Jessica F. and Dmitriy T.M. alerted us to a really interesting photo project by Duncan McNicholl, a member of Engineers Without Borders Canada. Frustrated with the portrayals of “poor Africans” he saw at home in Canada, he decided to take pictures of his acquaintances in Malawi “dressed to kill” and “dressed very poorly.” He explains his motivation:

We’ve all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out. Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things.

I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008. I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to. How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people?

The truth is that the development sector, just like any other business, needs revenue to survive. Too frequently, this quest for funding uses these kind of dehumanizing images to draw pity, charity, and eventually donations from a largely unsuspecting public…

This is not to say that people do not struggle, far from it, but the photos I was seeing only told part of the story… [To contribute to correcting this,] I am taking two photos of the same person; one photo with the typical symbols of poverty (dejected look, ripped clothes, etc.), and another of this person looking their very finest, to show how an image can be carefully constructed to present the same person in very different ways.

McNicholl asked his acquaintances to participate and to choose their own clothes and pose as they like. Here are two examples of the result:

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.

The image above, of a bird rescued from the gulf and cleaned of oil, may ease the ache in our hearts, but research suggests that euthanizing the birds would be more humane.

Environmental biologist and expert on oil clean-up, Silvia Gaus, explained that:

Catching and cleaning oil-soaked birds oftentimes leads to fatal amounts of stress for the animals… Furthermore, forcing the birds to ingest coal solutions — or Pepto Bismol, as animal-rescue workers are doing along the Gulf Coast — in an attempt to prevent the poisonous effects of the oil is ineffective… The birds will eventually perish anyway from kidney and liver damage (paraphrased at Speigel).

Further, birds who are relocated are often so disoriented that they die anyway, not able to re-establish survival routines in their new environment.

Gaus claims that 99% of the rescued and cleaned birds will die, usually within about seven days, and it will be a more painful death that takes longer than if they’d just been left alone.  As a consequence, many recommend quick and painless euthanization.  A National Geographic article complicates the story, reporting that survival rates depend on characteristics of the spill, but still reports that scientists largely have little hope that many birds rescued from the Gulf will survive.  A better strategy for saving birds, they say, is trying to keep them out of the oil in the first place.

If cleaning birds is unlikely to save them, and euthanizing them ultimately more humane, why are we cleaning birds?

The obvious answer is that it is good for BP’s public relations.  We feel better when we see the shiny oil-free feathers; those images make us feel like there is hope for the animals caught in the spill.  It makes it look as if BP is really doing something good.  In this case, why would BP care if the de-oiling worked?  They benefit whether the birds die (a slower, more painful) death or not.  It costs about $700 to clean an oiled pelican, but that may be money well spent.

There may be an even more nefarious reason.  There are fines and penalties for killing wildlife that can be levied against corporations.  The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, for example, specifies that corporations can be fined up to $500,000 if responsible for the death of a brown pelican.  Perhaps if the bird dies after release, without direct evidence that its death was caused by oil ingestion (without an expensive autopsy), then BP will not be vulnerable to those fines.  Further, the total number of dead birds attributed to their spill be lower; those numbers, instead, will be in the column marked “saved.”

UPDATE: Jay Holcomb at the International Bird Rescue Research Center disagrees with Gaus and other pessimistic scientists.  (Thanks to Paul for the link.)  It may also be that techniques for cleaning the birds have improved over time.  So the 1% number is probably wrong, or at least needs to be qualified.  Still, I think BP’s interests still apply, but it’s overstating it to say that de-oiling is bad for birds.  Thanks to everyone in the comments who added contrasting information!

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.

While most people look at the Gulf of Mexico and see seafood and beaches, oil executives see the Gulf differently.  They see a giant grid containing thousands of squares of possibility, each potentially yielding billions of dollars.

You see this:

(photo credit: Dmitriy Pritykin)

They see this, a grid of the entire gulf representing regions available for lease (click to enlarge):

(source)

This is a close up off the Louisiana coast (green lines and regions are oil pipelines and fields, the pink are the same for gas):

(source)

There are 6,652 leased squares, amounting to 22 percent of the lease-able Gulf (click to enlarge) and approximately 4,000 oil production platforms in the Gulf:

(source)

I offer this only as an illustration of the degree to which the Gulf has been commodified.  The Gulf is big, big, big business:

(source)

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.

