Sociology

Monday

Theo Hobson

The trouble with humanities

Sociology is an academic discipline that I generally steer clear of. It seems as full of trendy guff as Education. But there is a minority report, a subculture that questions progressive orthodoxies. A new book co-written by Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee called Growing Up in the Culture Wars, out in the US in January, is in this frail tradition. They offer some excellent insights into what has gone wrong. One insight is that mainstream sociologists have become confused about the idea of normality; it has become seen as an oppressive threat. They acknowledge that there is a healthy sociological tradition of criticizing “normativity,” meaning the way in which societies reinforce the status quo by presenting it as natural.

humanities

Tuesday

Genevieve Gaunt

Searching for the one and only is futile, say the sexologists

From our UK edition

In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’ of services range from less expensive sexual intercourse to the most expensive, ‘the White Whale’, starting at $20,000. Dr Justin Garcia, there with his colleagues doing research, asked the manager, a woman with bright yellow hair and a Minnie Mouse voice, what the White Whale was. She explained: ‘Oh, that’s the full Girlfriend Experience… sex isn’t necessarily part of it, but you’ll get a hell of a cuddle.

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

The mystical hold of the 1990s over Gen Z

From our UK edition

At some point during the past decade and a half, it was decided that the 1990s were a golden age. While Britpop, New Labour and acid house do not immediately evoke the same spirit as, say, Versailles under Louis XIV or Augustan Rome, compared with what followed they were certainly characteristic of something. Appetites for what the energetic Sawyer calls ‘the last nutty pre-internet age’ have never been greater Members of Gen Z who have known only the colourless, anodyne first years of the new millennium speak of the Nineties in mystical tones. At a party last week, I found myself holding court over some twentysomethings who’d discovered that I am a millennial. ‘What was it really like?’ they asked, as if coming face-to-face with Shackleton or Francis Drake.

Tuesday

Thomas P. Lambert

Reliving the terror of the Bataclan massacre

From our UK edition

On Friday 13 November 2015 France suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In quick succession, gunmen and suicide bombers struck the outer concourse of Paris’s Stade de France; then the pretty canal-side cafés and restaurants of the tenth arrondissement; then, most notoriously, the Bataclan theatre, where the doors were blocked and, over the course of an hour, 90 people massacred. The subsequent trial was not just a gargantuan administrative undertaking (20 defendants faced around 2,000 plaintiffs, and the proceedings occupied the purpose-built courtroom for the best part of a year); it was a cultural phenomenon.

Saturday

Natasha Feroze

Natasha Feroze, Robert Ades, Lucasta Miller, Sam McPhail, Toby Young and Catriona Olding

From our UK edition

38 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Natasha Feroze reports on the return of ex-Labour MP Keith Vaz (1:10); Robert Ades presents the case against sociology A-level (7:39); Lucasta Miller reviews Katherine Bucknell’s book, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out (15:24); Sam McPhail provides his notes on the lager Madri (23:16); Toby Young explains why he will be voting Reform (26:23); and, Catriona Olding reflects on love and friendship (31:17). Presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The great sociology con

From our UK edition

My default mood at the moment is bleak despair, although it can sometimes be triggered into nihilistic loathing, which I think I mildly prefer. The most recent occasion this happened was last Monday when I drove through torrential rain to three retail parks in search of an item which – as I found out later – didn’t actually exist. While turning the car around to drive home I switched on the radio and Stephen Fry was bashfully admitting to some fawning sap of an interviewer how bloody brilliant he was. Triggered, right there, at the roundabout where you enter the old coal-mining village of Pity Me. It took ages for the bleak despair to re-establish itself.

Thursday

Mary Eberstadt

Critical father theory

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, my stepfather worked as an auto mechanic in Upstate New York, at a ‘youth camp’ nestled in a pine forest. The bucolic sobriquet was a euphemism; this ‘camp’ was a medium-security pre-prison of sorts for boys 14-17, mostly from New York City, sent up following precocious encounters with the law. These youthful offenders were not the worst of the worst. Boys implicated in rape, murder or similarly terrifying offenses were assigned elsewhere, to compounds with barbed wire and armed guards. As it happened, campers liked to hang around the garage, and over the years, some who showed diligence and aptitude with tools were taken under my stepfather’s wing.

father dad

Thursday

David Kynaston

Social mobility has become a meaningless mantra

From our UK edition

‘Whatever your background,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Sun’s readers in 1983, she was determined that ‘you have a chance to climb to the top’. So, too, Tony Blair in 2004 (‘I want to see social mobility a dominant factor of British life’), David Cameron in 2015 (‘Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world — we cannot accept that’) and Theresa May in 2016 (‘I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege’).