Debbie Does Durkheim

October 27, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Remember “profiling” in the 1990s – “Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and then the TV series “Profiler” (1996 - 2000). It seemed like half the students in my crim courses were there because they wanted be profilers,* untangling the twisted psyches of serial killers, figuring out where they would strike next, and nabbing them just before they killed again. What a disappointment my course must have been.   

They’re baaack. Not my students. Profilers on TV. The show is “Mindhunter.” It’s on Netflix, it’s set in the late 1970s, and it has some big names attached – David Fincher and Charlize Theron are producers, and Fincher directed some of the episodes. And another big name: Emile Durkheim.

In the first episode, the central character Holden Ford, in a loud and crowded bar (there’s a rock band playing), finds himself standing next to Debbie Mitford, an attractive young woman. They step outside to continue their conversation. That’s when she utters the kind of pick-up line that’s become such a tired cliche these days.

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Debbie is a graduate student in sociology. He’s a hostage negotiator for the FBI, but his boss has just assigned him to the classroom – to teach agents hostage negotiation. He confesses his ignorance about Durkheim, but the flirtation continues.

This struck me as not quite right. Alas, I was not called in as a script doctor on this show. I know something about theories of deviance. On the other hand, I know little about bar conversations. Anyway, once Debbie has lured him this far, she adds, with a twinkle in her eye,

I haven’t seen the rest of the series, but it looks like the Debbie-Holden thing will have a life beyond this one meeting in a bar. The relationship will probably hinge on some underlying and never-resolved sexual tension  – a flat, humorless version of  Cybil Shepard and Bruce Willis in the first seasons of “Moonlighting.” Just a guess.

The sociology lesson ends with this:

And my point is that the ideas she attributes to Durkheim might be ideas you could derive from Durkheim. But they are not what he actually said. The key passage is the one in The Rules of Sociological Method (here), where Durkheim says that even in a society of saints there will be crime. It won’t be the crime of the unsaintly world. But the norms for acceptable behavior will be raised so high, that actions that are unremarkable in our world will be treated as criminal.

Over a half-century later, this passage became the cornerstone of labeling theory – the recognition that deviance is a not a thing but a process. It is the interaction between those who make and enforce the rules or norms and those who break them. But Durkheim himself never used the word labeling, nor did he take the more conflict-based view that criminality is a response to “something wrong” in the society.

Sociological script consultants – never around when you need one.

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* My inner dyslexic always wants to read “profilers” as “prolifers” – not exactly the same thing, though perhaps not entirely different. 

HT: Max for alerting me to this scene.

Halloween – When It’s Not About Sexiness

Oct 26, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Halloween’s just a few days away, and I still haven’t come up with a costume. I could do the same thing as the last few years and again opt for Slutty Max Weber. But it’s getting old.

OK, that was a joke. But for women, especially young women, deciding on a costume is no joke. A USA Today article on the topic quotes sociologist Lisa Wade*: “All of our choices are bad.”

The choices are bad because it’s about sex. Or rather, sexiness. As Alia Dastigir, author of the USA Today piece, puts it,“Dress sexy on Halloween and risk being judged or harassed, or forgo the fishnets and risk being ridiculed or ignored.” Note the passive voice. Judged, harassed, ridiculed, or ignored but by who? By men of course.

Because men have the power in these situations (and in most), women orient themselves to men’s ideas, hence the two unsatisfactory alternatives. The hegemony of men’s way of looking at things is especially acute in settings built on the expectation of male-female pairing. That setting, typically, is a party – a Halloween party.  And the expectations or hopes can range from “meeting someone” to all the different levels of  “hooking up”  or even to something like romance.

In places were the underlying idea of Halloween is not about male-female relations, women turn out in a variety of costumes, and the dimension they are judged on – by others and by themselves – is not sexiness. When my son was in college, his group went as Clue. Nobody, even Miss Scarlet, was trying for sexy. (My son, for his part, went to Goodwill and managed to find an actual green suit.)

In the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, participants seem to be striving for not for sexiness but for creativity and humor, often as a group effort.  The Thriller group is a great example, though its numbers make it a bit of an outlier – 200 or so ghouls and zombies with a handful of Michael Jacksons.



The Village Parade is an exception. Many paraders, perhaps most, make their own costumes. In the rest of America, we buy our costumes, and the costume companies cannot very well sell creativity. So most of what they sell for women is sexiness.

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* Lisa was the founding editor (along with Gwen Sharp) of Sociological Images, which for a while was by far the most visited sociology blog on the Internet. Maybe it still is.

Risk and Blame Again – Ms Bialik, Meet Mr. Trump

October 25, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

As Mayim Bialik discovered from the reaction to her op-ed, it’s hard for most of us to untangle the strands of risk and blame. Bialik explained why her appearance and demeanor put her at less risk of sexual harassment in Hollywood. People accused her of blaming the victims of sexual harassment and assault. (See my previous post here.)

A few days later, Bialik had unexpected company in the same boat – Donald Trump. The widow of a soldier killed in Niger reported that Trump, in phoning her to offer condolences, said, “He knew what he signed up for.”

