Two years ago we posted about the Ashley Madison Agency. Several readers brought our attention to a new ad campaign for the company, so we’re reposting it; scroll down for new material.

Lisa C. sent in a link to the Ashley Madison Agency, which she heard advertised on a talk radio station that generally targets a male audience. The site specializes in providing dating services to married individuals looking to have an affair:

The company clearly plays on its notoriety and the shock value of the idea that a dating site would cater to married people looking to cheat on their partners — as well as, in this case, appearing to promise men oral sex.

The company has come out with a new ad campaign that has received significant criticism. The ads, sent in by Danielle Q., Christie W., and an anonymous reader, combine “promotion of adultery, body shaming, and female objectification,” according to Christie. They present wives as fat (and therefore presumably unappealing) women who practically drive men to cheat on them with the thin, hot women they deserve to have sexual access to:

(Via.)

(Via Jezebel.)

One source of criticism comes from Jacqueline, the plus-sized model used in the two images. She apparently posed for a photographer years ago and is now faced with seeing her image used to elicit disgust at large bodies. As Jacqueline pointed out in a post she wrote for Jezebel, these images aren’t just about mocking large women; they’re about policing all women’s bodies:

A size 2 woman who sees this ad sees the message: “If I don’t stay small, he will cheat”. A size 12 woman might see this ad and think “if I don’t lose 30lbs, he will cheat”. A size 32 woman could see this ad, and feel “I will never find love”.

Thus, all women are told that they are perpetually in competition with all other women for the sexual attention and approval of men, and always on the verge of being ridiculed for the failure to meet impossible standards of feminine attractiveness.

The Census Bureau posted some information about the economic payoff of a college degree on their blog, Random Samplings. A recent report indicated that educational level had a bigger impact than any other demographic factor on lifetime earnings. More education leads to both higher incomes not just because those with more education receive higher salaries, but also because they are more likely to be in full-time jobs. The x-axis here shows the % of people in full-time, year-round jobs:

Not surprisingly, the gap in earnings widens over time, especially for those with a bachelor’s or higher degree compared to those with less:

The report also estimated lifetime earnings by race/ethnicity for men and women separately. As they point out, except for a couple of cases at the very highest educational levels, men from even the most economically disadvantaged racial/ethnic groups out-earn women from the most economically advantaged ones:

Of course, not all college degrees are equal. Dolores R. sent in a link to an interactive table from the Wall Street Journal that lets you look at earnings and the unemployment rate for various majors. I sorted them by median earnings; here are the ten with the lowest median earnings:

And the ten with the highest:

The highest unemployment rate? Clinical psychology, at 19.5%.

You can also search by area (art, engineering, etc.), though it looks like the categorization may be a little sketchy — for instance, “geology and earth science” and “liberal arts” show up under the arts.

For more on college majors, earnings, and future career opportunities, see the report College Clusters: Forecasting Demand for High School through College Jobs, 2008-2018, from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

Two additional cases of a boy being subject to schools rules that don’t apply to girls prompts a re-post. I’ve added the new instances to the end.

Tara C. sent us a link to a story about a 4-year-old boy who has been given in-school suspension (and was threatened with expulsion) for having hair that breaks the dress code for the Dallas, TX, school system:

Dmitriy T.M. sent in another story, this one featuring a 6-year-old named Gareth who was being placed into in-school suspension (i.e., spending all day each day in the principal’s office) because of his long hair and earring.

So, this still you see of him below… that’s what counts as long hair. And, can you spot the earring in his left ear? It’s there.

In another case, 16-year-old Kasey Landrum was suspended for wearing eye-liner on school grounds (after classes were out):

Of course, these aren’t just about enforcing a dress code. It’s a gendered code; girls aren’t required to have short hair cuts, because on girls, longer hair isn’t “distracting,” it’s “normal.”  As is make-up and earrings.  Implicit in the idea of what counts as an appropriate appearance, then, is the gender of the person wearing it.  These cases reveal, further, that girls are allowed more choices than boys because we are more accepting of girls acting boyish than boys acting girlish (in what sociologists call “androcentrism“).

