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Happy Graduation, Seniors! Congratulations! What’s next?  Below is some sociologically-inspired, out-of-the-box advice on work, love, family, friendship, and the meaning of life.  For new grads from the two of us!

1. Don’t Worry About Making Your Dreams Come True

College graduates are often told: “follow your passion,” do “what you love,” what you were “meant to do,” or “make your dreams come true.”  Two-thirds think they’re going find a job that allows them to change the world, half within five years.  Yikes.

This sets young people up to fail. The truth is that the vast majority of us will not be employed in a job that is both our lifelong passion and a world-changer; that’s just not the way our global economy is. So it’s ok to set your sights just a tad below occupational ecstasy.  Just find a job that you like.  Use that job to help you have a full life with lots of good things and pleasure and helping others and stuff.  A great life is pretty good, even if it’s not perfect.

2. Make Friends

Americans put a lot of emphasis on finding Mr. or Ms. Right and getting married. We think this will bring us happiness.  In fact, however, both psychological well-being and health are more strongly related to friendship.  If you have good friends, you’ll be less likely to get the common cold, less likely to die from cancer, recover better from the loss of a spouse, and keep your mental acuity as you age.  You’ll also feel more capable of facing life’s challenges, be less likely to feed depressed or commit suicide, and be happier in old age.  Having happy friends increases your chance of being happy as much as an extra $145,500 a year does.  So, make friends!

3. Don’t Worry  about Being Single

Single people, especially women, are stigmatized in our society: we’re all familiar with the image of a sad, lonely woman eating ice cream with her cats in her pajamas on Saturday night. But about 45% of U.S. adults aren’t married and around 1 in 7 lives alone.

This might be you.  Research shows that young people’s expectations about their marital status (e.g., the desire to be married by 30 and have kids by 32) have little or no relationship to what actually happens to people.  So, go with the flow.

And, if you’re single, you’re in good company.  Single people spend more time with friends, volunteer more, and are more involved in their communities than married people. Never-married and divorced women are happier, on average, than married women. So, don’t buy into the myth of the miserable singleton.

4. Don’t Take Your Ideas about Gender and Marriage Too Seriously

If you do get married, be both principled and flexible.  Relationship satisfaction, financial security, and happy kids are more strongly related to the ability to adapt in the face of life’s challenges than any particular way of organizing families.  The most functional families are ones that can bend.  So partnering with someone who thinks that one partner should support their families and the other should take responsibility for the house and children is a recipe for disaster.  So is being equally rigid about non-traditional divisions of labor.  It’s okay to have ideas about how to organize your family – and, for the love of god, please talk about both your ideals and fallback positions on this – but your best bet for happiness is to be flexible.

5. Think Hard About Whether to Buy a House

Our current image of the American Dream revolves around homeownership, and buying a home is often taken for granted as a stage on the path to full-fledge adulthood. But the ideal of universal home ownership was born in the 1950s.  It’s a rather new idea.

With such a short history, it’s funny that people often insist that buying a house is a fool-proof investment and the best way to secure retirement.  In fact, buying a house may not be the best choice for you. The mortgage may be less than rent, but there are also taxes, insurance, and the increasingly common Home Owners Association (HOA) fees. You may someday sell the house for more than you bought it but, if you paid interest on a mortgage, you also paid far more than the sale price.  You have freedom from a landlord, but may discover your HOA is just as controlling, or worse.  And then there’s the headache: renting relieves you from the stress of being responsible for repairs. It also offers a freedom of movement that you might cherish.

So, think carefully about whether buying or renting is a better fit for your finances, lifestyle, and future goals. This New York Times rent vs. buy calculator is a good start.

6. Think Even Harder about Having Kids

One father had this to say about children: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.” In fact, having children correlates with both an increased sense of purpose in life and a long-lasting decrease in individual and marital happiness.  Having kids means spending a lot of your short life and limited income on one source of joy. It’s not a bad decision. But it’s also not the only good decision you can make. We want to think we can “have it all” but, in fact, it’s a zero sum game. You have only so much time and money and there are lots of ways to find satisfaction, pleasure, and meaning in this life.  Consider all your options.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.  Gwen Sharp is a professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter.

Originally posted in 2013 and cross-posted at The Huffington Post and PolicyMic (with gifs!).

