Archive: 2011

I often find myself bemused at our insistence on using sex (i.e., male or female) as the defining thing that describes our sexual orientation.  We are homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, right?  These words supposedly mean that we are sexually attracted to the same sex, the other sex, or both.  Right?

No! Not by a long shot! Essentially no one is attracted to men, for example, no matter what their sexual orientation.  I’m straight and female, but I am attracted to a very, very, very small subset of men. I’m generally only attracted to men within a certain age range, with kind faces (I find the chiseled look a bit intimidating); also, I prefer them to be relatively clean.  If I can add non-physical characteristics, then being aggressive with buddies or rude to waitstaff or prone to jealousy are all turn-offs, as are certain politics.  I’ll stop here.  Suffice to say, suggesting that I’m attracted to men is a vast overstatement.  Sexual orientation, as we think of it, simply doesn’t describe my proclivities. I suppose this is true for most of us.

I was reminded of this idea when I came across an OK Cupid post.  Christian Rudder drew on the profiles of over 250,000 heterosexual users, discovering that a large percentage of them had (positive) sexual experiences with people of the same sex, or wanted to (source).

Thirteen percent of self-identified straight men have had a sexual encounter with another man.  Seven percent of them enjoyed it.  Another 5% haven’t had the pleasure, but they would like to.

Significantly more self-identified straight women, 33%,  have had a sexual encounter with another woman.  Twenty-six percent of them enjoyed it.  Another 18% haven’t, but they would like to.  Less than half reported that they hadn’t and figured they never would.

Reported sexual orientation, then, simply doesn’t map perfectly onto desires or behaviors, in addition to failing to capture the full complexity of our sexualities.

For more of OK Cupid’s data, see our posts on the racial politics of dating, what women want, how attractiveness matters, age, gender, and the shape of the dating pool, older women want more sex, and the lies love-seekers tell.

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 The Social Complex.

Take a look at these two images.  The people in Image A and Image B are identical, save for their relative heights and the way that their heads are tilted in order to maintain eye contact.  Now how do you think each of these images would be independently perceived by the average person?  How do you perceive the events depicted in these images?

(see full sized image here)

Do one of these men seem “assertive” while the other seems “submissive” or “pushy”?  What would you imagine the woman is thinking in each of these images?  How would you rate the social esteem of each of these men?  Which one seems to have the most business acumen?  The most leadership potential?  Which man would you rate as more attractive?  What do you think these two people are talking about in each image?  Does your perception of what is happening in the conversation change from image to image?

If you are being honest with yourself here, you probably are imagining many differences in the social interactions depicted in these two images that don’t actually exist outside of our cultural framework. From the age that we become aware of our environment we are bombarded with cultural images, traditions, behaviors, and ideals (both expressly and implicitly conveyed) which foster heightist concepts within our psyche.

These heightist concepts come into play along with our perceptions of gender.  Masculinity is culturally tied to “Tall” and femininity is culturally tied to “Short.” Therefore, the negative cultural perceptions that apply to “feminine males” also apply to “short males” and the positive cultural perceptions that apply to “masculine males” also apply to “tall males.”  That is why we perceive Image A and Image B differently, even though there is no story behind the images beyond what we imagine.

Perhaps (to some extent) the negative cultural perceptions that apply to “masculine women” also apply to “tall females” and the positive cultural perceptions that apply to “feminine females” also apply to “short females”?  I do not know.  However, I have my doubts that it works this way for females.

This is because (in my humble opinion – with no evidence to back this up):

• Being a masculine woman is probably NOT considered as negative in our society as being a feminine man.  In other words, our society values masculinity more than femininity and so it is more important for a male to be masculine, but much less important for a female to be feminine.
• Additional height (or “tallness”) is considered a masculine trait and so more important for a male to have than it would be detrimental for a female.
• Tallness (for some reason) is not considered masculine on a female.  Body mass (weight) is considered more of a “masculine” trait on a female than pure height.

Any comments?  Discussion?

