Alongside a New York Times article about the distribution of food stamps was a set of county-by-county maps showing the percentage of different kinds of citizens on food stamps. What struck me was the difference between the “all recipients” map and the “children” map.

Darker blue = a higher percentage on food stamps:

All recipients:

Children only:

As you can see, the number of children on food stamps greatly outweighs the number of people on food stamps almost everywhere in the country. So, next time you think about the poor, remember how many of them are kids.

Via Gin and Tacos.

Elizabeth T., my awesome former student, asked us to write about Taylor Lautner’s Rolling Stone cover.

Of course, everyone’s been talking about  It’s either “oh he’s so hot!” or “he’s just seventeen! child pornography!”  But what I think is hilarious is the fact that they had to have him posing with a football.

You see, in this photograph, Lautner is a sex object.  And, as I’ve written before, a “sexual object is to be presented as passive, consumable, inert (remember, only one person gets “fucked”).”  And who does the fucking?  Men.  Real men.  And who gets fucked?  Women and womanly men (you might know them as “fags”).

So Lautner, by virtue of being objectified, threatens to also be seen as gay:

Apparently they’d rather break one of the golden rules of photography (don’t have anything coming out of the subject’s head), than allow Lautner’s sexual objectification call his sexuality into question.

Yes, yes we get it.  Lautner is a guy’s guy.  I mean, wait a second, he’s a girl’s guy.  Wait!  I mean he likes dudes!   No, not that way!  In a bros before hos way.  He likes dudes best, unless it’s for sex, then he likes girls!  He likes girls!  Even though he’s all sexy and wet and objectified, he’s not a fag okay!  We swear!  Look!  THERE’S A FOOTBAAAAAALLLLLLL!

In my Power and Sexuality class, I sometimes assign articles from a book called Whores and Other Feminists. All of the essays are written by current and former sex workers who identify as feminist. It’s pretty fascinating.

Some of the phone sex operators talk about what they do while having “phone sex,” like chores and booking airline tickets and whathaveyou. It really demystifies the industry.

As do the photographs by Phillip Toledano, sent in by Phillip B.

This cartoon illustrates how a work-free year is interpreted as lazy and irresponsible if you’re a working class person and a well-deserved treat if you’re middle class or better.

Found at The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Genuis, via Missives from Marx.

I spent a day in Salzburg this September with a man from Dubai.  We had a wonderful time comparing perspectives.

Dubai, he explained, was a wildly modern, multicultural city.  The default language in public was English due to the international population.  He was a stockbroker who had gone to college in London and gone part way through an MBA.

He interacted with veiled, Middle Eastern women and non-veiled Western European women daily.  He seemed to have no qualms with the two styles of presentation, considering them simple choices; they were unpoliticized and carried no deeper meaning.  To him, women who veiled were simply religious, like the men he knew who would not drink alcohol, and himself when he would not eat meat improperly slaughtered.

In any case, women in Dubai, he felt, were liberated.  As an example, he explained how there was now a woman’s taxi service.

“A woman’s taxi service?”

“Yes, with women drivers.”

You see, it is not proper for women to be alone with a non-relative male and, so long as all taxis were driven by men, women (who also do not drive) could not run errands or visit friends.  They were largely neighborhood-bound.  To my friend, a woman’s taxi service was liberation.  And, indeed, from the perspective of their rules, it must have seemed like freedom indeed.

I was reminded of this chat when Happy A. sent in a link to a story about a new women’s taxi service in Mexico.  The taxis, painted pink, are driven by women and only women can hire them. The taxi service isn’t designed to allow women to travel, but to allow them to travel without the threat of harassment and assault.

Women’s groups, however, have called the taxis insulting.  They suggest that the girly pink, the protectionism, and the make-up mirrors in the back seats seem to encourage the very objectification that makes women targets in the first place.

Pink Ladies, in the U.K., rationalizes its service with the same protectionism:

And, in Moscow, they have Ladies Red Taxi:

I think these examples, considered together, do a really good job of undermining any absolutist ideas about what is good for women.

The situations in the different countries are dramatically different.  Women’s taxis improve the quality of life for women in Dubai (who can afford them) much more significantly than the taxis in, say, the U.K.

A radical feminist bent on destroying the system altogether may say that such taxis reinforce a gender binary and are easily co-opted by patriarchy (I wonder whose errands women are doing in those pink taxis?), a reformist feminist may say that the move is a good option for women both there and elsewhere, if not actually an end to male domination.

