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The 2017 Women’s March was a historic event.  Social media alone gave many of us the notion that something happened on an incredibly grand scale.  But measuring just how “grand” is an inexact science.  Women’s Marches were held around the world in protest of Trump on the day following his inauguration.  Subsequently, lots of folks have tried to find good ways of counting the crowds.  Photos and videos of the crowds at some of the largest marches are truly awe-inspiring.  And the media have gotten stirred up attempting to quantify just how big this march really was.

Think about it.  The image below is taken of some of the crowds in Los Angeles.  The caption Getty Images associates with the image includes the estimate “Hundreds of thousands of protesters…”  But, was it 200,000?  Or was it more like 900,000?  Do you think you could eyeball it and make an educated guess?  We’d bet you’d be off by more than you think.  Previous research has found, for instance, that march participants and organizers are not always the best source of information for how large a protest was.  If you’re there and you’re asked how many people were there, you’re much more likely to exaggerate the number of people who were actually there with you.  And that fact has spawned wildly variable estimates for marches around the U.S. and beyond.

More than one set of estimates exist attempting to figure this out.  The estimates that have garnered the most media attention (deservedly) are those produced by Jeremy Pressman and Erica Chenoweth.  They collected as many estimates as they could for marches all around the world to try to figure out just how large the protest was on a global scale.  Pressman & Chenoweth collected a range of estimates, and in their data set they classify them by source as well as providing the lowest and highest estimates for each of the marches for which they were able to collect data. You can see and interact with those estimates visually below in a map produced by Eric Compas (though some updates were made in the data set after Compas produced the map).

By Pressman & Chenoweth’s estimates, the total number of marchers in the U.S. was between 3,266,829 and 5,246,321 participants.  When they include marches outside the U.S. as well they found that we can add between 266,532 and 357,071 marchers to that number to understand the scale of the protest on an international scale.  That is truly extraordinary.  But, the range is still gigantic.  The difference between their lowest and highest estimate is around 2.1 million people!  Might it be possible to figure out which of these estimates are better estimates of crowd size than others?

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com tried to figure this out in an interesting way.  They only attempted to answer this question for U.S. marches alone.  And Silver and a collection of his statistical team produced their own data set of U.S. marches.  They collected as many crowd estimates as they could for all of the marches held in the U.S.  And there are lots of holes in their data that Pressman and Chenoweth filled.  March organizers collect information about crowd size and are eager to claim every individual who can be claimed to have been present.  But, local officials estimate crowd sizes as well because it helps to give them a sense of what they will need to prepare for and respond to such crowds.  As a part of this, some marches had estimates from march organizers, news sources, official estimates, as well as estimates from non-partisan experts (so-called crowd scientists)–this is especially true of the larger marches.  Examining their data, they discovered that for every march in which they had both organizer and official estimates, the organizers’ estimate was 50-70% higher than the officials’ estimates.  As Silver wrote: “Or put another way, the estimates produced by organizers probably exaggerated crowd sizes by 40 percent to 100 percent, depending on the city” (here).  The estimates Silver produced at FiveThirtyEight are mapped below.

You can interact with the map to see Nate Silver’s team estimate, but also the various estimates on which that estimate is based.  And you may note that the low and high estimates are often the same for Silver and for Pressman & Chenoweth (though not always).  Additionally, there were a good number of marches in FiveThirtyEight’s data set that lacked any estimates at all. And those marches are not visible on the map above.  Just to consider some of what is missing, you might note that there are no marches on the map immediately above in Puerto Rico, though Silver’s data set includes four marches there–all with no estimates.

Interestingly, Silver took a further step of offering a “best guess” based on patterned differences between types of estimates they found for marches for which they had more than a single source of data (more than one estimate).  For instance, where there were only organizers’ estimates, they discounted that estimate by 40%, assuming that it was exaggerated.  They discounted news estimates by 20% for similar reasons.  Sometimes, non-partisan experts relying on photographs and videos provide estimates were available, which were not discounted (similar to official estimates).

It might be possible then, as Pressman & Chenoweth collected many more estimates, to fine-tune Silver’s formula and possibly come up with an even more accurate estimate of crowd sizes at marches around the world based on the source of the estimate. It’s a fascinating puzzle and a really interesting and simple way of considering how to resolve it with a (likely) conservative measure.

