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Happy end of August!

SocImages News:

I had the opportunity to publish essays in Politico and Salon this month.  The first was a response to an accusation that progressives refuse to talk about race, genetics, and intelligence, so I did in “Yes, Let’s Talk about Race and IQ.”

The second sounds like it belongs better in Cosmopolitan, but I promise there’s good sociology in there: “5 Reasons Your ‘Sexual Peak’ Might be Fake.”

Backstage at SocImages, we put together a new Pinterest board aimed at collecting examples of women being presented as catty and jealous of one another (e.g., “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful”).  We call it the Mean Girls Meme.  We’re excited to add additional examples!

Finally, Gwen and I offered some advice to new college students.

Top Posts:

• 2,800 likes/tweets: “Men Need Clothes; Women Need to Look Sexy.”
• 2,000 likes/tweets: “Double Standards & the VMA Awards: What about Robin Thicke?“
• 1,500 likes/tweets: “Power, Mickey Mouse, and the Infantilization of Women.”

Elsewhere on the Net:

This month SocImages or its authors were quoted in articles at:

• Wired, “Google Glass Reborn as Something You’d Actually Want to Wear.”
• The Verge, “How Feminism and Commercialism Combined to Make ‘Camp Gyno’ a Viral Hit.”
• Los Angeles Times, “Study Dispels Notions of ‘No-Holds Barred’ Sex on Campus.”
• Jezebel, “Great News for Ladies Who Like Sexing: ‘Sexual Peaks’ are Nonsense.”
• Terceiro Tempo, “Mudanças Para as Mulheres das Lutas” [Changes in the World of Fighting Women].
• Minding the Campus, Reforming Our Universities, “Hookup Culture – Great Publicity, but Not That Popular.”

Cross-Post Highlights…

• Jezebel, “Behind the Imperative that Women Be Sexy and Cute.”
• Pacific Standard, “Why Don’t We Tip Flight Attendants?“
• Global Policy TV, “The Role of Employer Selection in Gendered Job Segregation.”

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

My fall schedule is falling into place.  If any readers are in the Twin Cities or Salt Lake City, I’d love to schedule a meet up!

• Citrus College (Sept. 10, 2013): “A Feminist Defense of Friendship”
• Carleton College (Sept. 30, 2013): TBD
• Macalester College (Oct. 2-3, 2013): TBD
• Westminster College (Mar.  11, 2014): “‘The Night Overall Wasn’t Bad’: What College Students Really Think About Hooking Up”

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

In Other News…

I enjoyed a drive to Key West thanks to my mom, Kay West.  It was pretty:

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.

Six years ago today we posted our very first images: a re-touched magazine cover featuring Faith Hill and two almost identical Skyy Vodka ads that appeared in Maxim and Cosmo (hint: it’s in the nipples).

While people often congratulate Gwen and I for coming up with the idea for the blog, we never actually intended the public to read it.  We initially started the site as a place for the two of us to share images that we used in teaching.  The rest is history.

Thanks to everyone who has visited over the last six years!  Almost 5,000 posts later, you’ve changed our lives and careers in unexpected and delightful ways!

Here are some highlights from the year! All deserving exclamation points!

• Gwen got tenure!
• We got a home page (thanks Jon Smadja)!
• We reached 12,000 Twitter and 25,000 Facebook followers!
• We added 8 new Pinterest Boards!
• One post was “liked” by over 30,000 readers!
• Shankar Vedantam started tweeting us!
• We learned that otters LOVE us!
• We made new relationships with Alternet, PolicyMic, and Pacific Standard!
• We got an email from fashion designer Paul Frank!
• We took an exercise class from Richard Simmons!
• We added two more Image Guides!
• We were quoted at CNN, NPR, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Business Insider, USA Today, and Slate, among others, and were featured at the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and Alternet!

Here’s to you and here’s to another great year!

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.

Originally posted in 2010. Re-posted in honor of the holiday.

In the U.S., Valentine’s Day is pretty much for women. While women do give Valentine’s gifts to male partners, the emphasis among adults is on men giving items to women: flowers, candy, cards, taking them out to dinner, and so on. In many cases women aren’t expected to reciprocate, or can give a less expensive/significant present, and I doubt many give flowers or chocolate in heart-shaped boxes.

