Today I Learned...

Another interesting point for Perv is that individual men tend to have much narrower sexualities than individual women. This fits with my personal observations: women are more like to be bisexual, more like to switch in a BDSM sense, less likely to have a true paraphilia (something they cannot become aroused or orgasm without. As opposed to a kink, which is a non-standard sexual interest that someone enjoys but does not require for every sexual encounter). Of course, it's impossible to determine the extent of cultural influence from observation alone, but Perv introduces some animal evidence that males fixate to a narrower range of targets.

You might think that supports the idea that it's genetic, but it doesn't. The experiment in question swapped baby goats and sheep with each other, and observed the sexual behavior of the adoptees. Males of both species pursued females of their adoptive species, females remained receptive to both (book didn't mention the behavior of females adopted by the same biological species and I can't find the cite). Male goats do not have a sheep-fucking gene. What this actually shows is not that courtship targets are inborn, but learned from the environment, and that males narrow down their target in the time between birth and puberty in a way females do not.

This offers a really satisfying explanation for the range of human male sexual behavior. Most obviously, the wide range in beauty standards between cultures but narrow range within cultures, and in what an individual man finds attractive. Young male brains have the capacity to learn from the culture what is most advantageous to impregnate, and work with that, but have a hard time shifting targets later in life. It works for non-reproductive sex too: Pederasty will never result in a pregnancy, but if sex with young boys is correlated with gaining resources that will aid in reproduction (e.g. status in Ancient Greece), and the relevant section of the brain is taught that while young, it will find the idea exciting.

So once again, the answer to the question "what are humans programmed to do?" is "be astoundingly adaptive to local conditions."

Ginger Snaps is an extended werewolves:puberty/sexuality metaphor. I'm usually annoyed by overt metaphors, but in this case I think it worked, it part because it was so full of context. The relationship between the two leads is wonderfully nuanced right at the outset,* to the point I think you could base a more talky movie on it all by itself. So when menstruation/werewolfization changes it, it actually means something.

Recently I've talked a lot about how comedy can be used to breech people's defensiveness on sensitive topics to get them to hear points of view they otherwise wouldn't. Ginger Snaps does something... similar? opposite? Basically, I can see myself taking someone who was well meaning but clueless and obstinate** and telling them "you remember how Bridget felt when werewolfism led her sister to push her way? Yeah, puberty can do that all on its own, and it feels exactly like that."

Scare wise, it's okay but not astonishing. It started me and scared my hilariously easy to terrify boyfriend. Most of the actors are great, although one of the two leads is either mediocre or has too strong a theater influence. It is not a great sign that I thought this movie came out 15 years before it actually did. And yet, it did some really difficult, important things that very few movies even attempt, and it did them really well. And its mediocrities hew very close to genre standards. So I'm going to say it's definitely worth watching but I hope that 50 years from now it's interesting as an example of where our culture was at the time, rather than a classic.

*It's also got some brilliant examples of how girls use sexuality/fear of sexuality to police each other, which you do not see very often.

**Again, when obstinance costs you your well-meaning card is a tricky subject.

Some anecdotes I think illustrate a common thread:

• Megan McArdle has a blog post up about how many women in Harvard Business School in particular and prestigious, demanding jobs in general drop out of the work force. The comments go off on a tangent about how high performing men who previously would have married secretaries are now marrying women much closer to their own achievement level, but post marriage logistics win out and the wives' careers are either dropped entirely or they shift into something emotionally rewarding but undemanding.
  
• The "generous, discrete" business man who messaged me on okcupid, looking for "smart, beautiful, intelligent" women to "share an evening with" while he was in town for work.
  
• That guy I went out with once who talked about how much he enjoyed smart women, how he couldn't imagine dating a dumb woman, but also couldn't imagine dating someone who wasn't at least five years younger than himself. He also believed all women were two drinks away from bisexuality.
  
• A former friend who started dating a 19 year old college student when he was 26 and several years into a career, and claimed she was so smart and mature until the break up, at which point she started "acting her age." AKA she was smart and doing what he told her, and then she stopped.
  
