*updates

You like!  Here are our most appreciated posts this month:

• Concern for equality linked to logic, not emotion (4,400+ likes)
• The sexual politics of veganism (2,200+ likes)
• Advice for college grads from two sociologists (1,700+ likes)
• Celery: The food of the rich and famous, circa 1900 (1,300+ likes)
• The swastika before World War II (650+ likes)
• When whiteness is the standard of beauty (600+ likes)

Thanks everybody!

Editor’s picks:

• All hail the “go-cup”: Culture as a form of social control
• Why has Godzilla grown?

In other news:

We put together a new Pinterest board: Racist Antics at Colleges and High Schools.

We reached 10,000 followers at our new Tumblr page. Please feel free to follow us there. We’re putting up all our new stuff, plus the best material from our archives.

We’re so honored to receive an award from MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching!  We’re so grateful to know that instructors find the site useful.

Congratulations to the amazing Gwen Sharp!  She won a state-wide teaching award from the Nevada Board of Regents!  She’s the best teacher in the whole state!  This is no surprise to me, of course.  Dr. Sharp co-founded and wrote for SocImages for many years.  I’m so grateful to have worked with her for so long.  You can read her posts here or follow her on Twitter.

I’m also honored to report that SocImages received this year’s award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources from the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. Thank you so much to Jane Moore and the team at MERLOT!

Best of March:

• Doing gender with the face, featuring Erika Linder (5,800 likes)
• New in pointlessly gendered products (2,600 likes)
• Snickers mocks the idea that men can respect women (1,900 likes)
• 3rd grade teacher reminds boy that writing is for girls (1,600 likes)
• What kind of work does Women’s History Month value? (1,300 likes)
• The Baby Dolls of Mardi Gras (1,100 likes)
• Does sleeping with a guy on the first date make him less likely to call back? (1,100 likes)
• Intimate inequality at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, 1960 (1,000 likes)

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

This is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, and Pinterest.  I’m on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, and @jaylivingston.

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.

SocImages News:

At the end of January we had the pleasure of introducing the world to 7 year old Charlotte’s letter to Lego asking for more female minifigs and adventures for girls.

It struck a nerve and was covered this month at The Independent, ABC News, CBC News, Fox News, io9, USA Today, The Examiner, The New York Daily News, San Francisco Gate, Buzzfeed, Shine, Huffington Post, Metro, Vitamin W, and The Daily Mail.  And that’s just a selection from the first two pages of search results!

Readers’ Picks!

• The Feminization of Love and Masculinization of Sex (2,300+ likes)
• “Shed Your Weight Problem” by Ditching Your Fashion Mags (1,200+ likes)
• Gillette, Stymied by Beards, Heads South (700+ likes)
• Questioning Media Portrayals of Female Drunkenness (500+ likes)
• Courtesy Stigma and the Consequences of Deviance (500+ likes)

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, and Pinterest.  I’m on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, and @jaylivingston.

Finally…

…a lovely picture of the steamboat Natchez on the Mississippi crescent.  I’m enjoying New Orleans and looking forward to Mardi Gras and the St. Ann’s parade!

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.

SocImages News:

A proud father shared with us a letter written by his daughter, 7 year old Charlotte, to the LEGO company.  She asked for for more female minifigs and more adventure for girls.  We put the letter out on social media this week and it’s been re-tweeted over 1,000 times and shared over 3,000 times on Facebook.  This is how social media can be used to put pressure on companies to change.  Huzzah!

Well done Charlotte and big thanks to Dad!

Reader’s Picks of the Month:

• Teachers offered personal loans to buy school supplies (9,500 shares)
• A little theory of homophobia (4,600 shares)
• Creative resistance to sexually objectifying advertising (2,800 shares)
• What’s Ikea for? Cultural differences in appropriate behavior (2,200 shares)
• More similarities than differences in a study of race and fatherhood (1,900 shares)
• 40 years since women were granted the right to credit cards (1,200 shares)
• Pssssst. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a sociology major.

Social Media:

This is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook,Tumblr, Google+, and Pinterest.  I’m on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, and @jaylivingston.

In other news…

Stay warm New Orleans!  I’m arriving on Monday and I expect you to be hospitable!

If you’re in the city, I’d love to get together!  I’ll be there through Mardi Gras.  Send an email to socimages@thesocietypages.org and I’ll be in touch!  

