violence

I could make some sociological comment about the linking of the marketing for Easter candy and professional wrestling… but really I just think this is hilarious.  Not only is it a linking of the marketing of Easter candy and professional wrestling (go, Jesus, go?), but there is something so wrong (or is it so right?) about the proximity of the words “EGG” and “RAW” (NOT appetizing) and also the phrase “Jelly-filled mallows” (so soft and sweet!) next to the ripped, muscle-bound dude in the middle.  I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Also in wrestling: No Nipples Allowed!!!

(Image at CMM News.)

Britt Karp, Occidental College student and all-around great person, saw this public service notice on a subway in Manhattan:

Britt remarks:

Why is the message not – don’t sexually assault people?! Instead of reprimanding perpetrators of sexual assault (most frequently men), this poster places the responsibility on the person who is being assaulted (usually a woman). By doing this, it completely normalizes sexual harassment. The poster alludes to the argument touted by evolutionary psychologists – that it is in men’s nature to sexually assault women and so trying to control this behavior is futile. In this way, they make it seem that the only way to deal with this issue is for women to be braver.  It’s no wonder women so frequently blame themselves when they are sexually assaulted.

NEW! Rachel McC. J., from Deeply Problematic, sent us another example of a poster asking women to stop men from behaving badly. This one targets young girls, telling them to turn away older men:

Bri a sent in this ad, found in Interview Magazine, and we’d like to know what you think of it:

It reminds me, somewhat, of this post featuring a billboard for Playstation with a black and white woman fighting.

I’ve always found it troubling when I hear people use the word “Nazi” metaphorically.  Terms like “fashion nazi,” “food nazi,” even Seinfeld’s famous “soup nazi” episode, seem to trivialize the Holocaust.  Of course, we often recognize the hyperbole and that’s part of what is supposed to make it funny.  But do we really want to make fun with such an idea?   Lots of people didn’t like it when PETA did it.

In any case, I was thinking about similar uses of the word “rape.”  The word “rape” seems to be everywhere.  People use it not just for its literal meaning, but to describe all manner of unpleasant experiences.  For example, in this story at bestweekever:

Do other societies use words like rape and murder metaphorically?  Have we always done so?  Must we?  Or are there alternatives that may be more sensitive to people who lost loved ones in the Holocaust, were raped, or knew someone who was murdered?

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.

Jay Smooth over at Ill Doctrine interviewed Elizabeth Mendez Berry (who wrote an article in Vibe several years ago about domestic violence in the hip-hop community) about the issue, which has received renewed attention in the wake of the Chris Brown/Rihanna incident:

It brings up some interesting issues–the pressure on women to not ruin the reputation of men by “airing dirty laundry” and the still-common assumption that women who are abused might have deserved it, higher rates of domestic abuse experienced by African American and Latina women than White women, etc. You might also use it to talk about the fact that both men and women hit their partners, and what that dynamic means. Overall, women in the U.S. hit more often in terms of total incidents (this includes things like the stereotypical slap across the face, not just punches), but are much less likely than men to inflict significant physical harm. Though the rates of harm caused by female aggression toward males is surely underestimated, there is little doubt that women simply do not inflict the levels of physical injury on men that men do on women each year in this country, particularly harm that requires a hospital stay or that ends in death. But I often encounter the sort of equivalency argument Jay Smooth mentions in the video–if women hit, they should be expect to be hit back, etc. It’s always a really interesting discussion, and Berry’s response might be useful for sparking some thoughts about domestic violence, personal responsibility, appropriate reactions (is hitting someone who has hit you first really the most appropriate response?), and so on.

Via Feministing, I found this SuperBowl ad for Bridgestone tires, wherein Mrs. Potatohead shouts driving advice to Mr. Potatohead until her mouth flies off and he looks relieved. Silencing women is hilarious apparently.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQkKP-VPUJM[/youtube]

We used to have a post up about Milgram’s famous obedience study, in which he led people to think they were giving other participants electric shocks, including some that were supposedly at a fatal level. It’s often used as an example of unethical research, since some participants suffered mental distress because they thought they had seriously hurt or even killed someone. We took the original post down when the videos we linked to disappeared, but I just found another video of some footage. For some reason it won’t embed, but here’s a link.

UPDATE: The original footage has been taken down, but the BBC did a replication:

Chris Uggen put together a pie chart of U.S. arrests (FBI statistics 2007) in order to show that “only a small proportion of arrests involve violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault” (see it here):

In 2007, only 4% of arrests were for violent crimes; another 12% were for crimes like burglary, theft, and arson; drug offenses (including drunkenness and DUIs) accounted for 31% of arrests.

Uggen mentions that he shows this data, in part, to talk about the way in which arrests for drug offenses disrupt families and neighborhoods.  Low income neighborhoods are devastated by the transfer (to put it nicely) of huge numbers of adult males to jails and prisons.  Those men are not overwhelmingly committing violent crimes (as stereotype suggest), but are imprisoned because of the intensive policing of drug crimes in those neighborhoods.  In another post, we put up a table that showed how the “drug war” that started in the 1980s disproportionately affected blacks.

For more on crime and imprisonment, see this post on the ineffectiveness of racial profiling, this table on the percentage of children with parents in prison by race, and this table that compares incarceration rates across countries.