Archive: 2012

Last year I posted about a map several geographers put together showing the distribution of last names across the U.S. Historical immigration and internal settlement patterns are reflected in the concentrations of names across the country.

Now one of the geographers involved in that project, James Cheshire, has done the same for London. Using 2001 electoral rolls, Cheshire plotted the 15 most common surnames in 983 separate London districts. Here’s a section of the map of the most common name:

The size of the font is scaled to represent the number of people with each name. They’re color-coded by place or origin (though since many immigrants have Anglicized names, origin of a name may not reflect a person’s ancestry).

As Cheshire points out, a few names fill the top slot throughout most of London. As you go a bit further down the list, London’s diversity becomes more apparent. Here’s a small slice of the map of the 10th most common surnames:

Those of you with more knowledge of London, what noteworthy patterns do you see?

Hanna Rosin, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of The End of Men, has written a piece about hook up culture on and off college campuses for the September issue of her magazine.  Given that I’ve done some research on hook up culture, W.W. Norton’s Karl Bakeman asked me to weigh in.  So, here are my two cents: Rosin isn’t wrong to argue that the culture offers women sexual opportunities and independence, but she mischaracterizes the objections to hook up culture and draws too rosy a conclusion.

Those who wring their hands and “lament” hook up culture, Rosin contends, do so because they think women are giving it up too easily, a practice that will inevitably leave them heartbroken.`She writes:

[Critics of hook up culture pine] for an earlier time, when fathers protected “innocent” girls from “punks” and predators, and when girls understood it was their role to also protect themselves.

If this is the problem, the answer is less sex and more (sexless?) relationships.  But, Rosin rightly argues, this wrongly stereotypes women as fragile flowers whose self-esteem lies between their legs.  It also romanticizes relationships.  Drawing on the fantastic research of sociologists Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth Armstrong, she explains that young women often find serious relationships with men to be distracting; staying single (and hooking up for fun) is one way to protect their own educational and career paths.

All this is true and so, Rosin concludes, hook up culture is “an engine of female progress — one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.”

Well, not exactly.  Yes, women get to choose to have sex with men casually and many do.  And some women truly enjoy hook up culture, while others who like it less still learn a lot about themselves and feel grateful for the experiences.  I make this argument with my colleague, Caroline Heldman, in Hooking Up and Opting Out: Negotiating Sex in the First Year of College.

But what young women don’t control is the context in which they have sex.  The problem with hook up culture is not casual sex, nor is it the fact that some women are choosing it, it’s the sexism that encourages men to treat women like pawns and requires women to be just as cunning and manipulative if they want to be in the game; it’s the relentless pressure to be hot that makes some women feel like shit all the time and the rest feel like shit some of the time; it’s the heterosexism that marginalizes and excludes true experimentation with same-sex desire; and it’s the intolerance towards people who would rather be in relationships or practice abstinence (considered boring, pathetic, or weird by many advocates of hook up culture including, perhaps, Rosin).

Fundamentally, what’s wrong with hook up culture is the antagonistic, competitive, malevolent attitude towards one’s sexual partners.  College students largely aren’t experimenting with sexuality nicely.  Hook ups aren’t, on the whole, mutually satisfying, strongly consensual, experimental affairs during which both partners express concern for the others’ pleasure.   They’re repetitive, awkward, and confusing sexual encounters in which men have orgasms more than twice as often as women:

The problem with hook up culture, then, is not that people are friends with benefits.  It’s that they’re not. As one of my students concluded about one of her hook up partners:  “You could have labeled it friends with benefits… without the friendship maybe?”

Hook up culture is an “engine of female progress” only if we take-for-granted that our destination is a caricature of male sexuality, one in which sex is a game with a winner and a loser.   But do we really want sex to be competitive?   Is “keep[ing] pace with the boys,” as Rosin puts it, really what liberation looks like?  I think we can do better.

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.

Somehow the accidental mis-translation of the Princess/Barbie character is just right…

Buzzfeed and CookdandBombd, via Work that Matters.

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.

We have a fun post about the various ways in which Prince Charles was posed with Princess Diana in order to obscure the fact that she was about his height.  Building on this, Geoffrey Arnold at The Social Complex has collected some examples of men’s height being manipulated in order to preserve the social illusion that men are taller (or at least not shorter) 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.

The September issue of Oprah’s magazine, sent in by YetAnotherGirl, features the woman herself on the cover wearing her hair in a “natural” (that is, real and non-straightened).  The O website announces that this is the first time in its 12-year history that Oprah has appeared on the cover without “blow-drying or straightening” her hair.

Black women’s hair is a touchy issue wrapped up deeply in racial power struggles.  The appearance of White people — in this case, the hair White people are more likely to have (that is, straight or slightly wavy) — is often considered the most beautiful or normal.  Black women who have tightly curled hair are faced with deciding to push back against white supremacy and wear their hair more-0r-less naturally (and face being seen as a “political” or “non-assimilating” Black person) or straighten their hair (and risk being accused of capitulating to racism).  Whatever they do, it’s sends a message.

What I think is notable here is that Oprah, of all people in the world, has never until now appeared on the cover of her own magazine with “natural” hair.   Lest we’ve forgotten who Oprah is, here’s a reminder (from wikipedia):

Winfrey was called “arguably the world’s most powerful woman” by CNN and Time.com, “arguably the most influential woman in the world” by the American Spectator, “one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th Century” and “one of the most influential people” from 2004 to 2011 by TIME. Winfrey is the only person in the world to have appeared in the latter list on all eight occasions.

