The Women Men Don't See

At Obsidian Wings, May 12.

Authoritarianism and the Slut Who Walks*

At Obsidian Wings.

The Thunder Rolls

Garland Grey at TigerBeatDown posted about misogyny in music and music videos.

Twenty years ago another music video about intimate partner violence came out, Garth Brooks’ “The Thunder Rolls.” CMT and TNN both refused to play it.

I commented:

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Not having heard of the Garth Brooks video, I went to YouTube. Whaddaya know, not there — though a bunch of other official Brooks videos are. You have to hit Teh Google and go to MySpace or similar to see the original Thunder Rolls vids.

Once you get past Attack of the 80s Hair, the most interesting thing about the video is that it shows an extra angle to the story. The cheatin’ man is killed because *the two women communicate*. They *both* want him dead.

But that desire isn’t enough. The man comes home, the wife accuses him, and he beats her. Then their daughter (age maybe 8) sees them, stares accusingly, and only *then* does the wife get the gun and kill him.

So it’s not just that the man is killed, he’s killed by a conspiracy of women to stop the cycle of abuse.

So tell me again why they pulled this video?

Is there evidence against this hypothesis?

I have this cynical, mean, low-opinion-of-humanity hypothesis, which I've been suppressing for a while. I am posting it at last, partly in hopes that people with greater knowledge will talk me out of it.

Many many details go into this hypothesis, but some of the more recent are:

1. The many-faceted Fail of the planned SGU episode "Sabotage" (as documented by sheafrotherdon starting here and here, especially the replies from Joe M. and the discussion here.

2. Joss Whedon talking about "Dollhouse" and his (and Eliza Dushku's) motives for making it.

What I suspect I'm seeing is men who are living in a world where many (most?) of the women they know are trading sex for something: money, position, access. They're living in a world where sexual harrassment is not a crime, but a perk -- it is accepted by all that a powerful man can do things like make an actress wash his car as her "audition". They don't just have casting couches, they have casting *lives*.

The Gate-PTB and Michael Bay IMHO don't even seem to know what consent *looks* like, much less why it's important. Joss knows better, but he seems more interested in relationships that are like prostitution than those like consent.

This is IMO completely ass-backward. One of the points of prostitution (and, I suspect, Hollywood culture's many variants thereof) is that it's simpler to have a relationship when only one of the parties is treated like a full human being. Consensual relationships, where *both* parties are thought of as people, are pretty much bound to be more complicated and interesting.

Basically, I think Hollywood sexual culture is a cross between that depicted in "Mad Men" and street prostitution. The next person who talks about "liberal Hollywood" gets my Vial of Wrath all over their head.

Tell me I'm misjudging. Go on, do it.

Blogcomment record: Speaking as a woman who was there

Another old comment: This one I left at Inside Higher Ed, in the discussion surrounding the nomination of Samuel Alito to SCOTUS and his membership in "Concerned Alumni of Princeton", or CAP.

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I entered Princeton in 1974, in the 5th year of coeducation. Obviously I did not know Mr. Alito, but like all other undergrads I was very familiar with CAP and "Prospect", which was distributed free around campus.

Though this article did not show it, "reactionary" was indeed the only word for CAP. For instance, in 1973 Shelby Cullom Davis (CAP's founder and moneybags) said, "Why should not a goal of 10-20% women and minorities be appropriate?" (quoted in Jerome Karabel's "The Chosen") -- this at a time when the freshman class was already 25% female and at least 5% non-Jewish minorities, not to mention around 10-15% Jews. They wanted Princeton to reverse course to be again overwhelmingly white and male, and "reactionary" is the word that fits.

As Mr. Strauss said, most students found CAP mockworthy: e.g. the halftime show at the 1974 Harvard game:
http://www.princeton.edu/~puband/halftimes/1974.html
(warning: sophmoric humor).

My problems with Judge Alito & CAP arise from his claim that he didn't remember what the organization stood for. Arguments over CAP went on for years in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (and I expect the next issue to be pretty exciting, too) and occasionally spilled over to the New York Times. Tigers don't forget things about Princeton, and we don't stop caring.

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Far from being opposed to affirmative action, CAP was in favor of quotas. They wanted to limit the number of female & minority students at Princeton, and were in favor of "affirmative action" (though not so-called) to boost the acceptance rates for white males, especially those from boarding prep schools. Before Princeton went to sex-blind admissions (1974) our standards for female admits were much higher than for males, and CAP wanted to exacerbate that.

