A moment of silence for the victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
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.
Pew Research Center reports that, as of 2010, women make up about 15% of enlisted soldiers and commissioned officers:
Not all types of women are entering the military at the same rate. Nearly a third of women in the military are Black, about twice their proportion in the general population. In contrast, about half are white, about 2/3rds their proportion among civilian women.
A larger proportion of women, compared to men, said that they joined the military because it was difficult to find a good civilian job:
They were just as likely as men, however, to report other more common reasons for joining:
Interestingly, women reported high levels of strain re-entering the civilian population and the majority believe that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not worth fighting:
Nevertheless, a large majority felt that entering the military was good for their personal growth and career opportunities:
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 The Huffington Post.
In most densely-packed urban cities, one will be able to observe a disturbing phenomenon: wealthy people marching past the homeless, day in and day out. Often, the residents of the street and the residents of the apartments recognize each other and even know each other’s routines. And, yet, familiarity doesn’t breed concern.
Psychologists Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske were able to detect a neurological process behind the ability to get used to seeing others suffer. Using functional MRIs, they exposed individuals to images of the homeless. These images tended to activate parts of the brain associated with disgust. This, they argue, supports the idea that “extreme out-groups may be perceived as less than human…” It is easy to overlook the suffering of the homeless, then, because we dehumanize them.
In an effort to disrupt this cognitive process, documentary film maker Goro Toshima has released a new film, Broken Doors. The 36-minute documentary follows a young homeless couple in Los Angeles, Starr and Rico. Not only does it put faces and names to an otherwise reviled and ignored population, the documentary shows viewers just how difficult it can be to survive on the streets and to get off.
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.
Over the past couple of years, the U.S. appears to have finally reached a tipping point regarding attitudes toward same-sex marriage. In polls from a variety of organizations over the last two years, more people supported same-sex marriage than opposed it, and in some polls an outright majority expressed support for marriage equality.
Data from the Pew Research Center poll provide more evidence for this fairly rapid shift in public attitudes:
However, those attitudes vary widely by region. Looking more closely at the Pew data, we see that support is highest in New England, where over 60% of those surveyed in 2012 favored making same-sex marriages legal, but most regions of the U.S. now show more support than opposition. In fact, only in the South Atlantic and South Central states did more respondents oppose marriage equality than support it. The South Central region was least supportive, with 56% of respondents opposing same-sex marriage:
Support for same-sex marriage has grown in ever region over the past 10 years. A decade ago, supporting same-sex marriage was clearly a minority opinion across the U.S.:
As the Pew Center post points out, it’s not that attitudes in the South aren’t changing, but they’re only now approaching where the rest of the country was on the issue a decade ago.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Over at The Global Sociology Blog, SocProf put up some interesting visuals about social mobility, the likelihood that you have a significantly different economic status than your father. Social mobility is important because it measures the degree to which a society has a caste system (in which you are restricted to the class you are born into, by whatever means) or one that gives people equal opportunities to ascend or descend the class hierarchy according to their hard work and talent.
Compared to similar countries, the U.S. has low social mobility (though most Americans think the opposite), along with Italy, the U.K., Chile, and Slovenia . Scandinavian countries, Canada, and Australia have the most (see SocProf’s data here).
SocProf, however, asked a question I’ve never seen asked before: does this mobility differ by gender? It does. She found that daughters are more upwardly mobile than sons.
This first graph shows the percent of sons, born to a low-earning father, who will end up the top 40% of earners (orange) or the bottom 40% (blue). Social mobility in the U.S. is lowest among the countries featured; almost 70% of American sons of low-earners stay in the bottom 40%.
The second graph is the same data for daughters. Mobility for daughters is higher in all countries, but it is especially so in the U.S. While 70% of sons stay in the bottom 40%, we can say the same for less than half of daughters.
Reflecting on the fact that the difference between daughters and sons was higher in the U.S. than in the comparison countries, SocProf suggests that “[g]reater mobility seems to go together with greater gender equality” in mobility.
See also this interactive graph mapping social mobility where you can see how you compare to the rest of the U.S.
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 Sociology Lens.
A number of researchers suggest that the marketing and advertising of Gardasil has been aimed at girls and women instead of boys and men. In this post I discuss two contradictory messages aimed at women through these advertisements.
The first type of ad focused around the protection of young girls. The makers of Gardasil imply that being a good parent means vaccinating your daughter and therefore protecting her from cervical cancer (an observation also made here at Sociological Images). For example, one advertisement read, “How do you help your daughter become one less life affected by cervical cancer?” Another advertisement had a similar sentiment, stating “Your daughter can’t possibly know the importance of the cervical cancer vaccine, but thankfully, she has her mother” (source).
This narrative of protectionism is not surprising. In other contexts, like sex education debates, the discourse about adolescent sexuality, and in particular, girls’ sexuality, reveals a desire to protect their “innocence.”
The other type of ad moves away from the narrative of protectionism and focuses on empowerment and choice. One ad stated, “I chose to get vaccinated after my doctor to me the facts” (source). Another ad read, “I chose to get vaccinated because my dreams don’t include cervical cancer” (source).
