I’m supervising senior theses this semester and so I have to be a super stickler about something that makes most students’ eyes roll back in their heads: operationalization.  Wait!  Keep reading!

The term refers to a careful definition of the variable you’re measuring and it can have dramatic influences on what you find.  Dmitriy T.C. sent in a great example.  It involves whether you include church donations in your definition of “charity.”   Friendly Atheist breaks it down.

If you include church donations, the South appears to be the most generous U.S. region:

But if you don’t, everyone looks a whole lot stingier and the Northeast comes out on top:

All you budding sociologists out there remember!  Think long and hard about how to define what you’re measuring.  It can make a huge difference in your results.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

In 2009 R&B singer Chris Brown pled guilty to assaulting singer Rihanna.  At the time of the incident, photographs of her bruised and swollen face were passed all over the internet.  This week we learned that Brown has tattooed the face of a battered woman on a very public part of his body, his neck.

I was particularly impressed by Amanda Marcotte’s analysis of his decision, sent in by Tom Megginson.   I encourage you to read it at Pandagon, but I’ll also summarize here.

People, Marcotte begins, are “… scrambling to claim that Brown’s tattoo is somehow not what it seems. But it is what it seems.”

What it is, she contends, is a way of bragging about the beating.

Men who beat and rape women want to feel powerful. They want to feel manly. And because hitting women and raping women makes them feel these things, they want to brag about it… A tattoo commemorating beating down your girlfriend is a trophy.

A desire to brag is the reaction of violent men — instead of, say, shame — because they don’t feel ashamed.  Citing research by psychologist David Lisak, who found that certain men will happily tell stories about successful sexual assaults, Marcotte argues that batterers and rapists are proud of what they’ve done because they believe that they are right.

[Many perpetrators] are defiant. They believe they are entitled to dominate women, and they feel victimized by a world that doesn’t give them what they believe is theirs. They act out, looking for little ways to assert the right to dominate they believe is theirs.

Because they believe that they are in the right, they aren’t troubled by other people’s outrage.  Marcotte again:

…telling others about it and watching them recoil basically means reliving the power trip… Not only did they dominate the victim, but they have provoked anger and disgust in you, and that makes them feel powerful all over again.

As a further example, she includes a two-minute clip of TV evangelist Pat Robertson recommending, gleefully, that a man beat his wife into submission:

Robertson’s advice here is plain: Women should be subordinate to their husbands and, if they are not, husbands have a right to beat them into subordination.  Husbands can get together and chuckle about this; getting women into line is a good thing, not a bad thing.  Actor Sean Connery — and many other people — agree that it’s “absolutely right” to slap a woman.  It’s part of being a real man.  Those men who might object to your treatment of women?  They’re pathetic and weak and upsetting them makes us laugh.

In sum, while it might be hard to believe, I think Marcotte’s analysis here is right on.  The tattoo — especially on such an exposed and public part of the body — is a giant “fuck you” to everyone who thinks he shouldn’t have beaten Rihanna.   It seems that way and “it is what it seems.”

In 1956 sociologist C. Wright Mills published a book titled The Power Elite.  In it, he argued that our democracy was corrupt because the same people exercised power in business, the military, and politics.  This small group, with so many important roles and connections, had an influence on our society that was far out-of-proportion with their numbers.  This, he concluded, was a dire situation.

Fast forward to 2012 and Lambert Strether posted a series of Venn diagrams at Naked Capitalism.  Strether writes:

[This] nifty visualization… shows how many, many people, through the operations of Washington’s revolving door, have held high-level positions both in the Federal government and in major corporations. To take but one example, the set of all Treasury Secretaries includes Hank Paulson and Bob Rubin, which overlaps with the set of all Goldman Sachs COOs. The overlapping is pervasive. Political scientists and the rest of us have names for such cozy arrangements — oligarchy, corporatism, fascism, “crony capitalism” — but one name that doesn’t apply is democracy.

UPDATE: I’ve included a criticism of the methodology after the diagrams; the overlap portrayed here is almost exclusively among Democratic politicians and the diagrams were explicitly intended to point out connections among progressives.

See for yourself:

On the methods for putting together these diagrams, Strether writes about the person who’s behind the diagrams:

Herman’s honest: Her goal is to “expose progressive corporatism,” and — assuming for the sake of the argument that D[emocrat]s are progressive, and that “progressives” are progressive — her chart does exactly that, and very effectively, too.

