I’ve posted in the past about surgical procedures used to give “Asian” eyes a more “Caucasian” or “Western” look. As Alexia R. showed us, though, there are temporary means of getting a similar effect, particularly gluing a fold into eyelids. A quick google of “eyelid glue” came up with products such as this for sale on ebay:

I don’t have many thoughts to to add that I didn’t say in the earlier post, except that watching that video has made my eyelids really itch and I can’t imagine what it must feel like to have them glued together. And also I’m kind of horrified by what apparently counts as not wearing much makeup; I had no idea I could conceivably be putting three different products on my eyelashes as part of my daily beauty regimen.

NOTE: Some commenters have made a good point about my post title and the implication that people who try to get an eyelid crease are trying to look more “Caucasian,” given that about half of people living on the Asian continent have an eyelid fold. I put “Caucasian” and “Western” in quotes to acknowledge the fact that I know these categories are socially created. But I think they have a good point about making assumptions as to why someone might use a product like this. The websites for eyelid surgery often DO very explicitly advertise their procedures as producing a “Caucasian” eye, so I think there often is that understanding or motivation, but people may use products like these for a variety of motivations, and I shouldn’t automatically imply that it is to approximate U.S. standards of (White) beauty. Thanks for the comments, everyone!

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

The New York Times has some interactive graphics showing various types of data about social class and class mobility. You can see where you fall in terms of four characteristics often used to measure class status, see the overall class breakdown for various occupations, and so on. This graph shows social class mobility by depicting which social class (divided into quintiles) the U.S. population fell into in 1998 based on the social class they started out in from 1988:

You can hover over a particular group, such as “lower middle,” to see the outcome just for them.

Another graph of social mobility:

This next graph counters the idea that poor families remain poor forever (often explained by some version of the “culture of poverty” thesis) by showing that if you track a poor family over multiple generations, there is a general trend toward upward mobility:

That isn’t to ignore the fact that being poor leads to circumstances (poor schools, etc.) that make upward mobility difficult. But the idea that poor families stay poor for generation after generation, passing on poverty almost like a genetic characteristic, simplifies a more complex story about how families become poor, how long they remain poor, and the importance of looking at structural factors as opposed to a “cycle of poverty” explanation.

Since Lisa shared an embarrassing story today, I’ll share one too: for some reason, I think because he had the album Purple Rain and was famous for wearing purple a lot, for the longest time I thought the book The Color Purple must be a biography about Prince.

Readers’ minds think alike, sometimes, and the changing advertising campaign for the “empire building” video game Evony caught the attention of fds, torenc, Assaf N., Elisabeth R., Sabriel, Nicole O., and Liz B. (images found at Gawker and Coding Horror, and hope I didn’t miss anyone who sent it in). Online ads for the game started out like this:

Then they added a woman with a little boob showing:

In case people weren’t noticing the cleavage, the ad evolved into one where the boobs are pointed out a bit more explicitly:

Moving on to a slightly more realistic look:

Christina W. sent us one with a woman actively disrobing and saying “Come play, my Lord”:

Mick H. found a close-up version similar to the one above:

D.R.S. sent us another:

And then they realized they could just dispense with all subtlety and get to the important part:

If that didn’t work, why not straight up near-nudity.  Dan J. found this one here:

This ad submitted by both Alex B. and Kim H. seems to be taking the advertising to a whole new level.  No longer content with boobs, they seem to be moving towards implied female masturbation:

Wtfcats sent this one in:

NEW (Dec. ’09)! Tom R. sent in this next one with a nice “we’re lesbian, but just for you” flair.  Using the term “discreetly”  to imply porn, it reads “join the fun”:

NEW (Jan. ’10)! Thanks to Chris M., Tinpantithesis, and Ryan, we now know that there is an Evony ad that doesn’t say anything about the game at all.  You simply see this image and are invited to click on her boobs, butt, or lips to turn her into the “ideal woman”:

When you click, you are taken to this site, which asks you to sign up for the game because “obvious[ly],” “it makes you feel like King!”

Or sometimes apparently you get this view:

Presumably some players will be disappointed that there isn’t a female “queen” to be saved or oogled in the game at all–the women were invented only for the purpose of adding boobs to the ads. Jeff A. from Coding Horror says,

Evony, thanks for showing us what it means to take advertising on the internet to the absolute rock bottom … then dig a sub-basement under that, and keep on digging until you reach the white-hot molten core of the Earth. I’ve always wondered what that would be like. I guess now I know.

