Archive: 2011

This is a whimsical trailer for an animated movie with a progressive pro-environment message based on Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax.  Pretty to watch, fantastical, heart-warming, and progressive… it draws you in and then, just as yoiur defenses had been lowered, BAM! It ends with a sexist joke.

Sigh.

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.

This is a re-post in response to a new submission by vmlojw.

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Toban B. sent us this photo he took in Cardiff, Wales, of Golliwog banks:

While the sign indicates these particular ones were for display only, Toban says there were others clearly for sale.

The golliwog (also spelled golliwogg) is an old racist caricature, clearly similar to blackface minstrel-type or mammy figures in the U.S. It emerged in the 1800s but was popularized when James Robertson and Sons adopted a golliwog named Golly as the logo for their jam around 1910:

Now, obviously you’ll often find these types of things for sale in antique stores, or on display at museums. They were very common in the U.S., Britain, and I’m sure many other countries, so it’s not surprising you’d come upon them.

The thing about the golliwogs Toban saw, though, is that they don’t appear to be antiques. The same ones can be found on ebay, and here’s the box they come in, which looks quite new (as do the dolls themselves):

The ebay listing for that one lists it as “brand new,” though theoretically that could refer to an antique that had never been taken out of the box, I suppose. But the listing doesn’t say anything about it being an antique. And Toban says,

…the items on the table around them — at Cardiff Market — generally weren’t antiques.  Since there were newly mass produced tourist/nationalism industry products around them, people passing by generally wouldn’t view the Golliwogg dolls as antiques.  The dolls weren’t somehow distinguished from the newer products.

vmlojw, who is in Sydney, Australia, emailed in to tell us that her 1-year-old daughter received one as a gift and she later “found a local charity stall full of knitted golliwogs.”  vmlojw figured this couldn’t happen in North America; I’m not so sure.

It’s one thing to find antique racist caricatures for sale. I still don’t know why you’d want to buy one, but I can certainly see why they’d be appropriate for museum displays. But I find it both bizarre and disturbing when new versions of such things are produced and put on sale as a “cutesy” souvenir. Do people think we’re so “post-racial” now that these are completely disconnected from their origins in a racist culture that viewed non-Whites as less human, less intelligent, and less civilized? Why would someone think this is an adorable reminder of their time in Cardiff? I really don’t get it.

Also see: vintage Jezebel products, mammy souvenirs for sale in Savannah, modern reproductions of old racist images, and patterns for making mammy-type dolls.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

Americans about my age and older all seem to have stories about how we survived our school playgrounds without today’s cushy soft surfaces, safety-oriented climbing structures, and running water.

Here is a picture of the playground at my elementary school. I myself survived a fall off one of those seesaws onto the broken-glass-strewn asphalt, with nothing but a scrape to show for it (attended to by the school secretary — there was no “school nurse” back then either).

In the safety craze in recent decades, sadly, real seesaws were one of the first things to go.

Go back another few generations, and you’ll find stories like this — about 200 children killed in the streets of New York in 1910 (from the NYT Jan. 1, 1911):

Most of those kids weren’t in cars or wagons; they were playing in the streets, doing work for their families, or just wandering around unattended — there were no public playgrounds. In contrast, in 2009 there were about 10 pedestrian or cycling children killed by vehicles in New York City. Ah, the good old days.*

Nowadays

As things have gotten safer for America’s children, of course, parents have become ever more concerned with their safety, as well as with their learning and development. Somewhere in America on a Sunday a few weeks ago, in an affluent community, a public playground was bubbling with activity. Every child seemed to be enjoying a rollicking good time on the latest safety-designed play equipment, cushioned by a luxuriously deep bed of mulch.

Also, each child seemed to be within a few feet of a parent or other adult caretaker — coaching, encouraging, spotting, supervising.

In recent years, concern about the physical fitness of children has increased, especially among poor children. Some researchers have asked whether the proximity of safe neighborhood playgrounds is one cause of the social class disparity in obesity rates. That would make sense because obesity rates are lower among children who play outdoors. But the relationship between social class and playing outdoors is not clear at all. Rich children have more access to some kinds of facilities, but poor children have more free time — and, where there is public housing, it usually includes playgrounds, like this one photographed in the 1960s:

In Annette Lareau’s analysis of family life and social class, Unequal Childhoods, children of middle class and richer parents spend more time in organized activities, and poorer kids spend more time in unstructured time (including play and TV). But as these pictures show, there’s play and there’s play. Are middle class parents hovering more than poorer parents do, and with what effect?

