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Though EVERYONE knows that models are very skinny and that this is bad for the self-esteem and health of women, I was just shocked at how deathly thin the models were at the most recent Paris Fashion Week.

Ashley Mears has a really excellent and sophisticated article in the journal Ethnography, based on her experiences as a model, called Discipline of the Catwalk.  She describes how models are subject to (from the abstract) “…a disciplining labor process in which female bodily capital is transformed into a cultural commodity.” More, because market demand is based on constantly changing fashions in women’s “looks,” women have little to no control over their own value in the market.  Mears writes:

This labor process typifies the politics of gender, in which women exercise power over themselves insofar as they internalize and pursue the glamour of their regime.

Given that some things about our bodies are simply not under our control (e.g., height, skin and eye color, etc), thinness may be appealing as it is one thing that models can control.  And, apparently, being very, very skinny is still very, very in.

These women are modeling Lindsey Lohan’s fashion line only incidentally.  It’s just the particular post I happened to see over at Jezebel.

See also a previous post on how celebrity superstar women have been getting skinnier over time.

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

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.

Sometimes you see an image or video that is pretty subtle and complicated, and it takes some mental wrangling to figure out what it’s conveying and what cultural ideas it’s drawing on or contradicting.

And then there are things like this, sent in by Joshua B.:

1. Normalization of heterosexual male gaze (until the very end)

2. Girls getting naked

3. While washing a car ‘n stuff

4. And they come in various ethnic flavors

That’s pretty much it.

About the man at the end, reader Victoria says,

I think it’s still the male gaze – just adding gay men to the mix at the end. The “Or, if you prefer” (or whatever they say) seems to clearly speak to the men in the audience.

I agree.

Amelie M. drew our attention to a comment by actress Olivia Wilde.

In an interview, she explained:

When people saw “The Black Donnellys” (2007), they didn’t know it was the same girl from “The O.C.” (2003). I’m a natural blonde, but I feel like a brunette. I feel like people treat me now [as a brunette] how I should be treated. People used to be shocked, when I was blond, that I wasn’t stupid. I used to get these comments that I swear people thought were compliments. Like, ‘Oh! You’re smart!’ – like they couldn’t believe it.

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

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.

Over at Everyday Sociology, Karen Sternheimer discussed one of Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments in his book, Outliers.  She explains:

While the American ethos of success suggests that it is the result of talent and hard work, Gladwell examines factors that sociologists refer to as social structure—things beyond our individual control—to understand what else successful people have helping them on their journey. Let’s be clear: skills and hard work are important, but so is timing.

One of the examples Gladwell uses is the strange concentration of wildly improbable success in birth cohorts (people born around the same time).  Sternheimer summarizes Gladwell’s argument as to how timing and geography shaped the ascendence of Gates and Jobs:

Gladwell describes how being born in the mid 1950s was particularly fortuitous for those interested [and talented] in computer programming development (think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both born in 1955). It also helped to be geographically near what were then called supercomputers, the gigantic predecessors to the thing on which you’re reading this post.

Sternheimer goes on to argue that members of Generation X may have a special advantage over earlier and later cohorts.  This figure shows that the number and rate of births peaked between the 1950s and then dropped precipitously during the period in which Generation X was born:

Those of us born in Generation X, then, would have had the advantage of schools designed and staffed for many more kids, leading to small class sizes and more resources for each kid.  Sternheimer writes:

As Gladwell describes, children born after booms… have the benefit of smaller class sizes. An unprecedented number of schools were built for Baby Boomers in the years before I was born. When my cohort was ready to go to school, there were newly-built buildings waiting for us, especially for people like me who lived in well-funded suburbs…

When I was in elementary school in the mid 1970s, there were so few students that many classes were combined: first and second graders had the same teacher, as did third and fourth graders. Looking back, this provided me with some unusual opportunities.

Being able to think through this intersection of biography and history is how C. Wright Mills describes as “the sociological imagination.”

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

Nielson recently released new data on teen media use.  Among the many findings, I was struck by the rapid rise in text messaging in just two years:

There’s a whole sociological literature on the adoption of technology, but I don’t know it. Does anyone out there familiar with it have any insights?

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

This nine-minute 1938 promotion video for White Sands National Monument is a stunning example of how incredibly short our attention spans have become.  Or is it just me?  Or maybe they found this mindnumblingly slow in 1938 also?

The introductory title pages finally fade away so that the substantive material can begin at about 40 seconds in.  40 seconds!  I was dying from boredom at about second 15!  See how long you can stand to watch it:

Via Weird Universe.

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

Sandra H. sent us a link to a story about a field of empty container ships parked off the coast of Singapore:

Simon Parry reports that the field includes about 12 percent of the world’s container ships.  More than “the U.S. and British navies combined,” he writes.

The idle ships are another visual indication of the worldwide economic downturn, alongside the images of Detroit’s decline, unsold cars, abandoned homes, and empty malls.

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

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.

Lynn drew our attention to the American Apparel webpages for men’s and women’s clothes.  She notes a distinct difference:

On the Women’s clothing pages, the girls are modelling THEMSELVES in addition to the clothes.  You see a butt purposefully sticking out here, a shirt pulled up to there, a head thrown back in a coquettish manner, a back arched this way and that.

On the Men’s pages, the men are essentially just “standing there”, letting the clothes speak for themselves.

I’ve included screen shots of all of the models in the slide show, so you can judge for yourself (sorry for the funky formatting; there were more images of women than men).

The men:

The women:

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