By these (likely conservative) estimates, marches in the U.S. alone drew more than 3,000,000 people across hundreds of separate locations across the nation.  In the U.S. alone, FiveThirtyEight estimated that 3,234,343 people participated (though, as we said, some marches simply lacked any source of data in the data set they produced).  And that number, you might note, is strikingly close to Pressman & Chenoweth’s low estimate for the U.S. (3,266,829).  Even by this conservative estimate, this would qualify the 2017 Women’s March as certainly among the largest mass protests in U.S. history.  It may very well have been the largest mass protest in American history.  And in our book, that’s worth counting.

Tara Leigh Tober, PhD is a Lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  She studies the sociology of memory, is writing a book on how the Irish have remembered being neutral during WWII, and is presently engaged in a study on mass shootings in the U.S.  You can follow her on Twitter here.

Tristan Bridges, PhD is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-editor of Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Inequality, and Change with C.J. Pascoe and studies gender and sexual identity and inequality. You can follow him on Twitter here. Tristan also blogs regularly at Inequality by (Interior) Design.

America woke up this weekend to the news of the Orlando massacre, the deadliest civilian mass shooting in the nation’s history. The senseless tragedy will undoubtedly evoke anger, sadness and helplessness.

In the meantime, many will forget to think and talk about Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s crime and his “summer vacation” jail sentence: three months for the vile sexual assault of an unconscious woman.

As a sociologist, I was struck not by the abrupt shift to a new moral crisis, but by the continuity. Sociologists look for the bigger picture, and in my mind, Mateen’s crime didn’t displace Turner’s. Yet the media simply replaced one outrage with another, moving our attention away from Stanford and toward Orlando, as if these two crimes were unrelated. They’re not.

Status, masculinity and sexual assault

Brock Turner was an all-American boy: a white, Division I swimmer at one of the nation’s top universities. What he did to his victim was arguably all-American, too, confirmed by decades of research tying rape to a sense of male superiority and entitlement.

I study sex on campus, where sexual violence is perpetrated disproportionately by “high-status” men – fraternity men and certain male athletes in particular. These men are more likely than other men to endorse the sexual double standard, believing that they are justified in praising sexually active men, while condemning and even abusing women who are less sexually active.

They are also more likely to promote homophobia, hypermasculinity and male dominance; tolerate violent and sexist jokes; endorse misogynistic attitudes and behaviors; and endorse false beliefs about rape. Accordingly, athletes are responsible for an outsized number of sexual assaults on campus, and women who attend fraternity parties are significantly more likely to be assaulted than those who attend other parties with alcohol and those who don’t go to parties at all.

Status, masculinity and violent homophobia

Omar Mateen’s crime is related to this strand of masculinity. Mateen’s father told the media that his son had previously been angered by the sight of two men kissing, and reports claim that he was a “regular” at the Pulse nightclub and was known to use a gay hookup app.

Anti-gay hate crimes, like violence against women (Mateen also reportedly beat his ex-wife), are tied closely to rigid and hierarchical ideas about masculinity that depend on differentiating “real” men from women as well as gay and bisexual men. Men who experience homoerotic feelings themselves sometimes erupt into especially aggressive homophobia.

As the sociologist Michael Kimmel has argued, while we talk ad infinitum about guns, mental illness and, in this case, Islamic identity, we miss the strongest unifying factor: these mass murderers are men, almost to the last one. In his book “Guyland,” Kimmel argues that as many boys grow into men, “they learn that they are entitled to feel like a real man, and that they have the right to annihilate anyone who challenges that sense of entitlement.”

He means “annihilate” literally.

We now know that many boys who descend on their schools with guns are motivated by fears that they are perceived as homosexual and that attacking suspected or known homosexuals is a way for boys to demonstrate heterosexuality to their peers.

It makes sense to me, as a woman, that men would fear gay men because such men threaten to put other men under the same sexually objectifying, predatory, always potentially threatening gaze that most women learn to live with as a matter of course. Being looked at by a gay man threatens to turn any man into a figurative woman: subordinate, weak, penetrable. That can be threatening enough to a man invested in masculinity, but discovering that he enjoys being the object of other men’s desires – being put in the position of a woman – could stoke both internalized and externalized homophobia even further.

