Monthly Archives: August 2011

The hypersexualization of female stars on the cover of Rolling Stone

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A sociologist found that Rolling Stone cover images of female stars have become more sexualized over the last few decades:

Hypersexualized images of women, on the other hand, went from representing six per cent of female covers in the 1970s to 61 per cent in the 2000s…

During the 2000s, women were 3 1 /2 times more likely to be hypersexualized than nonsexualized, and nearly five times more likely to be sexualized (hyper or otherwise) than non-sexualized.

Hatton acknowledges that many people will dismiss this conclusion as old hat, citing the venerable advertising maxim that “sex sells.”

But Hatton argues that to simply shrug off the findings is to ignore evidence that popculture’s accepted image of femininity is narrowing, dangerously, by the decade.

Several thoughts come to mind:

1. Rolling Stone has certainly changed over the years. From my own vantage point, it was once more serious, particularly about music, but has now become simply another pop culture magazine with occasional over-the-top political coverage.

2. The biggest surprise here is that the hypersexualization has become much worse over the years. And this is from a “progressive” magazine?

3. I wonder if large-scale surveys have presented such images to Americans and asked for their opinion. If so, then might we see a shift in opinion similar to the shift in images on the cover of Rolling Stone? In other words, are these covers simply a proxy for larger cultural opinions?

Pew again asks for one-word survey responses regarding budget negotiations

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I highlighted this survey technique in April but here it is again: Pew asked Americans to provide a one-word response to Congress’ debt negotiations.

Asked for single-word characterizations of the budget negotiations, the top words in the poll — conducted in the days before an apparent deal was struck — were “ridiculous,” “disgusting” and “stupid.” Overall, nearly three-quarters of Americans offered a negative word; just 2 percent had anything nice to say.

“Ridiculous” was the most frequently mentioned word among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. It was also No. 1 in an April poll about the just-averted government shutdown. In the new poll, the top 27 words are negative ones, with “frustrating,” “poor,” “terrible,” “disappointing,“ “childish,” “messy” and “joke” rounding out the top 10.

And then we are presented a word cloud.

On the whole, I think this technique can suggest that Americans have generally unfavorable responses. But the reliance on particular terms is better for headlines than it is for collecting data. What would happen if public responses were split more evenly: what words/responses would then be used to summarize the data? The Washington Post headline (and Pew Research as well) can now use forceful and emotional words like “ridiculous” and “disgusting” rather than the more accurate numerical figures than about “three-quarters of Americans offered a negative word.” Why not also include an ordinal question (strongly disapprove to strongly approve) about American’s general opinion of debt negotiations in order to corroborate this open ended question?

This is a possibly interesting technique in order to take advantage of open ended questions without allowing respondents to give possibly lengthy responses. Open ended questions can produce a lot of data: there were over 330 responses in this survey alone. I’ll be interested to see if other organizations adopt this approach.

Comparing the economies of US cities to countries

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A little fun information: New York’s GDP is similar to Canada, Los Angeles’ GDP is similar to the Netherlands, and Chicago’s GDP is similar to Switzerland.

This is a reminder that US cities/metropolitan regions are economic powerhouses.

h/t Instapundit

Translating Ritzer for Iranian audiences

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An Iranian translator says he will translate sociologist George Ritzer’s theory textbook into Persian:

Iranian author and translator of sociology works said that he will release two translations of American sociologist George Ritzer in Iran and added that he has decided to translate a book in the field of “Social work” as well as “Sociology in the internet era”…

Dr. Khalil Mirzaee told IBNA that one of the books which he has translated is George Ritzer’s “Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots” which had been previously converted into Persian as well. The inappropriate Persian equivalents encouraged me to re-translate the book, he added.

He said that George Ritzer reviews his works once in every four years which include omitting some theories as well as adding new theories.

It is interesting to hear how a common textbook is being used in other countries. But I wonder how this relates to news from last year that the Iranian government wanted to review sociology departments (among others) because of Western influences. Ritzer’s theory books are mainly about European and American theorists but Ritzer’s own ideas about globalization might also be of interest to both scholars and the government.

Sociologists on the “chore wars”

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Time magazine’s latest cover story on “chore wars” features two competing explanations from sociologists:

The assumption that working women had become the Clydesdales of contemporary marriage can be traced back to the publication of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Second Shift in 1989. In the 1970s, Hochschild was a sociologist with two young children who was trying to get tenure at Berkeley, where she saw her male colleagues unencumbered by demands at home and was inspired to write about the working women’s double day. “It came from my own anguish, my own conflict,” she says…

Hochschild came up with that number by averaging data collected in the 1960s, spotlighting what is now clearly the product of a culture in transition, a lag between women’s entry into the workforce and the great domestic shakeout in which working women cut back on housework, often by outsourcing, and men reduced office hours and chipped in more at home. Yet Hochschild’s interpretation of that statistical blip in the 1960s came to define the plight of women in the 1990s and 2000s. The Second Shift was a huge crossover hit and sparked a huge surge of academic writing on the inequalities of the household…

One American sociologist, Suzanne Bianchi, stood on the sidelines of the why-men-aren’t-doing-more debate for many years. From 1978 to 1994, she was a demographer and statistician at the U.S. Census Bureau working with large represtnative samples that shed light on long-term changes at thepopulation level. Bianchi was looking at almost everything but housework – education, earnings, changes in employment – so she became aware of the pitfalls of focusing only on the domestic sphere. “Maybe men really were all jerks and not doing their fair share, or maybe they were allocating their time to other things. By isolating housework from other kinds of work, you lost track of the fact that families need money as well as time,” she says. “I began to get interested in what we really know. We think men don’t do anything, but is that right? Are we systematically missing what they do do?”…

Bianchi and her colleagues analyzed time-diary data from 2003 to ’05 and found that among couples in which both partners work full time, men’s greater hours of paid work counterbalanced women’s greater hours of unpaid work. A second shift, where it still existed, was most evident in dual-earner couples with children under the age of 6, but it was a difference of five hours more of combined paid and unpaid work for women a week, not 15. “That didn’t mean that The Second Shift was completely wrong, just that it was misleading,” says Bianchi, who published her analysis in 2009. “Another thing that got missed was that women shed housework when they’re employed full time, but they hold on to a lot of child care, and that’s a big piece of why The Second Shift resonates so much.”

The article suggests that the gap between the work of men and women has closed and there needs to a more nuanced explanation about the subject. It seems like the larger conversation would also be enhanced with more data rather individuals relying on personal anecdotes. For the forthcoming edition of The Second Shift (January 2011), will Hochschild also include updated/new data?

Two further issues:

1. The argument in this story works because of a methodological concern: men’s paid work counts in their total. If we look at just the figures for work within the home, there is still a decent gap between men and women. On one hand, we could consider all kinds of work to be equal (and work at a paid job certainly has its own stress and advantages). On the other hand, if an earlier goal was for men and women to equally share work at home, it hasn’t happened.

2. Where do we go with this data? The article suggests the arguments of The Second Shift resonate with newer generations. Will this article convince anyone that men are doing more work (or more equal work) or will it simply reinforce existing divides?