Misty Copeland and the Newness of the Ballerina Body
Many hope that Misty Copeland is ushering in a new era for ballet. She is the first female African American ballet dancer to have the role of Principal Dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. She has...
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When Did It Become Allowable to be Pregnant in Public?
Pregnancy wasn’t always something women did in public. In her new book, Pregnant with the Stars, Renée Ann Cramer puts public pregnancies under the sociological microscope, but she notes that it is...
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“Tits”
Assigned: Life with Gender is a new anthology featuring blog posts by a wide range of sociologists writing at The Society Pages and elsewhere. To celebrate, we’re re-posting four of the essays as this...
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Imagining a World Without Sexual Orientation…
Until as late as the 1950s, there was no widely accepted set of terms that referred to whether people were attracted to the same or the other sex. Same-sex sexual activity happened, and people knew...
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Online Dating: Little Lies Might Lead to Love
Flashback Friday. Russ Ruggles, who blogs for Online Dating Matchmaker, makes an argument for lying in your online dating profile. He notes, first, that lying is common and, second, that people lie in...
View ArticleIs It Only Bodyhacking When Men Do It?
Rose Eveleth’s piece for Fusion on gender and bodyhacking was something I didn’t know I needed in my life until it was there. You know how you’ve always known something or felt something, but it isn’t...
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The Vanishing Barbershop?
The barbershop holds a special place in American culture. With its red, white, and blue striped poles, dark Naugahyde chairs, and straight razor shaves, the barbershop has been a place where men...
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Evolution, Complexity, and Human Mating Strategies
Flashback Friday. I heard stories this week about dung beetles and cuttlefish. Both made me think about the typical stories we hear in the media about evolved human mating strategies. First, the...
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Contrasting Aesthetics for “High End” and “Commercial” Models
Flashback Friday. Does the modeling industry fetishize whiteness? It turns out that the answer is: it does and it doesn’t. Ashley Mears, a model turned sociologist, found that high fashion models are...
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How “Pink Ribbon Culture” Harms Breast Cancer Patients and Survivors
In 1985, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals (now AstraZeneca) declared October “National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.” Their original campaign promoted mammography screenings and self-breast exams, as well as...
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Gender Gaps and the Stalled Gender Revolution
Gender gaps are everywhere. When we use the term, most people immediately think of gender wage gaps. But, because we perceive gender as a kind of omni-salient feature of identity, gender gaps are...
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The ugly secret behind the “Model Search”
Flashback Friday. Sociologists are lucky to have amongst them a colleague who is doing excellent work on the modeling industry and, in doing so, offering us all a rare sophisticated glimpse into its...
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Unbearable bodies: When nobody is good enough
Flashback Friday. In a society that objectifies women, women learn that, to many others, they are their bodies. Because our bodies are the means by which others judge us, we place our bodies under...
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Mocking perfect gender performances (because the rule is to break rules)
Both men and women face a lot of pressure to perform masculinity and femininity respectively. But, ironically, people who rigidly conform to rules about gender, those who enact perfect performances of...
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Sam Smith & The Sociology of Body Shaming
In March, in an Instagram interview with Jameela Jamil, British pop star Sam Smith announced being non-binary in both gender and sexuality, stating “I’m not male or female. I think I float somewhere...
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