Everyday Sociology Blog

Sociology & Tiaras

By Hilary Levey

Robert Wood Johnson Fellow in Health Policy

Every Wednesday night at 9 pm I sit down in front of the TV, put on TLC, pull out my notebook, and do research for two hours. Yes, that’s right—watching the pageant shows Toddlers & Tiaras and the new show, King of the Crown, is part of my research. Back in 1999, when I was a sophomore in college, I did a research paper on child beauty pageants for a required sociology class. Little did I know that a decade later I would still be writing about pageants, but now as a professional sociologist!

Ever since the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, Americans have been simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by child beauty pageants. Many people didn’t know about these events until the death of JonBenét, in late 1996, but I have found that child beauty pageants have existed in the United States in one form or another since the 1800s. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the growth and development of a variety of events that are precursors to the child beauty pageants of today, including May Day festivals, baby parades, and beautiful and healthy baby contests.

All of these festivals, parades, and contests started at about the same historical moment. Such child-centered contests were part of a larger movement that began to socially value children in new ways. It was during this time period, from roughly the 1870s to the 1930s, that child labor was eradicated, compulsory education began, and children came to be valued as “economically ‘worthless’ but emotionally ‘priceless,’” according to sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer.. This re-evaluation of childhood helped contribute to the development of distinct children’s spheres, like clothing designed especially for children (see Daniel Thomas Cook’s work on kids’ clothes).

The Asbury Park baby parade was arguably the most famous of the baby parades and contests that started at the turn of the twentieth century, rewarding children for their looks and their costumes. In its heyday, in 1893, it drew 30,000 spectators; in fact, it was so popular that Thomas Edison made one of his first movies of the event, on September 12, 1904.

As the popularity of parades and contests declined at the turn of the twentieth century, modern beauty pageants, for adult women, began to hit their stride. The first “live” beauty contest is said to have occurred in Reheboth Beach, Delaware in 1880. After that, pageants began springing up at carnivals and fairs and on beaches along both coasts, with pageants available for every age and body type.

The most famous, successful, and enduring of all of these is the Miss America Pageant , founded by a group of Atlantic City businessmen in 1921. These men wanted to keep visitors on the shore after Labor Day, the traditional end of the summer season, so they came up with the idea of a bathing beauty contest. They held the first Miss America contest on September 6, 1921 (though it didn’t come to be known by that name until 1941) with only seven “bathing beauties.” By the next year there were 57 contestants, and from there the Pageant continued to grow.

After the Miss America Pageant first appeared on television in 1954—breaking all previous viewing records with twenty seven million viewers—child pageants as we know them today started to develop in the void left by the closure of the parades and contests (which was mainly because of fears of polio in the 1950s). If you’ve seen Little Miss Sunshine, then you have a pretty good idea of how these pageants work.

One the biggest questions the public usually has after watching Little Miss Sunshine or one of the TLC shows is: Why do people, almost always mothers, put their little kids in these pageants? I’ve given you a bit of historical background, but I want to suggest a few explanations from other academic disciplines, before turning to my sociological analysis. Psychological explanations usually draw on the idea that many parents vicariously live through their children. Pageant moms are looking for self-affirmation when they are told their child is beautiful; they may be frustrated with their own lives and appearances and push their daughters to succeed in ways that they have not.

Economists focus more on the investment these moms are making in their children. Here the idea is that someday, their children will grow up to be successful (perhaps related to their participation in these events), and they will then have more resources to take care of the parents when they are elderly. Or, for some families, the pageants provide the possibility of a financial windfall. For example, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears both did child beauty pageants. On a smaller fame-scale, some pageant contestants can earn money in other ways. Remember the cringe-worthy final answer of Miss South Carolina Teen a few years ago?

Caitlin has now parlayed that “answer” into TV appearances, highlighted on TLC’s King of the Crown, and a recent commercial. Other pageant contestants use the scholarship money awarded to pageant winners. For all its faults, some of which I write about here, the Miss America Pageant remains the largest source of college scholarship money for women in the world.

And this leads me to part of my sociological analysis of why mothers enroll their very young daughters in child beauty pageants, like those shown on TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras (for a more complete analysis of participation in child beauty pageants, check out a paper I recently published in the journal Childhood). The majority of the pageant moms I met explain that they have their children involved to help ensure that they will be successful later in life.

One pageant mom explains, “I just want to see my daughters go somewhere—go somewhere in life. I didn’t. I ended up having kids right away. I’m stuck at home now. I’m doing this for them.” The idea that pageants can teach children specific skills that will help girls be successful was brought up literally hundreds of times in interviews with pageant mothers. There are eight major skills mentioned by moms (in decreasing order of frequency): learning confidence, learning to be comfortable on stage and in front of strangers, learning poise, learning how to present the self and dress appropriately, learning to practice, learning good sportsmanship, learning how to be more outgoing, and learning to listen. Of course, these are lessons and skills the moms want their children to learn and the children may not actually be learning them…But that’s a subject for another blog entry!

What do you think—can you think of other sociological explanations that explain participation in child beauty pageants? What might some “big name” sociological theorists, like Pierre Bourdieu and Thorstein Veblen, offer as explanations? Have you ever thought about doing a beauty pageant, perhaps even to help cover the costs of college?

