bogus science

Actual Researchers Prefer Not to Speculate, But For Ev Psych the EADR Gene Has Gotta Be About Hair and Boobs

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2013-02-23 14:37

Ermahgerd Ervarlershanery Psercholerghy!!!
Image by figleaf published with a Creative Commons license.

So some evolutionary biologists, Yana G. Kamberov and Pardis C. Sabeti, recently published a paper about a relatively recent (only 35,000 years old) gene mutations in humans that appears almost exclusively in East Asians. The mutated gene, EADR, appears to be responsible for thick hair, distinctively-shaped teeth, small breasts, and extra sweat glands. It's not carried by populations of European or African descent. With me so far? Great! So far we're just talking about regular, everyday genetics research.

The problem arises, as it usually does, in the interpretation of regular, everyday genetics research. Because sooner or later -- usually sooner -- some asshat "evolutionary psychologist" or sociobiologist is going to come along and insist it couldn't be about anything but sex.

Katy Waldman has the scoop.

Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, [says] it all comes down to pretty ladyparts.

According to Akey, “thick hair and small breasts are visible sexual signals which, if preferred by men, could quickly become more common as the carriers had more children.” In fact, he claims, “the sexually visible effects of EDAR are likely to have been stronger drivers of natural selection than sweat glands.”

Basically, the genetic mutation flourished because men wanted to do the no-no-cha-cha with women who carried it. Oops, I’d forgotten that science, the world, etc., revolves around what males find attractive. Never mind that this assumes an alarming passivity on the part of the females. Did they have no say in their mating partner? (That’s a rhetorical question: Studies throughout the animal kingdom show that it’s usually the females who decide who gets action and who doesn’t.) And even supposing that the women had no agency, were prehistoric East Asian men really so very picky? Did they typically refuse intercourse with large-breasted or fine-haired women? I am trying to imagine a caveman turning down a willing sexual partner on account of a triviality like insufficiently luxuriant tresses, and not just one caveman but the entire sperm-producing Pleistocene population.  

Source: Slate.com

So let's review. Here we've got a gene mutation that codes for four characteristics.. If one of those characteristics increases the survival prospects of one's descendants the whole mutation will likely be conserved and might even eventually outcompete all other variations on the gene. So it could be better ability to sweat -- but how useful would that have been in the extremely hot, muggy climate of east Asia 35,000 years ago? It could have been the teeth. It could have been the hair. It could even have been the breasts. And even if it was the breasts, it could have been that the particular configuration of smaller breasts were more efficient for nursing, less subject to infection, less likely to interfere with running or other physical activities. And sure, they could even have been more attractive to men, although given how many generations it takes for a characteristic to evolve and how fickle fashionable preferences tend to be in humans, it would have had to have been hella more attractive than all other breast types to have consistently been preferred by mating decision makers (men or, often as not, matchmaking parents) over tens of thousands of years.

But one way or another, if all characteristics are encoded by a single gene and just one of them confers a reproductive advantage then all the rest are just carried along for the ride.

Which, without considerable further research, makes it essentially a value judgement and/or an expression of conscious or unconscious bias to proclaim that one and only one of those characteristics "must" be the important one.

Now. Did the original researchers, Kamberov or Sabeti, make any such claim? No. Did their co-author Daniel Lieberman, another genetics researcher make the claim? Quite the contrary. Instead when Waldman asked him outright he said " “The problem with all selection, but especially sexual selection, is that it’s impossible to test on humans. We were careful not to make assumptions about the selective benefits of the gene.” And did Jerry Coyne, another evolutionary geneticist Waldman spoke to make any such claim? Nope! Once again an actual evolutionary geneticist said the idea was "extremely dubious" and, besides, sexually selected traits tend not to work that way anyway. (They usually arises in one sex only and generally impose that would otherwise be filtered out by increased mortality if the other sex didn't preferentially select it.)

Nope. The only scientist to jump on the titties and hair bandwagon was someone from the David Barash school (literally! Barash and Akey are both at the University of Washington) of just-so storytellers, a.k.a. making shit up to fit your expectations.

And what a story it is! A mutation crops up that affects teeth and chest shape, number of sweat glands, and hair thickness in both men and women. Some of these characteristics -- thick, shiny hair in particular -- are considered attractive in both men and women. And yet, somehow, the only possible advantage a nominally professional geneticist can imagine the mutation might convey is to make women more sexually desirable to men. But not the other way around? Really? No woman might be more attracted to a man with thicker, more luxurious hair? And therefore preferentially want to "mate" with him (a.k.a. jump his bones?)

