Tag Archives: American culture

The counterpart to women’s studies: men’s or male studies?

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Women’s studies programs are common at American colleges and universities. And in recent years, courses about men and masculinity have increased in numbers. An article in the New York Times explores this phenomenon and the split between proponents of men’s and male studies:

Male studies, largely the brainchild of Dr. Edward M. Stephens, a New York City psychiatrist, doesn’t actually exist anywhere yet. Last spring, there was a scholarly symposium at Wagner College on Staten Island, intended to raise the movement’s profile and attract funds for a department with a tenured chair on some campus. A number of prominent scholars attended, including Lionel Tiger, an emeritus anthropology professor at Rutgers, who invented the term “male bonding,” and Paul Nathanson, a religious studies scholar at McGill University, who specializes in the study of misandry, the flip side of misogyny. Both are on the advisory board of the Foundation for Male Studies, which Dr. Stephens founded last year…

The people in men’s studies, like those in women’s studies, take a mostly sociological perspective and believe that masculinity is essentially a cultural construct and that gender differences in general are fluid and variable. To Professor Kimmel, we live in a world that is increasingly gender-neutral and gender integrated and that this is a good thing for men and women both. “That ship has sailed — it’s a done deal,” he said recently, dismissing the idea that men and women are as different as Martians and Venutians.

The male studies people, on the other had, are what their critics call “essentialists” and believe that male behavior is in large part biologically determined. Men think and act differently from how women think and act because that’s how evolution shaped them. In the most extreme formulations of essentialism, men are basically still Neanderthals: violent, clannish, sexually voracious and in need of female domestication.

The article points this out but this sounds like another episode in the nature vs. nurture debate.

But the study of masculinity does seem to be a growing field of study. I don’t know much about this particular field  but it seems to me that there has been a growing recognition that there is a wide range of male experiences. And more men seem to be interested in at least thinking about this and how their lives have been shaped by cultural expectations.

What is the “typical” role for males today? Take a sector of the media like video games. These are popular among males, particularly the younger generations, and many of these games present particular views of masculinity and the world. Should one be an soldier shooting others in Black Ops? Should one be a 13th century assassin? Should one be a puzzle solver or an athlete? There are a number of roles, realistic and otherwise, that are presented. And all of this has real consequences: with terms like “man-cession” or “he-pression” being in the news recently due to the loss of certain jobs, what happens to males matters for society.

A sociologist discusses giving money and gift certificates as gifts

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The history and social significance of money is more complicated than one might think. One sociologist, Viviana Zelizer, has written a lot about money including pieces about how life insurance came to be seen as “moral” in the 19th century and how women’s earnings were seen as extra money rather than part of a household’s finances. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Zelizer tackled a subject that often comes up at the holidays: is giving money or a gift certificate an acceptable gift?

It turns out that both the economic realists who give money as presents and the traditionalists have history on their side, because this is a debate that began back in the early 20th century. As the consumer society expanded and Americans began giving more Christmas presents to more people, money emerged as an acceptable gift. Christmas money, according to a 1912 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, “supplies dearly cherished wishes, adds small luxuries, prevents worriment and gives opportunities for helpfulness as no other gift does.”…

We can’t all be as clever as Lou Eleanor Colby, but buying a gift card that restricts what the money can be used for is just another way of distinguishing gift money from regular money, and a way for givers to demonstrate their intimate knowledge of what the recipient likes and cares about.

The key here seems to be the significance behind the money or gift certificate: is it simply a cash payout (and writing a check or withdrawing money from an ATM can be a fairly normal and heartless event) or does it have thought behind it (meaning it is a gift certificate that matches one’s tastes)? I know we have had these discussions in my family with people coming down on various sides.

But as Zelizer points out in this op-ed, this was a particular historical process that had to occur. Businesses, particularly those catering to women, had to create a safe space for a gift of money or a gift certificate. Gift certificates do not have inherent significance – it must be endowed with such by the society, the giver, and the recipient.

Personally, I would accept both cash or gift certificates. But they do have separate meanings: cash tends to go into a larger pot of money and gets lost while a gift certificate, say to a bookstore, helps keep that money destined for books or music or DVDs. I would also expect that the younger generations have less difficulty giving and receiving money or gift certificates.