Postmodern Theory and the Balloon Boy Hoax

By Karen Sternheimer

By now you have probably heard that the runaway balloon supposedly containing a six-year-old boy was a hoax, according to his mother's admission. The story received hours of “breaking news” coverage on October 15, and has since consumed countless hours of news coverage about the scam perpetrated on the news networks and concerned viewers.

If French sociologist Jean Baudrillard were still alive, I dare say he would not be surprised that a father would allegedly cook up such a scheme, or that he contacted the local news, the police, or the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He might even say he’s surprised it took so long for something like this to happen.

As I recently blogged, Baudrillard described our contemporary mediated age as one where the boundary between image and reality has blurred to the point where they can no longer be neatly separated. Where once we might have had clearer distinctions between entertainment and reality, the two have fused, and the 24-hour news cycles and the Internet have helped them come together.

It has never been easier to enter into what was once a rarified space of celebrity: with YouTube and “reality” television, fame is increasingly based on promoting one’s private life rather than on professional achievements. It’s not that there weren’t people who were “famous for being famous” in the past, but we have so many more avenues to achieve instant celebrity now. There are more celebrities and they get famous faster. We likely forget about them more quickly now too.

Cable news is a big part of this equation. In competing for viewers of “fictional” programming and the myriad of other entertainment choices we have now, the news has morphed into infotainment: a hybrid that is a perfect example of Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality.

Baudrillard suggests that hypperreality creates a uniquely entertaining experience, what he called the “thrill of the real.” This thrill is something we might experience when that “Breaking News” banner unfurls on the screen. But the thrill constantly weakens and extinguishes itself unless something even newer happens. So news becomes more about live action excitement than analysis and investigation.

Perhaps that’s why the same networks that pre-empted their regular programming to cover this story for hours later turned on the family by trotting out angry commentators condemning the family and talking with legal analysts about the charges they should face. The news networks sent reporters to dig up dirt on the family and reported that they couldn’t find evidence that the parents worked steadily, and interviewed neighbors and other acquaintances on camera to malign the father’s character.

Let’s face it, the news networks that covered this event got Punk'd (another example of postmodernity where celebrities thought they were living their private lives but were in fact part of a television show) but seem reluctant to admit it. Maybe behind the scenes news directors will see this as a wake-up call about the folly of chasing shiny objects—literally in this case—during a time when they could be covering other more meaningful stories in greater depth. I’d like to think that the next time a story like this “breaks”—and you know there will be a next time—news directors will think carefully about how much attention it really deserves.

Yes, the Heene parents deserve the bulk of blame for breaking the law, and for using their children to fulfill their own dreams of fame. They took advantage of our fascination with the real, the private, and the exciting. While they might not reap the financial rewards for diving into the fishbowl for the rest of us to watch, many clearly have (I believe their names are Jon and Kate).

All of this recalls the 1998 movie, The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey’s character finds out that his entire life is actually a television show, and that everyone in his life has been cast by the producers. Truman is devastated to find out that his whole world is a set.

Fast forward a decade later, and many people clamor to turn their lives into a television set, to convert their friends and family members into cast mates. Yes, money and attention are huge motivators. Baudrillard might add that the “real world” and the “television set” can no longer be distinguished from one another. It could be that many of us feel like life might be more thrilling if someone was watching, and that to matter in the twenty-first century is to be observed by others, a character in our own Truman Show. What other sociological theories do you think might help explain this phenomenon?

Soap Operas and Postmodern Theory

By Karen Sternheimer

On September 18^th, the CBS daytime drama Guiding Light aired its final episode after 72 years on the air (fifteen years on radio and 57 on television). Ratings declined as they have for many soap operas over the past few years, leading to the network’s decision to end the longest running program in television history. Both my grandmother and great-grandmother watched the show religiously, and its end represents the passing of more than just a television show. It marks a major social shift.

Daytime melodramas became popular during a time when women spent less time in the paid labor force than they did in the early and later years of the twentieth century. In pre-television radio days, these dramas became known as soap operas because manufacturers of cleaning products advertised heavily to the mostly female audience.

The content of the soaps offered an escapist fantasy of outlandish plots that could temper the tedium of regular housework. For the uninitiated, soap opera characters regularly commit infidelity, plot each others’ deaths, come back from the dead, grow from childhood to adulthood after a year’s absence, and marry and divorce at a rate that would make Elizabeth Taylor’s eight marriages seem normal. Good and evil characters can change overnight and even come back in the form of another person, especially if a surgeon managed a scar-less face transplant.

When I would visit my grandmother, I would hear the plot twists unfold to dramatic music, watch the camera zoom into an actor’s dramatic facial expression and think that this style of storytelling seemed so different than many other programs on the air today.

One might argue that reality shows are a twenty-first century answer to twentieth century melodramas. For those who watch them, reality shows suggest that we are getting an inside glimpse into someone’s private life, usually someone whose life is marked by drama (or edited to highlight--if not produce--dramatic incidents). Most viewers are now savvy enough to know that reality shows are not entirely unfiltered windows into participants’ lives, but it is their illusion of reality that is part of the interest.

This fascination highlights some of the ideas of postmodern theory, particularly French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. According to Baudrillard, the real and the simulated are no longer distinguishable. He argues that in our media age, images of reality and reality itself interact so much so that they have become interchangeable.

