By the Numbers

September 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does Montclair Socioblog have a reader at CBS TV?

Two weeks ago, I blogged about all those numbers on the covers of women’s magazines.
Today, CBS Sunday Morning led off with a piece about the same thing.

It turns out I wasn’t quite right. The numbers are everywhere, not just on women’s magazines. Twelve steps, seven habits, a thousand places to see before you die. And that’s not counting all those ten-best list. Men’s magazines too find numbers irresistible. The CBS piece showed the guys at Men’s Health kicking around ideas. “'Ten or 15 signs she's cheating' is always a great one.” And the editor tells CBS, “When we put lists or numbers on the cover, our newsstand sales go up.”

Sure enough, at the Men’s Health website today you can find
  • 5 ways to get her into your bed
  • 10 foods you should eat every day
  • 10 muscles she wants to see
The lists and numbers appeal to two strong themes in American culture: self-improvement and rationalization. Self-improvement is a theme in American magazines date back at least to the late nineteenth century. It’s an idea that expands rapidly in a culture of optimism and an ideology of individualism and social mobility.

As for rationalization, it seems there is nothing so personal and ineffable that we can’t try to reduce it to a prescribed number of steps, Power Point list of bullet points. Like workers on a Taylorized assembly line, we can all follow the same routinized procedure to find success, raise happy children, be physically fit, have mindblowing orgasms, overcome our fears, or find the perfect hair style for this fall.

Kids and Danger - II

September 19, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Matilda’s mother apologizes for calling so late, but she wonders whether Caroline might be free for a playdate?

Like, tomorrow? “Matilda’s had a cancellation,” she says.

Liz searches the kitchen drawer for Caroline’s Week-at-a-Glance.
It’s ten already and she’s had her wine; down the hall the baby nurse, Lorna, is asleep with the twins and Caroline; Ted’s out of town. What the hell is Matilda’s mother’s name, anyway? Faith, Frankie, Fern—

“We could do an hour,” Liz says. “We have piano at four-thirty.”

That’s the opening of “Playdate,” a story by Kate Walbert published in The New Yorker several months ago. It fits with my previous post about parents and children, control and protection.

Is this the way we live now, I wondered as I read these paragraphs – six-year-olds with planner appointment books, mothers scheduling playdates because a child had “a cancellation”? A nurse for the kids even when mom is at home? (The twins, we learn later in the story, were conceived in vitro with another woman’s eggs.)

Sometimes fiction captures the culture and social structure well before the sociologists move in. For freshman English long ago, I had to read J.D. Salinger’s much anthologized story, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” At the time, I didn’t appreciate its sociological imagination, its showing the connections between private troubles and social structures. Nor did I appreciate how ahead of its time it was in applying this sociological imagination to women. (If you have a copy of the story, take it off the shelf and read it now. It won’t take long.)

The postwar years in the US seemed prosperous and problem-free. The principle criticism of the period at the time was that it was dull, dominated by conformity. But Salinger’s story gave us the underside of middle-class prosperity – the frustrations of the bright, educated woman trapped as a housewife in suburbia. That suburban context makes us understand and sympathize with her cynicism, her drinking, her anger at her husband, and even her anger at her child.

Salinger’s story was published in 1948. Sociologists and psychologists began exploring this territory in the fifties and didn’t begin thinking seriously about women until at least a decade later.

“Playdate” is obviously based on “Uncle Wiggly.” (I suppose there are fine lines between being inspired by, writing in homage to, and just plain ripping off another author.) The New Yorker blurb puts it this way: “Short story about two Manhattan mothers getting drunk and confiding in each other while their daughters are on a playdate.” Which would work for “Uncle Wiggly,” except that there’s only one daughter, and the setting is a Connecticut suburb rather than Manhattan. The rhythm of the events in the stories is the same, some of the images are identical (a woman lying on the floor balancing her drink on her chest), even the flow of the final sentence.

In both stories, the women sense that something is missing from their lives, something they can’t quite identify. In the 2007 story, that sense is symbolized in the pet cat’s “hot spot”: “Their cat . . . recently contracted a hot spot. A hot spot, she tells Liz, is an itch that can’t be scratched.” A problem you literally cannot put your finger on.

