The Donald and The Women

August 10, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s so much to say about Donald Trump and about the reaction to Donald Trump. So it seems trivial to focus on one little word – “the.” But I found Clyde Haberman’s tweet fascinating.

The word Trump used was not “great” but “phenomenal.” [Added, 8/12: And the preposition he used was to, not for.] Either way, the point is that “I’d be phenomenal for to the women” is different from “I’d be phenomenal for to women.” But why? Why is that definite article so important? In many languages this distinction would never arise.

In English, “for the women” has always been the less common, at least according to Google n-grams.

In 1850 the “for women” appeared about twice as frequently as “for the women.” By 1965 that ratio had increased to about 8:1. Then came the resurgence of feminism. In 2000, that ratio had risen to more than 20:1.  True, the women’s movement did pay attention to language, but it focused on nouns – firefighter instead of fireman, for example – and honorifics (it’s Ms., not Mrs. or Miss).  I doubt that anyone was writing articles about articles.

What Haberman is suggesting, I think, is that when you add “the” to a demographic group and speak of “the women” or “the Blacks,” you are separating them from the rest of society.  Without the definite article, they are included. To say, “In our society we have Blacks, Jews, women. . . . .” implies that they are all part of our group. But, “We have the Blacks, the Jews, the women . . . .” turns them into separate, distinct groups that are not part of a unified whole.*

I don’t know why. But that’s the way it sounds to my ears.

UPDATE, August 12:  At Language Log Mark Liberman, who is a real linguist, agrees with me about the use of “the” here, but points out that I ignored the larger context of Trump's comments, which he provides in both audio and transcript. True. I was not interested in how Trump actually feels about women. I was not interested in whether or not he would in fact be phenomenal for them.  I was interested only in the linguistic question of how “phenomenal for women” differs from “phenomenal for the women.” 

The comments on Liberman’s post are worth reading.

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* Among Jews of earlier generations, the cardinal question that might be asked of any issue was “Ist gut fuer yiddin?”  Translated as “Is it good for the Jews?” it suggests a lesser degree of integration and assimilation. There are “the Jews,” and there are the others (“the goyim”).  But “Is it good for Jews?” reduces the barrier. They are people who happen to be Jewish, not a special and separate group.

Blood, Danger, and Power

August 9, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a post “Trainwreck and Taboo” about Amy Schumer’s humor (here), I mentioned that some conservative men have a taboo-like reaction of disgust at her jokes about menstruation. Of course, the anthropology literature documents that such a reaction is widespread, especially in pre-industrial, agrarian and pastoral societies.

The Gopcanda observe powerful menstrual taboos.  Women’s menstrual blood is thought to have much dangerous power. A women in her menstrual period, according to Gopcanda thinking, can become deranged and especially likely to direct her fury at males. Therefore women may not speak publicly of the menstrual blood. And men may not speak of it at all. If a man overhears a woman mention it, he runs in embarrassment to his fellows, and together they initiate the ritual of shaming the woman.  As for the men, they may freely denigrate women – and they often do – and they strictly enforce the constraints on women. But if a Gopcanda man even utters the taboo word referring to menstrual blood, he may be seen as unfit for responsible roles in the tribe.         — Alvin St. Joigny, “Taboo and Power Among the Gopcanda” JPMS, 2002.

Compare that with today’s newspaper

Donald J. Trump’s suggestion that a Fox News journalist had questioned him forcefully at the Republican presidential debate because she was menstruating cost him a speaking slot Saturday night at an influential gathering of conservatives in Atlanta. It also raised new questions about how much longer Republican Party leaders would have to contend with Mr. Trump’s disruptive presence in the primary field.         — Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman. “Hand-Wringing in G.O.P. After Donald Trump’s Remarks on Megyn Kelly,” New York Times,  Aug. 8, 2015

Covers and Cover-ups

August 8, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

The title of Martin Haskell Smith’s new book pretty much tells you what it’s going to be about: Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist’s Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World. The blurb on the author’s website adds:

Naked at Lunch is equal parts cultural history and gonzo participatory journalism. Coated in multiple layers of high SPF sunblock, Haskell Smith dives into the nudist world today. He publicly disrobes for the first time in Palm Springs, observes the culture of family nudism in a clothing-free Spanish town, and travels to the largest nudist resort in the world, a hedonist’s paradise in the south of France. He reports on San Francisco’s controversial ban on public nudity, participates in a week of naked hiking in the Austrian Alps, and caps off his adventures with a week on the Big Nude Boat, a Caribbean cruise full of nudists.

Note that the author is “Haskell Smith,” not “Smith” as he would be in the US (for example, see this LA Times story).  In American sociological writing, C. Wright Mills is “Mills.” In the UK, he’s “Wright Mills.”

But there’s another interesting cultural difference – the book jacket.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

The US edition lets us peer through the letters to see the author – yes, that’s really Smith, or Haskell Smith (his head is in the “A”) – sitting on a beach chair, perhaps poolside on that Caribbean cruise, wearing only his glasses, his laptop atop his lap covering what Brits might call his willie, which in any case would be covered by the white space between the “L” and “U.” 

