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Flashback Friday.

The word commodification refers to the process by which something that is not bought and sold becomes something that is.  As capitalism has progressed, more and more parts of our lives have become commodified.  Restaurants are the commodification of preparing and cleaning up meals; day care and nannying is the commodification of child raising; nursing homes is the commodification of caring for elders.

We sometimes post instances of commodification that tickle us.  Previously I posted about a company that will now put together and deliver a care package to your child at camp.  A parent just goes to the site, chooses the items they want included, and charge their credit card.  As I wrote in that post: “The ‘care’ in ‘care package’ has been, well, outsourced.”

I was equally tickled by a photograph, taken by sociologist Tristan Bridges, of pre-dyed Easter eggs:

This is a delicious example of commodification.  If you don’t have the time or inclination to dye eggs as part of your Easter celebration, the market will do it for you.  No matter that this is one of those things (e.g., a supposedly enjoyable holiday activity that promotes family togetherness) that is supposed to be immune to capitalist imperatives.

While we might raise our eyebrows at this example, newly commodified goods and services often elicit this reaction.  We usually get used to the idea and, later, have a hard time imagining life any other way.

For more on commodification, peruse our tag by that name. This post originally appeared in 2012.

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.

Abortion is highly politicized in the U.S. (more so than in many other countries) and the fight between those who are in favor of and against available abortion occurs on two fronts.  One is familiar to just about everyone: the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the legislation Supreme Court decision that established the legality of abortion in 1973.

The second front, though, is less familiar.  It involves reducing the ease of access to legal abortion. Efforts to increase barriers to accessing legal abortion include passing laws that require minors to notify their parents of an abortion or get their consent, requiring mandatory counseling for abortion-seekers, instituting waiting periods, and discouraging medical schools from teaching abortion procedures.  Some of the issues of diminishing access are non-movement related; others are the direct result of pro-life activism.

I bring this up in order to focus on an additional barrier to access: a reduction in the number of clinics and hospitals that provide abortions.  The map below, based on data from the Guttmacher Institute and compiled by ANSIRH, shows how availability varies by state.  In the darkest states, up to 20% of women live in a county with no abortion provider; in the lightest states, between 81 and 100% percent do.

Living far from the nearest abortion provider is a problem especially for low-income women.  Such women are less likely to have an employer who will give her a day off to travel to the clinic, less likely to get a paid sick day, and less likely to be able to afford to lose even a single day’s wages.  She is also less likely to have a car, making it more difficult to get to a distant location, and less likely to have reliable day care for any existing children.  If the state requires in-person counseling and has a waiting period, it means that the woman must take two days off, travel to and from the clinic twice, and arrange for child care on multiple days.

Reduction in the availability of abortion does not necessarily reduce the number of abortions.  We recently posted global data showing that less liberal abortion laws actually correlate with higher rates of abortion.  The data below, also from Guttmacher, show that were abortion laws are less liberal (largely in developing countries), the rate of abortion is 34/1,000 women oer year, compared to 39/1,000 in developed countries (the difference may look significant here, but imagine how trivial it would look if the horizontal axis went all the way to it’s true maximum of 1,000):

Guttmacher explains that the relevant variable isn’t availability of abortion, but the unintended pregnancy rate (which is surprisingly high in the U.S.).

Barriers to accessing abortion, then, don’t lower the abortion rate.  They do, however, increase the likelihood that an abortion procedure will occur later in pregnancy and guarantee a greater logistic burden on the pregnant woman.

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.

Lately we’ve seen a number of instances in which men are portrayed as babies.  We saw it in a Jack in the Box commercial featuring men being pushed around in a stroller, in the recent advertising for the movie Life as We Know It, and now Australian Ikea has opened Manland, a “day care” for men, a place where women can drop off their husbands while they shop. Thanks to Andri, a brand new student of mine, and readers YetAnotherGirl, Laura E., and LM for sending it in.

The idea that men are like babies is pretty damn obnoxious and should be offensive on the face of it (see especially the Jack in the Box commercial). But this is more insidiously problematic even than that.  It tells women that they can’t expect men to be grown ups.  And if men can’t be grown ups, they we certainly can’t expect them to do their share of the dishes or the hard work of raising families or, for that matter, be a true and equal emotional partner.

We see a similar pattern of insulting men in a way that undermines women  in the new “mediocre man” genre.  As I’ve written elsewhere, the mediocre man (think Judd Apatow movies and Hard Lemonade commercials):

…is a self-deprecating character who undermines idealized masculinity by being likeable despite being decidedly non-ideal…  The viewers are meant to identify with the mediocre men, who revel in each others’ company, happy to be dudes free from the clutches of the women in their lives, even if they aren’t sleeping with supermodels.  The mediocre man may be kind of a loser, indeed, but he can thank God he’s a man.

