The two maps below are part of a series of maps that warp the size and shape of countries according to various international disproportions (see lots more here).

These two warp countries according to how much they are contributing to global warming and how much they are likely to suffer from global warming respectively.

Ezra Klein interprets:

The first shows the world in terms of carbon emissions. America, for instance, is huge. So is China. And Europe. Africa is hardly visible. The second map shows the world in terms of increased mortality — that is to say, deaths — from climate change. Suddenly, America virtually disappears. So does Europe. Africa, however, is grotesquely distended. South Asia inflates.

Kevin Drum summarizes:

Long story short, we spit out the carbon, but it’s people in Africa and South Asia who are mostly going to die because of it.

Thanks to Toban B. who linked to these maps in a comments thread.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I mean, it’s Ellen DeGeneres. She’s a comedian. Everyone knows she’s just being funny.

Besides, she’s totally gay. Gay ladies don’t really care about beauty, am I right or am I right?

What do you think?

I’ll tell you what I think. Satire or no, Cover Girl’s done a lot of market research and they think it’s going to make people buy make up just like any old advertisement.  And I think they’re right.

In fact, I think satire is disarming.  When we see this commercial, our “don’t fuck with us” response doesn’t kick in because it’s just funny ol’ Ellen bein’ wacky.  Advertising counts on us thinking it doesn’t affect us.  Otherwise we’d be pissed.  I think satire is a useful tool with which advertisers trick us into letting down our guard.

We’ve been hitting satire hard lately.  I think it’s because it’s really pretty tricky to figure out.  See our previous posts on or featuring satire here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Here’s one that actually refers to data (as opposed to just involves us mouthing off.)

(Via Moody Springs.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

These Virginia Slims ads from 1969, sent in by Fred H., show how the idea of “progress” was as useful then as it is now (see also this post on the subject). The commercials suggests that the right to smoke is part and parcel of women’s liberation.

Fred also notes the suggestion that “petite things are meant for women.” Notice that the last commercial, on a different theme, uses not only the “slim” analogy, but also calls the cigarette “beautiful.”

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXUbkIkwn2Y[/youtube]

For other examples of co-optation, see these posts using feminism to sell guns (here and here), beauty products (here and here), botox, diamond rings, cars and credit cards, cars and bras, pornography, cleaning products, panties, and eyeglasses, washing machines, and, of course, cigarettes (here and here).

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Sociologist Yen Le Espiritu popularized the idea of a pan-ethnic identity.  “Asian American” is a pan-ethnic identity. It is an invented label applied to dozens of different groups with wildly different cultural traditions and languages. Most Americans (Asian and not), over time, came to accept the term as meaningful. American Indian is also a pan-ethnic term, as is African American and most other such labels.

On the one hand, pan-ethnic labels can be empowering. There is power in numbers. A large community identified across ethnic and national identities by race (however fake that racial designation is) can, for example, become a powerful voting bloc to which politicians must attend, or be mobilized to work together to fight for a common cause.

On the other hand, pan-ethnic labels can be disempowering. They tend to ignore the distinctions that make ethnic and national identities meaningful, and the rough categories erase differences among groups, thus making it more difficult to see and, thus, problematize disadvantage.

This latter problem motivated the Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) of the University of California campuses to run its “Count Me In” campaign. They notice that, though “Asian Americans” were well represented on University of California campuses (they make up 43% of incoming frosh in 2006), certain groups deemed “Asian” remain underrepresented. These include students of Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian descent, among others.

The campaign asked the University of California system to disaggregate their “Asian” category.

In response the University of California added 23 new categories to their application.

For a much more extensive discussion of this issue, see Fatemeh Fakhraie’s post at Racialicious(where I stole this video clip).

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Feminist scholars argue that patriarchy relies not just on a hierarchy that places men above women, but a hierarchy of men that punishes men who don’t obey rules of masculinity.

An advertising campaign for Oberto Beef Jerky, sent in by Kate S., nicely illustrates the threat to men if they don’t comply with patriarchy.

