In this Jell-O ad, a perfectly manicured woman’s hand is holding a tiiiiiiiiiiny ice cream cone, suggesting that women are better off eating sugar-free pudding as a dessert. Below, I argue that this ad, far from promoting “decadence,” is actually a form of social control.

The words “60 Calories of Denial” imply that eating ice cream requires self-denial because a normal portion would be too high in calories.  In contrast, the large bowl of Jell-O pudding is labeled “60 Calories of Decadence.”  The fine print specifies that the pudding is “loved by lips and hips alike.”

To put it plainly, this ad for dessert tells women to be ashamed of wanting dessert.  It says, “You are a woman, so you are stressed about calories (and you should be). But we’re here to save the day. We can give you permission to have a little bit of dessert, but you will do so on our terms.”

So, while the ad suggests that Jell-O is offering women freedom, the converse of self-denial, in fact it is reminding women of the rule that they be calorie-conscious.  In other words, it reinforces the notion that every woman should be unhappy with or fearful of her body, always striving to attain or maintain thinness.

Camilla Bennett is a sophomore at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California where she is a Cognitive Science major with an emphasis in computation. 

The fashion industry is not inclusive of racial and ethnic minorities. Many of the industry’s most celebrated and acclaimed fashion houses rarely cast models of color for their runway shows. Fall 2013 was one of the worst seasons in diversity for casting. Almost 83% of the models on the runway were white (source):

The result is an incredibly homogeneous look on the runway.  Check out photos of the Fall 2013 Gucci show (source) and the Fall 2013 Calvin Klein show (source).

Faintly aware of this critique, some designers put a minority model on the runway every odd season. But while look-alike white models are hired en masse, designers often limit just how much color they’re willing to include.  Chanel Iman, an extremely successful multiracial model, told The Times: “Designers have told me, ‘We already found one black girl. We don’t need you anymore.’”

Leila Ananna, a casting director for Burberry, Gucci, Emilio Pucci, Saint Laurent, and more, thinks that this is okay.  Commenting on the lack of runway diversity, she said: “We think we need to keep in mind that these are shows. A show needs to make you dream, and it doesn’t necessarily need to represent reality.”

Ananna’s words pose many concerns. The idea that fashion shows are supposed to make you dream suggests that everyone is white in this idealized world. In contrast, I find the idealization of the homogeneous aesthetic to be a reflection of racism; this is a nightmare, not a dream.

Rebs (Wooyoung) Lim is currently a student attending Occidental College. She is interested in minoring in Sociology and majoring in Urban and Environmental Policy. She does not have a twitter account, sadly.

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post.

This is a new one.

Some of you may know that there is a wave of colleges and universities filing complaints with the Office for Civil Rights, claiming that their institutions are failing to protect women from sexual assault. This (first) wave includes Amherst, Yale, the University of North Carolina, and Swarthmore, among others.

Well, last night many of the details of the stories of the students whose cases have been mishandled — right down to exact quotes from their lives — found themselves in an episode of Law&Order SVU.  They didn’t ask for permission, offer a “consulting” fee, or even warn them that it was coming.

This just leaves a this-is-so-wrong-I-don’t-even-know icky feeling in the pit of my gut.   I know that Law & Order has been ripping stories from the headlines for three decades, but it stuns me that it can claim to be fiction and not compensate the real women who’s lives are clearly and unequivocally depicted in this show.

Let me put this in stark terms: Law & Order is brazenly capitalizing on the pain and trauma of young women and not only failing to compensate them for stealing their stories, but actually denying that they exist by claiming that the “story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.”  Stunning.

Alexandra Brodsky, a survivor who filed the complaints against Yale, told Jezebel:

The SVU episode strikes me as an extreme example of the risk of going public as a survivor: your story is no longer your own.

I’ve not seen a more obvious example of this fact.

The teaser for the episode, plus a list of 15 ways the episode copied real life, collected by Katie J.M. Baker at Jezebel, is after the jump.

Here’s the entire list:

SVU: Lindsay is gang-raped by three frat guys who later claim she’s crying rape because she’s embarrassed about her slutty behavior.

Real Life: Four University of Montana football players allegedly gang-raped a drunk female student; charges were dropped because it was unclear whether she was “just embarrassed” about what happened.

SVU: Lindsay Snapchats her rapist the next day, leading students and administrative officials to doubt that she was actually raped.

Real Life: Woman allegedly raped by Mizzou basketball player Michael Dixon Jr. texts him the next day, leading students, officials and cops to doubt that she was actually raped.

