popular culture – Holley Sociology

Kylie Jenner and Society 2020

When I’m asked where to start a sociological analysis, I think of how I began, in 2020, to introduce my students to society. I started with this statement; ‘Kylie Jenner is the youngest self-made billionaire.’ Then I asked students to say what they thought about this. Student responses are very revealing. What they understand turns out to provide a perfect starting point for thinking about society.

Some students doubt the claim that Kylie Jenner is truly self-made; they point to the Kardashian family’s earlier fame and success. Some also guess that, in reality, her cosmetics business is worth less than a billion. But what students do all agree on is that she is famous and has a business. These universally known facts are profoundly important. As a sociologist, I see this knowledge as anchoring young people into society in ways that have previously been overlooked.

What is it that students know and how does this tell them about society?

Students learn through objects that express what Kylie is. Items of her cosmetics business are bought, worn, and displayed in photographs. Through these objects, the essence of ‘Kylieness’ is possessed and displayed.
Kylie’s objects are attached to the performance of the feminine.
As a person and as a designer, her objects anchor students’ experience in one particular year on the calendar. Kylie things will be understood and associated with the year 2020 when she was popular.
Kylie’s product-based fame constitutes her ‘price’ or ‘worth.’ This is a valuation of the behavior and activities associated with her objects. This is simultaneously both sociological and economic.
Kylie’s name and products will lose their ‘value of the moment’ as time elapses. In a year or two, these particular objects will no longer signify the exciting features of the feminine. New objects will be needed – which Kylie herself may be able to evolve into and create its replacements.

Taken together, we can see that meaningful objects root people into society in a variety of ways. You don’t yourself have to be feminine or interested in cosmetics for these objects to connect you; being in your age group and knowing your generational peers is enough to involve you in society. Everybody your age will know Kylie Jenner, what her family does, and what Kylie’s personality and brand stand for. The sociological lesson this gives my students is that generational objects connect the entire age group with their society.

Unfortunately for social science, Kylie Jenner and popular culture is absent from current explanations. Serious political and sociological thinking steers away from today’s material objects. Instead, theory directs social scientists toward institutions and word-based explanations. Political theory, of the ‘problem of order’ in Hobbes and Locke, looks to government and economic property to explain people’s behavior. Objects don’t get a look in here; they are not considered capable of influencing people. Sociological theory hasn’t done any better. Durkheim’s ‘anomie’ and Marx’s ‘alienation’ both claim that people are disconnected from society or alienated by harsh money economics. Weber emphasized rational action in the institutions of government and business. But celebrities, meaningful objects, and how we dress to express ourselves in our own generation is totally missing from official social science. This makes it impossible to see how buying and sharing meaningful objects integrates people into society.

Student understanding of Kylie Jenner reveals that seeing, possessing and performing with key objects connects an entire generation with its society. This is a great way to start thinking about sociology. People’s choice of stars and merchandise gives each generation shared bonds. If a celebrity like Kylie can be known and admired through her image and her products, the way is opened up to discover what else binds generations to their society – which is the purpose of studying sociology.

Watching “The Bachelor” as a Sociologist

Recently, I heard a mother apologetically admit that, with her tween daughter, she watches “The Bachelor.” Is this something that needs forgiveness because it’s embarrassing? However involving, isn’t this just trash television and watching it a waste of time? Educated people often condemn popular culture, even if they indulge in it privately. I think this is due to people knowing of no justifying reason for it. But looking closer at “The Bachelor,” isn’t this show really about relationship sociology?

Photo Credit: “The Bachelor” ABC Television

The sociology here is romance; it’s about finding your life partner – the end of the show is expected to be a marriage proposal! Seen as evaluating potential suitors, “The Bachelor” discusses an essential life skill. The contestants make revealing choices – which partner to pick and how to deploy their own courtship. Audiences get involved by evaluating the evaluators. Like all reality television, the show is contrived and largely scripted. So it’s not giving us real life. But isn’t any kind of judging people something bad?

In response, I would remind us that the choices here aren’t moral universals or political discrimination. The decisions are profoundly personal; they involve identifying the right person, meaning ‘right for me, personally.’ Half this process requires us to learn about ourselves. Making this romantic decision involves discovering what we ourselves want and imaginatively projecting who would be compatible with us. There is a profound question behind a marriage proposal – “Could I spend the rest of my life with this person?”

Watching “The Bachelor” may be a great way of improving life’s most significant skill – picking the right person to live with. In my view, this is a great way to spend mother-daughter bonding time. And sociologists should be proud of these two watching the show together!

On Watching “The Duff” as a Sociologist

Of the three recent films, “The Fault in Our Stars,” “The Hunger Games” and “The Duff” no critic today will likely take the last of these seriously. But as a sociologist, I must insist that “The Duff” is the only movie of the three that any thinking person should care about.

“The Fault in Our Stars” is a tear-jerker about teenagers dying from incurable diseases. This theme is neither modern nor conceptually plausible. Death rates in modern society have fall very low and teens are the group least likely to suffer an untimely death. What is more, nobody needs to be convinced that dying young is a bad thing; conceptually, this theme has zero challenge to it. On both counts, “The Fault in Our Stars” is an intellectual dud; nobody could learn anything medical or social scientific from it.

Superficially, “The Hunger Games” looks a better candidate for learning about society. But, sadly, it is not. The fact is that nobody can learn anything from this or any other picture of dystopia. Modern societies cannot be run as dictatorships – they just don’t work this way. The most recent round of authoritarian dictatorships, those of the first half of the twentieth century, all collapsed under the weight of their own violence and mismanagement. No elite-planned competition of violence could keep any modern society together. No one could plan it; no group of people could execute it. Consider how the United States, which has the world’s largest military, cannot create a health care system that works reasonably and covers all its people. How less likely is that, in a democracy, a market economy, and an open media, any group of people could plan and run a system of compulsory, competitive and destructive games? Today’s fictional attempts to conjure up a dystopia don’t begin to provide a plausible picture of society. The idea of a fully planned dystopian society is impossible for a social scientist to take seriously. “The Hunger Games” ignores social science as much as “The Fault in Our Stars” ignores medical progress. We know that dystopias cannot exist so, as an assumption behind an entertainment, this premise offers zero intellectual challenge. You won’t learn anything from Katniss about either real people or actual societies.

When the bar is this low, it doesn’t take much for “The Duff” to soar into the heights of social science. But it’s more than just another high school movie. “The Duff” poses an intriguing problem of friendship and social ranking. Bianca becomes troubled by being the least attractive one in her group of girl friends. Significantly, it is not her enemy, Madison, nor even the cyber bullying of her fellow students, which is the thread of her story. “The Duff’s” truly important theme is how Bianca learns to deal with her own, entirely correct, assessment that she is least attractive one, the “duff,” in her group of friends. Any social scientist will find Bianca’s journey of self-discovery well worth studying. Can you conceptualize any of the work she does on herself using the concepts currently available in sociology? When social science can grasp any of Bianca’s learning and self-improvement, it will be on the cutting edge of human knowledge. The human situation here is all too real; many of us will not find ourselves on the top rung of success. And it’s vitally important to society that people deal with this constructively. Working with, and sometimes without, her friends, Bianca rebuilds herself into a more proactive and creative person. She shows us human social progress being created. Bianca, a self-defined “duff,” is a pioneering explorer of social science’s terra incognita – socially adept and high functioning self-improvement. While “The Duff” may never be considered a truly great movie – its dialog and dramatic scenes could be better – it’s the sociologist’s only choice when it comes to learning something new and genuinely interesting about modern life.

When Stars Hate Their Fans

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch has recently received bad publicity for finding his fans annoying, most likely because they embarrass him. It’s the “slash fiction” which he doesn’t like, stories which erotically pair the inexpressive Sherlock Holmes character he plays on television with his supposedly platonic companion, John Watson. Interviewers read him extracts from these imaginative and highly popular stories written by fans – knowing that they can get a rise out of him.

Writer Elizabeth Minkel in “The New Statesman” explains why Cumberbatch’s fans are rightly upset by this. How can stars hate their fans? A celebrity owes everything to his audience; they’re the ones who are buying his tickets and watching his shows.

What is surprising is that some celebrities still haven’t figured this out. In the 1920s, Rudolf Valentino was embarrassed by hordes of adoring fans. The movies were new then and fan actions were little understood. Men of Valentino’s era didn’t know what they were expected to do with the screaming and fainting women fans. Being a sex symbol seemed unmanly, undignified and impossible to respond to.

A century later, most celebrities know that they owe their success to their fans. Kathy Griffin explained that, at book signings, she smiles at whatever insults or absurdities fans say to her; she simply says, “Thank you for coming,” and that is enough. Fan fiction is something new and not widely understood. It is the new “movies.” Cumberbatch and his interviewers still have some learning to do.

Minkel is right that fan fiction isn’t written for celebrities. But stars should not have to figure out for themselves the uses and social functions of fan activities. Isn’t it the job of social scientists to explain what fan adoration is all about? After all, it’s been around for a hundred years.

Boomers Versus Millennials: Are There Generational Cultures?

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s recent statement that he won’t perform in colleges any more, for this sociologist, highlights how important decades and time are in modern society. When do generations come to an end, and where are the boundaries that separate them? What stops an older generation and starts a new one? When a famous Boomer generation entertainer is suddenly rejected by Millennials, surely light is being shed on these questions.

What is the cause of this rupture? Its protagonist blames the younger generation’s changed values and outlook. “They’re so PC,” he says. What Seinfeld means by political correctness is less important than the fact that he identifies the younger generation as having a changed view of the world. Here we find two generations on the cusp of change, with the older one discovering that the younger does not appreciate it. For Jerry Seinfeld, the young are incomprehensible for not understanding the satirical use of racism and sexism which was the common currency of Boomers. In return, Millennials think his attempts at humor just aren’t funny. Two generations have parted ways. The “Seinfeld Show,” a comedy adored by the generation of the late eighties and early nineties has, for Millennials in the mid twenty-teens, descended into cultural insensitivity and irrelevance.

Seinfeld’s honest and heartfelt frustration about this alteration is nowhere more evident than in the fact that his own fourteen-year-old daughter rejects him. “That’s racist. That’s sexist. That’s prejudice,” she hurls at her 61-year-old father. Clearly they no longer share the same cultural terrain. He expostulates “They just don’t know what they’re talking about.” For her part, his daughter holds her ground; she isn’t budging.

Whether it’s a college audience or your own children, eventually a cultural gap opens up that separates whole generations. How long is a generation given to be itself and live on top of the wave? Recent research seems to show that cultural generations last about eighteen years (see my blog post “Generations: A Mystery to Social Science”). But until we get sociological research with representative samples of generations, we must catch at what straws of information we can. The separation of generations that sincerely baffles a famous person like Jerry Seinfeld shows us the sociological process going on here.

Source: Cavan Sieczkowski The Huffington Post 8th June 2015

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/08/jerry-seinfeld-college-politically-correct-racism-sexism_n_7534978.html