A call to return to studying the American character

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A historian argues that we need more current research and writing about the American character:

Does America have a distinctive national character? Up until the 1960s, this was a question of great interest to historians. But then, according to historian David Kennedy, it dropped off the map, to be taken up only sporadically by sociologists and political scientists. Writing in the Boston Review, Kennedy argues that historians need to take the question back.

Kennedy is a Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford, and as he sees it historians are in a unique position to write on the subject of the American character. Over the last half century, they’ve put together an extraordinarily diverse set of very specific American histories, bringing once-marginalized groups into historical focus; in doing this, they stepped away from sweeping questions, becoming “a guild of splitters, not joiners.” Now, Kennedy argues, it’s time to start drawing on “the large but disarticulated library of social history that has emerged in the last few decades.”..

Kennedy singles out for particular praise Claude Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character. Fischer is a sociologist at Berkeley, but a sociologist who takes a historical approach, focusing, Kennedy writes, on “processes … trends and developments and differences over time – all matters lying squarely within the historian’s province.”

Fischer’s conclusion (according to Kennedy) is that it’s defined by voluntarism is at the core of the American character. Voluntarism has two aspects. On the one hand, it means thinking of yourself as an individual equipped with a (voluntary) will – as someone who’s entitled to pursue your own happiness. On the other hand, it means recognizing that, in Fischer’s words, “individuals succeed through fellowship – not in egoistic isolation but in sustaining, voluntary communities.” It’s because of these two aspects of voluntarism that we have an affinity for both the exclusive and the inclusive – for gated communities as well as religious diversity, for casual manners as well as social climbing. This can’t be the final answer, of course – Kennedy hopes that it’s only the first salvo in an epic exchange of fire among historians.

This is an interesting argument that might lead to some fruitful discussion. I feel that there is some discussion of this among academics: Americans of recent decades are often said to be marked by individualism, consumerism, materialism, and greed. And in order to understand something like voluntarism (or other traits), we would need to compare these behaviors and beliefs to those of other nations with similar or different historical trajectories.

Speaking of voluntarism, this has some basis in one of the key texts regarding the American character. Though it is now quite dated (over 160 years old), Democracy in America by Alexis de Toqueville is frequently cited in both popular and academic discourse. de Toqueville suggested one way Americans were distinct was their propensity to form voluntary associations. (I also wonder if this is one of those key academic works that many cite or reference but few have read all the way through.)

Kennedy also is suggesting that we need more overarching research on America and its social patterns. This is not necessarily easy: academics who engage in this sort of sweeping work could be open to criticism from many sides.

And it is also interesting to note that Kennedy singles out the work of a sociologist as the sort of work that he would like to see done regarding the American character.

Limited American meritocracy and the importance of a college education

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A foundational cultural value in America is that residents should have equal opportunities and that if people work hard and grasp these opportunities, they will be able to get ahead. But academics have suggested for decades that while this might sound good, real chances to move up the social ladder are more limited. Some recent data suggests this is indeed the case: compared to other industrialized nations, being born into a poor American family is more limiting.

Among children born into low-income households, more than two-thirds grow up to earn a below-average income, and only 6% make it all the way up the ladder into the affluent top one-fifth of income earners, according to a study by economists at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

We think of America as a land of opportunity, but other countries appear to offer more upward mobility. Children born into poverty in Canada, Britain, Germany or France have a statistically better chance of reaching the top than poor kids do in the United States.

What’s gone wrong? Thanks to globalization, the economy is producing high-income jobs for the educated and low-income jobs for the uneducated — but few middle-income jobs for workers with high school diplomas…And Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam argues that thanks partly to the rise of two-income households, intermarriage between rich and poor has declined, choking off another historical upward path for the underprivileged.

“We’re becoming two societies, two Americas,” Putnam told me recently. “There’s a deepening class divide that shows up in many places. It’s not just a matter of income. Education is becoming the key discriminant in American life. Family structure is part of it too.”

Increasingly, college-educated Americans live in a different country from those who never made it out of high school.

This article only mentions a small bit of data and it would be interesting to see the mobility rates for all Americans.

But these findings present Americans with a contradiction: we talk about social mobility but reality is a lot harsher. What often happens is that certain cases of people who “made it” are trumpeted and held up as examples when really those people were exceptions rather than the rule.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers lays this out in a simple way: those born into more privileged positions accumulate advantages over time. One of these advantages in America today is a college education. For many in the middle and upper classes, college is a foregone conclusion: a young child is expected to accomplish this goal. But to get to this point, middle and upper class children have more financial resources, better schools, better health and nutrition, parental support (“concerted cultivation”), and more.

