Archive: 2011

Justin G., an adjunct instructor in the Department of Sociology at Marymount University, recently received a gender lesson from his local Target. I’ll let him tell the story:

I grabbed the pack of eight depicted in the photo because they match our towels and bathroom wall colors and, to my surprise, when I scanned them for the price, I was told by the machine that they were “feminine casual” washcloths! I stood there and wondered how much darker the shades of blue and green would need to be for them to be “masculine”? Even when it comes to washcloths, it seems that Target and/or the manufacturer feels we need to be told what color we should be comfortable scrubbing our naked bodies with in the privacy of our own showers.

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.

Emory University has a very detailed database about the Atlantic slave trade, titled Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which I don’t believe we’ve posted before (my apologies if we have). It includes nine maps providing information on major points of departure and destination ports for the trans-Atlantic trade; here’s a general overview:

Initially the vast majority of slave voyages were organized by firms or individuals in Spain and Portugal; however, over time the slave trade was dominated by groups from northern Europe. Great Britain eventually played a major role, and over 1/3 of documented slave voyages were organized there.The description of Map 6 explains, “vessels from the largest seven ports, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Liverpool, London, Nantes, Bristol, and Pernambuco carried off almost three-quarters of all captives removed from Africa via the Atlantic Ocean.”

This map shows where voyages were organized, and the % of all documented African slaves that voyages from that country/area transported:

In the U.S., students generally learn about slavery in relation to cotton plantations and, to a lesser extent, tobacco. However, overall those two crops played a relatively minor role in the growth of the global slave trade. It was the growing taste for sugar, and the creation of sugar plantations, particularly in the Caribbean and South American coastal areas, that produced such an enormous demand for African slaves in the Americas. According to the Voyages website, less than 4% of all Africans captured were sold in North America.

The website also has a database of thousands of documented trips in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including everything from point of origin, destination, number of slaves, % who died during voyage, length of trip, and so on. Some include many more details than others, as you’d expect. You can also create tables to display the variables you’re interested in. Here’s the table showing the slave trade, broken into 25-year intervals and by destination. We can clearly see that the slave trade made one big jump in the late 1500s (going from 4,287 in the 1551-1575 interval to 73,865 between 1576 and the end of the century) and another huge jump in the late 1600s, with the height of the slave trade occuring in the 1700s through the mid-1800s:

You can also create various graphs and charts. Here is a graph of the % of slaves who died during the trip, by year:

I presume the extremely high numbers in the 1550s must be skewed by some ships that sank or met some other disaster that led to the death of everyone aboard.

Over time, ships carried larger numbers of individuals per trip:

The individuals taken as part of the slave trade were predominantly male:

Documented types of resistance from captives or from Africans trying to free them:

You can spend quite a bit of time on this, I warn you — creating timelines, graphs, and so on. It’s taken me an hour to write this post because I keep getting distracted creating charts and tables. Overall, the site is a fantastic resource for both specific information and for helping illuminate the enormity of the Atlantic slave trade. Thanks to Shamus Khan for the tip.

A set of stock photos on Hairpin must have hit a nerve because eight people — Renée Y., R. Walker, Amy E., Duff McDuffee, Lauren McG., Patricia P., Amy H., and Dmitriy T.M. — have sent it in.  The images appear, titled “Women Laughing Alone with Salad,” without comment.  Here’s a sampling:

These images resonate with readers, I think, because they are so damn familiar.  They are a good example of advertising in general.  They practically beg: “Please please please think it is fun to eat salad!”  And they insist: “Eating salad will make you haaaaappppppyyyyy!”  Much advertising today needs to convince you that the product will make you happy because we don’t need almost anything we buy.  Necessity lost out to desire in marketing a long time ago.

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.

Mab R. sent in a nice example of how children are socialized into gendered expectations. Chunky Monkey Mind has a post about the cut-out trading cards that appeared on the back of Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes a while back. Each card features a Cap’n Crunch character. Here’s the card for Smedley:

Ok, so for the male character we get basic stats, and he’s clearly an active guy who has thrilling adventures.