You can think of this as like a mirror that reflects an image from another mirror so much that the original image can no longer be identified. Baudriallard calls the outcome of this endless interaction hyperreality, and suggests in his 1983 book Simulations that we are fascinated by the "thrill of the real," particularly because in his view "reality" has imploded with simulation.

There are certainly limits to the application of postmodern theory, but it might help us understand why traditional twentieth century soaps are watching their audiences dwindle. Yes, with more women in the labor force fewer are at home during the day to watch television. And as women have more opportunities outside of the home they might find their lives less mundane and therefore would be less interested in melodrama.

Despite including younger characters, part of the soaps’ recent challenge has been that their audiences have aged and younger viewers have not begun watching in large number. A 2008 Boston Globe article describes how producers attempted to adopt the style of reality shows to attract new viewers. In particular, they sometimes use smaller cameras to mirror the informality of reality shows. But perhaps the biggest hurdle is that soaps are a product of twentieth-century modernity. Audiences may now prefer to observe people “being themselves” in our hyper-mediated age.

We can also look at the genre itself and see how it does not reflect our postmodern condition, where reality itself seems more entertaining than fiction. Soaps are deliberately unreal, asking viewers to enter a fantasy world and suspend their disbelief. We know the characters are played by actors, even if sometimes fans blur the boundary and think of the actor as their character. But the actors and producers make no claim that their character is real.

Realities shows like the Real Housewives and the Kardashian family shows, however, ask us to enjoy the illusion of reality itself by suggesting to us that these programs are depictions of real events. The stories are not limited to a television time slot: events can develop in blogs, tweets, texts, or even in the news, as pregnancies or marriages are reported by the press. Further complicating things, reality show participants are called casts and shows can win Emmys.

I think back to my grandmother, who to my knowledge had no interest in reality shows, and her mother before her, who knew nothing of them since she lived well before they existed. For those coming of age in an era of multimedia, a fantasy melodrama might not be as interesting as something that bleeds into many other forms of media. Rather than just different content, the different forms of media attract audiences today. How else might Baudrillard’s theory help explain today’s media environment?

New Media Revolution

By Karen Sternheimer

Media tend to get a bad rap in social science research. With each new form of media come new studies, mostly testing for negative effects. Will it make users more violent? Promiscuous? Obese? Anorexic? Stupid? Unable to concentrate? Hopelessly self-centered?

Can new media also help users become revolutionaries for democracy?

The demonstrations in Iran this summer appear to answer this question. While many journalists were expelled from the country or at least banned from covering protests, cell phone cameras, Twitter, Facebook, and initially text messaging all served as ways to subvert the attempts of the regime to control information about the country’s suspect election and silence dissent. This cell phone video is one of many that has showed the world what the Iranian government would prefer we not see.

While they were certainly not the first to use these new media to create a political movement—the Obama campaign used them to galvanize voters and volunteers last year—protesters in Iran have been able to circumvent a regime that only weeks ago seemed impenetrable.

A group whose voices and experiences have been all but silenced has trickled out in grainy video and 140 character tweets.

The bloodied face of murdered protester Neda Agha Soltan could travel around the world in seconds thanks to a cell phone, becoming an instant symbol of the regime’s brutality and fostering solidarity in a growing movement for change.

That new media becomes more and more difficult for authorities to control creates both opportunity and anxiety. The opportunity for greater, faster communication makes the sheer volume of messages difficult (though certainly not impossible) to monitor. Anxiety rises for those looking to suppress open communication.

Herein lies the rub: on a global scale, free societies welcome open communication and generally greet these new technologies as liberating. But on a small scale, parents might consider new media with suspicion, and a challenge to parental authority, particularly since young people tend to adopt many the new communication technologies first. This helps explain the long history of research testing for negative effects: we are scared of the changes—and challenges to adult control—that new media may bring.

I discuss these fears in my new book, Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture: Why Media is Not the Answer. In the book I examine dozens of studies that claim that popular culture has serious negative effects. Many of the studies are not nearly as convincing as we are led to believe, but collectively they help us focus on media as a primary source of problems. Focusing so much attention on popular culture as a problem not only helps us ignore serious social problems like poverty, neighborhood and family violence, and lack of access to quality education or health care. These fears also help us ignore some of the positive uses of new media.

Each new form of media has been greeted with suspicion. In 1929, the Payne Fund underwrote studies examining movies’ effects on children. The studies focused on a variety of factors, but most notably they attempted to link movies with delinquent behavior.

Similar studies on television emerged during the 1960s, again testing links between violent content and violent behavior in children. As video games have gained popularity in recent years, research has mainly focused on their possible negative effects. New research on the internet and children examines the potential negative effects of multitasking.

These are all questions worthy of study. But it is less common for social scientists to study how people use and understand new media, let alone potential positive effects. Some studies of video games, for instance, look at how they can be used to enhance hand-eye coordination, which might be useful for some people with physical disabilities. Further research needs to be done exploring the potential for these new technologies, rather than devoting so many resources to worst case scenarios.

More often than not, new media and the corresponding research about it reflects our fears. One fear is the inability to control content, both its production and consumption.

