marriage/family

Stephanie L. and Amie A. both sent in screen shots of the MSN tabs “for him” and “for her.”   It’s not particularly surprising that MSN segregates its content by sex, but the gendered themes were interesting, especially given that Stephanie and Amie captured two moments in time.

First, notice that the information MSN chose as relevant to him is almost always leisure related:

The two lists above include how to build a man cave (where men escape daily responsibilities), the new Nikes, technological innovation and great inventions to read about, sports news, dating advice, and wacky stories about cocaine, $100,000 dollar bills, catching lobster, and urine.  Except for a non-leisure-related, health story, all are either about leisure activities or a way to provide leisure with wacky, weird or fun news.

What about for her?

Her stories are about work (male careers), sexual harassment, babies (breastfeeding and baby talk), teenagers, the economy, and food (superfoods and allergy labels).  The video on wildlife, the story about Chelsea Clinton, the piece on Mad Men, the new hospital gown design (???)  can be interpreted as leisure-related in that they’d be fun to read.

Overall, then, the material aimed at men is almost entirely related to leisure, whereas the material aimed at women is heavily tilted towards her responsibility for work and the family and serious topics like sexual harassment and the economy.   Perhaps MSN knows what it’s doing.  In fact, men do have more leisure time than women.  So this is a structural problem related to how we organize work and family, as well as a cultural problem in how we represent and relate to men and women.

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.

Notions of how to properly raise children change over time and vary across cultures. In early America, children were necessary labor for struggling farmers trying to survive off the land. They were put to work as soon as they were able, apprenticing their parents and older siblings. After the Industrial Revolution, children went to work in factories; this seemed perfectly normal, considering that they had worked on farms for decades to contribute to the economic well-being of their families.

Today, we think that children should not work, but instead should have a “childhood” full of innocence, play, and imagination. This creates new burdens on parents who can no longer simply have their children work alongside them, but must actively cultivate the ability for their children to do what we believe children are supposed to be doing. This has led to what some sociologists have called “intensive mothering” (as it is usually mothers who do it): constant emotional availability and monitoring of their children’s psychological states, endless activity provision, and high investment in their children’s intellectual development.

Indeed, today some argue that failing to nurture children on every dimension of human capacity or, even, to just let them be, borders on neglect. While others argue that this is a new era of “helicopter parenting” in which parents monitor and control everything in their child’s life because they simply can’t look away or let go.

University of Notre Dame Sociology Professor Jessica Collett drew our attention to a set of cartoons illustrating this new contest over proper parenting at Free Range Kids.  The first, by Bill Bramhall, suggests that letting children roam free puts them at risk of homelessness. In it, two homeless-looking men sit on a park bench watching children play by themselves. One says, “My mother took me to the park and left me there, too.”

The second, by artist Richard Estell, is in direct response to the first, arguing that parents are acting out of fear and that over-supervised children are more likely to experience mental and physical health problems. The men read newspapers with headlines that read “Parents see only danger” and “Helicopter parents’ kids depressed.”

What we have here, then, is a new social contest.  Changes in ideas about who children are (kids vs. small adults), why people have them (as a personal indulgence or an additional laborer), and what good parenting looks like (intensive or functional) has created a new type of parenting.

As this new type has become the dominant idea of what good parenting looks like, a backlash has evolved that critiques it.  And thus we have an excellent example of historical change and the social construction of social problems.

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 a fascinating essay, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz argues that we do, indeed, play Farmville because we’re polite.  More people in the U.S. play Farmville than any other video game.

…over seventy-three million people play Farmville. Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.

(source)

The game isn’t popular, he argues, because it’s a good game.  In fact, Liszkiewicz thinks it’s a decidedly bad game.

…games offer a break from responsibility and routine, yet Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again…

Farmville is so laborious and tedious, that one of the rewards of playing Farmville is playing less Farmville:

As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks.

(source)

So why the heck is Farmville the most popular video game in America?  Liszkiewicz says, “people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.”

(source)

In other words:

Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

(source)

* Title borrowed from 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.

This 8-minute video from Powering A Nation documents the fight of Kindra Arnesen to save her family and her Gulf Shores community. It’s a stirring portrait of how one family has been affected by the oil spill and is trying to fight back:

Via NPR.

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.

