Tag Archives: men

Briefly noted: Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation — Laura Kipnis

May 12, 2015 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

Men is charming but inessential; like many essay collections it is better taken from a library than bought, though I bought and resold my copy. That being said the essays within were detailed, thoughtful, good on a sentence-by-sentence level, and made me re-evaluate almost of all of the subjects (like Larry Flynt or a movie I’d never heard of: House of Games.

The Flynt essay shows Kipnis being thoughtful and non-dogmatic:

[Hustler] was also far less entrenched in misogyny than I’d assumed. What it’s against isn’t women so much as sexual repression, which includes conventional uptight femininity, though within its pages, not everyone who’s sexually repressed, uptight and feminine is necessarily female: prissy men were frequently in the crosshairs too. In fact, Hustler was often surprisingly dubious about the status of men, not to mention their power and potency […]

men_kipnisThe ending of the essay is also excellent for reasons I’d rather not spoil: if John McPhee read this sort of thing, I could imagine him smile.

House of Games is not as visually compelling as it should be; the movie is ripe for a remaking because Kipnis is right about the script, and, as she says (perhaps without fully appreciating it):

Every woman adores a con man—to steal a page from Sylvia Plath. Especially one who knows you better than you know yourself, who looks into your eyes and reads your dirty secret desires, who knows what a bad girl you really are under the prim professional facade, and then takes you for everything.

Is it true? Maybe, for some values of “truth.” That said, not all of the sentences are true: “As we know, modern market societies require ambition, because they’re premised on social mobility, which is essential to a flourishing democracy.” All of those clauses are untrue: we don’t know what the sentence says we know; market societies don’t require ambition (they may sometimes reward the unambitious with a quasi-basic income, allowing them to do other things) and are based on giving people what they want, and democracy doesn’t necessarily mandate market societies, at least in theory. Most people, however, want More (defining “More” broadly), and democracies attempt on some level to give people what they want.

Like so many culture writers Kipnis is missing evolutionary biology, and the addition of it would make her even less politically palatable to the chattering set (already her essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” at the link and included in the collection, is accurate and contrary to Right Thinking and therefore all the more despised).

Kipnis complains about clichés, which is a good sign, but she’s still willing to use the word “problematic” (5), which is a bad sign. But the rest of the book is fun enough to make the bad sign ignorable.

For Men Only by Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn is missing evolutionary biology, behavioral economics, and psychology

January 17, 2013 By in Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

For Men Only promises “A Straightforward Guide to the Inner Lives of Women,” but it’s missing any acknowledgment of the vast amount of research that shows:

  • We don’t know what we really want.
  • What we say or think we want often doesn’t match how we behave.
  • We behave different ways at different times and places.

For_men_onlyThe book would benefit from close study of work by Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman. For most guys, it’s worth reading, but reading skeptically. I say it’s worth reading because much of the book, especially regarding emotional engagement, matches my mistakes.

The writers, for example, say that “Women tend to process things by talking them through. [. . . while ] Men, however, tend to process things by thinking them through, and not saying anything until they full understand what they are thinking.” That is, on average, true in my experience, and it took a lot of trial and error—and more error—to realize that talking without knowing why one is talking isn’t necessarily a sign of intellectual fatuousness or weakness. It’s a sign that a lot of women are simply “processing,” to use the Feldhahns’s language.

Elsewhere, the Feldhahns say that “When our wife or girlfriend is upset, we do what we would do with other guys: We give her space to work things out. But with very few exceptions, when women are upset they don’t want space. They want a hug.” Space increases feelings of loneliness, not feelings of competence and control. They also say that women often don’t necessarily want solutions to emotional problems—they want empathy, and a listener:

She just wants you to listen = she does want and need you to understand how she’s feeling about the problem. ‘It‘ = an emotional problem. This listening rule does not apply to technical conundrums.

To me, this makes no sense: why share a problem unless you want it resolved? But I’ve learned the the hard way that their reading is correct in many situations, and I’ve tended to discount emotions in favor of trying to solve problems. When this strategy failed, or elicited tears from girls, I would wonder what the fuck is the matter. I mean, when I have problems, I want them fixed, right? But, as the Feldhahns point out, I’m missing that the problem isn’t the problem—it’s a placeholder, in many situations, for something else. I failed to read the situation metaphorically.

The Feldhahns also point out that men overestimate the need to be seen as a “provider” and earn money, while underestimating the need for emotional and sexual closeness (for a literary example of this, pay close attention to the portrayal of Matt French in Megan Abbott’s novel Dare Me; he spends his life working, or worrying about work, in order to buy a big, crappy house, and neglects his wife to the point that she starts sleeping with another guy who probably makes less money but is sexy and available). Notice the words “overestimate” and “underestimate:” money and ambition matter, but not as much as many men think. The Feldhahns say, “For her, ’emotional security’ matters most: feeling emotionally connected and close to you, and knowing that you are there for her no matter what. Sure, providing financially is appreciated, but for most women it’s nowhere near the top of the list.” Clearly Jeff Feldhahn hasn’t dated some of the cold fish I have, but we’ll leave those stories aside.