This gap between the college educated and those with less than a college education is an important one to watch in the coming decades.

The problems in one of the best American communities, Falls Church, VA

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Newspaper editorials or commentary that discuss how wonderful a particular community is can be interesting. I recall one humorous article about Naperville from the early 2000s that defended the community for “wanting the best.”

This editorial about Church Falls, VA moves from the positives to things that still need to change:

With the release of data by the U.S. Census Bureau, it is now official. As we reported in last week’s edition, the City of Falls Church is officially Number One in the entire U.S. of A. in the categories of median household income, and percentage of the adult population with college and post-graduate degrees.

These statistics don’t lie, although some could argue that degrees in political science and sociology aren’t of the same gravitas as physics or biology. But still, given that it’s lawful that political majors are more prominent here, given our proximity to the nation’s capital where almost everyone works, the puzzle is all the more pronounced.

It’s this: How can the smartest, most politically savvy, best-off people in the nation turn out barely a quarter of its registered adult population to vote in local elections?…

Then there is the issue of affordable housing and a serious commitment to diversifying the community, economically and socially. Clearly, being “well off” financially does not correlate with generosity. This City’s leadership has permitted embarrassing repudiations of these principles, in practice, and no one seems to mind.

Of course, the school system in Falls Church is second to none, but not without a ferocious struggle by administrators, teachers and staff to maintain it in the face of recent years’ funding scale backs, and if that process continues, something is going to give fairly soon.

Even as the schools’ quality is above reproach, however, the issue of the well-being of the students in it, operating as they do under enormous pressure to perform at a high level in academics, athletics and everything else…

If that’s the case, then it may be that a lot of people in Falls Church should be reassessing their priorities in life.

From the outside, it looks like a town filled with self-indulgent people who care for nothing but their home values, on the one hand, and their kids’ SAT and other test scores, on the other. And this, ladies and gentlemen, this is the crème de la crème of America.

Several quick thoughts about this editorial:

1. This editorial comes off as fairly negative. Do the majority of Falls Church residents agree with this assessment about things that need to change? Or is this newspaper arguing for more than the community would be willing to tackle?

2. Is the concern over these issues the mark of a well-educated, wealthy community? If these are the primary concerns and things like a lack of jobs, bad schools, crime, high taxes, and stretched local budgets are not really an issue, then this community is indeed in good shape.

3. The quip that “political science and sociology aren’t of the same gravitas as physics or biology” is intriguing. What exactly do they mean? People take biologists and physicists more seriously? They are seen to be doing “real science” versus interpretation or commentary? They make more money and therefore deserve more respect? And this comes from a newspaper that admits that political science degrees are more prominent due to its location near Washington, D.C.

Thinking about what tolerance actually means

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This BBC News page has some commentary about the origins of the word tolerance and what it means to people today.

I would be curious to know how this word has developed in the American context. Is it tolerance to let my neighbor or fellow citizen do what s/he wants as long as it doesn’t impinge on my freedoms?

Discussing “princess culture”

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The topic of gender stereotypes in American culture tends to provoke interesting conversations. Virginia Postrel writes about “princess culture” and why this has such staying power in a culture and country that has never had real princesses:

Yet among today’s educated urbanites, “princess culture” is the subject of raging debate. What some parents consider innocent make-believe, others deem character-eroding indoctrination. Calling your daughter a princess fosters “a sense of entitlement and undeserved superiority,” declares one mother, commenting on a CafeMom post called, “Is the Princess Fantasy Dangerous?” Others fear that princess stories teach girls to be pretty and helpless, waiting for a prince to rescue them instead of acting on their own behalf. Should liberated women let their daughters play Cinderella? It’s a topic with which mommy blogs never seem to tire…

To play princess is to embrace two promises: “You are special” and “Life can be wonderful.”…

Neither of these need entail narcissistic entitlement or female passivity. Even that old-fashioned children’s classic, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1904 novel “A Little Princess,” portrays an imaginative, individualistic young heroine. Suddenly orphaned and destitute, Sara Crewe imagines herself a princess not only to escape her miserable circumstances but to maintain her good manners and self-control. “If you were a princess,” she reminds herself, “you did not fly into rages.” When unfairly abused, “you can’t sneer back at people like that—if you are a princess.”

