Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

What Ezra Klein said

When your whole romantic identity — when your gender identity, “the manhood thing” — is based on your ability to buy expensive dinners for the girlfriend you never see, something has gone terribly wrong. And it’s gone terribly wrong for you.

Read the quote in context here.

The topic was some erstwhile investment banker in the D.C. area who’s no longer high-rolling and therefore evidently no longer feels worthy and therefore no longer feels attractive.

He’s been seeing someone in New York City and where he once routinely flew up to visit her he now takes the legendary $5 Chinese bus up to visit her when he can afford it.

Klein says “the article is less funny than sad, and it gets to that line that those horrible, man-hating feminists always use: The patriarchy sucks for guys, too.”

And it’s written all over the guy himself — according to the WaPo article Klein quotes

“It’s definitely putting stress on our relationship,” he said recently, sitting in an Old Town cafe. “It comes back to this whole manhood thing. Like, can you be the provider, not just for yourself but for others?”

Source

You see that effect in a lot of guys: not just thinking that being “worthy” is the key to “getting” women but actually taking themselves out of consideration when they don’t see themselves as worthy enough to “deserve” a partner. Putting yourself in because you think money makes you attractive, and taking yourself out because you think not having it makes you unattractive, is kind of leaving, you know, actual women’s opinions about whether or not they think you’re attractive out of the equation. Which is pretty self-destructive but also awfully, well, patriarchal.

I don’t think there’s a patriarchy in the “Elders of Zion / Trilateral Commission” conspiracy sense where there are a bunch of guys all running a giant scam and if we could just get to them (and their minions, of course, all conspiracies have minions, right?) the whole thing would go away.

But I do think there’s large, interlinked set of behaviors and, especially, interpretations that amount to the same thing… only because there’s no central office it’s harder to subvert.

Klein’s subject certainly sounds caught up in all that. And yeah, to that extent patriarchy really is hurting him. It’s self-inflicted hurt but still hurt.

On the other hand consider his girlfriend who, since she’s still seeing him even though he rides the bus, must have, you know, loved him or something even though he thought he’d just bought her with all that money. And now that he doesn’t have money? They’re still together right? Sort of. Maybe. But because he feels all unmanned there’s all this stress on their relationship.

She’s doubly screwed in the sense that here this guy was pulling down what sounds like major bucks (or at least major for one’s mid-20s) and since he squandered it on show, now that flush times are over he not only won’t see her as often as perhaps either of them would like to see each other, he can’t.

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Semi-related aside: There’s a larger point to this, by the way, that I might need to wrestle with a bit. I’m… pretty sure most women don’t see men mostly as “walking wallets” but that’s how a lot of men are indoctrinated to think women see them. I’m similarly sure most men don’t see women mainly as “life support for pussies” but that’s how women are indoctrinated to think men see them. Not sure I have anything else to say about that right now but I think a lot of the resulting assumptions interfere with both inter-gender communication and personal decision making.

When you were mostly offline for a week it’s tough wanting to call attention to cool, cool posts that everyone else might already think of as, well, last week’s news. But they’re big-deal posts and somebody besides me might have missed them the first time, so…

Amanda Marcotte, writing at RHRealityCheck.org wrote about the paradigm-ridden nature of efforts to “deal” with women’s “low libidos.”

It’s an indicator of how male-dominated our society is that the fact that women have diminishing libidos and don’t seem to care that much about it is treated as the problem, when in fact it’s merely the symptom of a larger problem—that women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies.  If we treated the actual problems that women face, higher libidos would be the happy result, I’m sure.  But in order to do that, we’d have to treat male domination like a problem to be solved, and since few people really want to do that, instead we’re left with articles that note women’s lack of libido, but carefully resist asking why.

Read the quote in context here.

Another consequence of being off line so much last week is that I can no longer find a cool political/policy-wonk post I read… too long ago to find again evidently… by, I thought, food blogger and health-care policy wonk Ezra Klein. The insight there, though, was that a heck of a lot of increases in national healthcare costs are related to keeping us alive in the face of the really unhealthy diets, sedentary lifestyles, and environmental impacts brought about largely by… other national agricultural, transportation, and environmental policies. We might not be happy campers if we just stopped getting 40% of our calories from corn syrup and soybean oil, if we had to walk to a bus stop instead of drive a car, or if we had to stop jagging off with phthalate-ridden “novelty items”... but whether or not we were wiser we’d be both healthier and wealthier: finding money for better medicine so we can keep making money making ourselves sicker doesn’t make sense. On any level.