The UK and Australia editions are even more circumspect.

Michael Bywater in The Literary Review  compares the UK and US covers.

So that's the naked author, with his whacker and his Mac, and this is his book about nudists and what they’re like and what the hell they think they’re doing. So, not unreasonably, the book is categorised as social science. In the USA. But not here. Here in Britain, there’s no nude author. The cover is whimsical, cartoony: there are little pink blobby people, sunbeds, a swimming pool and a very tanned woman with a poodle and a tent. And here in Britain, the category is travel writing.

And what of Australia? No hint of nudity. Without the title, the cover would be completely misleading. Perhaps the Aussie graphics designers thought that since the title conveyed so much information, they were free to go for an adolescent, Freudian joke.

(Other SocioBlog posts on covers and culture are here and here, and for the messages that covers convey, go here for a post on a child guessing the content of literary classics just from their covers.)

Are Things Bad Just Because People Think They’re Bad?

August 5, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the Republican debate tomorrow, race relations may be one of the topics. If so, someone will surely point to the recent polls that have been announced in headlines like these

Poll Finds Most in U.S. Hold Dim View of Race Relations Here’s another sign that race relations in America have gotten really bad POLL: RACE RELATIONS BETWEEN WHITES AND BLACKS WORST SINCE 1990S

The first headline is from The New York Times, the second from the blog Townhall. Both are based on a CBS poll from late July. The third is from another right-wing blog, Breitbart, though it refers to a CBS poll from two months earlier.

The headlines seem to be saying the same thing. The Times headline is about what people think about race relations. The other two make claims as to the actual state of race relations. This difference raises an important question: Is the perception of race relations the same as the reality of race relations?

The Times headline –  about perceptions – is the most accurate. The survey asked, “Do you think race relations in the United States are generally good or generally bad?” The other two headlines assume that the perception is the reality.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

The timeline shows clearly one important factor influencing the answer to this question – front-page news. 

When people see a lot of footage of White cops beating and sometimes killing unarmed Black people, and when people see footage of Black people protesting and rioting in response, they think that race relations in the country as are generally bad. That’s what happened in 1992 with Rodney King and most recently with the killing by police of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others. When people see the country elect its first Black president, perceptions about race relations improve. (However, the Gallup poll showed almost no change in early 2009.)   

The historical pattern is the same for Whites and Blacks, though Blacks are usually about ten percentage points more pessimistic.

(Because of the small number of Blacks in the sample, the margin of error is larger, and the changes from poll to poll may appear greater than they actually were.)

Big news events affect how people perceive race relations in the country as a whole. But does that response reflect the actual goodness or badness of race relations for most people? Someone might argue that in this case, perception is reality. If I think that race relations are bad – i.e., that Blacks don’t like me because I’m White – and if Blacks think the same way, then the mutual distrust or fear does constitute bad race relations.  

Two other questions in the same survey suggest that what people think about race relations generally in the US is not at all the same as the way they experience race relations in their own lives.  One question asks whether race relations in the person’s own community are good or bad. 

Two things are clear. First, people feel much better about their own communities than about the US. Typically, five times as many people choose “Good” rather than “Bad.” Even among Blacks, on average twice as many choose Good over Bad. (The ratio is more than double, closer to 2.5 - 1).

Second, those big news stories don’t seem to have a big impact on perceptions about things close to home. In March 2014 – before Ferguson, before Eric Garner, before Baltimore – 26% of Blacks said that race relations in their community were “Bad.” When the same question was asked after those events (December 2014, March and July 2015), that percent had risen by only 2 or 3 points, well within the margin of error.

Finally, there’s the question of progress on the race front. Here is the way the survey asks it:

“Some people say that since the 1960s there has been a lot of real progress in getting rid of racial discrimination against blacks. Others say that there hasn't been much real progress for blacks over that time. Which do you agree with more? Would you say there's been a lot of real progress getting rid of racial discrimination or hasn't there been much real progress?”

For both races, optimists outnumber pessimists, except in May 1992, two months after the Rodney King beating, when 68% of Blacks saw no real progress. But other national events, including Obama’s victory in 2008, caused no sudden changes in the overall assessment of progress. Instead, perceptions of progress show a steady but real increase in the 1990s, with only small changes in this century.

I can understand how someone looking at the CBS poll can conclude that race relations are worse (especially someone who wants to think that in Obama’s presidency everything has gotten worse).  With jobs or GDP or taxes or the number of people without health insurance, we can measure the increase or decrease. We have no similarly clear measures of the quality of race relations. So we are left with perceptions. And after all, perceptions of race relations and race relations themselves are both mostly about people’s reactions – their ideas and feelings.So why not equate the perception with the reality?

The trouble is that a person’s perceptions about what seems to be the same subject, race relations, can be very different depending on the frame of reference – the US as a whole or the person’s own circumstances, recent events or a longer sweep of history.