media

On January 18th, 2012 many sites on the internet went “black” to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), including Wikipedia, Boing Boing, Reddit, Cheezburger, Craig’s List, WordPress, Wired, and Sociological Images too, to name a few (in solidarity, Google blacked out it’s logo).  While written ostensibly to make it easier to stop pirating of music, movies, and other media, opponents argue that the Acts are so penalizing and over-reaching that they would essentially criminalize sharing and creativity.  There’s a great slideshow of the blacked out sites at the Los Angeles Times.

The next day proved that this online action made a large difference, at least in the short run. Seventy Congress members switched their positions or newly decided to stand against the Acts (Boing Boing). Congress has postponed actions on the Act, which was slotted for today.

From the point of view of Sociological Images, this is a much needed victory. From a sociological point of view, it is another illustration of how the internet creates both new legal issues and facilitates new social movement tactics.

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.

Sociologists and others use the term “agenda setting” to describe the way that the media focuses our attention on some things and not others.  In this way, media actors may not control how we think about things, but they may very well control what we think about.

This instance of agenda setting involves SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.  Media Matters put together this figure illustrating the relative number of television segments given to SOPA and other issues — the British Royal Family, the football player Tim Tebow, Casey Anthony and her missing daughter, Alec Baldwin’s behavior on a plane, and the Kardashian divorce — between October 26th, 2011 and January 12th of this year.

Data like this is often used to explain why Americans tend to be quite uninformed about important issues.  For more examples, see this post comparing the covers of TIME and Newsweek in the U.S. and elsewhere.  See also: Setting the Agenda on Trump and Setting the Agenda on Janet Jackson’s “Wardrobe Failure.”

Thanks to Dolores R. for the tip!  Via Socialist Texan.

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.

“Hey look! Fox News, American Idol, and Monday Night Football had a threesome and it made a baby named the Southern Republican Presidential Debate!”

That was my first thought, anyway, as I watched my first Republican Primary debate of the season two nights ago. I was really surprised at the opening dramatization of the event on CNN.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you absolutely must watch the first few minutes of the video below (especially :40 to 2:30):

So, what do you think?  Does this smack of sensationalism to you?  Is this just what TV looks like these days?  Without being overly nostalgic, how does this compare to the mood of previous debates?  How might this framing of the debates affect how people think of the presidency, our government, the process?

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 declining birth rate in Latin America, depicted in this graph, is a nice example of the way that both cultural and social change affects individual choices.  Brazil is highlighted as an extreme case. It’s birthrate has fallen from over six children/woman in 1960 to under 1.9 today.

The accompanying Washington Post article, sent in by Mae C., explains that the decrease in the birthrate since the 1960s is related to migration to cities.  In rural areas children are useful. They can help with crops and animals.  In crowded and expensive cities, however, they cost money and take up space.  Economic change, then, changed the context of individual choices.

This transition — from a largely rural country with high birthrates to an industrialized one with lower birthrates — has been observed across countries again and again.  It’s no surprise to demographers (social scientists who study changes in human population).  But Brazil did surprise demographers in one way:

…Brazil’s fertility rate fell almost uniformly from cosmopolitan Sao Paulo, with its tiny apartments and go-go economy, to Amazonian villages and the vast central farming belt.

The decline in birthrate, in other words, has occurred across the urban/rural divide. Demographers attribute this to cultural factors.  The idea of “an appealing, affluent, highflying world, whose distinguishing features include the small family” has been widely portrayed on popular soap operas, while Brazilian women in the real world have made strong strides into high-status, well-paid, but time-intensive occupations.  They mention, in particular, Brazil’s widely-admired first female president, Dilma Rousseff, who has one child.

Ultimately, then, the dramatic drop in the birthrate is due to a combination of both economic and cultural change.

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.

Ethnographers worry that their mere presence on the scene may be influencing what people do and thus compromising the truth of their studies.  They try to minimize that impact, and most of their reports give detailed descriptions of their methods so that readers can assess whether the data might be corrupted.

