Monogamy: Made for a woman, like fancy jewelry.
Update: I just want to make sure this post is understood not to be talking about marriages where the sex life has actually dwindled inside the marriage. Both men and women can and do suffer from a spouse who loses all interest in sex, a problem that I think compounds itself over time, because if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. This article is more another whine from a guy who wants to screw around and wants his wife to “understand”, i.e. tolerate it without demanding her own right to screw around.
Women cheat nearly as much as men. This is not an unknown fact.
Survey takers guessed that twice as many people are having extramarital affairs as really are, estimating that 44 percent of married men and 36 percent of married women are unfaithful. The reality is it’s not as rampant as we think, with 28 percent of married men and 18 percent of married women admitting to having a sexual liaison, the survey found.
I’m always shocked at people who act like adultery is basically a male-only temptation, because who the hell are men cheating with? Prostitutes, sometimes. That might be enough to explain the gap, sadly. But I suspect—especially in our day and age where the older-men-preying-on-younger-women model has had a wrench thrown in it by feminism—that mostly men who cheat do so with peers. Which would probably be mostly equally married women.
I bring it up, because Salon blogged this maudlin “woe is men” story that claims, among other things, that evidence is growing that the need to cheat is hard-wired in men. Interesting, the only “evidence” that is growing that men are hard-wired to cheat, rape, and act like pigs is the number of times a single hack psychologist named David Buss is quoted. Sure enough, the author goes sniveling to Buss to give him “science” to prove to his wife and women of the world that he has to cheat, and Buss complies. Buss admits women cheat, but has to hedge, implying that men just roam around fucking anyone, whereas women just like to keep an extra boyfriend in reserve so they’re never going without should the current husband croak. You’d think the combination of male desire for variety and the supposed oodles of scientific evidence would cause one of the writers who tackles this subject to talk to someone besides Buss, but maybe full-blown hackery of his sort is hard to come by.
Another edition of “What’s Cary Tennis been smoking?” He’s been a lot better lately, so there’s not been any reason to write posts wondering about the potency levels of his preferred smoking materials, but today’s column is a doozy. The guy who writes in has a Bible-thumping friend, and the letter writer is an atheist, and they have fun with their contentious differences. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, right?* Now his friend, who teaches at a church school, is being pressured to teach young earth creationism to the kids, and the guy is fixing to do it, after going through a hefty process of convincing himself that he’s really considered the evidence, which is impossible, because honest engagement with the evidence in this case leads to one conclusion—evolution is the reality. I don’t say this lightly. We all have biases and prejudices that color our views and in many cases, the evidence is hazy enough that people can have real disagreements with no real conclusion. This isn’t true in the contentious debate between evolutionary theory and Adam and Eve. Objectively, one side has marshaled an irrefutable amount of evidence and the other is blowing smoke out their asses.
So what his friend is doing is that he already decided to bend over for the bullshit and is looking for a rationalization for it, so he doesn’t have to admit that he’s a wanker. Our letter-writer, however, is livid. He thinks teaching creationism is a form of child abuse, and while I think the term is overheated, I agree that using children in service of whack-a-doodle ideologies is cruel to children, especially in cases where your lies to them could have serious, long-term negative consequences on their job prospects. (The whole classroom, for instance, is automatically seeing any chance of going into sciences plummet through the floor because of this stuff.) Tennis, however, has one of his goofier answers, which is for this friend to dispassionately treat the misuse of these children as if he’s reading a book on anthropology.
A reminder to Americans with short fucking memories.
The number of anti-vaccination cranks out there on the interwebs seems to be multiplying. It seems you can’t make reference to any kind of vaccination lately without people, sometimes pretending to be liberals (sometimes actually misguided liberals) wailing and moaning about how terrible vaccinations are. It’s the new fluoridation. I’m somewhat surprised that no one wailed and moaned that I mentioned on Pandagon a tetanus vaccination I got the other day, but rest assured, while my arm has been kind of sore, I haven’t yet developed autism.
I have very little patience for cranks as a general rule (which is why working for this site is so fun, because it’s about pushing back against anti-choice cranks), but I reserve a special contempt and loathing for anti-vaccination cranks. They remind me of nothing so much as women who make their living as professional anti-feminists in terms of denial and idiocy levels. Anti-feminist professional women create a special kind of loathing, because they don’t acknowledge that their very ability to be out there earning a paycheck lambasting feminism would not be possible without feminism giving them the right to be women in the public sphere. Anti-vaccination cranks have a similar parasitic relationship to the existence of vaccines. If it weren’t for vaccination, our country would have far more immediate infectious disease health concerns to worry about that the largely imaginary health drawbacks of the vaccination wouldn’t have a chance to ruffle any feathers.
So we’re heading out for NYC for a week, so while I will try to do some blogging, it might be somewhat patchy and unpredictable. NYC Pandagonians: I’ll be doing readings at KGB Bar on Tuesday at 7PM and at Bluestockings on Thursday at 7PM. Hope to see y’all there.
I feel I should comment on the Indy win for Danica Patrick, because it’s a clear example of how Choads Who Love “Science” are very selective about when biological essentialism is extremely valid to them, and when they forget that was a line of argument altogether. Sexists love to trot out the fact that men are, on average, stronger than women, on average, though of course that rule doesn’t say much about individuals. Diana Taurasi could probably lay out some of your skinny geek dudes out there. But it is true that men are bigger and stronger than women to a degree that you’d have to seek extremes like that, and in athletics, there’s probably never going to be a time when women can compete on an equal playing ground with men in sports that require brute strength.
But there are many other physical skills, and the thing is that women are, on average, better than men at a lot of them. Again, individuals vary, but on average women are smaller, have better reflexes, more flexibility and more endurance in some regards. Which means that, all other things being equal, women probably should be the majority of fighter pilots and race car drivers. And yet they are not, which can’t but mean that there’s actual (gasp!) ingrained sexism pushing women away from these professions. In fact, there’s an irony to the fact that the same guys who probably take potshots about Patrick’s “unfair” advantage of being small by virtue of her gender would faint at the suggestion that men in football or basketball be handicapped so that women can play with them.
Of course, I don’t know much about sports, so I fully expect to be harumphed at in short order.
Sometimes I think the “Science for Choads” section would be better called the “Science Reporting for Choads”, but that would be too narrow to include all the people that make science-y sounding claims with absolutely no evidence to back it up. Via Echidne, the latest “science confirms all your gender prejudices” story is particularly nasty in terms of implication and timing.
WASHINGTON - A new brain-scan study may help explain what’s going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles — sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.
The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.
“You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,” said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.
Remember: The capitalist patriarchy can do no wrong. That is the first rule. Everything that goes wrong is due to effeminate liberals or actual women. The war would have gone smashing if not for the effeminate peace movement that stabbed the country in the back, just like a bitch would. Hell, why “stab in the back”? Why not “poison the eggs” to drive home the point? The inevitable abuses when you give men power over women—rape, domestic violence—women’s fault, of course, for starting shit. Women’s inequalities? Women’s choice.
You can tell they’re happier, because these drawings are smiling. Case closed.
Anti-feminist blathers vs. science and facts today on Pandagon! I hate to keep hammering at this stuff, but the articles about how women are naturally simple-minded, inferior, and not cut out for being untied from the stove just keep on coming. If you perceive an uptick, as you should, I’m going to hypothesize that the point of bashing women non-stop in mainstream and conservative journals is aimed square at making people think that Hillary Clinton is crazy or incompetent, of which neither is true. Attack a candidate’s strengths—it’s an old war and campaign tactic, and Clinton’s strengths are her stability, her experience, her intelligence, and yes, the fact that she’s got a shot at being the first female President.