For all its Victorian stoicism and sense of duty, this princess dream shares the mixture of openness and elitism that gives princesses their contemporary appeal. Like the superhero, the princess has a special identity and destiny. She is more than an ordinary girl. But her value is not determined by playground hierarchies. You don’t have to be popular to be a princess. You can be an iconoclast, even an outcast, but you must be worthy. You must be good. In this version, as my then-5-year-old niece once wrote me, “Anyone can be a PRINCESS.”

Postrel suggests that princess should be a broader term than referring to a girl who is just pretty or just acts in a dignified manner. Perhaps this is the key to the whole debate: simply change the definition of what a princess looks and acts like. Could we have a brainy princess? Could we have a devious or curious princess rather than just submissive princesses?

Thinking about it from another angle, what powerful alternatives to being a princess are there that would appeal to young girls? Wanting to be a princess seems to be powerfully shaped by being raised in a particular cultural milieu. While I’m sure there are lots of people who would say that there are all sorts of alternatives, are these commonly presented in the media (movies, TV) or in popular culture at large? Do we have and want heroines who kick butt and don’t take no for an answer? And can’t we push for alternatives by buying and consuming different goods?

h/t Instapundit

The theology of Stephen Colbert

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On his show, Stephen Colbert can be irreverent about faith and God. But in a segment from his December 16 show, Colbert brings up a recurring question: with which American political part would Jesus side? Playing up his conservative act, Colbert suggests Jesus is really a liberal Democrat and that means we need to take the Christ out of Christmas.

But in his closing statement, Colbert makes a more profound point:

Because if this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then just admit that we don’t want to do it.

An interesting set of choices.

Reduced American mobility

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One of the hallmarks of American life in the last 60 years is the incredible mobility. Even a few years ago, the average American family moved every 5-6 years.

But this has changed with the recent economic downtown:

“We’re seeing one of the lowest mobility rates in a century,” says Nathaniel Karp, chief economist for banking firm BBVA Compass. Karp says the recession has forced many people to stay put because they are unable to sell their homes, cannot find jobs or are unwilling to relocate for work if it means sacrificing a partner’s stable position.

The slowdown makes the question of who’s moving and why even more significant than in years past.

If people can move frequently, it leads to people being able to move to where the jobs are available, it means that the housing market has more people who are selling and buying, and it influences the middle-class and above ethos that you can determine your own destiny.

This psychological feeling that movement is possible might have a profound effect if the mobility rate stays low. In recent decades, the decently educated and paid American could expect that they would come out of school, move to where a job was available, move up to a house, and then continue a cycle of better job leading to better house and then going to a better job and so on. But this has changed somewhat: college graduates are returning home more frequently and there are many who are stuck in houses where they owe too much money.

Overall, this would impact what it means to be middle class: it would still lead to having certain levels of education and consumption but it wouldn’t mean the greater “freedom” of being able to move where one wants to.

American TV shows help limit extremism in Saudi Arabia

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The cables Wikileaks has put out contain all sorts of interesting information. According to the Telegraph, some American cultural products, such as Desperate Housewives, The David Letterman Show, and Friends, are valuable forces in combating jihad in Saudi Arabia:

In a message sent back to Washington DC, officials at the US Embassy in Jeddah said the shows, starring Jennifer Aniston and Eva Longoria, were successfully undermining the spread of jihadist ideas among the country’s youth.

Such programmes, broadcast with Arabic subtitles on several Saudi satellite channels, were part of a push by the kingdom to foster openness and counter extremists, according to the cable…

The diplomatic cable was headed “David Letterman: Agent of Influence,” referring to the US chat show host who is also being broadcast to a Saudi audience.

The May 2009 cable said: “Saudis are now very interested in the outside world and everybody wants to study in the US if they can. They are fascinated by US culture in a way they never were before.” American sitcoms and chat shows were said to be finding a popular audience even in remote, conservative parts of the kingdom.

I’m glad such shows can be put to use – but this probably wasn’t a use that American TV executives expected…

On a more serious note, this highlights how American cultural products can be exported to other countries. Whether these shows reflect “American culture” can be debated but they certainly can introduce new ideas and values. Our military power might be impressive but American TV, movies, music, and more often have their own powerful influence.