SVU: “I’m sorry that girl had a bad night, but why would Travis need to rape somebody?” a frat bro muses.

Real Life: Students at campuses all over the country don’t believe that Big Men on Campus can be rapists.

SVU: Students call Tau Omega the “Rape Factory.”

Real Life: A former Wesleyan student is suing the university for failing to “to supervise, discipline, warn or take other corrective action” against a frat which she says had a “reputation in the Wesleyan community as the ‘Rape Factory.'”

SVU: Renee is pressured to leave school and commit herself to a mental institution after she attempts to self-harm after the school ignores her rape report. Her rapist is set to graduate with honors.

Real Life: Former student Angie Epifano says Amherst abruptly decided to admit her into a psychiatric ward after she made suicidal comments spurred by the despair she felt when her allegations were repeatedly ignored. Her rapist graduated with honors.

SVU: Renee is penalized by her school’s Honor Court for “intimidating her rapist” by speaking out.

Real Life: UNC sophomore Landen Gambill says she was punished by the Office of Student Conduct for “intimidating” her rapist by speaking to the press about her sexual assault.

SVU: Renee is told that sex “is like a football game” by a school official.

Real Life: Former UNC student Annie Clark was told that rape “is like a football game” by an administrator.

SVU: The university’s mental health counselor says she was met with resistance when she tried to support rape survivors’ reports.

Real Life: UNC allegedly pressured former dean of students Melinda Manning to underreport sexual assault cases; Swarthmore and Occidental were recently accused of mishandling assaults.

SVU: Dean Reyerson says she couldn’t stop Tau Omega alumni from selling “We don’t take ‘no’ for an answer” rush t-shirts.

Real Life: Amherst’s administration came under fire for holding an ineffective closed-door discussion related to a similar frat t-shirt.

SVU: Dean Reyerson says students have the right to assemble, even if they want to chant, “No means yes, yes means anal.”

Real Life: Yale frat boys once gleefully ran around campus chanting exactly that.

SVU: Dean Reyerson says she can’t stop students from posting photos and rumors about rape survivors on an anonymous website because of “free speech.”

Real Life: Oberlin’s administration cites the First Amendment and does next to nothing about undergrads who are seriously harassed via its student-run anonymous message board.

SVU: Lindsay kills herself.

Real Life: Elizabeth “Lizzy” Seeberg committed suicide nine days after accusing a Notre Dame football player of sexually assaulting her in a dorm room; Notre Dame investigators failed to interview the student she accused until 15 days after Seeberg reported the attack and five days after she killed herself.

SVU: Frat boys are caught on video joking that they “raped [Lindsay] dead. (Also that they “raped her Gangnam Style,” which is one we haven’t heard before!)

Real Life: Anonymous leaked a video of former Steubenville High School baseball player Michael Nodianos cracking himself up as he calls a rape victim “deader than” JFK, OJ’s wife, Caylee Anthony, and Trayvon Martin, amongst others.

SVU: At the end of the episode, students hold up signs protesting rape culture using real quotes said to them by members of the community following their assaults.

Real Life: Amherst students put together a collection of photos of men and women who were sexually assaulted on campus, holding signs with words said to them by members of the community following their assaults.

SVU: “I was thinking about maybe starting a kind of support group on campus, so survivors know they’re not alone,” Renee says.

Real Life: A group of rape survivors including Dana Bolger (Amherst College ‘14), Alexandra Brodsky (Yale College ‘12, Yale Law School ‘16), Annie Clark (University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill ‘11), and Andrea Pino (UNC — CH ‘14), some of whom have filed complaint with the federal government against their universities, joined together to help students at colleges across the country stand up to administrations; they recently launched “Know Your IX,” a campaign that aims to educate every college student in the U.S. about his or her rights under Title IX by the start of the Fall 2013 academic term.

Cross-posted at PolicyMic.

Let me ask you a question: Do you have a good friend of the opposite sex?

Odds are you do. In fact, the odds are overwhelming.

When I first began teaching, 25 or so years ago, I asked my students how many of them had a good friend of the opposite sex. About 10% said they did. The rest were from what I called the When Harry Met Sally generation. You’ll remember the scene, early in the film, when Harry asserts that women and men can’t be friends because “sex always gets in the way.”  Sally is sure he’s wrong. They fight about it. Then, thinking she has the clincher for her position, she says, confidently, “So that means that you can be friends with them if you’re not attracted to them!”