But not only are these articles hateful bullshit that hurts all women, not just Clinton, they’re also bullshit in the sense of not adhering to facts or truth. To start with, for your reading pleasure, I offer Media Matters’ shining takedown of the now-infamous Charlotte Allen piece about how women are so dumb. She offers baseless assertions and allusions to silly TV shows, but they offer you the facts.
One at a time, ladies!
This article is quite possibly the pinnacle of choadery masquerading as science. The good professor, in an effort to prove yet another special way that women are born inferior to men, decided to “prove” that womenz got no sense of humor, because humor is aggression and men are more aggressive and testosterone and hand-waving and just believe it because by repackaging tired stereotypes as science makes them true. And don’t look too closely, please. How did he get the evidence that women have no sense of humor and men do (and it must be biological, because human beings have nothing like culture or social conditioning)? He rode a unicycle through the streets and recorded who made fun of him more, men or women. Men did, which is predictable, because society doesn’t look fondly on women who give into the urge to make fun of assholes. Which I have proven as a scientific fact by monitoring my own email and comment queue.
I suspect the good professor has serious problems with his observational skills, though. Why? Well, this passage:
He suggested men might respond aggressively because they see the other unicycling man as a threat, attracting female attention away from themselves.
“This would be particularly challenging for young males entering the breeding market and thus it does not surprise me that their responses were the more threatening.”
In other words, you guys are only making fun of Professor Shuster because he’s totally going to fuck your lady after impressing her with his mad unicycling skills. Doesn’t everyone know that unicycling is the top of the heap in the lady-slaying sports?
I know what you’re thinking—she must be kidding around, using irony as a device to mock the good unicycling professor. But I say to you now, that I cannot be mocking Shuster, because I am a woman and as such am biologically incapable of mocking someone. Why would I mock him, anyway? He’s not trying to get with my woman, though if he were, he totally could, because unicycles are so irresistible. I know I have often found myself sucking some cock without even meaning to, because I saw the unicycle and completely lost my mind with lust.
Of course, if you read the article itself, it becomes a lot more evident that this is a joke and the media ate it up, because anything that posits that women are inferior to men is taken at face value. So really, this “study” appears to be making fun of science choadary.
Through Ezra (at his new blog!), I found this great review by Malcolm Gladwell of James Flynn’s What is Intelligence?. It’s quite timely now that the racists are trotting out their favorite theory that gets trotted out every few years, smacked down, and then trotted out again once they figure everyone has forgotten the last smackdown, the theory that the IQ gap between whites and blacks must reflect fundamental, immutable, genetic traits, ergo a racist caste system is organic and not the product of oppression. Lord Saletan played the racist sucker for this go-round, making ridiculous claims about having poured over the evidence and having to accept (with a supposedly heavy heart) that the IQ fundamentalist, KKK-propaganda generators were right. Gladwell politely and semi-obliquely calls bullshit on Saletan’s claims of heavy research.
“Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern,” Saletan declared, claiming to have been “soaking [his] head in each side’s computations and arguments.” One argument that Saletan never soaked his head in, however, was Flynn’s, because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox upsets the certainties upon which I.Q. fundamentalism rests. If whatever the thing is that I.Q. tests measure can jump so much in a generation, it can’t be all that immutable and it doesn’t look all that innate.
The pinnacle of human evolution?
There is exactly 0% chance that this news that humans are not only still evolving but that our evolution has “sped up” after we developed what we think of as culture is going to make even close to a dent in the bullshit about how men and women’s brains are calcified into patterns set during a mythical hunter-gatherer time that suspiciously resembles the value systems of 1950s America. Armchair evolutionary psychologists were already treating “The Flintstones” like the greatest work of anthropology/biology ever concocted. The evidence that they’ve relied on, besides sitcoms, to argue that men evolved to go out in the world and do things whereas women evolved to have babies in between bouts of housework has always amounted to, “I should automatically win any argument with a feminist because I’m a man and god, aren’t women’s voices irritating?” Exhibit #1: The “martyrdom” of Larry Summers. The beauty of evidence-free “science” is that it’s impervious to any new evidence.
