Late Night TV host Jimmy Kimmel encouraged his viewers to film their children getting early Christmas presents that they would surely hate.  The result is a collection of children acting badly: bursting into tears, saying they hate their parents, lecturing them on proper gift giving protocol, etc.  It’s funny and also a great illustration of the gift-giving rules that Theodore Caplow meticulously lists in his article, Rule Enforcement Without Visible Means: Christmas Gift Giving in Middletown (pdf) (btw: this is the very first article I assign in Soc101).

(UPDATE: I was quoted briefly on this phenomenon in a New York Times story on the prank.)

In a number of cases, the gift is considered bad because the recipient is a boy and the gift is for a girl.  One boy, for example, gets a Hello Kitty gift, another gets a pop star-themed coloring book.  The boys’ reaction at being presented with a girls’ gift reveals their internalization of androcentrism, the idea that masculinity is superior to femininity.   They express both disgust and, in some cases I think, fear at being poisoned by contact — especially such personal contact as “I got this for you” — with girlness.

More posts on androcentrism: “woman” as an insult, being a girl is degrading, making it manly: how to sell a car, good god don’t let men have long hair, don’t forget to hug like a dude, saving men from their (feminine) selves, men must eschew femininity, not impressed with Buzz Lightyear commercial, dinosaurs can’t be for girls, and sissy men are so uncool.

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.

This commercial is good evidence that we still think nothing of being cruel towards people deemed “overweight”:

Via Copyranter.

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 Montclair SocioBlog.

Children in American movies are typically superior to adults.  The kids are not only all right, they are wiser, less corrupt, and more competent.  “Home Alone” is a classic example, where the plucky, resourceful kid triumphs over both the vindictiveness of the burglars and the mindlessness of his parents.  (An earlier post on children in films is here.)

“The Descendants,” the recent film with George Clooney (I saw it last night), starts more like a French film, where children are, well, children, and it’s the parents who must endure and learn to cope with the kids’ immaturity and thoughtlessness.

Clooney is Matt King, and the name is a deliberate irony.  Kinglike, he must decide the fate of a huge tract of pristine Kauai land that his family has owned for many generations.  The money from the sale will make him and his many cousins and their families rich.  Which developer will he sell the land to?But as a husband and father he is far being monarch of all he surveys.  His wife has been in an accident and lies in a coma.  His two daughters are unapologetically impudent and insufferable.  As the film starts, Scottie, age ten, has sent a nasty, obscene text to a classmate.  Alex, seventeen, now at an expensive private rehab/therapeutic school, first appears on screen drunk, having  sneaked out of her room at night with another girl.  Then there’s Sid, Alex’s friend, a slightly older boy, all stupidity and insensitivity, a chubby incarnation of Beavis and Butthead.Then the film magically transforms the kids.  Each has been introduced as obtuse, obscene, or obnoxious. But now Alex, it turns out, knows more than her father does, at least in one crucial area – that his wife, now on life support, had been cheating on him.

The kids change from being French, a burden for the grown-up, to becoming almost classically American, not superior but equal.  They are now his partners.  Teens and adult are a team trying to discover the identity and location of the seducer so that King can confront him.  The teenagers are suddenly much less difficult and much more helpful, while King sometimes appears uncertain and even silly, peering over hedges to spy on his wife’s lover.   He asks his daughter for advice.  He even asks Sid what he should do.(You can get some sense of this transformation in the trailers here and here, which also outline the rest of the story.)

Still, the movie doesn’t go pure Hollywood.  It does not present the world as a character contest where good faces evil, where the right action is clear and the only question is how the hero will come to make it.  Instead, it shows a grown-up trying to understand and cope with problems and people he cannot really control.

And nobody blows up a helicopter.

At Flowing Data, the Venn Diagram illustrated by a platypus playing a keytar. Go there.

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.

Poverty is usually described as a status, as there are people below and above the poverty line. We need to do more to capture and represent the experience of poverty.

There are ways this can be done even in a single survey question, such as this one: ”During the past 12 months, was there any time when you needed prescription medicine but didn’t get it because you couldn’t afford it?” Below are the percentages answering affirmatively, by official poverty-line status.

Percentage of Adults Aged 18-64 Who Did Not Get Needed Prescription Drugs Because of Cost, by Poverty Status (National Health Interview Survey, 1999-2010)

This is not the same as not having any of the prescription drugs you need. What it indicates is economic insecurity rather than deprivation per se, a more nuanced measure than simply being above or below (some percentage of) the poverty line.

Cross-posted at Ms.

Maybelline’s brand of lip gloss, “baby lips,” is a straightforward example of the infantilization of adult women:

We should be worried about the infantilization of women for two reasons:

First, it’s directly related to the sexualization of young girls.  The two phenomena, when considered together, clearly point to the convergence of female children and adult sexuality.  As I wrote in a previous post:

…on the one hand, women are portrayed as little girls, as coyly innocent, as lacking in power and maturity. On the other hand, child-likeness is sexy, and girls are portrayed as Lolitas whose innocence is questionable.

Second, the need for women to look like babies to be beautiful (and the requirement for women to be beautiful), turns aging into a trauma for women.  Susan Sontag, in her (truly beautiful) essay The Double Standard of Aging, put it this way:

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man… A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another…

There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.

A very lucrative defeat for Maybelline, if we buy into it.