What I mean to say is, when even Oprah largely avoids being seen as she really is, we know we are seeing a powerful cultural force.  In this case, a racist and sexist one demanding that women of all races conform to an unreasonable White standard of beauty.  I’m glad that Oprah decided to appear this way for the cover, but I’m saddened by why it took this long.

Via Jezebel.

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.

Trulia Trends has posted interactive graphs that let you look at crime by time of day in various cities in the U.S. Using data from SpotCrime (which largely relies on police reports to track crime), they plotted the commission of different types of crime. If you scroll over a city you can get details of the types of crime occurring at a specific time of day:

You can also choose types of crime, then get information on what percent of all crimes in each city fall into that category as well as its distribution throughout the day:

The graphs are useful for visually showing that, though violent crimes (shootings, assaults, robberies) understandably get more attention, the vast majority of crime is property crime.

I haven’t had time to go through and look for clear patterns or differences between cities or types of crime. Notice anything interesting?

Via Information Is Beautiful.

Well, crap. It turns out I might be a terrorist. I wasn’t aware of this, but then Dave A. sent in a video from Houston’s Make the Call anti-terrorism initiative, and it isn’t looking good.

The evidence:

• I sometimes walk off and leave bags unattended in public spaces.
• I gather information about routines in public spaces, often sending operatives out to stand by entrances and exits. They covertly take notes, and I specifically tell them not to draw attention to themselves. Occasionally they even take photos of the layouts of public places or ask employees detailed questions about the inner workings of the organization. I have cleverly disguised these surveillance activities as sociology assignments.
• I sometimes carry small electronic gadgets that might not be immediately recognizable to every single person sitting at a cafe.
• I get cold easily and often wear sweaters or bulky hoodies in summer, even in Vegas.
• I can be kind of hyper and nervous-acting, which probably makes me “sketchy”.
• I always forget the security code at my friend Robin’s housing complex, so I usually just sneak in behind someone else.
• I have been known to park in prohibited areas.

Watch the video and see for yourself:

This method of fighting terrorism is extremely unrealistic. The behaviors listed in the video are things people do all the time, in a variety of contexts. If every citizen of Houston reported every incident they see that is mentioned in this video, the Houston PD would be overwhelmed and unable to function because of the number of calls they’d have to investigate. I’d have to call the police every time I saw a woman wearing Ugg boots in Vegas, because it’s never cold enough here to justify them.

The video tells viewers not to ignore their “instincts.” But do we have an instinct for detecting “sketchy” people or behavior? Given what we know about stereotyping and selective perception, the reality is that people will view behavior through their pre-existing beliefs. Their interpretations of behavior as unusual or inappropriate will be influenced by how comfortable they otherwise are with the person engaging in it, which is impacted by race/ethnicity, class, and many other social categories. A guy leaving a backpack unattended is scary if that guy has a mohawk or, you know, looks scary and stuff, but when I do it, no one bats an eye. This video basically legitimizes turning anyone who makes you at all uncomfortable in public in to the police, on the argument that you are simply following your “instinct.” When you ask every citizen to become an intelligence agent, reporting every incident they perceive as odd, the result is the increasing stigmatization and semi-criminalization of those who can’t or won’t conform to pretty narrow standards of physical appearance, dress, and behavior.

UPDATE: There’s an interesting discussion in the comments about how you balance the need to avoid paranoia with the fact that, for instance, some rapes on college campuses would be prevented if people didn’t leave dorm doors ajar or let people in without knowing who they are, and that’s a conversation worth having. However, I’m also interested in the issue of feasibility here: If all the citizens of Houston literally did what this video suggests, law enforcement would grind to a halt and response times would slow for everyone.

As for why I sometimes leave bags unattended in public…Because there’s nothing of value in it and I left it on an outside table while I go inside to order, or because I’m gathering a lot of books at the library and I get sick of lugging my bag while I do this and leave it on a table while I go into the stacks, or because I realize I forgot to grab something on another aisle at the grocery store and I run around the corner to grab it without thinking to grab my bag. My point isn’t that any of the things I do are laudable or even smart, but rather that people do these things, sometimes on purpose, sometimes because we get distracted or make mistakes, and it’s going to take a massive increase in law enforcement if we really want citizens to start vigilantly reporting them.

Scholars are busy attempting to predict the effects of climate change, including how it might harm people in some parts of the globe more than others.  A recent report by The Pacific Institute, sent in by Aneesa D., does a more fine-grained analysis, showing which Californians will be the most harmed by climate change.

They use a variety of measures for each Census tract to make a Vulnerability Index, including natural factors (like tree cover), demographic factors (like age), and economic factors (like income).  At the interactive map, you can see the details for each Census tract.  Their compiled index looks like this:

You can also see the Vulnerability Index for each measure individually.  Here is the data for the percent of people over age 65 who live alone, a variable we know increases the risk of death from heat wave.

And here’s the data for the percent of workers who labor outside:

There’s lots more data at the site, but what’s interesting here is that, even in incredibly wealthy parts of the world, climate change is going to have uneven effects.  When it does, the most vulnerable people in the more vulnerable parts of the state are going to migrate to the other parts.  Most Californians don’t imagine that their cities will be home to refugees, but this is exactly what will happen as parts of California become increasingly difficult to live in.

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.