Over the years new forms of media have become increasingly private: most people could only view movies in a public theater at first, early television sets were in a family living room, compared with today, when media typically involves a personal hand-held device. This shift understandably makes some parents nervous, as it becomes harder to monitor what their children see, hear, and learn.

But on a global level new media has the potential to undermine dictatorships, which thrive on controlling information. Short of a complete clampdown on cell phones and internet use—which some totalitarian states enforce—information is much harder to control. While former Secretary of Education William Bennett suggested that the United States provide Iranian dissidents with "duplication machines," in fact we already have. Twitter and Facebook are cheaper, faster, and in the palm of millions of hands.

It’s likely we are just beginning to scratch the surface of new media’s potential. Social science research needs to let go of the twentieth century model of fear and embrace the future.

Thinking Like a Sociologist: Understanding Changes in the "Ideal" Body Size

By Karen Sternheimer

I have been working on a research project this summer that includes analyzing movie fan magazines published throughout the twentieth century. As I examined the articles and ads, I was struck by how even back in the 1910s ads for weight loss products were very common. By the 1920s, weight loss had become a topic in several magazine stories too.

Each year in my deviance class, we talk about how weight norms shift and change over time. The most common explanation students offer is a reasonable one: that super-skinny people are celebrated in media, from movies, television, and magazines, to gossip websites that criticize celebrities for being “fat” if they merely look normal.

This is makes sense; certainly popular culture shapes the way in which we understand beauty.

But thinking like sociologists, we need to dig deeper. Why, for instance, are there significant cultural differences in body dissatisfaction? Research has repeatedly found that African American girls feel greater body satisfaction than white girls, for instance. Why might this be? One study concluded that parental emphasis on dieting and dissatisfaction was the best predictor of teens’ feelings about their bodies. So culture matters, but not only media culture.

Here’s another sociological question the media answer does not address: why do body ideals change over time in the media?

It might seem like standards of beauty insist that women get thinner and thinner over time, but my magazine research reveals that the relationship is more complicated than that. Yes, today’s supermodels like Kate Moss are much thinner than 1950s icon Marilyn Monroe and her fuller-figured peers. But to understand why, we must examine this issue more deeply.

Let’s go back to the 1920s, when ads for weight loss products and articles about getting thinner appeared more regularly in the movie magazines I’m studying.

Photoplay, June 1925

If you take a look at a snippet from the 1925 article above, you can see that fame and material success were considered the rewards of silent movie star Clara Bow’s weight loss. The article also describes her as a flapper, or a young woman who flouted gender norms of domesticity and docility. Wearing bobbed hair, short dresses and abandoning full skirts and corsets, flappers also challenged notions of beauty.

Motion Picture Classic, November 1924, p. 21

Photoplay June 1925, p. 142

But thinking like sociologists, we need to think even more about why this style would have changed when it did and not, say ten years prior. A major political shift took place in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and women gained a constitutional right to vote in the United States.

Historian Joan Jacobs Blumberg, author of The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, considers this major change a watershed moment in women’s bodies. No longer bound by legal restrictions—women could increasingly inherit property and maintain custody of their children in the event of divorce—Blumberg argues that self control heightened at this time.

Photoplay, September 1926, p. 30

The growing prosperity of the 1920s also provided women with a bit more independence in their teen and young adult years. More women could attend college, though certainly not anywhere near the proportion we see today, but this too provided more opportunity in an increasingly advanced industrial economy. While the kinds of jobs women had were still very limited, the growth of department stores created new professions that gave women opportunities to gain a bit more autonomy.

I noticed a very interesting change when reading magazines from the 1930s: they offered advice and ads about how to gain weight! There were still occasional ads for weight loss products that rudely proclaimed how terrible being fat was, but an overwhelming number of ads chided skinny women. Yes, we do see frighteningly thin celebrities called out on magazine covers today if they appear anorexic, but I have no memory of ever seeing an ad promising weight gain like the one below.

Motion Picture, February 1934, p. 83

So why would thinness suddenly go out of style? One clue rests in the lower right of the ad: the National Recovery Administration (NRA) logo, a depression-era agency that set fair competition standards for businesses. At a time of want, such as the Great Depression, being skinny could reflect poverty, while in times of plenty being thin implies self-control. Developing countries today with serious poverty problems don’t idealize thinness the way that wealthier nations do.

Photoplay, September 1936, p. 72

As you can see, body ideals can shift relatively quickly due to economic and political circumstances. More recently, we might consider why the 1980s body image, personified by supermodels like Christie Brinkley, focused on women as athletic. Brinkley made the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue three years in a row and frequently appeared on fashion magazine covers.

Contrast that powerful 1980s ideal with the late 1960s icon model Twiggy, so-named for being stick thin. While we often identify the 1960s as the time when the second wave of the feminist movement really gained traction, it wasn’t until the 1980s when women made major professional inroads and began to take on positions of power at work.

Thinking like a sociologist, we can see that idealized images of weight are complex and a product of social, political, and economic realities. In the United States, we have an ongoing battle between consumption and gratification and the Puritan Ethic of self-restraint and self-control. Have you ever noticed at grocery story check-out lines the magazines with a big piece of cake on the cover and promise of a new diet inside? What other sociological factors do you think make the images of beauty shift in the media?

