culture

A while back, in a post of test prep for kindergarten entrance exams, I criticized the idea that we should be giving our children every advantage.  Have every advantage over who?  Somehow, I wrote, “the fact that advantaging your child disadvantages other people’s children gets lost.  If it advantages your child, it must be advantaging him over someone else; otherwise it’s not an advantage, you see?”

This notion applies, also, to our adult lives, as manifest in a post about the “luxury” of drinking tea that was especially time-consuming to prepare.  We’re supposed to find appealing the idea that someone else has had to work really hard for our pleasure and comfort.  Really?

I thought of both of these examples when I saw this Citigold ad, submitted by vmlojw.  The copy reads, “You may not consider yourself privileged.  Then again, you haven’t experienced our premium service yet.”

What is interesting to me about this is the assumption that we should all seek to have MORE than other people.  The ad doesn’t suggest that we should seek to be comfortable or have enough to get by, but instead appeals to the idea that we must all want a “premium” life, one that is characterized by having more than other people.

And this isn’t interpreted to mean that you’re greedy or arrogant.  It doesn’t reflect on your character negatively.  Instead, being on the top of a hierarchy is something to aspire to.   The fact that that your being on top requires other people to be on the bottom is of no concern.  The pleasures and comforts of being on the top are things that we should enjoy without qualms.

Meanwhile, the existence of hierarchy itself — the idea that we must live in a world where some people have so much and others have so little — is never questioned.  I think there’s a nearly-invisible American value here that I would like us to talk more about.

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 Montclair SocioBlog.

Jacob and Isabella were the most popular baby names last year.  Some observers, even some sociologists, see this as the influence of the Twilight series.  (See here for example.)

But Jacob, Isabella, and even Bella were on the rise well before Stephanie Meyer sent her similarly-named characters out to capture the hearts, minds, and naming preferences of romantic adolescents:

The forecasters predict a bumper crop soon in Rue, Cato, and perhaps other names that are from the Hunger series.  Still, since the YA (Young Adult) audience for these books and movies are more Y than A, I’m hoping for lag time of at least a few years before they start naming babies.  As I blogger earlier, Splash, the film with Darryl Hannah as Madison the mermaid, came out in 1984, but it was not until nine years later that Madison surfaced in the top 100 names. And if there’s a Hogwarts effect, we’re still waiting to see it.  The trend in Harry and Harold is downward on both sides of the Atlantic, and Hermione has yet to break into the top 1000.

Don’t look for any Katnisses to be showing up in your classes for quite a while.

Here’s a neat story that reminds us that beneath “mainstream” culture are rich, unique, and sometimes whimsical sub-cultures:

In 1946 a clown aficionado named Stan Bult began collecting the faces of clowns painted onto blown out chicken eggs.  It became a U.K. tradition and, because it is considered a great breach of etiquette to steal another clown’s face, the eggs served as  a sort of “registry.”  The tradition crossed the pond in 1979 when Leon “Buttons” McBryde began a collection in the U.S.   Linda, McBryde’s wife, paints the eggs herself (they use goose) and they’ve now collected over 700 unique clown faces.

Check out this example from the British collection.

Clown Eggs via Learn Something Every Day.

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 past few years I’ve been following a wonderful little blog, Hanzi Smatter. The author invites people to submit images of tattoos written in (what they think is) Japanese or Chinese, to find out what they actually mean. As it turns out, tattoos often do not mean what their bearers think they mean. The results can be hilarious, like Thought to mean: Loyalty. Actual meaning: Noodles.

It is quite trendy in the U.S. to get a word that means something to you in English (“love,” “strength” etc.) tattooed in Japanese or Chinese characters. Visit any tattoo parlor or online tattoo image gallery and you’ll see many Chinese and Japanese character options. So why is this so popular? Some argue that the beauty and simplicity of the symbols make Asian characters desirable for tattoos: “But what, besides the beauty of the art, would make these tattoos so popular? The main reason is that Chinese symbolism can be used to express so much, while still remaining simple and clean.” But couldn’t any written language be considered beautiful (cursive English, for instance)? And isn’t any language capable of expressing a lot in just a few simple characters (words have multiple meanings even in English)?

I don’t think this is just about beauty and simplicity. Using Japanese or Chinese characters makes a tattoo more exotic than getting the same word tattooed in English. And there is an added element of mystery—having a tattoo that not everyone in an English-speaking country can read is cool (even if the person with the tattoo can’t read it, either).

Cultural appropriation describes the adoption of specific aspects of a culture that is not your own. A Kanji tattoo when the wearer is not Japanese and has no specific connection to Japanese culture is an example of cultural appropriation. While we could debate whether or not cultural appropriation is ever positive (e.g. the popularity of yoga, or the interest in Italian food and culture when HBO’s The Sopranos was running), there are negative consequences to cultural appropriation. When language and symbolism are taken out of their original context, the meaning is over simplified or completely lost. Tattoos that attempt to translate English into Japanese or Chinese characters are a perfect example of lost meaning:

Intended meaning: None. Characters chosen for their appeal. Actual meaning: “Buy/trade”, “road, path”, and “card” which is like a type of prepaid card that allows its owner to access public transportation.

Thought to mean: Warrior. Actual meaning: Waterfall or rapids.

 Many tattoos are victims of what Hanzi Smatter calls “gibberish font.” There is no correlation between English letters and Japanese or Chinese characters, but some tattoo shops use this gibberish font for tattoos—using the font to spell out words letter by letter, when Chinese and Japanese don’t work that way.

Thought to mean: Initials of loved ones. Actual meaning: Nothing

Thought to mean: Beautiful. Actual meaning: “Calamity, disaster, catastrophe.”

 Thought to mean: As long as I breathe, I hope. Actual meaning: The five characters mean “living”, “air”, & “love” separately, but just the characters together do not create the intended sentence.

