culture

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

“Silver Linings Playbook,” the new David O. Russell movie, starts off by making the audience uncomfortable.  We want to like Pat (Bradley Cooper).  We root for him to overcome the internal demons that landed him in a mental hospital for eight months.  We do like him.  But he keeps doing things we don’t like.  He is socially insensitive and often offensive, utterly absorbed in his own deluded ideas and obsessions, and although we know that these emanate from his psychiatric condition, it’s impossible to separate the personal from the psychiatric.  He is his mental illness, and it’s often not pretty. We’re actually glad to see the cop who shows up to enforce the restraining order.  (Usually in American films, when a uniformed cop restrains the hero, the moral question is so clear the cop might as well be wearing a Nazi uniform.)

At some point, the film takes a turn away from the complicated and difficult.  It calls on a smooth, familiar recipe and gives us comfort food — sweet chocolate pudding, spoonful after spoonful.  It’s made from good chocolate, but it’s predictable  pudding nonetheless.

It all leads up to a climactic scene that we all know from countless other movies.  In this case, it’s a ballroom dancing competition:

The movie plays on one long-standing idea in American movies and TV: all moral questions, all questions of character, can be settled in a contest. Typically, the story sets out some difficulties for the hero — conflicts with the society, conflicts with some other person or organization, conflicts within himself. It all leads up to some climactic  contest.  Usually the hero wins, occasionally he loses. But the outcome doesn’t matter so much as the nobility of the fight, for win or lose, the hero has fought, and that seems to resolve all issues.   Rocky is the obvious example…

That’s from six years ago in one of the first posts on this blog.  (I’ve edited it lightly.)  That post was about the first episode of Friday Night Lights.   But it could have been about “Silver Linings Playbook” — “Rocky” meets “Dancing With the Stars.”

For a nearly complete plot summary, watch the trailer.

The contest seems to melt all problems no matter how complicated, no matter how seemingly unrelated to the competition itself – problems between a man and a woman, a son and father, friend and friend.

“Silver Linings Playbook” hits all three of those plus husband and wife, brother and brother, and maybe some others.  Other seemingly insoluble problems – from Pat’s obsession with his estranged wife to the side effects of medications – vanish.  And in case the pudding wasn’t already sweet enough, there’s an added Hollywood-ending bonus involving a large bet on the Cowboys-Eagles game, an outcome so predictable I’m not even putting in a spoiler warning.

And they all live happily ever after.

These themes are not inherent in movie contests.  In British films of the sixties – “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” or “This Sporting Life” for example – athletic contests bring a heightened consciousness of the class system.  But in American movies, regardless of the setting – the boxing ring, the pool hall, the poker game, the karate dojo, the dance floor, etc. – competition works its magic and allows the heroes to overcome all personal and interpersonal problems.

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Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University.  You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

In her classic article, Teddy Bear Patriarchy, Donna Haraway examined the arrangement of the taxidermied animals in the American Museum of Natural History mammal hall in the first half of the 1900s.  She observed that the dioramas consistently featured nuclear families with strong fathers alert for dangers and nurturing mothers attending to their children.

This was a lie, of course. As we well know, the nuclear family is the exception, not the rule among mammals.  Instead of science, it was our own beliefs about men, women, and gender roles that informed the curators of the exhibits… and left viewers with a sense that these arrangements were more natural and universal than they are.

I’m an animal lover and have a broad appreciation for science, so I particularly enjoy exposing this type of projection.  Bee Movie was a particularly egregious case and we’ve written posts on nature documentaries that do this (on hyenas and flatworms).  The latest case is a Geico commercial.  See if you can catch it:

So, if you know anything about lions, you know that it’s unlikely that “Karl” is doing the hunting.  Among lions, it is the females who specialize in hunting (and they usually do so in groups, for what it’s worth).

See, no manes:

The commercial certainly coincides nicely with what many of us believe to be true about the natural role of human men, but it doesn’t reflect the reality of lion life at all.

Perhaps the people at Geico thought that a female huntress would confuse or distract the reader from their joke.  Or perhaps everyone involved in the project didn’t know this fact about lions; their gender ideology would have masked their ignorance, such that it never occurred to them to look it up.  Either way, contemporary ideas about gender shaped this “diorama” and it potentially reinforces similar beliefs among viewers.

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.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012. Originally cross-posted at Ms.

Mojca P., Jason H., Larry H., and Cindy S. sent us a link to a story about a Saudi Arabian version of an IKEA catalog in which all of the women were erased.  Here is a single page of the American and Saudi Arabian magazines side-by-side:

After the outcry in response to this revelation began, IKEA responded by called the removal of women a “mistake” “in conflict with the IKEA Group values.”   IKEA seems to have agreed with its critics: erasing women capitulates to a sexist society and that is wrong.