Nicole S. sent us screenshots of two sets of books she saw for sale online at Barnes & Noble. They provide us with some very important information about how men and women differ, as well as the types of things/activities/emotions that have been masculinized or feminized. Not sure if you’re speaking to a man or a woman? Check to see what pet they have with them:

And don’t be fooled into thinking parents are interchangeable. They serve very different roles. Dads are for playing with. Moms need to stay in the house and bake while you’re out playing catch with Dad, and then console you when you get hit in the face with the baseball:

I would provide some more sociological analysis here, but I’m distressed to realize I’m not fitting into appropriate gender roles, so I need to run to the animal shelter and trade in my dogs for a couple more cats to go with the one I ended up with when an ex-boyfriend abandoned her, which he must have done after realizing owning her was feminizing him.

As for understanding me through my cat, the other day I was ignoring her while I read a book so she came up and bit me on the nose hard enough to draw blood, so apparently I’m either a masochist or an aggressive self-involved brat, depending on whether you judge me by my cat, or by what I put up with from her.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is famous for helping us understand how economic elites reproduce their own wealth across generations.  It takes money to make money, and that is certainly true.  But as Bourdieu noticed, it wasn’t just money.  Upper-class people had entire ways of living that excluded people without money and people who were newly rich.  They knew the right people (and knew them in common), the right things (e.g., how to talk about yachts), and the right way to act (e.g., which fork to use first).  Other people’s ignorance of these things exposes them to the elite as “not our kind of people.” Even when the elite aren’t biased towards their own on purpose, they’re still more likely to hire the guy who can chat about the most lauded vintage that year, and their children are more likely to marry the children of others who summered alongside them, and so on.  All of these little things — mannerisms, interests, languages, sartorial choices — send messages that distinguish the elite from the non-elite, preserving the group as distinctly advantaged.

In other words, Countess Luann is right:

Thanks to RGR for linking to this video in our recent birthday post for Pierre!  More Bourdieu-ian posts: taste, dumb vs. smart books, and the Evangelican habitus.

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.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight posted this graph that shows changes in attitudes toward same-sex marriage over time (each dot represents a poll Silver considers reliable). As he points out, there seems to be an acceleration in positive attitudes toward same-sex marriage:

CNN just conducted the first poll showing that a majority of Americans believe same-sex marriage should be legal. That’s just one poll, and we’ll need to see more data, obviously. But we can clearly see that an increasing number of polls show the % favoring same-sex marriage at or above 45%. A regression of all the polls shows a 4 percentage point increase in the last 16 months alone. If this trend continues, we should be nearing the point where differences in support for and opposition to same-sex marriage would fall within the margin of error.

Silver suggests that activism among gay and lesbian rights groups, including a specific push for recognition of same-sex marriages, has led to more acceptance:

Something to bear in mind is that it’s only been fairly recently that gay rights groups — and other liberals and libertarians — shifted toward a strategy of explicitly calling for full equity in marriage rights, rather than finding civil unions to be an acceptable compromise…it seems that, in general, “having the debate” is helpful to the gay marriage cause…

Of course, presuming this trend continues and we soon have a majority (even if not an overwhelming one) of Americans supporting legalization of same-sex marriage, that does not necessarily translate into legalization. Acceptance of same-sex marriage is surely unevenly distributed across the U.S. If legalization is left to the states, we can assume some will be much more likely to accept same-sex marriages than others, continuing the patchwork system we have now where gays and lesbians may find themselves married in one state but unmarried if they go on vacation to a neighboring one. National legislation to legalize same-sex marriage would be strongly opposed by a number of legislators from districts where acceptance is below the national average; I’m guessing that even many Democrats, who are usually depicted as more friendly to gay and lesbian rights than Republicans, would not go so far as to vote to legalize gay marriage in the near future. During the campaign, Obama and Biden clearly stated that they supported civil unions but not marriage for same-sex couples.

On the other hand, the federal judicial system could take this out of the hands of Congress and the Senate, or individual states; same-sex marriage could be legalized whether or not a majority of Americans supported it. But short of that, while changes in public attitudes toward same-sex marriage certainly present an encouraging picture for supporters, I think legislative action to actually legalize it is likely to lag significantly behind overall public acceptance.

Danielle Q. sent us this gem, a 1980s commercial for a doll called My Child. It teaches girls all the important parts of being a mom:

• Others will judge you as a mother based on how well-dressed and groomed your kids are.
• Mothering requires a lot of repetitive, time-consuming work, but good moms think “it’s a pleasure.”
• At age 8 or so, you should already be thinking of yourself as a “little mommy.”

Here you go: