consumption

At Family Inequality, Philip Cohen argues that the rising cost of higher education may be directly related to the cost of homes. In the figure below, he shows that housing prices and college tuition have risen in tandem, at least until recently:

Cohen doesn’t chalk this up to simple inflation influencing both trends. Instead, he argues…

…the connection between home wealth and college attendance was sometimes direct, as when experts advised parents to use home equity loans to send their kids to college (advice you don’t hear so much these days). But even without home equity loans, the wealth stored in middle-class homes — for most such families their largest asset — underwrote millions of college educations.  I guess you could say the federal policies promoting homeownership were big boons for the higher education industry, not just the GIs and mostly-white suburbanites who landed inside the picket fences.

That is, rising home prices meant that people who could afford those homes could pay more for their children’s college educations.  The price of college, then, could afford to increase without pricing out all those middle- and upper-class families.

Cohen asks for ideas about what will happen now that home prices have dipped and the cost of higher education continues to rise.

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.

These Bed Stü shoes, sent in by Dmitriy T.M., are meant to appear as if they are covered in oil accumulated while cleaning up the BP oil spill in the gulf.

According to Selectism, 100% of the proceeds are going to help wildlife affected by the spill.

So Bed Stü makes no money on this collection, but gains a great deal of publicity and, potentially, good will from consumers.  And then some dude is going to be wearing shoes that look like they’re covered in oil at a garden party.

This looks to me like an example of “conspicuous conservation.”  The term was originally derived from the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” defined by Wikipedia as “lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth.”  Conspicuous conservation, then, is the (often lavish) spending on “green” products designed mainly to advertise one’s environmentally-moral righteousness.

If you wear regular shoes and donate to the gulf spill clean up, your altruism is entirely invisible.  But if you buy these hideous things, everyone gets to know what a nice guy you are.

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.

In today’s edition of context is everything, this 1962 ad for the ironically-named Humble Oil and Refining Company brags that it produces enough energy to “melt 7 million tons of glacier!”

Text:

EACH DAY HUMBLE SUPPLIES ENOUGH ENERGY TO MELT 7 MILLION TONS OF GLACIER!

This giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet, the petroleum energy Humble supplies- if converted into heat- could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second! To meet the nation’s growing needs for energy, Humble has applied science to nature’s resources to become America’s Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research, Humble provides energy in many forms- to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the “Happy Motoring” sign is the World’s First Choice!

Ad and transcript borrowed from Ms. Marx.

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.

Safa S.-Y., of Naked Lady in a White (Silk) Dress, and K. sent us a link to a story about the recent collaboration between MAC cosmetics and the Rodarte clothing line to create a collection of makeup and clothing the sisters who own and design for Rodarte said was inspired by the city of Juárez and female maquiladora workers:

…the sisters explained that a long drive from El Paso to Marfa, Texas, got them thinking they might like to explore their Mexican roots. From there, they became interested in the troubled border town of Ciudad Juárez; the hazy, dreamlike quality of the landscape there; and the maquiladora workers going to the factory in the middle of the night. And that, according to the designers, who certainly know how to romance a pitch, led to this conclusion: They’d build a collection off the idea of sleepwalking. [source]

The cosmetics received names such as Factory, Ghost Town, Juárez, and del Norte. The eyeshadows are meant to give wearers an ashen, tired appearance. After many in the fashion blogsphere criticized the line, both MAC and Rodarte issued apologies, said they will change the names of some of the products, and promised to donate a portion of proceeds to charities working in Juárez.

Just for some context, MAC is a mid-range cosmetics company; a single color of eyeshadow runs about $14.50, lipsticks are generally $13-15 but some are $18-19. This is less than high-end lines like Chanel and Estée Lauder, but more than drugstore brands such as Cover Girl. Rodarte, on the other hand, is a luxury fashion line, selling t-shirts for $120+, sweaters for nearly $3,000, and dresses for $4,000 or more. They do have a much cheaper Rodarte for Target line, however.

Safa argues that it is problematic that these companies, both completely beyond the financial resources of maquiladora workers (and most people in the U.S., for that matter, particularly Rodarte), to use pale White women made even paler with cosmetics to represent low-wage workers in Mexico, none of whom they met or spoke to. Most of the online critics point out that Juárez is quite dangerous, and hundreds of women, many workers at maquiladoras on their way to or from work, have been raped and killed (NPR had a story about the murders in 2003). These numbers don’t include women who simply disappeared, since authorities don’t have proof they were murdered without a body, though most officials and activists believe that at least some of those women were also killed. The vast majority of the crimes are unsolved.

Safa says,

These women [the Rodarte designers], who had never been to Juarez, but nearby Texas towns, entitled themselves and their clothing line to represent the stories of women they never met.

Female factory workers in Juárez thus become exoticized Others for U.S. companies to represent and claim to speak for — that is, they are supposedly concerned about the problems faced by Mexican women workers (or anyway, they said so after all the criticism) and by creating a line in which White women are made up to look like zombies, or as though perhaps they got punched in the eye, they are actually helping women in Juárez by bringing attention to them…in some undefined way that most women who buy their products are unlikely, I think, to pick up and which probably isn’t going to lead to much concrete action to improve these women’s lives.

I think Safa sums it up nicely, so I’ll let her have the last word:

Human suffering became a look of glamour.  They presented social consciousness in the form of consumerism, and with that, female oppression became another commodity that could be measured not in statistics, but in revenue sales.

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

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Understandably, parents are eager to memorialize pregnancy and the birth of their child (well, the nicer parts of them, anyway).  Some of this is done informally by parents or relatives themselves. Earlier this summer I took my 4-year-old niece for her first ever haircut because my sister loves long hair and couldn’t bring herself to get it cut, but I’m a big meanie with no soul and it didn’t bother me to cut a little girl’s butt-length hair into what seemed to me a much lower-maintenance, reasonable length. But I digress. The point is, my sister’s one requirement was that I save her hair and bring it back in a ziploc bag. Not one or two curls; all of it. So I handed over to her a freezer-size bag full of a lot of hair. Many of us have baby books from when we were young where our parents saved our first lost tooth, hair from our first haircut, or other things deemed to have sentimental value.*

But an industry has also arisen to help parents turn every step of the pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy process into a precious memory, whether it’s paying to get a video of the childbirth or the enormous number of scrapbooking supplies that provide an array of materials and pre-printed statements to help you express your joy.

RudolfoRabulous sent in a coupon for a product that takes this process of turning every single event in a pregnancy and child’s life to a new level. If you buy an e.p.t. pregnancy test, you can send in a coupon for a FREE promotional “keepsake gift”…a pouch to save the used pregnancy test in, to “remember the moment you knew”:

I am sure there are people who treasure their used pregnancy test, perhaps because they were trying to get pregnant for a long time or wanted a baby more than anything in the world. I’m not trying to deny the importance that finding out you’re pregnant has for people who are actually happy about it. But…e.p.t. has created purple pouches you’re supposed to send in for so you can keep a peed-on stick in it (notice the coupon says, in bold, “Please do not send in your stick”).

This strikes me as part of the trend to treat increasing amounts of our lives as unique, precious moments that require formal remembrance through some type of physical creation/artifact, rather than something to remember fondly as a non-material memory. Technologies such as film and video cameras, and consumer products such as physical and digital scrapbooking materials and the wide array of “keepsake” items you can buy, both allow and encourage this process. It’s not that the desire to have physical reminders of important moments in our lives is new, we just have a much greater variety of ways to do that now, and many have become quite cheap (digital photos, for instance, have no cost, really, once you’ve bought the camera, unless you want to print them out). Those two factors mean we now have the ability to turn many more life events from intangible memories into an end product, either on our own or with the aid of the items provided by a helpful memory industry.

* Am I the only one who wasn’t really sure what to do with this stuff when my mom decided it was time to hand it all over to me? What am I going to do with my old teeth? Why on EARTH would I want my umbilical cord? I kept the baby book itself but all the bottles and baggies of accompanying biological materials went in the trash.

And what would you do if your mom gave you her used pregnancy test? Would you be excited or touched? Or creeped out? Or just confused/indifferent?

We previously posted Annie Leonard’s breakthrough video, The Story of Stuff, and a follow up, The Story of Bottled Water. Kraig H. sent along another by Leonard on how cap and trade will not stop climate change:

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.

Jamie Keiles is a new high school graduate from Pennsylvania who embarked on a fantastic project: trying to live according to the advice of Seventeen magazine… and blogging about it.

Her insights are many and she’s funny and accessible. The whole blog is worth reading.  And you can check out her new project at Teenagerie.

In this post, however, I wanted to highlight her analysis of the ad content of the June/July 2010 issue. She writes:

Magazines profit from ad sales more than they do from newsstand sales or subscriptions. From a business standpoint, the essential purpose of magazines (or television, or radio) is to round up a group of similarly demographic’d consumers that advertisers can easily target. I figured that the advertising content might have something to say about what the average Seventeen reader is imagined to be like. In the 171 page issue, there were 91 ad spaces. Here is how the content broke down:

So… mostly, as Jamie puts it, “stuff that makes you look better.” Jamie then broke it down by advertisements for products and ones for experiences:

She ponders:

I’m not heading toward any sort of conclusive argument with these graphs. Just thought it was an interesting exercise to explore how low the bar is set for Seventeen readers when it comes to what advertisers think will interest them. Products advertised definitely skew more toward tangible than experiential, and more toward short-term use than long-term investment. It would be interesting to do a similar data sample with the Economist or the New York Times. Wonder if this way of thinking is something that applies to all demographics, or mostly just teens.

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.

Sociologist Geographer David Harvey’s analysis of the current economic crisis is engagingly illustrated in this 11-minute video.  Harvey evaluates individual, institutional, ideological, cultural, and policy explanations for the recession.  He then explains Marx’s insights into the “internal contradictions of capital accumulation”:  capitalists want to pay low wages, but if they’re paying low wages, then no one can buy their stuff.  If both high wages and low wages translate into no profits, where does that leave capitalism?

From Cognitive Media via BoingBoing and Karl Bakeman.

Buy Harvey’s book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism.

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.