While I was at my grandma’s house this week I read Buying In: What We Buy and Who We Are, a fascinating book by Rob Walker. There will be more posts to come in the next few weeks, but for starters, I was struck by the results of a 2006 survey Walker mentions by the Pew Research Center. The survey asked people if various items were luxuries or necessities. Here are the results from 2006 and 1996:

Clearly, over time we’re defining more and more items as necessities rather than luxuries:

A breakdown of some results by age:

If I had to guess, I’d think the fact that younger people are less likely to say a TV is a necessity than older people is due not to less concern about TV but more willingness to watch content online. Does that seem reasonable? Other explanations?

The survey found that the higher a person’s income, the more items they define as a necessity:

The biggest differences by income were for dishwashers, cell phones, computers, and high-speed internet, which are more likely to be defined as a necessity as income increases.

The Pew Center’s website has links to more detailed breakdowns, as well as full info on the question wording, methodology, etc. And as the authors say in the summary, the results show only a one-way change: in no case did they find that the overall percent defining something as a necessity decreased between 1996 and 2006. As they put it,

The old adage proclaims that “necessity is the mother of invention.” These findings serve as a reminder that the opposite is also true: invention is the mother of necessity. Throughout human history, from the wheel to the computer, previously unimaginable inventions have created their own demand, and eventually their own need.

The income data would seem to back this up: what we have, we often come to define as necessities.

I would love to see an international comparison of some sort. I’ll see what I can find.

UPDATE: I haven’t found an international comparison yet, but I discovered that the Pew Research Center conducted the survey again in 2009 to see if attitudes had changed during the recession. Quite a striking change for several items:

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JustReading sent along a screenshot of the “shop” tab at Etnies.com.  It separates their products into “mens,” “girls,” and “kids” (the grammar mistake is theirs too).

So, yeah, men are men and women are girls.  We’ve featured more examples of this phenomenon: a vintage ad for “girl” pens and “Beer Man” and “Beer Girl” Halloween costumes.  Listen also to Bob Barker’s creepy girl talk.

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.

Stacey Burns wrote in to tell us about her successful effort to fight an ad campaign that objectified women and trivialized sex work.  She explains:

USI Wireless, an Internet provider that has a ten-year contract to provide wireless to the city of Minneapolis, recently launched a new ad campaign promoting its service. The ad features the image of a young woman who we are clearly meant to read as a sex worker, accompanied by the text “FAST, CHEAP, and SATISFACTION GUARANTEED.”

A photo of the billboard was placed on Facebook, which she saw on a friend’s page, and then re-posted with a critique.  She contacted the company, whose representatives were “polite but dismissive, telling [her] that they test-marketed the ad and it did well in focus groups.”  The photo of the billboard went viral and she took it to the City Council, who “responded to public outcry and succeeded in getting the ad pulled from the 12 locations it was posted” (story here).

Burns’ story is a nice example of how collective action, facilitated by the internet, can make a difference.

For more examples of this kind of resistance, read about fights against the Obama sock monkey, a Target ad, Mr. Wasabi, Frito Bandito, Motrin’s idea of motherhood, and the rebellyon.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Cory Doctorow took this snapshot of a vintage poster in the window of Simpson’s Family Barbershop in Menlo Park, CA.  The poster makes explicit what is usually left unsaid.  We don’t usually pick our hairstyles according to whim.  Instead, we are supposed to choose from a set of normative hairstyles (ones that are socially approved), unless we are willing to face the social police.

Found on BoingBoing thanks to Lauren McGuire.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Ryan was browsing the Walmart website for a toy for his soon-to-be one-year-old child and happened upon this play cop car:

Both boys and girls can aspire to be cops, of course, but the specifications on the product insist that it is for boys:

See also our post in which the exact same toy is marketed to boys as a doctor’s kit and to girls as a nurse’s kit.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.