One thing I love about sociology is the way it recognizes human creativity.  It acknowledges our ability to create meaning and invent practices.  Seeing the footage below, I couldn’t help but be amazed at the human ability to constantly innovate.

Via BoingBoing.

Retronaut recently posted a fun collection of vintage photographs of children posing with toys. What makes them interesting is how unhappy they look from a contemporary point of view: confused, bored, even morose.  Thinking through the vintage photographs you have in your mind’s eye, though, you’ll recall that almost all vintage photographs include blank faces.  No smiling, no bunny ears… just people.

The contrast between then and now reveals that how-to-act-when-someone’s-taking-your-picture is a social construction. Smiling didn’t come naturally, it had to evolve socially.  Today parents teach their children how to smile for photographs and, perhaps, even to act gleeful with toys.

More at Retronaut.

UPDATE: There’s a great conversation going on in the comments.  Some have pointed out that early photograph technology required a long exposure time, making smiling impractical.  Others are sharing their experiences in other countries, where it is still the norm to stop smiling when the camera comes out, even if everyone is having a jolly time.  Lots of stuff to think about…

Cross-posted at The Russell Sage Foundation.

Claude Steele and his colleagues have found ample evidence of “stereotype threat” in test-taking situations.  Stereotype threat occurs when people worry that poor performance on a task will inadvertently confirm a negative stereotype applied to the group to which they belong.  Their worry depresses performance, thus creating outcomes consistent with the stereotype. Stereotype threat depresses the performance of high-achieving African American students on difficult verbal tests as well as accomplished female math students on difficult math tests.

Not all stereotypes are negative, however, suggesting that certain stereotypes might also enhance performance.  With Min Zhou, I looked into how the stereotype that Asian Americans students are particularly smart and high achieving — as illustrated in this TIME magazine cover from 1987 — might shape their performances.

We argue that Asian American students benefit from a “stereotype promise”—the promise of being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype that leads one to perform in such a way that confirms the positive stereotype, thereby enhancing performance.  The Chinese- and Vietnamese-Americans students we studied described how their teachers assumed that they were smart, hard-working, and high-achieving, which affected the way that their teachers treated them, the grades they received, and their likelihood of being placed into the most competitive academic tracks, like Advanced Placement (AP) and Honors. For many students, stereotype promise exerted an independent effect, and boosted performance.

For example, Ophelia is a 23 year-old second-generation Vietnamese woman who described herself as “not very intelligent” and recalls nearly being held back in the second grade. By her account, “I wasn’t an exceptional student; I was a straight C student, whereas my other siblings, they were quicker than I was, and they were straight A students.”

Despite Ophelia’s C average, she took the AP exam at the end of junior high school, and not surprisingly, failed. Nevertheless, she was placed into the AP track in high school, but once there, something “just clicked,” and Ophelia began to excel in her classes. When we asked her to explain what she meant by this, she elaborated, “I wanted to work hard and prove I was a good student,” and also added, “I think the competition kind of increases your want to do better.” She graduated from high school with a GPA of 4.2, and was admitted into a highly competitive pharmacy program.

Once she was placed in a more challenging setting, then, where teachers’ expectations and peer performance were elevated, she benefited from stereotype promise. Ophelia did not believe at the outset that she was academically exceptional or deserving of being in the AP track (especially because she earned straight C’s in junior high school and failed the AP exam), but once anointed as academically exceptional and deserving, the stereotype promise exerted an independent effect that encouraged her to try harder and prove that she was a good student, and ultimately enhanced her performance.  While it is impossible to know how Ophelia’s academic performance would have differed had she stayed on the school’s “regular track,” that she was given the opportunity to meet her potential attests to the advantage that Asian American students are accorded in the context of U.S. schools.

In future research, I plan to study in what institutional contexts “stereotype promise” may emerge, for which groups, and in what domains. For example, males may benefit from stereotype promise in certain occupational niches where stereotypes about gender and performance prevail.

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Jennifer Lee is a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in intersection of immigration and race and ethnicity. She wrote, with Frank Bean, a book called The Diversity Paradox, that examines patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans.

Read a Q&A on with Jennifer Lee about “stereotype promise” at the Russell Sage Foundation.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to have the pleasure of giving public lectures on hook up culture at several colleges and universities.  I draw on my research in these talks, but I also always give a shout out to Paula England, a sociologist who has collected tens of thousands of surveys from students at dozens of schools.   My talk would be a shadow of itself if I couldn’t draw on her excellent work.  Accordingly, I’m pleased to be able to feature England giving a presentation about what she has discovered about hook up culture.  I suspect that you’ll be surprised, no matter who you are:

For more on hook up culture, see my 3-minute appearance on MTV Canada or my 40-minute talk at Franklin & Marshall College (slideshow and transcript if you’d rather read).