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Geoffrey Arnold is an associate with a mid-sized corporate law firm’s Business Litigation Practice Group.  When Geoffrey isn’t chasing Billable Hours in the defense of white-collar criminals, he is most likely writing about social justice with a special emphasis on height discrimination at his blog: The Social Complex.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

The OccupyWallStreet movement has succeed in forcing the media to acknowledge the extent and seriousness of income inequality.  In many ways wealth inequality is a bigger problem since it is wealth that largely underpins income and power differences.  According to an Economic Policy Institute posting,

the richest 5 percent of households obtained roughly 82 percent of all the nation’s gains in wealth between 1983 and 2009. The bottom 60 percent of households actually had less wealth in 2009 than in 1983, meaning they did not participate at all in the growth of wealth over this period.

It is worth dividing the top 5% into what has now become two familiar groups, the top 1% and the next 4%.  As the chart below shows, the top 1% of households captured 40% of all the growth in wealth over the period 1983 to 2009.  The next 4% gained 41.5%.

Putting these trends into dollars, households in the top 1% gained an average of $4.5 million in wealth and households in the next 4% gained an average of $1.2 million over the period.  It is worth restating that those are just their gains. How does your existing wealth stack up against their gains?

Race, sex, religion, color, national origin, age, disability, and veteran status are all what are called protected classes under federal law — characteristics that cannot be used as the basis for discrimination in hiring, housing, or other arenas. There are loopholes, however; one is that it is acceptable to discriminate based on a protected characteristic if you can show that it is “bona fide occupational qualification” (BFOQ). So, for instance, if you can show that being female is a legitimate requirement for being able to perform a particular job, you can refuse to hire men. Hooters used the BFOQ argument when they were sued for sex discrimination because they would not hire men as servers.

The exceptions are race and color, which are not legally seen as ever being legitimate qualifications for doing a job. As the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website states, “Nor may race or color ever be a bona fide occupational qualification under Title VII.” That is, there is absolutely no good reason that being of one race or another would ever be a legal basis for hiring.

And yet, there’s still at least one arena where race is blatantly and openly used as a basis for hiring: Hollywood casting. Back in 2006, Russell Robinson, a faculty member at the UCLA School of Law, looked at the sex and race/ethnicity characteristics specified in “breakdowns” — the summaries of characteristics presented in casting announcements. As Robinson explains in the article “Casting and Caste-ing: Reconciling Artistic Freedom and Antidiscrimination Norms,” his sample certainly doesn’t include all roles in the process of being cast during that period. Roles aimed at big stars who don’t go through the typical audition process may never be released as a breakdown, since there’s no intent to recruit for the role. But

Robinson’s team looked at all breakdowns for feature films released between June 1 and August 31, 2006, excluding calls for extras and stunt people. As they reported in the research brief “Hollywood’s Race/Ethnicity and Gender-Based Casting: Prospects for a Title VII Lawsuit,” the vast majority of the breakdowns explicitly state the race of the character, with only 8.5% of roles open to any race/ethnicity:

Notice that African Americans and Latinos are particularly under-represented compared to their proportion of the total U.S. population. And while 22.5% of breakdowns specifically said the character should be White, almost half included language that designated the role as implicitly White — for instance, including only White actors in a list of prototypes for the role. In fact, interviews with casting directors indicate that roles are presumed to be White unless the breakdown specifically says otherwise.

Almost all breakdowns specified the sex of the character; 59% of the breakdowns specified the role was for a man, while 35% of roles were for women.

Robinson also analyzed the cast of 171 films released in 2005 that made at least $1 million. The majority of all roles were reserved for men. An overwhelming 73% of leads were men, and even supporting roles were predominantly for men:

Of the leads in those films, 81.9% were White non-Hispanic:

Robinson’s work shows that Hollywood still explicitly uses protected classes in hiring decisions, including race/color, which have been excluded from the BFOQ loophole. For more on this, see our posts on race and roles in recent trailers, casting Whites in Asian roles, Hollywood’s discomfort with Asian lead roles, gendered positioning in promotional posters, race and representation in Hollywood, the Smurfette Principle in movies, who goes to see movies, anyway?, Anita Sarkeesian on male-centric plots, and the lack ofra African Americans on Friends.

