Desperately Seeking Sought-After

February 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

What does he want in this relationship, and what does she want?

A week ago, Gwen at Sociological Images posted this photo of an ad for a dating service that she found in an in-flight magazine.

Click on the image to see it in readable size.

The ad doesn’t give any prices, nor does their Website, but presumably, this is an expensive service, at least for men (“Women join for free”). But it’s the male/female differences that have nothing to do with cost that are more interesting. For example, the ad thinks its important to tell women that the service’s male clients are

• selective
• eligible
• highly educated
• commitment-minded

“Eligible” and “commitment-minded” don’t appear on the men’s side of the ad. My guess is that these are code words to tell women that the guys are not married and not out just for sex. Apparently that’s a concern for women (but not men), perhaps a concern born out of experience.

The ad for men lists in parentheses the criteria the guys might use – her religion, her age, etc., and the one I find most puzzling as a variable, her level of emotional stability. (“I’m looking for someone who’s 26-32, really pretty, college grad, and mildly neurotic.”)

The ad assures men that the women on the service are

• highly attractive
• intelligent
• sought-after

One of the commenters on Gwen’s post, someone with inside knowledge about the dating service industry, said that in fact the top criteria for nearly all men are simply a woman’s looks and weight, and for nearly all women, a man’s education and income.

Probably so. But what about “sought-after”? It’s one of only three things listed as making a woman desirable. But why? “Sought-after” implies that in deciding who they find attractive, men submit their feelings to a majority vote. For them, love is based not on the special chemistry between two particular people but on the consensus of what others think or on universalistic criteria. If lots of other guys want a woman, she must be the right woman for you. You choose a woman the same way you choose a car (“Car & Driver’s Top Rated” “America’s #1 Selling Luxury Model”).

In a similar vein, the Website for men equates finding love with career achievement. At the top of the men’s page is this headline

A BEST IN CLASS ADVISOR
While You Drive Companies Forward, We Help You Succeed In Your Personal Life

It’s all about success. The women’s page has nothing like that. For women, the top headline is

MEET AN INCREDIBLE MAN
Isn't It Time You Met The Real Love Of Your Life?

That love-of-your-life line appears on the men’s page as well, but at the bottom. As in the magazine ad, the Web page also tells women, but not men, that “you have nothing to lose and a wonderful man to gain.” I can see why men have something to lose – they’re the ones putting up money for this service – but why do only women have a wonderful someone to gain?

The Story in Pictures - But Which Story?

February 23, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

A couple of days after the election, back in November (how long ago that now seems), I posted a picture that I’d found on Ezra Klein’s blog at The American Prospect , and I urged readers to go there for the full sequence of photos that tell a wonderful story.


I was wrong about who took the photos. But more puzzling, I’m now not sure whether the story told by the photos is accurate.

I had thought that Klein himself had taken the photos. He hadn’t. He had gotten them from the blog of April Winchell who has a funny blog but earns a living mostly with her voice – radio, voice-overs (what else would you expect from the daughter of Paul Winchell*?). But Winchell didn’t take the photos either (she’s in LA, the rally was in Virginia), and apparently she didn’t know who did. But after the pictures had been sped around the Internet, appearing in places much more frequented than the Socioblog, she got an e-mail from the photographer, a 17-year-old girl named Nida Vidutis.

She wrote about what led up to the photos, and her account differs from Ezra Klein’s. Here’s what Ezra says:

here were two small children, both on their father's backs. At the beginning, they were about 10 feet from each other, staring anxiously at the stage. One was black, the other white. The little white kid had an Obama sign, the little black kid didn't. They took stock of each other. Soon, the little white kid leaned all the way over to try and give his sign to his new friend. The fathers, noticing, moved closer to each other. And the kids held the sign together. I had forgotten my camera, and was begging others to take pictures.

Here’s Nida’s account.