Consumption:

• The Sweet Smell of Environmental Degradation
• Measuring Love with $$$
• Love for Sale with Dogboy and Mr. Dan

Heteronormativity

• Have a Very Straight Valentine’s Day

Cross-Cultures

• Valentine’s Day in Japan

Gender

• The Feminization of Love
• Violent Metaphors in Vintage Valentine’s Day Cards (pictured)
• Do Men Want Flowers?
• The Heterosexual Gift Giving Imperative
• Men are Loved and Women are Property
• The Sexes are “Opposite”
• Steak and a BlowJob Day (for men)

Race/Ethnicity

• Vintage Valentine’s Day Cards Punning on American Indians
• More Vintage Cards with Racial Caricatures

(source: Google Images)

Since the inception of the Gaga machine, her message has been to love yourself, flaunt your difference, be you in a conformist youth culture. As a 20-year-old struggling for an alternative sexual expression to “sexpot”, my interest was piqued. She was young and raw, full of a singular energy that demanded attention, with a decent set of pipes… so what was the catch? The catch was the patriarchal bargain.

A patriarchal bargain, as Lisa Wade wrote in a previous post, is:

…a decision to accept gender rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power one can wrest from the system. It is an individual strategy designed to manipulate the system to one’s best advantage, but one that leaves the system itself intact… Don’t be too quick to judge; nearly 100% of women do this to some degree.

Even Lady Gaga.

Gaga, as weird and anti-Britney Spears sexy as she is, still exhibits sexiness that appeals to the male gaze. At times, it is positively pornographic. That is Lady Gaga’s patriarchal bargain. Despite bucking traditional rules of femininity with innovative fashion elements, she upholds contemporary standards of beauty and sex appeal. Her method is achieved through the use of palatable distractions: telephones as headwear, shamelessly poisoning ex-lovers, and dancing in flawless skeleton makeup. Give ‘em the old razzle dazzle and they won’t even notice that she’s a skinny white woman gyrating in underwear.

Bad Romance:

Telephone:

Throughout her body of work there is a thread of what we know all too well:  ass-shaking, barely-there nudity and conspicuous consumption, just in an offbeat fashion. Gaga is bonkers, but Gaga is sexy. Gaga is political and outspoken, Gaga is skinny and [often] blond.  Indeed, “Mother Monster” may uplift her fans because of her affinity for oddness, but lest we forget, she is a lady and must inhabit the flesh that adheres to gender norms and restrictions, she reminds us:

“I would rather die than have my fans see me without a pair of heels on. And that’s show business.”

If you want to ride the ride, you have to pay the price.  And that price is patriarchy.

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Sonita Moss is a 2010 graduate of the University of Michigan with a B.A. degree in Sociology and French & Francophone Studies. Sonita hopes to receive her PhD in Sociology with a focus on the intersections of gender, race, and beauty. Whilst she prepares for the GRE, she occasionally updates her blog, Deconstructed Beauty.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

I am convinced that women could pee standing up, with the same accuracy as a man (which means, what, 90% accuracy?), if they practiced as often as men do.

There, I said it.

In any case, I’m not the only one and, in fact, in 1953 American Standard unveiled a urinal for women (via Vintage Ads):

Close up:

A commenter says she remembers seeing these in roadside rest areas for a time. But, obviously, they didn’t catch on. I suspect that they were made with women in skirts in mind, and involved squatting more so than standing and leaning back. This set of instructions for an another women’s urinal may or may not have applied to this one:

In any case, I like to imagine an alternative future in which women use urinals as easily and lightheartedly as men.  It makes me appreciate the historical contingency of our everyday lives.  Reminds me of the horizontal wall refrigerator.

In an earlier post we reviewed research by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showing that income inequality contributes to a whole host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of mental illness, drug use, obesity, infant death, imprisonment, and interpersonal trust.

She summarizes these findings in this quick nine-minute talk at a Green Party conference:

See Dr. Pickett making similar arguments as to why raising the average national income in developed countries doesn’t make people happier or enable them to live longer, why unequal societies are more violent, and how status inequality increases stress.

And see more about income inequality and national well-being at Equality Trust.