Thanks to Dolores R. for the tip about Robinson’s study, which she originally saw at Racialicious.

(source)

In this post I’m happy to feature two short clips of sociologists at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas talking about the sex industry in Las Vegas.

First, in this two-minute clip, Barb Brents discusses the way that the sex industry in Las Vegas is set up in ways that protect “referral services” (the organizations that arrange for what often includes sex work), while exposing sex workers to policing and criminalization:

Second, Crystal Jackson, takes two minutes to explain that the stereotype of sex workers — women who have sex with men — makes male sex workers invisible and transgender sex workers seem deviant. This has consequences. It means that men in the sex industry are more able to evade the police (who aren’t looking for them), while transgender sex workers are even more likely than women to experience abuse from both the police and clients. This means that patriarchy is an insufficient theory with which to theorize sex 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.

In The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Philip Zimbardo tries to explain how seemingly ordinary, average people can become involved in, or passively fail to oppose, evil acts. Zimbardo is the researcher who designed the (in)famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment,  in which students were randomly assigned as “prisoners” or “guards” for an experiment on how prison affects human behavior. The experiment, meant to last two weeks, had to be called off after 6 days because of the extreme negative effects on, and brutality emerging among, the participants. Zimbardo’s study, as well as others such as Milgram’s obedience experiment, highlighted the role of conformity to social norms and obedience to apparent authority figures in leading people to engage in actions that would seem to be so ethically unacceptable that any decent person would refuse.

Dolores R. sent in a Candid Camera clip from 1962 that illustrates the power of conformity:

As Zimbardo says on his website,

We laugh that these people are manipulated like puppets on invisible strings, but this scenario makes us aware of the number of situations in which we mindlessly follow the dictates of group norms and situational forces.

From Open Culture, via Boing Boing.

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that coverage of the economy went up in October:

Overall economic coverage accounted for 22% of the newshole from October 3-9, up from 14% the week before (when it was No. 2).

(The word “newshole” refers to the limited space/time devoted to news in a day.)

Coverage of the protests is rising too, suggesting that Occupy Wall Street can take at least part of the credit:

The protests [themselves]… constituted the largest single thread in that coverage, making up about one-third of the economic storyline. That amounted to roughly 7% of the overall newshole, or nearly four times the amount of protest coverage from the week before.

So, is Occupy Wall Street also changing the discourse?

Jeremiah sent a link to data collected by Think Progress that suggests it is.  They counted the number of times MSNBC, CNN, and Fox used the terms “unemployed,”  “unemployment,” and “debt” during the last week in July, before the protests began.  They found that news coverage emphasized the debt (and the need to cut spending to reduce it) much, much more than the fact that there were large numbers of unemployed people (who would be helped by spending).

During the week of October 10-16, though, the language was different.  News coverage talked about the protests themselves, and the problem of jobs for the unemployed. The specter of the debt is now taking a back seat to the suffering of individuals.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

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 group of conservative research institutes led by W. Bradford Wilcox’s National Marriage Project, with support from the Bradley Foundation, have produced a website called The Sustainable Demographic Dividend. They argue:

…the long-term fortunes of the modern economy rise and fall with the family. The report focuses on the key roles marriage and fertility play in sustaining long-term economic growth, the viability of the welfare state, the size and quality of the workforce, and the profitability of large sectors of the modern economy.

The analysis is not important, mostly focusing on promoting religion and marriage (I wrote more about one of the articles here). But they do make a unique appeal to corporate America:

Companies whose fortunes are linked to the health of the family, such as Procter & Gamble, spend billions of dollars each year on advertising. … Executives with oversight across brands should ask themselves a simple question: Do the messages used in our advertising make family life look attractive? Or do they exalt single living? Obviously, it’s in their long-term interest to do more of the former.

And they offer as a positive example this video from Proctor & Gamble, celebrating the company’s 75th anniversary in the Philippines.

One of the essays in the report says,

A turning point has occurred in the life of the human race. The sustainability of humankind’s oldest institution, the family—the fount of fertility, nurturance, and human capital—is now an open question.

Would more of this kind of advertising help to bring back the traditional family?