Archive: 2011

The “poverty line” is an income, set by the federal government, used to measure whether one is in or out of poverty.  But this line, of course, is both sociological and political.  What is poverty?

A nonprofit organization called Wider Opportunities for Women has released a study challenging the federal poverty lines.  According to the New York Times article on their work, their aim is to “…set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.”  Their “lines,” then, deviate significantly from those of the federal government.

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.

Michel Foucault famously suggested that we stop congratulating ourselves for our willingness to talk about sex (“We are just so, like, liberated!”) and ask what it is exactly that we are saying. I thought of him as I pondered this 50-second compilation of each time a character in a single episode of the ABC Family show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, utters the word “sex.” How many times?  70 times.  70 times in just 45 minutes of programming.

So we definitely know that we’re talking about sex.  That’s for sure.  But what is the impact of all of this talk?  You can imagine a thousand different messages contained in the space between one “sex” and the next.  Whether that’s liberating is up for debate.

Found at The Daily What.

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.

I am trying to re-enter society after several days being sick, so I’m going with something short and simple today. Eden H. sent in this chart, found at Business Insider, that compares hourly minimum wages in a number of European countries to the U.S.:

The European data are available from Eurostat (though note they report minimum wages in terms of Euros per month, not hour, so the data was converted for the chart).

Ria sent along an example of something simultaneously routine and jarring.  Disney princess grapes:

Thinking out loud here:  By now, in the U.S., we’re used to thinking about food being branded with mascots, movie/tv show characters, and even corporate entities.  When I posted about Cars– and Disney princess-themed diet snack packs, for example, it wasn’t the branding of food that interested me.  But there is something unfamiliar to me about the associating of grapes with Disney.  I think it has to do with the idea of processed versus “fresh” foods.  In this case, Disney is marking a (genetically-modified) natural product in its natural state.  This feels different than marking a brightly-colored, largely synthetic, already highly-branded foodstuff.  Can Disney really claim grapes?  Celery?  Red peppers?   To me, these are the last things in the grocery store that actually feel as if they come straight from the farmer.  Now they’re taking a detour through the happiest place on earth?

Ria links the new development in branding to the obesity panic and the push for kids to eat healthier food. And she’s suspicious of the linking of corporate interests to health.

What do think?  Are you as weirded out as I am?  Is Ria onto something?  What does it mean!?  What’s next?  Republican Party chicken breasts?  South Park brand brown rice?

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.

Lauren S. sent in this ad for a used car dealership that ran in the London Free Press, a free newspaper in London, Ontario. The ad compares used cars to sexually experienced women with the lines, “You know you’re not the first. But do you really care?”:

As Lauren points out, it’s blatant objectification of women, but “in addition to objectifying women to sell vehicles, this campaign suggests that a woman’s sexual past is equivalent to depreciation.”

I suppose someone could argue that the message that you shouldn’t “care” whether your women/cars are “used” rejects the sexual double standard, but the objectification and the implication that non-virgin women are “used” undermine any apparent rejection of that double standard.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen this type of ad for used cars; we previously posted a BMW ad, but in that case, I suspect (though we’ve never been able to confirm) that it might have been a spec ad made by an ad agency but never actually used by BMW. In this case, Lauren actually saw it in print.

UPDATE 1: Well, I must give Dale Wurfel some credit. He is apparently an equal-opportunity objectifier. He ran a second ad that uses a man instead of a woman:

Via Wheels.

Of course, equal objectification doesn’t necessarily have equal effects. We live in a world with a sexual double standard. Calling a woman “used” resonates culturally in a way that it simply doesn’t for men, because we don’t punish men for sexual experience in the same way.

UPDATE 2: Lauren let us know that the car dealership issued an apology:

UPDATE: Comments closed.

In this TED video sent in by BlackCat and Chana Messinger, Tony Porter gives a nice introduction to what it means — for men, women, sons, and daughters — that men are confined by the dictates of masculinity.  (Trigger warning: at about the 9 minute mark, there is a story about a sexual assault.)

Transcript after the jump (thanks to DECIUS for posting it in the comments).

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Deeb K. sent in a story from the New York Times about who does unpaid work — that is, the housework, carework, and volunteering that people do without financial compensation. Based on time-use surveys by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this chart shows how many more minutes per day women in various nations spend doing such activities compared to men:

Childcare stuck out as an area with a particularly large gap:

On child care in particular, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do: 1 hour 40 minutes for mothers, on average, compared to 42 minutes for fathers…On average, working fathers spend only 10 minutes more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much time (144 minutes vs. 74) when not working.

The full OECD report breaks down types of unpaid work (this is overall, including data for both men and women):

The study also found that non-working fathers spend less time on childcare than working mothers in almost every country in the study (p. 19). And mothers and fathers do different types of childcare, with dads doing more of what we might think of as the “fun stuff” (p. 20):

Source: Miranda, V. 2011. “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work around the World.” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 116. OECD Publishing.

Chris Rock makes a downright profound observation about race discourse in this 2 1/2-minute clip, sent along by Collin College sociologist John Glass:

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.