I’ve often wondered if our brains are hardwired or just culturally constructed to idealize some kind of mythical era of Eden. It’s beyond clear that the main appeal of the bullshit theories that evolution “stopped” during some hunter-gatherer era is it gives certain kinds of men a fantasy of living in a time when women knew how to just clean up and shut up about it, and that there was no end of non-reciprocal sexual favors being supplied men in exchange for mammoth meat or whatever. Cooking, cleaning, baby-tending, and blow jobs all for the non-price of spending all your time out hunting with your buddies and quaffing Budweiser (Of course cavemen had Budweiser! What else does one drink while sitting in a mammoth blind?)—that’s the way life is supposed to be, and if feminists quit their bitching and just started cleaning something, they’d be happier in their natural environment. Surely.
I’ve been meaning to post about this for a few days, due to my dedication to Molly Ivins’ belief that Texas is a state to be watched, because so many right wing ideas and strategies hatch here only to be exported elsewhere. It appears that the director of the statewide science curriculum Chris Corner was fired for having the nerve to forward an email that indicated that she might just believe that the science classroom is for science and not for religious indoctrination. (Needless to say, I am pretty sure the “uppity bitch” element played a part in this—Texas both has a long tradition of smart-assed liberal women and the men who will do anything to make sure we get the smackdown.) From the Statesman:
Chris Comer was director of the science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency for nearly a decade when she was forced to resign recently. Her offense, as unbelievable as it is to relate, was forwarding an e-mail message about a presentation by an author critical of the intelligent design approach to science education.
The education agency, of course, portrays the problem as one of insubordination and misconduct. But from all appearances, Comer was pushed out because the agency is enforcing a political doctrine of strict conservatism that allows no criticism of creationism……
Robert Scott, the new education commissioner, is not an educator but a lawyer and former adviser to Gov. Rick Perry. This presents an excellent opportunity for the governor and his appointee to step in firmly to put an end to ideological witch hunts in the agency.
The person who called for Comer to be fired is Lizzette Reynolds, a former deputy legislative director for Gov. George Bush. She joined the state education agency this year as an adviser after a stint in the U.S. Department of Education.
In her memo criticizing Comer, Reynolds said that Comer’s passing along the e-mail “assumes this is a subject that the agency supports.” That’s absurd, of course, but it is in keeping with enforcing a doctrine that says creationism must not be criticized.
From PZ, Michael Hanscom has received a truly awesome ad for some snake oil.
Prairie picked up the mail and started flipping through the envelopes. Handing one to me with a puzzled look on her face, she asked, “What mailing list are you on?” The envelope she handed me had a somewhat softcore porn-ish shot of a man and woman in bed, with the text “THE FIRST TRUE REVOLUTION IN MALE SEXUAL POWER IS HERE…NOW!” emblazoned across it.
“I’m really not sure,” I said and popped it open. Pulling the folded newsletter style paper out of the envelope, my eyebrows shot up, and I started to laugh at the headline that greeted me:
It gets better. The product promises to blast estrogen from a man’s body, you know, so he can return to blasting his man fluid inside a female body on a more reliable basis, restoring the natural order of things. I think about what having sex with a guy who finds this ad compelling must be like, and once again I’m impressed by the formidable patience that many American women must possess as a basic marriage survival skill.
The eternal optimist in me looks at this and hopes that it might have the effect of raising awareness of the problem of estrogen mimickers in our environment, which you can’t blame for inconstant erections as you age, but certainly aren’t good things and probably linked to rising rates of cancers in both men and women. But the realist in me knows that these ads will probably just reinforce the notion that the process of being a “real” man requires scrubbing hints of the dreaded feminine within.
