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More proof of re-touching time from Photoshop Disasters, Lindsay Lohan’s cover and photo spread in German GQ featured a migrating belly button.

Where we might expect a belly button to be:

A surprisingly elevated belly button:

No belly button at all!

Gotta love our re-touching tag.

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.

Two friends of mine recently had a baby and the hospital sent home all kinds of instructional packets, all of which included product sample, advertising materials, etc. One item they found was this advertisement for the U.S. Career Institute’s program to become a medical claims processor who works from home. The ad plays on the guilt mothers often still have about working outside the home:

I don’t have a problem, in and of itself, with suggesting that a job provides options for parents who want to be home full-time but also work. Given the fact that women still bear the primary responsibility for childcare even though most want or need to provide financial support to the family, I’m sure many women (and for that matter, a lot of men) would find them appealing (in theory, anyway; I have my doubts about a lot of the “work at home and make a gazillion dollars a week!” pitches, but I have no knowledge of this one in particular).

What bothers me is the way the ad is written to not just say, “Hey, if you are staying home with the kids but would like to work for pay as well, this is a great opportunity.” Instead, the blaring headline “I’m glad you work at home Mommy” ties into the idea that children desperately want their moms (but apparently not dads) to stay home with them, and moms who do so are being the best moms. Even among women who value their careers and always planned to return to the paid workforce, many are surprised by how much guilt they feel when they do so. They may feel guilty for leaving their child with another childcare provider, but if they actually look forward to going back to work and are excited or relieved to be there, they often feel guilty for that, too. This is a burden of guilt that new fathers do not generally share; while they may wish they could be home more with their children, they usually don’t express guilt for not doing so, largely because by working outside the home, they are actually fulfilling the normative role of what a good father does, whereas working outside the home, particularly when children are young, it incompatible with ideals of good mothering.

On the very bottom of pg. 2 it does say, “USCI is nationally accredited and approved for veterans’ education benefits!” That’s an interesting line, since the majority of people would would qualify for veterans’ educational benefits would be men (for instance, women currently make up only 15.5% of the U.S. Army). There are other elements on the brochure that seem gender-neutral — being your own boss, setting your own hours, increasing job opportunities in the field — but that line seems to be the one part that is more tailored to a male audience.

On an unrelated topic, I love the totally meaningless graph at the top right of the 2nd page: look! This one column is way bigger than the others! It is entirely lacking in any useful information — how are they defining “growth”? What is 0% referring to? What level of growth are we talking about here? For all we know, the health/medical services bar could indicated 0.000001% growth.

And just out of interest, do any of you have any experience with these types of jobs? Did it live up to the claims (particularly flexibility and the amount of money you can make)?

Way back in June my friend Abby Kinchy let me know about an article in the New York Times by Stephanie Coontz, a scholar best known for her book The Way We Never Were, which addresses myths about the “traditional” family. The article is about no-fault divorces and their pros and cons. What struck Abby were the accompanying images, which depict two hypothetical break-up letters (to “John” and “Jane”) that include a list of stereotypes about men and women, what they want out of marriage, and why they fight.

The Dear John letter:

So women want to break up because they feel stunted in their marriage (they miss out on experiences, they’re bored, they want to travel), they are still hung up on old flames, they want kids and their male partners (of course) don’t, and they just might be lesbians.

The Dear Jane letter:

What do men stereotypically want to leave their female partners for? Being emasculated (“you make me feel like less of a…”), men aren’t supposed to be monogamous (“it’s not natural for a man to be mono…”), they want more sex with more people, women spent too much money shopping, or their wives get stupid haircuts.

There is some gender agreement, though; neither men nor women can take a spouse who gets fat.

UPDATE: Citizenparables thinks the images are more playing on those still-existing stereotypes:

Perhaps the point of the images is rejecting – crossing out – those cliche stereotypical excuses, which are by implication false (because surely they can’t all be true!), leaving the essential idea that when someone leaves a relationship it’s a choice, pure and simple, which they ought to own rather than blame on either themselves or the partner.

The New York Times has a neat interactive graph based on data from the American Time Use Survey that lets you look at hour-by-hour time use broken down by sex, employment status, 3 racial/ethnic groups (White, Black, Hispanic), age, education, and number of children (though, unfortunately, you can’t search by more than one category at once). Here is the breakdown for the entire sample:

For people age 15-24:

Watching TV and movies takes up a lot of the time of those over age 65:

You can also click on a particular activity to get more information about it:

Those with advanced degrees spent the most time participating in sports or watching them in person; I suspect that the data might look a bit different if time spent watching sports on TV went in this category instead of the TV category:

Just a note, the averages for time spent at work seem pretty low, but that’s because they’re averaged over all days of the week, including any days off, rather than only days a person actually went to work.

Presumably the amount of time you’ll spend playing around with the site goes under computer use.

I may not have found the love of my life on OkCupid, but I did fall in love… with their data analysis!

Their latest super-fun post by Christan Rudder, sent along by Rob Walker, Sara P. and an Anonymous Reader, looks at the lies people tell in their profiles.  They do this not by catching any given individual in a lie, but by comparing data on their users to data on the general U.S. population.  (It’s unclear what percentage of OkCupid users are American and they don’t specify if they are only looking at U.S. users, so I can’t verify that this is a fair comparison but… if they do restrict the analysis to Americans then…)  Since they have 1.51 million active users, we should expect that any distributions should more or less overlap.

But they don’t…

1.  Men lie about their height, reporting, on average, that they are about two inches taller than they are.  In the figure below, the solid purple line represents the U.S. population, the dashed line represents the reported height of OkCupid users:

2. Women lie about their height too.  Here’s the same figure for women (but with a dark purple implied best fit line; you can just ignore it):

3. People exaggerate their income, on average inflating it by about 20 percent (for this data, they controlled for regional differences in income).  The figure below, however, shows that the amount of exaggeration is related to age.  Both men (blue) and women (red) increasingly inflate their income up until around age 40.  After that, they just keep inflating it at about the same rate.

Rudder quips:

A woman may earn 76 cents on the dollar for the same work as a man, but she can fabricate, like, 85 cents no problem.

Oh and, yeah, there’s a reason why the men are lying (no word from Rudder on the women). Income is highly correlated with how many messages a man gets (red = fewer messages; green = more):

4. It also turns out that not all of the “recent pics” are actually recent. This is especially true for pictures rated “hot.” Rudder says that “hot” photos are more than twice as likely as “average” photos to be over three years old (12% and 5% respectively).

And the older a person is, the more likely they are to upload an older photo:

Fun!

Also from OkCupid: the racial politics of dating, what women want, how attractiveness matters, age, gender, and the shape of the dating pool, and older women want more sex.

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.

Anna M., Naomi B., Amanda C., Ben Z., and SpeZek sent in a new PETA ad campaign, the latest in a twisted story of objectification metaphor.

Feminists in the ’70s protested the objectification of women by metaphorically linking meat and female bodies (e.g., “we should not be treating women like pieces of meat”).  Meat is meat, so the argument went, but women are human beings and should be treated as such.

In mocking response, in 1978 Larry Flynt put a woman being chewed up by a meat grinder on the cover of Hustler magazine. We will treat women like meat if we want, was the message.  And we did, and we do, seemingly endlessly.

Forty years later, Pamela Anderson submits to being symbolically carved up for butchering by PETA in order to metaphorically link meat and female bodies again.  But this time, in an ironic reversal, it’s designed to condemn the way we treat animals, not the way we treat women.

And, forty years later, feminists are still saying “Please, can we not do the women/meat thing?”

So Canada denies PETA a permit for the launching of this new ad campaign.  An official explains: “…it goes against all principles public organizations are fighting for in the everlasting battle of equality between men and women” (source).  What a nice thing to say, feminists think.

But Anderson fights feminism with feminism:

How sad that a woman would be banned from using her own body in a political protest over the suffering of cows and chickens… In some parts of the world, women are forced to cover their whole bodies with burqas—is that next?

Yes, Pamela, I’m sure that’s next.

But I digress.

So PETA and Anderson must think that Canadians super-super-respect women like totally and never-never-objectify them to the degree that saying that animals are like women will suddenly inspire horror at the prospect of using animals for food?  Or is it that they think men will see the image and be like “oooh I’d really like to rub up against that rump” and then suddenly find cows too sexy to eat?  Or they don’t give a shit about women and are willing to use whatever attention-getting tactic they can to save animals from going under the knife (including using the body of a woman that has, um, gone under the knife)?

I submit this for discussion because I just don’t know.

More from PETA: women packaged like meat, and in cages, women who love animals get naked (men wear clothes), the banned superbowl ad, and a collection of various PETA advertising using (mostly women’s) nudity. See also my post on leftist balkanization, or the way that leftist social movements tend to undermine each other.

If you’re interested further, you may want to read Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat.

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 along a Slate slideshow chock full of interesting information on cigarettes and health warnings internationally. I found this particular tidbit most compelling:

As of June 22, 2010, U.S. cigarette manufacturers are no longer allowed to use the words “light,” “low,” and “mild” to describe their product because it gives the false impression that these cigarettes are better for you than others (source). In place of the words, however, manufacturers are using light and dark colors.  Between 2006 and 2009, for example, Salem cigarettes phased out their packages labeled with words (top) and moved to color based differentiation (bottom):

Marlboro has issued a “cheat sheet,” showing the move from descriptors to colors:

This is a very strategic move on the part of cigarette manufacturers, who know that the colors give consumers the same impression as the words.  At least one study has shown as much:

Scientists at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., studied 197 smokers and 200 nonsmokers who were shown two mock cigarette packs, one light blue and one dark blue.

They were then asked, “Which one would you buy if you were trying to reduce the risks to your health?” Eighty-seven percent of those surveyed selected the lighter-shaded pack, while just 8 percent chose the darker-shaded pack.

The New York City Health Department is trying to combat this new strategy with commercials aimed at exposing it:

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.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Courtesy of Talking Points Memo (via Comics with Problems), I have for you a link to the entire graphic novel (comic book? I’m not sure what to call this thing) Dignity & Respect: A Training Guide on Homosexual Conduct Policy. Here’s the cover:

If the cover hasn’t clued you in yet, this is a book meant to educate soldiers about the U.S. Army’s 1993 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy (which applies to other branches of the military as well). It covers what the policy means, what to do if you have “credible evidence” that someone is engaging in homosexual activities (being gay is ok, you just can’t do anything), the Army’s anti-harassment policy (you know, you can turn someone in for being gay and ruin their military career, but you can’t be rude), and provides scenarios of situations that might occur and how a soldier should react.

Among other things you can learn that it’s not ok to imply a male soldier would go on a date with another man, but apparently it’s ok to say that no man on earth would ever go out with a female soldier in your unit:

I’m not going to put up every page here, since you can easily get them all at the links above, but it’s worth at least skimming. It’s…something. I cannot imagine that any soldier, even ones who cared about the issue a lot one way or the other, took this book seriously.

I will give them credit, though: the characters are extremely diverse in terms of race/ethnicity and gender.