Domestic violence

Over the past week or so there's been an interesting and emotional series of posts in the political blogosphere about domestic violence, which I guess kicked off with :Linda Hirshman talking about Morgan steiner's book Crazy Love.

hilzoy:

Why do they stay? (April 10) Must-read.

Battered Women: The Sequel (april 13)

And another thing (April 15).

Ta-Nehesi Coates:

When You Love Someone Who Chokes You

Abuse and Responsibility (april 9). Must-read.

Battered Women and Responsibility, Pt. 2 (april 14)

Rambling, rambling, and more rambling (april 15)

On Last Note on Spousal Abuse (April 15)

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I can't remember if I posted multiple times, but I've certainly read a lot -- these posts, and their *voluminous* comments. My comment on hilzoy's latest post, for the record:

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It's not often that I disagree with Jes[urgislac] by being the *more* radical feminist one, but this time I do.

in any discussion of partner abuse, domestic violence, I agree it's probably better to attempt gender-neutral language - difficult though that is.

Abuse of women by male partners is objectively worse (=more likely to lead to murder, for instance) but also *different* from abuse of men. It is different because it has been -- historically, and in many cultures or subcultures still is -- endorsed. It is expected, it is normal, it is something (some proportion of) men feel entitled to do. They feel that way because other people back them up.

The problem of humans getting violent with their intimate partners is probably eternal. The super-problem here, the over-arching problem, is that one particular sort of violence is tolerated, endorsed, classified as "chastisement" or business as usual. IMHO treating female-on-male abuse as the equivalent of socially-endorsed male-on-female abuse is a way of directing attention away from the social factors, and in particular from the way that *we*, the rest of society, are complicit.

The Gender Gap in Voting

Thinking vaguely through a political issue, again.

echidne of the snakes notes The Secret Demographic Topic in These Elections:

[quoting a Time poll:

Non-college-educated white women split virtually evenly, 46%-45% for McCain. By contrast, Obama remains weak among white men. That group supports McCain 57%-36% overall, and non-college-educated white men back the Republican ticket by an even greater margin, 63%-27%.

Do you know what I think? I think we can learn enormous amounts about the culture by asking why we don't discuss the voting patterns of white men.

I've been thinking about the voting gender gap: the fact that since about 1980 American women have been more likely to vote Democratic than men. Or that men are more likely to vote Republican, though it's usually not phrased that way.

This is a modern development. female conservatism was for many years a feature of voting behaviour in Europe and the United States. In Europe there is currently no particularly clear pattern -- in some countries women tend to be more conservative, in other countries it's men. Overall, there's a tendency for women to be risk-averse, which in many countries makes the average female voter slightly right of center.

All of the studies of the voting gender gap take male voters as the norm. But statistically, if there is universal adult suffrage *female* voters are expected to be the norm, because men have shorter lifespans and thus women will be more than 50% of adults.

If you assume female voters are normal, then what we've seen in the US looks like men moving rightward. Because men have disproportiate power, both major parties end up being toward the right. And that's just how it looks to our European friends: the US has one slightly-right-of-center party and one far-right party, but no significant leftist party by their standards.

I've just started reading "The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women and Men’s Voting Behavior in Global Perspective." by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. (pdf), and it looks as though their conclusion is that women are becoming more leftist than men in most post-industrial societies:

the modern gender gap is more strongly the product of cultural differences between women and men in their value orientations, especially attitudes towards postmaterialism and the women's movement...

in postindustrial societies the modern gender gap was strongest among the younger age groups while the traditional gender gap was evident among the elderly.

What it looks like to me is not so much women moving toward the left, but a pervasive and even growing sense of aggrieved entitlement among men (especially, in the US, white men), which is moving them toward the right, and dragging the mostly-male power structure with them.

In the US, at least, I think there's also something about war. War has become a distinctly conservative value, and a distinctly male value, in a way that wasn't necessarily the case historically. I tend to link this with subtractive masculinity, in which only sports and war are safely masculine endeavors, but there may be something else at work, too.

It's not just Palin

Sarah Palin has been getting much-deserved flak because while she was mayor of Wasilla, rape victims were charged the cost of the forensic rape kit. The state had to pass a law making it illegal to charge victims for evidence collection. (the link is to the local Wasilla paper, from 2000.)

However, I don't think we can pin this on her, specifically. Charging rape victims for evidence collection turns out to be standard in North Carolina and Tennessee.