Drugs in America: Not Just for Celebrities

By Karen Sternheimer

My grandfather was a drug dealer. Shocked? Don’t be: he was a pharmacist who at one time owned his own neighborhood drug store, not an underworld kingpin.

What images do you think of when you hear the term “drug user”? Someone who steals, lies, or manipulates to maintain their habit? And what sort of drugs do you imagine them using? Crack? Heroin? Meth?

The speculation surrounding Michael Jackson’s death has brought celebrity pharmaceutical use to our attention. But the misuse of prescription drugs is not just for the rich and famous.

It’s interesting how we tend to ignore the use of pharmaceuticals in discussions of the so-called War on Drugs. Most of us have legally used drugs that our doctors have prescribed, and often we don’t question whether they are safe or healthy for us. In discussions of illegal drugs we often hear of the many potential dangers the drugs might pose for users, but seldom is this conversation extended into legal pharmaceuticals.

Recently, an FDA advisory panel recommended a ban on Percocet and Vicodin because of their potential harmful effects on the liver. The panel also voted to reduce the amount of acetaminophen (the active ingredient in drugs like Tylenol and Excedrin) in over-the-counter drugs.

According to the Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available) one in five Americans twelve and older have used pharmaceuticals for “nonmedical” use in their lifetime; just under seven percent have done so in the past year. This might be an undercount, since the NSDUH data does not include people who have asked for and received prescriptions for medications that they might not legitimately need or might be misusing.

To put pharmaceutical use in context, nonmedical use is more common than any other illegal drug other than marijuana (two in five Americans over twelve have tried marijuana). By contrast, just under fifteen percent have tried cocaine, (less than four percent have used crack), about five percent have used methamphetamines, and less than two percent have used heroin at least once in their lives.

The Department of Health and Human Services defines nonmedical use as “the use of prescription-type psychotherapeutic drugs that were not prescribed for the respondent by a physician or were used only for the experience or feeling they caused.” These drugs include opiates, or painkillers like oxycodone, benzodiazepines like valium and other tranquilizers, sedatives, stimulants, or muscle relaxants.

Nonmedical use of prescription drugs during the past year is most common for people in their late teens and early twenties, and peaks at age 21, with seventeen percent reporting use during 2007. Americans 25-44 were more likely to have misused pharmaceuticals than teens under fifteen were in the past year. Yet typically public service announcements, like the one below, focus on kids as the main users.

According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN)’s most recent data, nearly half a million emergency room visits per year are due to nonmedical pharmaceutical use. As the graph below indicates, Americans aged 35-54 were most likely to visit emergency departments (EDs) for pharmaceutical use.

It seems that we often underestimate the dangers of middle-aged drug use. While young adults might use pharmaceuticals more often, their bodies might be more resilient in handling the drugs. Older adults might have been using the drugs for a longer period of time as well, which could increase their tolerance and thus the amount of the drug used.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise that people would use pharmaceuticals without prescriptions if we think about the big picture. Consumers have been encouraged to seek out specific drugs since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) legalized direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs in 1997.

You know all those ads for drugs you see during sporting events or the evening news? The pharmaceutical companies want us to ask our doctors for drugs. Before 1997 drug companies could only market to physicians, and the ad campaigns are designed to sell more drugs to a wider array of patients.

That is, if you really are a patient. If you have ever gotten spam in your email inbox you probably have been offered the chance to buy drugs for which you have no medical condition (or the right anatomy). Online drugstores have been able to operate with little impunity and sometimes substitute a checklist for an actual medical exam.

The misuse of pharmaceuticals is a difficult problem to control. The industry is extremely profitable—a 2004 report estimated that Americans spent $200 billion annually on prescription drugs. As America ages, this number will surely skyrocket.

And let’s not forget that medications have extended lives and improved the quality of life dramatically. Pharmaceuticals have made diseases like HIV that were once death sentences into more manageable, though still serious, chronic conditions.

Even the prescription drugs most likely to be abused have done far more good than harm in the grand scheme of things. Unlike many illegal drugs, which have been demonized for decades, it is impossible to do this for pharmaceuticals. They cannot be unilaterally condemned like some other drugs have been (and may not deserve to be; but that’s a subject for another post).

What other sociological factors have made us less likely to recognize the problem of pharmaceutical abuse in the past?

What is Funny? The Sociology of Comedy

By Janis Prince Inniss

In what context is it okay to:

A. Give detailed – and I do mean detailed tips to women on performing oral sex?

B. Use the “n-word” so frequently that it seems to be used after every other word?

C. Talk about “essential” traits of black men, black women, black people?

D. Say that you hope someone’s kidneys fail?

E. Say that a young woman was “knocked up” at a baseball game?

At least with the examples of D. and E. you probably figured out that this is a list of things that comedians have said as those two have been widely discussed in the press. I heard the first three at stand-up comedy performances. Example A. was at a comedy club performance by Sheryl Underwood. The possibilities of who I am referring to in B. are many, but before his conversion away from the use of the word, it was true of Paul Mooney. White comedian Gary Owen seems to have built his career on the basis of C. (Owen says that he is married to a black woman and uses this as his entrée into the ways of blackfolk which he compares to those of whites.)

