Five years ago today we posted our very first images: a re-touched magazine cover featuring Faith Hill and two almost identical Skyy Vodka ads that appeared in Maxim and Cosmo.

While people often congratulate us for coming up with the idea for the blog, we never actually intended the public to read it.  We initially started the site as a place for the two of us to share images that we used in teaching.  That’s it.

Accordingly, in our earliest posts we didn’t bother to do much explaining.  We didn’t think we’d ever have anyone to explain to!

Quickly, though, and we’re not sure why, people began reading.  So we started adding more descriptive titles.  And more people came!  So we started adding text explaining why we were featuring the particular image.  Eventually the blog evolved into one aimed at a wide array of readers — that is, not just each other — and it became what it is today.

So, we’d like to conclude by effusively thanking those early readers with whom we reimagined the blog and those of you who read today.  Almost 4,500 posts later, you’ve changed our lives and careers in unexpected and delightful ways!

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If you’d like to learn more about SocImages, you can visit our about page, listen to this recent Contexts podcast or read our recent publication, Blogging as Public Sociology (email us at socimages@thesocietypages.org if you’d like a copy).

In the wake of the shootings in a Colorado theater last week, Sean D. sent in a BBC video clip commenting on media coverage of mass murders.  It criticizes the typical response, which usually involves intense coverage dissecting every piece of the story, focusing closely on the killer and his motivations.  This can go on for days.

The narrator argues that this is exploitative — the media is using gruesome events to drive ratings (often for days at a time) — and it feeds into the public’s tendency towards voyeurism.  He also includes an interview with a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Park Dietz, who specializes in such cases; he says that this type of coverage is the exact opposite of what the media should do… if it is interested in saving lives.  The attention, especially to the criminal himself, encourages other “anti-heros” to contemplate and execute mass murders themselves.

Sociologists use the term “stalled revolution” to describe how current state of the feminist movement.  It’s “stalled” in that, while women are (mostly) free to do what men do, men have been much more reluctant to do what women have traditionally done.  This makes sense because masculine things are generally valued and feminine things are not.

Housework is one of these things.  Married women still do twice as much housework and childcare as their husbands, on average.  If you used advertising as your metric, however, you’d think that women did 99%.  Here are three examples and a counter-example:

1.  Monica C. sent in an Olympics-themed content sponsored by Pampers.  It’s called the “Mommy Games,” as if only women parent:

2. Appliance maker Kenmore has a children’s line, sent in by Anna C.  All of the products are in pink:

3. Allison spotted the same phenomenon at Hoover.  They are inviting “real women” to submit vacuum stories:

4.  As a counter-example, Kristie McC. sent in a screenshot of Eco-Me products.  The company  make a point of putting images of both men and women on their cleaning products.

So, there are exceptions, but the overwhelming message is that parenting and childcare is something that women do.  For more, see our gendered housework/parenting page on Pinterest.

Many people around the world are eagerly awaiting the start of the Olympics next week.  A lucky few will compete and a small group of others will be there, in person, to watch.  Athletes and spectators, however, are just two of the groups that the games mobilize.  The Daily Mail reports on the large numbers of people hired to be temporary janitors, groundskeepers, maids, and other types of cleaners.  Many of these workers are migrants who have come to London hoping to work for a few weeks and return to their families having earned a little more than they otherwise could.

The story, sent in by Dolores R., focuses on the living conditions of these workers.  Most are paying rent to live in temporary trailers.  Packed together like sardines, the compound has been described as a “slum.” Pictures are available at the site.

Complaints include:

• Crowded living spaces.  “Any accommodation where more than two adults have to share a room is considered ‘overcrowded’ under housing laws.”
• Insufficient toilet and shower facilities that were “filthy” from overuse.
• Leaking trailers that the workers are told to live with or fix themselves; stagnant ground water around some of the trailers has forced them to put together make-shift stepping stones.
• Women are being placed in trailers with men they don’t know; at least two women have quit when they were told they had to stay with male strangers.

The Daily Mail says that the employees have signed gag orders that prevent them from talking to the press and that family and friends are barred from the camp for “security reasons.”

Via The Sociologist.

