While I’m most well-known for my work on hook up culture, I’ve written extensively on a different topic altogether: how Americans talk about female genital cutting practices (FGCs), better known as female genital “mutilation.”  While FGCs are passionately opposed by essentially all Americans who learn about them, our understanding of the practices is, in fact, skewed by misinformation, ethnocentrism, and a history of portraying Africa as naively “backwards” or cruelly “barbaric.”

The main source of distortion has been the mass media.  Aiming to encourage journalists to think twice when covering the topic, the Hastings Center has released a report by the Public Policy Advisory Network on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa.  In the rest of this post, I briefly discuss some of the things they want journalists — and the rest of us — to know and add a couple of my own:

Using the word “mutilation” is counterproductive.

People who support genital cutting typically believe that a cut body is a more aesthetically pleasing one.  The term “mutilation” may appeal to certain Westerners, but people in communities where cutting occurs largely find the term confusing or offensive.

Media coverage usually focuses on one of the more rare types of genital cutting: infibulation.

Infibulation involves trimming and fusing the labia so as to close the vulva, leaving an opening in the back for intercourse, urination, and menses.  In fact, 10% of the procedures involve infibulation.  The remainder involve trimming, cutting, or scarification of the clitoris, clitoral hood (prepuce), or labia minora or majora.  While none of these procedures likely sound appealing, some are more extensive than others.

Research has shown that women with cutting are sexually responsive.

Women who have undergone genital surgeries report “rich sexual lives, including desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction…”  This is true among women who have experienced clitoral reductions and undergone infibulation, as well as women who’ve undergone lesser forms of cutting.

Health complications of genital cutting “represent the exception rather than the rule.”

News reports often include long lists of acute and long-term negative medical consequences of FGCs, and these may feel intuitively true, but efforts to document their incidence suggest that health problems are, for the most part, no more common in cut than uncut women.  The Report concludes: “…from a public health point of view, the vast majority of genital surgeries in Africa are safe, even with current procedures and under current conditions.”

Girls are not generally cut in response to the influence of cruel patriarchs.

Most societies that cut girls also cut boys; some groups that engage in cutting have relatively permissive sexual rules for women, some do not; and female genital cutting practices are typically controlled and organized by women (correspondingly, men control male genital surgeries).

FGCs are not an “African practice.”

The procedures we label “female genital mutilation” occur only in some parts of Africa and occur outside of the continent as well (source):

Moreover, cosmetic genital surgeries in the U.S. are among the fastest growing procedures.  These include clitoral reduction, circumcision of the clitoral foreskin, labia trimming, and vaginal tightening, not to mention mons liposuction, collagen injected into the g-spot, color correction of the vulva, and anal bleaching.  While it would be simplistic to say that these are the same as the procedures we typically call “mutilation,” they are not totally different either.

Western-led efforts to eliminate FGCs are largely ineffective and sometimes backfire.

It turns out that people don’t appreciate being told that they are barbaric, ignorant of their own bodies, or cruel to their children.  Benevolent strangers who try to stop cutting in communities, as well as top-down laws instituted by politicians (often in response to Western pressure), are very rarely successful.  The most impressive interventions have involved giving communities resources to achieve whatever goals they desire and getting out of the way.

In sum, it’s high time Americans adopt a more balanced view of female genital cutting practices.  Reading The Hastings Center Report is a good start.  You might also pick up Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood by Stanlie James and Claire Robertson.  Full text links to my papers on the topic, including a discourse analysis of 30 years of the academic conversation, can be found here.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College.  She frequently delivers public lectures about female genital cutting. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Cross-posted at Ms. and the Huffington Post.

I loathe to weigh in on the “war on men” conversation, but… alas.

While one can use both logic and data to poke gaping holes in Suzanne Venker’s argument that women need to surrender to their femininity and let men think that they’re in charge if they ever want to get married, I just want to point out one thing — one endlessly repeated thing — that she gets very, very wrong.

Venker claims that there has “been an explosion of brain research” that proves that men and women have different brains.  This research, she claims, shows that men are loners who like to hunt and build things and women are nurturers who like to talk and take care of people.

This false on two fronts.

First, she’s wrong about the brain research.  The books and articles claiming that there are “pink” and “blue” brains are not consistent with existing research.  (They are out there because people can make a lot of money by confirming other people’s biases.)

What does the research say?

It’s true that scientists have documented a number of small, average sex differences in brain anatomy, composition, and function, as well as differences in size and tissue ratios.  (Other differences — such as the size of the corpus callosum and lateralization, whether one sex uses one side of their brain more than the other — have proven to be wrong.)

So, scientists do find some differences, but they have largely failed to link these to differences in men’s and women’s observed emotions, cognition,  or behavior.  That is, we’ve found some differences, but we have no proof that they translate into anything. Moreover, new research suggests that differences we observe may be designed not to create differences between men and women, but to reduce them.  The brain may have two strategies for achieving the same outcome or one difference may compensate for another.  (For more, see Brain Gender by Melissa Hines.)