And there was this kid at the rally, I think he was about six years old. He was black, and sitting up on his dad’s shoulders. He had an Obama-Biden sign, and for what I swear was about 3 hours straight, he held the sign straight up, with the most determined look I had ever seen on a six-year-old’s face. And then this other kid appeared, a white kid, on his dad’s shoulders. And all of a sudden they were sharing the sign back and forth. And then, then they held it together. And…it was so simple, SO simple. Yet, at the same time, it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, and the great part was that they had no idea what they were doing. Everyone looked at them, people took pictures, but they were just holding a sign. “Little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls…” It was so simple.

Klein’s story is more consistent with the photos (you can find the full sequence of six photos on Nida's page at Flickr). So who do we believe – the photos or the photographer?

*The voice of Jerry Mahoney or Tigger, depending on how old you are.

Marriage and the Family

February 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Last movie post before the Oscars on Sunday night).

In rituals, a group presents an idealized version of itself. Consequently, movies about weddings often contrast this ideal version with the less-than-ideal reality of the family. Thomas Vinterberg’s Celebration (Denmark) is a particularly grim example. Rachel Getting Married does something similar in upscale Connecticut (it was shot in Fairfield). But Rachel Getting Married hardly seems like an American movie. It’s not just that nobody blows up a helicopter. There’s not much that we would call plot. Nobody’s trying to accomplish something or overcome some internal or external obstacle or solve some problem or find the right lover. There’s nobody to root for.

 Instead, Rachel Getting Married unfolds the relationships within a family – mostly two sisters and a father. Rachel is the good girl, sensible and stable. Kym (Anne Hathaway, nominated for an Oscar) is beautiful, narcissistic, destructive, and self-destructive. Kym gets furloughed from rehab to go to Rachel’s wedding. The family revisit old and current conflicts and emotions, especially those surrounding the death of their baby brother Ethan ten or so years earlier. (Kym, age 16 and high on Percocet, driving Ethan home, lost control of the car, drove into a lake, and Ethan drowned.) Rachel gets married (in a much too long wedding scene), and Kym goes back to rehab. That’s it, more or less – two sisters, a past, a wedding, and not much plot.

I kept worrying that the film would have Kym try to seduce Rachel’s fiancé, but mercifully it stayed away from such Hollywood cliches. In fact, the traditional plot elements, such as they are, weaken the film. For example, the movie flirts with the theme of the 800-pound family secret – the one that everyone spends a lot of energy pretending not to see until it becomes unavoidable. (A previous post on this theme is here.) Have they not talked about the death of Ethan many times before? It flirts also with the pop-psych idea that if the characters can just discover or admit what really happened on that fateful day, all will be resolved. In this case, it turns out that it’s all Mom’s fault. But the film would be better if it weren’t so heavy-handed about this and just let Mom’s character – cold, selfish – unfold without making it the Answer. 

Still, this is a movie well worth seeing.

Police Intelligence - One MO Time

February 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Jenn Lena links to this BBC story about cops in Northern Ireland and the mysterious and ubiquitous driver, Prawo Jazdy, who was ticketed all over the country.


There are a couple of sociological aspects here. The economic expansion in the Republic of Ireland, which created lots of jobs, drew many Poles (with their prawo jazdys). Apparently that spilled over into Northern Ireland as well. Now that the Celtic Tiger isn’t roaring, many of these immigrants are returning to Poland.

The story is also a reflection on the parochialism of the police, so here’s my anecdote. When I was in college, I rode into Cambridge one day with a friend from St. Louis. He had a VW with Missouri plates. When we came back to the car, the parking meter had expired, and there was a ticket on the windshield. He handed it to me and said, “Throw it away.”

“But they’ll write to your state’s DMV and track you down.” (This was pre-Internet, pre 2-letter postal code.)

“Look,” he said, taking the ticket and pointing to the box marked “state” next to the box for the license number. The cop had written “MISS.” Any tracking inquiries would get sent to Mississippi.

“They always do it,” he said, crumpling the ticket and tossing it into the trash can.