Amanda’s saying the same thing: finding “cures” for “low libido” so that we can maintain the conditions that suppress libido doesn’t make any sense either. On any level.

You know, I spend a lot of time dumping on pop science reporting and, often, on pop science itself. I particularly spend a lot of time dumping on science that, in Venn Diagram terms anyway, falls into the category of evolutionary science. At a moment in time where seemingly increasing numbers of even educated citizens, of America and elsewhere, seem to be questioning fundamental ideas in science such as, well, evolution I want to take a moment to be clear — really, really clear — that I think science is cool and that the theory of evolution, like the germ theory of disease, or the theory of relativity, are overwhelmingly useful predictive tools and therefore instances of science at its best.

I think the problem with EP/sociobiology isn’t that there’s no theory behind it. For one thing there is! It’s certainly the case that some behaviors are genetically determined (consider sneezing or yawning) and very likely that other, more sophisticated behaviors are influenced by the expression of specifically-selected genes (consider, I dunno, maybe jealousy.)

Instead the problem is two-fold:

First, there’s the question of how much effect genes have. Take something as fundamental as sneezing, for instance. Something goes up your nose you’re going to sneeze, right? No problem. But then consider how intensely socialization affects how we sneeze and you have to start asking other questions. (A classic instance would be the difference between how “manly men” and “girly women” tend to exaggerate or suppress their sneezes.) So you can say sure, genes affect behavior but… you’re probably not going to see many people claiming that the way girly girls vs. macho boys sneeze is genetically determined.

Second part: well, you might find people who claim the difference in sneezes isn’t specifically determined… and then they’ll go to sometimes elaborate lengths to construct a case where, no, actually it was primitive men’s job to drive away predators and women’s jobs to… um… hide in a corner with the babies and be really quiet or something… and so it makes perfect sense that men sneeze loudly and women suppress… oh, and women select men based on the loudness of their sneezes and men on the demureness of women’s. (Sound far fetched? It’s been claimed men evolved snorning to scare away predators.)

The problem with claims of type #2, which is the main ones that get publicized by pop-EP types, is that a) many women don’t swallow their sneezes and some men do, b) there’s no evidence that sneezing scares rather than, say, attracts archaic predators, c) that women are particularly impressed by loud sneezing or men by the reverse, d) that even if there were such effects that they were significant enough to survival on the margins that they’d be positively selected for. Oh, and most important would be e) that the tools of both genetic analysis and behavioral observation were sophisticated enough to make such specific determinations that behavior X is founded in genetics, that it’s specifically selected for, that the observation supports the hypothesis, and that the hypothesized characteristic is the most likely reason the observed behavior would evolve… if it was evolved and not just learned… oh yeah, and that it’s the result of sexual selection (men and women select each other for it rather than, say, hyenas didn’t eat everybody who did anything else.)

And the further problem with item #2 is that the analytical tools at EP researcher’s disposal, and the sample sizes they almost invariably have to rely on, just don’t have the granularity to support the conclusions they draw.

So. Bottom line is that there’s actually plenty of good evolutionary behavior research going on, and even good sociobiology. And some day it’s entirely possible that those sciences will become sophisticated enough to separate cultural noise from genetic expression to make positive assertions about evolved human behavior as sophisticated as determining that, no, really, exaggeration or suppression of sneezing is genetically determined.

They’re just not there yet, they’re nowhere near that yet, and they’re probably not going to get near there till a whole lot more basic research is completed… by real, lower-case ep evolutionary scientists.

In other words, my objections aren’t about science, and definitely not about evolutionary theory. Not at all, at all. Science is cool. My issue is that it’s even cooler when you actually do it instead of just dressing up what might as well be Details Magazine or Cosmo articles with fMRI machines, precision that exceeds observational granularity, and rigorous statistics applied to data sets too small to distinguish results from background noise.

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Incidentally at least from my perspective the reason people on our side of the frequent arguments about upper-case EP pop Evolutionary Psychology and sociobiology don’t want to use those tools is that they’re bogus to the point that proponents might as well be making it up from old episodes of Gilligan’s Island. We could do that. And occasionally people on our side do. But since we’re actually trying to buck traditions instead of reinforce them (as EP strongly tends to do) it’d be a perpetually uphill battle. When you’re trying to change age-old assumptions, especially ones that just aren’t relevant in contemporary circumstances, there’s sort of by-definition not a lot of ancient myths and legends we can tie our wagons to.

