history

Originally posted in 2009. Re-posted in honor of Women’s History Month.

I still remember when the female characters on the sitcom Friends started the trend of visible nipples:

As long as I’d been alive and paying attention, hard nipples were embarrassing. Then, suddenly, they weren’t. I even remember hearing that women could get the all-hard-all-the-time look by buying those tiny rubber bands (that I only associate with the plastic bags aquarium fish come in) and fitting them tightly around your nipples. Nipples are still big, if measured by mannequins (Wicked Anomie noticed too).

It turns out this comes in fits and starts.  This vintage ad (no date on the source), for example, features a bra with built-in hard nipples! (Apparently it had been a trend before I’d been alive and paying attention.)

In the comments, Dmitriy T.C. added a link to the patent for this device. I can’t resist adding this particular paragraph explaining why a bra with fake nipples is important:

…simulated nipples for a brassiere would offer an acceptable compromise for ladies who do not wish to go without a brassiere and a welcome release from the subconscious effects of the suppression brought on by wearing brassieres of the types variously available, which obliterate the nipple.

LOL.

Anyhow, Tracey at Unapologetically Female wondered about wearing such a bra:

Didn’t anyone ever start to wonder why these women’s nipples were ALWAYS hard? And what if their real nipples (realistically probably located somewhere a bit lower than the bra’s) ever poked through, creating a quadruple effect?! Horrifying.

I find this whole thing especially funny, since, while shopping recently, Katie and I were making fun of these bras with built-in “modesty panels” that provide extra padding so that the nipple will never make an appearance. Times sure have changed.

Except times haven’t changed in the sense that women’s bodies still aren’t allowed to just be. Their nipples either must show, or must not show, or they should show in some contexts, or are allowed to show, but in other contexts they better not show.  (Remember the outcry over Hilary Clinton’s “cleavage”?  Can you imagine if she’d shown some nip!?)

So apparently we’re supposed to have nipple bras, bras with “modesty panels,” and a couple rubber bands in our pockets just in case. The one thing that is clearly less than ideal in all this: actual nipples doing what they do.

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.

John Millward, a self-described “ideas detective,” has done something intriguing.  He cracked the Internet Adult Film Database (IAFD) and used a sample of 10,000 porn stars to tell a story about porn.  Here are some of his findings.

Demographics

The average female porn star, he discovered, was 5’5″ and weighed 117 pounds.  She doesn’t have a double-D bra size; she’s a 34B.  And she’s not blonde:

She’s also not disproportionately white.  Millward found that the racial breakdown among porn actresses somewhat matched U.S. population demographics:

    Race                             % of actresses                     % of the population

• White                            70.5                                       78.1
• Black                              14.0                                       13.1
• Latina                              9.3                                       16.7
• Asian                               5.2                                         5.0
• American Indian        no data                                        1.2

Career

The average woman begins her career at 22.  This has been unchanged for the last 40 years.  The average age for men was 29 in the ’70s, but it’s dropped to 24.  Careers were longer in the ’70s.  Men quite after 12 years, women after nine.  Today men quit, on average, after four years and women after three.

Interestingly, success for male porn stars is much more concentrated than for female.  There are fewer of them (70% of all porn stars are women) and they’re less interchanged.  Millward reports that 96 of the most prolific porn stars of all time — measured by number of films — are men.  Women, on average, do fewer films each.  Just over half (53%) do three or more.

Content

The IAFD records all of the sex acts that actors do on film.  Accordingly to Millward’s analysis, this is what actresses do:

And here are the roles they play:

Wives in porn, by the way, are not typically having sex with their husbands.

For more data porn, visit Millward’s site.

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.

My best friend’s car has four cup holders in the front seat. FOUR. I would ask what a person does with four cup holders, except I’m too busy feeling jealous.  I drive with a measly two.

Cup holders, or what the US News and World Report quaintly called “crannies for drinking cups” as late as 1989, weren’t considered an automotive necessity until the ’50s.  That was when, reports Bon Appetit, “drive-ins and drive-thru windows became mainstays of American eating.”  Before then, people were expected to stop for food and drink and then be sated.  Can you imagine?

