This time of year Americans are incited to eat, eat, eat as much delicious holiday-themed food as possible, and then to lose, lose, lose the weight we gained with diet plans, gym memberships, appetite suppressing pills, and tummy tucks.  Somehow I don’t think it’s random that I received a coupon for a scale designed to measure the weight of my person as I exited Target this holiday season.

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.

NEWS:

We would like to express our gratitude to Michael Kimmel and Abby Kinchy for nominating us for the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award.  We’re grateful, also, to Chris Uggen, Doug Hartmann, Philip Cohen, Myra Marx Ferree, who wrote supporting letters, and to all of our Readers who submitted supporting anecdotes and words of praise.    We are committed to continuing the work we’ve been doing thus far and hope to make the website increasingly easy to use and helpful to instructors.

An original essay by Gwen, Family Movies: Where Are All the Girls (based on a post here at SocImages), was featured at BlogHer.  There she talks about the data on who produces these films alongside analyses of Bee Movie and the new Disney adaptation of Rapunzel, Tangled.

Always a fun treat, two of our posts — the baby worshipper and Target trampling — were featured on BoingBoing this month (here and here).

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

In other news…

FEATURED READER:

This month we received an email from Robin who inquired:

I was just reading your blog, and for the 100th time probably, asked myself “Who is Dmitriy T.M.? What do they do for a living/for pleasure that they come across so many interesting and varied images??”

I would love to see an interview with Dmitriy on your blog. For real, I want to know who this mysterious person is!

Well Robin, the mysterious Dmitriy submitted to an interview and sent along a revealing self-portrait!  Enjoy!  :)

Lester Andrist, at The Sociological Cinema, alerted me to a 9-minute short film revealing “Hollywood’s relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims.”   Created by Jaqueline Salloum and Dr. Jack Shaheen’s book, Reel Bad Arabs, it is a stunning and disturbing collection of clips.  The depictions are grossly prejudiced and relentlessly violent.  Andrist summarizes:

The Media Education Foundation also made a full length documentary based on Shaheen’s book.  The 5-and-a-half-minute trailer is a good indication of its content.  It contains many similar disturbing depiction, including a discussion of Disney’s Aladdin, but also points to how Arabs are frequently shown as buffoons (“rich and stupid,” “oversexed,” and “uncontrollably obsessed with the American woman”).

See also our posts on how Arabs are portrayed in video games and Reel Injun, a documentary about the representation of American Indians in Hollywood.

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.

Time magazine has an end-of-the-decade issue with a cover, sent in by Dmitriy T.M., that summarizes what they consider major events between 2000 and 2010:

The stories illustrate the way that, as ESPN puts it, “only bad news counts as news.” Of the 118 items chosen by the editors as “what really happened” over the last ten years, a few are what most people would probably see as relatively positive or benign (such as achievements in sports and the rescue of the Chilean miners) and others would probably fall into the “neutral” category (“U.S. Election” doesn’t say anything about the election — or, for that matter, even indicate which of the various elections that occurred during that time frame it refers to). And a few are just…odd. “AOL-Time Warner Merger” is one of the most important events of the decade? And “The Dark Knight Release” was selected as the most significant pop-culture-related event? Um…okay.

But the majority of items are clearly negative/scary, or at least I think the editors assume they’d be seen that way: BP oil spill, a space shuttle disaster, various diseases, several bombings, “Disaster in Darfur,” the Haiti earthquake, a tire recall, and various topics related to economic problems. According to the ESPN post,

The Time selection says nothing about major positive trends such as declining international military spending (rising U.S. spending is the exception to the rule), declining teen pregnancy rates, declining crime, declining accidental deaths. “U.K. foot and mouth crisis” [a livestock disease]…was cited, but nothing said about declining cancer rates. “Shark attack” was cited, but nothing was said about the dramatic rise in living standards in most of the developing world. (“Overall, poor countries are catching up with rich countries” on nearly all central measures, according to this important new [United Nations] report.)

The post continues, “Yes, journalists have always loved bad news, and have long pretended good news doesn’t exist.” That’s going a bit far. For instance, local newspapers often take part in what Harvey Molotch described as the “growth machine,” a collection of organizations, institutions, businesses, political leaders, and influential community members that support economic growth. Media outlets may contribute to such boosterism by running positive stories and providing space (in op-eds, etc.) for predominantly rosy depictions of the community.

That said, media scholars do criticize news outlets for focusing so much attention on stories that are sensationalistic or that imply the world is an incredibly dangerous, scary place, and leading the public to have quite unrealistic perceptions of actual sources of risk. And Time‘s editors play into this with their selection of the most significant stories of the past decade.

I recently saw a great example of greenwashing — that is, marketing a product as eco-friendly based on questionable or rather superficial characteristics of the production process. This decal was on the front of a calendar, touting it as “eco-positive”:

What was eco-positive (a term that has no real meaning or standards) about it? Was it made from recycled paper? No. Maybe some statement about non-toxic ink? Nope. It’s eco-positive because they used the scraps from producing the calendar to make you a very special gift…two bookmarks tucked inside the calendar.

I’m all for using scrap material, but that alone seems to be a pretty minor detail upon which to then market the entire product as an  “eco-positive” one, especially given that paper scraps from manufacturing processes are often reused already (notice how often paper products say they’re recycled from “pre-consumer” waste).

Cross-posted at Ms. and Family Inequality.

In the early 1990s, Arline Geronimus proposed a simple yet profound explanation for why Black women on average were having children at younger ages than White women, which she called the “weathering hypothesis.”

It goes like this: Racial inequality takes a cumulative toll on Black women, increasing the chance they will have health problems at younger ages. So, early childbearing might pose health risks for White women, but for Black women it makes more sense to start earlier — before their health declines. Although it’s hard to measure the motivations of people having children, her suggestion was that early childbearing reflected a combination of cumulative cultural wisdom and individual adaptation (for example, reacting to the health problems experienced by their 40-something mothers).

She showed the pattern nicely with data from Michigan in 1989, in which the percentage of first births that were “very low birthweight,” increased with the age of Black women, but decreased for White women, through their twenties:

Source: My graph from Geronimus (1996).

If the hypothesis is correct, she reasoned, the pattern would be stronger among poor women, who experience more health problems, which is also what she found.

The most recent national data, for 2007, continue to show Black women have their first children, on average, younger than White women: age 22.7 versus 26.0. And the infant mortality rates, by mothers’ age, also show the lowest risk for White women at older ages than for Black women:

Source: My graph from CDC data.

Note that, for White women, mothers have children in the early thirties face less than half the infant-mortality risk of those having children as teenagers. For Black women, waiting till their lowest-risk age — the late 20s — yields only a 14% reduction in infant mortality risk. So it looks like waiting is much more important for White women, at least as far as health conditions are concerned.

The implications are profound. If you base your perceptions on the White pattern, it makes sense to discourage early childbearing for health reasons. But if you look at the Black pattern, it becomes more important to try to improve health problems at early ages — and all the things that contribute to them — rather than (or in addition to) trying to delay first births.

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Cohen’s previous posts featured on SocImages include ones on the recession and divorce data, the relationship between cell phone use and driving deaths, measuring the number of welfare recipients, delusions of gender dimorphism, and the gender binary in children’s books.

This Tide commercial with Kelly Ripa, sent in by Joyce L., is an excellent example of one of the common themes in the marketing of cleaning products. Of course, cleaning products are almost entirely marketed towards women but, more, women are often portrayed as being absolutely OVERJOYED at the prospect of cleaning.

Indeed, Ripa is thrilled at the fact that a man spilled red wine on her white table cloth.  She is so pumped that he has given her an opportunity to use her washing machine, that she cannot wait. She literally sweeps the table cloth out from under the party so that she can wash it immediately.  And she is so excited that she invites the entire dinner party to partake, managing to communicate, in the process, her absolute adoration for Tide.  I don’t know about you, but this is what it’s like at my house.

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.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in this Dodge ad that associates cars with liberty and, by extension, America itself:

There are a few problems with this conflation of Dodge with patriotism and Americanness. For one, Dmitriy says,

Washington ( as the general) would’ve never been leading the charge. The commanders always stayed back ( preferably on the high ground) so that they could observe the progress and give commands ( and get away as quickly as possible in case of a loss).

So the image of the brave leader charging ahead of his troops into battle is misleading.

In addition, many Dodge vehicles aren’t made in the U.S. So Dodge wants us to associate its brand with the U.S. in a symbolic way that makes irrelevant, and invisible, where the car is made. What’s important is that Dodge, founded in the U.S., builds cars that represent a masculinized, tough version of “freedom,” and of course, freedom is uniquely American. It reminds me a lot of the symbolic identification Pabst Blue Ribbon drinkers often feel with blue-collar workers, an identification that has little to do with the actual production process.