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 50-minute documentary is about men who are in romantic relationships with high-end sex dolls. It’s a must watch. There is a lot to see in this movie: objectification of women, for sure; also the sad lonliness of men who don’t want to, can’t, or don’t think they can, be in a relationship with a real woman; as my friend Jason pointed out, the way in which the men project an interest in clothes and make-up onto their dolls; and so much more.
The Real Dolls website is worth a look, too.
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.
Nair (a cream hair-removal product) is now targeting teen girls. The Nair Pretty website treats shaving for the first time much like the first period–talk to your mom or older sisters! We know it can be scary! And of course what makes it scary is all the cuts and nicks you can get from a razor. And guess what? There’s an easy solution!
I especially like that Nair Pretty is supposedly formulated especially “for the skin of teenage girls.”
This campaign ad from 1988 is part of the larger politicization of the black underclass. “Willie Horton” and the “welfare queen” both emerged as symbols during this period with which to demonize poor blacks for political clout. Ultimately, using the name Willie Horton became a powerful tool to criticize politicians for being weak on crime and not protecting the innocent white population from the guilty black population.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y[/youtube]
Ultimately, increasing toughness of the criminal justice system led to a situation, today, where about 1/2 of all black men are in the prison system. See an interesting entry on Willie Horton on wikipedia here.
Click here for a humorous music video about prescription drugs and the pharmaceutical industry.
This website created by the American Anthropological Association is a great way to explore the social construction of race. There’s an awesome timeline that traces political and scientific trends where you can click on any part of it and get more information. It’s a great resource.It also includes this great 7 minute video called “A Girl Like Me”:
I’d actually love to get some feedback on this video. I really like it, but last time I showed it (in a social psychology portion of a Race and Ethnicity course), the class had a hard time recovering. It was depressing and I wasn’t very successful in DOING something SOCIOLOGICAL with it. Any ideas?
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.
James Watson won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA. He’s a pretty big deal.
The other day he said some very unfortunate things. The article from which I stole this information summarized those things as follows:
The controversy began with an article in The Times of London in October that quoted Dr. Watson, who was on a book tour, as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” According to the article, he said that “there are many people of color who are very talented,” and he hoped people were equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Well, it turns out that a test of his DNA revealed that he has 16 times more African origin genes than the typical European person: “about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African.”
That’s some awesome irony.
Here is a nice discussion of the scientific merit of his assertion and it’s testability by Janis Prince Inniss from the Everyday Sociology Blog supported by W. W. Norton & Co.
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.