Gay pride parades increasingly include marchers representing corporations, from defense contractor Raytheon to telecommunications conglomerate Comcast. During the most recent Pride Month, Starbucks unveiled its “Pride Cup,” while Target released a Pride line of clothing and accessories. It’s easy to view these gestures through a lens of cynicism – that they’re a way for companies...
When was it decided that women prefer some types of food – yogurt with fruit, salads and white wine – while men are supposed to gravitate to chili, steak and bacon? In my new book, “American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way,” I show how the idea that women don’t want red meat and...
In 1972, the comedian George Carlin performed a comedy routine in which he listed the seven words you couldn’t say on television. He opined that profanity related to sexual activities, body parts and bodily functions wasn’t inherently good or bad. All words, he would say, are “innocent.” But reciting those seven words in public got...
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U.S. Representative Katie Hill was the latest victim of a form of sexual abuse that’s become increasingly common: revenge porn. Intimate photos of her were leaked to the media and published, without her consent, for the world to see – a transgression Hill suspects her estranged husband was behind. The photos implicated Hill in a...
Ken Loach’s film, Sorry We Missed You, tells the harrowing tale of Ricky, Abby and their family’s attempts to get by in a precarious world of low paid jobs and the so-called “gig economy”. But how realistic is it? Can Loach’s film be accused of undue pessimism? After all, UK government ministers have applauded the...
Once upon a time you could become drunk and afterward, people might gossip about your oafish escapades but it more or less stopped there, unless you broke a law. Or you got stoned and did clumsy, stupid things, but the news didn’t travel too far. Perhaps a few photographs would be shared, especially if you...
For years news outlets have tied major sporting events to an increase in sex trafficking, but researchers have now revealed that assumption is a myth and that misleading news stories foster distorted views and misguided interventions that do not reduce harm or protect victims. Before 2018, 76% of U.S. print media helped propagate the myth...
Basketball season kicked off last month and with it comes the return of the most enduring of fan traditions: trash talk. Now, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder have taken a deeper look at the rivalries and insults to better understand how sports junkies interact with each other online. The researchers, led by CU...
Many commercial films worldwide continue to express womanhood in a stereotypical manner, a recent study using image analysis showed. A Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) research team developed a novel image analysis method for automatically quantifying the degree of gender bias in in films. The ‘Bechdel Test’ has been the most representative...
Remember domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species and Darwin’s tree of life metaphor we learned about in high school biology? That way of describing living-things lineages is just science’s best guess about how genes have mutated and split over time to change things into what they are today. It’s not uncommon for living...
