scatx sent in a link to the National Alliance to End Homelessness website, which includes a number of maps illustrating the increase in the homeless population over the past few years. The data come from community counts conducted each January of individuals in shelters as well as counts by outreach workers and volunteers of those sleeping in public places, in cars, abandoned buildings, and so on. Of course, counting the homeless will always be a challenging task, but these community counts provide at least some baseline data for those areas that take part.
If you go to the website, you can hover over an individual state to see the relevant data. The page also has a map of the total number of homeless individuals by state.
A more detailed interactive map lets you get information for individual communities. When you click on one of the circles on the map, a bar graph pops up underneath showing any data available for that city from 2005-2008. Here I selected Philadelphia:
A breakdown of the data shows that though most of those who are currently homeless are sheltered in some way, a significant number are living on the street, in a car, or in some other situation that wasn’t designed for human habitation:
The full report shows a striking increase in the number of people “doubled-up” — that is, staying with other families because of economic hardship (based on U.S. Census Bureau data):
While moving in with others is a common strategy, it is also often temporary; significant proportions of individuals in shelters end up there when they can no longer stay with friends or family.
The website has tons of data on homelessness — risk factors, demographics, changes, and so on — so it’s worth a look.
Suzy S. sent in an illuminating confession from PostSecret in which a woman confesses to being girly, but feels like she has to look more masculine because she’s a lesbian. It reads: “Because I’m a LESBIAN I feel obligated to cut my hair short and wear men’s clothing… I’m actually really girly”:
This woman says she feel “obligated” to tone down her girliness. In fact, adopting a masculinized appearance is one way that women signal to other people that they are gay, something they need to do because heterosexuality is normative and, therefore, generally assumed of everyone in the absence of signs otherwise. There are lots of reasons why lesbians may want to be visible.
They may want to be a symbol of the very existence of gay people and thereby fight the assumption that everyone is straight. They may want to find other gay women with which to build community or to find a girlfriend. Or they may simply want to ward off the unwanted attention of men. The style choices made by lesbians, then, aren’t simply about fashion or some internal inclination towards the masculine, as our confessor neatly illustrates. In some cases, at least a little bit, they’re strategic communication.
In two of my favorite earlier posts, I featured photographs by artist Edward Burtynsky. These photos depicted the outcomes of our consumerist societies: giant repositories of recycle-able materials and the consequences of resource extraction. In the same vein, J. Henry Fair has been taking photographs of industrial sites and environmental disasters from an even more distant place: small planes.
G.M. Cairney pointed out a set of photos at Time that highlights the scrutiny women’s bodies are under, the expectation that we constantly work to make our bodies look smaller, and a general cultural fat phobia, while making me wonder, again, why does this merit a slideshow? The article (which features only women) focuses on celebrities’ outfits at the Golden Globes on Sunday and makes it very clear what the main criterion for success is: could it possibly, in any way, from any angle, make these celebrities, most of whom are tiny, look even slightly larger than they are?
Here’s one of the offending garments, on Jennifer Lopez:
I don’t know that I particularly like the dress, but does it make her look fat? The author assures us, though, that this is a disaster: “White is a fright on an ample derriere, or on anyone who is not a size 0.” That’s right: if you’re over a size 0, the entire color white is off-limits to you.
Christina Aguilera’s dress commits the sin of making her look “buxom” and “hippy,” and she is rather oddly compared to Mae West as though that’s a bad thing:
Jennifer Love Hewitt’s dress is described as a “high-calorie confection,” reinforcing the association with fat.
All of these criticisms rest on the central assumption that there is an ideal body type that we should all be aspiring to, and that the role of fashion is to “camouflage” any areas that don’t conform. Any outfit that doesn’t do this has, by definition, failed, no matter how it actually looks on the person. Yes, the specific dress is supposed to be unique, individual, unlike anything else there, but the body inside it isn’t.
Everyone says that Barbie has unrealistic proportions, but have you seen them? Denise Winterman at the BBC decided to make a visual, borrowing one Barbie doll, one real human woman, Libby, and the wonders of photoshop.
First, Barbie’s measurements:
bust 4.6ins (11.6cm)
waist 3.5ins (8.9cm)
hips 5ins (12.7cm)
Second, the transformation:
Writes Winterman:
If Libby’s waist size of 28ins (71.1cm) were to remain unchanged, then applying Barbie’s proportions to her would mean Libby shoots up in height, to an Amazonian at 7ft 6ins (2.28m) tall. That’s just two inches shorter than the world’s tallest woman, Yao Defen. She would also have hips measuring 40ins (101.6cm) and a bust of 37ins (83.9cm).
But what if, instead, Libby’s height of 5ft 6ins (1.68m) was to remain unchanged. Doing the maths, Libby would have an extraordinarily tight waist of just 20ins (50.8cm), while her bust would be 27ins (68.5cm) and her hips 29ins (73.6cm). Even the famously slight Victoria Beckham reportedly only has a 23ins (58.4cm) waist. But neither are they unheard of — Brigitte Bardot was famous for her 20ins (50.8cm) waist.
Citing scholarship, Winterman reports that “the likelihood of a woman having Barbie’s body shape is one in 100,000. So not impossible, but extremely rare.”
