A  number of readers, including Mickey C., Lu Fong (writer and editor at The Good Men Project and Good Feed), Cheryl S., and Kelly V., let us know about Google Ngram. The program includes a database of a little over 5 million books and allows you to graph the frequency with which various words or phrases show up in books published in various languages over time (English can also be broken down into British or American English). Mickey and Lu each graphed the words “men” and “women” (see Lu’s discussion here):

Cheryl S. tried “shameful divorce” vs. “amicable divorce”:

The plateaus are due to smoothing, which presents the data as 3-year averages to reduce huge spikes and valleys from individual data points to make overall trends more apparent. You can change the level of smoothing. Here’s the graph with no smoothing at all:

Overall, the tool provides a way to track changes in language as well as social trends. Google provides some info on their methodology, though not as much as I’d like. Some key points:

1. They “normalize” the results based on the number of books published each year, to account for the fact that many more books are published each year now than in, say, 1800, so 100 occurrences of a phrase today means less than 100 occurrences then — that’s why results are presented as percentages, not as raw numbers.

2. Phrases have to appear in at least 40 books total to be included in the database.

3. Keep in mind, the dataset is not based on all books published, but of a subset of books digitized by Google Books. The database includes about 4% of all published books, according to a journal article just published in Science.

I suspect it will be an amazing time-killer.

Stephen Colbert reports, and mocks, some pretty stunning product placement on Days of Our Lives:

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the tip!

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.

Abbotsford, Wisconsin’s Mark Prior posted a sign reading “NO NEGRO’S ALLOWED” sign [sic] at the entrance to his strip club.  From the story at NBC (via Racialicious):

“Our mistake is sometimes we look for logic in something that is just plain stupid,” says Dr. Selika Ducksworth-Lawton, an African American historian at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Meanwhile, in Hayden, Idaho, Mark Eliseuson celebrated the first snow with a KKK snowman, complete with noose.  According to KTLA News, Eliseuson took down the snowman after being told that he could be charged with a “nuisance”:

(Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the tip off.)

See also our post on race-themed parties at colleges and universities and our post on The Compton Cookout.

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.

To commemorate the last weekend before Christmas, when many will be out trying desperately to complete holiday shopping, I thought I’d post this image, designed and sent in by Joseph Moriarty in response to the craziness of all the holiday-season shopping frenzies (including the now-predictable tramplings):

Genesis C. smartly decided to deactivate her Facebook account, and thus its distractions, during her final exams. “It felt as if Facebook was doing all it could to convince me to stay.”  First Genesis sought to delete her account altogether, but finding a delete button took quite a bit of digging (and some googling).  She set about to delete, but the site insists on a 14 day waiting period.  A deleted account in two weeks wasn’t going to help her study now, so she decided to deactivate instead.  She continues:

After I selected the “deactivate” button under “account settings” Facebook asked me “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account?” and under that it displayed pictures of a few friends, captioned with the lines “[Friend’s name here] will miss you.”

The images they included weren’t profile pictures, but pictures in which Genesis had been tagged, so Facebook deliberately included people that she knew personally.

Genesis concludes:

I just thought it was very interesting to find out how manipulative a social network like Facebook can be by trying their best to make you feel that you really need Facebook in your life. First of all by making it very hard to finalize your deletion request and by making you feel that by deleting/deactivating your account you lose connection with your closest friends, as if it were the only form of communicating with these people.

See also an ABC News story on deleting/deactivating your Facebook account.

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.

Andi M. sent in a video created by J.C. Penney called “The Doghouse.” The ad tells the story of men sent to the doghouse by their wives for various bad behaviors, but mostly for giving bad Christmas gifts. A bad gift is a non-romantic gift, or a gift that is related to housework, or that implies a woman needs to lose weight or change her appearance:

As Andi points out, the ad portrays men as idiots or even actively mean-spirited. But I’m also interested in the way we define what are appropriate gifts for women. We often see “practical” gifts as perfectly acceptable to give to men. But increasingly, gifts for women are supposed to be essentially romantic, a symbol of love, not usefulness, a cultural trend the jewelry industry, in particular, has encouraged and benefited from.

In this ad, we have several “bad” gifts — more computer memory, a vacuum cleaner, facial hair remover, and a work-out accessory. All are presented as equally idiotic choices for men to make. So getting a woman something that might significantly improve her computer is just the same as giving her something to work out with, while actively mocking her body and eating habits. Any non-romantic gift is risky, even if accompanied by an attempt to be sweet (see the poor computer memory guy).

I’ve discussed before research on low-income women who complain when they feel that men waste money on romantic but non-essential gifts rather than stuff they actually need. On the other hand, I asked one of my classes about what they would consider an acceptable gifts, and I was (probably stupidly) surprised that many of the women in the class were adamant that useful or helpful items were nice to get, but only in addition to a romantic gift, never as the “main” gift itself. A couple said they’d feel bad if their female friends were showing off jewelry they got for Valentine’s Day or Christmas and they didn’t have anything to show, because their friends would assume their boyfriends/husbands weren’t romantic or didn’t love them very much. So it was less about whether they wanted jewelry than that they knew other women did, and thus feared their friends would judge their relationships if they didn’t get the right gift to “prove” they had good partners.

I think ads like this both reflect and reinforce this social pressure to buy the “right” kind of gifts for women. J.C. Penney tapped into an existing cultural norm about what kinds of gifts women want, and then reinforces it by presenting jewelry as the only means available to men to get out of the doghouse, and shows all women as being in complete agreement about what an acceptable gift is.

UPDATE: Reader Josh Leo pointed out that the ad also portrays the doghouse as a place men are tortured by having to do feminine things:

…all they are fed in “the doghouse” is Quiche and Chai Latte’s. This is clearly a statement that these foods are feminine an almost a form of torture for “Real Men.”

In this six-minute video from the New York Times, past residents and developers describe how Times Square was transformed from “the sleaziest block in America” to the corporate palace that it is today.  Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the submission!

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 one-minute video exposes how one person is made to look his worst and his best for a sequential photo shoot. He is both a “before” and an “after” version of himself on a single day. It is as you have always suspected:

Borrowed from Body Impolitic.

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.