I guess I’m a little bit of a masochist, so I watched the trailer for Disney’s Cinderella re-make, due out in 2015. All they do is show a shoe, but what a shoe it is! Notice anything different?

Point to Gail Dines; Pamela Paul; Carmine Sarracino and Kevin Scott; and Kaarina Nikunun, Susanna Paasonen, and Laura Saarenmaa, all who argue that we’re seeing a “pornification” of everyday life.

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.

Flashback Friday.

One manifestation of white supremacy is the use of whiteness as the standard of beauty.  When whiteness is considered superior, white people are considered more attractive by definition and, insofar as the appearance of people of other races deviates from that standard, they are considered ugly.

Non-white people are still allowed to be considered beautiful, of course, as long as they look like white people.

This collection of images is a nice illustration of the way in which black women, in particular, are expected to look white in order to qualify as beautiful. The images are powerful because the black models look almost identical to the white models, but also because they are ads for make-up. So the ads are literally selling beauty.

This is Flashback Friday, so these are ads I collected and posted in 2008.  Have things changed or stayed the same? Or, am I being unfair? Most white women do not look like these women either.  And the women of color in the images are, in fact, women of color.  Who am I to say they don’t look “black”?  Is there something else going on here?  I’m happy for the 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.

There are more women in political office than ever, but the U.S. is not on the forefront of this change.  In 2013, the U.S. Congress was 18% female which, internationally, places us in the middle of the pack.

The Democrats can boast better numbers than the Republicans, but it wasn’t always this way.  At the Scholars Strategy Network, sociologist Danielle Thomsen observes that the Democratic party (green and blue) has increased female representation much quicker than the Republicans (red and purple), but only since the ’80s or so.

Thomsen argues that part of the reason for this difference has to do with increasing polarization in politics.  Both the Democratic and Republican parties have become more ideologically extreme, but this has hurt Republican recruitment of women more than Democratic ones.  This is because Republican women tend to be more moderate, on average, than Republican men.  Since there is less room for moderation in the party, the selection process favors more conservative politicians.  Among that group, there are very few women.

This hasn’t hurt the Democrats as much, since Democratic women are not more likely than Democratic men to hold moderate views.  The opposite, in fact, may be true, increasing the rate at which women may be picked up and supported by the party.

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.

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.

Visit A Whole Lot of Something.

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.

Flashback Friday.

We are a species that reproduces sexually and has a penchant for power hierarchies.  One thing that we’ve eroticized, then, is inequality.  In other words, we have sexualized power asymmetry.  I’m not necessarily talking about BDSM, though that may very well be part of it; I’m talking about the everyday gentle or not-so-gentle eroticization of power difference.   If you’ve ever been turned on by the idea of overpowering or being overpowered, that’s what I’m talking about.

An image of a pear next to and curving over an apple, used to illustrate a New York Times article about the sexual partners of vegans, is a striking example of eroticized inequality.

The image, apparently, was chosen because it was a story about sexual relationships between vegans, or “fruity” types. But in order to make fruit look sexual, they positioned them asymmetrically with the pear not just standing next to the apple, or even taller than the apple, but towering over it.  It’s the implication of power difference (and the satin sheets) that make this seem like a sexual image instead of, say, a sleepy one.

This post originally appeared in 2007.

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.

Ads are always selling more than just a product. They’re selling a fantasy.  In this case, buy Ballantine Ale and you’ll get this:

The this is this ad from 1954 is what interests me.  I see same-sex friendship. These are presumably two heterosexual married couples — though some would disagree — but the ad isn’t about love, marriage, or sex.  The ad is about the friendship that each spouse finds with their same-sex counterpart.  The two couples come together not for platonic cross-sex companionship, in other words, but same-sex friendship.

For much of American history, the idea that men and women could be friends made little sense.  This was not for the reason we tend to think this today (that is, sexual temptation), but because men and women were believed to be psychologically different.  Differences between the sexes were believed to make cross-sex friendship impossible and pointless.  You wouldn’t have anything in common and couldn’t understand one another.  Women needed men for marriage, domestic divisions of labor, and children — and vice versa — but true friendship was reserved for someone of the same sex.

We certainly don’t need to return to that type of thinking — even if it was adorable — but I do appreciate the way this ad is committed to the idea that simple friendship is fantastic.

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.

Check out the comic at A Whole Lot of Something.

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.