It turns out that reports of white ethnic identification on the U.S. Census shift so dramatically over time, that simple demographic change cannot account for them.  Instead, (especially) white people, who can largely pick which of their ethnic ancestries to emphasize at any given time, are inconsistent.  Accordingly, ethnicities fall in and out of favor.  For example, German became quite unpopular during World War II.  Similarly, American Indian rose in popularity in the 1960s.  Today, many people proudly report their Irish ancestry, but there was a time in American history when one might keep it a secret if one could.

In Blue Collar Bayou, Jaques Henry and Carl Bankston III describe the recent resurgence of Cajun identification in Southern Louisiana.  They explain that, between 1975 and 2000, there was a 300% increase in the number of people who identify as Cajun.

Cajuns are a people who settled in Southern Louisiana after being exiled from Acadia (now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) in the mid 1700s.  Mostly poor, for a very long time “Cajun” was a bad thing to be and negative stereotypes abounded.

Henry and Bankston explain that for most of their time in Louisiana, the portrayal of Cajuns was “solidly pejorative” (p. 65). They write:

Their Canadian origin, the dire circumstances of their settlement, and their early status as destitute refugees also set the Acadians apart from other white groups in Louisiana… [who] generally held higher socioeconomic positions… These groups… viewed the Acadian, and later Cajun, community as distinct and of little worth.

At the time, their food was described as “adequate.”

It wasn’t until the 1960s that these negative stereotypes started to change and now Cajun ethnicity, country, music and, especially, food is wildly popular:

Today Louisiana’s biggest problem isn’t getting people interested in Cajun food, it’s policing all the imitators.  Products labeled “Cajun” are so profitable today that the Louisiana legislature is trying to combat the “fake Cajun [product] problem” by using a logo on all Louisiana products that says “Product of Louisiana Certified Cajun“:

The new popularity of Cajun food can be attributed in part to efforts by the Louisiana tourism board and a handful of celebrity chefs, like Paul Prudhomme, who had the resources, skills, and business acumen to transform the food into a cuisine.

A nice example, I thought, of the social construction of both food and ethnicity.

Images here, here, and here.

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.

They engineered this, it seems perfectly reasonable (all that squatting for the crisper?), so why does it seem so bizarre!

I postulate that one reason that the cabinet refrigerator never caught on was because of standardization.  Most new homes are built to accommodate a stand-up fridge.  Home builders would have to choose: stand-up or cabinet level?  Whatever home builders chose is what most home buyers would go with, unless they re-modeled their kitchens.  Standardization, while quite useful, can also kill innovation.

NEW (Apr. ’10)!  Another example (bottom left):

(Both images from Vintage ads: here and here.)

ALSO NEW (Apr. ’10)! In the comments, ckilgore linked to a photograph of her grandma’s kitchen… that totally had, and still has, one of these fridges! People in the comments had lots of good reasons for why it was impractical… but I still think it’s cool:

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.

Liz B. sent in a screen shot and some commentary.  She did such a nice job explaining that I’m just going to let her do it:

I’m an undergraduate student at a Big Ten school, and today I was perusing the course tracking website that gives students access to their grades, their homework etc. One of the features is that you can change the “theme” of the site… I came across the “physiology and anatomy” theme…

What struck me was not that they had a physiological representation of both sexes, but by how gendered their stances are. The man stands straight, looking ahead, even weight distribution. The female form is almost classically passive, hands held behind her back, weight distribution uneven.

Close up:

Liz continues:

Its striking that these notions about gendered bodies are inserted into even seemingly scientifically oriented things. Its a fair assumption that the designers for the site intended this theme for those who are participating in an anatomically related major, people who are being (or should be) trained to view the body, sans socially constructed gender norms. Yet, here, we see a prime example of gender presentation used in a scientific context… [A]re our doctors and scientists being instilled with these kinds of images throughout their academic lives? If so, its no small wonder why there are doctors and scientists who lend credibility to gender norms by operating on them as if they are nature, or why many people view gender as so fatalistically natural.

More examples:

Jennifer sent in these two anatomy illustrations from a gym. “Surprisingly,” she said:

they had one for both men and women – you would think the two would be practically identical and you could get away with a generic figure.

Then I noticed that there was a big difference in how the two sexes were presented.  The male figure is standing straight up, lifting a heavy weight.  We see him in a simple front, side, and back view. The female figure, however, is posed in a flirtatious manner, and we see her only from the front and back.  Even when she doesn’t have skin or facial features, she’s still presenting her chest and butt and tossing her hair to the side.  She’s also shown lifting what appear to be very light hand weights.

It’s a problematic message: men go to the gym to become functional and stronger, women come to the gym to become sexually attractive but not TOO strong while they’re at it.

Here they are:

Liz Q. sent us a link to a CBS News video on urinary tract infections (via Jezebel) that included the following anatomical illustration:

Halley M. sent in this image from the Wikipedia entry under “human” and “anatomy.” It presents also presents the female in a decorative, as opposed to illustrative, pose (after the jump because NSFW):

more...

Example One: Is it me, or do the bare buns in this ad seem just a little bit child-porny?  It’s a nice example of how our sensibilities change; these days there is a loud and ubiquitous discourse around children’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation.  A discourse that, I think, would make this ad inappropriate today.

Example Two: After decades of anti-smoking public health initiatives which included, along with health warnings, the association of smoking with bad breath, yellow teeth, and stinking clothes and hair, I somehow don’t think food would be marketed with a cigarette in its mouth (1950).