Meanwhile, gay men, by their very existence, challenge male dominance by undermining the link between maleness and the sexual domination of women. It’s possible that Mateen, enraged by his inability to stop men from kissing in public and struggling with self-hatred, took it upon himself to annihilate the people who dared pierce the illusion that manhood and the righteous sexual domination of women naturally go hand-in-hand.

The common denominator

Mass shootings, frighteningly, appear to have become a part of our American cultural vernacular, a shared way for certain men to protest threats to their entitlement and defend the hierarchy their identities depend on. As the sociologists Tristan Bridges and Tara Leigh Tober wrote last year for the website Feminist Reflections:

This type of rampage violence happens more in the United States of America than anywhere else… Gun control is a significant part of the problem. But, gun control is only a partial explanation for mass shootings in the United States. Mass shootings are also almost universally committed by men. So, this is not just an American problem; it’s a problem related to American masculinity and to the ways American men use guns.

Some members of the media and candidates for higher office will focus exclusively on Mateen’s Afghan parents. But he – just like Brock Turner – was born, raised and made a man right here in America. While it appears that he had (possibly aspirational) links to ISIS, it in no way undermines his American-ness. This was terrorism, yes, but it was domestic terrorism: of, by and aimed at Americans.

I don’t want to force us all to keep Turner in the news (though I imagine that he and his father are breathing a perverse sigh of relief right now). I want to remind us to keep the generalities in mind even as we mourn the particulars.

Sociologists are pattern seekers. This problem is bigger than Brock Turner and Omar Mateen. It’s Kevin James Loibl, who sought out and killed the singer Christina Grimmie the night before the massacre at Pulse. It’s James Wesley Howell, who was caught with explosives on his way to the Los Angeles Pride Parade later that morning. It’s the grotesque list of men who used guns to defend their sense of superiority that I collected and documented last summer.

The problem is men’s investment in masculinity itself. It offers rewards only because at least some people agree that it makes a person better than someone else. That sense of superiority is, arguably, why men like Turner feel entitled to violating an unconscious woman’s body and why ones like Mateen will defend it with murderous rampages, even if it means destroying themselves in the process. And unless something changes, there will be another sickening crisis to turn to, and another sinking sense of familiarity.

Cross-posted at The Conversation, New Republic, Special Broadcasting Company (SBS), United Press International, Newsweek Japan (in Japanese), and Femidea (in Korean).

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.

FBI director, James Comey, didn’t call it the “Ferguson Effect.” Instead, he called the recent rise in homicide rates a “viral video effect” – a more accurately descriptive term for the same idea: that murder rates increased because the police were withdrawing from proactive policing. The full sequence goes something like this:  Police kill unarmed Black person. Video goes viral. Groups like Black Lives Matter organize protests. Politicians fail to defend the police. Police decrease their presence in high-crime areas. More people in those areas commit murder.

Baltimore is a good example, as Peter Moskos has strongly argued on his blog Cop in the Hood. But many cities, even those with all the Ferguson elements, have not seen large increases in homicide. New York, for example, the city where I live, had all of the Ferguson-effect elements. Yet the number of murders in New York did not rise, nor did rates of other crimes. Other factors – gang conflict, drugs, and the availability of guns – make a big difference, and these vary among cities. Chicago is not New York. Las Vegas is not Houston. All homicide is local.

There is another flaw with the viral-video theory: It assumes that the crime is a game of cops and robbers (or cops and murderers), where the only important players are the bad guys and the cops. If the cops ease up, the bad guys start pulling the trigger more often. Or as Director Comey put it,

There’s a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime — the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, “Hey, what are you doing here?”

This model of crime leaves out the other people in those high-crime neighborhoods. It sees them as spectators or bystanders or occasionally victims. But those people, the ones who are neither cops nor shooters, can play a crucial role in crime control. In some places, it is the residents of the neighborhood who can get the troublesome kids to move off the corner. But even when residents cannot exert any direct force on the bad guys, they can provide information or in other ways help the police. Or not.

This suggests a different kind of Ferguson Effect. In the standard version, the community vents its anger at the cops, the cops then withdraw, and crime goes up. But the arrows of cause and effect can point in both directions. Those viral videos of police killing unarmed Black people reduce the general level of trust. More important, those killings are often the unusually lethal tip of an iceberg of daily unpleasant interactions between police and civilians. That was certainly the case with the Ferguson police department with its massive use of traffic citations and other fines as a major source of revenue. Little wonder that a possibly justifiable shooting by a cop elicited a huge protest.