Britni Danielle of Oh My God, That Britni’s Shameless brings up a cool point about assumptions about transsexuals and gender.

While transwomen have a harder time passing in society, transmen oftentimes have a slightly easier social transition. Many find refuge in the lesbian community, where butch women are accepted and celebrated, and many can fly under the radar that way. And in public, many transmen are simply mistaken for young boys, as opposed to transwomen who oftentimes look like a “man in a dress” during their transition. This may also to contribute to older studies that had found that for every 3 transwoman, there was one transman. For a long time, transmen could choose to remain being seen as butch lesbians and were therefore not as obvious and desperate to transition as many transwomen were. Now that being transgender is becoming more socially acceptable, the number of transmen is increasing greatly and slowly catching up to the prevalence of transwomen. 

Read the quote in context here.

Sometimes it’s not that gender gaps exist, it’s that our assumptions about gaps make it easier to ignore people who don’t fit them. Asexual men? Naw man! 90% of men masturbate/look-at-porn/whatever and the other 10% are liars. Sexually dominant women? Naw man! I paid for a night with a “femdom” and she was hawt! Transmen? Naw man, that’s just another one-a-them bull dykes.

Image heavily modified from Scott Meyer’s excellent (hope he doesn’t sue) and particularly-appropriate-for-the-occasion “Basic Instructions” comic.

This post is about detecting the differences in levels of attraction between individuals who’ve just met. The image above isn’t just a shameless cut-out from a Scott Meyer comic, it illustrates a point I’ll get to further down. So take a good look and read on.

Via ResearchBlogging, a post at the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest Blog says

[U]sing footage of couples on speed-dates… [f]ifty-four students observed dozens of 10-, 20- or 30-second clips of real speed dating interactions and attempted to say in each case whether each person was romantically interested in the other.

The researchers had access to the daters’ real decisions about whether they were interested in any of their speed dates, and were able to compare these with the students’ judgements.

The students performed more accurately than would be expected had they simply been guessing. They judged the interest of the male daters with 61 per cent accuracy and the female daters with 58 per cent accuracy. Their accuracy was unaffected by the length of each clip, but was higher when the clip was taken from the middle or the end of a dating interaction. Students currently in a romantic relationship outperformed those who weren’t.

Read the quote in context here.

That’s actually pretty interesting, leaving aside the evident heteronormativity of the research anyway. I’m guessing we’ve all been in that sort of situation where we see two people interacting and it’s almost instantly obvious that they’re interested in each other. And yet even days or weeks later you can find each soliloquizing about the other, wondering whether the other even remembers. Same, of course, for less optimal situations where it’s clear one’s interested and the other’s not. And it’s cool to find out people can tell in as little as 10 seconds.

Or, sort of.

Approximately 60% accuracy isn’t random at all, but 60% accuracy also makes one pretty darn glad we don’t go in so much for yentas and other forms of mandatory matchmakers any more.

Sadly the study, by Skylar S. Place of Indiana University and colleagues... or perhaps just the report on the study (I can’t tell since firewalled research papers are prohibitively expensive to ordinary shmoes like me)... falls down when it comes to analysis. (Emphasis mine.)

The fact the students were less accurate when judging the romantic interest of females compared with males was just as the researchers had predicted. Place’s team said it made sense for women to “behave more covertly and ambiguously” because there is more at stake for them in making a potential mating choice. By hiding their romantic interest, the researchers argued, women are able to give themselves more time to evaluate a potential partner before revealing their feelings.

Sooo you’re probably expecting me to unload here about how if one is going to do science trying to justify stereotypes it’s a bit of a stretch to assume men don’t have feelings, or reasons to hide them, when they’re meeting someone for the first time. Or that those reasons would be better than women’s reasons for hiding theirs. Or you might expect me to grumble about the assumption that, whatever some imaginary “state of nature” might have been, contemporary western men’s investment in long-term partnerships is really significantly less than women’s?

You might expect me to scowl textually at descriptive words like “covert” and “ambiguous” and other terms that stereotypically imply disingenuousness or perfidy in women and, by implication, honesty and forthrightness in men.