Instead of focusing on the ways in which girls and women can be protected, the ads suggest that girls and women need to protect themselves. It seems like the advertising department at Merck (the makers of Gardasil) recognize that they needed another strategy if they wanted to appeal to young women who feel empowered about their sex lives.
These two strategies are opposed to one another. One strategy suggests that girls and women need to be protected, while the other strategy relies on the ability of girls and women to be active and educated decision makers. Merck is tapping into two gendered narratives in order to sell to as many people as possible. This is, of course, the way that advertising works. But it does reveal the different, and sometimes contradictory, cultural ideas about women’s sexuality, ideas that advertisers will draw on in order to make a profit.
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Cheryl Llewellyn is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Stony Brook University. She writes for Sociology Lens, where you can read her post about the feminization of the Gardasil.
The following two charts taken from a Center for Economic Policy and Research Center study by John Schmitt and Janelle Jones highlight the distressed nature of the U.S. labor market and the need for raising the minimum wage and strengthening union organizing.
Schmitt and Jones define low wage work as that work paying $10.00 an hour or less in 2011 dollars. As the charts show, low wage workers are far more educated and older in 2011 than in 1979.
Education and experience are not sufficient to ensure a living wage.
Not surprisingly, growing numbers of low wage workers at Walmart and at chain fast food restaurants have begun engaging in direct action for higher wages and better working conditions. They deserve our support.
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Martin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of Economics and Director of the Political Economy Program at Lewis and Clark College. You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front.
While I’m most well-known for my work on hook up culture, I’ve written extensively on a different topic altogether: how Americans talk about female genital cutting practices (FGCs), better known as female genital “mutilation.” While FGCs are passionately opposed by essentially all Americans who learn about them, our understanding of the practices is, in fact, skewed by misinformation, ethnocentrism, and a history of portraying Africa as naively “backwards” or cruelly “barbaric.”
The main source of distortion has been the mass media. Aiming to encourage journalists to think twice when covering the topic, the Hastings Center has released a report by the Public Policy Advisory Network on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa. In the rest of this post, I briefly discuss some of the things they want journalists — and the rest of us — to know and add a couple of my own:
Using the word “mutilation” is counterproductive.
People who support genital cutting typically believe that a cut body is a more aesthetically pleasing one. The term “mutilation” may appeal to certain Westerners, but people in communities where cutting occurs largely find the term confusing or offensive.
Media coverage usually focuses on one of the more rare types of genital cutting: infibulation.
Infibulation involves trimming and fusing the labia so as to close the vulva, leaving an opening in the back for intercourse, urination, and menses. In fact, 10% of the procedures involve infibulation. The remainder involve trimming, cutting, or scarification of the clitoris, clitoral hood (prepuce), or labia minora or majora. While none of these procedures likely sound appealing, some are more extensive than others.
Research has shown that women with cutting are sexually responsive.
Women who have undergone genital surgeries report “rich sexual lives, including desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction…” This is true among women who have experienced clitoral reductions and undergone infibulation, as well as women who’ve undergone lesser forms of cutting.
Health complications of genital cutting “represent the exception rather than the rule.”
News reports often include long lists of acute and long-term negative medical consequences of FGCs, and these may feel intuitively true, but efforts to document their incidence suggest that health problems are, for the most part, no more common in cut than uncut women. The Report concludes: “…from a public health point of view, the vast majority of genital surgeries in Africa are safe, even with current procedures and under current conditions.”
Girls are not generally cut in response to the influence of cruel patriarchs.
Most societies that cut girls also cut boys; some groups that engage in cutting have relatively permissive sexual rules for women, some do not; and female genital cutting practices are typically controlled and organized by women (correspondingly, men control male genital surgeries).
FGCs are not an “African practice.”
The procedures we label “female genital mutilation” occur only in some parts of Africa and occur outside of the continent as well (source):
Moreover, cosmetic genital surgeries in the U.S. are among the fastest growing procedures. These include clitoral reduction, circumcision of the clitoral foreskin, labia trimming, and vaginal tightening, not to mention mons liposuction, collagen injected into the g-spot, color correction of the vulva, and anal bleaching. While it would be simplistic to say that these are the same as the procedures we typically call “mutilation,” they are not totally different either.
Western-led efforts to eliminate FGCs are largely ineffective and sometimes backfire.
It turns out that people don’t appreciate being told that they are barbaric, ignorant of their own bodies, or cruel to their children. Benevolent strangers who try to stop cutting in communities, as well as top-down laws instituted by politicians (often in response to Western pressure), are very rarely successful. The most impressive interventions have involved giving communities resources to achieve whatever goals they desire and getting out of the way.
In sum, it’s high time Americans adopt a more balanced view of female genital cutting practices. Reading The Hastings Center Report is a good start. You might also pick up Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood by Stanlie James and Claire Robertson. Full text links to my papers on the topic, including a discourse analysis of 30 years of the academic conversation, can be found here.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. She frequently delivers public lectures about female genital cutting. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