The final case also reveals the importance of intersectionality, or the way that different identities come together in complicated ways. Landrum claims that an ostensibly heterosexual boy was allowed to wear punk-style make-up to school on the same day.  So breaking gender rules is apparently okay if you affirm that you’re heterosexual, and maybe being gay is okay if you don’t break any gender rules, but doing both is going too far.

In Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, Jeff Manza and Chris Uggen discuss the implications of state laws that bar convicted felons from voting, some even after their release and completion of all parole or probation requirements. The result? Over 5 million Americans are prohibited from participating in the democratic process.

But because African Americans are disproportionately likely to be in prison, they are particularly affected by the restriction of voting rights. The Prison Policy Initiative posted this map by Uggen and Manza showing the percent of voting-age African Americans in each state prevented from voting in 2000 as a result of a felony conviction:

For a thorough discussion of the history and consequences of laws barring felons from voting, see Uggen’s excellent Felon Disenfranchisement site.

Originally posted at Organizations, Occupations and Work.

Last week I discussed the connection between the Occupy Wall Street protests and the long-term transfer of national income into the finance sector. Well the problem is worse than Wall Street’s power over the national economy and polity.

There really are two faces to financialization. The most familiar face is the dominance of the finance sector over the rest of us: the giant profits and bonuses at the big banks and investment houses and the instability generated by too big to fail but rapaciously imprudent financial services firms. The other face is the financialization of the rest of the economy. Greta Krippner figured this out first. Greta discovered that since the 1980s firms in the non-finance sector have increasingly invested, not in the production of goods and services, but in financial instruments. The productive economy, Main Street in some formulations, has increasingly abandoned production in favor of financial shenanigans. Finance related income, including interest, foreign exchange profits, and stock market investments have risen from about 1/8^th of corporate profits to around 30%. In the manufacturing sector the move from production to financial strategies has been even more dramatic, rising to a ratio of finance revenue/profit as high as .60 after 2000.

The most well-known examples of this type of financialization might be the financial arms of automobile manufacturers. General Motors established its financial arm General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) in 1919 and Ford established its financial service provider Ford Motor Credit in 1959. Before the 1980s, the main function of these financial institutions was to provide their automotive customers access to credit to increase car sales. Starting in the 1980s, these firms broadened their portfolio. GMAC entered mortgage lending in 1985. In the same year, Ford purchased First Nationwide Financial Corporation, the first thrift that operated at the national level, to enter the savings and residential loan markets. In the 1990s both GMAC and Ford Motor Credit expanded their services to include insurance, banking, and commercial finance. In 2004, GM reported that 66 percent of its $1.3 billion quarterly profits came from GMAC; while a day earlier, Ford reported a loss in its automotive operation but $1.17 billion in net income, mostly from its financing operation.

Founded in 1943 GE Capital was designed to provide loans for the customers of home appliances. However, under the post-1980 leadership of Jack Welch, its scope rapidly expanded to small business, real estate, mortgage lending, credit cards, and insurance. After running a close second for more than two decades, it topped GMAC as the largest nonbank lender in 1992. The profit return to financial expansion was extraordinary. In retrospect this should not be surprising; the same financial deregulation than broke down the walls between various types of financial firms also freed non-financial firms to enter these markets. Simultaneously deregulation created fertile fields in which to capture income in multiple financial markets.

This kind of financialization is in many ways more insidious than the concentration of wealth and power on Wall Street. At this point many of us, including political movements such as Occupy Wall Street and even the Tea Party movement can see that financial power and concentrated wealth undermine democracy and capitalism respectively. I think that the financialization of the non-finance sector has undermined the real economy by reducing capital and management commitment to production and further marginalizing labor’s role in U.S. corporations. The result has been an incremental exclusion of the general workforce from revenue generating and compensation setting processes. While once CEOs were celebrated for expanding employment and market share, they are now lauded for increased profitability and decreased employment. They have accomplished this transition by shifting the creative energies and investment strategies of their firms away from the production of goods and services and into financial investments.