From what I can discern, those insights are correct, even if the process that led to those insights is bogus, or at least not optimal. The authors say, “Besides conducting hundreds of in-person interviews, we gathered huge amounts of anecdotal information at dozens of women’s events where Feldhahn was presenting materials from For Women Only.” What people say they want and what they actually do often differ severely, as anyone who has ever listened to girls complain about the “assholes” they sleep with, compared with the “nice guys” they don’t, can attest. But my favorite study on the topic of the discrepancy between what people state in various situations is Alexander and Fisher’s “Truth and consequences: Using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self‐reported sexuality:”

Men report more permissive sexual attitudes and behavior than do women. This experiment tested whether these differences might result from false accommodation to gender norms (distorted reporting consistent with gender stereotypes). Participants completed questionnaires under three conditions. Sex differences in self-reported sexual behavior were negligible in a bogus pipeline condition in which participants believed lying could be detected [meaning that “participants are attached to a non-functioning polygraph and are led to believe that dishonest answers given during an interview or on a survey can be detected by the machine” (28)], moderate in an anonymous condition [where participants don’t believe their answers will be revealed at all], and greatest in an exposure threat condition in which the experimenter could potentially view participants’ responses. This pattern was clearest for behaviors considered less acceptable for women than men (e.g., masturbation, exposure to hardcore & softcore erotica). Results suggest that some sex differences in self-reported sexual behavior reflect responses influenced by normative expectations for men and women

In other words, what people say about their sexual habits and beliefs depend in part on who is listening and how the speaker believes what they say will be interpreted. Given that fact, “in-person interviews” and “anecdotal information at women’s events” are arguably the worst way one could gather data on what women “really” want. Every time the Feldhahns say things like, “70 percent of the women said they’d rather their husband take a lower-paying job that would require financial sacrifices if it allowed more family time” (emphasis added) I wanted to say, “they only say that.”

Beyond the issue of what people say in different contexts, there’s an issue about what people do in different states of mind. In Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein’s paper “The heat of the moment: the effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making,” the authors show that college-aged guys in a “cold” state systematically underestimate their likely sexual preferences and acts when they are in a “hot” state (which the experimenters elicit through showing each individual man porn, encouraging him to masturbate, and then asking the same set of questions). In Predictably Irrational, Ariely describes the difficult of conducting that experiment in the first place because of his university’s human-subjects board, and he speculates that getting permission to operate the same experiment with female subjects would be more difficult still.

The women the Feldhahns speak to are, presumably, in a cold state. What they say they want at that moment, speaking to somewhat high-status writers, may or may not bear any relation to what they want in hot states, or what they want in the private sphere that still exists between their ears. We are all hypocrites, but some of us are better at acknowledging it, and incorporating that knowledge into our thinking, than others.

Perhaps the second-best romantic advice I’ve ever heard is simple: “Don’t pay any attention to what she says—just look at what she does.” (The first-best is “The worst thing she can say is ‘no.'” Alter the gender pronouns to fit your preferences, as needed.) The Feldhahns are paying a lot of attention to what she says.

Jeff also plays himself off as stupid, like many men: “I doubted that a woman could ever be understood. Compared to other complex matters—like the tides, say, or how to figure a baseball player’s ERA—women seemed unknowable. Random even.” That’s because he’s either a) an idiot or b) has bought into large-scale cultural nonsense. Women can be understood. Evolutionary biology is a good place to start: take a look at Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, then the new introduction to Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved, then Thornhill and Gangestad’s The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality. All of them explain a lot about the pressures women feel, and, by extension, the pressures men feel in response (the pressures men and women feel are, of course, a feedback loop, with one side “responding” to the other).

Individual preferences can’t be understood based on group identification, because individual preferences can vary substantially, but understanding the basic evolutionary and cultural pressures operating on each sex will show why many people behave the way they do. Those “cultural pressures” I mentioned in the previous sentence are also important, and books like Neil Strauss’s The Game discuss them.

Let me return to Hrdy for a moment. In describing her path to the book, she says:

Competition between females is documented for every well-studied species of primate save one: our own. Once we leave the scientific realm, of course, and consider history, literature, and, for many of us, personal experience, examples of highly competitive, manipulative, and even murderous females flock to mind.

