intersectionality

Jamie Keiles, of  the Seventeen Magazine Project and Teenagerie, wondered how racially representative Seventeen was compared to the U.S. population.  So she offered some data based on the May 2010 issue.  Her methods:

There are 332 faces in this month’s issue of Seventeen. I counted a face as a head with at least one visible eye. That is, backs of heads and disembodied mouths or eyes were not included in my data. I researched the races of the models and celebrities that I could identify. Those whose race I could not determine with reasonable certainty I’ve excluded from my data, making for 319 surveyed faces.

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 BlogHer.

Michaela M. alerted us to the news that Essence, the iconic fashion and lifestyle magazine for Black women, has hired an Australian-born, White woman, Elliana Placas, as its new Fashion Director.  Disappointed, former Essence fashion editor, Michaela Angela Davis, wrote:

If there were balance in the industry; if we didn’t have a history of being ignored and disrespected; if more mainstream fashion media included people of color before the ONE magazine dedicated to black women ‘diversified’, it would feel different.

In this 3-minute clip, Davis explains her position to Anderson Cooper:

The controversy over her hire is an example of a more widespread question about representation. Most agree that the presence of Black politicians, actors, models, teachers, professors, authors, and athletes (to name a few) is a good thing for Black people. It’s good, presumably, for two reasons. First, their presence in these roles normalizes Black achievement, beauty, intelligence, etc. The election of Barack Obama, for example, shows us that being Black and being the President of the United States are not mutually exclusive. The success of Tyra Banks and Alek Wek, similarly, upsets the notion that Black women aren’t beautiful.  It is good for all of us to be exposed to evidence that upsets negative stereotypes about Black people, stereotypes that all of us, no matter our color, unconsciously internalize to some degree (test your unconscious preferences here).

But there is a second reason why we often believe that representation is good. It is often presumed that people advocate for their own. Having a Black woman as Fashion Director, it is hoped, will mean that the content of the magazine will be empowering to Black women. That is, that the Director will be sensitive to the historic and ongoing racist idealization of white femininity that makes Black women’s bodies, hair, facial features, and skin color seem to need fixing.  Even if her racial politics are sound (and this is always a serious worry), she certainly does not have the experiences that Black woman in the U.S. often share nor, necessarily, the deep connection to the Black population that will make this a driving concern.

Essence‘s current Fashion and Beauty page with it’s August 2010 cover, featuring Janet Jackson, in the upper left corner:

The hiring of Placas is disappointing in the sense that it is a lost opportunity to put a Black woman in a position of power.  If, however, Placas is going to have this job, people concerned about the empowerment of Black women need to turn to evaluating her product.  The worry caused by her appointment is an opportunity to insist that Essence do right by Black women.  That is, Essence should be a refuge from racism.  One that, hopefully, does not subject Black women to the same sexism as White women in the name of equality.  Light skin does not preclude Placas from being able to do this, just as dark skin does not protect a person from internalizing and perpetuating colorism.

Ultimately, while having a darker-skinned, Black-identified person in the role of Fashion Director would be good, the production of a magazine that empowers Black women is also very important and this is something that Placas may be able to do.  It is up to us to insist that she does.

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.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Robin E. sent us to a downright fascinating set of survey results.   Administered by a Christian website, the survey questions were submitted by “Christian girls” who wanted to know what “Christian guys” think is modest.  1,600 guys then answered the survey, offering both quantitative and qualitative answers.   Why would girls care what guys, as opposed to God, think?  Because Christian guys, their future husbands, are judging them on their modesty.  Ninety-five percent of them say that modesty is an important quality in their future wife (see the question in the upper left corner):

So, how do these “guys” define immodesty?  The most common theme was dressing to draw attention to the body instead of the heart or spirit.

Something that is immodest is something that is designed to arouse lust within me (male, age 24).

Something that is immodest is something that is unnaturally revealing (male, age 20).

Something immodest draws attention to a girl’s body (male, age 28).

Many of the guys stressed that they really wanted to interact with girls as people.  Borrowing language from feminism, they expressed a desire to think of a girl as a whole person, not just a hot body.

Something attractive draws you toward them. It makes you respect the person. Something immodest is usually unattractive. It makes you think less of that person, thinking of them as an object… (male, age 16).

My responsibility is to not treat women as objects for my satisfaction, even if they dress and act like it. It devalues them, and makes me a user of people… (male, age 26).

In a move that is in contrast to (most) feminist values, however, girls are supposed to help men treat them like people by not dressing like an object.  That is, by not dressing immodestly.

So what rules for girls did guys identify?

Well, first, guys largely agreed that revealing clothes were immodest (again, see the question in the upper left corner):

Halter tops and mini skirts, I suppose, are obvious candidates for immodesty.  There were lots more subtle rules, too, though with less agreement.

