Group One students say the test is biased against them.
• The Group Two students say the test is biased against them.

And they all are right.

————————

Huge hat tip to my brother, S.A. Livingston.  He told me of this idea (it dates back to a paper from the1970s by Nancy Cole) and provided the made-up data to illustrate it.  He also suggested these lines from Gilbert and Sullivan:

And you’ll allow, as I expect
That they are right to so object
And I am right, and you are right
And everything is quite correct.

Adrienne K., from the excellent blog Native Appropriations, recently appeared on the Al Jazeera English show The Stream to discuss issues of cultural appropriation of Native American cultures in fashion and home decor, sports mascots, and so on. It’s a great segment about Native American concerns specifically, and the broader issues of appropriation, respecting different cultures, and how responsible different groups are for educating themselves and others about cultural traditions:

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

I have criticized sloppy statistical work by some international feminist organizations, so I’m glad to have a chance to point out a useful new report and website.

The Progress of the World’s Women is from the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. The full-blown site has an executive summary, a long report, and a statistics index page with a download of the complete spreadsheet. I selected a few of the interesting graphics.

Skewed sex ratios (which I’ve written about here and here) are in the news, with the publication of Unnatural Selection, by Mara Hvistendahl. The report shows some of the countries with the most skewed sex ratios, reflecting the practice of parents aborting female fetuses (Vietnam and Taiwan should  be in there, too). With the exception of Korea, they’ve all gotten more skewed since the 1990s, when ultrasounds became more widely available, allowing parents to find out the sex of the fetus early in the pregnancy.

The most egregious inequality between women of the world is probably in maternal mortality. This chart shows, for example, that the chance of a woman dying during pregnancy or birth is about 100- 39-times higher in Africa than Europe. The chart also shows how many of those deaths are from unsafe abortions.

Finally, I made this one myself, showing women as a percentage of parliament in most of the world’s rich countries (the spreadsheet has the whole list). The USA, with 90 women out of 535 members of Congress, comes in at 17%.

The report focuses on law and justice issues, including rape and violence against women, as well as reparations, property rights, and judicial reform. They boil down their conclusions to: “Ten proven approaches to make justice systems work for women“:

1. Support women’s legal organizations

2. Support one-stop shops and specialized services to reduce attrition in the justice chain [that refers to rape cases, for example, not making their way from charge to conviction -pnc]

3. Implement gender-sensitive law reform

4. Use quotas to boost the number of women legislators

5. Put women on the front line of law enforcement

6. Train judges and monitor decisions

7. Increase women’s access to courts and truth commissions in conflict and post-conflict contexts.

8. Implement gender-responsive reparations programmes

9. Invest in women’s access to justice

10. Put gender equality at the heart of the Millennium Development Goals