Rich Girls II

June 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

More on that Gallup poll in the previous post about Paris, Lindsay, Nicole, and Britney. Around the time I was looking at these poll results, a friend wrote about her daughter’s thirteenth birthday party. “After a year of getting to know these [13-year-old] girls, I've really started to care about them and like them. I think they are good at heart. Some of them come from extremely wealthy families and are spoiled rotten, so it took me a while to find the love for some of them.”

I was reminded of the movie “Thirteen,” in which a girl of modest means is corrupted by a wealthier classmate. Poor girl looks up to “cool,” rich girl; rich girl seduces poor girl into drugs, shoplifting, sex with boys. It’s a cliche, but at least it’s a low-budget, indie version of the cliche.

Like other cliches, it confirms a widely held view, in this case that having a lot of money is dangerous, especially because it can lead girls away from conventional middle-class ways.

(Are there similar tales about boys? I can’t think of any. Rich boys in American stories can be cruel — they can also be helpful — but they seldom corrupt the ordinary boy’s morals as is so common in the fallen-woman stories.)

Ms. Hilton and the others are considerably older than thirteen, but the money-vs.-morals theory retains its attractiveness even when we think about these twentysomethings. Gallup offered four choices for people to explain what caused the problems of these celebs.

“Having too much money at a young age”
“The pressures of fame at a young age”
“Negative influences of the Hollywood culture”
“Parents doing a poor job raising them”

Here are the results:
Too Much Money is the clear winner.

I don’t know the systematic evidence on child-rearing and what might cause girls to have problems. But Gallup respondents didn’t know either. Besides, even if we know that something is true in a general sense, it is impossible to know if it applied in any individual case. So what we’re looking at here is not solid reality; it’s people’s beliefs about reality, specifically about the effects of money.

Those beliefs seem to be rooted in a relentless belief that only middle-class morality will work. It’s a Goldilocks view of socio-economic status. We believe that poverty is not good for kids, but we also see dangers in great wealth. The middle-income range is just right.

I wonder if people in other societies take a similar view, especially in societies with less of an egalitarian ethos and with some trace of aristocratic tradition. The British may not be pleased with the behavior of the younger generations of the royal family, but I don’t think they attribute the shortcomings to an overabundance of money. It’s also possible that within an upper class, drunkenness and adventurous sexuality are not seen as inherently bad. Fidelity and sobriety are middle-class virtues, not nearly so exalted at the outer reaches of the social distribution.

There also seems to be some ambivalence here about middle-class aspirations. We would all like to have more money, though not too much more. (Ask people what the “right” income would be, the income that would allow them to live comfortably, and you’ll usually get a number that’s about 25% higher than what they’re currently making.) Historically, the American pattern of upward mobility is that parents want their own children to have it better than they did. Parents want to be able to buy stuff for their kids. They don’t want their kids to be at all deprived. Yet, there seems to be a nagging fear that giving kids these advantages might also spoil them.

We project that fear upward. I’m not going to give my kid enough to spoil him, not on my income and not even if I were making 25% more than I do now. But the Hiltons, and even those people who make twice what I make — they’re the ones who risk spoiling their kids.

The irony, of course, is that this analysis is relative to one’s own income, and at all levels throughout the broad spectrum that think of themselves as middle class, people may be applying the same moral-economic formula. Someone who makes half as much as you do may see you as one of those rich people who spoil their kids.

Girls (But Not Boys) Behaving Badly

June 16, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

George Bush’s favorability ratings keep sinking. In the latest polls (Quinnipiac, NBC/WSJ), only 28-29% of the people come down on the plus side. But wait. Gallup has found other public figures whose numbers are even lower.


Paris Hilton, of course, was the big winner in the girls-gone-bad sweepstakes. Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, even Britney Spears were more highly thought of, with sympathy ratings soaring upwards of 15%.

Note that Gallup asked only about young women. Gallup was only following the media, and the media would claim that they are only following the public’s interest. True, when it comes to stories about troubles people bring on themselves, the public seems to take much more delight in stories about women than about men. When Paris Hilton was jailed, and especially when she broke into tears on being re-jailed, the tabloid media reported with a self-righteous glee in her suffering.

Surely there must be male celebrities who have sinned— Russell Crowe throwing a telephone into the face of a hotel desk clerk, Mel Gibson spewing drunken anti-Semitic remarks at the cop who pulled him over, Robert Downey, Jr.’s recurrent drug problems, etc. Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton in “The Simple Life” set their own glam sensibilities against that of the heartland, but the show was self-mocking and generally not critical of middle America. Borat, by contrast, took some pretty serious swipes at middle America and used some underhanded (though legal) tricks in doing so.

But these men have not been surrounded with the sustained fascination we have given Paris, Lindsay, and the others, nor do the public and media seem to have the same sadistic longing to see them suffer legal or other consequences.

The media framed the Paris Hilton story as the rich girl trying to avoid justice and finally getting what she deserved. The media didn’t report much on what the usual sentence would be for a first-offense driver’s license violation. Probably not jail time. But for the media and public, this case wasn’t really about driving with a suspended license, just as the Clinton impeachment wasn’t really about lying to a grand jury. It was about sex. Paris Hilton’s real crime in the court of tabloid opinion was flaunting her sexuality. And the same may be true of the others.

