An NPR photo essay by Hugh Holland offers a fun glimpse into the evolution of skateboarding. Holland explains that a drought in mid-1970s Southern California led to the mass draining of swimming pools. Kids with skateboards took one look at the empty pools and invented vertically-driven trick skateboarding as we know it today. According to Wikipedia:

This started the vert trend in skateboarding.  With increased control, vert skaters could skate faster and perform more dangerous tricks, such as slash grinds and frontside/backside airs.

Ah the serendipity of cultural innovation.

Stephen W. sent in a photograph of a public relations notice at a gas station in Kansas City.  The notice, from BP, explains that the owner of the BP gas station is a member of the community:

The notice is clearly an effort to smooth over the negative publicity BP has recieved as a result of the oil spill in the gulf.  On the one hand, it seems obvious that it’s disingenuous for BP to claim that they are “part of the community.”  And, if one wants to boycott BP, one would not want to buy at a BP station.

On the other hand, BP is right.  According to the National Association for Convenience Stores, 80% of the gas in the U.S. is bought at convenience stores and in only 2% of cases are these owned by major oil companies (the remainder is largely sold through superstores like Costco and Sam’s Club).  57% of the time, these stores are owned by a person for whom it is a small business and it is the only convenience store they own.

So it is true that, in almost all cases, attempting to police or punish BP by refusing to buy their gas is also hurting a small business owner who has zero control over BP and its policies.

Please welcome Guest Blogger Ashley Mears.  Mears is a model-turned-sociologist who is doing fantastic work on the modeling industry.  In her forthcoming book, Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World (UC Berkeley Press), she examines the production of value in fashion modeling markets.  When Osocio‘s Tom Megginson forwarded us a link to a trailer for a new documentary on the topic, Picture Me, we turned immediately to our resident expert.  We’re so pleased that she agreed to share her thoughts.

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Picture Me documents ex-model Sara Ziff’s 4-year rise and exit through the fashion modeling industry.  It sets out to expose the grit behind the glamour, chronicling models’ exhausting work and travel schedules, warped body images (include hints of anorexic and bulimic practices), debt to agencies, innocent youth and the attendant vulnerability to sexual predatory clients.  It is a long, wandering complaint of the industry, and in the end, Ziff equates all bodywork with exploitation and dismisses modelling work as cheap thrills—albeit emotionally costly ones.

While critical of the industry, the film glamorizes what it supposedly condemns, most insidiously by portraying Ziff’s meteoric success as normal for a model.  Twice the camera zooms in on the many digits of her paychecks.  As her co-filmmaker/boyfriend Ole Schell wryly notes, “It’s not everyday you see a check for $112,000.”  This is especially the case, they should add, for most working fashion models.  As a winner-take-all market, modelling is extremely unequal; very few women reach this kind of success.  At any given modelling agency, in fact, dozens of women owe significant debt, an issue far more complex—and exploitive—than the moments it gets in Picture Me.  Models accrue debt for start-up costs advanced by their agencies, from plane tickets and visas to pocket money and apartment rent in an agency-owned apartment (to the tune of about $250 per week to stay regardless of how full or vacant its state).  They are charged anywhere from $5 to $50 for bike messengers to deliver their portfolios across town daily.  These costs are not negotiable or traceable; they are deducted automatically from her future earnings.  And they add up; at one New York agency I studied, a model was in the hole up to $18,000 even before stepping foot into her first casting audition.  To recoup their losses, agencies count on the top 5% of their models who bill more than $100,000 annually, people like Ziff who are statistical anomalies in their field.

A model who leaves an agency with a debt is legally bound by contract to repay it, though accountants will tell you that they don’t bother to pursue these debts, since indebted models are an unlikely source from whom to recoup losses.  Instead, agencies write off negative accounts as business expenses.  However, models’ negative accounts will by law transfer to their next agencies should they attempt to work elsewhere, which is unlikely as agencies are hesitant to represent models with existing negative balances from prior agencies.  In other words, once in debt, everywhere in debt.  It is an independent contractor status designed to alleviate the organization’s responsibility for its worker, pushing all market risks onto the freelancer in a work relationship that can resemble indentured servitude.  Thus, Ziff sits at the top of the pile, nonchalantly waving a wad of cash in her hand that masks a precarious career structure in which, for every Sara Ziff, there are thousands of women struggling to make ends meet.

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Another telling omission in the film is men.  Ziff’s accusations of systemic sexual abuse are distressing, and something I heard all too commonly in interviews with models—male models, that is.  I found women were far less likely than men to recount ordeals of sexual advances by clients.  There are a couple of explanations for this discrepancy.  First, it is likely that female models may not report or even recognize as report-worthy sexual advances by men, given the ubiquity of sexual harassment women are likely to face on any job.  Second, the filmmakers seem to have encouraged their subjects to recount their ordeals in confessional-style video diaries, a technique quite different from open-ended interviewing.

Also likely, I think male models do experience more unwanted come-ons than female models.  In an industry over-represented with gay men in decision-making positions, male models report feeling pressure to flirt with men in order to book jobs.  Male models earn considerably less than their female peers, making each job more important to them, and their agents often instruct them to charm important clients.  It’s referred to jokingly in the industry as going “gay for pay,” similar to male porn actors who do gay sex scenes to boost their earnings.  Male models do not as a population identify as gay, but it’s widespread and openly acknowledged that straight men must flirt shamelessly with gay clients to get work.  As one male model told me, “Everyone has to play his cards.”