It’s not clear exactly how the Full Ferguson works. Criminologist Rich Rosenfeld speculates that where people don’t trust the police, they are more likely to settle scores themselves. That may be true, but I wonder if it accounts for increases in killings between gang members or drug dealers. They weren’t going to call the cops anyway. Nor were people who have been drinking and get into an argument, and someone has a gun.

But maybe where that trust is absent, people don’t do what most of us would do when there’s trouble we cannot handle ourselves  –  dial 911. As in Director Comey’s version, the police are less a presence in those neighborhoods but not because they are afraid of being prosecuted for being too aggressive and not because they are being petulant about what some politician said, but because people there are not calling the cops.

Originally posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

Why are relations between black America and the police so fraught? I hope that this collection of 50 posts on this topic and the experience of being black in this country will help grow understanding. See, also, the Ferguson syllabus put together by Sociologists for Justice, the Baltimore syllabus, and this summary of the facts by Nicki Lisa Cole.

Race and policing:

• Race and gun laws in practice
• When force is hardest to justify, victims of homicide by police are most likely to be black
• The failure of racial profiling
• Stand Your Ground increases racial bias in “justifiable homicide” trials
• In simulations, people are quicker to shoot at people perceived as black
• The war on blacks: Arrests for marijuana possession
• NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy

Perceptions of black men and boys as inherently criminal:

• Framing children’s deviance
• Race, clothes, and perceptions of criminality
• Who’s afraid of young, black men?
• Whose deviance do we notice?
• Media portrayals of Mark Duggan and Mike Brown
• Racial bias and media coverage of violent crime

Proof that Americans have less empathy for black people:

• The racial empathy gap
• The death penalty, race, and the victim
• Can black men be sexually assaulted?
• Racial disparity in imprisonment inspire whites to be tough on crime
• Failure to understand when non-white people distrust the police

Evidence of the consistent maltreatment, misrepresentation, and oppression of black people in every part of American society:

• Racial wealth gaps that harm black children
• Fetishization and mocking of black women’s bodies
• The portrayal of black women as ugly
• Racism kills: New data on stress and mortality
• Racial differences in childhood asthma
• An elite university degree does not protect against racism
• Race and pre-term births
• Race and the initiation of treatment for breast cancer
• Racial bias in presidential pardons
• Racial bias in law firms
• Nearly half of black scientists mistaken for janitors or assistants
• Racism in ballet
• Racist antics at college parties, a collection
• Race, criminal records, and employment
• Percent of children with a parent in prison, by race
• Racial minorities have to wait longer at the polls
• Cultural invisibility: What color is “flesh”?
• Race, education, and earning potential
• College graduation and unemployment among blacks vs. whites
• Special education eligibility by race and region
• Black churches still going up in flames
• Whites, blacks, and kidney failure
• Racial bias in jury selection
• Whiteness as the standard of beauty
• White vigilantes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
• Distrust for black entrepreneurs
• Racialized representations of evolution
• Black invisibility in Hollywood
• Black/white disparities in prison sentences
• The children of the prison boom
• The sudden convergence of addiction treatment and whiteness
• And murder

On violent resistance:

• Angela Davis: “No idea what black people have gone through.”
• Stokely Carmichael: “The U.S. taught us very well how to be violent.”
• Malcolm X: “We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”

The situation now:

• “How much do you think people can take?”
• Zimmerman’s acquittal hurt race relations
• Race and beliefs about the ongoing fight for civil rights
• Many Americans overestimate and fear racial diversity
• 150 years of racism: Attitudes in the American South
• The average white American’s social network is 1% black

W.E.B. DuBois (1934):

The colored people of America are coming to face the fact quite calmly that most white Americans do not like them, and are planning neither for their survival, nor for their definite future if it involves free, self-assertive modern manhood. This does not mean all Americans. A saving few are worried about the Negro problem; a still larger group are not ill-disposed, but they fear prevailing public opinion. The great mass of Americans are, however, merely representatives of average humanity. They muddle along with their own affairs and scarcely can be expected to take seriously the affairs of strangers or people whom they partly fear and partly despise.

For many years it was the theory of most Negro leaders that this attitude was the insensibility of ignorance and inexperience, that white America did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro.  Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people.  Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.

– From A Negro Nation Within a Nation

A New Vision and a Hiatus:

Sociological Images turned 8 this year. It’s been a long, busy, and exciting journey and my own writing has been front-and-center for much of that time. Moving forward, my hope is to step back into more of an editor role, helping established scholars bring attention to their research, giving newer scholars a platform, and helping other sociology bloggers reach a wider audience. Essentially, I would like to use this site as an amplifier, broadcasting as many sociologists as I can as widely as possible by either cross-posting or using the SocImages social media reach. So, to all the sociologists out there, look out for more requests to re-print, please don’t hesitate to pitch me ideas, and feel free to send me things to share!

But… not yet. SocImages is taking its first hiatus. My book deadline is March 1st, so I’m taking two months off to polish the draft. See you all in 30 days!

Visits:

We rounded out the year with over 2,900,000 visits and nearly 4,000,000 page views.  We are proud and honored to enjoy almost 80,000 Facebook friends, over 23,000 Twitter followers, plus nearly 15,000 on Pinterest and over 24,000 on Tumblr.  A huge thank you to everyone for your enthusiasm and support!

Highlights:

• Sociological Images was granted the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award!
• With Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen, I edited what might be sociology’s first anthology of blog posts, featuring bloggers from all over the sociology blog-o-sphere. It’s called Assigned: Life with Gender. Coming soon to this series!
• I had the incredible pleasure of debuting a talk about SocImages as a plenary at the Midwest Sociological Society meetings! (Now there’s one for undergrads, too!)
• SocImages was quoted in Peggy Orenstein’s Girls & Sex, Kate Harding’s Asking For It, and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves!
• Jon Smadja made us mobile friendly!
• We were on NPR; covered or quoted in Autostraddle, the Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine; and I had an editorial in the Washington Post!
• Rush Limbaugh called me a “professorette”!

Best of 2015!

Over the last week we’ve featured my favorite and your most loved posts from 2015.  Here’s the list in case you missed it:

Reader’s Choice

• Where do negative stereotypes about feminists come from (5,200+ likes)
• Who farts? And who cares? (4,600+ likes)
• Five reasons why gendered products are a problem (3,800+ likes)
• Why don’t men kick each other in the balls? (3,300+ likes)
• Mass shootings in the U.S. are on the rise (2,400+ likes)
• Lumbersexuals and white heteromasculine pageantry (1,780+ likes)
• The corrupt economics behind Greece’s troubles (1,700+ likes)
• Who really runs the AirBnBs? (1,700+ likes)
• Are economics majors anti-social? (1,600+ likes)
• https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/11/03/man-buns-as-cultural-appropriation/ (1,400+ likes)
• Media spin on violence against police (1,400+ likes)
• Why lesbians and gay men don’t share space (1,300+ likes)
• What is a world in which commercials make you cry? (1,100+ likes)
• Why it was easy for Rachel Dolezal to pass as black (1,000+ likes)
• Why do people hate the word “moist”? (1,000+ likes)

Editor’s Picks

• What is creepiness?
• The unbearable daintiness of women who eat with men
• The iron cage in binary code: How Facebook shapes your life chances
• Don Draper and the pursuit of loneliness
• The trouble with American views of female genital cutting
• Powerful people are sensitive to injustice, but mostly when they are its victims
• A short history of trophy hunting in America
• Is Justin Beiber’s “What do you mean?” just as bad as Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”?
• Slave families’ desperate efforts to reunite during Reconstruction

Happy New Year everyone!  Here’s to wonderful things in 2016!

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 recently moved to a neighborhood that people routinely describe as “bad.” It’s my first time living in such a place. I’ve lived in working class neighborhoods, but never poor ones. I’ve been lucky.

This neighborhood — one, to be clear, that I had the privilege to choose to live in — is genuinely dangerous. There have been 42 shootings within one mile of my house in the last year. Often in broad daylight. Once the murderers fled down my street, careening by my front door in an SUV. One week there were six rapes by strangers — in the street and after home invasions — in seven days. People are robbed, which makes sense to me because people have to eat, but with a level of violence that I find confusing. An 11-year-old was recently arrested for pulling a gun on someone. A man was beaten until he was a quadriplegic. One day 16 people were shot in a park nearby after a parade.