Oh right. Based on all the evidence the primary purpose of reflex "evolutionary psychology" speculation is to buttress the dominant paradigm: it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire; it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. Therefore it's doubly inconceivable to Mr. Akey and his kind that nicer hair would make any difference to a woman's partner preference. End of story.

Fortunately there are other kinds of scientists.


Tags:

Alain de Botton Not Just Wrong but Dangerous About Meaning of Involuntary Erections, Wetness

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2013-02-13 10:57

I already didn't like "philosopher and writer" Alain de Botton before he got is gig at Psychology Today. Now, via I've got a serious problem with him. Here's why I think you should too.

In a post called 12 Rude Revelations about Sex de Botton makes the following startling, and wrong, and very, very dangerous assertion

Involuntary physiological reactions such as the wetness of a vagina and the stiffness of a penis are emotionally so satisfying (which means, simultaneously, so erotic) because they signal a kind of approval that lies utterly beyond rational manipulation. Erections and lubrication simply cannot be effected by willpower and are therefore particularly true and honest indices of interest. In a world in which fake enthusiasms are rife, in which it is often hard to tell whether people really like us or whether they are being kind to us merely out of a sense of duty, the wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.

Source: Psychology Today (naturally)

Emily Nagoski nicely dismantles de Botton's factual, psychological, and sexual claims so I don't have to. (Hint: if he were right then most men have serious sexual attraction to full bladders first thing in the morning.)

That means I can concentrate on de Botton's seriously creepy sexual-violence-supporting implications instead.

Involuntary reactions such as wetness or erections are "satisfying?" "Erotic?!?!" Seriously?

 this is giving direct aid and support to rapists? Because that whole “if you didn’t really want this you wouldn’t be hard/wet” is one of the big guns in abusers and rapist’s bags of psychological tricks. (Tip for de Button: try Googling “arousal during sexual assault.” Asshole!)

One result that pops up early on is from survivor-support site the Pandora Project (my italics.)

A sexual response or orgasm in the course of sexual assault is often the best-kept and most deeply shameful secret of many survivors. If you are such a survivor, it’s essential that you know that sexual response in sexual assault is extremely common, well-documented and nothing for you to be ashamed of.

…

And it isn’t just about you and the way your body responded either. It may also have been one of the repertoire of dirty tricks rapists use to get their victims to feel responsible. Diana Russell writes that “Some rapists think they’re lovers” and tells us:
(These rapists) think that if a woman is stimulated in ‘just the right way’ she will enjoy it. The conquest may seem more important if the rapist believes he has turned the woman on physically, particularly if it is against her will. Getting the victim to respond physically may also alleviate the rapist’s guilt feelings.

Source: Pandora Project: Sexual Arousal & Sexual Assault

Or regarding erections, from Living Well, and Australian site for recovering male victims (my italics)

People who sexually abuse boys and men often use their knowledge about male bodies to deliberately cause an erection and/or ejaculate to occur. They do this because they know it is extremely confusing and embarrassing. They might also do it to try and convince both the person being abused and themselves that what is happening is not really abuse. Whatever the reasons, ultimately they know that if the boy or man was aroused, they might be less likely to tell anyone about the abuse due to feelings of shame and embarrassment.

Source: Living Well: Sexual Assault and Arousal

In that context de Button’s choice of the words “Involuntary physiological reactions such as the wetness of a vagina and the stiffness of a penis are emotionally so satisfying (which means, simultaneously, so erotic)” (my italics) are just beyond horrifying and right up there with encouraging, endorsing, and maybe even celebrating sexual violence.

Maybe he’s too stupid to understand. Maybe he thinks he thinks he’s being “edgy” and contrarian. Maybe he’s trying to rationalize his own prior victimization. Or perpetration! But one way or another it’s not funny either that he said it, that his editors passed on it, or especially that Psychology Today (of all people*!) published it!!!

Sweet Mother of Pearl!

* Not that I expect Psychology Today to be particularly interested in truth, reality, or responsibility -- after all they seem to have picked de Button to replace their previous calculated-to-offend, too-distraced-even-for-them columnist Satoshi Kawazana -- but for a journal purporting to be about, well, psychology, today, I would at least expect them to have some sensitivity to the psychological and emotional well being of survivors of sexual violence.


