The editors at Big Think say something we all know, endlessly, over and over, because... well, first here's the story, arbitrarily truncated because the rest really doesn't matter

What's the Latest Development? The locations of the vagina, cervix and female nipples that correspond to the brain's cortex have been mapped for the first time. The study confirms that there is a difference between stimulating the vagina and the clitoris and that there is a direct neurological link ...

Source: Big Think

Yeah! Whee! Lady parts! We all just love sticking probes in women's ladybusinesses.  "For science" of course.

Extra credit for tossing in the nipple stimulation!

(I'm unable to confirm whether they're now hoping to get additional funding to measure the cortical reaction to researchers shaking their faces between the subject's breasts and going wooba-wooba-wooba-wooba.)

You know why this irritates me beyond all fucking belief?

Because, hello, when was the last time anybody did a study of fucking male orgasms? When was the last time anybody did a cortical assay of men's secondary erogenous zones?

Because, great bactrian camel humps!  Isn't anybody curious about male sexual response beyond "Oh men?  They just stick it in a hole and wiggle, case closed.  Now back to the "mysteries" of the pussy?"

You wanna know something gang?  We know roughly 130 times more about women's orgasms, women's sexual response, women's arousal patterns, women's SES/SIS interactions in the Dual Control Model of Sexual Response model, the maps of women's erogenous zones, women's g-spots, p-spots, a-spots, plus vaginal depth, width, lubrication, relative humidity, and fucking barometric pressure than we do about men.

Because for some crying-out-loud reason (coughRule #1cough, cough women as the "no-sex" classcough) we have to study women's responses over, and over, and over, and over because the very idea of women's sexual responsiveness is inconceivable! Intolerable!

Oh, that plus women are things and we study the crap out of things.  Men, though, even if anybody gave a crap about dime-a-dozen, here's-some-cold-cream-not-go-in-the-other-room-and-take-care-of-that-son men's cortical locations, are human beings.  And consequently studying us men would require, I dunno, human subject research determinations or something.  So nobody bothers.

So.  Anyway.  Two really, really big objections here.

1) It's not that women's sexual response isn't mysterious, it's that men's are no less mysterious.

2) It's not that men's sexual response is mysterious, it's that women's sexuality isn't either.

Men and women aren't identical.  But we're not so different that the unbelievable imbalance in research is warranted.

Update: One possibility that doesn't change my social critique at all: it's actually possible that men's sexual response, erogenous zones, etc., are academically as thoroughly researched as women's... but it's just never reported on blogs or in the press.

Note: Satoshi Kanazawa used the generic catchphrase "black" in the post I'm about to discuss.  Since it's not clear from his context whether his racism was directed at people of African, or African-American origin, or even just anyone with skin he determines to be darkly pigmented, in this particular I'm just going to use his terminology and say "black."

Usually when anybody types the words "Satoshi Kanazawa" my eyes start to glaze over. For obvious reasons. When I see him he's cited approvingly my blood also boils, but that's been happening less and less, so mostly when I see him referenced I just move on.

But last he became so extreme that even Psychology Today (the Cosmopolitan Magazine of science journalism) woke up enough to yank one of his posts. (After altering the title from Kanazawa's original "Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" to "Why Black Women Are Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" because that made it better.)

And now it sounds like (finally!) his employers at the London School of Economics might have been moved to action -- if not for his overt racism, sexism, and homophobia then at least for his really capricious methodology.

So anyway, there having been such an awesome uproar this time I had to take a look. And... yeah, he's pretty special that guy.

You sort of have to admire his serenely confident but argumentatively gratuitous shot that while “black women are on average much heavier than non-black women” that’s not why black women are uglier. Oh no, he's scientifically controlled for that so they're still just ugly even when you take into account that they're fat.

Next he blithly asserts that blacks on average are stupider (have lower intelligence) than all non-blacks… but that’s not why, quoth he, black women are uglier. Oh no, because, see, even though black men are just as stupid as black women they’re still significantly more attractive than non-black men. (Or, one supposes from his amended version, black men are rated more attractive. Which I guess is supposed to be less racist.)