In Japan, however, the roles are reversed: women give chocolates to men, as well as often buying gifts and providing meals. It apparently isn’t entirely clear how this tradition emerged.

There are two types of chocolates that women give men. Giri-choco, or “obligation chocolate,” is relatively cheap and is what you give to coworkers and the like. Honmei-choco is higher-quality chocolate reserved for men a woman is close to–partners or perhaps a family member. Some women choose to make their own honmei.

Men aren’t off the hook, however. A month later, on March 14th, is White Day, a day when men give candy and other gifts to women. According to wikipedia, these gifts are supposed to be more expensive than what the men received on Valentine’s Day.

A lot of websites say that White Day was invented by a marshmallow company in the ’60s as a way to increase sales, but I can’t find any reliable source for this explanation.

It’s a good example of the social construction of holidays and food. In the U.S., chocolate is highly feminized–we think of it as a food that women particularly like, and ads about chocolate, especially fancy chocolates, are usually aimed at women (or men buying for them). Valentine’s Day and big heart-shaped boxes with large bows on them are likewise feminized. Valentine’s Day is, primarily, a day when men are expected to show their affection for women through the purchase of these things (and, as a side note, the chocolate that comes in those heart-shaped boxes is often pretty unappealing). Insofar as women reciprocate with gifts for men, they’re unlikely to come in a similar heart-shaped box. When I brought up this possibility to my students, they said that would be really unusual and the male recipient would probably feel strange about it.

In Japan, clearly chocolates for Valentine’s Day (even expensive, fancy chocolate), heart-shaped boxes, and big bows are considered appropriate gifts for men. It makes it clear how our association of chocolate with women is culturally specific.

Of course, the fact that on White Day men are supposed to give women more expensive gifts than they received indicates that, while Valentine’s Day specifically is for men, the expectation is that overall, the balance of gift-giving requires men to show more affection-via-spending, similar to U.S. expectations surrounding the holiday.

Other posts: the social construction of chocolate and marketing chocolate to men.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Cross-posted at Chris Uggen’s Blog.

I’ve been reluctant to write about the terrible events at Sandy Hook Elementary School because the wounds are still too fresh for any kind of dispassionate analysis. As a social scientist, however, I’m disappointed by the fear-mongering and selective presentations of the research evidence I’ve read in reports and op-eds about Friday’s awful killing.

Such events could help move us toward constructive actions that will result in a safer and more just world — or they could push us toward counter-productive and costly actions that simply respond to the particulars of the last horrific event. I will make the case that a narrow focus on stopping mass shootings is less likely to produce beneficial changes than a broader-based effort to reduce homicide and other violence. We can and should take steps to prevent mass shootings, of course, but these rare and terrible crimes are like rare and terrible diseases — and a strategy to address them is best considered within the context of more common and deadlier threats to population health. Five points:

1. The focus on mass shootings obscures over 99 percent of homicide victims and offenders in the United States.

The numbers should not matter to parents who must bury their children, but they are important if policy makers are truly committed to reducing violent deaths. There are typically about 25 mass shootings and 100 victims each year in the United States (and, despite headlines to the contrary, mass shootings have not increased over the past twenty years). These are high numbers by international standards, but they pale relative to the total number of killings – about 14,612 victims and 14,548 offenders in 2011. In recent years, the mass shooters have represented less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the total offenders, while the victims have represented less than one percent of the total homicide victims in any given year. We are understandably moved by the innocence of the Sandy Hook children, but we should also be moved by scores of other victims who are no less innocent. There were 646 murder victims aged 12 or younger  in the United States in 2011 alone — far more than all the adults and children that died as a result of mass shootings.

2. The focus on mass shootings leads to unproductive arguments about whether imposing sensible gun controls would have deterred the undeterrable. 

As gun advocates are quick to point out, many of the perpetrators in mass shootings had no “disqualifying” history of crime or mental disorder that would have prevented them from obtaining weapons. And, the most highly motivated offenders are often able to secure weapons illegally. Even if such actions do little to stop mass shootings, however, implementing common-sense controls such as “turning off the faucet” on high capacity assault weapons, tightening up background checks, and closely monitoring sales at gun shows are prudent public policy. But the vast majority of firearms used in murders are simple handguns. I would expect the no-brainer controls mentioned above to have a modest but meaningful effect, but we will need to go farther to have anything more than an incremental effect on mass shootings and gun violence more generally.

