Part of what makes professional basketball appealing, for kids who love to play as well as fans, is the idea that a person can come from humble beginnings and become a star.  The players on the court, the narrative goes, are ones who rose to fame as a result of incredible dedication and extraordinary talent.  Basketball, then, is a way out of poverty, a true equal opportunity sport that affirms what we think America is all about.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz crunched the numbers to find out if the equal opportunity story was true.   Analyzing the economic background of NBA players, he found that growing up in a wealthy neighborhood (the top 40% of household incomes) is a “major, positive predictor” for success in professional basketball.  Black players are also less likely than the general black male population to have been born to a young or single mother.  So, class privilege is an advantage for pro ball players, just like it is elsewhere in our economy.

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The richest Black men, then, are most likely to end up in the NBA, followed by those in the bottom 20% of neighborhoods by income.  Middle class black men may, like many middle class white men, see college as a more secure route to a successful future.  Research shows that poor black men often see sports as a more realistic route out of poverty than college (and they may not be wrong).  This also helps explain why Jews dominated professional basketball in the first half of the 1900s.

LeBron James was right, then, when he said, “I’m LeBron James. From Akron, Ohio. From the inner city. I am not even supposed to be here.”  The final phrase disrupts our mythology about professional basketball: that being poor isn’t an obstacle if one has talent and drive.  But, as Stephens-Davidowitz reminds us, “[a]nyone from a difficult environment, no matter his athletic prowess, has the odds stacked against him.”

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.

More than exponential growth in the percent of the population with access to same sex marriage in their state:

Graph by Philip Cohen.

And here’s the global data, thanks to @filipspagnoli.

We rounded out the year with 6,850,000 visits and nearly 10,000,000 page views.  We are proud and honored to enjoy over 35,000 Facebook friends and 15,000 Twitter followers, plus nearly 10,000 on Pinterest and almost 1,000 on our two-month-old Tumblr page.  A huge thank you to everyone for your enthusiasm and support!

Highlights:

• Our 6th birthday.
• A home page.
• A shiny new Tumblr.
• A 5,000th post.
• New Pinterest pages: the social construction of flavor, “women” vs. “people”, marketing feminism, the mean girls meme, and rape culture (see them all here).
• Two new syndication relationships with Business Insider and Policy Mic.
• Tweets from Piper Kerman, Shankar Vedantam, and Amanda Palmer.
• New Course Guides: sociology of work and occupations, family and society, the sociology of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and women’s history (see them all here).
• A gig writing for Salon.

Best of 2013!

Over the last week we’ve highlighted our favorite and most loved posts from 2013.  Here’s the list in case you missed it!

Reader’s Choice (plus # of Facebook likes before we re-posted)

• From the Mouths of Rapists: The Lyrics of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines (174,000)
• The Balancing Act of Being Female; Or Why We Have So Many Clothes (31,000)
• Gender and the Body Language of Power (21,000)
• Stand Your Ground Laws Increase Racial Bias in “Justifiable Homicide” Trials (20,000)
• Surprise! Your Flight Attendants are all Strangers! (16,000)
• My Two Cents on Feminism and Miley Cyrus (15,000)
• Men Feel Bad around Smart, Successful Women (7,500)
• Shifting Discourses of Motherhood: The Victorian Breastfeeding Photo Fad (7,000)
• How Do Physicians and Non-Physicians Want to Die? (5,800)
• Double Standards and Blurred Lines at the VMA Awards (5,400)
• Most Women Would Rather Divorce than be a Housewife (5,100)
• Re-Touching the Consequences of Extreme Thinness (5, 100)

Editor’s Picks

• African-American Travel and Jim Crow Segregation
• Why Are People Changing Their Minds About Same-Sex Marriage
• The Marketing Tactics of Firearm Manufacturers
• Children’s Books and Segregation in the Workplace
• Men and Women Use Uptalk Differently: A Study of Jeopardy
• What are Rappers Really Saying about the Police?
• On the Sexualized Insult (Not for the Faint of Heart)
• The Unsung Heroes of the Crash Landing in San Francisco

And this Happened…

…the fruits of my obsession with flight attendants.   If you read these, you might be obsessed too!

• The Surprisingly Racist Reason We Don’t Tip Flight Attendants
• Before the Stewardess, the Steward: When Flight Attendants Were Men
• Domestic Behavior as Both Gendered and Raced: Who Does What for Airlines?
• International Politics and the First African American Flight Attendants
• Are Flights Full? Airline Advertising vs. Real Life
• Hanging onto the Stewardess at Delta Airlines
• Surprise! Your Flight Attendants are all Strangers! (also a reader’s pick)
• The Unsung Heroes of the Crash Landing in San Francisco (also an editor’s pick)

Happy New Year everyone!  Here’s to wonderful things in 2014!