In both the man-as-child and the mediocre man tropes, then, the portrayals manage to simultaneously mock guys and support patriarchy. Pretty amazing.

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.

You might have heard that the U.S. added 290,000 jobs in April.  At the same time, the unemployment rate rose!  Bwhat!?

The unemployment rate doesn’t measure how many people are unemployed.  It sounds like it should, being that it includes the words “unemployment” and “rate” and all, but it doesn’t.  Instead, the unemployment rate measures how many people are looking for jobs.  When things are really bad, some people get discouraged and give up, or go to school instead, or stay home to take care of their kids and save day care money.

So the number of jobs and the unemployment rate are not directly correlated.  Ezra Klein posted this visual:

It shows unemployment rising as job growth remains negative, leveling off as (perhaps) people drop out of active job seeking, and than actually going up again there at the end in response to two months of solid job growth.

So it turns out that, in this case, a rise in the unemployment rate is good news.  It means some people are hopeful again.

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.

Ed at Gin and Tacos offered up the figure below comparing the minimum wage (adjusted to inflation) and the poverty line for a family (he doesn’t specify how many children).  It reveals that, as Ed puts it: “not once in its 80-year history has the minimum wage, if earned 40 hours weekly, hit the Federal poverty line for a family.”  That is, a dedicated full time worker earning minimum wage does not earn, and has never earned, enough to keep a family out of poverty.

minpov

So, if you are a single parent, you’re screwed.  (And, frankly, if you aren’t, you’re still screwed because child care will likely wipe out, if not exceed one person’s entire income.  Subsidized day care only serves a fraction of the children that are qualified.)

Ed notes that, given this, the rational choice for a parent is to go on welfare.  Welfare doesn’t get you above the poverty line either, and you’re still likely to be miserable, but at least you’ll be miserable while parenting your children instead of miserable while flipping burgers.

Some argue that, if people choose to go on welfare instead of work, then welfare must be too generous.  Lower welfare payments and people will choose to work.  Ed, however, suggests that the real problem revealed by this figure is the insufficiency of the minimum wage.  Raise the minimum wage and people will choose to work.  Only one of these solutions actually mitigates human suffering.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

A recent photo from Dina Litovsky showing a model’s inflamed feet in slingback heels went viral, with reposts from National Geographic and a whole host of Instagram influencers. The photo garnered just over 500k likes and comments criticizing the prioritization of beauty over pain. This is not the first time these images have gone viral. In Louis Vuitton’s 2012 show in Paris, photos of runway models’ battered and bruised feet made the rounds.  

Photo by Dina Litovsky – see reflections, and even more images of the modeling industry, on the Substack here

Models can and have refused to wear outrageous shoes, but they risk paying the price by being judged as unprofessional, especially models with low status and prestige within the industry. The industry often praises models for their ability to endure long shoots and poses overtly or subtly contortionist. Yet measuring professionalism by a model’s willingness to endure pain demonstrates the toxicity of professional status at the cost of one’s wellbeing. Phrases like “beauty is pain” and “look good, feel good” link one’s appearance to their inherent value and capabilities. On the catwalk, the consequences of professional norms skew models’ agency, and prices of pain are paid to justify, uphold, and maintain a professional image.

These runway shoes teeter between symbols of empowerment and oppression, as models embody cultural ideals of gender, race, class, and sexual identity. Simultaneously, their personhood is commoditized as “aesthetic laborers.” Empowered by the high fashion industry’s exclusivity and idealism, models experience dogged yet isolating work conditions. These images serve looks, but also serve as reminders of social expectations of beauty that reinforce of cultural standards shaped by power, race, and status. Sociologist Ashley Mears’ ethnography of models, Pricing Beauty, argues these ideals become prescriptive shaping cultural expectation of how people should look and be.

The struggle spreads from the fashion industry to the everyday consumer. In her essay “Always Be Optimizing,” Jia Tolentino connects pain and suffering to self-optimization. Narrating her experience and research on intense Pilates and barre workouts, Tolentino argues that gendered beauty ideals have transformed into a pursuit of optimization that hides oppressive cultural beauty standards. These painful practices are obscured as self-care, sweating it out, and getting a toned and sculpted body. Important here is the illusion of “agency” in doing “self-care” and choosing to “optimize” or improving one’s womanly figure. These lures of “look good feel good” and cultural expectations of beauty and that “beauty is pain,” justify the aches and pains from working out. Shoes are both a vehicle for our feet and for gendered cultural and societal expectations, standards, and ideals worthy of praise.

Rachel Bickelman is a MA and PhD student at University of Massachusetts Boston.

