Some interesting data on who Republicans and Democrats feel represents them and the opposing party:
Gallup data borrowed from The Monkey Cage (via Matthew Yglesias).
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Toban B. sent us a link to an infographic that included data that put U.S. spending on the military into perspective:
See also this post looking at where our tax dollars go.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
I found this list of rules posted by the Lansing, Michigan, Chief of Police in dance halls during the 1920s in Allan Brandt’s book No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880:
I don’t know what a “gratusque” dance, from point 3, is–maybe “grotesque” spelled incorrectly?
Notice the association of jazz with sexual impropriety. And although I think most readers, like me, will read the list and laugh at the fact that people thought dancing was so problematic, keep in mind that there are still many people who do. In college a friend told me he had never been allowed to go to a dance of any sort because his parents were from an evangelical Christian group that thought dancing was evil and led to sexual promiscuity. He’d also never eaten a single piece of Halloween candy, which horrified me way more than never going to a dance. I apparently am a tool of evil because I insisted that he enjoy the pleasures of Halloween candy for the first time. Next thing you know, he was drinking and smoking pot, proving that candy is a gateway drug.
True story.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Teresa C. sent in a link to a benefit in Raleigh, NC, for a women’s center. The benefit was called Walk for Women and included a mile-long walk in high heels (though apparently the high heels are optional):
I get what they’re trying to do. Really, I do: an attention-getting way of raising money for what I’m sure is a worthy cause. And having worked or volunteered in many social-service jobs, I know fundraising can be hard (especially in an economic downturn) and you can end up doing some sort of weird stuff if you think it will bring in donations. (I once helped out at a dog blessing at an animal shelter. People brought in their dogs and had them blessed by an Episcopalian preacher [priest? I’m not sure of the terminology] and received a little medal with the image of some saint who apparently is the patron saint of animals, and who I am too lazy to look up right now, to hang on the dog’s collar. Also, there was wine, which in small-town Kansas was the source of some controversy.)
[NOTE: When I originally wrote this post, I had no idea that blessing animals is something some Episcopalians and Catholics do fairly often. I thought it was just something a sweet but kind of flaky volunteer thought up. I apologize if the comments about the animal blessing ceremony seemed disrespectful–I truly didn’t know that it’s a common religious ceremony. I decided to leave that section in but cross through it rather than delete it entirely, as it seemed dishonest to just erase it and pretend it hadn’t happened. I messed up, and I know it.]
So I know where people are coming from when they organize such things. But it still kind of bugs me that organizing walks in high heels has become a common fundraising technique for organizations that serve (primarily) women–women’s centers, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and so on. And I can’t help but think that walking around in heels is, ultimately, an odd way to help women. At least in this case, participants are apparently raising money. But several times I’ve seen high-heeled walks that are simply to “raise awareness,” with no particular emphasis on donations. The ones I saw all had men wearing high heels. And the thing is, I can’t figure out what on earth the point is. What type of awareness is it raising? Is walking around in high heels supposed to increase a person’s understanding of some of the problems women face? What are bystanders supposed to get out of it?
The Raleigh Walk for Women organizers also had a Beauty Blitz at a local salon, where people could drop in, register for the walk, and get discounts on salon services from a person who was a contestant on “Biggest Loser.” And also have a cocktail. So the event is this strange mixture of helping women by using the trappings of femininity (high heels, beauty care). And I just find it kind of odd.
Amy D. sent us this really fascinating South African commercial for a light truck:
Contextualizing the commercial, Amy remarks that, given race relations in South Africa, many companies probably do operate as this team does at the first job with the white home owner. Yet, the commercial presents the black and white men as partners, switching roles so as to maximize their customer base. There’s an irony, though: While the partners seem to be cooperating, their cooperation naturalizes an (in this case symmetrical) preference for those within one’s own race.
Amy is optimistic about the impact of the ad:
The tagline “the bakkie that helps build the nation” is a great play on words. Literally, it refers to the fact that many small contractors – builders, pavers, electricians, plumbers – use this small truck as it is cheap and reliable. Figuratively, the need for nation-building in South Africa is crucial. Although we are 15 years into democracy, there are still huge social and economic gaps between racial groupings, and there is a tendency for people to segregate themselves. The way I see it, the two men in this advert are therefore achieving this nation-building by firstly, breaking racial barriers by running a business as partners, and secondly, in the meta-context, by subverting our racial stereotypes through humour.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
As an exercise I sometimes ask the students in my gender class to try on the pants of their friends of the opposite sex. That is, I ask women to try on men’s pants and men to try on women’s pants. They often react with surprise at how effectively the jeans make their bodies look like the bodies of their opposite sex friends. (Women often complain that their guy friends look “better” in their jeans than they do!) This starts a discussion of the many ways that our choices about what to wear make it appear as if our bodies are in fact “opposite” when, in fact, they’re not quite as different as we often believe.
We dress ourselves to emphasize certain beliefs about what men’s and women’s bodies should look like by choice, because not doing so carries some negative consequences, and because doing so is institutionalized. It’s institutionalized insofar as department stores have separate men’s and women’s sections (and no unisex section) and jeans are made for and marketed as men’s and women’s.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and wasn’t always. Check out these ads from the 1960s and ’70s:
Found at Vintage Ads and the Torontoist.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Reminiscent of work by Anna Lappé and the Small Planet Institute‘s “Take a Bite out of Climate Change” initiative, I stumbled across Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews in Environmental Science and Technology. Looking past the fancy equations you see data presented like this snippet of Figure 1, documenting the green house gas emissions associated with household food consumption, allowing for a comparison of impacts between food groups.
The article presents data that systematically compares the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles,” finding that the production cycle accounts for the majority of emissions. In other words, changing the type of food you eat (e.g., less red meat) does more good for the environment than buying local.
Matthew Ygelsias posted a graph showing that, for those 25 and older, education-level is correlated with rates of unemployment: the more educated you are, the less likely you are to find yourself unemployed. This relationship appears to be uninterrupted by the current recession.
Red = less than a high school diploma
Purple = high school graduate, no college
Green = some college
Blue = bachelors degree or higher
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
