Always entertaining, Jamie Keiles, of  the Seventeen Magazine Project and Teenagerie, offered the age distribution of the “hot guys” profiled in the June issue of Seventeen magazine.  This issue, after all, was the “Hot Guys of Summer” issue.  Fun!

Keiles writes that:

…only two of the guys, Justin Bieber and Nick Jonas, were even in the age range for reading the magazine, ages 12 to 19. What I found weirder, though, is that the largest groups of males featured in the article fell into the two oldest age ranges. This means its possible that the oldest male hottie, Charlie Bewley, could have fathered the youngest targeted Seventeen reader, age 12, when he was 17 years old.

Here’s the data based on an N of 13:

Men and women do marry asymmetrically, with women, on average, marrying men who are taller, more educated, who make a bit more money, have a bit more status, and are a bit older.  The average age of marriage for women is 25 and the average age for men is 27.  So this is some evidence of early socialization to this idea.

But there’s more…

Not to be underestimated, Keiles asked the question that is on all of our minds: What percentage of hot guys are vampires or vampire-adjacent?

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.

Last semester my colleague, Mary Christianakis, assigned her students a mash up.  The idea was to take two forms of art (loosely defined) and combine them to inspire, instead of state, a critical perspective.  Below is one of the exemplars, by her student, Samantha Figueroa.  It combines scenes from Pocahontas with a spoken word poem, Slip of the Tongue, by Adriel Luis.

Nice work, Samantha!

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.

Last month the cast of Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The public responded negatively.  Says one snarky observer on the NYSE’s Facebook page:

The kids of the Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this week.  In a related story, civilization is down 500 points.

The trouble, it seems, comes from the weirdness of bringing together trivial-and-fake-“reality”-stars with the very-important-and-really-real-U.S.-financial-market.

Economic sociologist Brooke Harrington, however, thinks the two are less incongruent than they seem.  She writes:

I’d like to suggest that what seems so wrong with that picture of Snooki and company ringing the opening bell actually makes a lot of sense sociologically. If this meeting of worlds—entertainment and the stock market—seems strange, it may be because we’re so used to regarding the markets as “real,” rather than as a performance (or even as entertainment in their own right).

Markets, she explains, aren’t “more ‘real’ than ‘reality TV.'”  Instead, both the characters on Jersey Shore and markets are playing themselves.   The reality show stars respond to expectations of “Guido” and “Guidette” personalities.  Likewise, the market responds to  economists whose predictions often create the very reality that they anticipate.

Harrington brings in a fancy concept:

Both are engaged in producing what French sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard calls “the simulacrum:” a copy without an original, a pretense that replaces and ultimately negates “reality” so successfully that we no longer care about what is real.

She finishes:

Theorized through this lens, the image of the Jersey Shore cast ringing the opening bell at the NYSE persists in memory not because it is represents a collision of worlds, but because it brings together two genres of performance whose entertainment value depends on their purported “reality.”

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.

In the game of Monopoly, as the title implies, the object is to get as much money as possible, ideally bankrupting all the other players until you are the only player left.  The game, then, socializes children into a particular version of economic interaction, one quite compatible with capitalism as we know it.

The idea that Monopoly is a socializing agent is brought into stark relief by The Landlord’s Game (from which, it is believed, Monopoly was derived).

Patented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904, the object of this game was to illustrate the economic inequality inherent in the renter/owner relationship.  From Wikipedia:

Magie based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.

The game was manufactured beginning in 1910.  In 1935 the patent was ultimately purchased, ironically, by Parker Brothers; they wanted to buy the patents of all competing economy-based board games so as to have a monopoly on the genre.

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.

Kathleen P. sent in a commercial for Allstate Insurance that draws on stereotypes of teenagers:

This ad depicts a teenager girl, to be sure, but teenagers of both sexes and all races and classes tend to be portrayed negatively, albeit in different ways.  Jamie Keiles, a teenager herself, is trying to draw attention to this at her blog, Teenagerie.  Keiles writes:

Through the eyes of the media, teenagers are shown as narcissistic, lazy, and unintelligent. We are condemned for being tech-obsessed, shallow, and impulsive.

Keiles, however, blames media itself for promulgating this stereotype, giving teens the message that their lives should fall within its boundaries.  She’s hoping her project will make a difference.

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.

Martin W. found two neat graphs over at The Horizon that show the 2000 world population’s distribution by latitude and longitude.

It’s not that they’re shocking, in the sense that of course we’d expect more people to be living in temperate/tropical latitudes than in the Arctic, given availability of resources to support human settlements (at least until the development of modern conveniences like heat, canned food, and quick transportation to get them to people far from their sources). And the huge spikes where China and India are make sense too. But I still think it’s visually striking to see, for instance, how little of the world’s population is located in the Americas. And the patterns we see here certainly have important implications for global economic development and the likely highly uneven distribution of negative impacts of environmental/climate change, among other issues.

But then, I’m also just a geek about maps and like looking at them in general.

Right?

Or, at least, we’re constantly told that women love shoes.

This ad in the August 2010 issue of Elle Canada got a “major eye roll” from JT.  Women need focus (focus vitamin water, that is), so that they can shop for shoes.  They’re just so many kiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnds!

Meanwhile, Jacob spotted this Nine West sign in the Pittsburgh airport.  It reads “Everything A Woman Wants: MORE SHOES AND PURSES!”:

Both of these ads present women as obsessed with shoes (and purses).  I am not obsessed with either.  I buy all my shoes at thrift stores (except running shoes) and I care so little about purses that Gwen actually buys them for me in Las Vegas and mails them to Los Angeles so that I don’t carry the exact same purse until I die.

That is all.

See also: Men hate shopping.

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.

In today’s edition of context is everything, this 1962 ad for the ironically-named Humble Oil and Refining Company brags that it produces enough energy to “melt 7 million tons of glacier!”

Text:

EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER!

This giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet, the petroleum energy Humble supplies- if converted into heat- could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second! To meet the nation’s growing needs for energy, Humble has applied science to nature’s resources to become America’s Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research, Humble provides energy in many forms- to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the “Happy Motoring” sign is the World’s First Choice!

Ad and transcript borrowed from Ms. Marx.

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.