Archive: 2012

Enjoy our collection of Halloween posts from years past or visit our Pinterest page with all of our Halloween-related imagery:

Just For Fun

• A Hallowmeme costume: Women laughing with salad
• Fun and fear: The great equalizer (pictured)
• Mocking the sexy Halloween costume trend

Halloween and Politics

• Legal firm’s Halloween party mocks home foreclosures
• Lynching Palin
• Obama mask marketed as a “terrorist” costume
• Marking sex offenders on Halloween

Race and Ethnicity

• Dressing your dog up like a racial caricature
• Anne Skank: Trivializing and sexualizing the Holocaust for Halloween
• Othering of undocumented immigrants with an “alien” costume
• A collection of racist Halloween costumes
• Asian hair for Halloween
• Appropriating Dia De Los Muertos at Halloween
• Raising consciousness about racist Halloween costumes

Gender

• Dress up your little girl in a “little black dress”
• Men dressing up as fat women, apparently hilarious and disgusting!
• Gender and asymmetry: “beer man and “beer girl”
• Anna Rexia, the costume (also in plus size!)
• Gender and kids costumes
• Halloween and the trivializing of women in men’s occupations
• Girls: mean or queen
• The difference between boy and girl costumes
• Women dressing up like girls dressing up like women
• Even our skeletons have sex
• In sexy costumes for women and girls: when sexy overtakes all reason, sexy femininity and gender inequality, sexy scholar, Harem girl, and the sexy body bag costume
• Compare to sexy Halloween costumes for men and this vintage Halloween-inspired ad that urges women to be bewitching instead of half-naked

The intersection of Race, Class, and Gender

• Halloween hall of shame: the fat lap dancer costume
• Sexy “Indian” costumes
• An overview of raced, gendered, and heteronormative costumes

And, for no conceivable reason…

• Max Weber Jack o’Lantern (I carved it myself)

Now that we’re in the last full week of the presidential campaign, let’s look at voting patterns in the U.S. Who votes in national elections? And how many of us do so?

Voter turnout data is often somewhat misleading. The turnout rate is often reported as a % of the total voting-age population — that is, what percentage of people over age 18 voted? But that broad measure of voter turnout will be artificially low because it includes non-citizens living in the U.S., who aren’t eligible to vote. A more accurate measure would be to look at turnout among citizens over age 18; as we see in the data from the 2008 presidential election, the difference between these two measures of voter turnout was more than 5 percentage points:

It’s worth noting that the citizen measure doesn’t reflect those citizens who have been disenfranchised because they live in a state where individuals convicted of felonies lose the right to vote, often permanently.

If we look at voter turnout among citizens in 2008, we see significant differences by race/ethnicity. White non-Hispanics have the highest turnout, with African Americans about 5-7 percentage points behind, though the gap narrowed in 2008. Asian Americans and Hispanics are less likely to vote, with just under half of eligible citizens from these two groups voting in 2008:

Both parties are keenly aware of the steady growth in voter turnout among Hispanics; as the largest racial/ethnic minority group in the U.S., increasing participation in elections promises growing political influence in the future, a source of both opportunities and challenges for the parties as they vie for those votes.

Not surprisingly, age and education affect voting behavior. Within every educational level, the voting rate goes up steadily with age.

For more information on voting patterns, the Census Bureau has an interactive website that lets you select elections between 1996 and 2010 and see a map and graphs broken down by sex, race/ethnicity, age, and so on.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Last Halloween my students (at a private liberal arts school) told me that it was considered embarrassing to wear the same costume to two separate parties. Many of them, then, had purchased two or more costumes for the week preceding the holiday.  I remarked about how convenient that was for the economy, creating a need to spend money that helped our economic engine keep churning.

I thought of their stories when I came across this vintage ad for Halloween candy.  It tells the viewer that a really cool house will offer trick-or-treaters more than one type of candy and allow them to take one of each.  How excellent for the candy companies if offering only one piece of one kind of candy is considered below the bar.

Via Vintage Ads.

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.

Yesterday I posted about how “couples costumes” seemed to inevitably include a man and a woman.  Since then I found one top listed online costume seller that doesn’t follow this heteronormative trend, PartyCity.  While most are male/female, here are four of the couples costumes they feature:

Interestingly, I didn’t see any costumes for two women, which is consistent with the lesser visibility of lesbians relative to gay men (if, of course, that’s part of Party City’s logic for offering guy-guy costumes in the first place).

UPDATE: Sara P. found an online flyer for iparty that had both guy/guy and one girl/girl “double the fun” costumes:

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 this five-minute interview, Sociologist Joel Best debunks the idea that people are poisoning Halloween candy and talks about how his research in the area prompted his career studying the social construction of social problems:

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 Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

During a debate this past Tuesday, Indiana Republican senate nominee, Richard Mourdock, made the case against the rape exception for abortions: “I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God, and even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

So according to Mourdock, God intends for rape to happen, and the outcome of rape is a gift from God.

What puzzles me is how Mourdock’s rape enthusiast comments fit with Missouri Republican senate candidate Todd Akin’s recent comments that “legitimate rape” (read“forcible rape”) rarely leads to pregnancy because, ”If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Mourdock and Akin’s beliefs, when considered together, produce a bizarre philosophy. I would like to know: Why would God create female bodies that reject God’s “gifts”? And if women don’t get pregnant from “forcible rape,” does that mean that God doesn’t intend ”forcible rapes”? Put another way, does God only intend certain types of rape, you know, the ones that come with “the gift”?

One-in-five Americans agree with Mourdock and Akin’s abortion stance. Razib Khan’sanalysis of the General Social Survey shows that 20% of Americans think abortion should be illegal in cases of rape. Republicans with lower levels of education who identify as extremely conservative and believe the Bible is the word of God are more likely than other Americans to hold this belief.

For Mourdock, Akin, and more than 50 million other Americans, God truly does work in mysterious ways.

Caroline Heldman is a professor of politics at Occidental College. You can follow her at her blog and on Twitter and Facebook.

On the heels of yesterday’s post, illustrating the gender binary in Halloween costumes, compare the “Toddler Girls” vs “Toddler Boys” Cookie Monster Halloween costumes at Party City:

“We’re not joking when we say gender expectations and sexualization start early,” writes the blogger for Radical Notions.

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.

If you’re paying any attention to the U.S. presidential election, you’ve likely heard a lot about campaign spending on ads. So how much is being spent? And where?

Dmitriy T.C. sent in an interactive graphic that the Washington Post created that allows you to look at one particular type of campaign spending: commercials in various television markets. Spending, and thus exposure to presidential campaign commercials, is very unevenly distributed. Many states get almost no attention from the national campaigns and the interest groups and PACS that support them, since their voting outcomes are seen as all but inevitable.

I, on the other hand, live in the largest city in a swing state; $37 million has been spent on over 47,000 commercials here:

Here’s the key for the map; the darkest green shade indicates more than 20,000 ads, a number roughly equal to how many times I have been called by political pollsters during the past three months:

You can also limit the map to look just at Democratic or Republican spending.

Florida leads the nation in amount spent on TV ads by the two campaigns. The Republicans have outspent the Democrats in all of the top 11 states except New Hampshire:

The site also has a graph that lets you track spending in the most competitive states by week between mid-April and  now.

This is just one element of campaign spending. Add in the cost of all the mailers, campaign trips, online ads, the conventions themselves, and Get out the Vote efforts by the presidential campaigns or interest groups and SuperPACs associated with them, and the amount spent to elect our president is truly mind-boggling.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.