I have just what you were wishing for: an overview of the electoral college. Yooooor welcome.

Also from CGP Gray:

• A Case Against the Penny
• What the Bleep is the United Kingdom?!
• The Economics of Royalty
• The Social Construction of the Continents

At the Washington Post, John Cohen and Rosalind Helderman report:

The 2012 election is shaping up to be more polarized along racial lines than any presidential contest since 1988, with President Obama experiencing a steep drop
in support among white voters from four years ago.

They compare data from a recent poll with exit interviews from 2004 and 2008.  The results show that, while Obama is overwhelmingly the favorite among non-whites, he trails him among whites by 23 percentage points.

Cohen and Helderman say that Obama has lost support among whites even just recently.  Meanwhile, a whopping 91% of Romney supporters are believed to be white. We are, truly, a deeply divided nation.

Amie G. sent along a five minute documentary in which a series of artists and entrepreneurs talk about why the Day of the Dead has become so popular in parts of the United States.

While they don’t discuss issues of cultural appropriation (like at Halloween), they have some interesting things to say about why it is so appealing to a broad audience. A professor of Art History, Ray Hernández Durán, for example, traces it to the growing Latino demographic, the way media has changed, and a history of the U.S. being open to cultural influence.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

SocImages News:

It’s been a busy month at SocImages!

Gwen’s photographs of a small town in her native Oklahoma were featured in a Business Insider photo-essay about the economic aftermath of an oil boom.  It’s pretty great!

Some of our Halloween archives informed a Huffington Post Parents slideshow about the changing nature of costumes: “from silly to sexy.”  They quote me using the word “extremification,” so that was fun.  And I was pleased to be a part of a piece on race and Halloween costumes at USA Today.

We put together a Halloween-themed Pinterest page, so you can peruse our entire collection of images and click through to our posts if you like.  Browser beware!

Finally, I was part of a CNN radio story about the pressure young people are under to make themselves desirable college applicants: The Teenage Pressure Cooker (listen).

And I did a segment for the Los Angeles NBC affiliate about sexy Halloween costumes.  I don’t say much of note, but I did manage to say that Halloween was a “gender display ritual,” even for kids and that it a lot in common with a high school prom.  I also do an awkward stride through the Occidental College library.  Ah, local news.  :)

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

I have three talks scheduled for Spring so far. If you’re in Boston or Akron, I’d love to schedule a meet up!

• Western Political Science Association (Hollywood, CA, Mar. 28-30): panels on “Public Intellectualism” and the “Twenty-First Century Sex Wars”
• Harvard University (Women’s Week, Mar. 8-14): “A Feminist Defense of Friendship”
• University of Akron (Apr. 19): “Anatomy of an Outrage: Female Genital Cutting and the Politics of Acculturation”

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  We’re inching up towards 20,000 followers on Facebook, so that’s pretty exciting!

I’m on Facebook too, and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

A few years back I posted an photograph of two costumes side-by-side: labeled “Beer Man” and “Beer Girl.”  I wrote that the practice of using “man” alongside “girl” “reinforces a gender hierarchy by mapping it onto age.”  We see this outside of a Halloween context too, like in this vintage ad for pens.

Sara P. found another example, this time from iparty.  The flyer puts a girl and a boy side-by-side in police officer costumes.  The boy’s is labeled “policeman” and the girl’s is labeled “police girl.”

This phenomenon is an example of just how mundane and ubiquitous gender messages can be.

It’s officially a tradition.  Here is our annual post featuring sexy costumes that we think are just… bizarre.  When sexy “overtakes all reason,” you can sexualize just about anything.

Sexy snowy owl:

Sexy gnome:

Sexy macaw:

Sexy tootsie roll:

Sexy skunk:

Sexy Ernie(submitted by Chrissy Y.):

Sexy  hamburger:

Sexy Chinese take-out:

Costumes from Party City, Halloween Express, and Yandy.

Enjoy our collection of Halloween posts from years past or visit our Pinterest page with all of our Halloween-related imagery:

Just For Fun

• A Hallowmeme costume: Women laughing with salad
• Fun and fear: The great equalizer (pictured)
• Mocking the sexy Halloween costume trend

Halloween and Politics

• Legal firm’s Halloween party mocks home foreclosures
• Lynching Palin
• Obama mask marketed as a “terrorist” costume
• Marking sex offenders on Halloween

Race and Ethnicity

• Dressing your dog up like a racial caricature
• Anne Skank: Trivializing and sexualizing the Holocaust for Halloween
• Othering of undocumented immigrants with an “alien” costume
• A collection of racist Halloween costumes
• Asian hair for Halloween
• Appropriating Dia De Los Muertos at Halloween
• Raising consciousness about racist Halloween costumes

Gender

• Dress up your little girl in a “little black dress”
• Men dressing up as fat women, apparently hilarious and disgusting!
• Gender and asymmetry: “beer man and “beer girl”
• Anna Rexia, the costume (also in plus size!)
• Gender and kids costumes
• Halloween and the trivializing of women in men’s occupations
• Girls: mean or queen
• The difference between boy and girl costumes
• Women dressing up like girls dressing up like women
• Even our skeletons have sex
• In sexy costumes for women and girls: when sexy overtakes all reason, sexy femininity and gender inequality, sexy scholar, Harem girl, and the sexy body bag costume
• Compare to sexy Halloween costumes for men and this vintage Halloween-inspired ad that urges women to be bewitching instead of half-naked

The intersection of Race, Class, and Gender

• Halloween hall of shame: the fat lap dancer costume
• Sexy “Indian” costumes
• An overview of raced, gendered, and heteronormative costumes

And, for no conceivable reason…

• Max Weber Jack o’Lantern (I carved it myself)

Last Halloween my students (at a private liberal arts school) told me that it was considered embarrassing to wear the same costume to two separate parties. Many of them, then, had purchased two or more costumes for the week preceding the holiday.  I remarked about how convenient that was for the economy, creating a need to spend money that helped our economic engine keep churning.

I thought of their stories when I came across this vintage ad for Halloween candy.  It tells the viewer that a really cool house will offer trick-or-treaters more than one type of candy and allow them to take one of each.  How excellent for the candy companies if offering only one piece of one kind of candy is considered below the bar.

Via Vintage Ads.