You might expect me to foghorn on about how the slight differences could be attributed to a no-sex class reticence on the part of women, or, even better, hint that maybe because we’re all predisposed to the no-sex class paradigm where it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women to show sexual interest that the research subjects were predisposed to judge less subtle signs of interest as disinterest.

Eh. You probably were expecting me to say something just like that. Which is kind of cool because it would mean you’re starting to get it and so I don’t have to say it so much! :-)

Nah.

Instead I just wanted to see if you noticed the difference in the background color in that comic up top. Perfectly obvious eh? Wha…? Not so obvious? But I’d predicted based on theory that you’d have noticed that the background color on the left was 58% saturated and the background color on the right was 61% saturated! Go look again, because while I might have had other, credible things to say about the study I was going to base my analysis of my results on the fact that a 58% to 61% difference, though measurable, was really really significant! No?

But… but… but… the woman’s on the fifty-eight percent side! Doesn’t that make a huge difference now? And the man’s on the sixty-one percent side? Now can you see?

Gee, I guess “measurable difference” and “significant difference” don’t mean exactly the same thing.

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My point here isn’t to knock the basic research. It really is cool that people can tell, with somewhat better than random frequency, when two individuals are interested in each other based on just a few seconds of observation. And it would be really cool, actually, to conduct a study where accuracy was judged over time… because I’d be curious to know whether accuracy tended to decline during longer observation intervals. (I’d be inclined to guess yes because observers would tend to start overthinking and otherwise bringing in more complex culture-based analysis rather than pure reflex body-language judgment.)

But to conduct the experiment in order to confirm a hypothesis that women are harder to read than men because ? And get just a couple of percentage points difference overall? I probably wouldn’t brag about that.

Well, better late than never. I think this is the latest HNT I’ve posted, but several people emailed to see if everything was ok. Which is amazingly kind. (Yes, everything’s ok — I’m concerned, and very distracted, but not alarmed.)

Anyway, I had another pair of pants, purchased the same day in the same store, that tore just like this pair did. Only they tore maybe a year ago… just in time for a previous HNT! Thus history repeats itself.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

More barking prudish libertinism: Idle question based on hearing, just the other day, that such and such couple thought about naming their child Margaret because they’d had margaritas just, um, before the child was conceived. It was a moot point since they wound up having a boy. And maybe I’m a little trigger-y right now what with having a remote but beloved relative grappling with the reality of a partner who’s so alcoholic anti-seizure medication is required before detox can begin. But…

...doesn’t it seem that an awful lot of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies happen after one or both parties have had three or more drinks?

This is not, fortunately, an issue with the case with the relative I keep vaguely referencing. Nor am I suggesting that all failures of contraception, or failures to employ contraception, are the result of intoxication. Nor am I even suggesting that just because intoxication automatically equals impaired judgment it automatically equals irresponsibility. I’m just… wondering why, with all the crocodile tears of concern about “emotional damage” and “psychological damage” and “social damage” from “premarital” sex, or from contraception, or from abortion, or the “threat to civilization as we know it” of just plain old recognizing men and women and anyone in between as equal and autonomous human beings, we’re so sanguine about all the… interesting… consequences of alcohol consumption.

Long as I’m wearing the full-on prudish libertine hat, who, exactly should we be warning not to drink if we’re concerned about sexual assault? Because while there’s certainly evidence that alcohol can make potential victims more vulnerable to sexual assault but… but… there’s even more evidence that alcohol makes potential perpetrators waaaaaaay more likely to, well, perpetrate sexual assault!

And yet we tell women to stay away from bars. We tell women to stay away from parties where alcohol is served. We warn women to call cabs instead of walking home alone from clubs.

Because… what? Men in bars, at parties, and outside clubs are all sober, confident stalwarts sipping ginger ale and herb teas waiting for an opportunity to strike? Um, yeah, that happens but I don’t think it happens a lot.

See, the problem with making gendered men the standard against which all humanity is measured is that we don’t consider what policies might alter men’s behavior. And the problem with accepting the anti-feminist ideal of gendered men as ravening, uncontrollable, bestial, irresponsible, incapable, juvenile, undisciplined, dick-following, fart-lighting, dangerous (but, for some reason, also inherently superior?!?!?!) who’ll fuck anything that moves… or just moved recently… is that we don’t consider what policies might, y’know, chill us out a bit.