I think both are good points.

Does the fact that the Mexico service is run by the city and the U.K. service by a private company make a difference?  In the first case it is driven by concern for women’s safety, in the second case it is driven, at least partially, by profit.  Should people be profiting from women’s vulnerability?

Is a woman’s taxi service inherently feminist and liberating?  Or is it always sexist and demeaning?

I’m  not sure what I think about women’s taxis, but I like how cross-cultural comparisons like these remind us that context matters.

Click here for another sociologist’s take on the extent to which the pink taxis should be seen as liberating for women.

In a sweet anecdote, Sociologist Michael Kimmel talks about how he was playing the game of opposites with his son.  “What is the opposite of up?”  “Down.”  “What is the opposite of awake?”  “Asleep.”  “What is the opposite of man?”  He asked.

And his son replied, “Boy.”

Kimmel tells this story as a glimpse into an alternative world in which men do not define themselves in opposition to women, but see manhood in terms of maturity.

We don’t live in that world.  And Dockers thinks it can sell khakis by encouraging men to define themselves as not-women in its new man-ifesto ad campaign (text after the jump):

Of course, what is really interesting about this ad is the way that it defines manhood as in opposition to all kinds of things: womanhood, of course, but also boyhood, and feminine manhood, androgyny, and whatever disco, plastic forks, latte drinking, and salad represent.  What do men get?  Being in charge of women and children… and dirty hands (maybe the dirt is metaphorical).

I’d much rather live in Kimmel Jr.’s world.

(Thanks to Christina W. for encouraging us to write about this ad.)

For a similar ad, see this Ketel One commercial expressing nostalgia for a pre-feminist time.  And, for lots of material documenting the new pop culture version of masculinity, browse our gender: masculinity tag.

Jump for a transcript of the text:

Once upon a time, men wore the pants, and wore them well.  Women rarely had to open doors and little old ladies never crossed the street alone.  Men took charge because that’s what they did.  But somewhere along the way, the world decided it no longer needed men.  Disco by disco, latte by foamy non-fat latte, men were stripped of their khakis and left stranded on the road between boyhood and androgyny.  But today, there are questions our genderless society has no answers for. The world sits idly by as cities crumble, children misbehave and those little old ladies remain on one side of the street.  For the first time since bad guys, we need heroes.  We need grown-ups.  We need men to put down the plastic fork, step away from the salad bar and untie the world from the tracks of complacency.  It’s time to get your hands dirty.  It’s time to answer the call of manhood.  It’s time to wear the pants.

This week the New York Times featured a story about joblessness rates among black and white men and women.   As the figures below show, black men and women always face higher levels of unemployment compared to whites of the same education level; for men, the disparity increases as education level increases; and for black women, that pattern holds at least for 2009.

For more detailed data on this phenomenon, see our posts on race and the economic downturn, the intersection of race and criminal record, and education and unemployment.

Gwen and I were both so troubled by a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday that we decided to break our rule that all posts must contain an image and offer you a sound instead. The six-and-a-half minute story and a transcript can be found here.

This is the letter of protest that I sent:

Dear NPR,

I am sadly disappointed in NPR after listening to the latest installment of “Recession Diary,” featuring Caitlin Shetterly and her family.

The story features a husband and wife team of freelancers who have to take part time wage work and move in with their parents to support themselves and their new baby.  Caitlin gets a book deal that puts them back on their feet (but it’s not enough “even to buy a house,” so apparently it’s not a lot of money).  Her mother tells her that it was hard work and not good luck that made the difference.

Not only is this a wildly upper-class version of “hardship,” but the final evaluation of their “turn in fortune” as due to hard work and not luck is a slap in the face to the millions of Americans who work one or more demanding jobs and will likely never escape economic insecurity, recession or no.

The Shetterly’s had their fair share of good luck long before the recession hit, the kind of good luck that allows you to follow your dream of being a freelancer in the first place.  And while I’m sure they worked very hard, they were already situated such that their hard work could make their dreams come true.

This Recession Diary does an injustice to economic hardship.  It likely resonated with the public radio producers, staff, and talent, but I doubt it resonates with Americans whose dreams involve feeding their kids and getting their rent paid, with just a little left over to sock away for the next emergency.

Lisa Wade, PhD
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Occidental College
Los Angeles, CA

Okay, I can’t resist.

Here is a picture of a cake I made for my friend, Dorotha:

What you can’t see is that he is balding and has liver spots on top of his head.

I am still quite proud.