It took a long time, though, for the automobile industry to figure out exactly how to deliver us our cup holders.  First there was a “snack tray for car,” as pictured in a 1950 newspaper ad:

Companies also sold between the seat inserts that held cups and Cadillac sold a limousine with magnetic cup holders:

The cup holder as we know it today came to us in 1983 alongside another innovation: the mini van.  The first cup holders “sunk into the plastic of the dashboard” were installed in the Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager.  It would be a decade, though, before cup holders came standard in essentially every car.

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.

Inequality by (Interior) Design, a blog by sociologist Tristan Bridges, turned one-year-old last month and it is quickly becoming one of my favorites.  In a recent post, Bridges featured a product that reminds us all why history is awesome: the “portable baby cage”:

As I discussed in a previous post, with industrialization came cities and with cities came crowded, cramped living quarters.  The baby cage kept infants out of harm’s way and gave the family a bit more space.  As Bridges discusses, it also coincided with the idea that babies needed a lot of fresh air to be healthy.  The baby cage seemed like the perfect solution.

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 this charming minute-and-a-half, Walter Cronkite demos the home office of 2001, as envisioned in 1967.  Amazingly, reality seems to have far outpaced their imagination!

I love the first line, by the way: “This is where a man might spend most of his time in the home of the 21st century.”  Apparently professional futurists in 1967 couldn’t imagine women working!

Via Cyborgology.

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.

Naama Nagar tweeted us an interesting video commentary about hipsters.  In it, Mike Rugnetta uses Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital to describe the difference between nerds and hipsters.

This is a topic I’ve enjoyed thinking about myself (on CNN and here at SocImages).  I think Rugnetta makes an interesting argument that resonates with the observations of sociologists: being a hipster is about borrowing other people’s authentic cultural signifiers as their main or only consistent cultural practice.  Check it out:

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 week Neil DeGrasse Tyson tweeted the following, along with a photograph of suspiciously gendered AP exam study guide covers:

I’m going to take this to mean that Tyson is as big a fan of sociology as I am of astrophysics.  Made my day.

Thanks to Jay Livingston for the tip!

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 Racialicious and Family Inequality.

Trying to summarize a few historical trends for the last half century, I thought of framing them in terms of diversity.

Diversity is often an unsatisfying concept, used to describe hierarchical inequality as mere difference. But inequality is a form of diversity — a kind of difference. And further, not all social diversity is inequality. When people belong to categories and the categories are not ranked hierarchically (or you’re not interested in the ranking for whatever reason), the concept of diversity is useful.

There are various ways of constructing a diversity index, but I use the one sometimes called the Blau index, which is easy to calculate and has a nice interpretation: the probability that two randomly selected individuals are from different groups.

Example: Religion

Take religion. According to the 2001 census of India, this was the religious breakdown of the population:

Diversity is calculated by summing the squares of the proportions in each category, and subtracting the sum from 1. So in India in 2001, if you picked two people at random, you had a 1/3 chance of getting people with different religions (as measured by the census).

Is .33 a lot of religious diversity? Not really, it turns out. I was surprised to read on the cover of this book by a Harvard professor that the United States is “the world’s most religiously diverse nation.” When I flipped through the book, though, I was disappointed to see it doesn’t actually talk much about other countries, and does not seem to offer the systematic comparison necessary to make such a claim.

With our diversity index, it’s not hard to compare religious diversity across 52 countries using data from World Values Survey, with this result:

The U.S. is quite diverse — .66 — but a number of countries rank higher.

Increasing U.S. Diversity

Anyway, back to describing the last half century in the U.S. On four important measures I’ve got easy-to-identify increasing diversity:

The last one is a little tricky. It’s common to report that the median age at marriage has increased since the 1950s (having fallen before the 1950s). But I realized it’s not just the average increasing, but the dispersion: More people marrying at different ages. So the experience of marriage is not just shifting rightward on the age distribution, but spreading out. Here’s another view of the same data:

I calculated these using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1968 (for those married in the years 1950-1968) and comparing it with the 2011 American Community Survey for those married in the previous year. There might be a better way, of course.

I have complained before that using the 1950s or thereabouts as a benchmark is misleading because it was an unusual period, marked by high conformity, especially with regard to family matters. But it is still the case that since then diversity on a number of important measures has increased. Over the period of several generations, in important ways the people we randomly encounter are more likely to be different from ourselves (and each other).

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.