London filmmaker Michael Story sent in a short video he made about the mismatch between crime as presented in TV reports and the reality of crime in the UK. TV reports, Michael argues, misrepresent how common crime is, where it occurs, and who is most likely to be involved in violent crime; in so doing, they reinforce stereotypes about race, ethnicity, class, and criminality:
London’s 66,000 guns – by Michael Story from chichard41 on Vimeo.
On this second-to-last day of Black History Month, let us return to posts past.
We have been urged to celebrate Black History Month…
<sarcasm> Good times. </sarcasm>
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.
My Occidental College colleague, politics professor Caroline Heldman, snapped this photograph of a billboard on an L.A. freeway. It suggests that one may celebrate Black History Month by calling 1-800-GET-THIN. The billboard is another stunning example of the trivialization of black history by companies using it only as an excuse to market their product or service.
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 Family Inequality.
In 1994, Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur published, Growing Up With A Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps. The growth of children living with only their mothers was — then as now — a matter of concern not only for children’s well-being, but for intergenerational mobility. One of their empirical conclusions was this:
For children living with a single parent and no stepparent, income is the single most important factor in accounting for their lower well-being as compared with children living with both parents. It accounts for as much as half of their disadvantage. Low parental involvement, supervision, and aspirations and greater residential mobility account for the rest.
The biggest problem, in other words, is economic. The other factors — involvement, supervision, aspirations, mobility — are related to social class and the time poverty that economically-poor parents experience.
Examples
Here are some bivariate illustrations — that is, head-to-head comparisons of the difference between children of poor and non-poor versus single and married parents.
These are the “skill group” rankings by teachers of children by socioeconomic status (or SES, a composite of parents’ education, occupational prestige and income) versus race/ethnicity, gender and family structure. SES shows the widest spread in reading teachers’ group placement of first graders.
Source: Condron (2007)
Similarly, the poor/nonpoor difference is greater than the two-parent/single-parent difference in kindergarten entry scores:
Source: Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (2009)
Those are just two examples from early-childhood assessments. More importantly, here is the breakdown seen in a longitudinal study of children growing up. When women grow up to be mothers, their poverty level in childhood is more important than their family structure for predicting whether they will be in poverty themselves. The poverty difference is large, the family structure difference is not:
Source: Musik & Mare (2006)
This study included a more sophisticated set of multivariate analyses than this simple graph, but the author’s conclusion fits it:
Net of the correlation between poverty and family structure within a generation, the intergenerational transmission of poverty is significantly stronger than the intergenerational transmission of family structure, and neither childhood poverty nor family structure affects the other in adulthood.
That is, childhood poverty matters more.
Fewer single parents, or less poverty?
But if single parenthood and poverty are so closely related, some people say, we should spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting marriage to help children avoid poverty (and other problems). That’s what the government has done, with money from the welfare budget. Even if it worked, which it apparently doesn’t, it’s only one approach. What about reducing poverty? And, more specifically, reducing the relative likelihood of poverty in single-parent families versus those with married parents. That is, address the poverty gap between the two groups, rather than the size of the two groups. This has the added advantage of not singling out one group — single mothers — for social stigmatization (of the kind I mentioned here). And, because it defines the problem as economic rather than moral, may make it easier to build public support for helping the poor.
Consider a recent paper by David Brady and Rebekah Burroway, which will be published in Demography. They analyzed the relative poverty of single mothers versus the total population — that is, what percentage had incomes below half the median (per person, after accounting for taxes and government transfers). Such a relative poverty measure is really a measure of inequality, but specifically inequality at the low end. (Regardless of how rich the rich are, it’s theoretically possible to have no one below half the median income). Here is my graph showing that result, with only the countries that have reliable sample sizes in the survey:
The Nordic countries have the lowest overall poverty rates. But in absolute terms their advantage is much bigger for single mothers. (The red line shows equal poverty rates for single mothers and the total population.) The US and UK have the largest difference in poverty rates between single mothers and overall poverty. That is, we have the largest poverty penalty for single motherhood. If the relative poverty rates for single mothers were lower in the US, we might spend more time and money addressing poverty and less trying to change family structures.