H/t to Women's Health News.

Put Down the Sexism

Cross-posted from DailyKos.

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Just, drop it. Turn around and walk away.

Try going 24 hours while making comments about Sarah Palin that do not reference:

1. her anatomy or physiology

2. her attractiveness

3. her clothing

4. her hair or cosmetics

5. anything that can be abbreviated "I.L.F."

6. any of those qualities with regard to her husband or children

The biggest single danger of Palin's candidacy is that it will bring enough foaming misogyny out of the Democratic side to repel some female voters over to McCain.

The day after the NH primary, kos wrote of Hillary Clinton:

the more assholish her detractors behave, the more you help her. The way she was treated the past few days in New Hampshire was a disgrace, and likely a large reason for her surprise victory. So keep attacking her for bullshit reasons, and you'll be generating more and more sympathy votes for her.

...

The more she's attacked on personal grounds, the more sympathy that real person will generate, the more votes she'll win from people sending a message to the media and her critics that they've gone way over the line of common decency. You underestimate that sympathy at your own peril. If I found myself half-rooting for her given the crap that was being flung at her, is it any wonder that women turned out in droves to send a message that sexist double-standards were unacceptable?

Over at Shakespeare's Sister, the Sarah Palin Sexism Watch is already at Post #3. (#1, #2) They're doing it not because the Shakesvillagers agree with any of Palin's policies, but because that's how feminism works. They're getting too much material from this site. Dry up that well, people.

Thursday night, Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet for us, too:

one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character

Although Barack referred specifically to accusing your opponents of lack patriotism, I think he's also talking about other "fighting words", as well.

Here's one guideline: if you put your insult about Palin through a couple rounds of babelfish, would the translation be "She is female"? If so, you're doing it wrong. Worse yet, you're *hurting your own side*.

Just Joking about Bitches

wrathfully pointed out that #10 on this list of 10 Common Sense Money Saving Tips For Movie Fans is, "LET HER PAY HER OWN WAY!" -- but was originally, "LET THE BITCH PAY HER OWN WAY!" The blogger says, "It was a joke, thrown in for shock value."

My comment:

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11. Only go to movies that pass the Bechdel test.

12. Never go with anyone who thinks he can call his date "THE BITCH" and then make it all better with "lol jk".

Oddly enough, Michael, some "movie fans" are women. In our own right! Without having a guy take us to the movies! No, really.

I’m not sure where you think the "shock value" of your "joke" comes from. For the female reader, the shock is in realizing that, once more, women aren’t the moviegoers who count. Is that what you intended? I’m honestly curious, because I *don’t know* what your intention was, how you expected your readers to react.

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So far I'm not out of moderation. Surprise, surprise.

Sadness and Badness

Epidemic of rape in the Congo.

Telling an awful story to the world

Musing on the global culture of rape.

Corporations that stand to profit, and US contact numbers.

I'll edit in the morning, when I can bear to actually read some of the stuff I'm linking to.

Before then, does anyone know how or which religious organizations are involved in this?

Women Helping Women International seems to be doing a lot of work on the ground. Here's their website: http://www.womenforwomen.org/index.htm

I don't know if there's any organization that is working with the *men* in this most toxic of rape cultures.

Standards of Beauty

Posted at Making Light, in Indistinguishable from Parody, which is mostly about troll identification.

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Slight tangent: am I right in surmising that the singles scene is one of the reasons why the standard of beauty in the US is becoming the porn star?

I believe you are incorrect. I have seen what you're talking about, and I think it's due to the incredible ease of access to porn itself. I can't remember who pointed out (in a livejournal discussion, but that's all I recall) that these days the average 20-year-old man has seen far, *far* more women in porn than he has seen naked women in real life. His eyes are used to them, in a way that he won't be used to actual naked women.

What I noticed starting a few years ago is that young men stress thinness in young women much more than they used to. I've had a young man argue with me that male preference for slender women is "hard-wired", and that there must have been evolutionary change since the days of Renoir (!), because back then guys seemed to like fatties. *head desk*

When I was a young 'un in the 70s, the young men generally assured us young women that models & movie stars were *not* all that attractive to them, because they were much too thin -- and flat-chested, which made their assurances quite believable.

In recent years, though, the style in porn and in the rest of the entertainment industry has been for young women to be skinny but have breast implants, and this has gone along with the dissemination of free porn online. I think both men & women have gotten used to seeing skinny+implants women as the standard of sexy.

Sexist or Incomprehensible? You decide!

Amanda at Pandagon found an ad for the UK store Harvey Nichols -- click here to see it -- that is either incredibly sexist or makes no sense at all. Possibly both. And no-one can figure out how this is supposed to sell more shoes, either.

Do you only get the plump guy if you wear slippers? What's the correlation between the sneakers and the black guy? Or is this supposed to be a chart where you fill in your results?

Then echnidne of the snakes points out this Oliphant cartoon. What a laff riot! It has been suggested that maybe Oliphant was trying to poke fun at anyone who thinks he can ride roughshod over HRC (or that PMS is still an issue for her, given her age), but his track record argues against that.

When it comes to Chris Matthews, though, I don't think there can be two schools of thought -- he's really not that hard to understand.

Book report: The Invisible Sex, by Adovasio, Soffer, Page

The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory by J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, Jake Page

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I wanted it to be the Compleat Feminist Smackdown of Stupid Patriarchal Paleoanthropology; instead, it's some good smackdown ingredients plus some other stuff.

The authors (who I will abbreviate as A/S/P) do a great job of showing how important it is to get women working in paleoanthropology. Soffer herself is a good example: she may have been the first paleoarcheologist to study the clothing and hairstyles of Venus figurines, instead of getting stuck on "OMGbreasts!"

A/S/P do a great job of deconstructing many of the canonical stories about The Ascent of Man as male-centered fantasies. For instance, all the pictures of Stone Age hunters fighting mammoth or other large mammals (this latter from the classic Og, Son of Fire). These images show hunting as crucial, men-only, and risky -- but as A/S/P point out, this is based on neither good archaeology nor good anthropology. Modern hunter-gatherers don't habitually hunt large, fierce animals, it's not worth it the risk that someone will be injured or killed. The paleo-archeological evidence is much more compatible with "Mammoth Hunters" being Mammoth Scavengers, who only killed the animals when they were halfway dead already.

Disappointingly, A/S/P turn around and make up stories of their own. Chapter 6, "Leaving the African Cradle", ends with fictional accounts of the lives of various "mitochondrial mothers", which I found basically unreadable for their lack of a scientific basis.

This book really made me appreciate how many extremely inter-disciplinary paleoanthropology is, and how easy it is for specialists to run into trouble. A/S/P know a great deal about Late Stone Age technology, especially in materials other than stone: the perishable fiber, skin, and bone materials that undoubtably were most of the "stuff" in ancient people's lives. Since Elizabeth Wayland Barber's Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times is one of my and their favorite books, I'm already on board with their program to actually look for evidence of perishable "stuff" and women's work. They're really good about bringing in an anthropologist's sense of the complexity of tool making, use, and ownership in traditional societies. People in the culture may tell the anthropologist that a particular task is "women's work" or a particular material is "for men", but in practice the two genders depend on each other continuously. Hypothetical example, though not unlike many North American Indian cultures:

Men's Work	Women's Work
hunt deer
skin deer
remove hair & meat
	soften (tan) hide
	cut hide into pieces
twist leather into sandals	sew leather into shirts

So saying "men make sandals and women make shirts" is an oversimplification: it takes work by both genders to make each type of object, and no-one gets a complete outfit without cross-gender cooperation.

Though the book doesn't discuss this, I'll point out here that this, IMHO, is what human marriage is originally "for": the exchange of specialized labor between adults. Sex and children are side effects, the real purpose of marriage is to permit individuals to specialize in either "men's work" or "women's work" but be able to take advantage of both.

Back to the book. Although A/S/P are great at anthropology, they really don't know all that much biology. I feel as though they're really struggling with the fact that no organ comes "for free", that even eyes or intestines will fall away over evolutionary time if they're not useful. Not to mention that calling Alison Jolly "a primatologist who taught at Princeton" gave me a real WTF moment and shows they really aren't familiar with non-human primates and the people who study them (Jolly is the Jane Goodall of Madagascar, the first person to do real field observations of lemur behavior).

Bacause of their weakness in biology, A/S/P don't always know how much evidence they can use to eviscerate the Man-the-Hunter -Drove-Human-Evolution myth. For instance, they talk a lot about hunting animals versus gathering plant food (who did which, which was a more important source of nutrients, etc), but don't seem to realize that carnivorous animals aren't necessarily all that intelligent. In the human hunting:gathering equation, gathering -- using a wide variety of plants for food -- requires more brain-power than hunting. In the story of Christopher McCandless John Krakauer told in Into the Wild, for instance, what killed McCandless was what he didn't know about plant food; he had no particular trouble hunting more meat than he could eat.

It may also be their insecurity with the more biologically-based parts of the field that keep A/S/P from pushing the implications of their work back before the Upper Paleolithic. Evidence from human louse genes supports the idea that clothing and the strings that hold it together dates to about 70,000 years ago, though further louse research indicates that our ancestors lost their body hair much, much earlier, at the start of genus Homo if not before.

My dissatisfactions with the book in fact support A/S/P's thesis: that human evolution is such a complex and emotionally-loaded topic that we can't afford to exclude points of view. It's like trying to study a complicated structure you're living inside: you need to cross-correlate as many POVs as possible to get an idea of the big picture.

Breasts and Evolution

Lightly edited from comments I left in a post by Amanda at Pandagon,
If only someone could make a nifty little program…. about whether men are really more "visual" than women, and some of the fallacies of "Evolutionary Psychology".

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Puttin' on my Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ hat here.

Breasts are an example of how human anatomy & physiology have some unique and biologically bizarre features, features that contradict each other *and* contradict what evolutionary biology leads one to explect. Examples:

1) human males average larger than females -- as is expected if there is significant sexual selection on males (=females are picky, not all males reproduce)

2) human females have enlarged breasts, of a type found in no other mammal. This suggests that biologically unusual sexual selection on females is occurring. I don't think it can be to make nursing easier, Ailurophile, because my experience is that it *doesn't* -- it makes "latching on" a good deal harder than it is for droopy-chested chimps.

3) both human sexes (in most populations) have extremely exaggerated head hair, the longest hair of any mammal. This implies heavy, unbalanced sexual selection on at least one sex.

Look at it this way. You know how many other species of bird or mammals have males larger than females, but females more brightly-colored in *any* respect than males?[1]

*None*. Zip, zero. It does not compute. Far from being explicable by trivially easy "Evolutionary Psychology" reasoning (as practiced by sociologists, ferchrissakes), human reproductive biology is really problematic.

This is why I'm starting to think that self-domestication may be the missing link in human evolution. It's probable that for a long time (at least 100,000 years) humans have been attempting to control each other's reproduction, via arranged marriages and the like. No-one's done the math yet, so this is really just an educated guess on my part.

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growth of the breast isn’t to encourage group survival, but is a result of sexual competition - females with bigger breasts had an advantage over their flatter sisters, suggesting (again) that males favoured them for whatever reason. Evo psych rears its ugly head again.

And again, this is why I talk about “evo-psycho”, because they don’t actually understand biology.

For female mammals to have elaborate, permanent display structures like breasts is *bizarre*, even unprecedented (the role & significance of the sexual swellings in female baboons is hotly debated). It’s particularly weird when you recall that a woman’s breasts swell while she’s nursing — *and thus infertile*.

Frankly, I don’t know why human females have “display breasts”. One thing I would definitely ask is, who are they displaying *to*? Potential mates, or potential in-laws? Or other females?

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[1] In most warm-blooded animals males are larger and less camouflaged than females. There are some groups in which females are larger: baleen whales, birds of prey, and rabbits, for instance. In most of these, the males are still less camouflaged (e.g. Kestrels), so sexual selection is probably still acting on males, but ecological forces make them smaller.

There are a few birds in which females are larger and more brightly-colored than males (e.g. Phalaropes), and in these species females are polyandrous -- that is, sexual selection is for once acting more strongly on them than on the males.

There are *no* species in which males are larger and females are less camouflagued.

Gay-hatin' and Subtractive Masculinity

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has been asked to put in another post on the sources and support of the Gay-hatin' Gospel.. My comments got to be a bit long:

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I'm surprised, Fred, because I think you're overlooking the point, again.

A big part of the issue is gender roles. And that means that a big part of the issue is *women*. Even though (as several people have pointed out) 99% of the vitriol & repugnance is directed against gay men specifically and anal sex even more specifically, I think the thing which is being talked about without being named is *women*.

Same-sex marriage is in fact a threat to traditional heterosexual marriage, because SSM is obviously between equals. Anal sex is a deep threat to masculinity because it involves a man -- a full human being, just like the default "me" of patriarchal society -- being penetrated. And if human beings (=men) can be penetrated and not scorned, then maybe the people who are traditionally penetrated (=women) ... are human beings.

The idea that women might be human beings threatens J. Matt Barber profoundly, because the view of masculinity that has developed over the past century (I'm not sure about earlier) is subtractive. That is, a Man is defined as someone who is Not A Woman. This worked OK when men could do a lot of things women can't. But if women can be smart, then men must be stupid; if women can be moral, men must be evil; if women love beauty, men must love ugliness. You can see this all too clearly in the link Brel found in Part.5: creativity itself (long a male prerogative) has become suspect.

And at the end, Barber and his ilk are faced with the horrific consequences of their subtractive masculinity: if women are human beings, men ... cease to exist. He's reacting like he's facing an existential threat because he *is* facing one: he's standing what used to be a glorious castle but which turned out to be a pile of sand, slipping away into the tide. His idea of masculinity is part of his *self*, and eroding the one is eroding the other.
(continued on next rock)

One of the best illustrations of how subtractive masculinity works is in a old, not all that good science fiction story, "The Last Man" (written by Wallace West in 1929, anthologized in The Pocket Book of Science Fiction). My copy seems to have disappeared (or crumbled into dust), but IIRC the narrator talks about how women's energy and ambition couldn't be suppressed forever, and they moved into one field after another until all that was left for men to consider important were sports and war. And then war became unthinkable, and women got into sports, and then all the men just died out, useless (our hero is a throwback in a zoo).

Subtractive masculinity isn't confined to the evangelical Right in America, by any means. After the 2004 election, religion journalist Jeff Sharlet admitted what he'd been reluctant to say before: that homophobia is the true unifying factor for strongly religious Americans of every stripe. The stresses currently in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality are largely coming from churches in the Southern Hemisphere, based in societies that don't have all that much in common with the US Bible Belt. But they *do* still face stresses from changing gender roles, just as traditional Muslim societies do, too.

Amanda has a post up at Pandagon about the anthology Choice and about how too many men react:

abuse and control is less an obsession for a lot of men and more the natural result of thinking of women as functional objects in your life. Like if she starts behaving in ways that are inconvenient (like getting pregnant or trying to prevent pregnancy), then it’s appropriate to treat her like a malfunctioning appliance. ...

... Anything outside of functional use is considered irrelevant at best, an infringement on functionality at worst. Not that all men are like this, by any stretch, but this way of viewing women as objects is endemic and honest men will admit that even if they resist it, they get messages that it’s an appropriate way to view women.

But with a subtractive model of masculinity, men *have* to think this way -- because if women are not objects, then there's no humanity left for men.

Can this pattern be changed?

I just saw a print ad for Chuck and I finally snapped *ping*. I have *had* it with TV/movies pairing "regular guys" with superhot gals. (and yes, "Knocked Up", I'm looking at you. And "Beauty and the Geek".)

So I wonder -- is it possible to even imagine "regular gal" or even "smart but not good-looking or socially adept gal" with superhot guy, without the guy being a total douche? Is there any example of this besides Ugly Betty? Does it prove the rule?

Showrunners take note: "Ugly Betty" is both popular and critically acclaimed. Almost as though people *want* this sort of thing, even if you basically never give it to them.

eta: I have now been reminded that "Scarecrow and Mrs King" featured "regular gal" and "superhot guy", and it was *very* popular. "Remington Steele" was another possible example. That was a looong time ago, TV people.

Is this all part of the relentless quest for The Lost Demographic of Young Males? Or is it something in the zeitgeist?

Misogyny as a cross-cultural phenomenon

Hilzoy on "Honor killings" in Syria:

what possible conception of honor could involve being so strict about sexual morality that even sex that's completely involuntary counts as a stain on one's honor, but so loose about murder that the killing of innocents can be tolerated by it, much less required?

Meanwhile, Amanda on Robert Jensen’s book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity.

People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it’s about sex. In fact, this culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men’s cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for people — men and women — to face.

So, class, compare and contrast misogyny in these two societies. Are there common male impulses behind honor killings and porn, or are they arbitrary responses of different societies?

Use other side of page if neccesary.

Reporting on Sexual Selection

A lot of people have linked to the CNN report about a study of human mate preferences with the headline "Men want hot women", which hilzoy called the Dumbest Headline Ever. What seems to have slipped by is that CNN's headline isn't just dumb, it's wrong -- that's not what the study found.

I haven't seen the full study (subscription required), but the press release helps me decode it a bit, as does the abstract. The article, "Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences", is by Peter Todd et al., an international group mostly at the Max Planck Inst. in Berlin.[1]

As a biological rule, sexual selection is about female choice. Males do not, generally speaking, choose mates, they get chosen by females.[2] In the vast majority of animal species, males fight each other to be the one chosen by females. They compete for territories so females who are basically house-hunting will choose them along with the house. They are the ones who grow the bright colors or the elaborate antlers as conspicuous biological consumption, to show they have health and vigor to burn.[3]

There are a few species of birds where sexual selection is reversed and brightly-colored females compete for drab males, but this is never the case for mammals. When I was in grad school (in evolutionary biology) it is a byward that "milk is the limiting factor for mammal populations", which means that female mammals have even more at stake than female birds and are correspondingly choosier.

In other words, any time you see a popular discussion of human evolutionary biology, psychology, or sexual selection that does not focus on female choice, something fishy is going on. By "fishy" I mean:

a) the person doesn't actually understand evolutionary biology and is just making stuff up to fit their (his) prejudices and presuppositions

or

b) they are talking about something that is not based in biology, but *is* culture

or

c) they are talking about a way human biology differs from that of other animals, a way humans are distinctive and even abnormal

It's clear to me that Todd et al. are doing none of these things. This is really a methodological paper, to establish that speed dating can be used to study human mate choice. Speed dating is superficial and limited, but it also lets researchers study a lot of human interactions very quickly and without many ethical difficulties. This is a preliminary, does-this-fly study, that Todd et al. hope to use as the basis for studies with larger sample sizes.

One reason Todd et al. think speed dating is a reasonable thing to study is that they found men to be much less choosy than women. Again, this is exactly what an evolutionary biologist would predict: that female choice is crucial, while males will basically take whatever they can get. I think that if Todd et al. had found men being pickier than women at speed dating they would probably have thrown the results out as being culturally determined and therefore, from an evolutionary perspective, uninteresting.

This is what they mean by writing in the abstract that

Unlike the cognitive processes that Buston and Emlen inferred from self-reports, this pattern of results from actual mate choices is very much in line with the evolutionary predictions of parental investment theory.

Now, I think they're wrong. I don't think speed dating is a good predictor of human mate choice, whether "mate" means "person you live with" or "the other parent of your offspring". I think the anthropological evidence is that human mate choice (however defined) is *both* (a) subject to strong cultural influence, and (b) biologically distinctive.[4] I also see plenty of evidence that in most cultures sexual selection on females is as strong as sexual selection on males. This is a biologically unusual pattern, and thus should have biologically unusual causes and produce unusual results.

The mere fact that Todd et al. are using "speed dating" and "parental investment theory" in the same place should make you think twice -- or LOL, because becoming parents together is not really what the participants have in mind. More seriously, parental investment theory doesn't predict that all mating systems should be the same, or that females should *always* be doing the sexual selection -- it depends on the organism's ecology and reproductive biology.[5]

But, whether you agree with Todd or not, you should notice that CNN's headline says nothing at all about women's choices and how important they are: it's just What Men Want. Is this is common-or-garden variety sexism (in which men *must* be the active party), is it that the CNN editors subconsciously realize that women are choosy and thus need more information, is it part of a pervasive problem with science journalism echidne has discussed, is it just stupidity? I personally am splitting my vote between "sexism" and "stupidity", but you be the judge.

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[1] PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has a complex and idiosyncratic submission policy which used to have a very large component of pure ego- and nepo-tism. That has been reduced, but it's still important to note who is listed as the "Editor" of a particular article. This one is credited to Gordian Orians, a evolutionary biologist (expert on vertebrate mating systems) for whom I have huge respect but who's not all that young anymore.

[2] This article is a good, non-controversial overview of sexual selection and mate choice.

[3] For instance, it's male peacocks who have the gorgeous tails, male deer who have antlers, male lions who have manes. Do I need more examples, or does everybody know this?

[4] Notably, in the vast majority of human cultures people other than the couple have input into human mate choice. This has no parallel in nature, which means it should have effects that a naturalist would not expect.

[5] For instance, marmosets and tamarins are small South American primates that are frequently polyandrous, where a single female mates with more than one male. Male marmosets do a great deal of baby-carrying and other child-care (=high paternal investment). Probably because of the extra help from the males and from older siblings, marmosets usually have twins and occasionally even triplets, while twinning is rare in other primates.