3. The focus on mass shootings obscures the real progress made in reducing the high rates of violence in the United States. 

I heard one commentator suggest that America had finally “hit bottom” regarding violence. Well, this is true in a sense — we actually hit bottom twenty years ago. The United States remains a violent nation, but we are far less violent today than we were in the early 1990s. Homicide rates have dropped by 60 percent and the percentage of children annually exposed to violence in their households has fallen by 69 percent since 1993:

We can and should do better, of course, but these are not the worst of times.

4. The focus on mass shootings exaggerates the relatively modest correlation between mental illness and violence. 

Those who plan and execute mass shootings may indeed have severe mental health problems, though it is difficult to say much more with certainty or specificity because of the small number of cases in which a shooter survives to be examined. We do know, however, that the correlation between severe mental illness and more common forms of violence is much lower — and that many types of mental health problems are not associated with violence at all.

5. The focus on mass shootings leads to high-security solutions of questionable efficacy. 

Any parent who has attempted to drop off a kid’s backpack knows that security measures are well in place in many schools. Rates of school crime continue to fall, such that schools are today among the safest places for children to spend so many of their waking hours. In 2008-2009, for example, only 17 of the 1,579 homicides of youth ages 5-18 occurred when students were at school, on the way to school, or at school-associated events. Of course we want to eliminate any possibility of children being hurt or killed at school, but even a 2 percent reduction in child homicide victimization outside of schools would save more lives than a 90 percent reduction in school-associated child homicide victimization. While every school must plan for terrible disasters in hopes that such plans will never be implemented, outsized investments in security personnel and technology are unlikely to serve our schools or our kids.

In the aftermath of so many deaths I am neither so cynical as to suggest that nothing will change nor so idealistic as to suggest that radical reform is imminent. I’m just hoping that the policy moves we make will address our all-too-common horrors as well as the rare and terrible events of the past week.

—————————

Chris Uggen is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and the author of  Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, with Jeff Manza. You can follow him at his blog and on twitter.

Cross-posted at CNN.

For the past few days, Americans have been weeping together and wringing our hands once again at the senseless tragedy of a mass murder inside a school. The horrific scene in Newtown, Connecticut, is now seared permanently in our collective conscience, as we search for answers. We’ll look at the photograph of Adam Lanza and ask over and over again how he could have come to such a deadly crossroads.

We still know nothing about his motives, only the devastating carnage he wrought. And yet we’ve already heard from experts who talk about mental illness, Asperger’s syndrome, depression, and autism. The chorus of gun boosters has defensively chimed in about how gun control would not have prevented this.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee offered the theory that since “we have systematically removed God from our schools, should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?” (As if those heathen children deserved it?)

All the while, we continue to miss other crucial variables — even though they are staring right back at us when we look at that photograph. Adam Lanza was a middle class white guy.

If the shooter were black and the school urban, we’d hear about the culture of poverty; about how inner-city life breeds crime and violence; perhaps even some theories about a purported tendency among blacks towards violence.

As we’ve seen in the past week, it’s not only those living on the fringes of society who express anger through gun violence.

Yet the obvious fact that Lanza — and nearly all the recent mass murderers who targeted non-work settings — were middle class white boys seems to barely register. Look again at the pictures of Jared Lee Loughner (Tucson), James Eagan Holmes (Aurora) and Wade Michael Page (Oak Creek) — a few of the mass killers of the past couple of years. (Yes, the case of Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator at Virginia Tech, the worst school shooting in our history, stands out as the exception. And worth discussing.)

Why are angry young men setting out to kill entire crowds of strangers?

Motivations are hard to pin down, but gender is the single most obvious and intractable variable when it comes to violence in America. Men and boys are responsible for 95% of all violent crimes in this country. “Male criminal participation in serious crimes at any age greatly exceeds that of females, regardless of source of data, crime type, level of involvement, or measure of participation” is how the National Academy of Sciences summed up the extant research.

How does masculinity figure into this? From an early age, boys learn that violence is not only an acceptable form of conflict resolution, but one that is admired. However the belief that violence is an inherently male characteristic is a fallacy. Most boys don’t carry weapons, and almost all don’t kill: are they not boys? Boys learn it.