Competition between human females also exists—as “history, literature, and [. . .] personal experience” show us (we should get out of the lab and into culture if we’re going to study humans)—but it tends to exist along different dimensions than male competition. That’s why men tend not to notice it. In addition, male scientists suffer a failure of imagination, as Hrdy elegantly puts it: “The history of our knowledge about primate infanticide is in many ways a parable for the biases and fallibility that plague observational sciences: we discount the unimaginable and fail to see what we do not expect.”

Jeff doesn’t understand women because he doesn’t understand that women are also under competitive pressure, though he probably doesn’t realize what he doesn’t understand. Instead of thinking that women are “Random even,” he should be asking: What incentives operate on women that don’t on men? What’s it like to be female in our society? How can I learn more? He’s showing an empathy deficit and a research deficit.

Why are the authors ignorant about the vast literature on deception? They’re not researchers, and they don’t evince any interest in research, which is a major weakness. They’re may be inclined to massage their readers’ prejudice instead of challenging those views. They may also not want to know better, which I say because they say that “This book holds to a biblical world view. [. . . ] because Feldhahn and I view life through our Christian faith, we have seen that these findings are consistent with biblical principles.” In modern America, ensuring that “findings are consistent with biblical principles” is a code-phrase for militant, pointless ignorance. This is where I should point out that intellectual rigor and sophistication can (and should) co-exist with religious belief, but I don’t have the energy for culture-war crap.

The authors also sometimes evade important issues altogether, as their strategic use of passive voice shows here: “In this culture, women are not being protected emotionally. They are being humiliated.” Women are not being “protected emotionally” by who or what? “They are being humiliated” by who or what? As I tell students, cultures don’t just emerge from some amorphous cloud: they’re the result of aggregated individual decisions. Who should be doing the protecting? What does humiliation mean here? It’s hard to emotionally humiliate someone without their consent. This idea is simply asserted, and it’s asserted in a way that removes important information.

Links: Looking Up, change, real estate crowdsourcing, publishing, porn, men, game, and more

December 9, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Jeff Sypeck: “Some books you plan to write; others simply happen:” about Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles.

* How People Change.

* “The Real Estate Deal That Could Change the Future of Everything:” letting local people invest small amounts in local projects. The barriers are primarily regulatory.

* “Study: Porn stars aren’t ‘damaged:’ A report finds adult actresses are happier than the rest of us — and that being naked might lead to self-esteem.”

* Guy Kawasaki’s APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur–How to Publish a Book describes what I’m going to be doing and what you might be thinking about doing.

* The 5-Year Humanities Ph.D.: finally.

* The Rules Revisited: Men Don’t Have Commitment Problems.

* The Game life cycle.

* Standup desks gain favor in the workplace. I’m using one, and I’d file this under under the “obvious development” category.

* Awesome: Soaring Rents Drive a Boom in Apartments.

* If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We’re In Trouble. The essay mentions their book, The Blueprint: Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk, and Rescuing the Free Market, which I pre-ordered; it’s likely the sort of book that, even if it’s wrong, will still be interesting.

Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men — Roy Baumeister

December 4, 2011 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I would emphasize this, from Arnold Kling, about Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men:

1. If you are a zero-tolerance reader (“I stopped reading on page 9, because he said X, which is obviously wrong, so I figured there was no point in going any further”), then don’t pick up this book. If you are going to finish it, you have to follow almost the complete opposite approach. “Even if a lot of this is wrong, what insights can I take away?”

And there are a lot of ideas per word and little wasted space, especially because Baumeister goes out of his way to avoid dogmatic thinking, which he says overtly:

This book is not about the “battle of the sexes.” I’m not trying to score points for men against women, or vice versa. I don’t think the “battle” approach is healthy. In fact, I think the idea that men and women are natural enemies who conspire deviously to exploit and oppress each other is one of the most misguided and harmful myths that is distorting our current views about men and women.

That being said, Is There Anything Good About Men? has an unfortunate title but many of those deep “insights” worth exploring—and perhaps an equally large amount of unsupported bullshit. It’s frustrating, for example, to see issues like one on page 54 of the hardcover edition, where Baumeister’s claims about sex drive differences between men and women have no citations to actual underlying research. Nonetheless, it’s hard to conclude that men don’t have, on average, a higher desire for sex more often and with more partners than women do; the very structure of dating markets points to this idea. He does cite work later in the book, but why not cite it when the issue is first raised?

But most of the ideas are implications are better; it’s hard to choose among his many observations to discuss in a short blog post, but here’s one I find intriguing; apologies for the length of the quote:

Mostly, men had recognized that dangerous jobs fall to them and, more important, that to be a man they have to accept them. Whether this will continue is not entirely clear. Today’s men are brought up on a rhetoric of equality, and at some point they may balk at letting women be exempted from certain unpleasant tasks.