You can see from the abstract of this review article ("Ontogenetic variation in small-bodied New World primates: implications for patterns of reproduction and infant care") that parental investment theory doesn't predict a single social system for even this one group of creatures. It depends on what they eat, how fast the offspring grow before and after they're born, how large a group of adults can find food together, and even on twins being genetic blended in the womb. (that last article is *boggling* -- germ-line chimerism! in a primate! no wonder they're almost eusocial. I'm gobsmacked, scientifically speaking. I'll write more about this later.)

How to Tell Biology from Bullshit: Polygyny and Female Choice

echidne of the snakes made a series of four posts about a recent article in Psychology Today, Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature by Satoshi Kanazawa and Alan S. Miller.

Echidne has done a lot of work dissecting what is wrong with Kanazawa & Miller's article from the point of view of what you might call basic logic and knowledge of human society. I'm going to write about why their work (and a lot of so-call "Evolutionary Psychology" in general, which I'll call EvoPsy to distinguish it from actual scientific studies of evolution or psychology) is scientifically bogus.

I am a Real Evolutionary Biologist™ by training (*waves sheepskins*) and a science writer by sometimes trade. I will say as a blanket, dogmatic statement that you shouldn't write about evolution if you don't know biology. If you're going to claim to be an expert in the evolution of human behavior, you'd better show expertise in: evolution in general; the behavior of non-human primates; and anthropology, the study of a variety of human cultures. Kanazawa & Miller fail all these tests.

To start with their most obvious scientific failure: K&M state that humans are naturally polygynous (use a mating system where one male mates with many females). They also talk about a variety of qualities men supposedly look for in a mate: youth, hair color (!), beauty, etc.

These two things are opposites. It is true that biologists expect as a default that a mammal about which we know nothing else will be polygynous, because most mammals apparently are. We also expect that a bird will be monogamous, because most birds apparently are.

But -- we always expect that the males are the pretty ones. And the more polygynous the species, the prettier the males are likely to be.[1] It is the male peacock who has the beautiful, enormous tail; the male deer who has the big spreading antlers.

To use slightly more scientific terminology, sexual selection acts on males, because it is females who do the selecting. Females are the choosers, males are the choosees. If biologists talk about mate choice we are usually talking about female choice, because by the very definition of "male" (="the one with the small sex cell aka sperm") and "female" (="the one with the big sex cell aka egg") the female has more to lose by making a bad choice.

If real biologists see a species where the females show more sighs of sexual selection than males -- brighter colors, more complex display behavior, more elaborate secondary sex characteristics -- our gut reaction is, "wow, polyandry, how unusual." [2]

So, in nature polygyny means males choose their mates *less* and females are less beautiful. In nature, if a male gets to have many mates, he does not get to choose them, they are choosing him. In crude human terms, you can get a lot of action or you can be picky, you cannot have both. Females, who are expected to be more picky, can get mates more easily than males, and so they have the power of choice.

K&M are clearly not writing about "human nature" in the biological sense, they are writing a fantasy of power and sex. Any feminist can tell that they're doing this from their title -- "politically incorrect" is usually shorthand for "I have the power to not treat other people decently". K&M want the power to have sex with many women, but they also want the power to get women to look and act a certain way. This is not nature, this is a fantasy -- something in the human mind.

I'm not denying that the system K&M yearn for, polygyny with male choice, doesn't happen in many human societies. But it is patently unnatural, even anti-natural: it's not the human instance of a widespread natural pattern, it's something peculiar to human societies, something that makes it seem "natural" to behave in ways no other creature does. K&M don't seem interested in learning what that might be, and that makes them even worse scientists than they seemed already.

Because echidne asked so very nicely -- hardly any rains of amphibians or reptiles! really! -- I shall try to make this a series. Not on K&M, because they are too stupid and hurt my brain. But please make suggestions about topics you'd like to see a feminist Real Evolutionary Biologist address. Also, tell me where I need to put in links. Most of this stuff I know off the top of my head, so it's sometimes hard for me to recognize that you won't necessarily take my unsupported word for it.

[1] Should I put in a picture for illustration here?
[2] The link here is reasonably scientific, but out-of-date: it's now clear that there are various types of cooperative polyandry even in mammals. Examples: The small New-World monkeys marmosets and tamarins; the naked mole rat, the only fully eusocial mammal; the spotted hyena. Should I put links to accounts of these species?