This graphic reveals which states pay the most in federal taxes and which receive the most in return. At the very bottom of the graphic, you can see the ratio of taxes out and taxes in. Rhode Island is exactly even, while the states above and to the left are essentially “donation” states and the states below and to the right are “welfare” states:

Found at Visual Economics, via ChartPorn.

Grace S., Courtney V., Mazhira B., and Ashley B. (I hope I got everyone!) sent in Kleenex’s Get Mommed campaign. The campaign represents another instance in which nurturing is associates strictly with women (it is mom who takes care of us when we’re sick, not dad).

It also manages to throw in a number of racial and religious stereotypes, including the Latina Ana Maria (“hola!”) who brings traditional wisdom; the distracted upper class WASP (“just a moment, dear”); the sassy, full-figured black women who can do anything around the house; the pushy Jewish mom (“Phyllis wants to be your mommy, not just your mom”); the stern Asian mom (“I don’t put up with excuses, not even from babies!”); among others.

I didn’t dive into the website too far, but you’re certainly welcome to do so and feel free to report what you find!

A while back we posted before and after pictures of an eyelid surgery designed to give people of Asian descent an eyelid fold more characteristic of non-Asians (see also this post on eyelid glueing) with the idea that such an eye seemed more “awake.”

I recently came across a website advertising “Asian Rhinoplasty” by Dr. Younai.  The surgeon argues that “there are many fine differences between an Asian nose and that of other ethnicities” and claims expertise in this area.

He makes the following observations about what is “wrong” with “Asian” noses.  Notice how he uses a language of deficiency that is completely contrived (“underdeveloped,” “poor,” “lack”) (all emphases are his):

…most Asians from Korea, China, Philippines, Japan, Hawaii, and Malaysia have underdeveloped nasal bridge. This makes their eyes appear to be far apart.

The nasal tip in Asians is often round, wide, bulbous, and of poor definition. The thickness of Asian nasal skin also contributes to the lack of nasal tip sharpness.

Nostrils in Asians can be flared and wide.

Lack of nasal bridge height can give the appearance of a short nose.

His language is negative, but also inherently comparative to an unspoken norm.  “Underdeveloped” compared to what?  Of “poor definition” compared to what?  “Wide” compared to what?  “Short” compared to what?  Of course, in this context, the implicit ideal is a white ideal.

Here are some of his before and after photos:

Masculine!

Masculine! Masculine! Masculine!

Masculine!

(Thanks for the link, Michael C!)

P.S.: Girls and sissy boys suck!

UPDATE: In our comments threat, Reader adilegian offered this great breakdown of the commercial:

0:04. The voice over’s question “Should a phone be pretty?” is visually answered with an effect reminiscent of melting celluloid. The rupture starts on top of the woman’s head, exploding her “pretty” face.

0:06. Women are beheld as dolls.

0:08. Images appear superimposed over images beneath a verbal judgment. The beauty queen (fake) made out of plastic (fake) shown on a television (fake) is definitively stamped “CLUELESS.”

0:10. The commercial erased its first woman by destroying the medium of her representation (supposedly celluloid). The commercial again destroys its second “woman” by destroying the medium of her representation (a television).

0:10 – 0:13. Words across the screen: FAST, RACEHORSE, SCUD. Images: Lightning, racing horse, ripping off duct tape, SCUD missile. Combining these motifs into one single image, we see the SCUD missile flying across the screen with the word RACEHORSE as though it were written with lightning.

0:14. Droid applications: Reality Browser 2.1, Google Sky Map, Qik, Mother TED, CardioTrainer, Where. While I doubt that these applications were developed with the commercial’s themes in mind, their selections reinforce the messages thus far enforced visually: reality (woman of burnt celluloid, destroyed television), sky (SCUD missile), quick (FAST, RACEHORSE), mother (a Freudian slip recognizing the infantile nature of a power fantasy? ^_~), exercise (beef up for manliness stat +4), and going places (which SCUD missiles, race horses, and THE MANLIEST OF MANKIND’S MEN all do).

0:15. Word overlay: DOES. Men do things. Women are pretty and useless.

0:16 – 0:18. Buzz saw cuts banana over a brief yellow outline of a robot.

0:18. Three slim pretty boy models. Again, we see a conflation of all things hitherto condemned: prettiness and effeminacy (designer clothes on fancy-pants, unmuscular pretty boys) and superficiality (plastic people).