But what her data does not do is expose corporatism as such; there are very, very few Rs listed; it strains credulity that Hank Paulson was the only high-level GS operative in the Bush administration, for example, and if GS isn’t the R[epublican]s’ favorite bank, there’s surely another.

Hence, Herman’s chart, if divorced from context[2], might lead somebody — say, a child of six — to conclude that the only corporatists in Washington DC are D[emocrat]s.

Thanks to Carolyn Taylor for pointing out the methods bias.

Cross-posted at Racialicious.

Race as biology has largely been discredited, yet beliefs about one race being biologically superior to another still seem to pervade one social arena: sports.  Claims that different races have genetic advantages to play particular sports persists both because individual athletic ability obviously has some basis in biology (even though that does not mean it is racial biology at play) and athletics appears to be one social arena where racial minorities succeed over whites in certain sports.

For example, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports’ 2011 Racial and Gender Report Card on The National Football League (http://www.tidesport.org), over 2/3^rds of players in the NFL are African American — far higher than the proportion of Blacks in the general population of the United States.  This report also shows that all other racial groups are under-represented in the NFL relative to their proportion in the general population, including Asians who make up only 2% of the players in the league.

These statistics compel many to assume that racial biology plays a large part in athletic success.  However, the 60 Minutes investigation Football Island debunks this assumption during a trip to the place where most of the Asian players in the NFL come from: American Samoa.   This small island is a U.S. Territory in the Pacific and has a population small enough to seat comfortably in most professional football stadiums.  Yet the average Samoan child “is 56 times more likely to get into the NFL than any other kid in America.”

60 Minutes finds Samoans succeed at football only in small part because of their size and strength.  Rather, their success grows mostly out of a “warrior culture” that instills a strong work ethic in young men.  Also, on the island the daily chores that are a necessary part of survival provide a lifetime of athletic conditioning.  In short, many of the Asian players in the NFL are successful because of their nurturing, and not their nature.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/60688464[/vimeo]

Samoans are also driven to succeed at football because they come from a place plagued by poverty and often their only chance at a better life is through athletics (that, or follow another Samoan tradition and join the Armed Forces).  In the video, the most famous Samoan player, Troy Palamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers, explains “football is a ‘meal ticket.’  Just like any marginalized ethnic group, you know, if you don’t make it to the NFL, what do you have to go back to?”

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

This little annotated image is a humorous contrast to the call to help an Africa that is portrayed as corrupt, miserable, or pitiful.  Thanks to Amy H. for submitting it!

See also challenging stereotypes of African men, the “single story” of Africa, how not to write about Africa, and portraying poverty in Africa.  Found at themetapicture.

Dolores R. sent in a cartoon by rampaige.  It seems unlikely that a man would randomly criticize a woman in a scoop neck t-shirt for the existence of her breasts, but it happens more often than you think.

I’m a bit busty, and a girl, and strangers have occasionally given me “advice” about my breasts.  Once I was told by a man I had just been introduced to that I shouldn’t wear sweaters.  Stumped — and living in Wisconsin — I asked why.  He explained that sweaters have “pile,” by which he meant that the fabric was thick.  The thickness of the fabric, he said, made my boobs look even bigger.  Since that was a bad thing, apparently, he advised me to avoid sweaters.  Weird, I know.  But I’m just saying, this stuff happens.

In a stroke of brilliance, Jessica Valenti has named a new trope: Sad White Babies with Mean Feminist Mommies.   The trope offers a visual “no” to the question that won’t die, “Can women have it all?”  It serves as a cautionary tale to all the ambitious feminist ladies out there: go right ahead, get a good job, but don’t think for a second that you’re doing the right thing for your (future) child.  Thanks to Larry H. and Zeynep A. for sending it in!

TIME has an alternative image of the working mom that I thought was quite cute.

This week on PostSecret I stumbled across the following confession: 

The idea that certain beliefs about college may not be true reminded me of the concept of pluralistic ignorance.  The phrase refers to a phenomenon in which a large proportion of a population misunderstands reality.

For example, while many college students think that lots of people hook up a lot, 80% of college students hook up less than once a semester, on average.  About 40% of those hook ups involve intercourse, while a strong third just involve getting horizontal and making out.  Students, for what it’s worth, also tend to consistently overestimate how much drugs and alcohol other students are consuming.

So, while “everyone thinks” that “everyone has fun during their freshman year.”  In fact, the person who wrote this confession may be a lot less alone than s/he thinks, even if most people think that everyone does, in fact, have fun.