But it’s not a game to the men I interviewed who told horror stories of such performances turning into threatening situations.  Men reported being “felt up” by stylists while dressing, told to wear revealing clothes, or no clothes at all, and being kissed and hugged by prestigious clients at parties.  One model described how, on a shoot with a male photographer, he was asked to make himself semi-erect.  This is not to downplay women’s encounters with sexual harassment in the industry, but to note that all models are relatively powerless in this market, and given the sex composition of those in power, male models are especially vulnerable.

Picture Me revolves around shocking personal narratives, and as a biting (and I think unfair) NY Times review notes, the filmmakers go straight for the easy critiques at the expense of their social context.  It’s hard to contextualize economics, gender and sexuality, and a complicated career structure in a 75-minute documentary, especially when stomach-turning confessionals and eye-catching runway pictures are so readily available.  And this is what sociologists are for anyway.

For more of Mear’s insights on the modeling industry, see our posts on the contrasting aesthetics of high end and commercial modeling, the ugly other side of the model search, and control and thinness.

Lest you think that rape culture is confined to simply excellent institutions of higher education, Salon reports that Yale students pledging the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity were marched by women’s dorms marching “no means yes, yes means anal.”  Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory writes:

Now, DKE President Jordan Forney has been forced to apologize for this blatant sexual intimidation by calling it “a serious lapse in judgment by the fraternity and in very poor taste.” But this sort of hateful crap isn’t a “lapse in judgment.” It doesn’t innocently happen that you’re guiding male pledges by young women’s dorms in the dark of night chanting about anal rape. It isn’t a forehead-slapping slip-up, it’s a sign that you need major reprogramming as a human being.

UPDATE: Sociologist Michael Kimmel has a fantastic analysis of the second half of the chant:

This chant assumes that anal sex is not pleasurable for women; that if she says yes to intercourse, you have to go further to an activity that you experience as degrading to her, dominating to her, not pleasurable to her. This second chant is a necessary corollary to the first.

Thanks to feminism, women have claimed the ability to say both “no” and “yes.” Not only have women come to believe that “No Means No,” that they have a right to not be assaulted and raped, but also that they have a right to say “yes” to their own desires, their own sexual agency. Feminism enabled women to find their own sexual voice.

…

This is confusing to many men, who see sex not as mutual pleasuring, but about the “girl hunt,” a chase, a conquest. She says no, he breaks down her resistance. Sex is a zero-sum game. He wins if she puts out; she loses.

That women can like sex, and especially like good sex, and are capable of evaluating their partners changes the landscape. If women say “yes,” where’s the conquest, where’s the chase, where’s the pleasure? And where’s the feeling that your victory is her defeat? What if she is doing the scoring, not you?

Thus the “Yes Means Anal” part of the chant. Sex has become unsafe for men–women are agentic and evaluate our performances. So if “No Means Yes” attempts to make what is safe for women unsafe, then “Yes Means Anal” makes what is experienced as unsafe for men again safe–back in that comfort zone of conquest and victory. Back to something that is assumed could not possibly be pleasurable for her. It makes the unsafe safe–for men.

In this way, we can see the men of DKE at Yale not as a bunch of angry predators, asserting their dominance, but as a more pathetic bunch of guys who see themselves as powerless losers, trying to re-establish a sexual landscape which they feel has been thrown terribly off its axis.

For more indications that we live in a rape culture, see our posts on media coverage of a rape video game and the George Sodini murders, rapists as hyperconformists to ideal masculinity, the rape scene in Observe and Report, t-shirts endorsing sex with “drunk girls”, and, of course, the Purdue Exponent’s sex position of the week.

In this Zócalo video, sociologist Jennifer Lee discusses the social construction of race and the history of the U.S. census with NALEO’s Arturo Vargas and the L.A. Times‘ Steve Padilla:

For more on the social construction of race, see our post on race and ethnicity in censuses around the world.

In this video sociologist Devah Pager describes her experimental research on race, criminal records, and employment with Dalton Conley.  Using matched pairs of black and white students posing as job applicants, she finds, stunningly, that black men without a criminal record are as likely to get a call back for a job as white men with one (see the tables here).  Black men with criminal records receive call backs for only about one in 20 completed job applications.

See also our post in which one man explains the “hidden life sentence” he received after a crime 20 years past.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Tila Tequila has become famous through the strategic display of her culturally-idealized face and body.  A quick Google image search reveals as much:

Her success and celebrity suggests that Tequila has managed to negotiate with sexism such that she, by capitulating to the male gaze, wins. But the idea that it is ever possible to successfully maneuver around patriarchy is challenged by Tequila’s most recent court battle. Nearly seven years ago she and her then-boyfriend filmed themselves having sex. Her ex is now threatening to release this sex tape against Tequila’s will. Tequila went to court to get an injunction against the tape’s release, but the judge denied her request, arguing that “Tila exploits her sexuality” anyway.

Tequila’s exploitation of her own sexuality (or, more accurately, her sex appeal), apparently, gives everyone else the right to exploit her sexuality, too. This is what it means to live in a society in which women are second-class citizens, specifically, the “sex class.”  Women’s bodies are public property. Women are supposed to display them in public for men’s pleasure.  If they do not, they lose: they are dykes, bitches, and ugly, fat, feminazi cunts.  If they do, they lose.

Thanks to Stephanie Hallett at Ms. magazine for the tip.

In the comments thread to a recent post presenting an image of Afghanistan that doesn’t focus on war, violence, and misery, a Reader by the name of “S” linked to a documentary called Afghan Star.  The film documents an American Idol-style competition, one that places contestants at risk of violence, but also engenders intense devotion from some Afghanis.  It reveals another side of Afghanistan that Americans typically do not see.

The trailer:

Thanks to Myaisha for catching the comment!