Even more important, the psychological processes that enable men to do the dangerous jobs may be weakened. Men of past eras were famously out of touch with their feelings. Today’s men are brought up to be more like women, and that includes becoming more conversant with their own emotions. But might that undermine the ability to make themselves do what needs to be done?

To do the dirty or dangerous jobs, you have to put your feelings aside. Being a man in that sense meant that you focused on the task at hand. It meant others could count on you not to let your emotions interfere with getting the job done. One reason traditional societies put those jobs on men was that women might be too fearful or squeamish or tentative to do them. Traditional men weren’t supposed to admit to having such feelings. Yet nowadays we encourage young men to revel in their feelings. Having uncorked the emotional bottle, can we count on the men to stuff the feelings back inside and cork them away when we need them to do so?

The traditional male role has had definite privileges, but it also had duties and obligations. Our culture has come far along in doing away with those privileges. It has been slower about equalizing the duties and obligations. (to quote [Warren] Farrell once more, ‘Women have rights. Men have responsibilities.’) As we make men more like women and remove their traditional privileges, they may begin to object more strenuously to the duties and responsibilities. The obligations of fatherhood weigh far less on today’s man than on earlier generations, as indicated not least by the increasing numbers of men who abandon pregnant girlfriends or small children.

In other words, whatever the rhetoric that gender writers may espouse, when men and women face real problems and dangerous situations, men still tend to get the dirty and dangerous jobs. Equality is fine when it only means the good stuff, but when there’s a strange noise downstairs or coal mines to be stripped, guys still end up there. On the flipside, however, it may also be that society is evolving away from a space where men need not have feelings and toward one where men having feelings is more beneficial than it was in the past.

We may be seeing cultural evolution, live, even as people fight over whether it’s happening and, if it is, what it might mean. The “traditional male role” might be changing or evolving, and its supposed “privileges” or lack thereof too. See, for example, “Sex Is Cheap: Why young men have the upper hand in bed, even when they’re failing in life from Slate.com. Given the choice between coal mining and war or video games and babes in skirts, I suspect most men would rather get in touch with whatever their feelings might be and assume the latter.

You can see other examples of cultural evolution: I’ve been watching The Sopranos lately, and the tension between the “do what needs to be done” aspect and Tony’s supposed feelings and nostalgia for the maybe good-old-days, when men were men, makes The Sopranos intriguing: Tony continuously hearkens back to his father’s time, when men didn’t have (or at least show) feelings; by contrast, he’s being treated by a female therapist, who helps him explore repressed feelings that manifest themselves in dreams and panic attacks.

For whatever this passage might be worth, however, I don’t love the writing itself: vague mentions about “corking” and “uncorking” feelings among “the men” is too abstract for my taste: if this were a freshman’s paper, I’d write as much in the margins and encourage the writer to think about what, precisely, this means for individuals. Even if I know what it means, I can see reasons why it might help for men to uncork their feelings. Consider the experience of World War I, which shows the problems of men not being willing to express fear or tentativeness and willingly walking to their own deaths for no cause at all: that stupid, destructive, largely pointless war occurred in part because men were willing to let themselves be mass-brainwashed into walking into their own deaths for no reason, directed by ignoramuses who’d failed to realize that the nature of warfare had changed and that 19th Century infantry tactics will not merely fail, but fail spectacularly against 20th Century weaponry. So before we romanticize a lost era of male stoicism, let’s remember some of its costs, too, and the fact that turning off feelings and empathy may also allow men to do the many barbaric and cruel things men do.

There are other social changes, too: notice that the state is far more willing to pick up the slack for “pregnant girlfriends and small children,” which changes incentives for men and women; in addition, women appear to be much more willing to dump men who don’t suit their needs than they once might’ve. They write long articles that get turned into books like Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough that are all about female unwilligness to compromise. It’s also become much more obvious that women do not always tell the truth about fatherhood, and it’s hard to read articles like “How DNA Testing is Changing Fatherhood” and not realize what’s at stake:

Over the last decade, the number of paternity tests taken every year jumped 64 percent, to more than 400,000. That figure counts only a subset of tests — those that are admissible in court and thus require an unbiased tester and a documented chain of possession from test site to lab. Other tests are conducted by men who, like Mike, buy kits from the Internet or at the corner Rite Aid, swab the inside of their cheeks and that of their putative child’s and mail the samples to a lab. Of course, the men who take the tests already question their paternity, and for about 30 percent of them, their hunch is right.”

It’s possible in many states for a man who signs a child’s birth certificate to be responsible for paying that child’s mother for eighteen years even if that child isn’t his. That’s not an optimal way to encourage male responsibility or eagerness to support Baumeister’s pregnant girlfriends. But Baumeister doesn’t quite this far.

Nonetheless, his central insights about the sexes facing potential trade-offs that guide median preferences is fascinating and possibly true. Notice the language in the previous sentence: “trade-offs” and “median preferences,” rather than saying all people are this way or that way. From that one can extrapolate to current cultural conditions.