Forty-four percent of guys think that designs on the back pockets of jeans are immodest (19% aren’t sure):

A minority, 19 percent, think that shirts with pockets are immodest (25% aren’t sure):

Forty-eight percent think that purses should not be worn across the body (19% aren’t sure):

Thirty-nine percent oppose tights with designs (25% aren’t sure):

Forty-seven think that t-shirts with messages across the front improperly draw attention to breasts:

But being modest wasn’t simply a matter of clothes.  Guys defined immodesty, also, as an “attitude” or a “carelessness.”  Attaining modesty was also about how you use your body and the way you act, “sexually or otherwise.”

An immodest lady is loud, proud, and dresses in a way that communicates such an attitude (male, age 24).

Something becomes immodest when the person wearing it has an attitude of carelessness (male, age 17).

As one guy said:

If you are dressing to get attention from a guy, then anything you wear can be immodest (male, age 13; my emphasis).

Some examples of behavior the guys mostly agreed was immodest:

Immodesty, then, is not simply about being vigilant about your clothing (don’t wear a purse that falls diagonally across your body, don’t show your arms or your thighs), it’s a constant vigilance about how you display your body (don’t stretch, bend, or bounce).  “Clothing plays a part in modesty, but it is only a part,” an 18 year old male explains, “Any item of clothing can be immodest” (his emphasis).

In addition, these rules are potentially changing all the time.  A “technically modest” outfit, such as a school uniform, can suddenly have immodest connotations (so watch MTV, girls, to stay on top of these shifting meanings):

This is a great deal of self-monitoring for girls.  Not just when they shop, but when they get dressed, and all day as they move, and with constant re-evaluation of their clothes and how they fit.  But, the rationale is, they must be vigilant and obey these rules in order to protect guys from the power of all bodies (both their own sexiness, and men’s biological response to it).  Guys are burdened with lust, they insist.

A lot of the guys in this survey talked about temptation.  In some cases, the men would use very powerful words, such as this guy defining immodest:

Immodest:  Screams that her body is different than mine. Attempts to manipulate me. Forcefully offers to trade what I want (in the flesh) for what she wants: attention (male, age 30).

This language — suggesting that women’s bodies “scream” at him, attempt to control him, and “forcefully” tempt him — is reminiscent of Tim Beneke’s interviews with men about sexual violence in Men on Rape.  Michael Kimmel (summarizing Beneke in Guyland) discusses how lots of the terms used to describe a beautiful, sexy woman are metaphors for danger and violence: “ravishing,” “stunning,” bombshell,” “knockout,” “dressed to kill,” and  “femme fatale.”  “Women’s beauty,” Kimmel surmises, “is perceived as violence to men” (p. 229).

This is very much like the rationale for the burqa.  Women’s bodies incite men’s sexual desires, sometimes to violence; they must be kept hidden.

These Christian guys, however, did claim responsibility for their own thoughts, feelings, and actions.  When asked about their role in avoiding lust, many were adamant that it was their own responsibility.  Many felt that innocent, shameless, platonic interaction between men and women was a team effort:

Sisters in Christ, you really have no concept of the struggles that guys face on a daily basis. Please, please, please take a higher standard in the ways you dress. True, we men are responsible for our thoughts and actions before the Lord, but it is such a blessing when we know that we can spend time with our sisters in Christ, enjoying their fellowship without having to constantly be on guard against ungodly thoughts brought about by the inappropriate ways they sometimes dress. In 1 Corinthians 12 the apostle Paul presents believers as the members of one body – we have to work together. Every Christian has a special role to play in the body of Christ. That goal is to bring glory to the Savior through an obedient, unified body of believers – please don’t hurt that unity by dressing in ways that may tempt your brothers in Christ to stumble (male, age 24).

The asymmetry of this project, however, is striking.  The lust is men’s; the bodies are women’s.  It’s an asymmetry built right into the survey design. Modesty is something pertains to only girls and immodesty is something that guys get to define.  This may be even more pernicious than women’s constant self-monitoring.  It erases women’s own desires and the sex appeal of men’s bodies, leading women to spend all of their time thinking about what men want.  By the time they do have sex, and most of them will, they may be so alienated from their own sexual feelings that they won’t even be able to recognize them.

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.

Following up on our most recent re-cap of data analysis from OkCupid, sent in by Sara P. and an Anonymous Reader, in this post I summarize their findings on reported sexual orientation and recorded messaging.

It turns out that a whopping 80% of all users who identify as bisexual message men or women, but not both.

The reasons for this are likely complex, diverse, and not immediately obvious.

Blogger Christian Rudder’s hypothesis:

This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches. You can actually see these trends in action…

The figure below plots age against the percent of self-identified bisexual men who message both men and women, only women, or only men.  The percent that are bi in practice as well as theory message both men and women drops by about half between the ages of 18 and 54 (from about 20% to about 10%), but men in their 30s and early 40s are much more likely to message only women.  Ticking biological clocks and hopes for a wife and kids perhaps?

The narrowing blue swatch may reflect the possibility that men who once identified as bisexual have come to terms with being plain ol’ gay (but the data isn’t longitudinal, so it may be a cohort thing instead of a life stage thing).