 Thought to mean: Outlaw. Actual meaning: “[In] hiding” and “criminal”, or the equivalent of “snitch” or “rat”.

 Thought to mean: Live for today. Actual meaning: None.

Hanzi Smatter discusses that last one:

As is, this gibberish means nothing in Japanese or at least nothing like “live for today” and I don’t think it means anything in Chinese either. The only meaning I can guess is that if it were written 生きて現れる, this would mean “to show up alive” or “turn up alive” as if someone thought dead had appeared alive. Anyway, it sounds pretty spooky, like seeing a zombie!

I think the person who made this up just looked in a dictionary for the word for “to live” 生 and a word that means something like “now” 現and thought you could stick them together to make “live for today.”

The fact that these tattoos, and countless more like them, don’t mean what people think they mean, illustrates the consequences of fetishizing aspects of a culture. Symbols and language don’t translate easily from one culture to another. Adopting aspects of a culture that might seem “exotic” without understanding what they mean in their specific contexts ends up creating cultural gibberish; tattoos that make no sense to anyone at all.

It is Easter Sunday. How about other places on the globe such as Japan? Christians are less than 1% of the population of Japan.  Yet, because of globalization, geographic locations plays less and less of a role in defining culture.  Many people around the world now consume the same food, clothing, music, movies, and technology.

Global corporations play a role in transmitting culture from place to place.  Recently, American corporations in Japan have been trying to popularize and commercialize Easter.  Disney’s theme park in Tokyo, for example, has promoted Easter with the Disney Easter Wonderland since 2010:

Likewise, beginning last year, Baskin Robbins has been promoting the holiday.  This year they have a month-long Wonderful Easter Campaign:

It will be very interesting to see how Easter becomes part of Japanese culture.  When the Japanese adopted Valentine’s day, for example, they added their own twist.  Women are expected to give chocolate to men; men are supposed to return the favor by giving candy to women on March 14th, White Day.  I would not be surprised to find that Easter becomes popular in Japan, but celebrated with a twist – a Japanese flavor.

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Sangyoub Park is an assistant professor of sociology at Washburn University, where he teaches Social Demography, Generations in the U.S. and Sociology of East Asia. His research interests include social capital, demographic trends, and post-Generation Y.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that when we find certain traits sexually attractive in others it may be because they signal reproductive fitness.  It goes something like this: People who have been sexually attracted to traits that tell the “truth” about genetic superiority have been more likely to choose mates with superior genetics and, therefore, have been more likely to produce healthy offspring that live to an age where they, in turn, can reproduce themselves.  Accordingly, nature has selected for individuals attracted to people who display signs of genetic excellence.

Culture throws a wrench in this theory because human can create their own systems of meaning, collectively convincing each other that certain traits are desirable regardless of the relationship between the trait and reproductive fitness.  The thinness ideal for women is an excellent example.  Judging by pop culture, heterosexual men have a strong preference for very thin women.  In fact, however, the weight idealized in mass media is not conducive to reproductive fitness; women won’t ovulate or menstruate below a certain weight because their body recognizes that it can’t support a pregnancy.

A new study — by Leigh Simmons, Marianne Peters, and Gillian Rhodes — offers another tantalizing piece of information regarding the relationship between attractiveness and reproductive fitness.  Pre-existing research shows that men with lower voices are judged more sexually attractive, so the authors decided to measure one indicator of their reproductive fitness, sperm count.

The results? Voice attractiveness is related  to sperm count, but in the opposite direction expected.  Men with higher voices, in fact, have higher sperm concentration, not lower.

The jury is still out about what this means, but it’s an intriguing addition to the ongoing conversation that social and biological scientists are having about how culture and nature interact to shape human experience.

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.

W.W. Norton released a couple two-minute interviews in which I talk about hook up culture, part of their collection of academics talking about their research.

In the first clip, I discuss the difference between hooking up and a hook up “culture.”  In the second, I respond to the concern that there is something “wrong” with casual sex on college campuses.  There is something wrong, I argue, but it’s not unique to casual sex. Instead, the problems students face on campus — heterosexism, gender inequality, and a relentless pressure to be “hot” — don’t go away with graduation.

In that sense, for better or worse, college is a “functional training ground” for the friendships, marriages, workplace interactions, and other types relationships that students will encounter after college; social inequalities threaten the health of all of these relationships.  Instead of shaking our fingers at college students, then, we should recognize that the acute problems we see on campuses are symptoms of the ills that characterize our wider sexual culture as well.

I’m speaking about hook up culture at Harvard and Dartmouth this week. If you’re in the area, please come by and say “hello!”

• Monday, Mar. 26th at 8:00pm: “Sex Lives and Sex Lies: Hooking Up on Campus” (Harvard University, Science Center D)
• Wednesday, Mar. 28th at 7:30pm: “Sex Machines vs. Sex Objects: How Stereotypes Subvert Sexual Pleasure” (Harvard University, Fong Auditorium)
• Thursday, Mar. 29th at 4:30pm: “The Promise & Perils of the Hook-Up Culture”  (Dartmouth University, Rockefeller Center “Rocky” 2)

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.

The burqa and headscarf are often identified as symbols of women’s oppression in Muslim countries.  In fact, head covering is a form of religious garb in many sub-cultures.  Some of these subcultures require head covering all of the time, and others only during religious rituals, but all involve this tradition.  Yet, when it comes to Muslims, the discussion often goes forward as if it is a uniquely oppressive, and uniquely Islamic, practice.  Food for thought.

Thanks to Dolores R. for the link.  Found at Socialist Texan.

UPDATE: In the comments, Alastair Roberts suggests that it’s important to consider whether head covering is required for just women, or both women and men.  I agree.

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.