Listening to him, I am left with the impression that race is a biological determinant. In case you missed the event and the resulting dust-up, example D. refers to the 2009 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at which comedian Wanda Sykes said she hopes Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys fail. (Limbaugh had said that he hopes President Obama’s “liberalism” fails.) E. is an allusion to David Letterman's jokes about the daughter of Alaska governor, Sarah Palin.

How about pretending to be a health official and telling someone that they have “oaktreeitis” and that a tree will grow out of his navel? And that the condition could cause his death! I heard this prank telephone call on comedian Steve Harvey’s syndicated radio show recently. The call was made by his nephew (called Nephew Tommy) who excels at these calls and has done so many that they seem to have enough to play at least one per day. He told one man that his wife, Tina used to be his brother Tim! Nephew Tommy confirmed that Tina has a scar above her left hip and a birthmark on her shoulder and after some more details the man seemed to believe that Tina used to be Tim.

During one call, posing as an immigration officer, Nephew Tommy informed a Guyanese-born American citizen that she would be deported to Guyana, and that he would be keeping her U.S. born son. On another call, Nephew Tommy told a man that it had become apparent that Tommy and his wife were being treated by the same fertility specialist as the man and his wife. Tommy explained that he had just been notified that there was a mix-up: Tommy’s sperm had been used to artificially inseminate the man’s wife, instead of her husband’s. The husband was shocked and furious. And unbelievably, it was this man’s wife who arranged for the prank call to be made. In every one of the Nephew Tommy prank calls that I have heard people have become so upset that they curse at Nephew Tommy and their words are bleeped out on the air. The man with “oaktreeitis” started crying.

The whole gotcha branch of comedy has grown in recent years. Have you seen Punk’d? I have only see one or two episodes of this television show but the premise seems to be to put a celebrity in an upsetting situation with cameras rolling. I saw an episode in which former NBA player Magic Johnson’s vehicle was vandalized by a young woman who said that Johnson’s son had used her sexually. Funny, right?

Without the settings of comedy routine or comedy bits, many of these incidents would be considered rude, obscene, or even tasteless. Why are they acceptable because they’re funny, or meant to be that way? Is there any other avenue in our lives in which we are allowed to behave like this? Both Sykes’ and Letterman’s jokes drew tremendous responses from people saying they had gone too far, while others said they were simply funny.

But what is funny? And who decides what is funny? What if most of your friends and family think that something is funny and you don’t? Does that mean you are hypersensitive? Think about how context shapes what is and is not funny. Time is an important aspect of context. Compare old comedies with your current favorites. How has comedy changed over time? And how does the setting of a comedy club influence what we find funny? What if Sheryl Underwood undertook her instruction with the woman sitting next to her on a plane? With prank calls and shows, the victims are unaware of the comedy context, hence their distress and heightened comedy. What, if anything, do we learn about our society’s humor when it’s at someone’s expense? Is humor always at someone’s expense?

Social Theory and the NBA Finals

By Sally Raskoff

During this year’s NBA finals, I found myself less focused on basketball, and more on the players and on how they adorn themselves. The uniforms and tattoos are only some aspects of their costumes. It was their “arm covers”, for lack of a better word, that caught my eye – the close fitting sleeves that run from wrist to upper arm.

Since I was watching the game with a lot of fans, I asked them what those covers were for and I got almost as many answers as there were people in the room. The most prevalent responses had to do with sports ergonomics (it keeps their shooting arm “warm” as the spandex supports better circulation) and enables modesty or prevents them from being fined for tattoos the league might find offensive.

Sociologically speaking, it occurs to me that the functionality is only one interesting aspect of the “shooting arm sleeve”. Instead of analyzing this phenomenon from a functionalist perspective, which would focus on the benefit and overall purpose of the sleeve, the combination of symbolic interactionist and conflict perspective can highlight the importance of the sleeve. Symbolic interactionist theories focus on how we construct a sense of identity in social settings, while conflict theorists consider the ways in which these identities are constrained by economic forces.

Drawing on symbolic interactionism, it is apparent that many professional athletes use tattooing as a form of expression. This subject caught enough interest to spur a book, In the Paint: Tattoos of the NBA and the Stories Behind Them, published in 2003. Tattooing in the NBA has increased tremendously in the last few years and many players are covered with tattoos depicting their hometowns, teams, spouses, and other images. (Click here for a slide show of NBA players and their tattoos.)

Using bodies as art or expression is certainly not a new phenomena. However, these players are already somewhat objectified since their bodies are used to sell both basketball as entertainment and other products and services. Much like prostitutes and porn actors who sell their bodies for a particular purpose, professional athletes are getting paid for using their bodies to entertain others. Their tattoos make their already objectified bodies become even more of an object when they are used as a canvas for expressing hometown ties (Carlos Boozer) or spousal apologies for infidelity (Kobe Bryant). Stephan Marbury has gone so far as to tattoo his clothing company logo onto his head ().

One might imagine that tattooing corporate sponsor logos is coming next – what player will have the Nike swoosh tattooed on his head or legs and how much would that deal cost? Actually, this has already happened. Marcon Gortat has a Nike logo on his leg

that his current sponsor, Reebok, did not appreciate in the Spring 2009 NBA finals.