ALSO NEW (Dec. ’09)! Apparently the Evony ads have become such a thing that other games are referencing them to advertise themselves.  Timm F. sent along the ad below making fun of the Evony ads.  It reads, “She is actually in our game, my lord”:

Mark Thoma at Economist’s View posted the following graphical representation of changes in the age distribution of the population of the U.S. between 1950 and today, and projected to 2050:

The bump, slowly moving off to the right, is the baby boom generation. The downward slope in the lines as you move to the right represents a population with a larger percentage of older people or, in other words, an older average age. If the forecast is correct, about 10 percent of the U.S. population will be over 75 by 2050.

Mark observes that many examinations of historical trends likely need to take into account this changing age distribution. For example, he asks:

…with a larger and larger fraction of the population moving into the asset liquidation phase of their life-cycle, how is the saving rate affected? How much of the change in the saving rate in recent years is attributable solely to changes in the age-distribution of the population?

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

Elizabeth M. and Toban B. sent in a clip from the British TV show “That Mitchell and Webb Look” that has a humorous take on how advertisers target men and women:

Remember the hymen? The hymen is that flap of skin that “seals” the vagina until a woman has sexual intercourse for the first time. Supposedly one could tell whether a girl/woman was a virgin by whether her hymen was “intact.” (It bears repeating that neither of these things are true: it doesn’t “seal” the vagina and is not a sign of virginity at all.)

Because an intact hymen signaled virginity, and virginity has been considered very important, preserving and protecting the hymen was, at one time, an important task for girls and women. You can imagine how tricky this made the marketing of that brand new product: the tampon. Early marketing made an effort to dispel the idea that sticking just anything up there de-virginized you. It worked. (In fact, some partially credit tampon manufacturers for the de-fetishization of the hymen that’s occurred over the last 60 years.)

We still see tampon marketing addressing the question. Here’s a link to a website where it’s a FAQ and here’s an example of an advertisement from the ’70s ’90s:

Selected text:

I really wanted to use tampons, but I’d heard you had to be, you know, ‘experienced.’  So I asked my friend Lisa.  Her mom is a nurse so I figured she’d know.  Lisa told me she’d been using Petal Soft Plastic Applicator Tampax tampons since her very first period and she’s a virgin.  In fact, you can use them at any age and still be a virgin.

See this post, too, on the marketing of tampon to women in the workforce (wearing pants!) during World War II.

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

Married women in the U.S. do about 70 to 80 percent of the housework. When women marry, the number of hours they spend on housework increases; for men, it stays the same. When couples have children, her housework increases three times as much as his. Feminist women do less housework than non-feminist women; men married to feminist women do the same amount of housework as men married to non-feminist women.

All this and more, including some data on Portugal, China, Russia, South Africa, Italy, Britain, and the Netherlands, can be found at this fact sheet at the blog Social Studies.

The discrepancy between the number of hours wives and husbands contribute to housework decreased between 1965 and 1995:

According to the fact sheet:

…in the 1990s, U.S. women spent about half the time on housework as they had 30 years earlier (17.5 hours down from 30 each week), while men, on the other hand, were spending just over twice the time they had spent (10 hours up from 4.9).

Women, however, still do nearly twice the amount of housework as men.

You may notice that the increase in hours that husbands now spend on housework does not match the decrease in hours that wives now spend on housework.  This means that we have dirtier houses (no, really, we do).  We also now hire housecleaners, and that makes up some of the difference.  It may also be true that our gadgets (e.g., washers and dryers) save us time.

Relevant Links

Historical examples of the social construction of housework: husbands “help” wives by buying machines, gadgets replace slaves, feminism by whirlpool.

Contemporary cultural endorsements of the idea that men just don’t do housework (not so funny in light of the data): porn for women, men are jackasses, cleaning products are for women, men do housework fantasy calendar, KFC offers moms a night off, men are lazy oafs, and porn for new moms.

Also, women love to clean: cleaning is power, joy in cleaning, cleaning products are women’s special friend, and mmm, a new washer.

And, the intersection of housework, gender, and race: the color of housework.

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

The recent federal bailouts have drawn attention to CEO compensation. The screenshots below, taken from the New York Times, show what that compensation looks like for specific CEOs and the change in compensation between 2007 and 2008. Click over to the source for many more examples, company performance data, and methodology.

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