Archive: 2011

HAPPY October! Here are some highlights from last month…

New Contributor:

We’re pleased to announce that Wendy Christensen, visiting Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College, has joined us as a regular contributor. She studies the families of men and women in the armed forces, especially the ways that the military “recruits” family members into support roles.  Her first post on war-themed advertisingwas picked up by BoingBoing! Keep your eye out for posts or follow her on twitter.

News, Publications, and Appearances:

Thanks to Rebecca Pardo and the team at Impact,  I had the super fun experience of talking about hook up culture on MTV Canada last week.  That’s a first for me!

I also got to play a part in a CNN story about the difference between nerds and hipsters. Great idea for a story and well written by Aaron Sagers.

Contributor Caroline Heldman continues to report on the cheerleader who was forced to cheer for the man who she alleges sexually assaulted her.  After losing a court case against the school, she was required to pay the school’s $35,000 in legal fees.  An outcry led to an overturning of that requirement.  More at Ms. magazine.

I’m looking forward to visiting Pacific Lutheran University this month (October 25-26). I’ll be talking about both hook up culture and my research about U.S. discourses on “female genital mutilation.” I’d love to see you there!

I’ve also just scheduled talks at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and Harvard in March.  More on those later!

We were also linked from Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Feministing, The Frisky, and BoingBoing (as mentioned above).  We bask in the attention.

Progress on Course Guides:

Mary Nell Trautner — University at Buffalo, SUNY — has developed a fantastic new Course Guide for instructors teaching Sociology of Gender. We hope you think it’s as awesome as we do!

Gwen is also hard at work on her Introduction to Sociology Course Guide and I’m working on a Research Methods guide that’ll be ready soon.

We’d like to collect as many Course Guides as we can, even different takes on the same course.  So, if you’re interested in writing on, please see our Instructors Page. There’s other good stuff for instructors there too.

Best of September:

Our fabulous intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from last month.  Here’s what she found:

• Christie Barcelos, Exclusion and American Yoga
• Margo DeMello, Capitalism, Animals, and the Ownership of Icons (with Toucan Sam!)
• Dave Paul Strohecker and David Banks, QR Codes and Digital Exclusivity
• Martin Hart-Landsberg, The Innovation Trap: How the iPhone Isn’t Saving America
• Wendy Christensen, United We Buy: Using Patriotism and War to Sell Products
• Gwen Sharp, How to Avoid Harassing Asian Women
• Gwen Sharp, Openly Breastfeeding on Sesame Street
• Lisa Wade, Exposing the Artificiality of Women in Fashion
• Lisa Wade, Race-Themed Events at Colleges (trigger warning)

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter and Facebook.  Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:

• @lisadwade
• @gwensharpnv
• @familyunequal
• @carolineheldman
• @jaylivingston
• @wendyphd

Naomi and Katie sent in a link to a fabulous photo project in which typical model poses are reproduced in real life by real people. The photos, by Madrid-based artist Yolanda Dominguez, reveal just how distorted fashion, and expectations for women, have become. In an interview, Dominguez explains:

I tried to express what many women feel about women’s magazines and the image of women in the media – absurd, artificial, a hanger to wear dresses and bags, only concerned about being skinny, beautiful. We don’t identify with this type of woman – we are much more. I used the impossible poses to represent this type of woman and to show how absurd it is in a real context… [The] poses of the women are ridiculous – they seem dead, twisted, pulled. Why are men never put in these positions? They are always straight, successful, able and healthy… I try to express deep questions (sometimes dramatic) but always with irony and humour. I feel that when you can laugh at something you can get rid of it.

See more from Yolanda Dominguez at her website.

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.

Affirmative action policies in higher education help mediate the real race-based disadvantages that some minorities face, above and beyond class-based disadvantages that are faced by people of color and whites alike.  They have a nefarious dark side, though; a dark side that causes even people who otherwise support affirmative action to question the approach to alleviating racial inequality.  They sometimes undermine the self-confidence of minorities admitted into college, as this PostSecret confession suggests:

College students often have a pretty poor understanding of admissions processes.  In the absence of any real information, it’s easy to let stereotypes and biases inform beliefs about how any individual student got into college.  A student of color, then, may be viewed as less-deserving of admission regardless of their grades, test scores, and extra-curricular activities.

More perniciously, they may question their own qualifications for admission, even when they have significantly out-performed their white peers.

A simple message to college students of color, for what it’s worth:

Your institution accepted you because they thought you could succeed.  Period.  You belong in college.

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.

The media likes to talk about markets as if they were just a force of nature.  In fact, markets and their outcomes are largely shaped by political power.  In a capitalist system like ours, that power is largely used to advance the interests of those who own and run our dominant corporations.

Thanks to Bloomberg News we have yet another example of this reality.  In brief, as a result of Congressional and media pressure the Federal Reserve was recently forced to reveal its lending activity for the period August 2007 through April 2010.   Bloomberg News examined these Federal Reserve records and found that the Fed secretly provided selected banks, brokerage houses, and even non-financial firms (such as General Electric and Ford) with at least $1.2 trillion in loans, often with minimal collateral required and at below market interest rates.

This money was given through more than a dozen lending programs.  Many firms tapped multiple programs through multiple subsidiaries. Bloomberg arrived at its total by focusing on the seven largest programs, which included the Fed’s discount window and six temporary lending facilities (the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility; the Commercial Paper Funding Facility; the Primary Dealer Credit Facility; the Term Auction Facility; the Term Securities Lending Facility; and so-called single- tranche open market operations).