SocImages News:

• We’ve agreed to another partial syndication agreement, this one with Business Insider, so expect to see some of our work over there.
• I had the opportunity to write about men’s friendships with men at Salon.  It really struck a chord!  The story was covered in eight news outlets and I did interviews for public radio in Canada (still forthcoming), Wisconsin, and New Hampshire.
• Also at Salon, I responded to the attack on the webpage allowing anonymous reporting at Occidental College by so-called “men’s rights activists.”

New Orleans!

I’ll be in nola from early February through Mardi Gras.  If you’re in the city, I’d love to get together!  Send us an email at socimages@thesocietypages.org and I’ll be in touch!

Tweet of the Month:

Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black!

Popular Posts this Month:

• Compulsory Monogamy in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (3,900+ likes/tweets)
• Classism in the Rise and Fall of the Duck Dynasty Patriarch (3,100+ likes/tweets)
• “Help! My Eyeball is Bigger than my Wrist!” Gender Dimorphism in Frozen (2,800+ likes/tweets)
• Online Dating Reveals the Cold, Hard Facts about Race in America (2,100+ likes/tweets)
• When Cowboys Wore Pink (2,100+ likes/tweets)
• U.S. Rare in Spending More Money on the Education of Rich Children (900+ likes/tweets)
• Woman as Cat in Anti-Suffrage Propaganda (800+ likes/tweets)
• $22.62: The Minimum Wage if it had Risen Like the Incomes of the 1% (700+ likes/tweets)
• If You Refrain from Talking about Race, People Might Think You’re Racist (700+ likes/tweets)
• Is the Rise of Men’s Sexual Objectification Equality? (700+ likes/tweets)
• The Soundbite Echo Chamber and the Woman Who Sued McDonald’s for Too Hot Coffee (700+ likes/tweets)
• What Names are Normal? Shifting the Center of the World (600+ likes/tweets)
• The Difference Between Criminals and Non-Criminals? Getting Caught (600+ likes/tweets)

Social Media:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook,Tumblr, Google+, and Pinterest.  I’m on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, and @jaylivingston.

Finally…

In case you missed it.

We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in.  Enjoy!

@bfwriter tweeted us a link to a college design student’s photograph that has gone viral.  Rosea Lake posted the image to her tumblr and it struck a chord.

What I like about the image is the way it very clearly illustrates two things.  First, it reveals that doing femininity doesn’t mean obeying a single, simple rule. Instead, it’s about occupying and traveling within a certain space.  In this case, usually between “proper” and “flirty.”  Women have to constantly figure out where in that space they’re supposed to be.  Too flirty at work mean’s you won’t be taken seriously; too proper at the bar and you’re invisible.  Under the right circumstances (e.g., Halloween, a funeral), you can do “cheeky” or “old fashioned.”

The second thing I like about this image is the way it shows that there is a significant price to pay for getting it wrong.  It’s not just a faux pas.  Once you’re “‘asking for it,” you could be a target. And, once you’re reached “prudish,” you’ve become socially irrelevant.  Both violence and social marginalization are serious consequences.

And, of course, all women are going to get it wrong sometimes because the boundaries are moving targets and in the eye of the beholder. What’s cheeky in one setting or to one person is flirty in or to another.  So women constantly risk getting it wrong, or getting it wrong to someone.  So the consequences are always floating out there, worrying us, and sending us to the mall.

Indeed, this is why women have so many clothes!  We need an all-purpose black skirt that does old fashioned, another one to do proper, and a third to do flirty… at the very least… and all in casual, business, and formal.   And we need heels to go with each (stilettos = provocative, high heels = flirty, low heels  = proper, etc, plus we need flats for the picnics and beach weddings etc).  And we need pants that are hemmed to the right length for each of these pairs of shoes.  You can’t wear black shoes with navy pants, so you’ll need to double up on all these things if you want any variety in your wardrobe. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Women’s closets are often mocked as a form of self-indulgence, shop-a-holicism, or narcissism.  But this isn’t fair.  Instead, if a woman is class-privileged enough, they reflect an (often unarticulated) understanding of just how complicated the rules are.  If they’re not class-privileged enough, they can’t follow the rules and are punished for being, for example, “trashy” or “unprofessional.”  It’s a difficult job that we impose on women and we’re all too often damned-if-we-do and damned-if-we-don’t.

Cross-posted at Business Insider and The Huffington Post; view the original.

We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in.  Enjoy!

A recent RadioLab podcast, titled The Bitter End, identified an interesting paradox. When you ask people how they’d like to die, most will say that they want to die quickly, painlessly, and peacefully… preferably in their sleep.

But, if you ask them whether they would want various types of interventions, were they on the cusp of death and already living a low-quality of life, they typically say “yes,” “yes,” and “can I have some more please.”  Blood transfusions, feeding tubes, invasive testing, chemotherapy, dialysis, ventilation, and chest pumping CPR. Most people say “yes.”