I would guess that Baumeister, like me, wants equal opportunities in all parts of life, but he would also point out that equal opportunities doesn’t mean people will want the same things. Men, in his viewing, are optimized towards risk taking; DNA analyses indicate that we’re descended from 40% of the men who ever lived but 80% of the women. Which means the median man died without reproducing and the median woman did. Which means the median man has an evolutionary incentive to take risks, given that his outcome if he lost the gamble was zero but so was his outcome if he didn’t take the gamble at all. Hence the hierarchies in all parts of life that men love to set up; Baumeister eventually says: “The pyramid of success is steep and cruel. Nature dooms most of the males to fail but impels each of them to try to be the one.”

I do not think most women appreciate that. Which isn’t to say most men appreciate what it’s like to experience female incentives, costs, and desires. One of the more unusual nonfiction books I’ve read attempts to do exactly that: Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, in which she (a lesbian in “real life,” for lack of a better term) dresses and goes about life as a man for about a year. Baumeister says:

One of the most interesting books about gender in recent years was by Norah Vincent. She was a lesbian feminist who with some expert help could pass for a man, and so she went undercover, living as a man in several different social spheres for the better part of a year. The book, Self-Made Man, is her memoir. She is quite frank that she started out thinking she was going to find out how great men have it and write a shocking feminist expose of the fine life that the enemy (men) was enjoying.

Instead, she experienced a rude awakening of how hard it is to be a man. Her readings and classes in Women’s Studies had not prepared her to realize that the ostensible advantages of the male role come at high cost. She was glad when it was over, and in fact she cut the episode short in order to go back to what she concluded was the greatly preferable life as a woman. The book she wrote was far different from the one she planned, and any woman who thinks life is better for men will find it a sobering read.

He goes on to say that men and women don’t have it “better” than each other per se; they have it different, and his book is, among other things, an attempt to explain why.

Baumeister also said something that, incidentally, reminded me of a potential weakness of the novel as a genre, and that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: “If you consider the problems facing the world today (e.g., global warming, terrorism, pandemics), you can see that they are not likely to be handled by single persons—more likely by large and complex networks of organizations.” One problem for novels is that they focus on individuals and small groups; it’s very hard for a novel to address very large-scale issues save in the context of an individual or small group. Think of how Ian McEwan’s Solar uses Michael Beard and his foibles to discuss some of the technical challenges around global warming.

This may explain why many men prefer nonfiction to fiction: nonfiction is more easily dedicated to large, abstract ideas and organizations potentially involving thousands or millions of people. Fiction is intimate, self has more than a half dozen major characters, and often focuses on a single or small number of very intimate relationships. The fiction that men prefer on average—Elmore Leonard, murder mysteries, and so forth—often involve a single protagonist who is matching wits and brawn with a single antagonist or series of antagonists, which he must confront using an array of shallow connections to many people.

Philip Zimbardo and the ever-changing dynamics of sexual politics

August 16, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

A friend sent me a link to Philip Zimbardo’s talk, “The demise of guys?“, which recapitulates and shortens Hanna Rosen’s long Atlantic article, “The End of Men.” Based on the video and reading lots of material on similar subjects recently (like: Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?, although I do not find all of it compelling), I replied to my (female) friend:

1) There is still a very strong preference for males in much of the developing world, including India and China.

2) Barring unpredictable improvements in reproductive technology that bring us closer to Brave New World, I do not see substantial numbers of women wanting to live without men. There are some, have always been some, and will always be some, but they’re in the minority and probably will be for a long time.

3) I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s actually happening is that we’re seeing an increasing bifurcation in male behavior, as we’re seeing in many aspects of society, where the winners win more and the losers lose more than they once did. I suspect you can see more guys getting a larger number of women—a la Strauss in The Game, guys in frats, and guys who want to play the field in major cities—but also more guys who substitute video games and porn for real women, or who are incarcerated, or otherwise unable to enter / compete in mating markets. This makes women unhappy because they have to compete for a smaller number of “eligible” guys, the word “eligible” being one women love to use without wanting to define it. Women on average aren’t punishing men as much as one might expect for playing the field—see, e.g., this Slate article. Notice how Baumeister is cited there too.

4) Guys are more likely to drop out of high school, but they’re also more likely to be in the top 1% of the income distribution. They’re overrepresented in software, engineering, novel writing, and lots of other high-octane fields. They’re also overrepresented in prisons, special ed classes, and so forth. If you concentrate on the far reaches of either end of the bell curve, you’ll find guys disproportionately represented. Feminists like to focus on the right side, Zimbardo is focusing on the left. Both might be right, and we’re just seeing or noticing more extreme variation than we used to.