Recently Ken-Hou Lin and I have found that as financial strategies replace production ones, income inequality climbs dramatically. In fact as industry financialization rises so does capital’s share of income. In addition, financialization is associated with higher compensation for corporate officers and higher income inequality among employees. We estimate that about half of the post 1970s decline in labor’s share of income, 10 percent of the growth in officers’ share of compensation, and 15 percent of the growth in earnings dispersion between 1970 and 2008 are linked to the financialization of the non-finance sector. One way to think about financialization is that it is a system of income redistribution which strengthens the hand of finance capital and weakens the hand of labor associated with the real economy.

This is a re-post in response to a new submission by vmlojw.

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Toban B. sent us this photo he took in Cardiff, Wales, of Golliwog banks:

While the sign indicates these particular ones were for display only, Toban says there were others clearly for sale.

The golliwog (also spelled golliwogg) is an old racist caricature, clearly similar to blackface minstrel-type or mammy figures in the U.S. It emerged in the 1800s but was popularized when James Robertson and Sons adopted a golliwog named Golly as the logo for their jam around 1910:

Now, obviously you’ll often find these types of things for sale in antique stores, or on display at museums. They were very common in the U.S., Britain, and I’m sure many other countries, so it’s not surprising you’d come upon them.

The thing about the golliwogs Toban saw, though, is that they don’t appear to be antiques. The same ones can be found on ebay, and here’s the box they come in, which looks quite new (as do the dolls themselves):

The ebay listing for that one lists it as “brand new,” though theoretically that could refer to an antique that had never been taken out of the box, I suppose. But the listing doesn’t say anything about it being an antique. And Toban says,

…the items on the table around them — at Cardiff Market — generally weren’t antiques.  Since there were newly mass produced tourist/nationalism industry products around them, people passing by generally wouldn’t view the Golliwogg dolls as antiques.  The dolls weren’t somehow distinguished from the newer products.

vmlojw, who is in Sydney, Australia, emailed in to tell us that her 1-year-old daughter received one as a gift and she later “found a local charity stall full of knitted golliwogs.”  vmlojw figured this couldn’t happen in North America; I’m not so sure.

It’s one thing to find antique racist caricatures for sale. I still don’t know why you’d want to buy one, but I can certainly see why they’d be appropriate for museum displays. But I find it both bizarre and disturbing when new versions of such things are produced and put on sale as a “cutesy” souvenir. Do people think we’re so “post-racial” now that these are completely disconnected from their origins in a racist culture that viewed non-Whites as less human, less intelligent, and less civilized? Why would someone think this is an adorable reminder of their time in Cardiff? I really don’t get it.

Also see: vintage Jezebel products, mammy souvenirs for sale in Savannah, modern reproductions of old racist images, and patterns for making mammy-type dolls.

The Pew Charitable Trusts just released an update on the effects of long-term unemployment. One aspect of this economic crisis that sets it apart from others over the past several decades is how long unemployment is lasting. At this point, about a third of the unemployed have been out of a job for a full year or more:

Though the likelihood of being unemployed went down with age, among those who have lost their jobs, long periods of unemployment are more common among older than younger workers:

Read the full mini-report here. Via Talking Points Memo.

Also check out Lisa’s post on the long-term consequences of unemployment.

With all the emphasis on Halloween, you may or may not have heard that this year, October 31st was noteworthy for another reason: according to the United Nations, that’s the day the global population hit 7 billion. The UN has set up a website to provide information about population trends and estimates for the future. Here’s the current world population, by region:

The map is interactive, so you can click on a region to find out its population, as well as its percentage of the total world population.

You can also estimate the population through 2100 based on various fertility scenarios. In the default medium scenario, fertility is expected to follow past trends, leveling out at a little over 10 billion by 2100:

On the other hand, if we saw no further reductions in global fertility, the 2100 population would be over 26.8 billion:

There’s an enormous amount of data available at the site. For instance, if you select the Births tab, you can click on either a region or a specific country and find out what percent of births are to women in different age groups. Here’s the % of all births to women aged 15-19, by country:

And the chart showing the total age breakdown for Finland (at the site you can hover over the graph to get the actual %):

A chart of deaths by age and sex, illustrating the continued high mortality in infancy and early childhood:

There’s also a section of the site where you can enter information about your own date and place of birth and then get a snapshot of what the global population was when you were born. Since I entered the world:

Overall, it’s a pretty great resource, and another one of those websites that can easily eat up a significant amount of your time without you realizing it.