Photojournalists also claim to be showing us the truth — “pictures don’t lie” — but they compunctions about influencing the people in their photos.  Here for example is a photo taken in Israel by Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori.  (This is a screen grab of a video, hence the subtitles.)

The defiant Palestinian youth, the flames of the roadblock — it’s all very dramatic.  But it is far from spontaneous.  Here’s the photo from another point of view:

Salvadori studied anthropology, and he is well aware that observers influence what they observe.  But editors want “good” photos, not good ethnography.  So observer influence is an asset, not a problem.

If you point a tiny camera at somebody, what is he going to do?  Most likely, he’s going to smile or do something.  Now imagine this enlarged with a group of photographers. That show up with helmets, gas masks, and at least two large cameras each, and they come there to take photos of what you do.  So you’re not going to sit there twiddling your thumbs.

No, the youths don’t twiddle their thumbs, not with the photogs on the scene.  Instead, they burn a flag.

Their relationship is symbiotic.  The photogs want dramatic images, the insurgent youths want publicity.  Of course, even with the Palestinians youths and the Israeli soldiers, when the action gets real, nobody is thinking about how they’ll look in a photo.

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(The full 8-minute video of Salvadori talking about photography in the combat zone was posted at PetaPixel back in October, though I didn’t hear about it until recently.)

As reported at Jezebel, 2011 “was either lacking severely in girlchievements or a banner year for lady pandas.”

Summarizing BBC’s “Faces of the Year,” Erin Gloria Ryan writes:

…the rest of the list will leave people who were hoping for a progressive set of female movers and shakers disappointed. Sure, it includes Michele Bachmann… and Dilma Rousseff, the first female President of Brazil. But the list also includes Charlene Wittstock, a woman famous for almost not marrying a prince, a very wealthy Spanish duchess who married a younger man, and Pippa Middleton, a woman famous for being related to a woman who married a prince. We’ve also got two sexual assault victims on the list— Eman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman who was dragged away from reporters while trying to tell them she’d been raped by Gaddafi forces, and Nafissatou Diallo, the woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her in his $12 zillion per night hotel room. And then there’s the US Marine who successfully asked Justin Timberlake to go to a dance with her.

All in all, more than half… are rape victims, princesses and thereabouts, or bears.

And as SocImages reader @ThatJohn pointed out after comparing the BBC’s lists, men are noteworthy for doing things, women for having (often violent) things done to them.

Who would you nominate as a woman of the year?

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 last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011.

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You often hear that everything is sexualized nowadays, and not just women but men too. In the September 2011 issue of Sexuality & Culture, we examine this idea in an analysis of Rolling Stone magazine covers.  Specifically, we wanted to know if men and women are equally sexualized, and if they have become either more frequently or more intensely sexualized over time.  To do this, we analyzed every cover from the first issue of Rolling Stone in November 1967 through 2009, minus a few (such as those that featured cartoons rather than people, etc.). You can read more about our methods in the article here.

In order to analyze these 1000+ images of men and women, we developed a “scale of sexualization.”   This scale was composed of 11 different variables to measure different aspects of sexualization.  For instance, a cover model was given “points” for being sexualized if their lips were parted, if they were scantily clad (more points if they were naked), if the text describing them used explicitly sexual language, or if they were lying down on a bed or otherwise posed in a sexually suggestive way.  Images could score anywhere from 0 points (and 176 did) to 23 points (though 20 was our highest score).

Once all of the images on all 43 years of Rolling Stone were scored, we divided the images into three groups:  those images that were generally not sexualized, those images that were sexualized, and those images that were so sexualized that we dubbed them “hypersexualized.”

The graph below shows our findings:

Looking first at images of men (represented by dotted lines), we see that the majority of them– from 89% in the 1960s to 83% in the 2000s — were nonsexualized.  Men are sometimes shown in a sexualized manner (about 15% in the 2000s), but they are rarely hypersexualized (just 2% in the 2000s). In fact, only 2% of the images of men across the entire dataset — all 43 years — are hypersexualized.