One of the goals of this blog is to help get sociology to the public by offering short, interesting comments on what our discipline looks like out in the world.

A sociologist can unpack this!
Photo Credit: Mario A. P., Flickr CC

We live sociology every day, because it is the science of relationships among people and groups. But because the name of our discipline is kind of a buzzword itself, I often find excellent examples of books in the nonfiction world that are deeply sociological, even if that isn’t how their authors or publishers would describe them.

Last year, I had the good fortune to help a friend as he was working on one of these books. Now that the release date is coming up, I want to tell our readers about the project because I think it is an excellent example of what happens when ideas from our discipline make it out into the “real” world beyond academia. In fact, the book is about breaking down that idea of the “real world” itself. It is called IRL: Finding realness, meaning, and belonging in our digital lives, by Chris Stedman.

In IRL, Chris tackles big questions about what it means to be authentic in a world where so much of our social interaction is now taking place online. The book goes to deep places, but it doesn’t burden the reader with an overly-serious tone. Instead, Chris brings a lightness by blending memoir, interviews, and social science, all arranged in vignettes so that reading feels like scrolling through a carefully curated Instagram feed.

What makes this book stand out to me is that Chris really brings the sociology here. In the pages of IRL I spotted Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas, Mario Small’s Someone to Talk To, Nathan Jurgenson’s work on digital dualism, Jacqui Frost’s work on navigating uncertainty, Paul McClure on technology and religion, and a nod to some work with yours truly about nonreligious folks. To see Chris citing so many sociologists, among the other essayists and philosophers that inform his work, really gives you a sense of the intellectual grounding here and what it looks like to put our field’s ideas into practice.

Above all, I think the book is worth your time because it is a glowing example of what it means to think relationally about our own lives and the lives of others. That makes Chris’ writing a model for the kind of reflections many of us have in mind when we assign personal essays to our students in Sociology 101—not because it is basic, but because it is willing to deeply consider how we navigate our relationships today and how those relationships shape us, in turn.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.

It is a strange sight to watch politicians working to go viral. Check out this video from the political nonprofit ACRONYM, where Alexis Magnan-Callaway — the Digital Mobilization Director of Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign — talks us through some key moments on social media. 

Social media content has changed the rules of the game for getting attention in the political world. An entire industry has sprung up around going viral professionally, and politicians are putting these new rules to use for everything from promoting the Affordable Care Act to breaking Twitter’s use policy

In a new paper out at Sociological Theory with Doug Hartmann, I (Evan) argue that part of the reason this is happening is due to new structural transformations in the public sphere. Recent changes in communication technology have created a situation where the social fields for media, politics, academia, and the economy are now much closer together. It is much easier for people who are skilled in any one of these fields to get more public attention by mixing up norms and behaviors from the other three. Thomas Medvetz called people who do this in the policy world “jugglers,” and we argue that many more people have started juggling as well. 

Arm-wrestling a constituent is a long way from the Nixon-Kennedy debates, but there are institutional reasons why this shouldn’t surprise us. Juggling social capital from many fields means that social changes start to accelerate, as people can suddenly be much more successful by breaking the norms in their home fields. Politicians can get electoral gains by going viral, podcasts take off by talking to academics, and ex-policy wonks suddenly land coveted academic positions.


Another good example of this new structural transformation in action is Ziad Ahmed, a Yale undergraduate, business leader, and activist. At the core of his public persona is an interesting mix of both norm-breaking behavior and carefully curated status markers for many different social fields. 

In 2017, Ahmed was accepted to Yale after writing “#BlackLivesMatter” 100 times; this was contemporaneously reported by outlets such as NBC NewsCNNTimeThe Washington PostBusiness InsiderHuffPost, and Mashable

A screenshot excerpt of Ahmed’s bio statement from his personal website

Since then, Ahmed has cultivated a long biography featuring many different meaningful status markers: his educational institution; work as the CEO of a consulting firm; founding of a diversity and inclusion organization; a Forbes “30 Under 30” recognition; Ted Talks; and more. The combination of these symbols paints a complex picture of an elite student, activist, business leader, and everyday person on social media. 

Critics have called this mixture “a super-engineered avatar of corporate progressivism that would make even Mayor Pete blush.” We would say that, for better or worse, this is a new way of doing activism and advocacy that comes out of different institutional conditions in the public sphere. As different media, political, and academic fields move closer together, activists like Ahmed and viral moments like those in the Gillibrand campaign show how a much more complicated set of social institutions and practices are shaping the way we wield public influence today.

Bob Rice is a PhD student in sociology at UMass Boston. They’re interested in perceptions of authority, social movements, culture, stratification, mental health, and digital methods. 

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.