Trump’s critics inferred that he was in effect blaming the victim for taking the risk. Not just any victim and any risk, but a victim whose risk was to defend our country (assuming that’s what our soldiers are doing in Niger). Nobody said that Trump was factually incorrect, but even though what he said was a change from his usual tenuous relation to the truth, it was still unwelcome. His remark about risk wasn’t inaccurate; it was “insensitive.” It demonstrated his insensitivity, especially to people of color (so what else is new?)

Unlike Bialik, who basically recanted, Trump, as usual, attacked. He said that the widow and her Congressional representative Frederica Wilson, who had also heard the phone call were lying about what he had said. They weren’t. He made another false accusation against Ms Wilson. Then he tried another of his favorite strategies, attacking Obama. Obama and other previous presidents, said Trump, had never called the families of fallen soldiers. They had.

Trump could have avoided this mess if he had issued a statement to the effect that pointing out risk is not the same as blaming. “I meant to thank her and her husband for the great risks he took – the risk that all our soldiers take – in defending us.” Instead, he went on the attack, coming out with at least three falsehoods, mostly false accusations against African American women. So it probably won’t cost him any points in the approval polls. 

Risk and Blame

October 18, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tweeters were throwing shade at Mayim Bialik this week for her op-ed in the New York Times. In that article, Bialik said that in her Hollywood career she had never encountered the kinds of sexual predation and harassment that Harvey Weinstein’s victims are reporting. The reason, she said, was that she was not as physically attractive.

I have also experienced the upside of not being a “perfect ten.” As a proud feminist with little desire to diet, get plastic surgery or hire a personal trainer, I have almost no personal experience with men asking me to meetings in their hotel rooms. Those of us in Hollywood who don’t represent an impossible standard of beauty have the “luxury” of being overlooked and, in many cases, ignored by men in power unless we can make them money.

The charge leveled against Bialik for this was victim-blaming. 

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Bialik also had many supporters who said that her accusers had misread the Times column. But she quickly came around and issued a statement (on Twitter I think) that sounded as though she had cribbed it directly from Eve Ewing (Wikipedia Brown)..

God forbid I would blame a woman for her assault based on her clothing or behavior. . . .How you dress and how you behave has nothing to do with being assaulted. Assault and rape are acts of power, they’re not acts of sexual desire. There is no way to avoid being the victim of assault by what you wear or the way you behave.

The amazing thing about the dispute is how civil it was. Yes some comments were foolish or fallacious. But there was little of the snark ranging from snide to vicious that plagues so many Internet conflicts. (I wrote a blogpost a while ago called  “The Tragedy of the Comments.” The title said it all.) And nobody, as far as I know, mentioned Hitler. Nor has Bialik (again AFAIK) gotten any death threats. Maybe that’s because the participants were mostly women. But maybe it’s also because most of the participants on both sides share the same politics and the same general outlook.

The apparent conflict arises because they cannot separate the empirical from the moral. What can a woman do to change her risk of victimization? That is an empirical question. Who is to blame for sexual harassment and assault? That is a moral question.

Bialik’s critics seem to think that you shouldn’t even ask the empirical risk question, for to do so leads to the wrong answer on the moral blame question. They also think that they already know the answer to the empirical question. As the chastened Bialik says, echoing the views of her critics, “How you dress and how you behave has nothing to do with being assaulted. . .  There is no way to avoid being the victim of assault by what you wear or the way you behave.” This is just a few days after she said that she avoided sexual harassment and worse by the Harvey Weinsteins of Hollywood precisely by how she looked and behaved. 

She was right the first time. It seems obvious that when male predators have a choice – and men in positions of power, men like Weinstein, Trump, Ailes, et al., do have a choice – they choose victims who are physically attractive. In the wider world outside the corridors and hotel rooms of power, not all women are equally likely to be victimized. Data from the national victimization survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that age, marital status, and income make a difference.

Bialik’s statement can be true only if when she says “there is no way to avoid being the victim,” she means one hundred percent certainty. Yes, some women will be victimized regardless of appearance and behavior. As the BJS survey shows, even among women 65 and older, 2 in every 10,000 reported being victims of rape or sexual assault.* But younger women face a far higher risk of victimization. Does that mean we blame rape victims for being young? Or poor? (Unfortunately, some people do blame them for being unmarried.**)

Or perhaps Bialik means that once a predator has decided to victimize a woman, his power (physical, economic, social) may make it nearly impossible for her to avoid the assault.

In an ideal world, a woman’s appearance and behavior would make no difference in her risk of being a victim of sexual assault. In an ideal world there would be no sexual assault. The way that both Bialik and her critics would like to move towards that ideal is by men changing their behavior. How that is to be accomplished is a huge empirical question. The good news is that the BJS survey also shows that rates of rape and sexual assault have decreased greatly over the past quarter century.

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* This estimate is based on a very small number of cases, ten at the most. But while the estimate may be unreliable, the point is that at least some older women were victims.

** See this post from 2014 on the idea that part of the marriage contract is the protection of the woman from sexual predation. The post ends with a quote from Philip Slater: “Before long, of course, every protection contract becomes a protection racket: ‘Give me what I want and I will protect you against me.’”