5) I’m not convinced the conclusions drawn by Zimbardo follow from the research, although it’s hard to tell without citations.

6) If guys are playing 10,000 hours of video games before age 21, no wonder they’re not great at attracting women and women are on average less attracted to them. This may reinforce the dynamic in number 3, in which those guys who are “eligible” can more easily find available women.

7) Most women under the age of 30 will not answer phone calls any more and will only communicate with men via text. If I were on the market, I would find this profoundly annoying, but it’s true. Many women, at least in college, make themselves chiefly available for sex after drinking heavily at parties; this contributes to perceived problems noted by Zimbardo, instead of alleviating them. If women will mostly sleep with guys after drinking and at parties, that’s what guys will do, and guys who follow alternate strategies will not succeed as well. Despite this behavior, many women also say they want more than just a “hookup,” but their stated and revealed preferences diverge (in many instances, but not all). In other words, I’m not sure males are uniquely more anti-social, at least from my perspective. When stated and revealed preferences diverge, I tend to accept evidence of revealed preferences.

EDIT: At the gym, I was telling a friend about this post, and our conversation reminded me of a student who was a sorority girl. The student and I were talking and she mentioned how her sorority was holding an early morning event with a frat, but a lot of the girls didn’t want to go if there wasn’t going to be alcohol because they didn’t know how to talk to boys without it. Point is, atrophied social skills are not limited to one sex.

8) For more on number 7, see Bogle, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus; I read the interviews and thought, “A lot of these people, especially the women, must experience extreme cognitive dissonance.” But people on average do not appear to care much about consistency and hypocrisy, at least in themselves.

9) In “Marry Him!“, Lori Gottlieb argues that women are too picky about long-term partners and can drive themselves out of the reproductive market altogether by waiting too long. This conflicts somewhat with Zimbardo’s claims; maybe we’re all too picky and not picky enough at the same time? She’s also mostly addressing women in their 30s and 40s, while Zimbardo appears to be dealing with people in their teens and 20s.

10) If Zimbardo wrote an entire book the subject, I would read it, although very skeptically.

One of the more interesting study abstracts I’ve read — “Using the Bogus Pipeline to Examine Sex Differences in Self-Reported Sexuality”

December 2, 2010 By in ideas Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Pretty much anyone who’s seen naive or unsophisticated sex surveys knows that straight men consistently report far more sex than women, which is somewhat improbable given that it takes two people in most circumstances (and more in others, but we’ll leave those be for now). Or, as Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher put it, “Several of these well-established sex differences in sexual behavior are somewhat bewildering. Researchers have questioned the statistical improbability of men having more heterosexual intercourse partners than women, as these numbers should be equivalent for the sexes [. . .]”

They have an answer:

Men report more permissive sexual attitudes and behavior than do women. This experiment tested whether these differences might result from false accommodation to gender norms (distorted reporting consistent with gender stereotypes). Participants completed questionnaires under three conditions. Sex differences in self-reported sexual behavior were negligible in a bogus pipeline condition in which participants believed lying could be detected [meaning that “participants are attached to a non-functioning polygraph and are led to believe that dishonest answers given during an interview or on a survey can be detected by the machine” (28)], moderate in an anonymous condition [where participants don’t believe their answers will be revealed at all], and greatest in an exposure threat condition in which the experimenter could potentially view participants’ responses. This pattern was clearest for behaviors considered less acceptable for women than men (e.g., masturbation, exposure to hardcore & softcore erotica). Results suggest that some sex differences in self-reported sexual behavior reflect responses influenced by normative expectations for men and women.

The study is “Truth and Consequences: Using the Bogus Pipeline to Examine Sex Differences in Self-Reported Sexuality.”

One of the more interesting study abstracts I've read — "Using the Bogus Pipeline to Examine Sex Differences in Self-Reported Sexuality"

December 2, 2010 By in ideas Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Pretty much anyone who’s seen naive or unsophisticated sex surveys knows that straight men consistently report far more sex than women, which is somewhat improbable given that it takes two people in most circumstances (and more in others, but we’ll leave those be for now). Or, as Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher put it, “Several of these well-established sex differences in sexual behavior are somewhat bewildering. Researchers have questioned the statistical improbability of men having more heterosexual intercourse partners than women, as these numbers should be equivalent for the sexes [. . .]”

They have an answer:

Men report more permissive sexual attitudes and behavior than do women. This experiment tested whether these differences might result from false accommodation to gender norms (distorted reporting consistent with gender stereotypes). Participants completed questionnaires under three conditions. Sex differences in self-reported sexual behavior were negligible in a bogus pipeline condition in which participants believed lying could be detected [meaning that “participants are attached to a non-functioning polygraph and are led to believe that dishonest answers given during an interview or on a survey can be detected by the machine” (28)], moderate in an anonymous condition [where participants don’t believe their answers will be revealed at all], and greatest in an exposure threat condition in which the experimenter could potentially view participants’ responses. This pattern was clearest for behaviors considered less acceptable for women than men (e.g., masturbation, exposure to hardcore & softcore erotica). Results suggest that some sex differences in self-reported sexual behavior reflect responses influenced by normative expectations for men and women.