0:19 – 0:21. Fruit appears now as a weapon. Hardcore Droid-using man (who is also most likely a fancy, beautiful, professional male model IRL, natch) throws apple at sassy plasticman’s hat, suggesting a Victorian upstart’s rambunctious bucking of all things pretentious with a snowball thrown to knock off a businessman’s hat. Succeeding apples create gore effects.

0:21. Porcelain sheep crushed between the maws of raw, unrelenting MANROBOTPHONE power. Porcelain sheep also conflate all previously condemned messages: prettiness, delicacy, weakness, and artifice.

0:23 – 0:25. Sissy phone explodes into a milky white substance, suggesting ejactulate, with the word NO followed by an image of a woman holding the same ejaculate-phone in her hand with her lips parted. The word PRINCESS is superimposed with glitter effects.

0:25 – 0:27. Layers within mechanical layers give way to reveal the Droid phone.  The Droid phone now appears in the palm of a man’s hand. From his POV (deliciously male gaze, yes?), we see him traveling the world at blinding speed (FAST, RACEHORSE) with city lights blitzing past (lightning).

0:28 – 0:29. MANBOT phone breaks through a white, crumbling wall, again conflating the previously condemned ideas (bland superficiality as connoted by white porcelain sheep, white plastic male models, and light pink plastic Miss Pretty).

A PHONE THAT TRADE HAIR-DO

FOR CAN-DO.

Carolyn Steel answer this question with a long range view (and lots of fascinating information), and points out the problems in our supply chain, in this TED video:

Trivial Pursuit reinforces the idea that men and women are on opposite sides:

OKCupid, an online matchmaking site, offers data on gender and perceived attractiveness that I might use in my spring deviance course (via boing). The figures might help me make a Durkheimian society of (hot) saints point about the relative nature of beauty and a Goffman point on stigma affecting social interaction, while providing another illustration of the taken-for-grantedness of heteronormativity.

In any case, the first figure shows that male OKCupid ratings of female OKCupid users follows something like a normal distribution, with mean=2.5 on a 0-to-5 scale from “least attractive” to “most attractive.” Also, women rated as more attractive tend to get more messages. At first, I thought I saw evidence of positive deviance here, since women rated as most attractive get fewer messages than those rated somewhat below them — the 4.5s garner more attention than the 5.0s. But, as I’ll show below with the next chart, that would probably be an incorrect interpretation — confounding the “persons” in the dashed lines with the “messages” in the solid lines.

The next figure shows that female OKCupid users tend to rate most male OKCupid users as well below “medium” in attractiveness. According to OKCupid, “women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable.”

Hmm. The latter point isn’t wrong, I guess, but it shouldn’t obscure the bigger point that more attractive men still get more messages than less attractive men. Again, note that persons (OKCupid members) are the units of analysis for the dashed lines and messages (messages sent by OKCupid members) are the units for the solid lines. On first scan, I read the graph as suggesting that the top “attractiveness quintile” was getting fewer messages than the bottom attractiveness quintile — that uglier men were actually doing better than more attractive men — but that’s not the case at all. Instead, it just means that in the land of the hideous, the somewhat-less-than-loathsome man is king.

If almost everybody is rated as unattractive, most of the messages will go to those rated as unattractive. Nevertheless, the rate of messages-per-person still rises monotonically with attractiveness. As the “message multiplier” chart below shows, the most attractive men get about 11 times the messages of the least attractive men — and the most attractive women get about 25 times the messages of the least attractive women.

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Chris Uggen is Distinguished McKnight Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.  His writing appears in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Criminology, and Law & Society Review and in media such as the New York Times, The Economist, and NPR.  With Jeff Manza, he wrote Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy.

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These days the talk is about adult-olescence, or the seeming extention of adolescence well into ones twenties.  But the idea that children should have a childhood at all is actually pretty recent.  Before industrialization, when families tended to work their own land, children got to work as soon as they were able.  Being apprentices to their parents was the difference between life and death.

Industrialization brought a whole new kind of work: wage work that occurred outside the home.  At that time, it made perfect sense that kids would work, as they’d be working on the farm all along.  Only later did we decide that working outside the home was different than working at it and that, perhaps, children working outside of the home needed protection.  The first federal law regulating child labor was passed in 1938.

Below are some amazing photographs of child laborers from The History Place (thanks to Missives From Marx for pointing me to them).

The Spinning Factory:

Newsies:

Miners:

Factory Workers:

Seafood Workers:

Fruit Pickers:

Misc.: