Abstract
Rich Defendant, Poor Defendant
Robert H. Richards IV, an heir to the du Pont fortune, was convicted of sexually abusing his own child. Justifying her decision to put Richards on probation, a judge noted that the wealthy defendant would not “fare well in prison.” A few months earlier, an affluent Texas teenager convicted of killing four people while driving drunk was also sentenced to probation in lieu of prison. His lawyer successfully used the “affluenza” defense, arguing that his client was not fully accountable for his actions because of his privileged upbringing. While the slaps on the wrist these wealthy defendants received led to public outrage, most Americans are unmoved by the fact that poor defendants disproportionately bear the weight of criminal penalties.
In their 1998 book, The Common Place of Law, scholars Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey offer a framework for understanding this apparent contradiction. Most people actually hold complex and seemingly contradictory views about the law and the legal system, they argue. People often believe that the legal system provides fair treatment under the law most of the time, while also acknowledging that some criminal defendants are at times treated differently because of their race and class. Our ability to hold multiple views of the legal system explains why we can become outraged over specific class-based sentencing decisions, while remaining complacent about routine discrimination against poor and minority defendants.
Fashion Victims
Earlier this year, survey researchers at the University of Michigan questioned citizens of seven Muslim countries about how they think women should dress. They asked both men and women to select from among five styles of hijabs, or veils, or whether women should wear no hijab at all. They tried to reduce a multifaceted piece of clothing, embodying a set of complex decisions, to a few simple choices, as shown below.
For one thing, the meaning of the hijab varies widely across the Muslim world. In Egypt, veiling is a personal choice, and can be an expression of virtue, personal style, or resistance to secularism, according to anthropologist Saba Mahmood (Politics of Piety, 2004). In Iran, where the hijab is mandatory, hijab styles are a sign of resistance against an Islamic government that sees itself as the guardian of women’s bodies.
© Pew Research Center
In addition, the hijab is not merely one piece of clothing, and encompasses many different styles. The intense competition among women’s wear designers, Islamic fashion shows, and glossy hijab magazines showcase these variations—and their wide appeal for Muslim women.
What this tells us is that people’s way of dressing is shaped by their social context, as the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod reminds us in her 2013 book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? After all, American women don’t live in a world of free choice either. The “tyranny of fashion,” in other words, is a challenge for women in many parts of the world.
The Selfie Exchange
Corey Fields
If you are a teen with a social media account, chances are you have posted a selfie. The practice is so ubiquitous that last year the Oxford Dictionaries defined it as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website” and made it their “word of the year.” A Pew Research poll found that 91 percent of teens who participate in some form of online social media have uploaded an image of themselves—up from 76 percent in 2006.
Accounting for the meteoric popularity of selfies, some see them as a means of free self-expression among teens. For example, “Selfie,” a short marketing film made by Dove, the soap manufacturer, depicts teens taking selfies to express their “true selves” and “true beauty.” But sociologists tell us that selfies, rather than liberating youth to be whomever they wish, may in fact act as a kind of social capital.
Teens participating in an online social network in Israel told sociologist Ori Schwarz that they understood the selfie as a form of currency. The “right” type of selfie, typically a “sexualized ad-like” pose, provided users with social capital in the form of “likes” or positive comments that were highly valued within that community, according to his 2010 Convergence article, “On Friendship, Boobs and the Logic of the Catalogue.” This social bartering process is one of the few forms of capital teens control.
In other words, in addition to being a form of self-expression, selfies may act as a kind of social real estate for teenagers.
Building Better Children
In an attempt to actively address gender inequality, Sweden has incorporated gender-neutral socialization into public education, stocking schools with gender-neutral toys. Swedish children also see other children modeling cross-gender play—advertisements regularly show girls playing with Legos and boys playing with baby dolls.
A Swedish advertisement encourages gender-neutral play.
Sociologists have observed that school-age children often act as gender police, regulating how girls and boys should behave. Since children’s brains are most malleable in the first five years of life, initiating gender-neutral socialization when boys and girls are most open to such ideas may contribute to greater gender equality in society. But how to do so?
In a 2012 article in Sex Roles, sociologist Priscilla Goble and her colleagues show that interactions with peers, parents, and others influence what children play with and how they play. And according to Emily Kane, writing in Gender & Society in 2006, girls in the United States gender-cross or play with gender-neutral toys more than boys because parents and other adults discourage boys from engaging in feminine activities.
Perhaps Sweden is onto something: today’s gender-neutral children could be tomorrow’s egalitarian adults.
A Storm Called Hercules
Winter storms now have names like Hercules and Maximus, thanks to the Weather Channel. By naming storms, the channel says, it is trying to raise awareness about dangerous weather and make communication easier. The National Weather Service, rival private weather forecaster Accuweather, and The New York Times, criticizing the scheme as a marketing stunt, have declined to use the names. Yet there may be more at stake in naming storms than simply branding, according to social scientists. Naming is not just about awareness-raising or marketing—it’s also about asserting control over the unknown.
Corey Fields
According to psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues writing in Psychological Review in 2007, people are more likely to ascribe human characteristics to nonhuman agents when they don’t understand them well, or when they highly value maintaining control and avoiding uncertainty.
By naming things, and people, we try to shape them. When parents name their babies, they often attempt to influence their children’s futures, rather than merely identify them, according to a 2011 Cultural Sociology article by sociologists Mark Elchardus and Jessy Siongers. But they are wrong: one’s class background plays a more important role in shaping their lives. Similarly, while naming a storm might be a way of asserting power over it, we can’t actually control the storm through this naming. We can indicate that we understand the storm—but this is largely a symbolic gesture. Professional meteorologists might genuinely possess this understanding, but the rest of us can only dream of being like Hercules.