The threat is: If you’re not an “Alpha,” then you’re a “Sidekick.”

The Alpha is first; the Sidekick is second. The Alpha gets served; the Sidekick serves. The Alpha gets the hot chick; the Sidekick gets the “ugly friend.” The Alpha makes the decisions; the Sidekick takes them.

In one part of the website, it actually encourages you to “establish your dominance.”   It features taunting emails and cards that you can send to your friends to trick them into looking like idiots/being your sidekick.

UPDATE: In the comments thread, Toban B. (T B) had a really nice observation:

As Murray Bookchin has written, language about ‘alpha males’ naturalizes hierarchy.

Bookchin highlights how people have conflated animal and insect interactions (e.g. ‘queen’ bees) with societal structures created by humans — as opposed to the far more instinctual of relations of non-human creatures.  (For Bookchin, there is a continuum between humans and other life forms, so these distinctions aren’t binaries.)  Basically, the point here is that if human hierarchies are the same as instinctual hierarchies (e.g. interactions with a lion ‘king’), then the human hierarchies must be just as natural and inevitable — which just isn’t the case.

Joanne suggests, further, that humans, invested in patriarchy and hierarchy, actually project it onto the natural world:

Using the terms “alpha” and “dominance” just reinforces the belief that nature exists within a patriarchal, hierarchical model.  It actually doesn’t.  I do a lot of work with horses, researching and observing the horse-human relationship, and this whole idea of “dominance” is one that has started with and is kept alive by the patriarchal worldview of Western culture.  Many observers of animal behavior are brought up in and continue to live in that worldview, so they impose it on animals and the natural world.  If you step outside of that worldview, what you find in the natural world is something entirely different.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

We’re pleased to feature a post by Macon D.  About himself, Macon writes, “I’m a white guy, trying to find out what that means. Especially the ‘white’ part. I live in that heart of the heart of American whiteness, the ever-amorphous ‘Midwest.’”  Macon’s blog, Stuff White People Do, is an excellent source of insights about race and racism.  We thought this post grappled nicely with the complicated phenomenon of (literal and figurative) black face, while addressing a difficult and contemporary form of humor:

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Toban B. sent us a link to these two images illustrating the global spread of Starbucks and McDonalds (put together by Princeton):

UPDATE: Toban offered these great insights in the comment thread:

When I sent this in, I was looking at the images as indicators of who is and isn’t part of certain aspects of ‘globalization.’

While there has been increased homogenization, some people also have exaggerated the extent to which we all are part of One world (which some people call a “global village” — a term that I find downright ridiculous, to be frank.) I think that people talk like the world is all One because they are ignoring most of the world — i.e. the spots on the above maps that don’t have many coloured dots on them. Obviously the ‘North’ ‘Western’ areas also are very different in some respects (e.g. linguistically), but there’s more consistency in those areas of the world in terms of McDonaldization, digitization, and other features of the ‘North’ ‘Western’ ends of ‘globalization’ — that is, the sides of ‘globalization’ that people tend to highlight (whereas people don’t pay much attention to international waste trade dumping grounds, for instance).

If the world is all One, it is One in a way that entails different positions (e.g. as producers vs. consumers), and a lot of inequality (e.g. in terms of where the money is). If (for instance) Columbia is part of some sort of globalization, the place of Latin America is a lot different from France (for instance).

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Stephen W. sent us a photograph of a billboard in Rock Valley, IA.  It suggests that keeping your baby, instead of having an abortion, is good for the economy:

Sociologists talk about how nations are invested in reproduction.  Without babies, nations literally disappear; too many babies and nations collapse under the strain of a population they cannot support.  Because nations need babies (but not too many babies), states adopt pro- and anti-natal policies (e.g., the one child rule or medals for mothers) that encourage or discourage childbearing.  This billboard is an interesting example of a call to women to have children so as to help the nation (though it is sponsored by a pro-life organization, not the state).  Women, in this argument, have a responsibility to the nation (perhaps equivalent to military service?) that transcends their individual reproductive preferences.

(See this related post on making babies for the military.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.