Abstract
Vaccine in the Crossfire
At a Republican presidential candidates debate in September, then-candidate Michelle Bachmann derided Texas Governor Rick Perry’s decision to “force innocent little 12-year-old girls” to have “a government injection through an executive order.” Perry’s 2007 executive order, which was overturned by the Texas legislature, had required that all 6th grade girls receive the HPV vaccine Gardasil. HPV, the human papillomavirus, can be transmitted through sexual contact and causes certain cancers. Bachmann’s comments reignited controversy about the HPV vaccine and sexuality.
“The case of Gardasil exposes the inadequacy of a health system where pharmaceutical companies dominate the flow of information about diseases.”
Initially, the FDA had approved Gardasil amid few objections. According to Three Shots of Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine’s Simple Solutions, a 2010 volume edited by Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Steven Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz, Merck, the drug-maker that developed the vaccine, framed Gardasil© as a vaccine against cancer rather than a sexually transmitted virus (HPV). This frame insulated Merck’s product from a politics of sexuality that Epstein and co-author April Huff say has “privileged a Christian Right moral agenda over the mainstream scientific consensus.”
To overcome the image problem associated with giving “innocent little girls” a vaccine to prevent an STI, Merck cast the drug as a tool of female empowerment. “I chose to get my daughter vaccinated,” said a mother pictured in a 2008 advertisement. In another ad, a young woman boldly proclaimed, “I chose to get vaccinated.” The spots concluded with the feminist tagline: “You have the power to choose.” Merck presented young girls as “health consumers who, by making the ‘right choices,’ can realize their imagined disease-free adult bodies,” according to Three Shots’ contributors Laura Mamo, Amber Nelson, and Aleia Clark.
But while Merck’s desexualization of HPV may have been successful in insulating Gardasil from controversy, it obscured questions of risk for women and men. Merck’s ads never mention, according to Epstein and Huff, that “lack of access to routine health care services, exposure to misinformation or a lack of sexual health education, and structural and cultural obstacles to condom use” place girls at increased risk for contracting the virus. Epstein further notes that desexualizing HPV has caused the public debate to largely ignore gay men and their risk of anal cancer from HPV. Even though the vaccine was approved for boys in 2009, it took nearly two years for the Center for Disease Control to recommend that boys receive it. HPV has, in the meantime, become one of the leading causes of throat cancers, in addition to causing mouth, anal, penile, and cervical cancers and genital warts.
Perhaps it’s too much to expect that a major drug company would highlight health inequities and challenge homophobia in an ad campaign. Still, the case of Gardasil exposes the inadequacy of a health system where pharmaceutical companies dominate the flow of information about diseases. As Three Shots reminds us, “The U.S. public health infrastructure needs to be wrestled away from capital (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) and returned to a multidisciplinary set of social thinkers and actors who weigh global and local STI risks, preventions, and treatments, including but not limited to the HPV-cancer link, in the interests of public good.” While Bachmann’s adoption of unscientific anti-vaccine rhetoric dominated media attention, issues of public health and equity went largely unaddressed. jeffrey dowd
The Graying of Facebook
The average user of Facebook is now 38 years old.
According to Mary Madden and Kathryn Zickhur of the Pew Research Center, older Americans’ social networking use is on the upswing: it’s doubled among Internet users between the ages of 50-64, and nearly tripled for those over 65 during 2009 to 2011 (“65% of online adults use social networking sites,” Pew Internet and American Life Project 2011). In 2010, Facebook alone witnessed a 59 percent increase in users over the age of 55, with women in this age group emerging as the single fastest growing demographic.
People 55 and older like this.
While the 50-64 age group comments on photos and “likes” things on Facebook less frequently than “power users” like younger women, Keith Hampton and colleagues at the Pew Research Center find that they post status updates even less frequently than other users (“Social networking sites and our lives,” Pew Internet and American Life Project 2011). As such, older users may reap the benefits of use while avoiding some of the social costs. Power users need to manage their complex social worlds (so that mom, boss, and best friend don’t all see the same material), but older users are able to sidestep many of the same conflicts. Retirees may be less likely to fear “friending” past co-workers and higher-ups, for instance. And, as part of the draw of Facebook is reconnecting with old friends, older users may be less concerned about interactions between “high school” and “adulthood” friends. They may seek out diverse opinions and attitudes in their social networks.
Alice Marwick, a social media researcher at Microsoft, predicts the waning of “generational schisms” in attitudes about social networking site use as more and more older people join. Partially, this is because, as Facebook becomes more pervasive among all ages, not joining can entail higher social costs for everyone. Not belonging to Facebook limits or blocks access to certain organizations and information and may prevent full engagement with friends and family who post frequently. So, just as some younger people report feeling pressured into participating in Facebook, older people may also feel a push into social membership. According to Marwick, not belonging may “require everyone around you to accommodate something that’s slightly socially unusual.”
Paradoxically, as more and more older Americans are pulled into the orbit of Facebook, opting out may lead to greater social isolation. jennifer hemler
Transgender Prisoners
Prisons pose problems for all inmates, but there are especially tricky issues at work for transgender people. Recognizing this, Italy proposed last year to open a new prison near Florence for male-to-female transgender inmates only. Many welcomed the plan as a long-overdue step toward protecting a vulnerable population behind bars.
While plans for the prison were eventually dashed, Italy’s policies governing the custody and care of transgender inmates remain innovative. Male-to-female transgender prisoners, disproportionately immigrants, are mainly housed separately in male facilities. They are permitted to wear individualized personal clothing, including feminine attire and accoutrements—consistent with a decades-old policy supporting self-expression in Italian carceral settings.
Germany and Great Britain also recently announced plans to permit prisoners to wear the clothing of their choice and even specify which gendered pronouns they prefer to use. Together, these European penal systems stand in stark contrast to American prisons, in which sex (and presumably gender) segregation and standardized uniforms are generally the rule.
Sociologists Jennifer Sumner and Valerie Jenness’s recent research on transgender correctional policy in the United States reveals that while the special medical needs of transgender prisoners are receiving some attention, housing policy remains firmly rooted in binary, anatomy-based distinctions. Sumner is now studying Italy’s experience to explore alternative ways of managing the custody and care of this vulnerable population.
Failure to Respond
Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Tropical Storm Irene, and other disasters are generating debates about relief efforts. Who gets help and why? How do programs allocate resources?
Emily Chamlee-Wright and Virgil Henry Storr, writing in Public Choice in 2010, suggest that victims of Katrina had very specific expectations of how government should respond to their plight. While residents of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward didn’t expect the government to make victims whole again, they saw state aid as a contractual obligation; government’s failure to provide sufficient help was a breach of that contract. And contrary to media claims, most requests for assistance were modest.
New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, more than three years after Katrina.
It turns out that racial minorities received less state aid in Katrina’s aftermath than whites did—and far less than they needed to rebuild their homes. Daniel Aldrich’s 2010 Social Science Quarterly article demonstrates much the same in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Caste, location, wealth, and family status all influenced who did or did not receive aid. Disasters didn’t discriminate, but disaster responders did.
How blame is attributed also shapes aid and recovery efforts, according to a 2011 article in Race and Social Problems. Euro-Americans were likely to blame poor government response post-Katrina on incompetent or corrupt bureaucrats and politicians, according to Amy Ai and her coauthors. Blacks, on other hand, were likely to see the problem as situational, varying by victims’ race.
Those who attributed the destruction of New Orleans to natural forces were less likely to offer aid or volunteer to help those in need. Zdravko Marjanovic, C. Ward Struthers, and Esther Greenglass say that if participants believed that the disaster was human-made, they were more likely to believe that humans should play a role in prevention or mitigation (Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2012).
Taken together this new research shows that the social and governmental response to disaster is more nuanced than scholars and policy makers believe. Since global warming is likely to increase the severity and frequency of future disasters, figuring out how best to facilitate the process of recovery is a pressing issue.
Who’s Coming to the Tea Party
Who is joining the Tea Party? Where are Tea Party organizations cropping up? Sociologists Tina Fetner and Brayden G. King presented their research on these questions at the American Sociological Association’s meetings in Las Vegas last August. Using the Tea Party’s database of organizations (online at TeaPartyPatriots.org), the scholars dispute the group’s claim that the growth of their movement is a direct response to increased government debt and higher taxes.
Fetner and King told conference attendees that the facts reveal the opposite: lower-taxed counties have a greater propensity to give rise to Tea Party organizations. These communities are more likely to be experiencing economic decline, as evidenced by higher rates of mortgage foreclosure and real estate bankruptcies. Still, Tea Party supporters are not economically worse off than average Americans, according to Fetner and King. Their findings are straight forward: ideology is key. Communities with a history of support for the Republican Party are more likely to produce Tea Party groups.
So much for the Tea Partiers’ claims of disdain for party politics.
Sociologists on Occupy Wall Street
“There is a tension between this emotionally powerful movement and the emptiness of the message itself so far.”
Nina Eliasoph, New York Times, October 3, 2011
“The movement doesn’t have leaders, but it certainly has organizers… There are people running it.”
Heather Gautney, International Business Times, October 4, 2011
“Such movements hope to remain forever under construction, fluid, unfixed. They slip laughingly through the nets of journalism, which prefers hard-and-fast answers to the question, ‘What do you people want?’”
Todd Gitlin, New York Times, October 9, 2011
“It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.”
Slavoj Žižek, speaking at Occupy Wall Street, October 9, 2011
“In the real world, this movement lacks a popular constituency. Whatever else it may be, this occupation of urban space is not a grassroots movement.”
Frank Furedi, Spiked, November 1, 2011
“Successful movements start out as expressions of anger, and then quickly move beyond that. It’s very difficult for opponents to control or repress a movement that has many heads.”
Doug McAdam, New York Times, November 6, 2011
“The movement’s slogan, ‘We are the 99 percent’ has had an important impact in overcoming the balkanization all too common on college campuses today, where students are part of an often bewildering array of separate campus groups, clubs, causes, and volunteer activities.”
Joan Mandle, Huffington Post, November 7, 2011
“The attempt to disrupt or suppress the movement will backfire. People involved think this is just the beginning. People are having a conversation about what’s wrong with the country. The police are not going to dissuade them from protesting or remaining active. It’s just going to anger people and radicalize them, and maybe draw new people into the conversation.”
Jeff Goodwin, New York Times, November 19, 2011
“Someone had to seriously open a debate about the yawning gap of inequality in this country. My advice to them is, ‘Move on.’ The encampments were running out of steam. They’ve achieved the best they could hope to achieve, which is to draw the country’s attention to extraordinary inequality. In my view, they should pack up their tents and march on Washington.”
Sidney Tarrow, New York Times, November 19, 2011