But while the mood of Salinger’s postwar story is isolation and anger, the tone of “Playdate” is not as bleak, and its central feelings are anxiety and uncertainty. The mothers have attended a talk at school: “Raising a Calm Child in the Age of Anxiety; or, How to Let Go and Lighten Up!” Walbert is spoofing pop psych here, but the “anxiety journal” the professor tells the parents to keep becomes a significant item in the story.

“We are living in the Age of Anxiety,”says the professor. But several eras in the last century have been the age of anxiety – the phrase itself originates (I think) in a 1948 poem by Auden, and an Internet history guide applies the phrase to the 1920s. What’s different from one era to another are the causes of the anxiety. This is the post-9/11 era. “Helicopters,” the mother lists in her anxiety journal along with Thieves, Crowds, and Playdates. Twice in the story we hear the subway warning announcement: “Protect yourself. If you see a suspicious package or activity . . . .”

There may also be differences in how we react. Salinger’s suburban postwar mother chose sarcasm and alcohol. The Manhattan mothers in 2007 deal with anxiety by trying to schedule uncertainty out of their children’s lives. They hover like helicopters.

Too Safe for Children?

September 16, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The city went about its business, and in many ways the place was heady and wide open in ways that just aren’t possible now.”

The New York Times devotes its entire City section to the idea of being seventeen in the city. This sentence is from a nostaligic piece on being seventeen in 1980. The author, Christopher Sorrentino, has the uneasy sense that kids today are more sheltered. “Apron strings were untied a lot younger then,” he says. “Parents didn’t hover so much,” says the Times blurb.

Sorrentino adds, “I should confess that I can’t imagine making a similar arrangement with my own kids . . . Are you kidding? The kid’s going to be 12, and my heart’s in my mouth if I send her out for a quart of milk.”

This dilemma isn’t confined to New York, this nagging thought that in giving kids more safety we've also deprived them of something important. Alongside all the news stories about the dangers of toys and priests and candy and everything else, there has been a small but noticeable backlash. Sorrentino’s article is part of this ambivalence – the sense that protection is becoming overprotection. The Dangerous Book for Boys has been a best seller, largely because its title and publicity promise a more rugged, less cautious ideal of childhood. Elsewhere, Jeff Zaslow in a Wall Street Journal article – linked to by a couple of sociology bloggers (Ezster, Anomie) – complains that the concern about child sexual abuse has poisoned the atmosphere. Children are taught to fear men, and men are afraid to go near children other than their own. Last Halloween, I contrasted today’s trick-or-treating with that of my youth, when kids would range far from home unaccompanied by parents.

Apparently, it’s not just in the US that childhood has become more circumscribed.. The London Daily Mail posted a map showing the roaming area of children over four generations in the same family in roughly the same part of Sheffield. Back in 1919, Great-grandfather at age eight had a range of six miles. Today, the eight-year-old in the family is allowed to walk 1/6 mile – to the end of the street.

Ready, Aim . . .

September 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I should really have passed this one off to Dan Myers, who is developing urinal blogging into something of an art form or at least he was until he ascended into the lofty area of peace studies. Or maybe I should have passed it to Chris Uggen, who has blogged about the American tendency to deal with problems by criminalizing them. But I’ll do the reporting myself, even though the story is old news. I discovered it only recently on, of all places, a food blog.

Ten years ago, the powers that be at JFK airport signed a Dutch company, Schiphol, to run the International Arrivals Building, probably because the Amsterdam airport, run by Schiphol, is one of the world’s finest. JFK was one of the worst.

In Amsterdam, they had a clever solution to a men’s room problem. No, not the Larry Craig kind of problem; the Dutch are very open-minded about sex. The Dutch are also very clean. And the problem was that jet lagged travelers, men at least, tended to be, how shall we put it, careless? aimless?

I imagined what the American solution might be. Signs posted on the walls: “No Spillage or Spraying. Penalty $500 fine.” But where Americans tend to frame problems in moral terms, the Dutch have a more practical approach, focused on solving a problem rather than on punishing evil. At the Amsterdam airport that meant improving aim by providing a target.

If you go to the men’s room in the Amsterdam airport, you’ll see a fly in the urinal.


If you’d look closely, which you probably wouldn’t, you’d see that it wasn’t a real fly but a trompe l’oeil black outline. The idea was that men would aim for the fly - the stream would go from one fly to another (I’m sure this pun doesn’t work in Dutch) – and the men’s room would stay cleaner.

It worked. A study by Schilpol’s social science team found that fly urinals had an 80% reduction in spillage.