If you like visuals, here is a 5 minute video that provides a good summary of what Bloomberg gleaned from its examination.

UPDATE: Embedding was disabled, but you can watch it here.

Bloomberg also has an interactive site that allows you to chart who got what and over what period.

Some of the highlights are as follows:

The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley, got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion . . .

Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG, which got $77.2 billion. . . .

The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 — the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg — was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Federal Reserve fiercely resisted making its records public, arguing that doing so would stigmatize those institutions that received loans.  A group of the largest commercial banks actually petitioned the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful effort to keep the loan information secret.

Perhaps one reason that the Federal Reserve and the banks were reluctant to have these records made public is that they raise significant questions of conflict of interest.  According to a statement by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders:

…the Fed provided conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans.

For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed’s board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed.  Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed’s emergency lending programs.

In another disturbing finding, the GAO said that on Sept. 19, 2008, William Dudley, who is now the New York Fed president, was granted a waiver to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time AIG and GE were given bailout funds.  One reason the Fed did not make Dudley sell his holdings, according to the audit, was that it might have created the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Another reason may be that the Federal Reserve didn’t want it known that it was deviating from its past practice of requiring borrowers to provide secure collateral, which was normally either Treasuries or corporate bonds with the highest credit rating, and never stocks.  For example:

Morgan Stanley borrowed $61.3 billion from one Fed program in September 2008, pledging a total of $66.5 billion of collateral, according to Fed documents. Securities pledged included $21.5 billion of stocks, $6.68 billion of bonds with a junk credit rating and $19.5 billion of assets with an “unknown rating,” according to the documents. About 25 percent of the collateral was foreign-denominated.

Moreover, as Bloomberg News also reported, many Fed loans were made at below market interest.

On Oct. 20, 2008, for example, the central bank agreed to make $113.3 billion of 28-day loans through its Term Auction Facility at a rate of 1.1 percent, according to a press release at the time.

The rate was less than a third of the 3.8 percent that banks were charging each other to make one-month loans on that day. Bank of America and Wachovia Corp. each got $15 billion of the 1.1 percent TAF loans, followed by Royal Bank of Scotland’s RBS Citizens NA unit with $10 billion, Fed data show.

These loans were absolutely critical to the survival of our leading companies.  A case in point:

Citigroup was in debt to the Fed on seven out of every 10 days from August 2007 through April 2010, the most frequent U.S. borrower among the 100 biggest publicly traded firms by pre- crisis market valuation. On average, the bank had a daily balance at the Fed of almost $20 billion.

These loans are also a key reason that our post-Great Recession economy remains largely unchanged in structure.  In other words, it was the exercise of political power, rather than so-called market dynamics or efficiencies, that explains the financial industry’s continuing profitability and economic dominance.

Now imagine if we had a state that engaged in transparent planning and was committed to using our significant public resources to reshape our economy in the public interest.  As we have seen, state planning and intervention in economic activity already goes on.  Unfortunately, it happens behind closed doors and for the benefit of a small minority. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Super thanks to Rebecca Pardo for inviting me to be part of a segment on hook up culture for MTV News!  She and her team did such a wonderful job of editing and illustrating the interview.  I’m so tickled to be on MTV and excited to share it here!

The gist? College students are having sex, but not as much as you might think. And most of them are kind of disappointed about the whole thing. All in three minutes!

For a longer and decidedly less MTV-y approach to this topic, feel free to watch a 40-minute version of the talk taped at Franklin and Marshall College (slideshow and transcript if you’d rather read).

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.

Eve P. and Will LeS. suggested that we write about the window decals that have popped up on the back windows of cars in the last couple years.  The decals supposedly list the members of the car owner’s immediate family, sometimes including pets.  They also, though, tend to reproduce some interesting ideas about families.  Here’s what Eve had to say:

• The figures are almost always placed on the left side of the car, so that the figures (usually placed from tallest to shortest) strongly give the impression of a visual hierarchy or ranking.
• A “dad” figure is first in line, before a “mom” figure, and the adult figures come before the child figures (boy children before girl children, unless the boy is younger child), and the child figures come before any animal figures…
• This ranking seems to suggest that men take precedence over women, adults take precedence over children, and all humans take precedence over animals.
• I don’t think I’ve ever seen a two woman or two man setup (or any other set of adults besides one man and one woman)…
• The “dad” figure is taller than the “mom” figure…

So the stickers tend to reproduce the normalness of (1) being paired up with (2) someone of the other sex, (3) having children, (4) a gender hierarchy, and (5) the imperative that men be taller than women.

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.

Shamus K. posted this clip from the show QI, in which Stephen Fry provides a  3 1/2 minute primer on the truly stunning statistics about U.S. imprisonment rates:

Relatedly, Tara B. provided a link to data posted at Think Progress about the growth in lobbying by private prison operators, who receive contracts to house prisoners; their political contributions nearly tripled between 2002 and 2010:

Private prisons are still a minor, but growing, segment of the U.S. prison system. As of 2009, they housed 8% of all federal and state prisoners:

For more on private prisons and their lobbying efforts, see our earlier post on the role of Corrections Corporation of America in passage of the Arizona anti-immigration law.

Dmitriy T.M. and Laura McD. sent in this awesome one-minute clip of 1950s commercials in which men insult their wives’ coffee. There’s something just stunning in the nature of the relationships portrayed. The men seem so entitled to their wives’ service, and so disdainful of her genuine efforts to please him. It’s sad.

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.