Tags:

More Evidence Misandry is Real But That It Predates Feminism

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-12-08 22:03

If one Y (male) chromosome is bad two must be worse, right? Well, no, but it's taken a while for the once very-popular notion to fall out of favor. I've argued frequently allegedly "man hating" beliefs attributed to "radical feminism" generally pre-date feminism. Here's a great example, from a sympathetic post by genetics researcher Ricki Lewis (emphasis mine)

A battered paperback entitled The XYY Man, by Kenneth Royce, leans in a corner of my bookshelf. It’s a spy novel that chronicles the adventures of “Spider” Scott, an ex-felon who wants to become law-abiding, but finds that he is genetically predisposed to criminality because he has an extra chromosome. Unlike most men whose XY sex karyotype imparts their maleness, Scott has been endowed with an XYY karyotype by his novelist creator.

This condition is not fanciful.

...

In 1970 geneticist H. Bentley Glass advocated the relaxation of abortion laws to allow women to end pregnancies if the fetus was XYY. Speculation even ran that Richard Speck, the infamous murderer of eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966, owed his propensity to violence to an extra Y chromosome. That proved untrue. In one notorious case of the mid-1970s, a British court wrongfully convicted Stefan Kiszko of the murder of an 11-year-old girl largely because of his XYY karyotype, and it took more than 15 years for him to win release from prison. For further historical takes on the misunderstood extra chromosome see Y Envy.

Source: PLOS DNA Science Blog

Kennith Royce (born in 1920) was not a stalwart feminist when he wrote his gender-determinist spy novel. Nor was Hiram Bentley Glass (born in 1906) when he issued his prejudgment of "excessively male" infants.

Again, it's trendy in some circles to say there's no such thing as misandry. It's even trendier in even more circles to say there is such a thing as misandry but it's all feminism's fault. Both trendy circles are wrong: there is such a thing, and it's roots lie not in feminism but in the same bullshit culture that motivated feminists in the first place.

Oh and speaking of bullshit, while it turns out that about 1/1000 boys and men really do have an extra Y chromosome the modern scientific consensus is that the impact is minimal. As Lewis puts it in her concluding paragraph

Slowly, as the suppositions of the 1960s give way to current research, the public is changing its thinking on XYY syndrome. Few people today believe that an extra Y chromosome condemns its owner to a life of violent crime. Genetic counselors explain the condition to families and teach ways to nurture XYY boys. Men like the fictional “Spider” Scott can exercise their free will without fear that a sex chromosome has turned them bad.

I would have called it "the superstitions of the 1960s" but close enough. Good riddance.


Tags:

Men as the "Sex Class:" "Not Particularly Choosy"

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2012-09-28 18:39

In a Huffington Post, err, post hypothesizing about (white? western?) men's fascination with women's breasts Larry Young and Brian Alexander reference the old sociobiology canard about men. Something about the way they said it made me feel even more skeptical than usual. (Emphasis mine.)

But men aren't known for being particularly choosy about sex partners. After all, sperm is cheap. Since we don't get pregnant, and bear children, it doesn't cost us much to spread it around. If the main goal of sex -- evolutionarily speaking -- is to pass along one's genes, it would make more sense to have sex with as many women as possible, regardless of whether or not they looked like last month's Playmate.

Source: Huffington Post

Is this true? Are men really not particularly choosy about sex partners? Really?

And even if they are is it really because of biology?  Or is it maybe more about 

Are that many men completely indifferent about their even casual partner's unplanned, unwanted pregnancies?  Enough so that it can be tossed off as a blanket statement about all men?  Because under normal circumstances even the most desperately non-choosy men are generally pretty appalled to learn their current or erstwhile partner is "knocked up."  (That alone ought to scotch the whole "seed spreading" meme.)

I mention "normal circumstances" because there are circumstances of dislocation such as military or wage-seeking migrant separation where men don't appear to be as choosy, and there are circumstances where shame-driven alienation (religious/social strictures) or fear-driven alienation ("wide stanced" men in homophobic cultures) drive men to be less choosy.  But almost by definition those aren't the normal circumstances in which most men live most of their lives.  

I mean...