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.

We rounded out the year with 6,850,000 visits and nearly 10,000,000 page views.  We are proud and honored to enjoy over 35,000 Facebook friends and 15,000 Twitter followers, plus nearly 10,000 on Pinterest and almost 1,000 on our two-month-old Tumblr page.  A huge thank you to everyone for your enthusiasm and support!

Highlights:

• Our 6th birthday.
• A home page.
• A shiny new Tumblr.
• A 5,000th post.
• New Pinterest pages: the social construction of flavor, “women” vs. “people”, marketing feminism, the mean girls meme, and rape culture (see them all here).
• Two new syndication relationships with Business Insider and Policy Mic.
• Tweets from Piper Kerman, Shankar Vedantam, and Amanda Palmer.
• New Course Guides: sociology of work and occupations, family and society, the sociology of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and women’s history (see them all here).
• A gig writing for Salon.

Best of 2013!

Over the last week we’ve highlighted our favorite and most loved posts from 2013.  Here’s the list in case you missed it!

Reader’s Choice (plus # of Facebook likes before we re-posted)

• From the Mouths of Rapists: The Lyrics of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines (174,000)
• The Balancing Act of Being Female; Or Why We Have So Many Clothes (31,000)
• Gender and the Body Language of Power (21,000)
• Stand Your Ground Laws Increase Racial Bias in “Justifiable Homicide” Trials (20,000)
• Surprise! Your Flight Attendants are all Strangers! (16,000)
• My Two Cents on Feminism and Miley Cyrus (15,000)
• Men Feel Bad around Smart, Successful Women (7,500)
• Shifting Discourses of Motherhood: The Victorian Breastfeeding Photo Fad (7,000)
• How Do Physicians and Non-Physicians Want to Die? (5,800)
• Double Standards and Blurred Lines at the VMA Awards (5,400)
• Most Women Would Rather Divorce than be a Housewife (5,100)
• Re-Touching the Consequences of Extreme Thinness (5, 100)

Editor’s Picks

• African-American Travel and Jim Crow Segregation
• Why Are People Changing Their Minds About Same-Sex Marriage
• The Marketing Tactics of Firearm Manufacturers
• Children’s Books and Segregation in the Workplace
• Men and Women Use Uptalk Differently: A Study of Jeopardy
• What are Rappers Really Saying about the Police?
• On the Sexualized Insult (Not for the Faint of Heart)
• The Unsung Heroes of the Crash Landing in San Francisco

And this Happened…

…the fruits of my obsession with flight attendants.   If you read these, you might be obsessed too!

• The Surprisingly Racist Reason We Don’t Tip Flight Attendants
• Before the Stewardess, the Steward: When Flight Attendants Were Men
• Domestic Behavior as Both Gendered and Raced: Who Does What for Airlines?
• International Politics and the First African American Flight Attendants
• Are Flights Full? Airline Advertising vs. Real Life
• Hanging onto the Stewardess at Delta Airlines
• Surprise! Your Flight Attendants are all Strangers! (also a reader’s pick)
• The Unsung Heroes of the Crash Landing in San Francisco (also an editor’s pick)

Happy New Year everyone!  Here’s to wonderful things in 2014!

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.

SocImages News:

• We’ve agreed to another partial syndication agreement, this one with Business Insider, so expect to see some of our work over there.
• I had the opportunity to write about men’s friendships with men at Salon.  It really struck a chord!  The story was covered in eight news outlets and I did interviews for public radio in Canada (still forthcoming), Wisconsin, and New Hampshire.
• Also at Salon, I responded to the attack on the webpage allowing anonymous reporting at Occidental College by so-called “men’s rights activists.”

New Orleans!

I’ll be in nola from early February through Mardi Gras.  If you’re in the city, I’d love to get together!  Send us an email at socimages@thesocietypages.org and I’ll be in touch!

Tweet of the Month:

Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black!