Example Three: This candy ad begins “Some tigers eat people.  I eat tigers.  His tail was 3 chocolates longer.”  Then, it continues, “P.S. I made a gun from the tube.”   Today, in most parts of the U.S., childhood innocence is no longer marketed with firearms.

Source: Vintage ads (here, here, and here) and Found in Mom’s Basement.

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 Marital Bliss Bar, sent in by Chenoa A.:

The description of the candy bar at the source says:

Here’s a sweet way for “soon-to-be-married” or “brand-new” grooms to get used to the fact that they’ll have to re-learn how to calculate percentages once married….talk about new math!

So, just to be clear, the narrative is:

Guys… in marriage, women get more; getting used to it is the only way you’re going to be happy.

Turns out the data suggest otherwise.  The following things are true, on average:

1.  Married men are happier than unmarried men.  But the opposite is true for women.  Unmarried women are happier than married women.

2.  Women are more likely to file for divorce than men and, after divorce, women are happier, while men are less happy.

And yet, time and again, we’re told that getting men hate the idea of getting married and are wives are such a drag (see here and here for examples).

(One of the reasons, by the way, that women are less happy in marriage is because they do a disproportionate amount of housework and childcare.)

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 Dove deodorant commercial, sent in by Emma H., is a nice, simple example of how women are taught that certain feminine performances are required.  In the commercial, the woman wants to wear a sleeveless dress. Her comment is followed by the following text:

Emphasis on “has” and “of course,” of course.

Watch it:

This is the same Dove, of course, that markets itself with the “real beauty” campaign and is owned by the same company as Axe.

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.

Boy, you can’t open the paper these days without seeing something about how irrevocably fucked California’s finances are. With a budget deficit approaching a staggering $40 billion dollars, it’s worth noting that not only is their deficit the biggest in the country in absolute terms but also as a proportion of state GDP. That’s pretty impressive given that California’s economy is bigger than all but a handful of countries.

In my line of work, “Raiding the UCs” is a very real phenomenon. Faculty have seen salaries slashed by 20% (with talk of more cuts to come) while students have experienced dramatic tuition hikes – although it’s fair to note that in-state tuition before the hikes was far lower than in most states. The recent cuts come on the tail end of a 15 year trend that has seen the university system’s share of the state budget halved. With too many obligations and not enough money, it would make sense that cuts to a vital sector like education would be indicative of cuts across the board.

Oh.

Lost in the budget debate is the fact that California spends nearly 10% of its annual budget on the Department of Corrections. Eight billion dollars. Let’s see that with the zeroes: $8,000,000,000. This is, of course, in addition to other money spent on law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Such figures look reasonable only in comparison to a trainwreck like Michigan, where a mind-blowing 22% of the state budget is spent on warehousing the poor in prisons.

We can re-hash all the usual, obvious, and valid culprits – “guideline” sentencing, mandatory minimums, three strikes, a vast social underclass deriving minimal benefit from the state’s aggregate wealth – but we’d say nothing new. The more important questions is how prison systems, and California’s in particular, can absorb the coming increase in crime concomitant with an extended period of double digit unemployment. At a time when every agency needs to get cheaper, the CDC must continue to get bigger (and inevitably costlier) to provide a convenient dumping ground for society’s expendables.

This problem is fascinating because like the Federal budget there is no reasonable move that doesn’t make the situation worse. California can start paroling more people. With no jobs available even for Californians with clean criminal backgrounds, we can imagine how few ex-inmates will find an “honest” living and how high the rate of recidivism will be. It can adopt different sentencing guidelines, which is politically unlikely and will provide only gradual long-term relief. They can simply stop arresting and/or charging so many people, but that too is politically infeasible and may ultimately lead to increased crime levels. They can, as publications as mainstream as Time have noted, formally surrender in the War on Drugs and legalize weed. I will believe that when I see it (although I don’t entirely discount it as the budget situation gets progressively more desperate). They could simply slash the budget, which may not be realistic given the high fixed costs of the system and the current levels of overcrowding/understaffing.

Spending twice as much on prisons as higher education should prompt some soul searching. I won’t hold my breath; in all likelihood the status quo will be maintained and the share of the budget devoted to corrections will continue to increase. Devoting one of every ten tax dollars to locking up the poor is understood as the cost of doing business in a state and society that choose to solve the problem of a persistent underclass the same way it deals with trash; that is, by collecting it in cities and shipping it out to the middle of nowhere to be buried under a mountain of other garbage, never to be seen or thought of again.

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Ed is a Political Scientist who claims to finds “the spatial and geographic context of political behavior — partisanship, turnout, and public opinion” — particularly thrilling.  You can learn more, vaguely inappropriate, things about Ed here.  In the meantime, we’re thrilled to feature his post questioning California’s questionable budget priorities. He blogs at Gin and Tacos.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Reader Clifford McC. and his (female) partner both receive Bicycling magazine (which, he explains, is more of a free advertisement that they get whether they want to or not).  In any case, this month’s issue was the 2010 Buyer’s Guide and, though the issues each received were identical, the one addressed to his partner was stickered:

The sticker read, “BONUS! SPECIAL WOMEN’S SECTION.”

Perhaps they were trying to be inclusive, but a sticker advertising a special women’s section just goes to show that the magazine is, first-and-foremost, for men.

For the same phenomenon elsewhere, see our posts featuring websites selling dinosaur toys and Legos(see “exhibit three”), each with a special section for girls.

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.