It doesn’t matter that in many cases, it’s the tabloid media and public that are mostly responsible for making public what had been private — the voyeuristic photos, the theft and distribution of a private video. The media and public strip the clothes off these female celebs and then punish them for indecent exposure.

These stories aren’t news. They’re morality tales, and they show that moral standards are still different for women and men.

Attitudes and Familiarity

June 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston


In the previous post, I said that professors who have the most negative attitudes towards Evangelicals probably are those who have the least contact with them. I don't have any data on that specific issue, but studies on other topics generally confirm the idea that familiarity breeds content. Or if not content, at least a decrease in antipathy.

The graph shows some data from a survey that asked, among other things, if immigrants were a burden on the US.
The people who had little contact with immigrants were more than twice as likely to say that immigrants were a burden.

I live in New York. Buy food in a grocery store, take a cab, buy a newspaper, eat in a restaurant, check into a hotel or hospital — just about anything you do will bring you into contact with immigrants. I doubt that many New Yorkers see immigrants as a threat to the Republic.

The same principle holds for attitudes on issues that surround homosexuality—  should they be allowed to teach in schools, should they be able to marry.

The same is true of homosexuality.

People with no gay friends or relatives are more than twice as likely to favor allowing schools to fire gay teachers. People who do have gay friends or relatives are more than twice as likely to favor allowing gays to marry.

Evangelicals in the Classroom

June 11, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Q: What religious group do college faculty feel least favorable about?

A: Evangelicals.

That’s one result from a recent study, and in yesterday’s post, I offered my guess that faculty were really reacting to what they perceived as the politics of Evangelicals, not their religion. In that sense, the attitude is different from other kinds of prejudice, especially prejudice based on ascribed characteristics like race.

But I would also guess that the attitude shares something with other kinds of prejudice: those who have the most unfavorable attitudes towards Evangelicals are probably those who have the least contact with them. It’s true of homosexuality, and it’s true in the current debate over immigration.

So I wonder about those professors who say they view Evangelicals unfavorably. I think about the late Donna Darden, who taught sociology in Tennessee, where Evangelicals and fundamentalists were the rule rather than the exception. She had wonderful stories about her struggles to get students to think sociologically. I’m not sure whether Donna was an atheist or Wiccan, but whichever it was, when students learned of her views, some would stand up and “witness” right in class. Here’s an excerpt from something she posted to a sociology Internet group.

Their next assignment calls for them to post a completion to the stem, “If I had been born a member of a different race...” They have read good stuff about the social construction of gender and race. Many will still tell me that they cannot answer that question because God made them the persons they are, and they cannot second-guess God.

But for all her disagreement and frustration with her students, she certainly would never have answered the survey by saying she felt “cold” towards them.

My own contact with Evangelicals and other born-again students has been limited. Northern New Jersey ain’t Tennessee, and up here in Sopranoland, most people are content to be born only once. I started teaching before the Moral Majority became a strong political force, but even so, I may have shared some of the same pre-judgments as the professors in the recent survey. At the very least, I expected that Evangelicals would be closed-minded and dogmatic. But what I found was something else.

First, I never had Donna’s experience of students injecting their theology into sociological discussions. The only way I could even guess that a student was an Evangelical was this: on the first day, I ask students to fill out index cards with their name and phone numbers. But so I’ll have a better chance of remembering them and learning their names, I also ask them to put down the title of the best film they’ve ever seen. Not just the most recent, I say; take a minute to think. OK. Then do the same thing for a book and a record. I also ask for a TV show they watch regularly — one they’d record if they weren’t going to be home when it was on. (This exercise also gives me a small window onto all those areas of pop culture that I’m growing farther and farther away from.)

Every once in a while, there’ll be a student who for best book lists The Bible. So I figure here’s someone who, if not Evangelical, fundamentalist, or born again, at least takes their religion pretty seriously. My sample is small, but my impression is that compared with the average student, they are more conscientious— less likely to miss class and more likely to do the reading and to turn in assignments on time.

But it’s not just that they are well-behaved. They regard the sociological ideas from class as something important, not just a bunch of stuff that you leave behind each day once you walk out of the classroom, except maybe to remember for a test. Where many students are content to “learn” the material in a sort of Durkheim-said-this-Weber-said-that way, these students will follow the line of thought further and look for its corollaries, implications, and applications.

They engage the material more than most students because they walk into the course already having a more or less coherent world view. Most students at age twenty or so have an inchoate set of ideas for understanding the world. They take it as it comes and haven’t thought systematically about the way they are interpreting it. They don’t even see themselves as making interpretations. They have trouble seeing the differences between theories, between Weber and Marx for instance.

But the born-again students have a systematic scheme for encountering the world. They have a “theory,” a set of related ideas, and they are constantly alert to interpret the events of the real world with respect to that theory. Give them some new data or some new ideas, and they want to know how these fit with their own view.

They may reject sociological ideas. They may even, like some of Donna Darden’s students, shun these ideas as the work of Satan. But in order to make that judgment, they first have to think through those sociological ideas and see how they match up against their religious ideas. They have to take the material seriously.