More of the quote at a previous post.  And, for more on the infantilization of women, see our posts on baby teeth, lady spanking, Glee, this collection of examples, a vintage example, and the Halloween edition. Link via BagNewsNotes.

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 Hipster Effect.

I know, I know – you hate hipsters. Maybe somebody called you one once, but they were clearly mixing you up with the real hipsters. You know the ones.

Hipsters have beards. Or mustaches. Or neither. They wear skinny jeans. Or maybe they don’t. They’ve got thick-rimmed glasses. Or sometimes not. You may not be able to describe one offhand, but you know one when you see one. Right?

As elusive as a unicorn yet as common as an ant, the hipster seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. The only definite thing about a hipster is that nobody wants to be called one (yet pretty much all of us are guilty of having called other people hipsters). It’s become one of the worst insults you can bestow upon somebody (yet it’s also among the most common). If you want to completely discount a person and everything that they stand for, just break out the H-word and watch their credibility to go down the drain. Once you’ve been dubbed a hipster, you yourself become meaningless in that context.  You become one of those people and we all know what those people are like.

Or do we?

The definition of a “hipster” is at best a collection of vague cultural artifacts that we associate with a certain set of personality traits, very few of which actually exist in tandem. The prototypical hipster is a trust-fund baby who spends his days talking about art projects that he never gets around to starting. He drinks the cheapest beer available even though he can afford better. He does this ironically, and he wears his clothes in the same way. He judges you, the non-hipster, based solely on your appearance, quickly dismissing you as a non-member of the hip elite. He listens to bands you’ve never heard of and thinks it’s sad that you can’t keep up with his cooler-than-cool musical tastes. In short, the prototypical hipster is an asshole – but for the most part, he doesn’t even exist.

In a way, we’ve vilified the hipster archetype as a way of dealing with our own insecurities. Being cool was something most people never worried about once they graduated high school. Our internet-fueled society has since changed that, bringing the hunt for the newest and most interesting things into our day-to-day lives. There is a burden to be cool that now follows you into your 20s and 30s and beyond, whereas before these things were safely relegated to lunchtime cafeterias and high school auditoriums. And with the internet now spitting out a different concept of cool with each and every day that goes by, it’s almost impossible to keep up. Eventually we throw up our hands in exasperation and, whenever we see somebody who looks like they’re trying harder than us, we spit out the word: hipster.

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Sophy Bot is the author of the forthcoming book, The Hipster Effect: How the Rising Tide of Individuality is Changing Everything We Know about Life, Work and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Bot also runs The Hipster Effect blog, examining how identity, society and work have metamorphosed in the age of perpetual connectivity.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

Things that make you say… “peer review”?

This is the time of year when I expect to read inflated or distorted claims about the benefits of marriage and religion from the National Marriage Project. So I was happy to see the new State of Our Unions report put out by W. Bradford Wilcox’s outfit. My first reading led to a few questions.

First: When they do the “Survey of Marital Generosity” — the privately funded, self-described nationally-representative sample of 18-46-year old Americans, which is the source of this and several other reports, none of them published in any peer-reviewed source I can find — do they introduce themselves to the respondents by saying, “Hello, I’m calling from the Survey of Marital Generosity, and I’d like to ask you a few questions about…” If this were the kind of thing subject to peer review, and I were a reviewer, I would wonder if the respondents were told the name of the survey.

Second: When you see oddly repetitive numbers in a figure showing regression results, don’t you just wonder what’s going on?

Here’s what jumped out at me:

If a student came to my office with these results and said, “Wow, look at the big effect of joint religious practice on marital success,” I’d say, “Those numbers are probably wrong.” I can’t swear they didn’t get exactly the same values for everyone except those couples who both attend religious services regularly — 50 50 50, 13 13 13 , 50 50 50, 21 21 21 — in a regression that adjusts for age, education, income, and race/ethnicity, but that’s only because I don’t swear.*

Of course, the results are beside the point in this report, since the conclusions are so far from the data anyway. From this figure, for example, they conclude:

In all likelihood,  the experience of sharing regular religious attendance — that  is, of enjoying shared rituals that endow one’s marriage with transcendent significance and the support of a community  of family and friends who take one’s marriage seriously— is a solidifying force for marriage in a world in which family life is  increasingly fragile.

OK.

Anyway, whatever presumed error led to that figure seems to reoccur in the next one, at least for happiness:

Just to be clear with the grad student example, I wouldn’t assume the grad student was deliberately cooking the data to get a favorable result, because I like to assume the best about people. Also, people who cook data tend to produce a little more random-looking variation. Also, I would expect the student not to just publish the result online before anyone with a little more expertise had a look at it.

Evidence of a pattern of error is also found in this figure, which also shows predicted percentages that are “very happy,” when age, education, income and race/ethnicity are controlled.

Their point here is that people with lots of kids are happy (which they reasonably suggest may result from a selection effect). But my concern is that the predicted percentages are all between 13% and 26%, while the figures above show percentages that are all between 50% and 76%.

So, in addition to the previous figures probably being wrong, I don’t think this one can be right unless they are wrong. (And I would include “mislabeled” under the heading “wrong,” since the thing is already published and trumpeted to the credulous media.)

Publishing apparently-shoddy work like this without peer review is worse when it happens to support your obvious political agenda. One is tempted to believe that if the error-prone research assistant had produced figures that didn’t conform to the script, someone higher up might have sent the tables back for some error checking. I don’t want to believe that, though, because I like to assume the best about people.

* Just kidding. I do swear.