Consider a recent article by Myron Floyd and colleagues (covered here), which attempted to assess the level of physical activity among children in public parks by observing 2,700 children in 20 public parks in Durham, NC:

[The] presence of parental supervision was the strongest negative correlate of children’s activity… the presence of adults appears to inadvertently suppress park-based physical activity in the current study, particularly among younger children… This result should be used to encourage park designers to create play environments conducive to feelings of safety and security that would encourage rather than discourage active park use among children. For example, blending natural landscapes, manufactured play structures, and fencing in close intimate settings can be used to create comfortable environments for children and families. Such design strategies could encourage parents to allow their children to freely explore their surroundings, providing more opportunities for physical activity.

Interestingly, park in the pictured above has a fence around it so that parents can hang around at a distance with little fear for their children.

Under social pressure

In Under Pressure, one of many books bemoaning the excesses of over-parenting, Carl Honoré wrote:

Even when we poke fun at overzealous parenting… part of us wonders, What if they’re right? What if I’m letting my children down by not parenting harder? Racked by guilt and terrified of doing the wrong thing, we end up copying the alpha parent in the playground.

The point is not just that some parents have overzealous supervisory ambitions, driven by unequal investments in children and a threateningly competitive future. I think there is a supervision ratchet that feeds on the interaction between parents. In an article called “Playground Panopticism,” Holly Blackford summarized her observations:

The mothers in the ring of park benches symbolize the suggestion of surveillance, which Foucault describes as the technology of disciplinary power under liberal ideals of governance. However, the panoptic force of the mothers around the suburban playground becomes a community that gazes at the children only to ultimately gaze at one another, seeing reflected in the children the parenting abilities of one another.

This plays out in everyday interaction, whether one wants to engage it or not. If everyone else’s kid is closely supervised while yours is running around bonkers on her own, what is a parent to do? If the other parents insist that their kids not go “up the slide” and yours just scrambles past them, you feel the pressure. (You also put the other parent in the position of violating another taboo — supervising someone else’s child.) So it’s not just fear of underparenting that drives parents to hover — it’s also the cross-parent interactions. These are the moments when contagious parenting behavior spreads.

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*I started looking at this after reading about it in Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child, in which she writes, “The case of children’s accidental death provides empirical evidence of the new meanings of child life in twentieth-century America.”

Reminder: This blog post does not constitute research, but rather commentary, observation and recommendations for reading and discussion. The description of my childhood playground, and of one recent afternoon at one park, are anecdotes, something that stimulates reflection on wider issues, not empirical evidence or data.

Cross-posted at Bytes of China.

Oh how this Toyota Highlander advertisment is reflective of the new global order.  I saw this picture in Guangzhou’s domestic terminal. A Chinese couple is getting out of their Japanese brand car into what appears to be a private yacht. A white male greets them, taking their travel items and appears to be eager in their service.

This advertisement reflects a new Chinese imaginary — one that is global, expansive, unlimited, and exploratory. It also tells us who has the power to live out this imaginary. Ten years ago or even five years ago, I don’t think this advertisement would’ve existed. But now companies have turned to the Chinese consumer, encouraging them to participate in this lifestyle. The entire global economy right now depends on the Chinese elite and middle-class to spend. But how long can this go on for until we see the next crisis? For how long can each system create “value”?

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Tricia Wang is an ethnographer, sociologist, and researcher. She is on a Fulbright in China observing how digital technologies are mediating new conceptions of information and desire among youth & migrants. She is a student at UC San Diego’s PhD Sociology program.  She blogs at Bytes of China.

Thanks to Benjamin B. for the tip!

Homefront war support is a critical part of war; care packages, letters, emails, and phone calls greatly increase troop morale. Typically homefront war support is gendered. In the U.S., women are usually the ones at home providing support to the men serving. During various wars the military has encouraged women to support male troops. It’s patriotic, as this WWII poster notes:

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have altered our images of the gendered make up of the homefront and warfront. Today 16% of the military is female, and even though women are not officially allowed in combat positions, they are often in combat situations in the current wars, where the lines of combat are blurred. As a result, over 115 women have been killed in combat. We’re still used to seeing these kinds of images:

Embed from Getty Images

But images such as this are becoming more common:

Embed from Getty Images

But a student of mine brought me the following ad from the most recent issue of Cosmopolitan:

Main text:

Cosmo and Maybelline New York are collecting ‘kisses’ for our brave armed forces overseas. For each ‘kiss’ you send, we’ll donate $1 to the USO.* Detach a postcard from the previous page, write a note of thanks with our Color Sensational kiss, add a stamp and drop it in the mail. *Up to $20,000

So Maybelline has teamed up with the USO (United Service Organization- a private, non-profit organization) to send support, in the form of “kisses,” and up to $20,000, to the troops overseas.