• Hugo Schwyzer (noted student-fucking professor), who claims he was never tempted to increase the grade of a student he was fucking because “The only students I was interested in were already A students. It’s not just a pretty face. It’s also intellectual ability.”.
  

That last one is extra on my my mind this week because I'm at my alma matter on a recruiting trip. I took a walk around the bookstore, and what I found myself most nostalgic for was a time in my life when the success criteria were determined by someone else and reachable via an obvious path. I could sign up and someone would stuff knowledge in my brain and I would get a reward for it. Relative to the real world, college required a lot of effort but very little executive function. Now, a good chunk of my job is deciding what my job should be and getting everyone else on board with it, and that's exhausting.

Simultaneously, what I most regret about my time at college is that I stuck to such a very strict path. I chose my first (very demanding) major when I was 12, committed to a second (also very demanding) my first semester, and had no time left over to explore. I avoided fuzzy classes both because I found the uncertainty inherently scary, and because my schedule genuinely didn't allow for anything to go wrong. I wanted a second major because otherwise all my credits from high school would have me graduating from college in two years, and I really wanted four. It never occurred to me I could use those extra two years to just explore a bunch of interesting things that might be interesting, without a clear use case for them. I was living Alfie Kohn's nightmare.

At the same time, that second major is what got me my current career, a career that has given me untold freedom in my adulthood. That's worth something too.

There are any number of reasons a very smart person could be getting less than an A in Hugo Schwyzer's class. Maybe she has to work to put herself through school or take care of family members and it cuts into her homework time. Maybe her dad died the day before an exam and she didn't know she could ask for a delay. Maybe she's brilliant in a different area and took this class deliberately to stretch herself. Maybe she did exemplary work that challenged Schwyzer's views and he lowered her grade subconsciously as punishment. Maybe she had grad school interviews that semester and they severely disrupted her study schedule. My point is that if Schwyzer is only fucking students getting As in his class, he's not selecting for intelligence, he's selecting for skill at following his rules.

That would be problematic to all on its own, and becomes worse when the perpetrator tries to mask it under something socially acceptable like an intelligence fetish. But I find it almost tragic in this case, because I'm pretty sure Schwyzer has done more to help me recognize this pattern than anyone else I've read or talked to. He is the one that explained that the sign of a good partnership isn't an absence of conflict, it's the presence of conflict that leads to growth for both parties- that "iron sharpens iron"- and that looking for less than that is a failure of moral courage. I'm not surprised he failed to live up this, because his writing always sounded like a dry drunk, but I am sad.

I've read and watched a few things on the emergence of pornography as part of the sexual revolution, and this is the first one that gave me some insight into what a shift it was. I always thought of this period as "sex moved into the public sphere", and of course Deep Throat was tried for obscenity because it was the most public. This is untrue. The first prosecution of Deep Throat specifically focused on its legitimization of the clitoral orgasm. That is, there was an actual court case in which the government's* argument was "this film teaches women that they can get pleasure from something other than vaginal intercourse, and that is morally corrupting and bad for society."** And they won. This was non just about sex, or non-marital sex, becoming more visible, it was about women participating in sex rather than having it done to them.

Then there is 1970s feminism's relationship with porn. The touch on this just long to reinforce my belief that Hugh Hefner is so close, and yet so far Let me paraphrase an exchange:

Feminists: Playboy will be sexist until you come out with a cotton tail on your rear end.
Hefner: I think I have more in common with the girls than they...
Feminists: women. We're Women.
Hefner: *eyeroll* I have more in common with the ladies.

This is perhaps a very good illustration of the difference between "being an ally" and "having some goals in common."

*I believe this was the local NYC prosecution, but I could be wrong.

**the fact that this was occurring with a mythical throat clitoris, and elevating an act that at a physical level is really about male pleasure, is an interesting complication.

Just watched Orgasm, Inc, a documentary on the creation of the diagnosis Female Sexual Dysfunction and the search for treatment (verdict: decent, but not spectacular). My short thoughts:

• If 80-something percent of people who can have the diagnosis do have the diagnosis at some point in their lives, it is probably worth reevaluating the concept of what merits the dysfunction label.
  
