During college I spent a season selling fireworks at a roadside stand in South Dakota.  As you can see on the map below, posted at Buzzfeed, South Dakota is one of the few states where you can buy serious fireworks.  We sold some pretty hard-core stuff, but I mostly liked working there because the packages were so pretty.

In any case, if you haven’t lived in any of the dark blue states, you may not have seen the roadside stands that pop up this time of year.  Some are elaborate seasonal operations, but others are rather ramshackle.  Fireworks for sale end up getting crammed into all manner of places.  Lucky for us, in 2010 photographer Bill Vaccaro drove across the country snapping shots of these retailers.

It seems so.

According to a Gallup poll, “Americans believe that one’s stature has a decided effect on a variety of important dimensions.”

More people would prefer to be taller than shorter:

People think that taller people have a greater likelihood of getting respect at work, and even getting promoted:

Via Geoffrey Arnold, at The Social Complex.  See also Arnold’s guest posts from The Social Complex introducing the concept of heightism as a gendered prejudice and discussing heightism (and other icky stuff) at Hooters.

SocImages News:

Lisa appeared on the pop culture podcast Sounds Familiar to talk about the role of women in horror flicks.  Are slasher flicks feminist?  Well, kinda they are!

She also served as the guest expert on KPCC’s AirTalk for a conversation on the grandfather who was kicked out of a Barnes & Noble children’s book section for being a single male.  She called it  “gender profiling” (listen).

The folks from Office Hours, one of our sibling blogs at The Society Pages, posted a podcast with Lisa and Gwen discussing Sociological Images and public sociology more generally.

The Guardian reposted part of Matt Cornell’s SocImages post on his “man boobs” and Playboy Radio had him on for an “awkward” Q&A.

Quotes and Links:

We were quoted or linked at The Atlantic, the Kansas City Star, TV Tropes, the Huffington Post, and Jezebel.

New Resources:

Gwen added a section on politics to her Intro to Sociology Course Guide and Lisa put together a new Pinterest page, this one collecting all the images from our posts on Disney.

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 wanted to give a shout out to the anonymous fan who added this sticky note to the paperwork for a book Lisa ordered on interlibrary loan.   You made our day!  :)

The Stonewall Riots, widely described as the birth of the modern gay and transgender rights movement, occurred on this day in 1969.

• Police Raids and the Stonewall Riots (pictured)
• Historic Photos of the Stonewall Riot and its Aftermath
• Celebrating at the Stonewall Inn after the Passing of the NY Gay Marriage Law

When asked to contribute to an exhibition about chocolate, photographer James Mollison decided to “explore the disparity between the producer and consumer.”  Chocolate is always a luxury, of course (and is often deliberately marketed this way), and the product, at its finest, can be exceptionally delicious and exceptionally expensive.

Mollison went to Côte d’Ivoire, the country responsible for producing the largest proportion of cacao, to bring the contrast between the product and its producers to life.  The men he photographed, he reports, earned less than $1 a day.

You can see them at his website.

Raised by a racist father, Johnny Lee Clary joined the Klan in 1963 at the age of 14. By 30, he had risen through the ranks and was named the Imperial Wizard, the leader of the entire organization.  He was an outspoken advocate of white supremacy and violence against non-whites, even appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show.

In this four-minute video, he discusses his association with Reverend Wade Watts, a Black civil rights activist and member of the NAACP.  Watts expressed kindness and love towards Clary, even in the face of escalating violence (Clary ultimately set fire to his church).  Deeply affected by Watts, Clary would eventually recant his association with the KKK and join Watts in the fight against racism.

The term glocalization — a combination of globalization and local — refers to the tendency of globalizing processes to have to adapt to local peculiarities.  McDonalds is a great example.  It’s a brand recognized around the world, but it responds to local tastes in developing its menu.  So, you can buy a McItaly burger, a Maharaja Mac in India, a McLobster in Canada, and an Ebi Filit-O with Seaweed Shaker fries in Japan (source).

I thought of the concept of glocalization when I came across a set of publicity photos for TV programs in 13 different countries, all modeled after America’s Married with Children.  Each has its own flavor (e.g., the parrot replacing the dog in Chile) and I imagine if we were able to watch them all we’d see great examples of the phenomenon.

The original:

Bulgaria:

Chile:

Croatia:

Germany:

More examples at Neatorama.

UPDATE: Dmitriy T.C. sent me this trailer for a movie called Exporting Raymond, about making a Russian version of Everybody Loves Raymond. It’s along the same theme and looks quite good:

In a previous post I discussed how the U.S. became more religious in the 1950s, in part in response to its the Cold War enemies (atheist communists).  In fact, the U.S. is among the most religious countries in the world.  Using data from the International Social Survey Programme, Sociologist Tom Smith paints wildly different religious portraits of 28 nations (full text).