But wait! Maybe they’re not gratuitous structural arguments: he may have brought them up by way of eliminating the factors most favored by his superficial racist stereotypes to get to his more fundamental ones: “well, you’d think black women were uglier because blacks are fatter and stupider but no, even filtering out their fatness and stupidity black women are still ugly.

Oh, and then there's this lovely bit!

[B]ecause they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

He says that black male attractiveness eliminates as a reason the “fact” that since blacks “have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, blacks have more mutations in their genomes than other races.” And, you see, purer races prefer lower “mutation loads.” But once again, despite those preferences (and, don’t forget, men’s seed-spreading willingness to screw anything that moves… er… to make lower genetic “investments”) and all those icky mutations make black men “if anything, more attractive.”

(Speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that were Kanazawa of black heritage he'd instead have have concluded not that rather than having more “mutations” blacks have robust genetic diversity, which instead would be superior to those icky “inbred” races with their “evolved” aversion to replenishing their degenerate gene pools. He could even use same "objective" statistics to back back up that claim! But I digress.)

(Also speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that black people have more “mutations” because, as you say Rob, “black” is only a race in the sense that “black” people have darker skin, with the result that while “black” people descended from populations recently indigenous to north Africa, south Africa, central, east, and west Frica, south Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, parts of India, and so on are, yeah, a $@^%@ of a lot “older” and racially “mutated” since some of them are likely more genetically similar to what ever relatively genetic monoculture Mr. Kanazawa calls homeland than they are to each other. But I digress again...)

But nope, nope. Instead he says he's factored that out too: “mutations” don’t make black women uglier either. In fact, says he,

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently.

Yup, that’s probably the only other thing that could possibly explain the difference. (If he'd said they had less oxytocin we could all go home.)

It’s also the point at which he stops being a racist asshole using raw statistics and becomes a… free-wheeling racist homophobe "evolutionary psychologist" of the sort that gives evolutionary psychology a really bad name.*

See testosterone, Kanazawa believes, makes everybody look more manly. And black women have more testosterone. Which makes them look more manly. And it's looking manly that makes them ugly.

And so by inference that makes anyone who’s attracted to black women Teh Gay Takei. And, as we all know, Teh Takei is an evolutionary dead end. So all right-minded, offspring-maximizing men recognize that black women are ugly: QED.

And does he present any graphs or charts to back up these assertions? No. Does he bring up any counterarguments? Not at all. Does he cite any prior research? Nope. Does he cite anyone else's research? Not that either.  And does he bring up any other possible reasons why black women might be singled out as less attractive?  Not a bit.  Did he even stop check his arithmetic to make sure that, you know, the data he was using says what he wanted it to?  Evidently not(!)

Nope, nearly all the preceding crap is just Kanazawa being an unencumbered racist doing what racists are really good at doing -- selectively using the tools of a still-emerging field of science to advance his foregone conclusions. He happens to use evolutionary psychology much the way early 20th-Century racists and classists used Darwin to advance "social Darwinism," the way Dick Army, Paul Ryan, and Brian Caplan use economics to advance their defense of the status quo, the same way Dinesh D'Souza and Charles Murray use statistics to defend segregation, and just the same way Donna M. Hughes uses feminism as sheeps clothing for her neoconservatism.

With any luck, though, this time next year Kanazawa will be publishing from The Spearhead or National Vanguard and working lecturing at Bob Jones University or Liberty University. Which, his nominal Darwinism notwithstanding, should welcome him with open arms.

* I.e. he starts pulling shit out of his ass and saying "it must be evolved because it gives me such a woodie" and leaving it at that. Evolutionary psychology itself isn't objectionable in principle -- it would be hard to argue that nothing about human behavior has been influenced by natural selection. And most practitioners are actually fairly moderate people and many of them are outright Unitarian, Birkenstock-wearing, old-school liberals. And as far as I know none of them actually like, let alone admire Satoshi Kanazawa. But! Up till now he's been the closest thing to a Carl Sagan EP has had. And... yeah... how's that been working?

Via Geek Feminism and Restructure!, it turns out there might be something else going on besides "girls suck at math" that keeps more women out of, well, math.

Skeptics might wonder if some of the [gender] differences [in engagement] among students relate to how well the students know the material. The researchers checked for that and found that, across sections, women outperformed men on grades. So the data point to women losing confidence with male instructors — even if female students know the material as well as or better than their male counterparts.