• There was a woman who had new wires put into her spine in order to correct the deficiency of being unable to orgasm from penetration. Goddamnit doctors, you should not be so bad at this.
  

My longer thought involves the (long term) use of testosterone to treat FSD. Testosterone is a critical chemical in many biological pathways. Using it to treat one very localized problem seems like using a sledgehammer on a fly. On the other hand, testosterone seems like an excellent treatment for low testosterone levels, for which low libido is definitely a symptom. Because of the way medical patents work, there's no financial incentive for a drug company to investigate what a normal testosterone range is, and what symptoms indicate a person would benefit from more testosterone even if their numbers look normal. This seems like an excellent thing for the government to invest in.

There is a point I see a lot in writings on Nice Guys (TM), which is that it's no good identifying a target for sex/a relationship and then pretending that's not what you're after, because they can tell. I saw this most recently on Ferret's blog, but it comes up lots of places, many of which devote vast swathes of their other writings to talking about Using Your Words. This strikes me as a little contradictory, and I'd like to expand it.

Some people can successfully fool others as to their intentions most of the time. These people do not ask me, Ferret, or Captain Awkward how to get laid.* Of the people who read about Nice Guys (TM) and think that it might apply to them personally, and are trying to disguise their desires: some targets will know what they are up to immediately. Some will not, but will vaguely uneasy. Some will feel fine, but the attempt will still fail because hiding the fact that you are lost from your passengers doesn't mean you are not lost. And hiding your wants might even work in some small fraction of the population. But not often.

The more literal/ASD side of me wants to say that if people detect bad intentions 100% of the time, than surely it's reasonable to expect the same accuracy rate when I develop good intentions, and see a corresponding shift in behavior. Which is in fact not a fair or reasonable thing to expect, and reinforces the mentality that women are vending machines that dispense responses appropriate to the amount of change you put in.


*My opinion is that doing this has serious hidden costs, but that's a different issue.

Since leaving tiny ninjas, I've been teaching biology at a school for sick children and their siblings. The school is really there as a support system and to keep their brains busy, which is good, because the biology program is in terrible shape. I didn't get a textbook until this week, and it is terrible. There is no curriculum, and I'm completely unqualified to teach a real biology class. But I am reasonably qualified to show two kids things I find interesting and show them how to follow up on their own interests. It took me four weeks, but I finally got them to ask questions so I could start opening their minds to the wonders of science.

Unfortunately, what they want to know about is the genetics of racial differences.

They're asking innocently. They used the same tone when asking about the biology of zodiac signs, whether their red hair meant they were angrier, and if the doppelgangers from Vampire Diaries could actually exist. But it puts me in a tricky position. There is a lot of horrible psuedoscience used to support racism, and I don't want to lend credence to it. On the other hand, I don't want to teach them that questions with potentially unpleasant answers shouldn't be asked. Some day they may be doing medical research. Back on the first hand, stereotype threat is a real problem and truth is not an ultimately defense when it is involved. Also, I would like to not get in trouble.

What I told them at the time was: most people talking about genetic differences between races are evil and also bad at science (bonus: they're young enough I can shock them by swearing!), there are often substantial differences between small populations, but two distinct Asian populations look as different from each other as they do from a European population. I threw in a bit about how the classic racial categories just are not biologically true, but maybe not enough. For homework I assigned them articles on sickle cell anemia and lactose tolerance, on the theory that malaria and pastoralism are neutral ways to talk about differences in environment applying selective pressure. I dream of ultimately finding one of those racist fact sheets and eviscerating it with them, which would be both anti-racism and pro-science, but we are not there yet.

