Archive: Jul 2012

Five years ago today we posted our very first images: a re-touched magazine cover featuring Faith Hill and two almost identical Skyy Vodka ads that appeared in Maxim and Cosmo.

While people often congratulate us for coming up with the idea for the blog, we never actually intended the public to read it.  We initially started the site as a place for the two of us to share images that we used in teaching.  That’s it.

Accordingly, in our earliest posts we didn’t bother to do much explaining.  We didn’t think we’d ever have anyone to explain to!

Quickly, though, and we’re not sure why, people began reading.  So we started adding more descriptive titles.  And more people came!  So we started adding text explaining why we were featuring the particular image.  Eventually the blog evolved into one aimed at a wide array of readers — that is, not just each other — and it became what it is today.

So, we’d like to conclude by effusively thanking those early readers with whom we reimagined the blog and those of you who read today.  Almost 4,500 posts later, you’ve changed our lives and careers in unexpected and delightful ways!

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If you’d like to learn more about SocImages, you can visit our about page, listen to this recent Contexts podcast or read our recent publication, Blogging as Public Sociology (email us at socimages@thesocietypages.org if you’d like a copy).

In the wake of the shootings in a Colorado theater last week, Sean D. sent in a BBC video clip commenting on media coverage of mass murders.  It criticizes the typical response, which usually involves intense coverage dissecting every piece of the story, focusing closely on the killer and his motivations.  This can go on for days.

The narrator argues that this is exploitative — the media is using gruesome events to drive ratings (often for days at a time) — and it feeds into the public’s tendency towards voyeurism.  He also includes an interview with a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Park Dietz, who specializes in such cases; he says that this type of coverage is the exact opposite of what the media should do… if it is interested in saving lives.  The attention, especially to the criminal himself, encourages other “anti-heros” to contemplate and execute mass murders themselves.

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 U.S. Census Bureau recently posted some visualizations of data related to urbanization and the distribution of the U.S. population. One shows changes in the regional distribution of the population from 1790 to 2010. I can’t embed it, but I took a couple of screencaps, but it’s much more striking to watch it and see when various trends (say, the surge of population in the Midwest in the late 1800s) first appear, so I’d go check it out at the Census site.

In 1850, the South and Northeast had about equal portions of the population, and the West was just barely in the picture (I presume the 1850 Census data excludes Native Americans living in the West; if anyone is certain, let us know in the comments):

By 2010, we see a smaller percent of the population living in the Northeast, which has been overtaken by the West (though the Northeast is also the smallest of the four geographic areas, so it’s still overall more densely settled than the West):

There’s also an animated graph showing urbanization in the U.S. between 1790 and 1890. Here’s 1840:

And fifty years later:

Finally, there’s a map showing all cities that have ever been in the top 20 largest cities in the U.S. since 1790. If you click on a city name, you can see

Los Angeles:

And for Dmitriy T.C., here’s New Orleans:

The Census site lets you click through for the data each visualization is based on, so there’s lots to dig through if you’re really excited about this type of thing, as I am.

Sociologists use the term “stalled revolution” to describe how current state of the feminist movement.  It’s “stalled” in that, while women are (mostly) free to do what men do, men have been much more reluctant to do what women have traditionally done.  This makes sense because masculine things are generally valued and feminine things are not.

Housework is one of these things.  Married women still do twice as much housework and childcare as their husbands, on average.  If you used advertising as your metric, however, you’d think that women did 99%.  Here are three examples and a counter-example:

1.  Monica C. sent in an Olympics-themed content sponsored by Pampers.  It’s called the “Mommy Games,” as if only women parent:

2. Appliance maker Kenmore has a children’s line, sent in by Anna C.  All of the products are in pink:

3. Allison spotted the same phenomenon at Hoover.  They are inviting “real women” to submit vacuum stories:

4.  As a counter-example, Kristie McC. sent in a screenshot of Eco-Me products.  The company  make a point of putting images of both men and women on their cleaning products.

So, there are exceptions, but the overwhelming message is that parenting and childcare is something that women do.  For more, see our gendered housework/parenting page on Pinterest.

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.

When we categorize people into “races,” we do so using a number of physical characteristics, but especially skin color. Our racial system is based on the idea that skin color is a clearly distinguishing trait, especially when we use terms like “black” and “white,” which we generally conceive of as opposite colors.

Of course, because race is socially constructed, there’s actually enormous diversity within the categories we’ve created, and great overlap between them, as we’ve forced all humans on earth into just a few groupings.  And terms like “black” and “white” don’t really describe the shades of actual human skin.