“Ah,” says Harry, “you pretty much want to nail them too.”

Young people today have utterly and completely repudiated this idea. These days, when I ask my students, I’ve had to revise the question: “Is there anyone here who does not have a friend of the opposite sex?” A few hands perhaps, in the more than 400 students in the class.

But let’s think, for a moment, about the “politics” of friendship. With whom do you make friends? With your peers. Not your supervisor or boss. Not your subordinate. Your equal.  More than romance, and surely more than workplace relationships, friendships are the relationships with the least amount of inequality.

This changes how we can engage men in the efforts to end sexual assault, because there are three elements to sexual assault that can be discussed and disentangled.

First is m en’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, to sex. This sense of entitlement dissolves in the face of an encounter with your friends. After all, entitlement is premised on inequality. The more equal women are, the less entitlement men may feel. (Entitlement is not to be confused with resentment; equality often breeds resentment in the privileged group. The privileged rarely support equality because they fear they have something to lose.) Entitlement leads men to think that they can do whatever they want.

Second, the Bro Code tells those guys that they’re right – that they can get away with it because their bros won’t challenge or confront them. The bonds of brotherhood demand men’s silent complicity with predatory and potentially assaultive behavior. One never rats out the brotherhood. But if we see our female friends as our equals, then we might be more likely to act ethically to intervene and resist being a passive bystander. (And, of course, we rescue our male friends from doing something that could land him in jail for a very long time.)

Men’s silence is what perpetuates the culture of sexual assault; many of the excellent programs that work to engage men suggest that men start making some noise. We know the women, or know people who know them. This is personal.

Finally, we’re better than that – and we know it.

Sexual assault is often seen as an abstraction, a “bad” thing that happens to other people: Bad people do bad things to people who weren’t careful, were drunk or compromised. But, as I said, it’s personal. And besides, this framing puts all the responsibility on women to monitor their activities, alcohol consumption, and environments; if they don’t, whose fault is it?

This sets the bar far too low to men. It assumes that unless women monitor and police everything they do, drink, say, wear etc., we men are wild, out of control animals and we cannot be held responsible for our actions.

Surely we can do better than this. Surely we can be the good and decent and ethical men we say we are. Surely we can promise, publicly and loudly, the pledge of the White Ribbon Campaign (the world’s largest effort to engage men to end men’s violence against women): I pledge never to commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women and girls.

Our friends – both women and men – deserve and expect no less of us.

Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stonybrook.  He has written or edited over twenty volumes, including Manhood in America: A Cultural History and Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.  You can visit his website here.

Here’s a random creepy fact: one of the tunes that float out of ice cream trucks all summer is a racist song called “Nigger Love a Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!,” first recorded 1916 or before.  Have a listen.

During slavery, the African population’s supposed taste for watermelon was used to suggest that they were stupid.  As I wrote in an earlier post:

…defenders of slavery used the watermelon as a symbol of simplicity.  African Americans, the argument went, were happy as slaves.  They didn’t need the complicated responsibilities of freedom; they just needed some shade and a cool, delicious treat.

Googling around, I learned almost nothing about the song.  It seems clear that it’s not an inside joke between Black people, making fun of the stereotype.  Instead, it’s an earnest, intended-to-be-humorous song meant to make fun of Black people.  But I could find little contextualizing information.  I also don’t know if the tune was also set to other lyrics that were or weren’t racist.

Still, the fact that the tune is an ice cream truck classic reveals how our racist history is still part and parcel of our everyday lives.

Hat tip to Theodore Johnson.

Here at SocImages, we typically use the phrase “cultural appropriation” to describe rather frivolous borrowing of cultural practices and objects for the purposes of fun and fashion.  We’ve posted on examples ranging from the appropriation of American Indian fashion,  the mocking of the Harlem Shake, and an Orthodox Jew-inspired fashion show.

A slideshow of members of the punk scene in Burma, however, offers another version of cultural appropriation.  Their fashion is clearly inspired by the punk scenes of Britain and the U.S., which started in the 1970s. Accordingly to an interview with Ko Gyi at Vice and an article at Spiegel Online, some members of the sub-culture believe themselves to be rebelling against an oppressive state, others are interested in “non-political anarchism.”  While their music has to pass through state censors, they are talented in pushing their lyrics right up to the limit and deft in using metaphor to get their point across.