They learn it from their fathers. They learn it from a media that glorifies it, from sports heroes who commit felonies and get big contracts, from a culture saturated in images of heroic and redemptive violence. They learn it from each other.

In talking to more than 400 young men for my book, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, I heard over and over again what they learn about violence. They learn that if they are crossed, they have the manly obligation to fight back. 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.

This sense of entitlement is part of the package deal of American manhood — the culture that doesn’t start the fight, as Margaret Mead pointed out in her analysis of American military history, but retaliates far out of proportion to the initial grievance. They learn that “aggrieved entitlement” is a legitimate justification for violent explosion.

The easy availability of guns is another crucial variable. After the terrible school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, Great Britain enacted several laws that effectively made owning handguns illegal in that country. The murder rate in the U.S. is more than three times higher than Britain.

And yes, boys have resorted to violence for a long time, but sticks and fists and even the occasional switchblade do not create the bloodbaths of the past few years. In 2011, more than 80% of all homicides among boys aged 15 to 19 were firearm related.

We need a conversation about gun control laws. And far more sweeping — and necessary — is a national meditation on how our ideals of manhood became so entangled with violence.

It’s also worth discussing why so many of these young mass murderers are white. Surely boys of color have that same need to prove their masculinity, and a similar sense of entitlement to annihilate those who threaten it. Perhaps the only difference is that it seems to be nearly the exclusive province of white boys to so dramatically expand the range of their revenge and seek to destroy the entire world, not simply the person or group that committed the supposed offense. Perhaps. It’s a conversation worth having.

I am not for a moment suggesting we substitute race or gender for the other proximate causes of this tragedy: lax gun laws, mental illness. I am arguing only that we can never fully understand it, unless we also add these elements to our equation. Without them, the story is entirely about him, the shooter. But the bigger story is also about us.

In the coming weeks, we’ll learn more about Adam Lanza, his motives, his particular madness. We’ll hear how he “snapped” or that he was seriously mentally ill. We’ll try to explain it by setting him apart, by distancing him from the rest of us.

And we’ll continue to miss the point. Not only are those children at Sandy Hook Elementary School our children. Adam Lanza is our child also. Of course, he was mad — as were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Lee Loughner, James Eagan Holmes, and Wade Michael Page — and the ever-longer list of boys and young men who have exploded in a paroxysm of vengeful violence in recent years. In a sense, they weren’t deviants, but over-conformists to norms of masculinity that prescribe violence as a solution. Like real men, they didn’t just get mad, they got even. Until we transform that definition of manhood, this terrible equation of masculinity and violence will continue to produce such horrific sums.

————————

Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stonybrook.  He has written or edited over twenty volumes, including Manhood in America: A Cultural History and Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.  You can visit his website here.

Since the school shooting last Friday, intense attention has focused on gun ownership in the U.S., as well as the likelihood of real changes in gun regulation. Nate Silver posted about characteristics associated with gun ownership.

Not surprisingly, gun ownership is strongly correlated with political party, with Republicans much more likely to own guns than Democrats. As Silver explains,

Whether someone owns a gun is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of other demographic characteristics.

That gap between the political parties has grown significantly since he early 1990s, as fewer and fewer Democrat and Independent households own guns:

There’s a gender gap in gun ownership, but according to exit polling of 2008 voters, it is largely due to Democrats; Republican women are only slightly less likely to own guns than Republican men:

Gun ownership goes down as educational level increases:

Silver also presents differences by urban/suburban/rural location, income, military service, religious affiliation, and several other characteristics. These demographics matter, but the impact of political party remains clear, even accounting for other differences.

