Last month I had the pleasure of writing a really fun essay about sexual dimorphism for Salon.  The phrase refers to the degree to which males and females of a species are different.  I offered a bunch of fun examples of strong dimorphism and imagined what humans would be like if we were like those animals.

Men would be 11 feet tall, for example, if we were as dimorphic as the elephant seal; they’d be the size of a walnut if we were like the blanket octopus.  And don’t we all think that glistening iridescent skin, like the feathers on male birds, would make men more fabulously attractive?  It’s a no-brainer.

In any case, coincidentally the New York Times put together an animated video about one of my favorite examples: the green spoonworm.  The male spoonworm is very small compared to the female, equivalent to a human male being about the size of a breath mint.  And he lives his entire life inside of the female’s digestive tract.  Now that’s sexual dimorphism!  Enjoy:

SocImages Meet Up in Minnesota!

Today I’m enjoying a visit to Carleton College and looking forward to spending the next two days at Macalester.  If you’re in the Twin Cities area, I’ll be at the W XYZ bar at the Aloft hotel in Minneapolis (900 Washington Ave S) on Thursday Oct. 3 at 8:30pm.  I would love to meet you and, more importantly, I would love to introduce you to each other!

Posts that Killed It:

We had an extraordinary month in September thanks to Sezin Koehler’s post on the lyrics of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.”  Many had called the song “rape-y” and the video misogynistic, but Koehler took it a step further, aligning the song’s lyrics with the words of actual rapists.  This struck a chord, making stark the discomfort many felt with the song.  The post has 163,000 “likes” and 1,600 comments and counting.  It was also cross-posted or discussed at Al Jazeera, Ms., Feministing, xoJane, Pacific Standard, and Jezebel.

We had some other super popular posts this month too!  Here are the highlights, starting with Koehler’s amazing work:

• From the Mouths of Rapists: The Lyrics of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines (163,000 likes)
• Gender and the Body Language of Power (20,000 likes)
• Surprise! Your Flight Attendants are All Strangers! (15,000 likes)
• Men Feel Bad Around Smart, Successful Women (7,400 likes)
• Wrinkle-Washed: Female Faces in Film Marketing (2,500 likes)

And y’all seemed to like our list of professors’ pet peeves too (5,000 likes)

New Course Guides:

• Sociology of Work and Occupations, by yours truly (highlighting my minor obsession with flight attendants)
• Family and Society, by Marcie Hambrick, MSW of Georgia State University.

You can see all of our course guides here.  We hope they’re useful!

Elsewhere on the Net:

This month I had the fun opportunity of writing two original essays for Salon and one for Alternet.

• On testosterone: I responded to the study saying good dads have small testes by reviewing the way that men’s testosterone levels respond to social cues (like driving a Porsche, winning a video game, or becoming a father).
• On sexual dimorphism: I had fun with the idea of sexual dimorphism, imagining how different men and women would be if we were like highly dimorphic species.  Elephant seals, blanket octopi, spoon worms, the resplendent quetzal, primates, and the platypus all make an appearance.
• On sexual anatomy: And I dusted off my master’s degree in human sexuality and wrote up seven little-known facts about sexual anatomy for Alternet.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

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

In Other News…

Contributor Philip Cohen can cross another thing off his bucket list.  And the rest of us will live vicariously.  His pup was featured at the joy-spreading Cute Overload.  I’m so jealous!

Every once in a while the internet is abuzz being horrified by vintage ads for Lysol brand douche.  The ads seem to suggest that women are repulsing their husbands with odorous vaginas caused by neglected feminine hygiene.  In fact, it only looks like this to us today because we don’t know the secret code.

These ads aren’t frightening women into thinking their genitals smell badly.  According to historian Andrea Tone, “feminine hygiene” was a euphemism.   Birth control was illegal in the U.S. until 1965 (for married couples) and 1972 (for single people).  These Lysol ads are actually for contraception.    The campaign made Lysol the best-selling method of contraception during the Great Depression.

Of course, we’re not wrong to be horrified today.  Lysol was incredibly corrosive to the vagina; in fact, it’s recipe was significantly more dangerous than the one used today.  Hundreds of people died from exposure to Lysol, including women who were using it to kill sperm.  It was also, to add insult to injury, wholly ineffective as a contraceptive.

Here’s to safe, legal, effective contraception for all.

Via Buzzfeed and @CreativeTweets.

Two recent events had a strikingly similar theme.  Kenichi Ebina won America’s Got Talent and Nina Davuluri won Miss America.  In both instances, other Americans objected to their victories, claiming that they were not really American because Ebina and Davuluri are of Japanese and Indian origin respectively.   Still other Americans objected to this reaction.  And yet, as I’ll argue below, most of us share their bias.

First, thanks to Public Shaming, we have examples of the reaction on Twitter.  Reactions to Ebina’s win:

Reactions to Davuluri’s win:

These are stark examples of people who believe that only white people count as American.  It’s a bizarre position, of course, because people of European descent are immigrants to America, and an overtly racist one as well.  I don’t lose any sleep over publishing their identities on this blog.

But, the truth is, the majority of us — even those of us who oppose racism and embrace the idea that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants — hold the belief that America = white.  We just believe this subconsciously.

Project Implicit is an online psychological test that measures implicit beliefs, ones we hold that we’re not necessarily conscious of holding.  One test is of the association of Asian-ness with American-ness.  It works by measuring how long it takes us to sort Asian and European faces and American and Foreign famous sites into the proper categories.

