Randall Munroe took two minutes to answer Ben Stein's (and by extension The American Spectator's) fatuously privileging question regarding the arrest of IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn: "People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes?"

On a whim, I just did a little research, and couldn’t believe what I found.  Guess who holds an economics degree?

Paul Bernardo.

For those not familiar with the case, Bernardo is one of the nastiest serial killers in history. He and his wife drugged, raped, and tortured to death a number of schoolgirls in the late 80’s and early 90’s. The story is the stuff of nightmares.

Source: xkcd blog

To be fair, Bernardo may not have been a "true" economist -- when he began murdering his victims he was only majoring in economics.  So Stein and his fellow rape apologists at the Spectator could probably say "yes, but what true Scotsman economist has been convicted?"

The flip answer would be that James Urbaniak was able to quickly come up with a list of professional, public economists who've been convicted of violent sex crimes.

The better answer to Stein's logic (and a more chilling answer in most ways) would be to ask the conceptually identical question "how many air force base commanders in major NATO countries have been convicted of violent sex crimes?"

I'd just add that my question isn't just about Stein's classic-Republican "seen any elephants*" logical fallacy.  It turns out that not only were they both serial rapist/murderers, Paul Bernardo and former CFB Trenton Base Commander Russell Williams may have been acquaintances in college but they may have taken the same economics classes.

* Recall jokes of the form "Q: Bobby, why are you tearing up strips of paper?" "A: To keep the elephants out of the pantry?"  "Q: How do you know that keeps elephants away?"  "A: Seen any elephants

SlightlyMetaphysical of Asexual curiosities has had enough of a certain near-universal gender stereotype. Even better, he beautifully illustrates how men are socially constructed as the obligate, reflexively sexual “sex class.” Check it out.

“Isn’t it annoying how men are really sex-obsessed?”
“Not all men are sex-obsessed. If you thought about it for a moment, you’d realise that a lot of the men you know aren’t.”
“Give me an example.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, you don’t count. You’re asexual.”

“I think everyone would secretly do anything for sex, they’re just hiding it.”
“Again, not true. I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, but you don’t count. You’re asexual.”

So what’s with this idea that, because I’m asexual, I’m outside of the normal spectrum of sexuality? I’m statistically written off? I think partly, it’s an example of how people construct a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy in their stereotypes, especially of gender. They think that, for example, men like sex, and so think of men who like sex as being most typically men, and then, when they think of the people who they know who are typically male, surprise surprise, they all like sex.

He said it here.

Got that? The notion of men as the sex class is so entrenched that men who don’t fit the profile aren’t even permitted in the data set! It’s like… well, we wanted to do a sexual-interest profile of men. But since including them always screw up our results we discard asexuals before we do our analysis.

I’ll go him one better! In the face of such stereotypes about men, men with low or no libido are going to be extremely unlikely to disclose their actual preferences… and actually rather likely to pretend otherwise. Either way they have very little incentive to buck the stereotype.

And with perfect timing as a follow-up to this post Via Alex of Neatorama, Time Magazine has an article by Michiko Toyama about Japanese “elder porn”

Besides his glowing complexion, Shigeo Tokuda looks like any other 74-year-old man in Japan. Despite suffering a heart attack three years

ago, the lifelong salaryman now feels healthier, and lives happily with his wife and a daughter in downtown Tokyo. He is, of course, more physically active than most retirees, but that’s because he’s kept his part-time job — as a porn star.

...

Tokuda is rare among Japanese porn stars in that his name has become a brand. The Shigeo Tokuda series he’s just completed portray him as a tactful elderly gentleman who instructs women of different ages in the erotic arts, and he boasts a body of work far more impressive than most actors in their prime.

Read article here.

As A from France put in in comments on that previous post, “We feel exactly the same as we ever did but people judge us from our outward appearances, or our birth certificates.” It’s easy to mock John Derbyshire’s claim that women are already “over the hill” after puberty but if he’d said instead that men and women are over the hill considerably later — say 65, or 75, or so how many people would have mocked him then?