The recent Atlantic article by Anne-Marie Slaughter revived an ongoing conversation about women’s efforts to balance work and family in their lives.  Unfortunately, new data from the Pew Research Center suggests that striking a happy balance is increasingly out of reach.  This is because the value women place on both parenting well and having a successful career is growing.  In other words, women’s expectations are rising.

Interestingly, men’s expectations are rising, too, increasing the degree to which their desires might conflict, but to a somewhat lesser degree.

Let’s look at the data.

Young women between 18 and 34 are more likely to say that a successful career is “very” or “one of the most important things” in their life last year, compared to 1997.  The percentage has gone up 10 percentage points for women, while it went up only one point for men.

Young women are also more likely to say that being a good parent is “one of the most important things.”  Up a whopping 17 percentage points since 1997. This desire has risen significantly for men, too; 47% of men now say that parenting is very important, compared to 39% in 1997.

Since 1997, then, men have revised their expectations for parenting up, while their interest in work has remained more or less steady.  Women have raised their expectations for both and, generally, report higher life expectations than men.  That is, men are less likely than women to be interested in either a family or a career.

It will be interesting to see how public policy responds to these raised expectations, if at all. The U.S. is notoriously stingy when it comes to helping families balance these competing pressures, as this post on paid parental leave illustrates.  The time bind, though, is tightening and something will have to give.

Food shortages during World War II required citizens and governments to get creative, changing the gastronomical landscape in surprising ways.   Many ingredients that the British were accustomed to were unavailable.  Enter the carrot.

According to my new favorite museum, the Carrot Museum, carrots were plentiful, but the English weren’t very familiar with the root.  Wrote the New York Times in 1942: “England has a goodly store of carrots. But carrots are not the staple items of the average English diet. The problem…is to sell the carrots to the English public.”

So the British government embarked on a propaganda campaign designed to increase dependence on carrots.  It linked carrot consumption to patriotism, disseminated recipes, and made bold claims about the carrot’s ability to improve your eyesight (useful considering they were often in blackout conditions).

Here’s a recipe for Carrot Fudge:

You will need:

• 4 tablespoons of finely grated carrot
• 1 gelatine leaf
• orange essence or orange squash
• a saucepan and a flat dish

Put the carrots in a pan and cook them gently in just enough water to keep them covered, for ten minutes. Add a little orange essence, or orange squash to flavour the carrot. Melt a leaf of gelatine and add it to the mixture. Cook the mixture again for a few minutes, stirring all the time. Spoon it into a flat dish and leave it to set in a cool place for several hours. When the “fudge” feels firm, cut it into chunks and get eating!

Disney created characters in an effort to help:

The government even used carrots as part of an effort to misinform their enemies:

…Britain’s Air Ministry spread the word that a diet of carrots helped pilots see Nazi bombers attacking at night. That was a lie intended to cover the real matter of what was underpinning the Royal Air Force’s successes: the latest, highly efficient on board,  Airborne Interception Radar, also known as AI.

When the Luftwaffe’s bombing assault switched to night raids after the unsuccessful daylight campaign, British Intelligence didn’t want the Germans to find out about the superior new technology helping protect the nation, so they created a rumour to afford a somewhat plausible-sounding explanation for the sudden increase in bombers being shot down… The Royal Air Force bragged that the great accuracy of British fighter pilots at night was a result of them being fed enormous quantities of carrots and the Germans bought it because their folk wisdom included the same myth.

But here’s the most fascinating part.

It turns out that, exactly because of the rationing, British people of all classes ate healthier.

…many poor people had been too poor to feed themselves properly, but with virtually no unemployment and the introduction of rationing, with its fixed prices, they ate better than in the past.

Meanwhile, among the better off, rationing reduced the intake of unhealthy foods.  There were very few sweets available and people ate more vegetables and fewer fatty foods.  As a result “…infant mortality declined and life expectancy increased.”

I love carrots. I’m eating them right now.

To close, here are some kids eating carrots on a stick:

Via Retronaut.  For more on life during World War II, see our posts on staying off the phones and carpool propaganda (“When You Ride ALONE, You Ride With Hitler!”) and our coverage of life in Japanese Internment Camps, women in high-tech jobs, the demonization of prostitutes, and the German love/hate relationship with jazz.