Look, if you lock men, or women, in confined quarters for months at a time they routinely start smearing the walls with their feces.  Yet somehow we don't make statements such as "men aren't known for being particularly choosy about where they smear their feces."  That's because, actually, under normal circumstances people are actually pretty well known for not smearing their feces.

And speaking of normal circumstances...

Really?

Really?

Men aren't particularly choosy?

Are you kidding me?  First of all, if men weren't particularly choosy then Cosmopolitan Magazine wouldn't have a circulation rate of three million would it?  If men weren't particularly choosy there would be no traditions of partnerless women behind stories or songs about "wallflowers" would there?  If men weren't particularly choosy there wouldn't be so much frickin' choosiness expressed in endless comments on various porn and not-so porn websites about how anyone short of utterly flawless doesn't measure up at all.  Nor would there be male-to-male putdowns like "I wouldn't fuck her with your dick."  Nor would you have other commenters on the right opining that they wouldn't want to have sex with, say, Hillary Clinton, or equally as bad there wouldn't be commenters on the left making similar judgments about, say, Ann Coulter.  Nor would there be so very many married women (especially women bloggers) so aching with frustration with their long-term partner's lack of libido that they blog or comment about it.

More importantly, nor would there have been the online post that inspired me to write "The limits of 'no means no'" which was about a woman's observation that the misogynist notion that "women have the power" in sexual relations applies only to those women who are asked!

Clue: in any given year, month, week, or day an enormous number of women are not being asked.

Anyway, I know, I know, it's part of the dominant paradigm to just "know" that men are the "sex class:"  reflexively, uncontrollably, and otherwise eternally obliged to seek sex at every opportunity and never to decline it.  And, being ingrained in the dominant paradigm it's almost impossible not to bake the assumption into even somewhat skeptical scientific discourse.

But...

But...

Is it true that men are not particularly choosy? Or do we just "know" it's true... so true we don't even bother to check.  (Or even so true we outright discard men from the data set if they don't fit the profile?!?!?)


Tags:

If I Wrote a Book Imagining Men's Penis/Brain/Self Identity I Would Be Laughted Out of the Gender Blogosphere

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2012-09-14 00:42

So where does Naomi Wolf get off thinking she can write a correspondingly bogus book claiming vaginas are distal lobes of women's brains?

This is not a "what about the menz" question, incidentally.  Going back to antiquity are already plenty of books and letters asserting pretty much that men's penises do much of our thinking for us.  Some of them even assert it proudly. Though others who make the case call it phallocentrism.

And it's not like plenty of others have written long and loud, again dating back to antiquity, making cases disturbingly similar to Wolf's!  Only for most of them it's not vaginas, it's "wombs."  And they didn't call it "depression" they called it "hysteria."

Sorry gang, we're not our genitals, m'kay?

This does not mean we don't or can't express ourselves through our genitals.  We can! But only in the same way we can express ourselves with our hands (see violins, typing, massage, fooseball) or our mouths (see arias, lectures, kissing, epicurian cuisine) our eyes, feet, etc.  But usually when we say an artist or athlete has a direct connection between his or her hands or bodies we recognize we're speaking metaphorically.

Heck, even when we say something coarse like "he lets his dick do the thinking" we still recognize we're speaking metaphorically.

Oh.

Oh! 

Back to that phallocentrism business for a second.  Wolf claims she and all women have a special, unique connections between vaginas and brains.  Unique erotic/sexual ones too, not just spiritual ones.  Ones that men couldn't possibly share.

It would be cool if she said women, being human beings, can discover (if they haven't already, um, noticed) a connection between mind and genitals that thanks to, oh, maybe, the bogus Two Rules of Desire women have traditionally been pressured to deny or repress in ways that men often have not.  But she didn't.  Which I think is a mistake.

I dunno.  Outside of harsh traditions of gender binding it's either a mundane observation or a really dumb one.  So what the heck?


Tags:

Mmm, Mmm Good! Ten Years Later Reporters *Still* Finding Gordon Gallup's Semen Swallowing Story Too Tasty to Fact Check

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-08-25 09:10

Photo by Flickr user Trevor Coultart. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user Trevor Coultart. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So my heart sank when I read the headline at Medical Daily: How Oral Sex or Having Sex Without a Condom Can Be Good For Women's Health. My heart sank even further at the lead sentence:

Performing oral sex or having sex without a condom may benefit both mental and physical health in women, according to scientists who analyzed the effects of semen's "mood-altering chemicals."