The study is “Truth and Consequences: Using the Bogus Pipeline to Examine Sex Differences in Self-Reported Sexuality.”

Sex at Dawn — Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá

July 21, 2010 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 41 Comments

EDIT: This review, from the journal Evolutionary Psychology, is the one I would’ve written if I’d been better read in the field and had more time to read extensively in it. Read the linked review if you really want to understand the problems with Sex at Dawn.

Furthermore, “The Myth of Promiscuity: A review of Lynn Saxon, Sex at Dusk: Lifting the Shiny Wrapping from Sex at Dawn” discusses the (many) problems with Sex at Dawn in a more complete fashion than I did. So if you’re looking for a deeper discussion than the one I can offer, consider Sex at Dusk.

My bottom-line assessment of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality is that the book would never get past peer review because so many of its descriptions of existing research and ideas are wrong or skewed. The book argues that humans are not “naturally” monogamous. That might be true. But Sex at Dawn doesn’t prove it. The data are ambiguous.

The biggest problem with the book starts on page 46, with the chapter “A Closer Look at the Standard Narrative of Human Sexual Revolution.” But there is no standard narrative of human sexual revolution: there are a wide array of people who have made inferences about the evolutionary basis of sexuality, but their narratives aren’t consistent and new papers and ideas constantly jostle or replace old ones. Ryan and Jethá don’t cite anyone else who claims a “standard” narrative, because to my knowledge no one has, and the standard narrative they cobble together is just that: cobbled together from a variety of sources with a variety of views.

I mentioned the lack of citations as a problem that occurs in their chapter on the standard narrative. It continues throughout the book. On page 293, Ryan and Jethá say that “To avoid the genetic stagnation that would have dragged our ancestors into extinction long ago, males evolved a strong appetite for sexual novelty and a robust aversion to the overly familiar.” But they don’t have any evidence for that. Similarly, they accuse scientists and others of claiming that monogamy is “natural” or inborn and cite, the anthropologist Owen Lovejoy as saying, “The nuclear family and human behavior may have their ultimate origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene” (34). And he’s right: such behaviors may have their origins there. Or they may not have. Good scientists tend to be more tentative than polemicists because scientists recognize the fragility of so much human knowledge.

In Melvin Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood, he writes:

A double standard of sexual restriction is common across cultures; still, most human marriages have been mainly monogamous, owing either to environmental constraint or cultural principle. Modern cultures are monogamous in principle, but both adultery and serial monogamy are common. In at least thirty-seven countries, men express preference for women several years younger than themselves and place more emphasis on appearance, while women prefer men several years older and emphasize status and wealth (41).

The “environmental constraint” is important because it takes a lot of resources to support multiple spouses; this means that most men in most places and most conditions cannot afford to support multiple women. One woman might be able to support or be supported by multiple men, but polyandry is far less common than polygyny, as Konner points out. This is probably as close to accurate as one is likely to get regarding the historical or anthropological record on the subject of polygamy. It also has the advantage of coming from someone who spent his entire career on the subject of childhood development and who is deeply familiar with the vast literature surrounding evolution, anthropology, and childhood.

Ryan and Jethá also have many sections where they ask rhetorical questions or pit themselves against imaginary foes of great power; the page after the Lovejoy quote, they say, “This is what we’re up against. It’s a song that is powerful, concise, self-reinforcing, and playing on the radio all day and all night . . . but still wrong, baby, oh so wrong” (35). Enough with the polemics: if you’re right, show us that you’re right and leave the judgment up tot he reader.

Dan Savage called Sex at Dawn “the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948.” The statement is hyperbolic and unlikely but nonetheless demonstrates the power of the book, especially when America’s most famous sex columnist is pimping it, so to speak.

In addition, Kinsey was at least doing original research by taking and compiling sexual histories. Ryan and Jethá aren’t: they’re rehashing a variety of other people’s research, and in doing so regularly misrepresenting that research. Furthermore, Kinsey was reacting to a much, much different culture than ours today; Sexual Behavior in the Human Male had essentially no real forerunners, while Sex at Dawn is a weak entry to a crowded field of evolutionary biologists and psychologists like Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind), Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (The Woman Who Never Evolved, and David Buss). All three get cited, but out of context, and their deeper arguments are never really engaged. I don’t think it a coincidence that all three are academics.