That’s one reason why Venker is wrong.

The second reason is even more damning.  Most of the research attempting to explain gender difference assumes that there differences to explain.   In fact, meta-analyses aimed at summarizing the literature on human sex differences and similarities in traits, personality, cognitive abilities, sexuality, temperament, and motor skills offer better evidence for similarity than difference.  On the vast majority of traits, men and women overlap tremendously.

Janet Hyde, a pioneer in this area, did a meta-analysis of meta-analyses that combined the results of 7,084 separate studies. She found evidence for a large or very large difference on 8% of characteristics and evidence for medium-sized differences on 15%.  She found evidence for small differences on another 48%.  What does a small difference look like?  Here’s an example of a mid-range small difference (for self-esteem):

For the final 30% of characteristics, she found no evidence gender difference.  So, on 78% of characteristics, she found teensy differences or none at all.  Wow, “opposite sexes” indeed.

The truth is, men aren’t loners and women aren’t talkers. Venker assumes the stereotypes and counts on her readers to agree that they are true, but the data doesn’t back her up.

Two excellent books summarize the debates over gender and neuroscience.  Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender is great for a beginner. She’s funny and you’ll learn a lot. Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm is great for someone who wants and intermediate to advanced introduction to these issues.  Her book is downright brilliant.  I highly recommend both.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College.  Feel free to take a look at her forthcoming article, “The New Science of Sex Difference.”  You can also follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Along with “work/life balance” and other tired topics, an evergreen issue in the media remains the controversies surrounding breastfeeding.  Less than six months ago, Jamie Lynne Grumet lit up the blogosphere by posing for the cover of TIME Magazine while breastfeeding her standing toddler.  Outcry included pronouncements that the image was almost pornographic, psychologically damaging to her child, and exploitative of her white, twenty-something good looks.  The drama of the image worked as the magazine flew off shelves and was named one of the top ten most controversial covers by the New York Daily News.

Within the “lactivist” community there seemed to be double-edged concern — on one hand, glee that an image of a breastfeeding woman was so publicly displayed — on the other, anger that the image so clearly did not depict the intimacy and bonding between mother and child that they insist breastfeeding promotes.

Sensing an opportunity to “set the record straight” as well as launch their own uptick in cover attention, the nonprofit quarterly magazine Pathways to Family Wellness persuaded Grumet to pose for them, this time surrounded by her husband, adopted son, and cradling her nursing naked now 4-year-old child in her lap.  The inclusion of other family members changes the image from one of solo defiance to a message about her family system.  On the cover, Grumet still looks directly at the camera, not at her feeding child, but her glance is far from defiant.

Grumet agreed to pose again in order to send a different message about breastfeeding, one she preferred.  Grumet has said that this image portrays toddler breastfeeding more realistically, “incorporating the husband and siblings.” Yet, the multicultural family portrait has its own sense of staging.   The idyllic family pile-on seems hardly part of everyday life, much less every feeding.  Both images – part of the wider debate over breastfeeding — are carefully crafted to tell a particular story.

Some critics have mentioned that while Grumet’s intention may have been to reframe the image of breastfeeding, perhaps unwittingly again, she has contributed to the fanning of the flames around this issue. Others have accused her of “milking the moment.”   The breastfeeding support website KellyMom tracked down the three other mothers who were all photographed for the TIME cover. KellyMom interviewed them about their experiences during the shoot, then reaction to, and fallout from the cover.  Unfortunately, given the nature of the debate, individual women can often seem like pawns in these ever-intermittent media storms.

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Elline Lipkin, PhD, is a Research Scholar with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women.  She is the author of Girls’ Studies and The Errant Thread, recipient of the Kore Press First Book Award for Poetry. She tweets at @girlsstudies.

I was finishing up my dissertation in 2006.  The Great Recession was still two years away.  Nevertheless, there was talk about it being a tough job market for newly-minted sociologists and, like most everybody in my shoes, I was scared sh*tless about getting a job.

It’s obvious now that I was extremely lucky to get out of grad school when I did.  A few years later the American Sociological Association (ASA) would report that the number of jobs for new PhDs fell 40% from ’06/’07 to ’08/’09 (sociologists have a job “season” that straddles the New Year).

Neal Caren, a (gloriously employed) sociologist at UNC Chapel Hill, has been tracking the job market himself ever since.  His data, posted at Scatterplot, shows that the discipline has yet to recover from the Great Recession (if that’s the sole cause of the decline in job openings).  The yellow and green line represent the drop captured in the ASA report.  The purple line represents the devastating next year and the two blue-ish lines represent a slight recovery.