But not physicians.  Doctors, it turns out, overwhelmingly say “no.”  The graph below shows the answers that physicians give when asked if they would want various interventions at the bitter end.  The only intervention that doctors overwhelmingly want is pain medication.  In no other case do even 20% of the physicians say “yes.”

What explains the difference between physician and non-physician responses to these types of questions.  USC professor and family medicine doctor Ken Murray gives us a couple clues.

First, few non-physicians actually understand how terrible undergoing these interventions can be.  He discusses ventilation.  When a patient is put on a breathing machine, he explains, their own breathing rhythm will clash with the forced rhythm of the machine, creating the feeling that they can’t breath.  So they will uncontrollably fight the machine.  The only way to keep someone on a ventilator is to paralyze them. Literally.  They are fully conscious, but cannot move or communicate.  This is the kind of torture, Murray suggests, that we wouldn’t impose on a terrorist.  But that’s what it means to be put on a ventilator.

A second reason why physicians and non-physicians may offer such different answers has to do with the perceived effectiveness of these interventions.  Murray cites a study of medical dramas from the 1990s (E.R., Chicago Hope, etc.) that showed that 75% of the time, when CPR was initiated, it worked.  It’d be reasonable for the TV watching public to think that CPR brought people back from death to healthy lives a majority of the time.

In fact, CPR doesn’t work 75% of the time.  It works 8% of the time.  That’s the percentage of people who are subjected to CPR and are revived and live at least one month.  And those 8% don’t necessarily go back to healthy lives: 3% have good outcomes, 3% return but are in a near-vegetative state, and the other 2% are somewhere in between.  With those kinds of odds, you can see why physicians, who don’t have to rely on medical dramas for their information, might say “no.”

The paradox, then — the fact that people want to be actively saved if they are near or at the moment of death, but also want to die peacefully — seems to be rooted in a pretty profound medical illiteracy.  Ignorance is bliss, it seems, at least until the moment of truth. Physicians, not at all ignorant to the fraught nature of intervention, know that a peaceful death is often a willing one.

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard, The Huffington Post, and BlogHer.

We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in.  Enjoy!

The philosopher Susan Sontag has written achingly about the way in which men are allowed to age and women are not.

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built…

There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.

Perhaps nowhere is this more plain than in the movies, where men’s love interests stay the same age as they get older, and @sphericalfruit sent in a fantastic example.  The four posters below are part of a new marketing plan for the forthcoming movie, The Counselor.

Notice anything?

What a stunning example of Sontag’s observation.  The men are not considered unattractive by virtue of the fact that you can tell they have skin.  The women, in contrast, have faces that are so smooth that they look inhuman; their images are halfway between photograph and cartoon.  Amazingly, this treatment of images of men and women is so ubiquitous that it now looks more or less normal to us.

Cross-posted at Business Insider and VitaminW.

We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in.  Enjoy!

Flight attendants are not only friendly with their passengers, they’re also often super friendly with each other.  This may be because especially gregarious people go into the profession, but it’s also an adaptation to a surprising structural feature of their job. It turns out that, on any given flight anywhere in the world, most flight attendants are meeting their co-workers for the very first time.

There are about 100,000 flight attendants in the U.S. alone and they get their flights through a process of bidding, one month at a time, one month ahead.  Most really do “see the world,” as the old glamorized image of the intrepid stewardess suggests, instead of working the same route over and over again.  As a result, explains Drew Whitelegg in Working the Skies, they rarely run into the same flight attendant twice.

This means that flight attendants must get to know one another quickly once they get on board.  They need to do so to make food and beverage service efficient, to coordinate their actions in the tight galleys in which they work and, most importantly, so that they will trust one another if they are called upon to do what they are really there for: acting in an emergency, one that could theoretically happen within seconds of take-off.  There’s no time to lose. “[F]rom the moment they board the plane,” writes Whitelegg, “these workers — even if complete strangers — begin constructing bonds.”

Their instant bonding is facilitated by their shared experiences and their “peculiar identity,” Whitelegg explains — few people understand their job and the airline industry deliberately misportays it — and also by a culture of confession.  The galley has its own rules to which new flight attendants are socialized.  So, even though the workers are always new, the workplace is predictable.  Whitlegg describes how galley conversations during downtime tend to be extremely, sometimes excruciatingly personal.  “The things you hear,” laughs Clare, a flight attendant for Continental, “I could write a book. The things you hear at 30,000 feet.”  It’s the odd combination of a habit of bonding and the anonymity of strangers.

So, if you have the pleasure of taking a flight, spend a few minutes watching the surprising coordination of strangers who seem like old friends, and take a moment to appreciate the amazing way these workers have adapted to their very peculiar position.

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post, Pacific Standard, and Work in Progress.