Archive: Oct 2012

SocImages News:

It’s been a busy month at SocImages!

Gwen’s photographs of a small town in her native Oklahoma were featured in a Business Insider photo-essay about the economic aftermath of an oil boom.  It’s pretty great!

Some of our Halloween archives informed a Huffington Post Parents slideshow about the changing nature of costumes: “from silly to sexy.”  They quote me using the word “extremification,” so that was fun.  And I was pleased to be a part of a piece on race and Halloween costumes at USA Today.

We put together a Halloween-themed Pinterest page, so you can peruse our entire collection of images and click through to our posts if you like.  Browser beware!

Finally, I was part of a CNN radio story about the pressure young people are under to make themselves desirable college applicants: The Teenage Pressure Cooker (listen).

And I did a segment for the Los Angeles NBC affiliate about sexy Halloween costumes.  I don’t say much of note, but I did manage to say that Halloween was a “gender display ritual,” even for kids and that it a lot in common with a high school prom.  I also do an awkward stride through the Occidental College library.  Ah, local news.  :)

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

I have three talks scheduled for Spring so far. If you’re in Boston or Akron, I’d love to schedule a meet up!

• Western Political Science Association (Hollywood, CA, Mar. 28-30): panels on “Public Intellectualism” and the “Twenty-First Century Sex Wars”
• Harvard University (Women’s Week, Mar. 8-14): “A Feminist Defense of Friendship”
• University of Akron (Apr. 19): “Anatomy of an Outrage: Female Genital Cutting and the Politics of Acculturation”

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  We’re inching up towards 20,000 followers on Facebook, so that’s pretty exciting!

I’m on Facebook too, and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

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.

A few years back I posted an photograph of two costumes side-by-side: labeled “Beer Man” and “Beer Girl.”  I wrote that the practice of using “man” alongside “girl” “reinforces a gender hierarchy by mapping it onto age.”  We see this outside of a Halloween context too, like in this vintage ad for pens.

Sara P. found another example, this time from iparty.  The flyer puts a girl and a boy side-by-side in police officer costumes.  The boy’s is labeled “policeman” and the girl’s is labeled “police girl.”

This phenomenon is an example of just how mundane and ubiquitous gender messages can be.

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’s officially a tradition.  Here is our annual post featuring sexy costumes that we think are just… bizarre.  When sexy “overtakes all reason,” you can sexualize just about anything.

Sexy snowy owl:

Sexy gnome:

Sexy macaw:

Sexy tootsie roll:

Sexy skunk:

Sexy Ernie(submitted by Chrissy Y.):

Sexy  hamburger:

Sexy Chinese take-out:

Costumes from Party City, Halloween Express, and Yandy.

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.

As evidence of how mainstream and taken-for-granted dressing up like Native Americans for Halloween (not to mention as a general fashion trend) is, Kari sent in this photo of a costume store, where Native American is a sufficiently popular costume category that it deserves prominent signage:

Via Yo, Is This Racist?

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

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.