In a society where being fat is considered a personal and social tragedy, it is difficult to imagine that anyone would be fat on purpose.   But if fat makes a person socially ineligible for the sexual gaze, then this can be quite functional for a couple of different reasons.

Women who find men’s sexual attention especially disturbing or scary, sometimes report gaining weight on purpose.  Being fat, they hope, will protect them from being looked at, unwanted touching, and sexual assault.  In a study by sociologist Julie Winterich, a lesbian suspects that she gained weight for this kind of purpose:

You know, I remember thinking one time, maybe one of the reasons I’m overweight is so that men would not be attracted to me, because I knew that I wasn’t attracted to them.

Another reason to become or remain fat would be protect oneself not from the attention that comes with the male gaze, but the fear that you would not be lovable, even if thin.  Being judged as sexually-unacceptable, in this scenario, is less terrifying than being judged as simply unacceptable.   This was the idea expressed in a recent confessional PostSecret postcard:

Source: Winterich, Julie. 2007. Aging, Femininity, and the Body: What Appearance Changes Men to Women with Age.  Gender Issues 24: 51-69.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Alli sent us a link to a vintage ad posted at BoingBoing that reminds us, in the wake of the Abercrombie Kids push-up bikini top fiasco, that encouraging young girls to act like adult women, including wearing lingerie, isn’t a brand-new phenomenon. The ad, from 1959, offers bra and panties set for girls sizes 2-12:

Initially posted by Mitch O’Connell.

I wonder how this ad would have been perceived in 1959. Creepy? Just an example of harmless childhood mimicking of adults? How do we draw the line between the two?

The Numbers

Types of Taxes as a Percent of GDP (1937-2014) (pictured)
Historical Comparison of Top Tax Brackets (1945-2010)
Tax Receipt for 2009

The Winners and the Losers

Social Class and the Tax Burden
Donation and Welfare States
Corporate Tricks of the Trade
Who Benefited from the Bush Tax Cuts

Taxes in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Collecting Taxes in Pakistan
Danish vs. American Attitudes Towards Taxes

While preparing my taxes — on April 13th on the dot, like every year! — I came across a screen that reminded me of a post I’d written about lifecourse assumptions.  The post featured a slideshow with birth control advice with very rigid age-based expectations.  Turns out, Turbo Tax has some similar ideas.  As I finished up my returns, it announced that it was ready for what would come next in my life. It knows I’m single, rent, and have no dependents so… married, house, and kid (obvi!).

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Sonita M. sent in a link to an image at GOOD that shows the makeup of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives now in terms of various characteristics (race/ethnicity, gender, political party, religion) and what it would look like if its members were more demographically representative of the U.S. population as a whole:

As they point out in the accompanying article, however, the area where Congress most differs from the U.S. population as a whole is in terms of socioeconomic status. The average wealth of members of Congress, according to OpenSecrets.org (they don’t specify if it’s the mean or the median, so I presume it’s the mean):

For the U.S. as a whole, median wealth was $96,000 in 2009 (the mean was $481,000), according to the Federal Reserve (via CNNMoney).

Katrin sent us a great example of anachronistic portrayals of Native Americans, this time in a German (?) ad for a muscle pain relief product. The slogan at the end, “Indians do not know pain,” plays on the idea of the stoic native:

The “poverty line” is an income, set by the federal government, used to measure whether one is in or out of poverty.  But this line, of course, is both sociological and political.  What is poverty?

A nonprofit organization called Wider Opportunities for Women has released a study challenging the federal poverty lines.  According to the New York Times article on their work, their aim is to “…set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.”  Their “lines,” then, deviate significantly from those of the federal government.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Michel Foucault famously suggested that we stop congratulating ourselves for our willingness to talk about sex (“We are just so, like, liberated!”) and ask what it is exactly that we are saying. I thought of him as I pondered this 50-second compilation of each time a character in a single episode of the ABC Family show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, utters the word “sex.” How many times?  70 times.  70 times in just 45 minutes of programming.

So we definitely know that we’re talking about sex.  That’s for sure.  But what is the impact of all of this talk?  You can imagine a thousand different messages contained in the space between one “sex” and the next.  Whether that’s liberating is up for debate.

Found at The Daily What.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.