There is a tendency in Western culture to envision white people are more modern and progressive than people of color who are seen as more traditional, even tied to ancient ways of life (see this post and its links).  This tendency is illustrated in Mattel’s new Japanese Ken and Barbie dolls, released this year:

When was the last time you saw a Japanese person dressed like this?  Regarding Ken, Dolls of Color put it:

Right, because an Asian Ken can’t be wearing jeans and a tshirt? Or a tuxedo if one must get fancy? An Asian Ken must be some kind of exotic fantasy and not just that cool dude next door? Right.

We’ll know that we respect people of color as people when we start portraying them as people instead of exotic objects or historical artifacts.

UPDATE: Of course, as several commenters have pointed out, these costumes aren’t at all historically accurate.  Instead they exoticize a stereotyped notion of the traditional Japanese person.

Via Racialicious.

In Afghanistan, girls are not supposed to obtain an extensive education, be in public without a male chaperone, or work outside the home.  This is typically discussed as a burden for girls and women but, as an article in the New York Times sent in by Dmitriy T.M. explains, it can also be a burden on families.  Families with sons can send all of their children out in public with the boy as a chaperone.  This is useful for the whole family: the girls get more freedom and the parents can send their children on errands, to school, or on social visits without their supervision.  Since boys can also work outside the home, boys can be a source in extra income for a family.  Families with all girls, then, are not only pitied from a social perspective (because girls are devalued compared to boys), but from a practical perspective (because gendered rules make daily life more difficult).

One solution is to bend the rules.  Journalist Jenny Nordberg explains that some families without sons pick a girl-child to be a boy.  One day they cut her hair, change her name, and put her in boy clothes.  They then send her out into the world as a boy.  er mother explains:

People came into our home feeling pity for us that we don’t have a son… And the girls — we can’t send them outside. And if we changed Mehran to a boy we would get more space and freedom in society for her.  And we can send her outside for shopping and to help the father.

Her father concurs:

It’s a privilege for me, that she is in boys’ clothing… It’s a help for me, with the shopping. And she can go in and out of the house without a problem.

The practice isn’t new, but long-standing.

Nordberg is unsure how many families do this, but it is common enough that most people are unsurprised when a biological girl suddenly becomes a social boy before their very eyes.  Teachers have become accustomed to such sudden shifts.  Relatives, friends, and acquaintances accept and participate in the farce. There is even a name for this kind of child, “bacha posh,” which translates into “dressed up as a boy.”  Later, when the child reaches puberty, she typically becomes a girl again.  Meanwhile, the family might choose a younger sibling to take over her role.

One of the interesting things about this, from a sociological perspective, is how easy it turns out to be to break these extremely rigid gender rules.  If the family simply decided that their daughter should be able to go outside without supervision, get higher education, work outside the home, and interact as an equal with men, it would be a slap in the face of the gender regime.  By dressing her a boy, however, they are effectively nodding to the rules, even as they break them.  They are saying, “Yes, it is true that girls should not be able to do these thing,” but we need a boy in the household for social and practical reasons.  And, because other Afghanis understand, they are willing to look the other way.

These sorts of adaptations are often lost when we hear about the cultural rules in places we deem oppressive.  People in these narratives often seem unbelievably oppressed.  Often they are living under extreme conditions, but it’s important to also be exposed to the ways in which individuals find ways to wrest autonomy from rigid rules through ingenuity and creativity.  This wresting of autonomy, further, is often part and parcel of the culture, allowing for far more flexibility than outside observers are sometimes capable of seeing.

The New York Times reports that there has been an increase in the percent of Black Americans reporting that they are “pretty” or “very” happy (though Blacks lag behind Whites in happiness).  Indeed, while their happiness quotient appears to have dipped a bit this decade, Blacks have reported significantly higher rates of happiness in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, compared to the ’70s.

Still, the article entirely skips over the fascinating gender difference.  While American Black men’s happiness appears to have peaked in the ’80s and ’90s, they show real losses in reported happiness in the ’00s.  In contrast, Black women’s happiness has been steadily rising; they  neither express the same rapid increases or decreases that characterize the trend among men.

When we look at race and gender together, Black men are often among the most disadvantaged groups in society.  They are among the most hard hit by the recession in terms of joblessness.  They are less likely than Black women to enroll in and complete college.  That said, I am hardly an expert in happiness studies… any ideas as to why the gender disparity in self-reported happiness would be so much stronger among Blacks than Whites?

Via Racialicious, and sender-inners Patricia P. and Dmitriy T.M.

No one knows.

But here is some rather fascinating data about exactly how HUGE it is in Europe and North America (with many other parts of the world not too far behind).

How many people are on Facebook?

What percent of people are on Facebook?

What percent of internet users are on Facebook?

Lots and lots of people are on Facebook.  I suppose what this means has everything to do with what we do with it.

Via Thick Culture.

Right?

Or, at least, we’re constantly told that men hate shopping.

Ben K. pointed us to a new Lee Jeans ad campaign revolving around a fictional “epidemic among the male population” called “shop phobia” (website):

These ads argue that men don’t shop or are even afraid of shopping.  They tell us what men are like.  Ben begs to differ, but feels the pressure to be the man they insist he is:

As a man in my mid-twenties who actually does enjoy clothes shopping from time to time, I am, nevertheless, totally complicit in propelling the stereotype that clothes shopping is for women and not men – a stereotype reinforced out by mass culture and my experiences growing up with two younger sisters and a dad who taught me well the ways to keep myself from “losing my manhood” when going shopping with my mom (bring a book, find the chairs near the dressing rooms).

Ben’s confession illustrates how cultural rules about behavior actually create that behavior, thereby making the behavior seem natural instead of rule-driven.  Men hate shopping, we learn, and so it appears they do.  (See also our post on the self-fulfilling stereotype.)

On a different note, Ben had a really interesting thought about what is so scary about shopping:

I wonder if it has to do with anything about men being seen as in positions of authority or that their work necessitates certain types of clothes (police officers, construction workers), and, so clothing becomes a matter, in the cultural mind, of pure function related entirely to the public work of men. Thus shopping for extra clothes is irrelevant, even dangerous… perhaps because any indication of leaving that world of authority, and public work is also an indication of loss of “manhood.”

See also: Women Love Shoes.

Yesterday I posted the news that the percent of Americans in poverty reached nearly 15% in 2009.  Philip Cohen, at Family Inequality, used the same Census data to give us an idea of how both wealth and poverty are distributed across U.S. racial groups.  We know that Blacks, Latinos, American Indians and some, but not all, Asian sub-groups are poorer, on average, than Whites.  Cohen offers us a different way of looking at this, however, by plotting the income-to-needs ratio for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos over the last 8 years.

That income-need ratio is, by definition, 1.0 at the poverty line, and numbers above that are multiples of needs, so 3.0 is income of 3-times the poverty line.

That ratio sits along the vertical axis, with time at the horizontal:

This, Cohen explains, “…allows us to see the size of the White advantage…”  He continues:

So, for example, the richest 5th of Whites are above 11-times the poverty line, while the poorest 5th of Whites are (on average) just above the poverty line. In contrast, the richest 5th of Blacks and Latinos are around 7-times the poverty line, and 40% of both groups are below 1.5-times the poverty line.

It’s not simply, then, that Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately poor.  Their poor are also poorer than the poor Whites and their rich are less rich than rich Whites.

This week the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the American poverty rate has reached 14.3%, the highest it has been in 15 years:

Children are over-represented among the poor; among those  less than 18-years-old, the poverty rate is 20.7%:

The Census report suggests that the poverty rate would be even higher if it weren’t for an increase in non-nuclear family households.  Over the last two years, an additional 11.6 percent of households now include non-family or family members from three generations or more.  Consider this data from Philip Cohen’s Family Inequality blog (and notice that the near poor are more likely to be living with a grandparent than the poor, who may not have this option):

So, the economic recession is correlated with an increase in poverty, but what does “poverty” really mean?   The New York Times reports that in 2009 it meant a pretax income of $10,830 for a single person with no dependents and less than twice that, $22,050, for a family of four.

Trying to imagine keeping a roof over my head, sufficient food in my belly, and clothes on my back on that amount of money is difficult.  But even if this was possible, human beings  need more than food, shelter, and clothes.  Try to imagine, with this amount of money, maintaining friendships and romantic partnerships, nurturing your children’s emotional health and educational potential, having pride and comfort in your home and personal appearance, finding the resources to invest in your own human capital, or giving yourself a modicum of leisure.  Poor people are human too and these numbers only begin to scratch the surface of the kind of deprivation many Americans suffer every day.

Images borrowed from Graphic Sociology.

As Anthropologist Peggy Sanday has shown, societies can be more or less rape-free or rape-prone.  A rape-prone society is characterized by a rape culture, one in which women’s desires are unimportant and emotional, psychological, and physical sexual coercion is normative.   In the U.S., pressuring or convincing women into sex is, in fact, well-tolerated.  So goes the saying, ” ‘No’ doesn’t mean ‘no’; it’s just the beginning of negotiations.”

Claire B. and Sylvia M. sent in matching sartorial testaments to the dismissal of the requirement that women consent to sex.  The first, on a website called teesbox (trigger warning), is a t-shirt that reads “I heart drunk girls.”  In case you don’t get the point, along with the shirt are photos of drunken or incapacitated women and captions like, “She’ll let you do anything you want to her, any hole, any time (as long as it’s while she’s still wasted).”

This second t-shirt (text below) is sold on Amazon.com:

Text:

two beers $7
three margaritas $15
four jello shots $20
Taking home the girl who
drank all of the above…
Priceless