A while back I was summoned for jury duty and found myself being considered for a case against a young Latina with a court translator.  She was accused of selling counterfeit Gucci and Chanel purses on the street in L.A.  After introducing the case, the judge asked: “Is any reason why you could not objectively apply the law?” My hand shot up.

I said:

I have to admit, I’m kind of disgusted that state resources are being used to protect the corporate interests of Chanel and Gucci.

Then I gave a spiel about corruption in the criminal justice system and finished up with:

I think that society should be protecting its weakest members, not penalizing them for trivial infractions. There is no way in good conscience I could give that girl a criminal record, I don’t care if she’s guilty. Some things are more important than the rules.

I was summarily dismissed.

Criminal prosecutions are one way to decrease counterfeiting and, yes, protect corporate interests and Shaynah H. sent in another: shame.  This National Crime Prevention Council/Bureau of Justice Assistance ad, spotted in a mall in Portland, tells you that if you buy knock-offs, you are “a phony.”

Yikes.  I would have preferred “savvy” or “cost-conscious.”  But, no, the message is clear.  You are a fake person, a liar, a hypocrite.  You are insincere and pretentious.  You are an impostor.  (All language borrowed from the word’s definition.)  And these are not something that anyone wants to be.

But, honestly, why does anyone care?

I suspect that counterfeits don’t really cut into Chanel’s profits directly.  The people who buy bags that costs thousands of dollars are not going to try to save some pennies by buying a knock-off.  Or, to put it the inverse way, the people who are buying the counterfeits wouldn’t suddenly be buying the originals if their supply ran out.

Instead, policing the counterfeiters is a response to a much more intangible concern, something Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital.”  You see, a main reason why people spend that kind of money on handbags is to be seen as the kind of person who does.  The handbags are a signal to others that they are “that kind” of person, the kind that can afford a real Gucci.  The products, then, are ways that people put boundaries between themselves and lesser others.

But, when lesser others can buy knock-offs on the street in L.A. and just parade around as if they can buy Gucci too!  Well, then the whole point of buying Gucci is lost!  If the phony masses can do it, it no longer serves to distinguish the elites from the rest of us.

In this sense, Chanel and Gucci are very interested in reducing counterfeiting; the rich people who buy their products will only do so if buying them proves that they’re special.

The term sexual dimorphism refers to differences between males and females of the same species.  Some animals are highly sexually dimorphic. Male elephant seals outweigh females by more than 2,500 pounds; peacocks put on a color show that peahens couldn’t mimic in their wildest dreams; and a male anglerfish’s whole life involves finding a female, latching on, and dissolving until there’s nothing left but his testicles (yes, really).

On the spectrum of very high to very low dimorphism, humans are on the low end.  We’re just not that kind of species.  Remove the gendered clothing styles, make up, and hair differences and we’d look more alike than we think we do.

Because we’re invested in men and women being different, however, we tend to be pleased by exaggerated portrayals of human sexual dimorphism (for example, in Tangled). Game designer-in-training Andrea Rubenstein has shown us that we extend this ideal to non-human fantasy as well.  She points to a striking dimorphism (mimicking Western ideals) in World of Warcraft creatures:

Annalee Newitz at Wired writes:

[Rubenstein] points out that these female bodies embody the “feminine ideal” of the supermodel, which seems a rather out-of-place aesthetic in a world of monsters. Supermodelly Taurens wouldn’t be so odd if gamers had the choice to make their girl creatures big and muscley, but they don’t. Even if you wanted to have a female troll with tusks, you couldn’t. Which seems especially bizarre given that this game is supposed to be all about fantasy, and turning yourself into whatever you want to be.

It appears that the supermodel-like females weren’t part of the original design of the game.  Instead, the Alpha version included a lot less dimorphism, among the Taurens and the Trolls for example:

Newitz says that the female figures were changed in response to player feedback:

Apparently there were many complaints about the women of both races being “ugly” and so the developers changed them into their current incarnations.

The dimorphism in WoW is a great example of how gender difference is, in part, an ideology.  It’s a desire that we impose onto the world, not reality in itself.  We make even our fantasy selves conform to it.  Interestingly, when people stray from affirming the ideology, they can face pressure to align themselves with its defenders.  It appears that this is exactly what happened in WoW.