Popular Posts this Month:

• Compulsory Monogamy in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (3,900+ likes/tweets)
• Classism in the Rise and Fall of the Duck Dynasty Patriarch (3,100+ likes/tweets)
• “Help! My Eyeball is Bigger than my Wrist!” Gender Dimorphism in Frozen (2,800+ likes/tweets)
• Online Dating Reveals the Cold, Hard Facts about Race in America (2,100+ likes/tweets)
• When Cowboys Wore Pink (2,100+ likes/tweets)
• U.S. Rare in Spending More Money on the Education of Rich Children (900+ likes/tweets)
• Woman as Cat in Anti-Suffrage Propaganda (800+ likes/tweets)
• $22.62: The Minimum Wage if it had Risen Like the Incomes of the 1% (700+ likes/tweets)
• If You Refrain from Talking about Race, People Might Think You’re Racist (700+ likes/tweets)
• Is the Rise of Men’s Sexual Objectification Equality? (700+ likes/tweets)
• The Soundbite Echo Chamber and the Woman Who Sued McDonald’s for Too Hot Coffee (700+ likes/tweets)
• What Names are Normal? Shifting the Center of the World (600+ likes/tweets)
• The Difference Between Criminals and Non-Criminals? Getting Caught (600+ likes/tweets)

Social Media:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook,Tumblr, Google+, and Pinterest.  I’m on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, and @jaylivingston.

Finally…

In case you missed it.

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.

New Tumblr Page!

Our Tumblr is now one month old!   We think we’re getting the hang of it, including the daily SocImages posts, highlighting the best stuff from our archives, and adding compelling quotes and links.  Please feel free to join us there!  And thanks to our intern, Javier Quiroz, for doing the bulk of the work!

Five thousand posts!

We reached quite the milestone this month.  This is our 5,016th!  Thanks to Gwen Sharp, our contributors, and our many, many guest bloggers.

New Pinterest:

I put together a new Pinterest board featuring commercials and ads that co-opt the idea of women’s liberation for marketing purposes.   Peruse examples at Marketing Feminism. Here’s a sample:

Your Favorite Posts this Month:

• Men and Women! They Talk Like People! (13,000+ likes)
• U.S. Corporations are Hoarding Wealth at Highest Rate Since 1971 (1,500+ likes)
• When Jews Dominated Professional Basketball (700+ likes)
• Doing Gender with Wallets and Purses (500+ likes)
• The Re-Victimization of Homosexual Targets of the Nazi Regime (400+ likes)
• Hannukah and Social Privilege (almost 200 comments)

Plus, the most popular post on Tumblr this month:

• Black and White Twins and the Social Construction of Race (50+ notes)

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, and Pinterest.  I’m on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, and @jaylivingston.

Finally…

Shout out to my dance team, choreographers Steve and Chanzie, photographer Kyle Ellison, and director Pascal de Maria.  We danced the lindy hop to Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On all up and down that bowling alley!  Can’t wait to see the video!

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 Other SocImages News:

• If you’d like a sneak peek behind the scenes, I enjoyed a nice chat with Kyle Green about the site that we recorded for The Society Pages podcast.
• We found ourselves cross-posted at Talking Points Memo this month.  It’s the first, but hopefully not the last time!
• If you’re a technophile or a efficiency expert, I surely disappointed you at UseThis earlier this month.
• Thanks to Take Part Live for including me in their coverage of cause-based marketing and breast cancer. I held no punches!

Your Favorite Posts:

• Taking the Sexy Halloween Costume Trend to its Most Absurd (26,000 likes)
• My Two Cents on Feminism and Miley Cyrus (15,000 likes)
• A Halloween Gender Binary (4,500 likes)
• Halloween Costumes Then and Now: Yes, They’re Sexier (3,300 likes)
• Google Search Reveals What People Really Think about Men, Women, and Feminists (1,900 likes)
• Pinkwashing: Ethical Problems with Cause Based Marketing (1,700 likes)

Tweet of the Month:

Yeah, when musician Amanda Palmer tweeted a SocImages article to her one million followers and implied we were smart?  That was cool.

Insult of the Month:

We don’t know who this “Linda Wade” chick is, but… BURN!

Social Media Milestones!

This month we breached 30,000 Facebook friends and 15,000 Twitter followers.  Thanks to all of you who follow, like, and share!  And, for the curious, you might be interested to know that after Google search, Facebook is the #1 referrer to SocImages; Twitter is in the mix too.  So, for those of you who support our work, know that being a follower is a BIG help!  :)

Finally…

SocImages fan Jason W. wishes you a bloody delicious Halloween!  You should have made the face, Jason!  Next time make the face!  :)

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.