But, there is a competing progressive value at play: cultural sensitivity.  Isn’t removing the women from the catalog the respectful and non-ethnocentric thing to do?

Susan Moller Okin wrote a paper that famously asked, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”  The question led to two decades of debate and an interrogating of the relationship between culture and power.  Who gets to decide what’s cultural?  Whose interests does cultural sensitivity serve?

The IKEA catalog suggests that (privileged) men get to decide what Saudi Arabian culture looks like (though many women likely endorse the cultural mandate to keep women out of view as well).  So, respecting culture entails endorsing sexism because men are in charge of the culture?

Well, it depends.  It certainly can go that way, and often does.  But there’s a feminist (and anti-colonialist) way to do this too.  Respecting culture entails endorsing sexism only if we demonize certain cultures as irredeemably sexist and unable to change.  In fact, most cultures have sexist traditions.  Since all of those cultures are internally-contested and changing, no culture is hopelessly sexist.  Ultimately, one can bridge their inclinations to be both culturally sensitive and feminist by seeking out the feminist strains in every culture and hoping to see those manifested as it evolves.

None of this is going to solve IKEA’s problem today, but it does illustrate one of difficult-to-solve paradoxes in contemporary progressive politics.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012.

A recent episode of Radiolab centered on questions about colors.  It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither The Odyssey nor The Iliad included any references to the color blue.  In fact, it turns out that, as languages evolve words for color, blue is always last.  Red is always first.  This is the case in every language ever studied.

Scholars theorize that this is because red is very common in nature, but blue is extremely rare.  The flowers we think of as blue, for example, are usually more violet than blue; very few foods are blue.  Most of the blue we see today is part of artificial colors produced by humans through manufacturing processes.  So, blue is the last color to be noticed and named.

An exception to the rarity of blue in nature, of course — one that might undermine this theory — is the sky.  The sky is blue, right?

Well, it turns out that seeing blue when we look up is dependent on already knowing that the sky is blue.  To illustrate, the hosts of Radiolab interviewed a linguist named Guy Deutscher who did a little experiment on his daughter, Alma.  Deutscher taught her all the colors, including blue, in the typical way: pointing to objects and asking what color they were.  In the typical way, Alma mastered her colors quite easily.

But Deutscher and his wife avoided ever telling Alma that the sky was blue.  Then, one day, he pointed to a clear sky and asked her, “What color is that?”

Alma, at first, was puzzled.  To Alma, the sky was a void, not an object with properties like color.  It was nothing. There simply wasn’t a “that” there at all.  She had no answer.  The idea that the sky is a thing at all, then, is not immediately obvious.

Deutscher kept asking on “sky blue” days and one day she answered: the sky was white.  White was her answer for some time and she only later suggested that maybe it was blue.  Then blue and white took turns for a while, and she finally settled on blue.

The story is a wonderful example of the role of culture in shaping perception.  Even things that seem objectively true may only seem so if we’ve been given a framework with which to see it; even the idea that a thing is a thing at all, in fact, is partly a cultural construction.  There are other examples of this phenomenon.  What we call “red onions” in the U.S., for another example, are seen as blue in parts of Germany.  Likewise, optical illusions that consistently trick people in some cultures — such as the Müller-Lyer illusion — don’t often trick people in others.

So, next time you look into the sky, ask yourself what you might see if you didn’t see blue.

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.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012.

Pierre Bourdieu was an amazingly influential thinker who, among other things, theorized a concept called “the habitus.”  The term refers to our often unconscious bodily knowledges and habits.  According to Bourdieu, our habits reflect where and how we grow up.  The kid of a rancher, in other words, will have a very different habitus than the kid of a New York finance elite.

I thought of the habitus when I saw this quick video of people in New York, exiting a subway platform, tripping — one after the other — on the same step. Brooklyn Filmmaker Dean Peterson, who recorded this for us, remarks that the step in question is just a fraction of an inch taller than all the others. But that’s all it takes.

What is striking is how perfectly calibrated are bodies are. Most stair heights (correct me if I’m wrong) are standardized and, when we grow up in this environment, our habitus becomes tuned to that standard.  We come to learn exactly how high to lift our foot to be able to climb each step, and we learn to lift it no higher.  Our habitus allows us, then, to climb stairs throughout each day with minimal effort and without having to individually gauge each step, but it also makes us easy to “trip up.”

Thanks to Thomas G. for the tip!

Via BoingBoing.  For another stunning example of habitus, see the baby worshipper and babies learn to have a conversation.

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.

This is one of our favorite Christmas-themed posts from the archive.  We hope you don’t mind the re-post!

