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.

Yesterday I posted about how “couples costumes” seemed to inevitably include a man and a woman.  Since then I found one top listed online costume seller that doesn’t follow this heteronormative trend, PartyCity.  While most are male/female, here are four of the couples costumes they feature:

Interestingly, I didn’t see any costumes for two women, which is consistent with the lesser visibility of lesbians relative to gay men (if, of course, that’s part of Party City’s logic for offering guy-guy costumes in the first place).

UPDATE: Sara P. found an online flyer for iparty that had both guy/guy and one girl/girl “double the fun” costumes:

In this five-minute interview, Sociologist Joel Best debunks the idea that people are poisoning Halloween candy and talks about how his research in the area prompted his career studying the social construction of social problems:

On the heels of yesterday’s post, illustrating the gender binary in Halloween costumes, compare the “Toddler Girls” vs “Toddler Boys” Cookie Monster Halloween costumes at Party City:

“We’re not joking when we say gender expectations and sexualization start early,” writes the blogger for Radical Notions.

Fuck No Sexist Halloween Costumes has started a collection of paired costumes that illustrate an enforcement of the gender binary by the holiday industrial complex (yeah I just made that up).  Pairing matched costumes, she shows how dressing up becomes an opportunity to “do” gender difference.

Lots more at the site.

Ghostbusters costumes sent in by @broshenko.  Thanks!

New neurological research, reported by Robert Wright at The Atlantic, suggests that racism is learned.  Earlier studies had shown that the amygdala, “a brain structure associated with emotion and, specifically, with the detection of threats,” is active, on average, when White people see Black faces.

A new paper, however, led by Eva Telzer, shows that we don’t see this reaction until about age 14. Moreover,  how powerfully it is after the age of 14 depends on the racial composition of your peer group.  White people who grow up in more diverse environments show a much weaker reaction than those in homogeneous ones.

This figure illustrates the difference.  As peer diversity increases, reaction of the amygdala retreats to zero.

This is what it means, Wright explains, to say that race is a social construct:

It’s not a category that’s inherently correlated with our patterns of fear or mistrust or hatred, though, obviously, it can become one. So it’s within our power to construct a society in which race isn’t a meaningful construct.

For lots of examples of why race is socially constructed, see our Pinterest board on the topic.

And, for other super cool stories about biology, see language, culture, and color; a story of human echolocation; human brain synchronicity; and men with higher voices have higher sperm counts.

Originally posted in 2012. Re-posted in solidarity with the African American community; regardless of the truth of the Martin/Zimmerman confrontation, it’s hard not to interpret the finding of not-guilty as anything but a continuance of the criminal justice system’s failure to ensure justice for young Black men.

Oops they did it again.  What color do you think graces the bottle and packaging for Rihanna’s new fragrance, named “Nude”?  You guessed it.

The deep and abiding centrality of whiteness is made especially clear when words like “nude”  are used to describe light tan even in the context of a darker-skinned woman. It happened to Michelle Obama too.  Thanks to @GenderPolitics on Twitter for sending us the tip!

We’ve many examples of this phenomenon.  All can be found on our Pinterest page, titled “What Color is Flesh?“

Dolores R. and Kelly S. alerted us to Ellen Degeneres’ ridiculing of the new Bic product, “Bic for Her” (yes, a real product, if you hadn’t heard).   Gentle but straight up, it’s worth four minutes of your time: