My wife introduced me to two television shows, both built on a similar premise but with radically different results.

First, check out this clip from Clean House, airing on the Style Network.

Now, compare that to this ad for Hoarders, airing on the A&E Network.

This is a wonderful example of medicalization. We have people engaging in almost the exact same behavior, but their actions are interpreted in two diametrically opposed ways. Clean House generally (though not exclusively) frames their subjects as having poor habits that, with a little tough love, can be corrected. Hoarders, on the other hand, frames their subjects as having serious mental illnesses. Indeed, they regularly bring in clinicians to treat their subjects. The former invokes judgment (note the eye-rolling and smirking in the first clip), while the latter invokes sympathy (hear the dire music).

Our behaviors do not come with meaning necessarily embedded in them. We have to made sense of them, and the way that we ultimately do so has consequences. We did this in the past with the behavior of children, particularly of little boys. Is Johnny being rambunctious? There once was a time when Johnny was sent to the principal’s office for a spanking, but today, he is much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and given a pill. As we medicalize more and more in our society, our acceptance of and reaction to our behaviors change.

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Dmitriy T.M. sent in this hilarious 2-minute rap about first world problems. The idea is to draw attention to how the daily frustrations faced by those of us in the most advantaged and developed countries in the world are really, really, like really small.

Edit: Sociologist Michael Kimmel reminds me that, though in certain ways the above is definitely true, it’s also not useful to trivialize the ways in which advantaged and developed countries still create suffering. Some of us benefit from our overall advantage more than others.

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.

In his classic 1973 overview of U.S. agribusiness and its effects on the food we eat, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, Jim Hightower discusses how the search for market efficiencies had changed the tomatoes Americans could buy in their local supermarkets. Tomatoes posed a number of problems for modern industrial agriculture; in particular, they tended to get bruised or smashed when harvested by machine and transported long distances. To facilitate mechanical harvest and shipping, varieties were developed that were harder and tougher — often at the expense of other qualities, such as taste. This same process has occurred with many crops. For instance, I can buy huge, bright red strawberries year-round in the U.S. these days, as long as I don’t mind that they have only a hint of the rich taste of the strawberries my grandma used to grow.

As a result of concentration in agribusiness (including grocery chains) and selection of varieties that can withstand the mechanical harvesting and long-distance shipping required by the industrial food system, we see fewer and fewer varieties of crops on the shelf. Despite the efforts of heritage seed banks and heirloom variety enthusiasts, many have disappeared altogether; others are dangerously close to doing so. It’s an enormous loss of genetic diversity, of varieties that were developed over many years based on flavor, resistance to pests, ability to withstand drought, frosts, or other environmental stresses, and so on.

Dolores R. let us know that National Geographic posted an image based on a 1983 study by the Rural Advancement Foundation International that illustrates the loss of this genetic diversity. RAFI looked at a typical commercial seed catalog from 1903 — that is, a catalog of seeds targeting farmers producing for the market. They found a large number of varieties available.

But then they looked at the seed collection at the National Seed Storage Laboratory (now the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation). This government entity is in charge of collecting and storing seeds to preserve genetic diversity among crops and livestock. The bottom half of this image shows how many of the varieties in the 1903 catalog were in the lab’s collection as of 1983:

Of course, the NCGRP isn’t the only organization storing seeds; many private groups, such as Seed Savers Exchange, preserve heirloom varieties. And many varieties have been introduced, such as the Round-Up Ready crops developed by Monsanto to be compatible with Round-Up weed killer. The NCGRP has also added greatly to its collection over time. Nonetheless, many varieties have simply disappeared, reducing the genetic diversity available in our current agricultural system and increasing the risks should a virulent pest or disease attack the dominant varieties of crops and livestock. For more on this, see the full National Geographic article.

Cross-posted at Love Isn’t Enough.

The West has a long history in which Black and African people were stereotyped as more in touch with nature and more like animals than White and European people.  This elision still haunts us, and Sasha H. sent in a link to an example. To be fair, I went through several pages of Google search results and found only two instances of this particular mistake, but I thought it was worth pointing out as a cautionary tale.

Sasha’s link was to an amusement-focused website called Silly Village.  They posted a series of photographs of a little girl, named Tippi Degré, who was born to wildlife photographers in Namibia, where she grew up. The photos are of her with lots of animals and the set of photos is titled “Young Girl Life with Wild Animals.”  The thing is, though, two of the photos do not include animals, but include only her and local Africans, no animals at all.

I found this same mistake at a more serious source, one that should have editors who are more careful than this, The Telegraph.  The story, titled “The Real-Life Mowgli who Grew Up with Africa’s Wild Animals,” includes a slideshow introduced with this language:

A remarkable range of pictures in a new book show Tippi Degre — a French girl labelled the ‘real-life Mowgli’ — growing up with wild animals.

But the slideshow includes three images, again conflating African animals with African people.

If this happened rarely, it could be chocked up to a random mistake, but this conflation is actually rather ubiquitous.  We’ve posted on this many times. Here are three choice posts: animalizing women of color, Africa is wild and you can be too, and choosing girls of color for animal costumes.

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.

Last week I posted the results of a survey that found that many beneficiaries of government programs don’t recognize themselves as participating in a federal program at all. For instance, 60% of respondents who have written off their mortgage interest on their taxes didn’t see that as a government benefit or themselves as program beneficiaries. Basically, programs and policies that are disproportionately used by the middle- and upper-classes are taken for granted. I wrote,

…allowing you to write off mortgage interest (but not rent), or charitable donations, or the money you put aside for a child’s education, are all forms of government programs, ones that benefit some more than others. But the “submerged” nature of these policies hides the degree to which the middle and upper classes use and benefit from federal programs.

Brian McCabe, over at FiveThirtyEight, recently wrote a post about who benefits from the mortgage interest tax deduction program, which remains enormously popular among the general public. McCabe says,

Commentators often talk about the mortgage interest deduction as a prized middle-class benefit that enables households to achieve the American dream of homeownership. But despite their strong support for the deduction, middle-class Americans are not the primary beneficiaries of this federal tax subsidy.

If you aren’t familiar with the program, basically when you’re doing your taxes, you are allowed to reduce your taxable income by subtracting the amount you paid in mortgage interest that year. Home ownership isn’t treated equally — the tax deduction is worth more as the price of the home, and thus the amount of interest paid, goes up. McCabe points out that in 2009, this program meant that the federal government took in about $80 billion less than it would have otherwise, making it one of the most expensive tax policies and the single most expensive deduction offered to homeowners (much more than deductions for putting in energy-efficient windows, etc.).

But this expensive program is disproportionately used by relatively wealthy individuals. For instance, about a quarter of taxpayers making $40,000 – 50,000 a year claim the deduction, while over 75% of those making above $100,000 a year do:

The differences in usage is partly because the wealthy are more likely to own* homes. In addition, those with lower incomes generally buy cheaper houses and often find that they reduce their taxable income so little by writing off the mortgage interest that they’re better off taking the standard tax deduction than to itemize.

Because wealthier individuals are more likely to use the program at all, and when they do, generally have more mortgage interest to deduct, the benefits of the program go disproportionately to those with higher incomes. This image shows the proportion of all tax filers that fall into each income category, and the proportion of the total tax deduction benefit that goes to each category:

This is similar to what we see with farm subsidies: while small- and mid-sized farms benefit, the money spent on the program disproportionately goes to the largest farms.  The mortgage interest deduction program is discussed as a method for helping the middle-class achieve the American Dream of homeownership. And certainly it does make home ownership more attractive to many middle- and lower-income individuals. But it overwhelmingly benefits upper-income home buyers, at a significant loss of tax income for the federal government.

* On a side note, I find it odd that we say someone “owns” their home when they owe a mortgage on it. The second I signed a mortgage last year, I entered the much-praised category of the home-owning citizen. Yet as my mortgage-hating farm family has made me very aware, I’m not even close to truly owning my home at this point; I’m more of a special category of rent-to-own resident whose landlord is the bank or mortgage company.

After the tsunami in March, we featured a series of hateful Facebook updates suggesting that the Japanese deserved the devastation. Yesterday Japan won the women’s World Cup against the U.S. and we’re seeing the same rhetoric.  The collection below, and more, was up on Buzzfeed as of yesterday night.

Interestingly, in addition to the now familiar racism and jingoism, some of the updates suggest that the gods were smiling on Japan in the aftermath of the tsunami, allowing them to win because they’ve had such a rough time of it lately. Of course, this nicely erases the athletic ability of the Japanese team and the possibility that they were actually just better than the U.S. team.

Trigger warning:

Thanks to Who, Harmony for the heads up on Twitter, a new distraction that I’m enjoyingsuper much!

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.

If you’re not writing a dissertation or taking care of twins, you might have heard that News of the World, a tabloid newspaper in the U.K., has been gathering news by illegally listening to people’s voicemail messages. News of the World is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s firm News Corporation, the second largest media company in the world. News Corporation also owns Fox. This is a great natural experiment testing the potential problems with media consolidation, the fact that more and more media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer companies.

So how does Fox report on this scandal? Rob Beschizza, writing for BoingBoing, highlighted a segment on Fox News in which the host and guest agree that “hacking scandals” are a “serious… problem” and imply that, in this instance, News of the World was the victim, not the perpetrator.  More, the guest “expert” is not a politician, scholar, or even a pundit, he’s actually a public relations professional who specializes in spinning scandals to obviate the negative consequences for corporations. Says James Fallows at The Atlantic:

He is Robert Dilenschneider, former head of Hill and Knowlton and now head of the Dilenschneider Group, who recently was featured in an interview, “How to Manage a PR Disaster.”

So Fox is having an expert on spin as a guest, who just so happens to spin the scandal about their parent corporation:

Partial transcript:

The NOTW is a hacking scandal, it can’t be denied. But the real issue is, why are so many people piling on at this point? We know it’s a hacking scandal, shouldn’t we get beyond it and deal with the issue of hacking? Citicorp has been hacked into, Bank of America has been hacked into, American Express has been hacked into, insurance companies have been hacked into, we’ve got a serious hacking problem in this country, and the government’s obviously been hacked into, 24,000 files.

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The bigger issue is really hacking and how we as the public going to protect our privacy and deal with it. I would also say, by the way, Citigroup, great bank. Bank of America, great bank. Are they getting the same attention for hacking that took place less than a year ago, that News Corp is getting today?

Of course, as Beschizza at BoingBoing points out, Citigroup and Bank of America were hacked into, whereas News of the World did the hacking.  It’s also an interesting use of the word “hacking.”  Beschizza continues:

Though we all use the term “hacking” broadly, punching in a default PIN number isn’t quite the same thing as the skills required to hack into banks and governments. You can’t pretend these are the same class of problem, unless you’re happy being ignorant of the crisis management issues on which you are being presented as an expert.

Use of the term, then, makes the illegal activity seem more like the mischief of a techy teenager or the nefarious work of anti-establishmentarians, not the plain ol’ straightforwardly criminal behavior it is.

See also: Shameless promotion of the movie, Tinkerbell, at Good Morning America.

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.

An anonymous reader snapped a photo of this ad for Freelancers Insurance Company in the NYC subway.  The ad reads: “Maybe joining a group to buy insurance is communal.  Maybe it’s rational self-interest.  Either way, it’s cheaper.” With the phrase “either way,” the ad draws on a common juxtaposition: the idea that putting the group first is equivalent to sacrificing your own interests.

Certainly in some cases it’s true that privileging the collective hurts the individual, but this certainly isn’t always true.  Yet Americans consistently receive the message that it is rational (i.e., maximizes our personal well-being) to put ourselves first.  A University of Minnesota campaign to encourage students to get the flu shot — “Do it for the herd”— is a nice counter-example.  In some other societies the idea that one should sacrifice the self for others, and even the idea that doing for others is good for you, is a more common cultural theme.

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.