Stressing remarkable differences between the two, Rachel and Lucy sent in the music videos for the original Mariah Carey version of “All I Want for Christmas is You” (1994) and the re-make (2011).  They suggested that the comparison reveals two trends: the rising emphasis placed on consumption and the new hyper-sexualization.  I figured, “yeah, I’ll bet they’re onto something there.”  And boy were they.

The first video involves Mariah mostly bounding around in the snow in a snow suit. Often acting pretty darn goofy, with dogs and Santa.

She spends part of the video inside with kids, a Christmas tree, presents, and more animals.  She’s usually wearing a sweater.

She spends less than (I’m guessing) 10 seconds of the video in a sexy Mrs. Claus outfit and, when she’s wearing it, it looks like she’s got long johns on her legs.

The new video, featuring Justin Bieber, is wildly different. Instead of a snowy field or an intimate home, the video takes place in a shopping mall.  It centrally features a Nintendo product.

Likewise, instead of bounding around in the snow like a goof, she spends the entire video up against a wall in super high heels and the sexy Mrs. Claus outfit (except this one doesn’t have sleeves or a midriff).

At one point she runs her hand down her body, touching her breast and moving down to her crotch; at another she just leans against the wall with her back to us and swings her butt back and forth.

So there’s one data point, for what it’s worth, but in line with emerging research on and plenty of anecdotal evidence of the “pornification” of American culture.

“All I Want for Christmas is You” (1994):

“All I Want for Christmas is You” (2011):

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.

A set of photos, taken by Ian Mansfield, are a neat illustration of how culture can coordinate human action.  They capture London on Christmas morning.  Said Mansfield:

Apart from the emptiness of the city, it is the silence that makes the experience such an addictive one for me.

London is never silent, not even at 3am, but on Xmas morning, it is almost silent. The background drone of aircraft approaching Heathrow has gone, and away from main roads, the streets lack the sound of car tyres rolling over tarmac.

Heading home, also a sound you never really hear now – the pealing of church bells. Not just coming from a single church you are nearby, but from all over the city as the sound carries far further than usual and surrounds you from all sides. Magical.

More at Ian Mansfield’s website (via BoingBoing).

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.

Cross-posted at Global Policy TV and The Huffington Post.

The refrain — “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” — does an injustice to the complicated homotechnocultural phenomenon that we call a massacre. Evan Selinger, at The Atlantic, does a wonderful job taking apart the “guns don’t kill people” phrase.  It assumes an instrumentalist view of technology, where we bend it to our will.  In contrast, he argues in favor of a transformative view: when humans interact with objects, they are transformed by that interaction.  A gun changes how a person sees the world.  Selinger writes:

To someone with a gun, the world readily takes on a distinct shape. It not only offers people, animals, and things to interact with, but also potential targets.

In other words, if you have a hammer, suddenly all the world’s problems look like nails to you (see Law of the Instrument).  The wonderful French philosopher Bruno Latour put it this way:

You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you.

So, that’s the homotechnological part of the story.  What of the cultural?

Elsewhere on SocImages, Michael Kimmel observes that the vast majority of mass killings in the U.S. are carried out by middle-class, white males.  “From an early age,” he writes, “boys learn that violence is not only an acceptable form of conflict resolution, but one that is admired.”  While the vast majority of men will never be violent, they are all exposed to lessons about what it means to be a real man:

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… They learn that “aggrieved entitlement” is a legitimate justification for violent explosion.

Violence is culturally masculine.  So, when the human picks up the object, it matters whether that person is a man or a woman.

Bushmaster, the manufacturer of the weapon used by Lanza, was explicit in tying their product to masculinity. Though it has now been taken down, before the shooting visitors to their website could engage in public shaming of men who were insufficiently masculine, revoking their man card and branding them with the image of a female stick figure (top center) (via Buzzfeed).

In one case, a person with the name “Colin F” is described as “just unmanly” because he “avoids eye contact with tough-looking 5th graders.” He is rebuked with the announcement: “Man Card Revoked.”

Bushmaster has just the solution.  Ads featuring an image of their Bushmaster .223 caliber Remington semiautomatic (see an example here), originally appeared in Maxim magazine, include the copy: “Consider your Man Card reissued.” Manliness is tied to gun ownership (and, perhaps, gun use). Whatever it is that threatens his right to consider himself a man, a gun is an immediate cure.

Many people are calling on politicians to respond to this tragedy by instituting stricter gun control laws and trying to reduce the number or change the type of guns in American hands.  That’ll help with the homotechnological part.  But, as Kimmel argues, we also need to address the cultural part of the equation. We need to change what it means to be a man in America.

Thanks to Thomas G., Andrew L., and @josephenderson for the tips.

Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp are the founders and principle writers for Sociological Images.  You can follow Lisa on Twitter and Facebook and you can follow Gwen on Twitter.