The problem is that a neutral reporting of the facts is not enough here. There's reasonably good statistical evidence that Ashkenazi Jews are slightly smarter than Europeans from the same geographic areas. There's super interesting speculation as to why*, and I have in fact discussed that speculation is detail with a very socially conscious Jewish friend. But if all I tell the kids is "Jewish people are smarter", I risk reinforcing some really horrible stereotypes. Luckily, the story of the selective pressure is intimately tied up with persecution and bigotry, so it's easy to bring up. If I talk about rice farming selecting for mathematical aptitude or poor hygiene in Europe selecting for a better work ethic, relative to south Asia, I risk reinforcing some really horrible stereotypes. But the things that would counter those stereotypes are outside the scope of a biology class.

It'd probably be much the same if we cover reproduction (not guaranteed- kids are only here for a few months and I'm letting them choose the topics). In a world where kids learn all about enthusiastic consent and masturbation and queer sexuality, I could teach them the biology of reproduction and move on. In the current world, teaching reproduction reinforces the undeserved primacy of straight, cis, PIV sex.** But I don't thing I can assign What You Really, Really Want as part of biology class.

I'm open to suggestions here, on both the meta issue and on specific examples I can explore with them.


*Short version: the risk of spontaneous attacks by Christians rewarded medieval Jews for keeping forms of wealth that were easy to travel with and hard to seize. Farm land was the opposite of this. Gold was pretty good. Intelligence was perfect.

**I have a BA in biology and the only time I ever heard vaginal wetness discussed in college was a psychology class, where they explained that arousal experiments were done primary on men because they were easier to measure.

Autism and Oughtism has a post about how she feels her son has covered an ever shifting third of the house in invisible red paint. She can't see it, but he can, and he gets very upset when she touches or moves anything he's painted red. It wouldn't be so bad, she could just memorize everything she wasn't allowed to touch, except he keeps painting new things, and sometimes he paints things she really needs to touch at some point, like lightswitches. It was, as you can imagine, incredibly stressful to live with.

Women deal with this, in less obvious forms, a lot. Don't be a slut, but don't be a prude either. Don't be mean, but be a tease. Don't be fat, but don't ever admit to putting any effort into being thin. Don't be a moocher, but don't make more money than your husband. To be fair, the opposing paints are often being applied by different people, but all that means is there's no one person to yell at for the whole mess. The paints are often applied and enforced by other women, not men, which makes almost 0 difference to how frustrating it is.

In the form of "creepy", women finally have gotten their own paint. For once, we don't have to give a powerpoint presentation to justify our feelings, we can just call someone creepy, get the behavior change (or at least sympathy) we want, and move on with our day. Has the paint been used against certain men unfairly? Against men who were not only not safety threats, but obviously not safety threats? For very bad reasons, like race or class or trans-status? And is it being disproportionately applied against people who were already low on the totem poll? Yes. That is human nature. We kick down, and we're not known for surgical use of new tools. That's why we're outsourcing surgery to robots. Additionally, there is genuine ambiguity. Perfect use is an unreasonable expectation, and "you can only have your reasonable request if you've behaved perfectly" is something women hear a lot and are just not in the fucking mood for now that we have our paint. Lastly, sometimes we're using a dirty trick to get a fair outcome.

Mindy Kaling has a story in her book, Is everyone hanging out without me, about going to a photoshoot and finding racks and racks of clothes that were half her size, and one mumu that fit her. The photographer assumed she'd wear the mumu. She used the closely related "I only feel comfortable in" paint to make him more or less destroy a really nice designer gown so it worked on her in the photos.* It was unfair to make the photographer feel like a subway flasher when he hadn't violated any sexual boundaries. On the other hand, Mindy Kaling was the same size she had always been, which is a fairly common size, and it was bullshit of him to bring a bunch of clothes that didn't fit her to an event that was in large part about putting her in clothes. Could she have gone all fat acceptance on him? Sure. But it would have cost a lot of energy, probably wouldn't have worked, and could easily have gotten her a reputation for being difficult, with long term career implications. So she used the one weapon she had that, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, carried no retaliation risk.

"No retaliation risk" is another way of saying "no way to fight back", and it does suck to have people use weapons you can't fight against. That is why we get so upset about the slut/prude/fat/anorexic/rude/tease/gold-digger/bitch paints. Moreover, in a world that is constantly insisting we justify our feelings, it is really nice to be able to tell my friends "he was creepy" and have it just be understood.