This is a fully different kind of appropriation, the kind that is about fighting the establishment, not spicing it up with “colorful” bits of marginalized groups.  It is more akin to feminists and gay liberation activists borrowing the tactics of the civil rights movement.  Alexander Dluzak writes:

In Burma, punk is far more than just a superficial copy of its Western counterpart. Here, what is probably the most rebellious of all subcultures in the Southeast Asian country is going up against one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes.

Cultures can borrow from one another, then, in ways that both empower and disempower.  It will be fascinating to see if this particular appropriation can shape the future of Burma.

Planet Money’s Jacob Goldstein and Lam Thuy Vo offered some interesting data last week about the history of energy consumption in the U.S.  First they offered data on the rise and fall of alternative energy sources.

Coal, the first to replace wood, became a common energy source largely thanks to the railroads.  Wood was more or less everywhere, but coal had to be transported.

The invention and spread of the internal combustion engine drove the demand for oil.  According to this site (PM doesn’t say), natural gas becomes common in the ’50s thanks to the improvement of techniques for making metals and welding. This facilitates the building of oil pipelines, hence the rise of oil.

The overall rise in energy consumption per capita is worrisome, but it has fallen off since the mid-70s.  Thanks to high prices that encourage lower use and greater efficiency of appliances, our appetite for energy seems to have leveled off.

Not to end on an optimistic note, though.  That data is per capita.  Because our population has been rising, our overall energy use has continued to go up.

A guiding principle driving the sociological understanding and analysis of deviance is the recognition that behaviors themselves are not inherently deviant; rather it is the social perceptions and reactions to a behavior that makes a particular behavior deviant.  This explains why opinions and attitudes towards different forms of supposedly deviant behaviors regularly change.  A notable change in one type of deviance, using marijuana, is revealed in a report compiled by the Pew Research Center.

According to David F. Musto, a century ago marijuana was an obscure drug used almost exclusively by Hispanics in the Southwest.  Its limited association with this ethnic group is largely why marijuana initially became illegal.  With the onset of the Great Depression, both federal and state governments sought ways to expel nonwhites from the country as their cheap labor was no longer necessary.  Making one of this group’s pastimes illegal was a way to stigmatize Hispanics and rally public support for a population transfer.  With a populace stirred into a moral panic by racism, nativism and propaganda movies like Reefer Madness, there was little resistance to the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act which effectively made cannibas illegal.

In the 1960s marijuana experienced a cultural comeback when it became the drug of choice for baby-boomers who saw the drug as a safer alternative to the alcohol and methamphetamine that plagued their parents’ generation.  Marijuana was even legal for a brief period after the Supreme Court found the 1937 marijuana act unconstitutional.  However, because of widespread concern that drugs were corrupting the moral fabric of America’s youth, in 1970 marijuana was one of many drugs outlawed by President Nixon’s Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.  Interestingly, marijuana was the only drug targeted by this act that did not include a medical exception.  In the 1980s, President Reagan increased penalties for breaking drug laws, and subsequently the prison population in the United States swelled to a size seemingly unimaginable in a wealthy democracy.

The graph below from PEW’s report captures how federal action came during times of heightened public support to make marijuana illegal.

Yet, the graph also captures how in the early 1990s, support for the legalization of marijuana started to increase.  According to the PEW report, around this time California pioneered using the drug for medicinal purposes; seventeen other states (including D.C.) have since followed California’s lead while six other states decriminalized possession of small amounts.  In 2012, citizens in Colorado and Oregon voted to completely legalize marijuana despite federal law.  This relaxing and even elimination of marijuana laws mirrors favorable opinions of marijuana and growing support for its legalization.

It is difficult to tell if legalization, medical or otherwise, drives public opinion or vice-versa.  Regardless, an especially noteworthy finding of the PEW report is that right now, more than half of the United States’ citizens think marijuana should be legal.  Sociologists always take interest when trend lines cross in public opinion polls because the threshold is especially important in a majority-rule democracy; and the PEW report finds for the first time in the history of the poll, a majority of U.S. citizens support marijuana legalization.

This historical research data on opinions about marijuana reveals how definitions of deviance, and in many cases the ways those definitions are incorporated into the legal system, grow out of shared social perceptions.  Although there have been some notable genetic and cultivation advances, marijuana has changed relatively little in the last forty years; yet our perceptions of this drug (and therefore its definitions of use as deviant) regularly evolve and we can expect opinions, and therefore our laws, to further change in the future.

Jason Eastman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Coastal Carolina University who researches how culture and identity influence social inequalities.