On the same box that featured the Smedley card was a card for Magnolia Bulkhead, who is shown with hearts hovering around her face as she clasps her hands together in rapture:

But of course, being female, she isn’t going to give us all of her vital statistics — in particular, age and weight are secrets women should guard carefully. Also notice the reinforcement of the idea that women are obsessed with romance. While Smedley’s hobbies involve action, Magnolia’s only listed hobby is daydreaming about a man (and his cereal). And her greatest adventure? Why, almost getting married, of course. Yes, the most amazing adventure of her life is something she failed at, but since it held out at least the possibility of romance, and she’s female, it was still the highlight of her life.

Ah, gender stereotypes! Fun for kids of all ages!

In an earlier post we reviewed research by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showing that income inequality contributes to a whole host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of mental illness, drug use, obesity, infant death, imprisonment, and interpersonal trust.

In the 3 1/2-minute video below, Kate Pickett argues that social inequality causes violence by creating status inequalities that those on the bottom respond to with violence.

Pickett and Wilkinson’s data is striking, but I’m not sure I buy that low status combined with status-sensitivity instigates violence.  Sociologists have made this argument; but others have questioned these conclusions.

Villanova University’s Lance Hannon, for example, tested this “subculture of violence” thesis as applied to poor African Americans. Using police department homicide data, he found no evidence that Black people were more likely than White people to react to an insult with violence.  This is swapping race for class, of course (and Hannon doesn’t control for class because the data was limited), but it does suggest that we should think carefully about the kind of argument Pickett is making.

See Dr. Pickett making similar arguments as to why raising the average national income in developed countries doesn’t make people happier or enable them to live longer and how status inequality increases stress.  And see more about income inequality and national well-being at Equality Trust.

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.

“It is big, it is strange, it is unexpected.”

Schell spends the first six-and-a-half minutes of the lecture below talking about the surprising wins in technology this year.

Club Penguin, a flash game for kids, being bought by Disney for 350 million dollars.

Guitar Hero.

Webkins. “What?” “Really?”

He spends next 22 minutes trying to explain why these games have been so successful. Including:

Anything you spend time on, you start to believe, “This must be worthwhile. Why?  Because I’ve spent time on it.  And therefore it must be worth me kickin’ in 20 bucks because look at the I’ve spent time on it.  And now that I’ve kicked in 20 bucks, it MUST be valuable, because only an idiot would kick in 20 bucks if it wasn’t!”
…

What these all have in common is that these are all busting through to reality… We live in a bubble of fake bullshit and we have this hunger to get to anything that’s real.

…

Pockets turn the law of divergence inside out… remember the swiss army knife! …and this is why everyone hates the ipad.

And then, from about 21 minutes forward, he gives an account of what he thinks the future will look like. It’s, um, chilling.

Enjoy!

See also: Do We Play Farmville Because We’re Polite?

And also, he makes the same point we made in a previous post about how the new Ford Hybrid has made driving green into a game.

Via Text Relations.

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.

Wandering around Las Vegas, Gwen and I happened upon a High School Musical-themed book complete with a little gadget that allows small children (3+) to practice texting.  The gadget allows children to press 1, 2, or 3 to send a pre-fabricated message to High School Musical characters, who send pre-fabricated messages back, and so on.

Kids, of course, like to do what they see adults doing.  That’s why they like getting play vacuums and lawn mowers.  It’s not inherently fun, it’s just fun to copy.  So it makes sense that, in a world where adults text, little kids would want to text too.

Just like play vacuums and lawn mowers, however, a toy phone to text on is training children how to be adults or, in this instance, teenage girls; ones who flirt with boys, spend a lot of time socializing on their cell phones, and use text-speak (the book includes a lingo dictionary explaining, for example, that LOL means “Laugh Out Loud” and WAZ UP means “What’s up?”).

Front:

Back:

Thanks to Jordan G. for help on this one.

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.

Michaela sent in two Australian ads for Selleys sealants. Both target men and caution them about the consequences of neglecting home maintenance projects:

So men who fail to do the type of housework that is consistent with ideals of masculinity — fixing things — face threats to other areas of masculinity as well, since, of course, women (who cannot, themselves, caulk a shower, obviously) will be unable to resist a hot dude who can (and will) fix stuff, thus proving himself to be the ideal man. Who doesn’t love emasculation as a marketing tool?