Brandy B. let us know about an interesting article by Isis the Scientist at Science Blogs on the apparent whitening of a children’s cartoon character for the Christmas toy market. PBS’s cartoon, “Super Why!”, includes a female character, Princess Presto, who has the power to spell. Here’s what she looks like:
Yet the plush doll version of Princess Presto (who is supposed to have one White and one African American parent) looks significantly different:
I did find one set where she looks more like the original:
Isis the Scientists says that in comments to an article on the topic at the Orlando Sentinel, someone claiming to represent the company says the plush doll looks more like the original in person than the pictures online and says the following:
…The hair on the doll is more purple than black and this was an aesthetic choice…The placement of the facial features was intentionally tweaked to make the embroidered beanies look cute, so there is a slight difference from the onscreen character. The alterations were similarly made across all characters in the line, not just Princess Presto. There are almost always slight differences when translating the onscreen characters to off-air product especially with regard to colors because we have to use PMS or CMYK color choices for products.
Isis says BS — that having seen an actual version of the plush toy, it looks like it does in the photo, with very light skin, and that aside from that, other manufacturers seem to be able to make African American dolls just fine. And saying you changed things for “aesthetic” purposes doesn’t explain why you thought her existing characteristics were insufficiently aesthetically pleasing. Of course, we also don’t know for sure the person writing the comment was from PBS.
I tend to side with Isis here: the idea that technical limitations prevent making a more accurate representation of a dark-skinned doll is…sketchy, to say the least, and makes me think PBS needs to partner with a better toy design firm. And the choices about what the Princess Presto doll should look like in doll form put PBS in the position of appearing to think that a mixed-race character needs to be whitened to sell. PBS’s dolls exist in a marketplace where we’ve seen controversies about African American dolls being literally valued less than White dolls, and whatever their supposed reasons, it’s hard to get around the fact that all of the choices made in the name of aesthetics added up to a doll that looks awfully White.
Many Americans are familiar with “female genital mutilation.” The term is typically applied to practices occurring in some parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but not to genital cutting practices that happen in the U.S. and other Western societies (including cosmetic surgeries on the genitals, surgeries on children with ambiguous genitalia, and transsexual surgery) and, by definition, not to genital cutting practices that happen to men in both Western and non-Western countries (male circumcision and other rare but more extreme practices). “Female genital mutilation” elsewhere, then, is widely condemned by Americans, but rarely condemned in light of these other genital cutting practices, nor America’s own history of genital cutting. In fact, it was not unusual to subject women in the U.S. to proper circumcision (removal of the clitoral prepuce, or foreskin) until the 1960s and these procedures remained legal until 1996 (though, as far as I’m concerned, their legality is still up in the air).
In any case, RabbitWrite gives us a glimpse into this era in American history. Reading from a Playgirl published in 1973, she recounts the confessions of a woman who chose to be circumcised and offers a short critique.
Nils G. drew my attention to a fascinating now-abandoned America educational practice that nicely illustrates how ideas about ideal parenting shift over time. Between 1919 and 1969, the Home Economics departments of about 50 colleges and universities served as foster homes for orphans. Writes Emily Anthes at Wonderland:
During this time, homemaking… was considered to be something that could be conquered by science. Running a home based on instinct was considered to be woefully old-fashioned; the idea that raising a child and maintaining a home could be optimized by following a set of scientific rules was gaining currency.
Accordingly, getting a degree in Home Economics included a labratory set up exactly like a home: “practice apartments.” And what better to fill these homes with than “practice babies!” Students would practice applying the latest science-endorsed parenting techniques on orphans. An article published in the Journal of Home Economics in 1920, by Elizabeth Vermilye, explained the rotation of care:
Each girl, in rotation, carried the work of “baby manager” for one week… The “baby manager” assumed the entire responsibility for the care of the child during her period. She herself did the actual work of caring for him between the hours of 6.00 to 8.00 a.m. and from 4.30 to 6.00 p.m. During the day the child was in the care of three or four other students during the time they were not in class, the manager making the program for this care, giving instructions regarding food and other matters needing attention. The baby manager did the baby’s laundry work.
A student taking care of a practice baby:
Far from being exploited, it was believed that these babies would get not just excellent, attentive care, but the best, most scientifically-valid care. Vermilye claims that the examining physician was highly impressed with the children’s development during their stay with the students. She quotes him saying, “The improvement in the condition of these children speaks highly for your cooperative motherhood.”
These pictures of orphan and practice baby Bobby Domecon (surnamed after his role in the Domestic Economics department) reveal his chubbification.
A skinny 6 pounds at 2 months old:
Perking up at age 10 months:
Nice and chubby 5 months later:
Because these children were believed to be benefiting from the latest science of parenting, they were highly adoptable; many couples were eager to get their hands on a child that had such a good start in life (source).
Eventually, however, ideas about mothering began to change. In particular, scholars began to talk about Attachment Disorder and argue that a child’s development required that it strongly bond to one unique person. In 1954, a short Time magazine article on the subject included experts suggesting that the program was harmful. Starting with the Superintendent of the Illinois State Child Welfare Division, the author writes:
“It is not a normal family setting,” said he. “There are just too many persons involved in the handling of that child.” Heaven only knows, added the superintendent, how many neuroses little David might develop. Other officials seemed to agree. “Imagine.” cried Mrs. Babette Penner, director of the Women’s Services Division of United Charities, “what anxieties there are in a child who is given a bottle in twelve or more pairs of arms.”
The scientific consensus eventually changed and, as a result, by 1969, then, “practice babies” were a thing of the past.
In this video from ABC Doris Mitchell, Cornell University graduate and Home Economics major, sweetly remembers her experience helping raise a practice baby at Cornell University:
For another fantastic example of historic management of children without parents, see our post on the Orphan Trains.
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