This year, however, the thick orange line, reveals that this year’s market is not signalling a recovery to the job market of my own debut.  It’s up 5% from last year, Caren explains,  15% from 2010, and “a whopping 73% from 2009.”  Extrapolating from the ASA data, we’re still down 33% from ’06/’07.

In 2011 the U.S. birth rate dropped to the lowest ever recorded, according to preliminary data released by the National Center for Health Statistics and reported by Pew Social Trends:

The decline was led by foreign-born women, who’s birthrate dropped 14% between 2007 and 2010, compared to a 6% drop for U.S.-born women.

Considering the last two decades, birthrates for all racial/ethnic groups and both U.S.- and foreign-born women have been dropping, but the percent change is much larger among the foreign-born and all non-white groups.  The drop in the birthrate of foreign-born women is double that of U.S.-born and the drop in the birthrate of white women is often a fraction that of women of color.

It’s easy to forget that effective, reversible birth control was invented only about 50 years ago.  Birth control for married couples was illegal until 1965; legalization for single people would follow a few years later.  In the meantime, the second wave of feminism would give women the opportunity to enter well-paying, highly-regarded jobs, essentially giving women something rewarding to do other than/in addition to raise children.  The massive drop in the birthrate during the ’60s likely reflects these changes.

In addition to a drop in the number of children women are having, this data reflects a steady rise in the number of women deciding not to have children at all.  The decision to eschew parenting altogether is disproportionately high among highly educated women, suggesting that the there-are-now-other-things-in-life-to-do phenomenon might be at play.

Many European countries are facing less than replacement levels of fertility and scrambling to figure out what to do about it (the health of most economies in the developed world is predicated on population growth), the U.S. is likely not far behind.

Cross-posted at the Huffington Post.

Anjan G. alerted us to an internet sensation, Liu Xianping.  The 72-year-old man in China has risen to fame modeling for his granddaughter’s clothing store, Yuekou.  The clothes are designed for teen girls:

Commenters are impressed about Xianping’s ability to “pull off” this look, but we shouldn’t be surprised.  Masculinity and femininity are performances, and so is age.

While the idea that we “do” gender is no surprise to SocImages regulars, we also “do” age.  In fact, we have a whole language of age-related chiding that serves to get people to act in ways that we deem suitable for their number of birthdays.  Says sociologist Cheryl Laz:

“Act your age. You’re a big kid now,” we say to children to encourage independence (or obedience). “Act your age. Stop being so childish,” we say to other adults when we think they are being irresponsible. “Act your age; you’re not as young as you used to be,” we say to an old person pursuing “youthful” activities.

Age, then, is a social construction too.

Accordingly, Xianping’s adoption of feminine poses and youthful fashions makes him appear younger and more girly than we think he should look.  Importantly, though, he is no more an actor here than are actual teen girls.  Each is playing a part, both with the help of just the right accessories.

There are six (progressive) tax brackets for income.  The tax rate paid by earners is bumped up each time they reach a bracket threshold.  The threshholds are determined by type of household.  Here’s a handy chart for 2012 from Wikipedia:

U.S. politicians are now debating how these tax rates should change and they often focus on the “marginal” or “top” tax rate.  That’s the one that applies to the highest tax bracket, right now at 35%.

Dylan Matthews at the WonkBlog notes that the squabbling has been mostly over a percentage point or two.  Small beans, he asserts.  To put this in perspective, he includes this graph of fluctuations in the top tax rates throughout history (click to enlarge):

The green line labeled “income” correlates to the chart above.  You can see that especially income, but also corporate and capital gains top tax rates, have been shockingly variable since 1910.  They were about 25% right before the Great Depression, raised to about 95% during World War II, dropped to about 70% in the ’60s, and have been on the decline ever since.

Matthews refers to a pair of economists, Nobel laureate Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez, who argue that the top tax rate should optimally be 73%.  Sociologist Jose Marichal, however, at ThickCulture, observes that tax policy has rarely been about what is optimal for society.  Instead, he writes:

What these wild shifts in tax policy suggest is that our determination of how much we should tax our wealthiest is not based on any pragmatic assessment of what would result in the best policy outcome, but is rather guided by foundational assumptions about what is fair.

Beliefs about what is fair are, of course, strongly influenced by cultural ideologies and group stereotypes.  Politicians both fall victim to their own biases and strategically invoke and create ideas and resentments.  We shouldn’t expect the current debate over how to change our tax code to be either rational or practical, then.  The debate will be political, but you already knew that.

We’ve had some fun posting uses of the word “gay” before it meant what it means today. For example, the “gay nineties,” “to wake up GAY in the morning!,” and “I’ve robbed the rainbow to make you gay” (yes, really).

Here’s another fun one: a letter from Marilyn Monroe thanking the German Consulate General  for a bottle of champagne.  May we all be as gracious.

Thanks to Retronaut for the find!