Artist and photographer Angelica Dass has an art project, Humanae, that illustrates the tremendous diversity in skin color (via co.CREATE, sent in by Dolores R., Mike R., and YetAnotherGirl. She uses an 11×11 pixel of individuals’ faces to match them to a specific color in the Pantone color system, which catalogs thousands of hues and is used in many types of manufacturing to standardize and match colors. She then takes a photo of them in front of a background of their Pantone color.

Currently the project is very heavily focused on people we’d generally categorize as White — there are a few individuals from other groups, but not many, and in no way does it represent “every skin tone,” as I’ve seen it described in some places. So that’s a major caveat.

That said, I do think the project shows how reductive our system of classifying people by skin tone is, when you look at the range of colors even just among Whites — why does it make sense to throw most of these people into one category and say they’re all physically the same in a meaningful way that separates them from everyone else (and then connect those supposedly shared physical traits to non-physical ones)? And which part of the body do we use to do so, since many of us have various shades on our bodies? Or which time of year, since many of us change quite a bit between summer and winter?

Maru sent in a similar example; French artist Pierre David created “The Human Pantone,” using 40 models. We think racial categories make sense because we generally think of the extremes, but by showing individuals arranged according to hue, the project highlights the arbitrariness of racial boundaries. Where, exactly, should the dividing lines be?

Via TAXI.

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

Many people around the world are eagerly awaiting the start of the Olympics next week.  A lucky few will compete and a small group of others will be there, in person, to watch.  Athletes and spectators, however, are just two of the groups that the games mobilize.  The Daily Mail reports on the large numbers of people hired to be temporary janitors, groundskeepers, maids, and other types of cleaners.  Many of these workers are migrants who have come to London hoping to work for a few weeks and return to their families having earned a little more than they otherwise could.

The story, sent in by Dolores R., focuses on the living conditions of these workers.  Most are paying rent to live in temporary trailers.  Packed together like sardines, the compound has been described as a “slum.” Pictures are available at the site.

Complaints include:

• Crowded living spaces.  “Any accommodation where more than two adults have to share a room is considered ‘overcrowded’ under housing laws.”
• Insufficient toilet and shower facilities that were “filthy” from overuse.
• Leaking trailers that the workers are told to live with or fix themselves; stagnant ground water around some of the trailers has forced them to put together make-shift stepping stones.
• Women are being placed in trailers with men they don’t know; at least two women have quit when they were told they had to stay with male strangers.

The Daily Mail says that the employees have signed gag orders that prevent them from talking to the press and that family and friends are barred from the camp for “security reasons.”

Via The Sociologist.

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 recent Atlantic article by Anne-Marie Slaughter revived an ongoing conversation about women’s efforts to balance work and family in their lives.  Unfortunately, new data from the Pew Research Center suggests that striking a happy balance is increasingly out of reach.  This is because the value women place on both parenting well and having a successful career is growing.  In other words, women’s expectations are rising.

Interestingly, men’s expectations are rising, too, increasing the degree to which their desires might conflict, but to a somewhat lesser degree.

Let’s look at the data.

Young women between 18 and 34 are more likely to say that a successful career is “very” or “one of the most important things” in their life last year, compared to 1997.  The percentage has gone up 10 percentage points for women, while it went up only one point for men.

Young women are also more likely to say that being a good parent is “one of the most important things.”  Up a whopping 17 percentage points since 1997. This desire has risen significantly for men, too; 47% of men now say that parenting is very important, compared to 39% in 1997.

Since 1997, then, men have revised their expectations for parenting up, while their interest in work has remained more or less steady.  Women have raised their expectations for both and, generally, report higher life expectations than men.  That is, men are less likely than women to be interested in either a family or a career.

It will be interesting to see how public policy responds to these raised expectations, if at all. The U.S. is notoriously stingy when it comes to helping families balance these competing pressures, as this post on paid parental leave illustrates.  The time bind, though, is tightening and something will have to give.

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’ve posted in the past about the ways in which ads often depicted non-White women as wild and exotic (and thus exciting), even conflating them with animals through poses or animal-print clothing. Unstraightened African American hair is also used as an exotic marker, presented as less civilized. Recently readers sent in two separate examples of these tropes.

Michelle H. noticed that Lane Bryant advertised “exotic inspirations” as part of a “tribal trend” “inspired by nature” that allows you to use your “natural instincts”. The model used to personify this exoticism is an African American woman with unstraightened hair:

Similarly, Sonia A., Jen J., and an anonymous reader noticed that data analysis firm ATLAS.ti used an image of an African American woman with several pencils stuck in her natural curls along with text encouraging you to “tame your data” but also “go wild”:

The company removed the banner from its Facebook page after complaints, but it’s still on the company website in an image and accompanying brochure on the product info page and several other places on the site.