A Sociological Eye

    There has been a lot of reporting and social media furor this week about the dubious religious messaging being sent by the Trump administration. Most of that has focused on Trump’s posting of an AI-generated picture of himself as a Jesus-equivalent figure, miraculously healing the sick with glowing light beaming from his hands, while fighter jets and a strangely demonic figure hover above him. Personally, I find the much less-noticed claims being made by Trump’s vice president JD Vance more shocking. Oh, I know, Vance’s statements are just in the form of words, and fairly dry ones at that. People find that much more boring than the zingy offering of a blasphemous AI slop image of a deified Trump. But here’s the thing: only the most ignorant and self-deluding think Trump is a devout Christian. The man has never read the Bible, and can’t quote or even name a single passage off the top of his head. He has a long and very public history of enjoying the seven deadly sins, a...

  This is the “Monkey Gland,” a cocktail invented in the 1920s. It is made of equal parts gin and fresh orange juice, with a bar spoon full of grenadine and another of absinthe.  OK, that sounds interesting if a bit odd (orange and absinthe?). But what’s with that name ?  “Monkey glands” were kind of a 1920s meme. The glands in question were testes. And the reason they were all the rage back then? Because a French doctor of Russian origin named Serge Voronoff was removing the testes from chimpanzees and transplanting slices of them into human men’s scrotums. Okaaaay. Why, exactly? Because Dr. Voronoff claimed that this would extend the men’s lives. It would give them added mental and physical vigor, allowing them to work longer hours with greater concentration! It would reverse signs of aging, improve muscle tone, perhaps even cure the need for glasses! In other words, this was an opening salvo of the techbro era of “biohacking.” Long before wearable fitness trackers and...

  Here’s something ironic: lawyers have gotten this individual’s statements about his DOGE activities cancelling basically all federal grants for work in the humanities taken down from YouTube, based on claims that he is now being cancelled by people on the internet.  We really need to talk about what it means to cancel something or someone, because those actions are not equivalent. . .  So: here is the context. The National Endowment for the Humanities is the US federal agency tasked with funding work in the humanities—including history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, languages, law, classics, ethics, and subjects MAGA particularly disdains like gender and women’s studies, ethnic studies, and sexuality studies.  A year ago, in March 2025, DOGE was let loose on the NEH, and within the space of 22 days, 97% of all NEH grants had been cancelled . Basically all work in the humanities other than preserving the papers of George Washington was defunded.  In May ...

  I teach a course in sociology of sexuality, and the etymologies of sexual phenomena are things I collect by habit. Let me share one with you!  In Mediaeval Latin, a "clapus" or "claperius" was a pile of stones. What might you do with a pile of stones in the Middle Ages? Well, if you put a few such piles in a stream, and then put stone slabs or wooden planks going from one pile to the other, you could construct what was called in English a "clapper bridge," like the one pictured here. Very picturesque! If on the other hand you piled the stones loosely on the ground with plenty of spaces amidst them, you could make a place to house rabbits for food. In French, this was a "clapier." The association of rabbits with sexual frequency and enthusiasm led the term clapier to come to be used as a euphemism for a brothel. The Normans brought these usages to English shores, where they became, just as in the bridges, a "clapper," referring either ...

  What happened to adolescence? In my seminar on sociology of the body this week, something strange emerged in the discussion. First, a student stated to widespread nodding that it used to be true that children became adolescents when they hit puberty at 12 or so, then existed in this awkward in-between phase of life until they turned 18 and were deemed adults--but that this not the case today. Instead, the student said, girls today hit puberty and instantly look like adults. The class agreed that 12-year-old girls today look like they're 25. And they felt the reason is because the girls immerse in TikTok videos about makeup applications that are designed for adult women, and then duplicate them. They can do that because, while Millennials at 12 got childish makeup palettes at a Claire's in the local mall, filled with bright colors designed for kids, Generation Alpha tweens were "Sephora kids," taught to desire skincare products for adults and indulged with purchases ...

This is a chart showing you the number of babies given a certain name over time in the USA—the name my father was in fact given. His name was Dick. Ok, that was the name he always used, but his actual given name was Richard. That Dick is a nickname for Richard seems peculiar to many Americans today, but here’s how that emerged: a classic Medieval nickname for Richard was Rick (as it remains today!). Rick was a shortened version of the name, which at the time was pronounced rather like “Rick-hart.” And in Medieval England, new nicknames were coined via rhyming—hence Rick became Dick.  In the 1930s when my father was born, Richard was the fifth most popular name for children designated male at birth. But plenty of parents skipped the formality of naming their kid Richard before calling him Dick. They just named their children what they intended to call them. And you can see in the graph that Dick (as a given name) peaked in popularity in 1934. You can see similar patterns with other ...

  I want to talk to you about eros and thanatos, and the way they cause us to dance. A century ago, in the 1920s, three forces came together. One was industrialization, allowing an explosion of manufactured goods to enter the marketplace. The second was the surge in popular media, with radio and cinema expanding on print media—something manufacturing companies wanted to exploit with a flood of advertising so they could sell their products. And the third was Freudian psychology, especially the belief in the power of the libido, of desire, of eros, in driving human activity. The result? Something that came to be experienced as inevitable: a world in which people became immersed in advertising constantly seeking to stoke their desires. That could be direct: ads pictured luscious, dripping desserts, or displayed advertised clothing on beautiful, nubile bodies. Or it could be indirect: buy our pimple cream or automobile and you will be pursued by enraptured, aroused, sexy potent...