The paint doesn't even always work. Which only makes the overuse issue worse, because we get used to hearing people dismiss the creep label even when it is used against really legitimate targets** and that makes us insensitive to complaints when it genuinely is misused. This is not unique to feminists or women or the creep paint, it's what human beings do.

So, commenter on No Seriously What About Teh Menz: you are correct that creep "is a stronger way of saying “I don’t like that guy” without giving any information about WHY he’s considered a threat". You are simply incorrect in your belief that anyone owes anyone else an explanation for their disinterest.

I am going to preemtively concede that men have a bunch of contradictory paints to cope with too, and that the creep paint feels like it conflicts with some of them (even though I think there's a third way not banned by any paint). I don't believe this changes my argument.


*If I understand correctly, they ripped it open from the back and sewed in several new panels. It would look hideous in person, but photographed well from certain angles.

**Seriously, read that post, men are dismissing their girlfriends complaints about men who sexually assaulted them in front of a witness.

Attention women: if you don't react to a joke the way Michael Ian Black wants you to, you are a bitch. Actually, you're worse than a bitch, but Comedy Central beeped out the rest of it. But whatever it is, it's pretty bad

I have a new hypothesis: Women say yes to assholes more often (than would be predicted by a naive model) because assholes are easier to say no to.

Let's suppose men vary on two traits: aggressive/passive, and decent human being/not decent human being. Passive not decent human beings are Nice Guys (TM). Aggressive not decent human beings are assholes. There's no catchy name for either side of the decent human being track, so let's call them Assertives and Laid Backs. Let's further posit that aggression level is very easy to detect, and decentness is not.

First, I posit that decentness takes longer to detect in passive men than in aggressive men. The aggressive ones just give you data faster. So even if aggression is associated with smaller chance of being a decent human being, you might be find more decent human beings faster by checking aggressive s than passives.

Related but distinct, I posit that assholes are easier to reject than Nice Guys. Women are socialized to not hurt people and smooth over disharmony. One way this manifests is a need for a reason to break up or reject someone.* Assholes will give you that reason, often in a way that makes for a hilarious story to tell your friends later. Nice Guys will make you second guess yourself- maybe I misinterpreted that, I shouldn't be so quick to judge, I guess I have to give him another chance. And they will never provide obvious points at which to reject them, so it will drag on for weeks if not months.

Even among the decent human beings, it's easier to reject an Assertive who is nonetheless not the pants for you than a Laid Back. They'll present you with a clearer decision point, and faster.

Let's illustrate this with two men I know through the same set of friends. The Nice Guy has spent multiple evenings making up excuses to be around me, trying to make me touch him, engage me in conversations I don't want to have but can't politely leave, etc. I avoid this guy like the plague any time we're at the same party. Could I use my words? Sure, I guess. But what words? "I will never ever consider you a viable sexual or romantic prospect"? That's awfully presumptuous to say to a man who has never asked me out. "Stop trying to engage me in conversation"? So he can't join a conversation with his friends and roommates because I'm there? Yeah, that'll go over well.

Compare with the Asshole. It took four minutes to figure out he was an asshole, because he explained a basic economics concept wrong despite working in finance and was horribly condescending when I asked a clarifying question. He then tried to organize a twister competition but somehow forgot to invite any men. I won't seek this guy out, but I'll tolerate his proximity, because there's a reasonable chance he'll do something entertaining, and I can slap him down the minute he does something unwanted. This guy coming from behind (when I didn't know he was there) and putting his arm around me bothers me less than the Nice Guy repeating soliciting fist bumps, because I was able to immediately and completely impart my displeasure to the Asshole via the point of my elbow, but the fist bumps just hung around.

So women don't have to prefer assholes as long term partners for going out with assholes more frequently to be a rational decision. The general form of this is that probably-bad ideas that will reveal themselves quickly will be more attractive than more promising but slowly resolved ideas, which has all sorts of consequences.





*Men aren't immune from this, but I think the example is clearer when I use specifics.