And Silver argues the gap may grow. Younger Democrats are less likely to own guns than older Democrats, but there’s very little difference between Republicans of different age groups:

Thus, as the two political parties consider their responses in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, they face very different realities in terms of their members’ gun ownership and likely personal stake in arguments about possible gun regulations.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

This photograph is of the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, where Hooker Chemical (now Occidental Petroleum Corporation) buried 21,000 tons of toxic, chemical waste:
In 1953, Hooker Chemical sold the land that they had been using for toxic waste disposal to the Niagara Falls School Board for $1. The sale deed contained warnings about the chemical waste and a disclaimer of liability. However, planners hastily built schools and homes on the contaminated land to accommodate the city’s growing postwar population. By the late 1970s, residents were reporting a litany of illnesses and birth defects. Scientists discovered high levels of carcinogens in the soil, groundwater, and air. The community mobilized to bring attention to the situation, and President Carter declared a federal health emergency in the area.
Elizabeth Blum, a professor of history at Troy University, has written about the environmental activism of Love Canal residents. Such activism, called “popular epidemiology,” attempts to link spikes in localized health issues to their origins. Despite such grassroots movements, though, the media tends to show little interest in the causes of cancer and greater interest in finding the cure.

The many “Stand Up to Cancer” ads, for example, urge people to donate money (or just use their credit card for purchases) to help fund the development of cancer treatments:

When media attention is focused on the causes of cancer, it usually takes an individualistic tone. Risk factors (smoking, poor diet, etc.) are blamed for various forms of cancer.

The thing is: there’s no money in prevention.

Mainstream media outlets have a vested interest in not exposing the causes of cancer.  The companies that pay to advertise on their channels, and often their parent companies or subsidiaries, often traffic in known carcinogens. Pharmaceutical companies, likewise, have a perverse incentive. Healthy people make them no money, neither do dead people; sick people though, they’re a goldmine.  Many organizations, including the multi-million dollar Susan G. Komen Foundation, are in the business of raising money “for the cure,” more so than prevention.

The politics of cancer, then suffer from the individualism characteristic of modern American and capitalist imperatives, leaving the causes of the cancer epidemic invisible and, accordingly, the unethical and illegal behavior of companies like Hooker Chemical.

Dan Rose is an assistant professor of sociology at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee.  His research focuses on medical sociology and health inequalities in minority neighborhoods.

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.

Course Guide for
SEXUALITY AND SOCIETY
(last updated 01/2012)

Developed by Amanda M. Jungels
Georgia State University

Integrating/Interrogating Biological and Social Views of Sexuality

Challenging Evolutionary Perspectives on Sex/Sexuality

• Challenging Evolutionary-Biology Perspectives on Mating Strategies

Social Construction of (Biological) Sex

• The Question of Caster Semenya’s Sex
• “Creating” Normative Genitals
• Conflating Gender, Sex, and Sexual Orientation

Social Construction: Changing Views on Sexuality

• Buy Virginity for Just $14.99
• Marketing the Tampon: “Will I Still Be A Virgin?”
• Changing Biology: Age at First Menstruation
• Masturbation and “Social Hygiene” in 1922

Sexuality and Social Categories

Social Construction of Gender

• Teens and Transgendered Women: Threats to Society
• On the J. Crew Pink Toenails “Controversy”
• Semenya’s Makeover: Gender as Performance
• “Some Men Just Need to Be Slapped”: Policing Masculinity
• A Beauty Regime for the “New Man”
• Karate Studio Ad: Gender Policing and Unofficial Marketing Materials
• One Family’s Experience with “Curing” Gender Non-Conformity

Transgender/Third Gender/Gender Queer

• On Being Gender Queer
• A Third Gender in Oaxaca, Mexico
• Argentinian Bank Depicts Transgendered Positively

Social Construction of Sexual Orientation

• How Useful is the Concept of Sexual Orientation?
• Are We Born Gay? And If We Were, How Would We Know?
• What Seems “Gay”?
• Was Franklin D. Roosevelt Gay?
• What Does a “Prehomosexual” Look Like?
• Homosexuality and Our Collective Consciousness
• Destabilizing Heteronormativity
• Normalizing Lesbian Couples
• Gay Couple in Budweiser’s “Coming Home” Ad?
• Survey Finds Different Levels of Acceptance for “Gays” Versus “Homosexuals”
• “Homosexual” vs. “Gay”: Discourse in the Culture Wars
• Public Opinion on the Cause of Homosexuality

Learning about Sex/Sex Education           

Sex Education

• How Government Policies Impact Sex Education and Reproduction
• Sources of Sex Education Information for Teens
• Teens as Objects of Control
• British TV Commercial Promotes Abortion Services
• Anti-Teen Pregnancy PSA
• Teen Motherhood Sucks…Unless You’re Bristol Palin