I’ve lived here for a short time and — being white, middle-aged, middle class, and female — I am on the margins of the violence in my streets, and yet I have never been so constantly and excruciatingly aware of my mortality. I feel less of a hold on life itself. It feels so much more fragile, like it could be taken away from me at any time. I am acutely aware that my skin is but paper, my bones brittle, my skull just a shell ripe for bashing. I imagine a bullet sheering through me like I am nothing. That robustness that life used to have, the feeling that it is resilient and that I can count on it to be there for me, that feeling is going away.

So, when I saw the results of a new study showing that only 50% of African American teenagers believe that they will reach 35 years of age, I understood better than I have understood before. Just a tiny — a teeny, teeny, tiny — bit better.

I have heard this idea before. A friend who grew up the child of Mexican immigrants in a sketchy urban neighborhood told me that he, as a teenager, didn’t believe he’d make it to 18. I nodded my head and thought “wow,”‘ but I did not understand even a little bit. He would be between the first and second column from the right: 54% of 2nd generation Mexican immigrants expect that they may very well die before 35. I understand him now a tiny — a teeny, teeny tiny — bit better.

Sociologists Tara Warner and Raymond Swisher, the authors of the study, make clear that the consequences of this fatalism are far reaching. If a child does not believe that they might live to see another day, what motivation can there possibly be for investing in the future, for caring for one’s body, for avoiding harmful habits or dangerous activities? Why study? Why bother to see a doctor? Why not do drugs? Why avoid breaking the law?

Why wouldn’t a person put their future at risk — indeed, their very life — if they do not believe in that future, that life, at all?

If we really want to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people in our country, we cannot allow them to live in neighborhoods where desperation is so high that people turn to violence. Dangerous environments breed fatalism, rationally so. And once our children have given up on their own futures, no teachers’ encouragement, no promise that things will get better if they are good, no “up by your bootstraps” rhetoric will make a difference. They think they’re going to be dead, literally.

We need to boost these families with generous economic help, real opportunities, and investment in neighborhood infrastructure and schools. I think we don’t because the people with the power to do so don’t understand — even a teeny, teeny tiny bit — what it feels like to grow up thinking you’ll never grow up. Until they do, and until we decide that this is a form of cruelty that we cannot tolerate, I am sad to say that I feel pretty fatalistic about these children’s futures, too.

Re-posted at Pacific Standard.

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.

Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the intervention of the birth control pill. There is no doubt that the pill has had a huge influence on sexual attitudes, sexual activity, and how much control women had over their own fertility. The pill, although it may not be the right choice for everyone, should be celebrated for these reasons. But there is something else to consider here: how did the invention of the pill shape the way that women (and the medical community for that matter) view periods?

When you think of the pill, the first image that comes to mind is that iconic little container of pink and white pills that represents one menstrual “cycle.”

In Malcolm Gladwell’s fantastic article, John Rock’s Error, Gladwell explains how the invention of the pill was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church. One of the creators of the pill, a devout Catholic, wanted it to be viewed as “natural” since it used chemicals that naturally occur in the body to prevent pregnancy. It was necessary, then, for women to continue to have their period regularly to show that the pill did not interfere with a woman’s menstrual rhythm.

But, speaking from an evolutionary standpoint, there is nothing natural about having a menstrual period every month because it is not natural to limit fertility. Our female ancestors spent a good portion of their reproductive years pregnant and not having a period. And, in fact, having a period every month can be dangerous. Every time a woman has a period, tissue lining sheds and new cells must grow to replace it. And every time there is cell regrowth there is a new chance for mutations to occur. This leads to an increased risk of cancer and cysts.

It may be healthier (and more natural), then, for women to suppress menstruation (the way pregnancy used to). But because the idea of a natural rhythm is now synonymous with monthly periods, introducing pills with alternative cycles has proven difficult. Pills that allow for four periods a year (like Seasonale, Seasonique, and Yaz) have come on the market. But instead of discussing the medical benefits of fewer periods, they are marketed in a woman-on-the-go sort of way, as a way for women to “take back” their lives by avoiding an inconvenience.

Marketing the pill in this fashion has created push back by women who think this method this pill is all about suppressing “natural” womanhood, but it is a falsely constructed version of womanhood to begin with.

Sources: NY Times, LA Times, Planned Parenthood, WebMD, No Period, and Annals of Medicine. Originally posted in 2010.

Lauren McGuire interned for Sociological Images in 2010. See more posts from Lauren on social psychology and policing by race and the evolution of Cosmopolitan magazine.