Selling space on a body for corporate ads takes this objectification of the body to a new level, not wholly unexpected in a capitalist environment. Gortat's responded to Reebok: "They didn't say anything about it when I signed the contract, so it's not going anywhere. I don't think they are paying me enough to take it off.'' (Source)

Objectification of the body exemplifies Marx's concept of alienation, in this case from the body. If one’s body becomes an object, one’s connection to that body is one of distance; it isno longer subjective, intimate, or holistic. As the objectification of professional athletes’ bodies intensifies, their alienation from self also intensifies. With alienation comes depression, anger, dissatisfaction with life. This may help explain some of the infamous pro-athlete “misbehaviors” although one might expect that training regimens and the insulation and isolation of fame are also important contributing factors.

How else can we apply sociological theories to understand professional sports and professional athletes’ behavior?

Celebrity and Collective Memory

By Karen Sternheimer

What memories have Michael Jackson’s death evoked for you? Listening to gathering mourners talk to reporters, you might have noticed many of them spoke of their own lives and how Jackson’s music intersected with their personal history. Some recalled “growing up with him” via his music, whether they were talking about his work with the Jackson Five or his solo hits of the seventies, eighties or nineties.

The tragedy of his death, along with the death of seventies icon Farrah Fawcett, goes beyond the loss of them as individuals. Certainly their families and friends are feeling a different kind of pain that only their intimates will experience. And yet there are some people who transcend their mortal status—sometimes even in life—and take on a larger role than just individuals, even compared with other famous people.

Certain people and events become embedded in society’s collective memory, which is distinct from although related to our individual memories. Collective memories are typically drawn from people or events that somehow seem to symbolize important social meanings, sometimes meanings so diverse and profound we cannot define them clearly. Instead a person or situation comes to embody what otherwise might be hard to name.

Although the television program Charlie's Angels was central to Farrah Fawcett’s rise to fame in the 1970s, she only appeared in it for a single season. She appeared in a famous poster too, which in itself doesn’t seem like something that would create iconic status. It is what that poster embodied at that specific time that made her not just a famous actress but a symbol of something larger. During a time of change in the status of women, she seemed to personify several contradictions. She possessed both traditional beauty and athleticism; she played a crime-fighting detective on Charlie’s Angels, and yet the show and others like it were called "jiggle TV" because of the skimpy outfits its stars wore.

As a child of the seventies, I rarely watched the show because it was on past my bedtime. Her poster was everywhere, though, and even though I was very young during her heyday my memories of her fame are mixed with my memories of my life at the time. When I see that poster I think of things that seem to be totally unrelated: slumber parties, swimming, and summer camp. The poster becomes a memory shortcut to those years of my childhood. Likewise, Michael Jackson’s music reminds me of my early teen years, when nearly everyone I knew owned the Thriller album.

Collective memories partially emerge from a large group of people having similar memories; Jackson’s career was so long that people from their twenties to their fifties can honestly say they have childhood memories of his music. His career is so loaded with symbolism that volumes might be written about its sociological meaning: the Jackson Five's popularity coincided with desegregation in the 1970s, when fierce debates over busing children to schools in different neighborhoods to promote integration took place, the changes in his appearance and meanings of race, as well as a new era of tabloids where celebrities’ personal lives and legal troubles became big business.

The interesting thing about collective memory is that we don’t even need to have individual memories of a person or event to feel them strongly. For instance, those of us born after the Kennedys or Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated still likely feel powerful emotions when seeing footage of those events. I suspect people born after September 11, 2001, will also feel the weight of that day in years to come.

These memories become part of culture for many reasons: they might serve as significant markers that new members need to familiarize themselves with; much like people who study for a citizenship test must know important historical facts. Collective memories are part of the way a group defines themselves, and they are passed along through media images such as video, photographs, and sound bites. These memories can motivate members, much like a reference to Martin Luther King, Jr. might serve as a call for those interested in social justice. The photo of Neda Soltani, the young woman killed during a protest in Iran, could certainly serve as a marker of collective memory for those involved in the movement for change in Iran.

Collective memories can also be passed along through stories and religious texts, and help create shared meanings of events. While people might have different feelings about iconic figures in any society—we certainly don’t all agree on their importance or meaning—their existence helps create a sense of what it means to be a member of a particular social group.

Generational Differences, Cartoons, and Cooperation

By Jessica Collett

University of Notre Dame

I’m a member of Generation X . My students, on the other hand, are mostly Millennials, sometimes referred to as Generation Y. This difference extends beyond age. As C. Wright Mills explains in The Sociological Imagination, our history and biography are profoundly connected. As different generational cohorts we experienced unique defining moments and cultural influences that have shaped our hopes and our fears, our personalities and our preferences.

For example, because I came of age during the Cold War, the villains in my favorite childhood action movies were Russian or Eastern European. Today, pop culture bad guys tend to be Arabs. In college, I associated one night stands with AIDS, they are associated with the “hook-up” culture. Public service announcements of my youth warned against the devastating effects of drugs (mostly crack cocaine). Today, the truth campaign against smoking and tobacco is Gen Y’s PSA of record.