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for days (of course, I’ve been non-blog ready for a couple days now, but back from West Texas today)—from PZ, it looks like Michael Medved is going to be a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. I love the move, because it’s so transparent. The weak claims to be an institution dedicated to scientific research fall away; Medved is no scientist, just a dedicated culture war soldier. Which of course means that the Discovery Institute is less interested in discovery than in squelching any perceived threat to the cultural dominance of white Christians of a fundamentalist stripe. Medved no doubt was hired because of his willingness to lie, deceive, conceal, and distract from any realities that clash with his and the Discovery Institute’s culture war goals.
For instance, Medved is a slavery denialist, a practice that’s going the way of calling the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. As usual with denialism, it’s not so much about denying that the event ever happened—they usually realize they can’t even get their foot in the door with that—but raising a bunch of objections that imply that it wasn’t as widespread or as violent or as horrible as people make it out to be. Medved’s slavery denialism is a rundown of the standard objections to treating slavery like it was a bad thing—black people should be grateful, slavery is nothing new and therefore whining is inappropriate, there was barely any slavery at all,* slave owners were nice to slaves, everything but arguing that slaves made a game out of rattling their chains. To sane, normal people, the willingness to engage in slavery denialism is a sign that someone is both delusional and a rabid racist, but to the Discovery Institute, it no doubt showed a stellar willingness to stand up to the tyranny of reality.
The well-financed distribution of right wing crank theories that would, in a sane world, be relegated to being distributed by mimeograph, are a constant source of embarrassment to reality-based Americans. I’ve been reading the blogs respond to Lord Saletan’s embarrassing series on IQ and race, where Saletan is clearly puffed up on the idea that he’s a nifty contrarian pushing back against the tyranny of public opinion that blacks are as intelligent as whites. Saletan is clearly sheltered in a world where people are more attached to reality than casting around for any kind of crank theory to justify their prejudices, or else he’d realize that in the real world, the racist belief that black people are born stupid is neither clever nor new. As Robert at LGM says:
Now that I’ve gone and created a “Science For Choads” category, I feel I should blog more in it, which I often don’t, because the crap that passes for science in the mainstream media often just leaves me weary. Or like The Editors said, “The social sciences: (almost) the only profession in which you get paid for trolling!” But Jeff’s excellent take on this study about women’s walks and how we supposedly shake our hips more according to what time of the month it is made me realize that there’s two basic categories of female behavior in the mind of the hack evolutionary psychologists:
- Women are advertising their strong desire for you to take us right now, stud, or
- Women are lying, sleazy teases.
M. LeBlanc at Bitch Ph.D. has a cheeky post up about how the essentialist truism about men being more visual than women doesn’t pass muster if you think about it for more than minute, even in terms of other stereotypes.
But it’s totally insane! What the hell does that even mean? If women aren’t as visual, why are they, by the same cultural narratives, more concerned with fashion, interior decorating, sunsets, and pretty flowers? Why does being an artist make you a girly-man?
Perhaps what “women aren’t as visual” really means is that “women aren’t as easily aroused by visual stimulation designed to arouse.” However, we have a problem. Stimuli designed to arouse (i.e. porn) are usually designed to arouse men. No wonder. Even so, these same stimuli often arouse women anyway.
Reading the post, it occurred to me that the “men are more visual (when it comes to sex, otherwise, women are more visual)” stereotype is a perfect example of how essentialist statements that sound vaguely scientific actually function as normative statements used to shame women out of claiming powers that are usually reserved for men, i.e. the vast majority of armchair evolutionary psychology you hear. The way these theories are presented, it’s as if the behavior in question (in this case, women looking at men) doesn’t happen of its own accord, but in reality, what happens is the essentialist statements function to shame women who behave differently. You hear that women don’t look, so if you are female and look, you feel unnatural and try to restrain your behavior, thereby sparing men the discomfort of having their bodies and looks evaluated by women.
It’s a useful rule for translating most pseudo-scientific evo psych claims about the inferior female psychology/biology. Evo psych statements that fit the formula, “Women are just naturally X,” can usually be translated as, “I hope that any women whose behavior strays outside of X feels a deep shame and restrains herself,” or, “I would like the social restraints on women that keep them from straying from X to stay in place.” If the statement is, “Women are more X than men,” translate it as, “I want women to suffer shame and punishment for X that men don’t suffer.”
This simple formula makes 95% of the pseudo-intellectual feminist-bashing at places like TPM Cafe a lot more clear.
It’s so confusing why it might be more appealing to be the fun good guy than the priggish bad guy.
Via Feministing, a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family that indicates that women are “more comfortable” with the idea of childlessness than men. I use the quotation marks, because I found the phrasing interesting, in that it implies that most people think of having children as the default and that not having children is a deviation of the norm that one doesn’t embrace so much as tolerates. It seems to me that if you ask the question, “Are you comfortable with the idea of never having children?”, you’re going to get much different answers than with a more straightforward “Do you want children?”
If in fact they asked the first question instead of the latter, they may not have been measuring just the desire to have children, but also a willingness to be flexible about the future. Women, having it hammered at us non-stop that we can’t “have it all”, have probably on average spent more time than men reconciling themselves with the idea that they may have to relinquish having children for relationship reasons or career reasons. In fact, the study shows that the more educated women are, the more “comfortable” they are with the idea of having children. The researchers seem to think this is because a college degree makes you more aware that kids can be a pain in the ass.
The finding that women’s acceptance of childlessness increases with the amount of education they have shows that “the smarter you are, the more you know about the costs,” Goldenberg added. “You understand that it’s difficult to do both things. The whole idea of doing both is really tough. Doing both at a high level is maybe possible for only a few women. Ordinary women can’t handle it all.”
I should have added the category “Science For Choads” a long time ago to cover all those articles that make reactionary claims that are supposedly based in science, but when you look deeper, it turns out the science doesn’t say that, doesn’t really say that, or is completely made up. This article about the “happiness gap” pushed me over the edge. I saw this reported on a few feminist blogs, and they took it seriously, citing the well-known fact that women have much less free time than men on average as the probable cause. As Jill notes, the sexist commenters at the NY Times and at Digg took the intended bait and suggested two possible causes: Female inferiority and feminism. The former (it sucks to be inferior) needs no explanation. The second is a common anti-feminist theory that goes something like this: Women need men to be happy, but men will only tolerate women’s presence if women are properly subservient. Since feminism, bitches are too uppity to get men, and are unhappy, but men are perfectly happy to get by watching porn. Also, I’m a Nice Guy®, so why can’t I get—
Wait, different rant. Most of them are smart enough to space them.
Jill’s favorite comment to explain the happiness gap:
Oh boo hoo! Feminists made their bed, now they have to lie in it alone with their cats.
Translation: I don’t call it a “dry spell” . I call it a “sex strike”. And it’s completely voluntary. I swear! Look, cats!
Anyway, for better or worse, turns out the happiness gap isn’t real. It was a lot of hoary number-pinching that doesn’t seem really justified, but the NY Times ran with it because of their long-standing editorial policy of greeting any evidence, no matter how made up or weak, that feminism is a bad idea with open arms.
What kills me about this article and all attempts to say that women were happier being subservient, etc. is this: No one is stopping women. Seriously. If you personally find it satisfying and happiness-inducing to marry a man who will lord over you and treat you like a cross between and a child and a butler, you have every right. That women are passing by this option in large numbers now that they have the right is pretty good evidence that it’s not all that appealing.
Of course, the idea is that women are too stupid to know what they want. That’s the logic behind claiming that feminists are crying themselves to sleep every night with their cats, and it’s the logic behind Gonzales v Carhart, where Justice Kennedy opined that women as a class are too stupid to know whether or not they want life-saving medical intervention, so the government will just have to tell them no. Better dead than risk the possibility of regret, you know.
