In case you haven’t seen the FOX News commentary in which the host suggests that a fist bump between Obama and his wife is a secret terrorist signal, you can see it here. (And I thought this was bad.)
Here’s an image of the infamous terrorist signal:
NEW! It’s not an image, but Patrice Evans has an interesting essay on the “fist bump heard ’round the world,” arguing we should celebrate National Fist Bump Day.
The graph below, from the New York Times, challenges a stereotype about Asian-Americans and their choice of major in college. The author writes:
The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math.
The article also discusses the way in which the category “Asian-American/Pacific Islander” makes invisible the dramatic discrepancy between the educational attainments of Asians who’s families immigrated from different places. For example, they write:
…while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.
The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.
And, to a great degree, the success of a given Asian immigrant group in this society is correlated with the wealth of the nation from which they immigrated.
In case you hadn’t seen it already, this is the ad that is causing all the hullabaloo about Rachel Ray and Dunkin’ Donuts being in bed with Muslim terrorists (via lawgeek):
The incident might be useful in illustrating the social construction of social problems, moral panic, and racial politics after 911.
The University of Michigan Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center gives a thumbs up to these ads for Pyrex kitchen cookware for using androgynous figures instead of women. Doing so suggests that people use kitchens, not just women. Contrast it to, well, as far as I can remember, just about every other ad for every other kitchen product that I’ve ever seen (for examples, see here, here, here, here, and here).
Thanks to Laura L. for the tip!
Laura R. sent us this 1939 test for husbands and wives, developed by an M.D./Ph.D. in psychology, designed to determine how well each is performing in his or her gendered role with marriage. For proper behavior the spouse earns merits, for improper, demerits. Below is the front page and the first page of the test for both men and women. Click here to see the whole thing (via boingboing).
Thanks Laura!
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.
A humorous look at how yogurt is marketed to the generic category, “woman.” Quite funny! (From Current TV via Jezebel.)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf_roIC9Pso[/youtube]
NEW: Here’s an actual yogurt ad that makes it clear that a) yogurt is for women and b) yogurt somehow makes women feel more like “themselves.” Thanks, 73man!
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.
Over at the New York Times, Peggy Orenstein wrote a light article about the social construction of race, ethnicity, and culture through the lens of multiracialism. This figure (in Hawaii, Hapa means “half”) shows the states with the highest percentages of people claiming to be multiracial:
For background: 2000 was the first year that the Census allowed us to mark more than one race… talk about the social construction of racial categories!
