This was originally posted at Jezebel by Lindsay Robertson. Thanks to Chloe A. at Feministing for drawing our attention to it as a possible cross-post!

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Last night, ABC used hidden cameras and actors to see what regular people would do if they saw an obviously abused woman being harassed by her boyfriend. A lot of regular people failed the test.

The highly-successful 20/20 spinoff What Would You Do? brings social experiments to television, using variables to test how ordinary people react to situations such as seeing someone steal a bike in a park, or witnessing a deli clerk give a blind man incorrect change. Lately, the show has been raising the stakes, and last night reporter John Quiñones showed us what restaurant diners do when they see a very obviously bruised woman getting picked on by her boyfriend at a nearby table.

As they often do, the producers used different variables to see if they changed the outcome, staging the scene with both white and African American actor “couples” to see if race affected bystanders’ willingness to step in. In both cases, the actresses were helped by fellow diners (though fewer men got involved with the African American couple):

But then they tried a different variable: the women’s clothing. When the same actresses dressed “provocatively,” and we’re talking clothing that’s pretty average for a Saturday night, not Julia Roberts’ blue-and-white monokini-thing in Pretty Woman, nobody came to their rescue. Diners complained to the staff that the couple were “upsetting customers” and one man told the abusive boyfriend actor that the two were “embarrassing themselves as a couple,” but nothing like what happened when the women were dressed conservatively occurred in this case, and in fact, two middle-aged female witnesses joked with each other about the beaten-up woman being a prostitute.

While obviously the show is highly unscientific (notice that in the second video, the white actor is inexplicably dressed up in a suit) and meant for entertainment, it can’t be a bad thing to force viewers to think about issues such as racism or domestic violence. Maybe the next time they see someone being abused, they’ll be more likely to step up. (After all, they might be on TV!)

What Would You Do? [ABC]

Send an email to Lindsay Robertson, the author of this post, at lindsay@lindsayism.com.

Sixty-two percent of Americans think that the country should reduce spending in order to cut the deficit.  What do they think we should cut?  Nothing really.

Well, nothing except foreign aid.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones reminds us that foreign aid is about one percent of the U.S. budget.

…there were only four [other] areas that even a quarter of the population was willing to cut: mass transit, agriculture, housing, and the environment. At a rough guess, these areas account for about 3% of the federal budget. You could slash their budgets by a third and still barely make a dent in federal spending.

The Economist, via BoingBoing.

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.

This cute two-minute video explains it:

Feminist Frequency, via my friend Ronke O.

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.

This graph, from Flowing Data, shows the obesity rates of different generational cohorts as they age.  Each differently colored lines represents people who were born in different decades (between 1926 and 1935 and on up).  Ascending lines represent higher percentages of obesity.  Horizontal progress represents age.

So, first things first: rates of obesity go up as a cohort ages.

What else?

People born after 1975 are starting out with higher rates of obesity than people born between 1956 and 1975.

And.

Obesity rates seem to rise at a pretty consistent rate as cohorts age.  So, if a cohort starts out with a high rate of obesity, they will have an ever higher rate 10 years later, and an even higher rate ten years after that, and so on.

The consequence:  Higher rates of obesity overall for each cohort that follows the last.

The data for the most recent cohort, born between 1996 and 2005, however, looks like it might be bucking the trend.

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.

Dmitriy T.M. alerted us to a new report by the Guttmacher Institute on the characteristics of women who have abortions.  There’s lots of interesting data there, including the figure below that tells us how women are paying for their abortions.

According to the study, 33% of the women in their study were uninsured, but 57% of them paid for their abortions out-of-pocket.  Why?

I was able to track down two reasons.   First, medicaid only covers abortions in the cases of rape and incest or if a woman might die if she proceeds with the pregnancy.  Second, according to another report by Guttmacher, 15 states deny or restrict the coverage of private insurance companies or the insurance plans of employees of the state:

The fact that non-therapeutic abortion is not covered by medicaid and by some private insurers, of course, hurts poor women and their families the most.  While middle and upper class women can always find the money to make up for the gap in their insurance, poor women may not be able to do so.

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.

Eden H. sent in this image, found at FlowingData, that shows the categories federal ag subsidies fall into, compared to federal recommendations for how often we should eat those types of food (originally found at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine):

Just to clarify, the 73.8% figure for meat and dairy on the left doesn’t refer just to direct subsidies; it also includes subsidies for crops that are grown primarily to feed livestock. The “grains” category (13.23%) refers to grains grown for human consumption. If you included all grains in one category it would be much larger, but somewhat misleading in that the vast majority of grains grown in the U.S. aren’t intended for people to eat.

Without subsidized grain, keeping livestock in confined feeding facilities to fatten them up would be much more expensive, if not entirely cost-prohibitive. Thus, farm subsidies are an essential component of U.S. agribusiness.

J.L. Bell at Oz and Ends counted the number of rumors about President G.W. Bush and President Obama that were identified and determined by rumor-validation site, snopes.com, to be true, false, a mixture of true and false, or uncertain.  It turns out, there are a lot more rumors and a lot more false rumors about Obama than there were about Bush:

Jay Livingston summarizes:

In less than two years, Obama rumor-mongers have had nearly twice the output that their Bush counterparts managed in eight years – 87 to 47. And while the Bush rumors split almost evenly true-false, false Obama rumors dwarfed the true ones. The false rumors about Obama outnumbered the total number of rumors about Bush. And while the lies about Obama are almost all negative, some of the false rumors about Bush are quite flattering, along the lines of the George Washington cheery tree rumor – like the rumor that had Bush paying for the funeral of a boy who had drowned near the Crawford ranch.

Looking closer at the mixed rumors, Bell reports that:

I delved down to the stories that the site designates as a mixture of truth and falsehood. For Obama, in most cases the truth is innocuous while the lie reflects poorly on the President, particularly photographs that are misrepresented or show behavior that produced no complaints when his predecessors did the same. In contrast, in this mixture of truth and falsehood about George W. Bush praying with an injured soldier, the lie reflected well on that President…

Looking at the last two Presidential candidate losers reveals the same pattern: more false rumors about Kerry than McCain.

Bell interprets this evidence to mean that Republicans fight dirtier than Democrats.  What do you think?

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.

I swore months ago to never post another Evony ad. I’ve seen so many, and the direction they’re going seems pretty clear.

But today I’m breaking my vow. I submit to you this screencap, taken by spinach, of an Evony pop-up ad featuring a faceless woman’s torso, obscuring the website spinach was viewing at the time: a biography of feminist poet/theorist Adrienne Rich.

A moment of silence, please.