Edward Bernays (1891-1995) is largely considered the founder of public relations (or “engineering consent,” as he called it) but is not known very well outside of the marketing and advertising fields. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays was the first to theorize that people could be made to want things they don’t need by appealing to unconscious desires (to be free, to be successful etc.). Bernays, and propaganda theorist Walter Lippman, were members of the U.S. Government’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), which successfully convinced formally isolationist Americans to support entrance into World War I. While propaganda was commonly thought of as a negative way of manipulating the masses that should be avoided, Bernays believed that it was necessary for the functioning of a society, as otherwise people would be overwhelmed with too many choices. In his words:
Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.
[Source: Bernays, Propaganda, 1928, p. 52; available here.]
After WWI, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to encourage women to start smoking. While men smoked cigarettes, it was not publicly acceptable for women to smoke. Bernays staged a dramatic public display of women smoking during the Easter Day Parade in New York City. He then told the press to expect that women suffragists would light up “torches of freedom” during the parade to show they were equal to men. Like the “You’ve come a long way, baby” ads, this campaign commodified women’s progress and desire to be considered equal to men (relevant clip starts at 3:00):
“Cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual power…Women would smoke because it was then that they’d have their own penises.”
Here are some of the news photographs of women smoking publicly during the Easter Parade:
[Photos via.]
The campaign was considered successful as sales to women increased afterward. Cigarette companies followed Bernays’s lead and created ad campaigns that targeted women. Lucky Brand Cigarettes capitalized on recent fashions for skinny women by telling women to “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”:
Marlboro, in stark contrast to the Marlboro Man ads we’re familiar with today, started the “Mild as May” campaign to encourage women to take up smoking cigarettes that were appropriately mild and easier to smoke:
Chesterfield, in a 1930s ad, argued that “women started to smoke…just about the time they began to vote”:
A later ad for Phillip Morris tells women to “Believe in yourself!”
Cigarette makers also worked to teach women how to smoke properly. Ads often depicted women in the act of smoking. Some companies, like Philip Morris, even held smoking demonstrations for women:
[Via.]
The article describes how a “pretty registered nurse” is touring the country to teach women proper smoking etiquette. The article also lists “men’s pet peeves” and “women’s pet peeves” for men and women smokers. (Full text after the jump below.)
Together, these efforts to conflate smoking with freedom and make smoking acceptable for women created a new set of consumers and reinforced Bernays’s argument that demand could be created.
On the heels of our guest post describing the surprising rise in hypersexually-objectified women on the cover of Rolling Stone, comes troubling research out of cognitive neuroscience, sent in by Dolores R.
Mina Cikara and colleagues did a series of experiments — using Implicit Association and fMRI — to test whether sexist and non-sexist men’s cognition varied when looking at sexualized versus non-sexualized images of women. In fact, when men who tested high on a scale of sexism were shown images of sexualized women, they associated them more easily with words that implied an objectified “thing” than a thinking “person.” This was reflected in the fMRI study.
The take home message? When sexist men are exposed to strongly sexualized messages, they are inclined to dehumanize women, to see them as things. Seeing someone as a thing is the first step towards treating her like her desires, thoughts, and preferences do not exist (because objects don’t think). In other words, it facilitates sexual assault.
So… hmmmm… who to pick on here. How about American Apparel…
American Apparel, this is brain poison (after the jump; NSFW):
In his book, Great American City, sociologist Robert Sampson argues that, while the effects of macro factors like poverty and political neglect on individual lives are well-documented, other local mechanisms matter too. It’s important, then, to think about the constitution of neighborhoods.
Along these lines, he argues, even if a community is economically- and socially-marginalized, an existing neighborhood organizations can make a big difference. He takes natural disasters as a case study. A neighborhood organization can spread the news of an impending disaster, establish leadership, and organize assistance before, during, and after a crisis. In this way, Sampson brings together micro, meso, and macro forces shaping the impact of disaster.
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.
Here’s another one for our collection of instances in which we describe light tan as “nude,” “skin-,” or “flesh-colored” (symbolically erasing the existence of people without light tan skin). Yahoo’s OMG! describes uses the word “nude” to describe the color of Lil’ Kim shirt.
It’s always particularly amazing when they use the word to talk about something a black person is wearing. Like, um, Michelle Obama.
For more examples, see our posts on products designed for white people, the widespread use of such language to describe light tan in the fashion world, and lotion marketed as for “normal to darker skin.” See also our Contexts essay on race and “nude” as a color.
For contrast, see this post about how the generic human in Russian cartoons is colored black instead of white.
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.