It sank because I assumed the "new" research the blogger, Catharine Hsu, referred to was finally going to corroborate "evolutionary" psychologist Gordon Gallup's ten year old "research" paper that made the same claim.

I needn't have worried.

Following the link it turns out that yet again someone's stumbled across Gallup's original paper -- Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 31, Number 3 (2002), 289-293, DOI: 10.1023/A:1015257004839 and breathlessly reported on it as if it were new. Or news. Or fact. Or, um, science.

This isn't new research. Gordon Gallup's (grievously suspect) paper was published 10 years ago, in 2002, not 2012. In those 10 years no researchers have reproduced his results. Nor has Gallup followed up with further research on what, on the face of it, one would consider pretty significant news.

Even more tellingly, in those 10 years pharmaceutical companies have conducted clinical trials, let alone primary research, on semen-based anti-depressants. When you consider the seemingly limitless market for depression treatments this is the most significant "market based" refutation of Gallup's alleged research.

Add in the part about how married women, who are presumably most likely to be regularly "exposed" to "doses" of semen, typically report being less happy and healthy than when they were single.

Add in the fact that men, even straight men, are rather routinely exposed to semen without it seeming to do us much good in the mood department ("even after adjusting for intercourse.")

Add in that Gallup is a psychologist, not an MD nor even a biologist.

Don't get me wrong. As a straight man I think it would be really, really nice if my semen had health benefits for young college women. Even nicer if the (small) benefits Gallup claimed to be able to detect in completely unprotected sex outweighed the (very large) adverse consequences we tend to be more familiar with. Instead it's old-guy, frat boy, and shock-jock wish fulfillment, not actual, you know, medical science.

Note: More than five years ago I wrote nearly the same post when Psychology Today breathlessly exhumed the same too-good-to-check zombie "research. But as I said then and I'll say now.

Like a lot of other stories along these lines this one continues to circulate not because the research was credible (it wasn’t!) or the researcher widely respected by his peers (he doesn’t appear to be.) Instead it circulates because it’s too good to fact check. Too good for lad-magazines and anti-feminists to pass up because, hey, it’s another line for doods to use on chix. Too good for for feminists to pass up because, hey, it’s outrageous. Too good for health professionals because, hey, it’s a chance to fret about increased risk of infectious disease.

...

If you like semen that’s just great. If you don’t, well, that’s great too. If you’re hungry for it, well cool, but it’s not addictive. If you wouldn’t go near the stuff, it’s not like you’re missing out on anything. I propose that you should enjoy it, or not enjoy it because it’s semen, not because it might cure anything.

I said it here.

Till next year. When yet another reporter will pop up with the same old too-good-to-fact-check "news."


Tags:

Maybe Researchers Only Have Two Hands: About Evolutionary-Psychology Theories About Big Boobs

Posted by figleaf on Sun, 2012-08-05 17:39

On the one hand they say men are "naturally" attracted to younger women.
On the other hand they say men are "naturally" attracted to women with big boobs.
On the third hand, however, almost all women's boobs continue to get bigger as they grow older.

Discuss?


Tags:

Petra Boynton Does Credibility Diminishing on G-Spot "Augmenting" Researcher

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-04-28 18:09

Speaking of overzealous male sex researchers, Petra Boynton the latest g-spot un-debunker, Adam Ostrzenski, who says he's definitely, positively found what he's calling the "g-spot" organ while dissecting the anterior vaginal wall of one particular cadaver of an 83-year-old woman, has a pretty glaring conflict of interest.

[T]he author claims he has no conflict of interest. Which is concerning given he runs a Cosmetic Gynaecology practice this is not in itself sinister but it does have a bearing on why he may have an interest in proving the presence of a g-spot and should have been declared in both the press release and the paper. It is remiss of the journal and publisher not to ensure this was done.

Alongside the numerous cosmetic genital procedures he offers, Dr Ostrzenski trains practitioners in procedures including ‘g-spot fat augmentation’ and ‘g-spot surgical augmentation’.

This sounds very much like something that could well be considered a conflict of interest and should have been declared as such in the paper.

Source: Dr. Petra Boynton

On the one hand, maybe you can say that a guy who tries to make a living in "g-spot fat augmentation" would have a vested interest in locating the actual g-spot in order to best, well, augment it. On the other hand, though, if the guy's got a vested interest he be a little over invested in finding something he can claim his procedure "augments." Either way, though, it's unusual for good researchers to claim no commercial interest when they plainly have one.

