Posts by Laurie Essig

May 23, 2012, 10:10 AM ET

Count Romney and the Reign of Bain Capital

By Laurie Essig

Just a few short years ago, vampires ruled. Twilight, True Blood, and other cultural obsessions posited the vampire as perfection--a strong predator who is not merely beautiful, but never ages. Joan Rivers with a mixed martial arts fighter's body. But perhaps it is a sign of our times that these ubervampires have morphed into the far more campy ones in Dark Shadows. As Americans lost our appetite for the sort of blood-sucking predators who ruled Hollywood and Wall Street, vampires no longer haunted our cultural imaginary as heroes, but as villains. By the time Matt Taibbi used the phrase "vampire squid" to describe Goldman Sacks in 2009, the vampire had lost his mojo. So perhaps it should be no surprise that the Obama campaign released an ad comparing Mitt Romney's Bain Capital to a vampire. Needless to say, a blood bath ensued. Corporate leaders and corporate media whined that not all... Read More

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March 7, 2012, 11:04 AM ET

Send Limbaugh and Palin to Lady Gaga's Harvard

By Laurie Essig

Rush Limbaugh's bullying has finally gone too far. Last week, when Limbaugh discussed Sandra Fluke, a young Georgetown law student who testified in favor of Obama's birth-control policy, Limbaugh let loose with his misogynist self, calling her a "slut" and a sex worker. Although Limbaugh was forced to apologize, he has lost at least 36 advertisers because of his remarks. Not to be outdone in making a public spectacle, Sarah Palin weighed in with this bit of Mama Grizzly wisdom:

I think the definition of hypocrisy is for Rush Limbaugh to have been called out, forced to apologize and retract what it is that he said in exercising his First Amendment rights.

I certainly did not know that calling people with whom we disagree over health insurance policy sluts was covered by the First Amendment, but I defer to Palin's more legalistic mind. However, as I watched yet another moral panic... Read More

January 5, 2012, 10:34 AM ET

Taking Down the Christmas Tree

By Laurie Essig

It is that time of year. Cold and gray in the parts of the world I inhabit. Time to dismantle the Chrisnukkah decorations, the menorah and the hot pink artificial tree, the lights, the pretty, glittery balls full of possibility and take stock of another year gone by and another year begun. I will admit to hating the holidays, particularly the Shopocalypse in which people pepper spray one another to get more cheap stuff and shoppers die during stampedes at large box stores. But this year the holidays seemed to so effectively take the Christ out of Christmas (and the sun out of Solstice and the miracle out of Hanukkah and so on), that it left me even more Grinch-y than usual. And then, a woman around the corner from my apartment in Brooklyn was set ablaze, apparently because she owed someone a couple of thousand dollars, and in that horrendous act I found something I didn't expect: my... Read More

October 24, 2011, 03:49 PM ET

Marriage Rites and Rights

By Laurie Essig

A wedding is always a spectacle in the sense that it is a public display or performance. But In Society of the Spectacle, French social theorist Guy Debord defines spectacle slightly differently. Dubord writes that

“the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between the people that is mediated by images.”

Weddings are now spectacles in the way Dubord meant: they are not so much about relationships, but how those relationships are then publicly displayed as images. At this point in time, all weddings are always already mediated by the images of other weddings. Well, royal weddings have long been spectacles, but before the 19th century it was difficult to circulate the images of royal weddings to the masses. By 1840, when Victoria married Albert, technology was far enough along that the wedding could be circulated in newspapers throughout the... Read More

October 11, 2011, 12:32 PM ET

Is It Really the 1 Percent Who Are to Blame?

By Laurie Essig

I am a sociologist. Among other things, that means that I was well trained in the gathering of statistics and that I come from a discipline that helped to establish numbers as a source of "truth." For those of you who never suffered through an intro soc class, it was primarily Emile Durkheim, sociologist extraordinaire, who used statistics in his canonical work Suicide to show that his analysis of society was "scientific" and therefore absent of social biases. This claim to a view from above has now become so everyday in our numbers-based culture that everything from advertising to public policy is based on statistical claims. But as a sociologist, I was also trained in critical thinking and therefore tend to agree with Durkheim's contemporary, Benjamin Disraeli, who seems to have said that there are "lies, damned lies and statistics." And so we have Occupy Wall Street's statistical... Read More

August 24, 2011, 02:40 PM ET

Fraternities Are Tradition. End Them Anyway.

By Laurie Essig

David Skorton, president of Cornell University, has an op-ed in today's New York Times calling for an end to the pledging practices of fraternities. Skorton knows firsthand the deadly consequences of fraternity hazing rituals since last February a Cornell sophomore died in one. Skorton writes that

This tragedy convinced me that it was time — long past time — to remedy practices of the fraternity system that continue to foster hazing, which has persisted at Cornell, as on college campuses across the country, in violation of state law and university policy.

It is interesting that the lesson he draws is to end hazing, not fraternities. Although Skorton admits that members of fraternities and sororities are more likely to abuse alcohol:

At Cornell, high-risk drinking and drug use are two to three times more prevalent among fraternity and sorority members than elsewhere in the student...

January 17, 2011, 09:11 AM ET

Reproducing Anxiety

By Laurie Essig

In the past couple of weeks, everyone and their mother is going on about two recent articles on parenting. The first, "Meet the Twiblings," was a personal account by Melanie Thernstrom of reproduction as anxiety. The second, in the Wall Street Journal, was by Yale law professor Amy Chua on how "Chinese Mothers Are Superior" and is a study in reproducing anxiety. Thernstrom, in her early forties at the time and married to a man five years younger, was

haunted by the thought that if we didn’t have children—even though he loved me and even though that love might blind him to the truth—in some sense marrying me would have turned out to be a mistake.

In other words, reproduction was necessary for her marriage to survive. And so she did what any other peri-menopausal but apparently quite wealthy woman would do. She found an egg donor, two surrogate mothers, took her husband's sperm, and... Read More

October 3, 2010, 09:00 PM ET

Queer Youth Not a Tragedy

By Laurie Essig

This past week, my inbox has been flooded with messages from colleagues about how "we must do something" to show our outrage at the five suicides of gay teens that have occurred in the past three weeks in this country.

That's right—five young gay people who killed themselves apparently in response to homophobic bullying and harassment by their classmates. By now the names of these five young men are etched into our collective consciousness. Asher Brown, 13, of Texas; Billy Lucas, 15, of Indiana; Seth Walsh, 13, of California; Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who threw himself off the George Washington Bridge; and now Raymond Chase, 19, a student in Rhode Island.

Ellen DeGeneres made a video calling these deaths a sign that teen bullying is an epidemic. Dan Savage decided to put a call out on YouTube to stop queer youth from killing themselves. The campaign, entitled It Will Get ...

October 1, 2010, 09:15 AM ET

'No Wedding, No Womb' No Joke

By Laurie Essig

I thought it was joke when someone sent me the song "No Wedding, No Womb." The catchy lyrics go something like this.

"I know you want it, but no wedding no womb" and "tragedy for the children of our community" and "my little girl wants her father but he's not here" thrown in. Then it ends with the reading of statistics—about runaways and suicides and behavioral problems caused by "fatherless homes." The statistics are meant to incite the sort of moral panic upon which such campaigns are built.

If this isn't enough inspiration for you, you can watch a YouTube clip with various Black women insisting that they are worthwhile and therefore "No wedding, no womb!"

The song is part of a larger campaign led by Christelyn Denise Karazin to encourage Black women to stop having children out of wedlock. The campaign started September 22nd and is described as a national...

September 25, 2010, 02:00 PM ET

Firestorm at 'Forbes'

By Laurie Essig

I have a confession to make. I am not a blog virgin. My first blog was with a site called True/ Slant. I was one of a handful of people who helped start a site that was considered by many to be “ground-breaking” both in the diversity of voices presented and the freedom given to writers to say what they wanted in a way that they wanted.

True/Slant was eventually successful in terms of attracting readers and advertisers. But its biggest success happened this past summer when Forbes bought it. Apparently Forbes has an aging audience of readers and so they thought they’d blog-i-fy themselves since nothing says “old” like journalism and nothing says “young” like blogs.

All seemed like a match made in heaven. Forbes even offered many of us True/Slanters a chance to blog for them. And True/Slant bloggers offered Forbes content that was a lot less stodgy.

But then something went wrong....