But, again, the vast majority of men — some 83% in recent years — were not sexualized at all.  So, if you were to pick up a copy of Rolling Stone in the 2000s, you would most likely see men portrayed in a non-sexualized manner, such as in these images:

In contrast, women, especially recently, are almost always sexualized to some degree.  In fact, by the 2000s, 61% of women were hypersexualized, and another 22% were sexualized.  This means that, in the 2000s, women were 3 1/2 times more likely to be hypersexualized than nonsexualized, and nearly five times more likely to be sexualized to any degree (sexualized or hypersexualized) than nonsexualized.

So, in the last decade, if you were to pick up a copy of Rolling Stone that featured a woman on its cover, you would most likely see her portrayed in a sexualized manner, since fully 83% of women were either sexualized or hypersexualized in the 2000s. Here are a few examples of hypersexualized images:

In our article, we argue that the dramatic increase in hypersexualized images of women — along with the corresponding decline in nonsexualized images of them — indicates a decisive narrowing or homogenization of media representations of women.  In Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, journalist Ariel Levy (2005:5) describes this trend in this way:  “A tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular.  What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression,” Levy writes, “we now view as sexuality” (emphases in original).  In this article, we offer empirical evidence for this claim.

So what explains this trend towards women’s hypersexualization?  We don’t think it’s just the idea that “sex sells.” If that were true, we’d see many more images of women on Rolling Stone’s covers (only 30% of covers feature images of women) and we’d also see more sexualized and hypersexualized images of men.  We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Mary Nell Trautner and Erin Hatton are Assistant Professors of Sociology at SUNY Buffalo. Trautner is the author of many articles on the relationship between law, culture, organizational practices, and social inequality (and has written a fantastic Soc Images Course Guide for Sociology of Gender courses).  Hatton, a sociologist of work, is the author of The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011. Originally cross-posted at Ms.

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The cover of this month’s Dossier Journal magazine has caused a great stir.  In a matter of a few hours, five readers — Andrew, Jessica B., anthropology professor Kristina Kilgrove, artist Thomas Gokey, and my brilliant colleague, music professor David Kasunic — all sent in a link.  Here’s what all the fuss is about:

(source)

The model is a man named Andrej Pejic, with hair and make-up usually seen only on women, sliding his shirt off his back.  Some might say that he is gender-ambiguous and the image deliberately blurs gender; are we seeing a chest or small breasts?  It is not immediately apparent.

Both Barnes & Noble and Borders “bagged” the magazine, like they do pornographic ones, such that one can see the title of the magazine but the rest of the cover is hidden.  Barnes and Noble said that the magazine came that way, representatives for Dossier say that the bookstore “chains” required them to do it (source).  Non-ambiguously-male chests pepper most magazine racks, but this man’s chest hints at boobs.  And so he goes under.

What’s going on?

Explaining why it is legal for men to be shirtless in public but illegal for women to do the same, most Americans would probably refer to the fact that women have breasts and men have chests.  Breasts, after all, are… these things. They incite us, disgust us, send us into grabby fits.  They’re just so there.  They force us to contend with them; they’re bouncy or flat or pointy or pendulous and sometimes they’re plain missing!  They demand their individuality!  Why won’t they obey some sort of law and order!

Much better to contain those babies.

Chests… well they do have those haunting nipples… but they’re just less unruly, right? Not a threat to public order at all.

So, there you have it.  Men have chests and women have breasts and that’s why topless women are indecent.

Of course it’s not that straightforward.

It’s not true that women have breasts and men have chests. Many men have chests that look a bit or even a lot like breasts (there is a thriving cosmetic surgery industry around this fact).  Meanwhile, many women are essentially “flat chested,” while the bustiness of others is an illusion created by silicone or salt water.  Is it really breasts that must be covered?  Clearly not. All women’s bodies are targeted by the law, and men’s bodies are given a pass, breasty or chesty as they may be.

Unless.

Unless that man’s gender is ambiguous; unless he does just enough femininity to make his body suspect.  Indeed, the treatment of the Dossier coverreveals that the social and legislative ban on public breasts rests on a jiggly foundation.  It’s not simply that breasts are considered pornographic.  It’s that we’re afraid of women and femininity and female bodies and, if a man looks feminine enough, he becomes, by default, obscene.

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.