Most people assume that the various benefits we collectively describe as “welfare” go to people who aren’t working.  The truth is, however, that some people with full-time jobs still find themselves below the poverty line.  The U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.  A full-time employee who doesn’t miss a single day of work for a year earns $290 a week; that’s 15,080 a year.  According to how the government measures poverty, that’s enough to support a single adult.  For a single adult with a child, however, it’s officially below the poverty line. It’s $4,000 below the poverty line for a family of three.  When a person has a full-time job, but still lives in poverty, they are what sociologists call the “working poor.”

Some welfare benefits, then, go to people who do work.  The  Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, is an example.  Working parents have always comprised a large percentage of people receiving food stamps.  Today the number of working families who rely on food stamps is higher than it’s been in over 20 years (source).  These numbers reflect the impact of the recession generally, but also the extra-burden placed on already struggling families.  The first chart shows the rise of poor families, the second shows the increase in the working poor using food stamps.

This kind of data inspires me to ask if this is what a functional economy looks like.  We have policies — e.g., the federal minimum wage and somewhat laissez faire free market policies — that create a situation in which working full time doesn’t allow a single parent to support even one child.  When we hear criticisms of people who receive benefits, then, we should be careful to remember that their economic crisis is not a straightforwardly personal characteristic, one that can be explained by a poor work ethic or disorderly personality. There are structural reasons that people end up in need.  We have three choices: let them suffer and perhaps die, help them, or change our society.

Elisabeth R. sent in a commercial that, I admit, I kinda like.   As the ad progresses, a Mustang driven through urban streets gets a new paint job as a diverse group of people project their personalities onto the car.  At the very end a little girl holding the hand of her father, wearing a pink ballerina get-up, spies the car.  The car turns pink and then goes black.  As it drives by her, she’s reflected in the mirror as a bad-ass black angel pictured above.

What I like about the commercial isn’t the fact that they portray the girl as resisting girliness.  Suggesting that girls who are less girly are better than those who aren’t is just another form of sexism, one that demeans femininity.  Likewise, the characters are diverse, but that’s par for the course these days, especially when an item is being marketed as urban and modern.

What I like, instead, is just the fact that the ad has an ounce of creativity, that it ends with a twist.  Advertising is so stereotypical today and relies so strongly on tropes, that I find it exhausting to watch.  So, while the twist wasn’t totally subversive, I was relieved that the marketing team for Mustang did something interesting.  Really, at this point my standards for not-horrible are pretty low.

Tip: This may look like a boring update post, but you really, really, really want to scroll down to the bottom.

SocImages News

• Gwen was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition this week!  She had the pleasure of talking about one of SocImages Readers’ favorite topics: pointlessly gendered products.  In this interview, she discusses reactions to the new “Bic for Her.”
• Lisa appeared on the Everyday Sociology blog talking about what is and isn’t wrong with hook up culture (in all of two minutes).
• We were quoted twice in Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast column, the Dish.  Once drawing attention to our post on the social construction of color (Is the Sky Blue?) and again in response to the New York Times article about gender diversity in boys.

Resources for Instructors (and Other Curious Types)

If you haven’t yet, please visit our For Instructors page.  Here are some highlights:

Course Guides

As you begin the Fall semester, don’t forget about our amazing Course Guides!  These organize SocImages posts in a way that follows standard syllabi for frequently-taught sociology courses.  We currently feature the following:

• Introduction to Sociology, by Gwen Sharp (Nevada State College)
• Sociology of Gender, by Mary Nell Trautner (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
• Sociology of Sport, by J.A. Carter (University of Cincinnati)
• Sexuality and Society, by Amanda Jungels (Georgia State University)
• Sociological Research Methods, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)

For those of you that already use them.  Thank you so much!  Our guides have been visited, collectively, 43,000 times.  We’re thrilled.

Have a Guide you might like to put together?  We’re looking for volunteers — sociology professors or graduate students — who are willing to browse our archives, pull out the most compelling posts, and arrange them in ways other instructors would find familiar and convenient.  The Guides can cover entire courses or be designed to help illustrate a theory, article, or book.  (We’re even happy to have duplicate Guides, since every instructor is different.)  Send us an email at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

Pinterest Pages

Our Pinterest pages are fun for everyone, but they’re useful for professors looking for just the right image to illustrate an idea.  We currently have one page with all SocImages material (over 9,000 pins!) and 17 pages on specific topics.  Please feel free to browse!

• Social Construction
• Re-Touching and Photoshop
• Sexually Suggestive Advertising
• The Great Recession
• Vintage Ads and Products
• Comics and Cartoons
• Deconstructing Disney
• Sexy Toy Make-Overs
• Racial/Ethnic Objectification
• What Color is “Flesh”?
• The Social Construction of Race
• Heteronormativity
• Gendered Parenting and Housework
• Sexualized/Gendered Food
• The Tyranny of Pink and Blue
• Glamorizing Violence in Fashion

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Lisa has started booking talks and lectures for the fall.  Her first talk will be at Indiana State University (Sept. 17th-19th) where she’ll be giving a featured lecture at the International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

In Other News…

We totally went to an aerobics class taught by Richard Simmons! It was every bit as wacky and amazing as you would think it would be. He even took a  photo with us. If you’re in L.A., you can take a class with him for only $12, and we highly recommend it. Here we are with Richard in all our post-workout glory:

Sociological Images owes a great debt to Jean Kilbourne, a pioneer in the feminist critique of advertising.  She’s most famous, probably, for her video series, Killing Us Softly.

In those videos, she offers a typology of ways that women are subordinated in media content.  One of those is silencing.  Sometimes this means actually covering a woman’s mouth (forcibly, but also playfully), other times copy simply says that she need not (or shouldn’t) speak.  Below are a series of images we’ve collected that illustrate this.  Some of them are dated, but they give you an idea of what the mechanism of silencing looks like.

Canada’s Next Top Model (Cycle 3), sent along by Julie C., included a photoshoot in which the models’ mouths were covered with duct tape.

Erin S. sent in a link to a set of fashion photos in New York Magazine that show faceless women.

Reanimated Horse sent us an American Apparel ad in which the woman’s body is highlighted but her face is obscured:

The next two ads are examples of one’s that suggest that women need not speak, that products can speak for them.

“Eye contact is speaking without words”:

“Make a statement without saying a word”:

Finally, Sarah B. sent along a form of resistance to these kinds of images.  Colin von Heuring, who just started a brand new blog on media subversion, saw an ad with the copy  “You don’t need words to make a statement.”  He decided to “ma[k]e it explicit” (original on the left, modified on the right):

For more on Jean Kilbourne and the subordination of women in advertising, here’s the trailer to Killing Us Softly 4:

Today is the first day of school at the college where I teach, so I thought it would be a nice time to re-post this oldie-but-goodie on the relationship between income and SAT scores.  I’m sure all of our students are brilliant, of course, but whether the SAT measures intelligence fairly is up for debate.

The College Board is an education association that, among other things, administers the SAT college entrance examination.  A report on the scores from 2009, reviewed by the New York Times, included a break down of scores by the household income of the student. Scores correlate strongly and positively with income:

I can think of two explanations for the correlation.

First, it is certainly true that children with more economic resources, on average, end up better prepared for standardized tests.  They tend to have better teachers, more resource-rich educational environments, more educated parents who can help them with school and, sometimes, expensive SAT tutoring.

Second, the test itself may be biased towards wealthier students.  These tests tend to be written and evaluated by privileged individuals who may inadvertently include class-based knowledge, not just knowledge, in the exam (asking questions, for example, that rely on background information about golf instead of basketball).

In any case, this correlation should give us pause; it calls into question, quite profoundly, the extent to which the SAT is functioning as a fair measure.  Perhaps it measures preparedness for college, but whether it measures potential is up for debate.