Or perhaps the distribution is the result of an interaction between age and who it’s easy to meet.  Maybe young bisexual guys have an easy time meeting women and turn to the internet to meet men; whereas men in their 30s and beyond find it easy to meet men and so turn to the internet to meet women?

Other ideas?

For women who identify as bisexual, the percentages messaging both men and women, just women, and just men show less of a trend across age.

Overall, however, 75% of women who identify as bisexual are not messaging both men and women.  Rudder suggests that there may be a social desirability factor here; that is, that straight women know that men are into bisexual chicks and, so, they claim to be bi in order to appeal to the dudes.

UPDATE: I recommend reading the comments thread for a great discussion of sexual fluidity, the meaningulness of labels like “bisexuality,” and lots more good ideas for why this data looks like it does.

Also from OK Cupid: the racial politics of dating, what women want, how attractiveness matters, age, gender, and the shape of the dating pool, older women want more sex, and the lies love-seekers tell.

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.

I may not have found the love of my life on OkCupid, but I did fall in love… with their data analysis!

Their latest super-fun post by Christan Rudder, sent along by Rob Walker, Sara P. and an Anonymous Reader, looks at the lies people tell in their profiles.  They do this not by catching any given individual in a lie, but by comparing data on their users to data on the general U.S. population.  (It’s unclear what percentage of OkCupid users are American and they don’t specify if they are only looking at U.S. users, so I can’t verify that this is a fair comparison but… if they do restrict the analysis to Americans then…)  Since they have 1.51 million active users, we should expect that any distributions should more or less overlap.

But they don’t…

1.  Men lie about their height, reporting, on average, that they are about two inches taller than they are.  In the figure below, the solid purple line represents the U.S. population, the dashed line represents the reported height of OkCupid users:

2. Women lie about their height too.  Here’s the same figure for women (but with a dark purple implied best fit line; you can just ignore it):

3. People exaggerate their income, on average inflating it by about 20 percent (for this data, they controlled for regional differences in income).  The figure below, however, shows that the amount of exaggeration is related to age.  Both men (blue) and women (red) increasingly inflate their income up until around age 40.  After that, they just keep inflating it at about the same rate.

Rudder quips:

A woman may earn 76 cents on the dollar for the same work as a man, but she can fabricate, like, 85 cents no problem.

Oh and, yeah, there’s a reason why the men are lying (no word from Rudder on the women). Income is highly correlated with how many messages a man gets (red = fewer messages; green = more):

4. It also turns out that not all of the “recent pics” are actually recent. This is especially true for pictures rated “hot.” Rudder says that “hot” photos are more than twice as likely as “average” photos to be over three years old (12% and 5% respectively).

And the older a person is, the more likely they are to upload an older photo:

Fun!

Also from OkCupid: the racial politics of dating, what women want, how attractiveness matters, age, gender, and the shape of the dating pool, and older women want more sex.

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 Chilean ads for menstrual pain medication, sent in by Mia A., turn women into symbols of violent aggression: fighters, literally, but also men of color.  They simultaneously affirm, then, the association of violence with both masculinity and non-white skin and the de-association of women with those characteristics.  The message is that men of color are appropriately violent, while women are not.

(source)

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 1957 ad for an Exercycle tells young and old women and men exactly what they should be concerned about:

So old women are supposed want to be young, young women want to be slender, young men want to be strong, and old men want to be active.  I think it’s pretty much the same today.

Vintage Ads.

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 addition to differences in income, there is a persistent wealth gap between black and white families in the U.S. The term “wealth” refers to all of your assets (the home you own, money in savings and investments, etc) minus your debt. According to a new research and policy brief by Thomas Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Laura Sullivan, the wealth gap has increased from $20,000 in 1984 to $95,000 in 2007.

The authors explain the growth in the gap this way:

The [increase in the] racial wealth gap… reflects public policies, such as tax cuts on investment income and inheritances which benefit the wealthiest, and redistribute wealth and opportunities. Tax deductions for home mortgages, retirement accounts, and college savings all disproportionately benefit higher income families.

There are also much variety in how much wealth is held by people within any given race. The figure below, shows that the gap between high-income and middle-income whites has tripled since 1984. Both groups, however, have seen an increase in the amount of wealth they hold.

In contrast, the wealth of middle-income black families has stagnated and the wealth of high-income black families has recently dropped, flattening differences in wealth among middle- and high-income blacks, but dramatically increasing the wealth gap between blacks and whites.

So why don’t we see an increase in the wealth gap among blacks? The authors point to “…the powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit, and labor markets.”

For example, African-Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes. These reckless high-cost loans unnecessarily impeded wealth building in minority communities and triggered the foreclosure crisis that is wiping out the largest source of wealth for minorities.

The authors conclude:

Public policies have and continue to play a major role in creating and sustaining the racial wealth gap, and they must play a role in closing it.

Hat tip to Philip Cohen, Family Inequality.

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