Increasingly professors and employers are trying to use their knowledge about these cohorts to increase learning, attract top applicants, and enhance employee productivity. Although a tremendous amount has been written, one of the main sources of information on the Millennials is Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation”(2000) by Neil Howe and William Strauss. While there is debate over the generalizability of Howe and Strauss’s assertions, one of their findings that has captured the attention of many is Millennials’ preferences for collaboration. Many believe that they favor teamwork over independent ventures, choosing cooperation over competition.

Maybe globalization is partly responsible for this shift, specifically the diffusion of Saturday morning programming. One of the things that diffuses across the world with globalization is culture, both material and symbolic. Material culture is the “things” of a culture – its food, tools, and art (including children’s television shows). Symbolic culture is the values, beliefs, and norms associated with a group. The two types of culture are intricately connected.

For instance, a cultural group’s art (material culture) likely reflects the group’s values or norms (symbolic culture) and television shows are no exception. When I ask my students what their favorite childhood programs were growing up, The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers always tops the list. What students may not realize is that Power Rangers, actually imported from Japan, is laden with cultural messages that emphasize cooperation over competition. In the end it always takes all the Power Rangers coming together to overtake evil, demonstrating that the whole is better than the sum of its parts.

While the United States has prized individualism for much of its history, Asia traditionally has a much more cooperative culture. Children’s programming in both countries largely reflects these values. Take, for example, national superheroes. In his chapter, “Transformational Magic: Some Japanese Super-Heroes and Monsters,” from The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures (1998), Tom Gill discusses two superheroes of the mid-twentieth century, Superman and Ultraman. Superman is quintessentially American. He’s an immigrant to the United States from some place far away. His human form lets his viewers relate to him and see his power as their potential. He’s ultimately alone, with no Superdad or Supermom or Supersiblings, yet he can win every battle. His story stresses individual achievement to the American children who look up to him. Gill contrasts Superman with Ultraman, Japan’s superhero. Ultraman, unlike Superman, never flies solo. His family grows over time, and his brothers, parents, and other kin are included in storylines and spin-offs. Ultraman often calls home for help in order to defeat his opponent. Watching these programs, Japanese children learn filial loyalty and the value of solidarity.

Ultraman might have never made it to the United States, but other Japanese characters and shows increasingly have. In addition to Power Rangers, many children today follow Teen Titans, Pokemon, and Hamtaro. The opening and closing sequences of Hamtaro, a cartoon about the adventures of a group of hamsters known as the Ham-Hams, are rich with cultural messages, not only of solidarity and cooperation, but also of the importance of school:

It's Hamtaro time!

…When we work together it's much better!

…My best friend!

…My Ham-Hams!

If she heads for trouble, we won't let her!

…Laura's gone to school, let's go to our Ham-Ham Clubhouse!

We can fix their troubles just be quiet as a mouse

Watch out for those cats you know they're smarter than you think

But if we work together we can make their plans sink!

Hamtaro!

Snoozer, Howdy, Penelope, Panda,

My best friends!

Oxnard, Bijou, Cappy, Maxwell

My Ham-Hams!

Dexter, Boss, Pashmina, Jingle

Hamtaro!

Little Hamsters, Big Adventures!

'scuse me while I work out, gotta run on my wheel

Hamtaro!

Hamtaro's here to help you!

Hamtaro!

Hamtaro's team is for you!

Snoozer, Penelope, Panda, Howdy, Oxnard, Bijou & Boss let’s go!

Zersnoo, Pepenelo, Sobs, Dapan, Dehow Nardox Joubi & Hamtaro!

…Let’s make a wish ­ ooh, ooh

Make it come true

Singing along with us is all you do!

Come on and do your very best, ooh, ooh

Get a hundred on your test

All of your dreams will come true

…This will be our song, come on and sing

Snoozer, Penelope, Panda, Howdy, Oxnard Bijou & Boss let’s go!

Zersnoo, Pepenelo, Sobs, Dapan, Dehow Nardox Joubi & Hamtaro!

Little Hamsters, Big Adventures

Ham-Ham, Hamtaro!

Contrasting the above songs with the theme song of Jimmy Neutron , an American cartoon, is particularly striking:

From here to the stars,

With my candy bars,

Rides a kid

With a knack

For inventions.

A super-powered mind,

A mechanical canine, 

He rescues the day

From sure destruction.

…He's gotta save the world

And get to school on time,

So many things to do

And not much time

Who can we count on?

Jimmy Neutron!

Who can we count on?

Jimmy Neutron!

Who can we count on?

Jimmy Neutron!

Unlike the Hamtaro songs, which highlight the group or team and go so far as to list the names of all of the Ham-Hams, Jimmy Neutron’s episodes and theme songs emphasize the importance of one boy who must constantly save the world. Jimmy Neutron was born with “a knack for inventions [and] a super-powered mind” and school is mentioned in passing, as one of the many things he has to do. Hamtaro, on the other hand, emphasizes doing one’s very best and making a hundred on a test, to make all one’s dreams come true.

While I don’t know of any scientific research on the power of these children’s shows for fostering cooperation or competition, sociology is rich with research on the influence of the media on our perceptions and behavior. It might just be that one of the reasons the Millennials value collaboration is all those Saturday mornings spent with the Power Rangers and the success of the team-oriented shows that continue to follow might be suggestive of media’s tendency to both shape and reflect culture. It might just be that shows demonstrating cooperation over competition are more appealing to today’s young people.