August 29th is the anniversary of the day that Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and side-swiped New Orleans, breaching the levees.  These posts are from our archives:

Was Hurricane Katrina a “Natural” Disaster?

• Profits Over People: The Human Cause of the Katrina Disaster
• An Iconic Image of Government Failure: Empty, Flooded School Buses

Racism and Neglect

• Racial Violence in Algiers Point
• Hurricane Katrina and the Demographics of Death
• The Fate of Prisoners During Hurricane Katrina (pictured)

Disaster and Discourse

• “Finders” vs “Looters” at the Associated Press
• Disaster Tourism
• The Politics of Hurricane Humor

Devastation and Rebuilding

• Slow Recovery on the Gulf Coast (pre-oil spill)
• Population Recovery in New Orleans
• Rebuilding in the Lower 9th Ward

Hanna Rosin, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of The End of Men, has written a piece about hook up culture on and off college campuses for the September issue of her magazine.  Given that I’ve done some research on hook up culture, W.W. Norton’s Karl Bakeman asked me to weigh in.  So, here are my two cents: Rosin isn’t wrong to argue that the culture offers women sexual opportunities and independence, but she mischaracterizes the objections to hook up culture and draws too rosy a conclusion.

Those who wring their hands and “lament” hook up culture, Rosin contends, do so because they think women are giving it up too easily, a practice that will inevitably leave them heartbroken.`She writes:

[Critics of hook up culture pine] for an earlier time, when fathers protected “innocent” girls from “punks” and predators, and when girls understood it was their role to also protect themselves.

If this is the problem, the answer is less sex and more (sexless?) relationships.  But, Rosin rightly argues, this wrongly stereotypes women as fragile flowers whose self-esteem lies between their legs.  It also romanticizes relationships.  Drawing on the fantastic research of sociologists Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth Armstrong, she explains that young women often find serious relationships with men to be distracting; staying single (and hooking up for fun) is one way to protect their own educational and career paths.

All this is true and so, Rosin concludes, hook up culture is “an engine of female progress — one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.”

Well, not exactly.  Yes, women get to choose to have sex with men casually and many do.  And some women truly enjoy hook up culture, while others who like it less still learn a lot about themselves and feel grateful for the experiences.  I make this argument with my colleague, Caroline Heldman, in Hooking Up and Opting Out: Negotiating Sex in the First Year of College.

But what young women don’t control is the context in which they have sex.  The problem with hook up culture is not casual sex, nor is it the fact that some women are choosing it, it’s the sexism that encourages men to treat women like pawns and requires women to be just as cunning and manipulative if they want to be in the game; it’s the relentless pressure to be hot that makes some women feel like shit all the time and the rest feel like shit some of the time; it’s the heterosexism that marginalizes and excludes true experimentation with same-sex desire; and it’s the intolerance towards people who would rather be in relationships or practice abstinence (considered boring, pathetic, or weird by many advocates of hook up culture including, perhaps, Rosin).

Fundamentally, what’s wrong with hook up culture is the antagonistic, competitive, malevolent attitude towards one’s sexual partners.  College students largely aren’t experimenting with sexuality nicely.  Hook ups aren’t, on the whole, mutually satisfying, strongly consensual, experimental affairs during which both partners express concern for the others’ pleasure.   They’re repetitive, awkward, and confusing sexual encounters in which men have orgasms more than twice as often as women:

The problem with hook up culture, then, is not that people are friends with benefits.  It’s that they’re not. As one of my students concluded about one of her hook up partners:  “You could have labeled it friends with benefits… without the friendship maybe?”

Hook up culture is an “engine of female progress” only if we take-for-granted that our destination is a caricature of male sexuality, one in which sex is a game with a winner and a loser.   But do we really want sex to be competitive?   Is “keep[ing] pace with the boys,” as Rosin puts it, really what liberation looks like?  I think we can do better.

Somehow the accidental mis-translation of the Princess/Barbie character is just right…

Buzzfeed and CookdandBombd, via Work that Matters.