Abstinence vs. Comprehensive Sex Ed

• Boys Receive Less Sexuality Education Than Girls
• Explaining Variation in Teen Pregnancy Rates by State: Race and Sex Education
• Consequences of U.S. and Dutch Approaches to Teen Sex
• Sexing Up Abstinence
• Abstinence Billboards

Sexual Practices

• Sexual Orientation and Sexual Behavior: OkCupid Data
• Bisexuality and Dating on OkCupid
• Promise and Perils of Hook-Up “Culture”
• MTV on Hook-Up Culture

The Sexual Body

The Female Body

• Orgasmic Birth and the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm
• How Vulvas Vary
• Gender Differences in Body Regimens

Menstruation

• Weird Tampon Ad from Australia
• Kotex Sells Tampons by Making Fun of Selling Tampons
• Re-Framing Menstruation
• Race, Gender and Aggression in Ads for Menstrual Pains Meds

Presenting the Female Body as Unclean: Removing Body Hair

• Summer’s Eve’s “Hail to the V” Campaign
• Shave or Men Will Never Find It                            
• Mow the Lawn
• Civilize Your Bush
• Encouraging Hair Removal for Children?
• The Miss of Sisyphus
• PETA Attacks Pubic Hair
• Advertising Against Bush
• Anxiety about “Objectionable Hair” = Money in Someone’s Pocket
• Nair Hair Removal Products for Teens

Presenting the Female Body as Unclean: Douching

• Douching Your Way to the Top
• Vintage Zonite Douche Ads

Bodily Modification and Female Genital Cutting

• Spanish Ads Compare Women with Genital Cutting to Fuck Toys
• Female Circumcision Endorsed in a Vintage Playgirl
• When Vaginoplasty Meets Contemporary Television
• Pelvic Fitness Spa: More Things for Women to Worry About (NSFW)
• Vajazzling Revealed

Social Construction of the Male Body/Male Sexuality

• Social Construction of Sperm
• Medicalization of Impotence
• Conflating College Achievement with Sexual Prowess
• A Historical Look at the Popularity of Male Circumcision
• Fetishizing Black Men

Presenting the Penis as a Dangerous Weapon

• Safer Sex PSAs Conflate the Penis with a Firearm (NSFW)
• Safer Sex PSAs
• Presenting the Penis as a Dangerous Weapon (NSFW)

Representing Sex

Sexualization of Children’s Products

• Sexualized vs. Sexual: The Case of Thylane Blondeau
• Dora the Explorer’s Makeover
• Strawberry Shortcake: Extreme Makeover Edition
• Sexy Toy Makeovers: Lisa Frank, Trollz and Cabbage Patch Kids
• More Sexy Toy Makeovers: My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite and Candy Land

Sex in the Media

• Onslaught: Dove vs. Axe
• Non-Subtle Sex in Advertising
• “Subliminal” Sex in the Media

Ejaculation and Phallic Imagery

• Ejaculation Imagery
• Sexual Overtones in Cologne Ad
• Ejaculation Imagery in a Dutch Creamer Ad
• Phallic Imagery in a Skyy Vodka Ad
• Pornification of Advertising

Sex and Violence

• Violence Against Women on Prime-Time Up Since 2004
• Re-thinking the Famous Dolce and Gabbana Gang Rape Ad
• More Sexualized Violence in Fashion (NSFW)
• Calvin Klein Ad Implies Sexual Violence
• Even More Violence in Fashion Images

Objectification

• Objectification of Women: Everybody Wins!
• Gender, Sexualization and Rolling Stone
• Sexualized Images of Female Dominance

Infantilization of Women

• Vintage Infantilization

Forced/Coerced Sex

Sexual Script

• Sex and Dating as a Hunt
• Women are Wild Animals; Men are Hunters
• Men are Animals

Rape Culture

• Making Light of Rape in the Purdue University Newspaper
• Yale Frat Pledges Chant “No Means Yes, Yes Means Anal”
• Do Full-Body Scans or Pat Downs = Sexual Groping?
• Ad Aimed at Discouraging Teen Drinking Threatens Prison Rape, Homosexuality

Use of Alcohol as a Tool for Coercive Sex

• Alcohol as a Tool in the Dating Game
• Booze=Sex
• Beer, Sex, and “The Hunt”
• Drunk Women are Easy Targets

Sexual Assault Prevention Campaigns

• Framing Recovery from Child Sexual Abuse (Trigger Warning)
• Resistance, Language and the Toronto Slutwalk

Commercial Sex

Pornography

• Online Porn Subscription in Liberal vs. Conservative States
• Finally an Ad that Acknowledges What High-Speed Internet is For
• Are Kids Watching Internet Porn?
• Mainstreaming of Pornography
• Gail Dines on Pornography
• Cindy Gallop on How Porn is Shaping Our Sex Lives

Contemporary Views on Prostitution

• Sex Work in Las Vegas
• Humanizing Sex Workers?
• Facebook, Technology and Prostitution
• Disparate Trends in Permissiveness: Homosexuality and Prostitution
• What Does the Sex Industry Look Like?
• Disparate Trends in Permissiveness: Homosexuality and Prostitution

Historical Perspectives on Prostitution

• 1890s Guide to New York City Brothels
• Personifying Danger: Women as Vectors of STIs
• The Virgin-Whore Binary in WWII VD Propaganda
• STI Transmission: Wives, Whores and the Invisible Man
• Loose Women and the War Effort

Sex Trafficking

• Misleading Measurement of Anti-Trafficking Enforcement
• Thinking Critically about Sex Trafficking
• Disney Still Makes Light of Sex Slavery

Other Forms of Sex Work

• Phone Sex: Real and Imaginary (NSFW)
• “Work,” “Sex Work,” and Everything in Between

Social Control of Sex Work

• Halloween Hall of Shame: Fat Lap Dancer Costume
• Sex Work, Disrespect and Women’s Empowerment
• How Can You Tell If You’re a Prostitute?
• Questioning the Benefits of “Rescue” from Prostitution
• Posters Opposed to the Criminalization of Prostitution

Reproduction/Abortion

Reproduction

• To Whom Do Children “Just Happen”?
• Protecting Boys with Condoms for Kids
• Pre-Conception Care: Good for Babies, Bad for Women?
• The Pill and the Invention of the Monthly Cycle
• Visualizing the Fetus
• Thomas Beatie, the Pregnant Man, in the Public Sphere
• Threat of (Brown) Women’s Fertility

Abortion

• Why are Insured Women Paying for Abortions?
• Mis-Illustrating Abortion
• Framing the Abortion Debate
• Racializing the Abortion Debate
• Racialized Abortion Campaigns and Rethinking Choice
• More on the Racialization of the Abortion Debate
• Trends in the Rate of Abortion: New Data Shows a Plateau
• Measuring Abortion Beliefs
• Public Opinion on Abortions in Select Countries
• Public Opinion on Abortion by Party and Gender
• Abortion Laws Around the World
• Reproductive Politics, Race and Obama

Sterilization

• No Family for You: Examples of State Disruption
• Coercive Sterilization? Think of the Children!
• Breaking Down the Force/Choice Binary in the Sterilization of Women of Color

Contemporary GLBT Issues

Gay Rights Movement

• Images from the Early Gay Rights Movement
• Historic Photos of the Stonewall Riot and Its Aftermath
• Police Raids and the Stonewall Riots
• Increasing Cultural Acceptance of Gay and Lesbian Rights
• Should We Vote on People’s Rights?
• Opinions of Gay Rights Issues by State
• Attitudes Toward Gays and Lesbians

GLBT Parenting

• Portraying Lesbian Parents

Same-Sex Marriage

• Anti-Gay Marriage Ads
• Global Recognition of Same-Sex Marriages
• The Tipping Point for Support of Same Sex Marriage?
• Acceleration for Support of Same-Sex Marriage
• Who is Driving Increasing Acceptance of Gays and Lesbians?
• Turbo Tax Wants to Know if You are Gay Married
• Support for Same-Sex Marriage by Age and State
• On Gay Marriage and the Contact Hypothesis
• Gay Marriage and the Social Construction of Social “Problems”
• Views about Same Sex Marriage by Generation
• Rhetorical Strategy in the Gay Marriage Debate

GLBT-Related Legislation

• Southern Poverty Law Center Map of Hate Groups
• Sodomy Laws
• Increasing U.S. Public Support for Gays in the Military
• Educating Soldiers about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
• “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is Done