First they ask you to sort faces and places with Asian and Foreign together on the left and European and American together on the right. Like this:

Then they switch the bottom designations so that Asian and American are on one side and European and Foreign are on the other.  For most people, the harms their ability to sort faces and places: it slows down and includes more errors, revealing that their brain implicitly sees Asian and foreign as one category and American and European as another.

Here’s the aggregate data.  Almost a quarter of people make no association either way, 60% implicitly believe that Asians are less American than Europeans, and 17% think the opposite.

The take home message is: even though it’s easy to condemn the twits making overtly racist comments, this is a problem that is much more pervasive and pernicious.  Even those of us who are horrified by those tweets likely carry the bias behind them.

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.

How great is this?  If you are estimating the height of the Eiffel Tower, you will likely offer a slightly smaller estimate if you are leaning just barely to the left.  In fact, your estimations of all types of numbers — height, but also quantities, weights, etc — will generally be smaller if you are leaning just a wee bit left of center.

Here’s the data: variation between average estimates were statistically insignificant if answered when standing upright or leaning to the right (gray and black, respectively), but leaning to the left depressed estimated quantities (white):

Why?

Here’s a hint: we would expect the results to be the converse if we used research subjects who primarily spoke Arabic or Hebrew.

English, in contrast to those two languages, is read from left to right. When we write down numbers in order, then, the numbers on the left are smaller than those on the right.

We learn, over time, to associate smaller numbers with our left side and larger numbers with our right side.  This constant association biases our mind towards smaller or larger numbers, hence the data.  How great is that?

I recently across two examples of cross-species education.  Both illustrate that what we often consider instinctual must also often be learned, revealing that nature and nurture are not competitive forces, but deeply interconnected.  The first is adorable to the point of making me cry from laughter, the second is so sad I can hardly stand it.

Here’s the first.  A sheep tries to teach a young bull how to head butt.  Words don’t do justice to the care and patience shown by this teacher.

Perhaps the bull just isn’t ever going to understand, but the fact that the sheep seems to understand that the bull doesn’t understand, and then thinks of an idea of how to fix that, is amazing to me.  Presumably, he would take as much care with a young sheep who would be predispositioned for head-butting, but might still benefit from some instruction.

Here’s the second.  Remember the movie Free Willy, where the captive killer whale is freed by a little boy?  Well, in true Hollywood irony, the whale that played Willy, Keiko, wasn’t freed at the end of the movie, of course.

After the movie was released in 1993, however, people joined in a movement to free him.  After 22 years in captivity, humans — who count as animals in this story — spent a decade and 20 million dollars trying to rehabilitate him to the wild, attempting to teach him how to feed himself and bond with wild whales.  He continued to seek out humans, even after he was left to fend for himself, and died in 2003 from pneumonia.

There are lots of lessons to take from this story.  One is the importance of nurture in making us what nature intended us to be.  Keiko was a social individual who learned how to be a captive killer whale.  Given the opportunity, he never could be the wild killer whale he once had the potential to be.  Or, at least, we’ll never know if he could.

Whenever we talk about human biological imperatives, we should remember the patient sheep and the friendly killer whale.  We need each other to become human, and we can become human in many different ways, depending on what is demanded of us.  Nature never works alone. Without each other, we simply don’t become recognizably human at all — as one of the worst cases of child neglect taught us only too well — regardless of our biological potential.

A recent Guinness ad has been getting a lot of kudos and I want to join in the praise.  It involves a set of guys who get together to play a pick-up game of wheelchair basketball and then join each other at a bar to celebrate the game.  Lots of people have mentioned that it’s nice to see (1) a lack of objectification of women as a form of male bonding  and (2) a nice representation of people with disabilities.  Both of those things are great in my book.

But here’s another thing I really liked: their retreat to the bar and their formation once they got there.  They sat in a circle.

Why is this neat?  Because scholars have found that male and female friendships tend to be different.  Male friendships tend to be more “shoulder-to-shoulder” than “face-to-face.”  Men are more likely to get together and do stuff: they watch football together, go out and play pool, have poker nights, etc.  Women are more likely to spend time just talking, confessing, disclosing, and being supportive of each other’s feelings.

The benefits of friendship are strongly related to self-disclosure.  And so men’s friendships — if they don’t involve actual intimacy — often don’t offer the same boost to physical and well-being as women’s friendships.  The fact that these guys sit down together at a bar, in a circle, in order to engage in some face-to-face time after their shoulder-to-shoulder time… well, that’s really nice to me.

Thanks to Rebecca H. for submitting the commercial!

Lauren McGuire pointed us to a post by Gilligan at Retrospace inspired by a scene in the 1963 Western, McLintock!  The movie included a scene in which George McLintock, played by John Wayne, uses a shovel to spank his estranged wife, played by Maureen O’Hara.

The spanking scene apparent stuck quite the chord, as it was used repeatedly in the promotional materials.

Gilligan suggests that the spanking of adult women by adult men was a midcentury theme, from Kiss me Kate to comic books:

Here’s an Q&A from the New York Daily Mirror, circa 1950s (thanks to @perstornes):

Lady spanking is a manifestation of the infantilization of women.  The idea that they are not men’s equals, but are expected to obey them as subordinates and can be punished when they do not behave.  Of course, materials riffing on the spanking adult women today (outside of porn and fetish communities) would probably inspire an outcry, but that leaves open the possibility that the gendered power asymmetry simply manifests in other ways.  Adult women are still infantilized (see posts here, here, and here) and dominance/submission is still sexualized in mainstream materials (consider our post asking what love is supposed to look like).

Originally posted in 2010; re-posted in response to a new example. Images borrowed from here, here, here, here, here.  H/t Retrospace.