Link: Inoculation Against Stereotype (Inside Higher Ed)

Source: Geek Feminism Blog

Yes, the plural of lots of anecdotes still isn't data, but my observation in engineering, tech, math, and hard sciences -- in academia and even more so in industry -- has been that the biggest obstacle for women trying to get and do their work hasn't been their ability to do the actual work.

Incidentally, Penelope Trunk, who hasn't gotten the memo, still thinks it's all about brain differences.

One fundamental difference between the male and female brain is gray matter. And University of California at Irvine released solid data to explain why men are good at math.

“Evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology who led the study.

“In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of—or connections between—these processing centers.”

Source: Brazen Careerist

Not to sound all "don't have enough white matter to do interprocessing" or anything but gray matter is what we do math with, and if there are such vast differences between men's and women's white and gray matter then how is it possible that the average woman is capable of math as the average man?

Since that doesn't make any sense it must mean either that most men totally waste 5.5x of their 6.5x advantage over women in math-a-licious gray matter or... maybe something else is going on.

Based on the graceless quality and tone of the "congratulations" a friend of mine just got from her department head after receiving the highest NSF score anyone in her hard-sciences department has gotten in years I think it might be "something else."

The something else, incidentally, might be the worthiness trap conviction men have (doesn't matter if it's socialized or "genetic") that if they don't do better than women (let alone other men) then they'll never get sex.

You can't discount the effectiveness of that conviction, incidentally, or the grown-man-panic drive it can generate when a man's afraid he's going to be shown up by a woman.  Thank Rule #2 of the bogus  Two Rules of Desire for this -- if we're convinced women can't find us handsome and we're afraid they won't find us handy we imagine we're screwed... or more precisely not screwed!

Meanwhile women's worries about never getting sex run along pretty different lines (again whether it's socialized or genetic is kind of irrelevant.)

No one's asked me so far, but if someone did I'd say the difference in "...or I'll never get sex" accounts for far more of the differences in outcomes Trunk and others see in science, in sales, and in startups than gray matter ratios or "girls suck at math."

According to Annie Scudder, one of the items in a current Time magazine roundup of "things you didn't know about sex addiction" would be...

An orgasm a day is considered troublesome: The article explains, "seven orgasms a week (either alone or with someone) is still considered by many experts to be a threshold for possible disorder."

Source: Très Sugar

While this is a very big improvement on the Victorian belief that men could develop terminal and/or mental illness with "as many as" ten ejaculations a year, it's still a pretty ridiculous threshhold. 

I'm not saying, at all, that all people should have libidios.  Roughly 1% of adult men and women are straight-up asexual so no doubt 1% of sex "rehab" counselors are asexual as well.  (Same with Time Magazine reporters, editors, and fact checkers, who seemed a little more skeptical of the claim.)  Substantial numbers of other men and women have modest libidos, and numerous others either neglect or avoid erotic interest, and the libidos of others may be episodic or circumstantial where said circumstances are not common.  So, again, I don't expect all of them to have average to above average libidos.

But do none of them?

Actually, if I may be fair for just a moment, the very fact that people's libidos vary enormously both from each other and even within individuals over time suggests that "seven orgasms a week" might be a sign of "addiction" in an individual who's natural libido cycle would ordinarily be substantially lower.  In other words as with other silly-sounding but perfectly legitimate psychiatric disorders, a guideline of once per day can be an indication, but not an automatic diagnosis. If someone's libido interferes with their normal daily functions either directly or through obsession or anxiety about it then treatment might be beneficial.  Or, as the American Psychiatric Association's proposal puts it you might have a disorder if "you have an illness if you spend so much time pursuing intercourse or masturbation as to interfere with your job or other important activities."

But so much for being fair.  First because once a day doesn't seem like a very reasonable threshold. Second because I'm as suspicious of those who profit from "curing" sex addiction as I would be of, say, vibrator vendors who claimed one should have at least one orgasm a day.

Bottom line: the proposed APA definition based on effectiveness encroachment is waaaay more reasonable than a blunt count.

(via Em & Lo)