No, instead it’s all “ooo, them ladies orta watch what they drink or they’ll get what’s coming to them for not being more careful.”

Yeah, how’s that been working for, oh, the last 3,000 years? Not so great?

I don’t have numbers at hand but I think there’s evidence that where women are persuaded to reduce alcohol consumption and/or otherwise drink “responsibly” rates of sexual assault drop by about 10%. And I don’t have numbers at hand because as far as I know there aren’t any but I’ll give you a nickle if persuading men to reduce alcohol and/or otherwise drink “responsibly” rates of sexual assault would drop by, um, a lot more. Not 100% and maybe not 80% but, yeah, more than 60% so…

Photo by Flickr user mazzle278. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hi, my name is figleaf and I am not an alcoholic.

However, recently a member of my extended family has moved to the area. And while that member isn’t an alcoholic, that member’s new partner... in a relationship that’s just far enough along to be too hard to for extended family member to just turn away from… turns out to be very, very, very much a verging-on-final-stage alcoholic.

This is turns out to be…

a) everything I’ve always heard even though a lot of what you hear about sounds incredible, hard to believe, stupid, and wrong, and
b) distracting, emotionally draining, time consuming, and
c) a serious challenge to my ideals about treating every human being on the level of a human being
d) even if the alcoholic partner-in-law-in-law-in-common-law sincerely, even desperately seems to want to dry out

Even though I don’t have the enzymes to properly metabolize alcohol, and even though I come from a long, long line of teetotaler temperance-leaguers, I’m not particularly concerned about moderate alcohol consumption. Heck, I used to work in bars. I’ve had perfectly pleasant relationships, including sexual relationships, with people who drank — some of whom drank heavily. But…

But…

But…

Wow, for being legal that stuff sure is astonishingly, deeply, lastingly, damagingly psychotropic. Both directly as in

The brain maintains neurochemical balance through inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters. The main inhibitory neurotransmitter is gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which acts through the GABA-alpha (GABA-A) neuroreceptor. One of the major excitatory neurotransmitters is glutamate, which acts through the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) neuroreceptor.

Alcohol enhances the effect of GABA on GABA-A neuroreceptors, resulting in decreased overall brain excitability. Chronic exposure to alcohol results in a compensatory decrease of GABA-A neuroreceptor response to GABA, evidenced by increasing tolerance of the effects of alcohol.

Alcohol inhibits NMDA neuroreceptors, and chronic alcohol exposure results in up-regulation of these receptors. Abrupt cessation of alcohol exposure results in brain hyperexcitability, because receptors previously inhibited by alcohol are no longer inhibited. Brain hyperexcitability manifests clinically as anxiety, irritability, agitation, and tremors. Severe manifestations include alcohol withdrawal seizures and delirium tremens.

Source: American Academy of Family Physicians

...and by reference as measured by the startling conniptions partners, friends, family members, and sometimes even random strangers can wind up tangled up in the alcohol-user’s problems.

Meanwhile adults can go to prison for smoking pot? A substance, by the way, I also stopped consuming when I turned 21. Meanwhile adults can go to prison for selling (or, but only very rarely, buying) sex. But drinking? Meanwhile questions about eight years with a dry… or possibly wet drunk President, and eight years with a Vice-President who evidently gets so hammered while “hunting” penned animals he can’t tell a 12 ounce quail from a 72-year-old companion turns out not to be “invasions of personal privacy?” What. Ever.

Oh yeah, and since this is at least nominally a blog about sex, relationships, gender, and politics, alcohol seems to have some fascinating properties with regards to, on the one hand, having sex when one otherwise wouldn’t or shouldn’t, and, on the other, being incapable of becoming sexually aroused, when one would very much enjoy it. (And no, I don’t know if that’s the case in the aforementioned situation. I’ve just talked to people in the past who’ve had to deal with it and I thought I’d mention it here.)

$%@!##

Matthew Yglesias says

But consider. Milk is about a small businessman who goes into politics and takes a stand against firing people for actions irrelevant to their job; the implicit subtheme is that couples who love each other should get married. Naturally, conservatives hate it.

He said it here.

Kind of says it all. He contrasts ‘winger distain for Milk with their equally incoherent enthusiasm for the non-violence-affirming, anti-immigration-mocking, racism-mocking, you-kids-get-off-my-lawn-mocking let-the-police-handle-it endorsing Gran Torrino. Go figure.