When asked whether they “know that God really exists and… have no doubt about it,” 61% of Americans say “yes.”  Of the 28 nations studied, only four were more likely to say “yes” to this question: Poland, Israel, Chile, and the Philippines. Here’s how we look compared to similar countries:

Here’s all 28 in rank order (borrowed from LiveScience).  Notice how wide the divergence is.  In Japan, the least religious country according to this measure, only 4% say they have no doubt God exists.  In The Philippines, 84% have no doubt.

% Have No Doubt God Exists:

• Japan: 4.3 percent
• East Germany: 7.8 percent
• Sweden: 10.2
• Czech Republic: 11.1
• Denmark: 13.0
• Norway: 14.8
• France: 15.5
• Great Britain: 16.8
• The Netherlands: 21.2
• Austria: 21.4
• Latvia: 21.7
• Hungary: 23.5
• Slovenia: 23.6
• Australia: 24.9
• Switzerland: 25.0
• New Zealand: 26.4
• West Germany: 26.7
• Russia: 30.5
• Spain: 38.4
• Slovakia: 39.2
• Italy: 41.0
• Ireland: 43.2
• Northern Ireland: 45.6
• Portugal: 50.9
• Cyprus: 59.0
• United States: 60.6
• Poland: 62.0
• Israel: 65.5
• Chile: 79.4
• The Philippines: 83.6

Americans are also particularly likely to believe in a “personal God,” one who is closely attentive to the lives of each and every person.

Quite interestingly, the U.S. is in the minority in that Americans tend to become increasingly religious as they age.  In most countries, people become less religious over time.  This graph (confusingly labeled), shows changes in DISbelief over the life course.  The U.S. is the only country among these in which disbelief declines:

Lifetime Change in Religiosity (from increase in disbelief to increase in belief):

• The Netherlands: -14.0
• Spain: -12.4
• Australia: -12.0
• France: -11.3
• Norway: -11.0
• Great Britain: -10.1
• Switzerland: -8.2
• Germany (East): -6.9
• Denmark: -6.1
• Czech Republic: -5.5
• Sweden: -5.5
• Germany (West): -5.4
• New Zealand: -4.0
• Italy: -2.7
• Poland: -1.8
• Japan: -1.5
• Ireland: -0.9
• Chile: +0.1
• Cyprus: +0.2
• Portugal: +0.6
• The Philippines: +0.8
• Hungary: +1.0
• Northern Ireland: +1.0
• United States: +1.4
• Israel: +2.6
• Slovakia: +5.6
• Slovenia: +8.5
• Latvia: +11.9
• Russia: +16.0

Rates of atheism — a strong disbelief in God — also vary tremendously.  East Germany is the most atheist, with more than half of citizens claiming disbelief.  The country is a stark contrast to the atheist among them, Poland and the U.S. (only 3% atheist), Chile and Cyprus (2%), and The Phillipines (1%).

% Atheist:

• East Germany: 52.1
• Czech Republic: 39.9
• France: 23.3
• The Netherlands: 19.7
• Sweden: 19.3
• Latvia: 18.3
• Great Britain: 18.0
• Denmark: 17.9
• Norway: 17.4
• Australia: 15.9
• Hungary: 15.2
• Slovenia: 13.2
• New Zealand: 12.6
• Slovakia: 11.7
• West Germany: 10.3
• Spain: 9.7
• Switzerland: 9.3
• Austria: 9.2
• Japan: 8.7
• Russia: 6.8
• Northern Ireland: 6.6
• Israel: 6.0
• Italy: 5.9
• Portugal: 5.1
• Ireland: 5.0
• Poland: 3.3
• United States: 3.0
• Chile: 1.9
• Cyprus: 1.9
• The Philippines: 0.7

As a post-9/11 American watching another election cycle, I can’t help but notice how so much of our rhetoric revolves — sometimes overtly and sometimes not — around people who are the wrong religion.  Notably, Muslims.  And yet, the U.S. and many Muslim countries are alike in being strongly religious, at least in comparison to the many strongly secular countries.

This is odd because stands in contrast to recent data on American attitudes.  Within the U.S., people express much less tolerance for atheists than they do Muslims (homosexuals, African Americans, and immigrants). Weirdly, we think we have more in common with more secular nations like Great Britain than we do with countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. In certain ways, the opposite might be true.

Thanks to Claude Fischer for the graphs.  Fischer, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, is the author of Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character.