For another example of imprecision in Sex at Dawn, Ryan and Jethá point out that men are only 10% – 20% larger than women (in polygynous species, the larger the size difference between sexes, the greater the number of sex partners). But that raw size or height difference way underestimates how that size translates to muscle. Consider David Potts’ work:

When fat-free mass is considered, men are 40% heavier (Lassek & Gaulin, 2009; Mayhew & Salm, 1990) and have 60% more total lean muscle mass than women. Men have 80% greater arm muscle mass and 50% more lower body muscle mass (Abe, Kearns, & Fukunaga, 2003). Lassek and Gaulin (2009) note that the sex difference in upper-body muscle mass in humans is similar to the sex difference in fat-free mass in gorillas (Zihlman & MacFarland, 2000), the most sexually dimorphic of all living primates.

These differences in muscularity translate into large differences in strength and speed. Men have about 90% greater upper-body strength, a difference of approximately three standard deviations (Abe et al., 2003; Lassek & Gaulin, 2009). The average man is stronger than 99.9% of women (Lassek & Gaulin, 2009). Men also have about 65% greater lower body strength (Lassek & Gaulin, 2009; Mayhew & Salm, 1990), over 45% higher vertical leap, and over 22% faster sprint times (Mayhew & Salm, 1990).

(That’s from Puts, David, A. “Beauty and the Beast: Mechanisms of Sexual Selection in Humans.” Evolution & Human Behavior 31.3 (2010): 157-75.)

The weird thing is that this information supports their assertion that humans are polygynous but hurts their assertion that early societies were mostly kind and peaceful, which they probably weren’t, per Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization. Both the Potts paper and the Keeley book are the kinds of things that peer reviewers should be apt to point out.

Even when they aren’t simplifying the research others have done or selectively quoting writers without fully engaging in their arguments, Ryan and Jethá are merely poor writers. Take this: “For better or worse, the human female’s naughty bits don’t swell up to five times their normal size and turn bright red just to signal her sexual availability,” which is true in many species of apes. But note how bad this writing is: the sentence starts with a cliche, moves on to a childish description of women more appropriate to 14-year-olds than a real book and that also reinforces the very cultural forces the authors are trying to counteract, and then proceeds to something that has already been stated earlier in the chapter. The writing in much of the book is equally bad, the reasoning sloppy, and the thought underdeveloped. Which isn’t to say the book doesn’t have interesting or useful elements—it does—but those tend to get subsumed by its flaws.

The more I read about humanity, history, and the rhetoric of authenticity, naturalness, human instinct, and the like, the more I think there aren’t such things and the claims about what is “natural” reflect more about the person making the claim than anything about humanity itself. I would say that it’s natural for people to make claims about what is natural, but relatively little else is; circumstances affect so much that it’s hard to perceive many higher order behaviors as anything other than reflecting the bizarre combinations of self and environment.

People simply vary widely in their preferences, and most appear to view whatever society and subculture they grew up in as normal and natural. I posit that it’s not normal or abnormal to be polygamous or monogamous: in some circumstances one might make more sense, and in others the other strategy would. And people are too variable to say one mode is completely correct for all people under all circumstances.

I had actually begun this post before I read Paul Graham’s latest essay, “The Top Idea in Your Mind.” This part especially resonated:

I’ve found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I’ve already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done. [3]

To really catalog everything that’s wrong with Sex at Dawn, I’d have to go back through at least five or six books (and probably more) and at least a dozen papers. It would take me all day. Why spend that much time on a book that’s not very good? A while ago I promised myself that I wasn’t going to write many more posts on books that are bad in a generic way that doesn’t do anything special because I’m usually not spending my time in an optimal way. And reading Sex at Dawn is unlikely to be an optimal use of your time.

Paging Captain Obvious regarding Why Women Have Sex

April 29, 2010 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

Paging Captain Obvious:

Women also have specialized emotional defenses that protect them from being deceived. Research from the Buss Lab shows that women become extremely angry and upset when they discover that men have deceived them about the depth of their feelings in order to have sex. These emotions cause women to etch those deceptive episodes in memory, attend more closely in the future to possible instances of deception, and ultimately avoid future occurrences of deception.

In other words, women get mad when men lie to them. I wonder if men feel the same. Without a research study, I wouldn’t want to guess. (And what are these “specialized emotional defenses,” and how can they be biologically imparted?)

The quote is from David Buss and Cindy Meston’s Why Women Have Sex, an occasionally useful and often frustrating book that I describe in further detail at the link.

EDIT May 6 2010: Still, as Dawkins and Krebs observe in Behavioural Ecology on “Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation?”, “Whenever there is any form of assessment, for example in combat, courtship or between parents and offspring, bluff, exaggeration and deceit might be profitable strategies.” But in humans, this is obviously not a purely male or female strategy.

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