The assumption here is that armed service members are male and need the support of “kisses” from the homefront—a homefront that is comprised of women. The campaign is also an example of heteronormativity (the often unnoticed ways that heterosexuality is normalized and privileged) because it assumes that (men) serving overseas are heterosexual and will want to receive lipstick kisses from (presumably heterosexual) women. While women service members have been more visible during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this campaign reminds me that war is still largely gendered in a heteronormative fashion. The warfront is still thought of as men’s domain, the homefront women’s domain, and war support relies on heterosexual relationships.

Cross-posted at Ms.

According to a BBC News story sent in by Leiana S. and Kinesiology professor Mary Louise Adams, the International Boxing Association may soon require female boxers to wear skirts.  The President of the Association, Dr. Ching-Kuo Wu, argues that it will allow viewers to tell the difference between the men and the women who currently wear the same uniforms, including headgear.  Right now the skirt is an optional variation on the official uniform but, Dr. Wu says, “After we hear about its comfort and how easy it is to compete in the uniform, it may be compulsory.”

At the European Championships in Rotterdam last week, female boxers from Poland and Romania adopted the new uniform.  A coach of the Poland team said: “By wearing skirts, in my opinion, it gives a good impression, a womanly impression.”

This might be an example of officials assuming that (1) men are the main audience for boxing and that (2) men will watch women’s boxing more if they differentiate/sexualize women.

It might also, however, be an example of an attempt to retrench difference between men and women exactly when those differences start to dissolve.  Discomfort with the lack of actual differences between men and women sometimes leads individuals to encourage or enforce artificial ones.  I would say that this is one of the main functions of clothes today. Yeah, I said it. I think exaggerating what are actually rather weak and strongly overlapping differences between men and women is one of the primary functions of clothes.

In any case, it’s probably a combination of both.

Earlier this year they tried this with Badminton, but it didn’t take.

The idea that female athletes aren’t sufficiently feminine has been around as long as sports have been around.  Today, the feminizing of athletes is ubiquitous.  See our posts on Serena Williams’s ESPN cover, Candace Parker “is pretty, which helps,” press photos of female athletes in dresses, groundbreaking female sailor is also pretty, sexualizing female Olympic athletes, diets of champions, media portrayals of female athletes, and valuing dads in the WNBA.

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 from Family Inequality.

The Congressional Budget Office has a new report on trends in the income distribution. The big news is the 1%’s blitzkrieg assault on equality.*

The headline image will be this one, which shows the changing share of after-tax-and-transfer household income. Every group except the top 1% had a smaller share of income in 2007 than they did in 1979, or just an equal share in the case of the 81st-99th percentile group. That means the gains in the top quintile are all concentrated in the top 1%.

That is very important and a source of outrage for the hundreds of thousands of Facebook users posting, commenting, or “liking” Occupy Wall St. and its related pages.

But it would be misleading to view the chart as showing that incomes fell for the other groups, since it shows shares of the total income. Income growth has been very skewed toward the top, but it is by no means confined to the top 1%. Here is my graph showing the income cutoffs for each quintile, and for the top slices separately. These are the cutoffs in 1979 and 2007 (in inflation-adjusted dollars), with the percentage change in the backgrounded bars.

(Note there is no lower cutoff for the bottom quintile — the price of entry for that group is always $0).

Two thoughts about this.

• Even if there were no 1%, if the graph only included the green bars, there would be plenty of increasing inequality for what might then be called “the 80%” to protest. The 81st-99th folks may be lucky to have the popular anger directed at the grotesque opulence of the sliver above them. (I’m not diminishing the extremity of the gains for the top 1%, but, as Matt Taibbi describes, the object of opposition is not just their income, but their influence.

• If you look at the families and networks of the top 1%, how many of them have relatives, friends, and even co-“workers” who are only in the top 10%? Would a self-respecting 1% family be appalled if their son married someone from a stable 5%-er family?

What I’m wondering is whether the 1% folks are merely a statistical convenience rather than a socially cohesive group (dare I say, class?). That’s an empirical question that national income distributions can’t necessarily answer.

*I should mention that the report is not just another rehash of Census numbers, though. Two adjustments they made seem especially good. First, they used a tricky matching method to combine Current Population Survey numbers (which do better at benefits and low-income households) combined with Internal Revenue Service data (which is better for high-end data). Second, they adjusted for household size and composition, and calculated distributions before and after taxes and transfers, and among different kinds of income. The report is here, a summary is here, and the blog post version is here.

The Pew Charitable Trusts just released an update on the effects of long-term unemployment. One aspect of this economic crisis that sets it apart from others over the past several decades is how long unemployment is lasting. At this point, about a third of the unemployed have been out of a job for a full year or more:

Though the likelihood of being unemployed went down with age, among those who have lost their jobs, long periods of unemployment are more common among older than younger workers:

Read the full mini-report here. Via Talking Points Memo.

Also check out Lisa’s post on the long-term consequences of unemployment.