Via Ed Yong


Tags:

No-Sex Class and STEM: Do We Know More About "G-Spots" Than "Testicle-Spots" Because Researchers are Still Mostly (Hetero) Male?

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-04-28 17:55

Photo by Flickr user avlxyz. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user avlxyz. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Speaking of (mostly-male) researcher's obsessive fixation on "female sexuality" and (almost complete) neglect of men's sexuality, Dr. Petra Boynton brings it home with the following thought experiment. She's talking about yet another case of "does she or doesn't she" research on, what else, whether women have "g-spots."

[C]onsider how this scenario would look if it were penises under the microscope. While there are undoubtedly distressing issues facing men around penis size and stamina the stereotype for men is they all experience pleasure from their dicks. If you talk to men you discover some get intense pleasure from testicle stimulation and are unable to orgasm without this. Some hate their balls touched. Some get a lot of pleasure if attention is paid to the shaft of the penis. Some find direct stimulation to the glans uncomfortable. Others experience more pleasure from anal stimulation.

Yet we do not suggest because men can and do experience pleasure from different areas in their genitals that there are specific spots that guarantee male orgasm or that men are somehow deficient if they do not experience say, a left testicle orgasm. We don’t scan, survey, or perform autopsies on penises to establish the most sensitive parts. Nor do we have self help books, courses or sex toys designed to coach men into experiencing orgasm through stimulation to specific areas of their genitals.

Indeed suggesting this usually results in people laughing. Why would we do this? But we do seem to feel the need to continue to make women’s bodies and sexual responses seem complex and difficult. Actually that’s not quite true. One journal and the media appear preoccupied with this. Most people are not that bothered and certainly most sex researchers are not.

Source: Petra Boynton

First of all, hey, left-testicular orgasms! WTF? Where can I get one of those!?!?!? Why aren't there tons of books and DETAILS magazine articles telling me, and my partner(s) how to find this elusive "L-T spot?" Oh, right.

Hey, is it time to get out the bogus Two Rules of Desire of the dominant women-as-the "no-sex" class paradigm yet? Thanks to Rule #1 (it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to express sexual desire) "female" sexuality is a big, giant mystery. A medical problem! Heck, did I say medical? It's an out-and-out engineering problem! Meanwhile, thanks to Rule #2 (it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired) there... pretty much isn't a field anyone calls "male sexuality."

It goes without saying that neither women nor men benefit from what amounts to the academic equivalents of trying to get a peek into the girl's lockerroom.

Now. Does that mean there's anything particularly wrong with turning an interest in the sexual details of the kind of people you have an orientation for into a topic for research? Not specifically. Unless for some reason the vast, vast, vast majority of researchers are of one sex and one orientation.

Similarly is should we be particularly put out that guys like this Adam Ostrzenski would prefer to feel more comfortable, say, dissecting dead 83-year-old women to trying to help, say, live 21-year-old men have left-testicle orgasms? Eh. It might be a little phobic but you can't say there's not a heck of a lot of social pressure on straight men not to spend a lot of time thinking about other men's penises.

So!

Not to sound petty or self-interested but this seems like as good a reason as any to encourage more women to become academics in STEM fields. As commenter PattyCake put it in my last post "Because who wants to think about guys jacking off? (Me!)"


Tags:

Curious Gender Imbalance in the Curiosity of (Mostly-Male) Sex Researchers

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2012-04-23 12:04

Photo by Flickr user marsmet462. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user marsmet462. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Sweet mother of pearl is there ever a mind-bending difference in the number of research papers on "female arousal" compared to similar studies of men.

This despite the fact that it sure looks like sex researchers (particularly principle investigators) are overwhelmingly male. And would have plenty of research material at... er... hand.

You'd think, especially for no-brainer (heh) PET-scan research like this one, called High-intensity Erotic Visual Stimuli De-activate the Primary Visual Cortex in Women, someone would bother to try the same experiment on men to see whether there were differences or similarities.

Or, if they did do use such experimental "controls" you'd think they'd mention it in the abstract. Not least because you'd think someone would be interested in one of two obvious outcomes

  • Research showed that women's brains categorically process "high-intensity erotic visual stimuli" differently than do men's, or
  • Research showed that women's and men's brains process such stimuli similarly.

Either way you'd think news about the latter two would be more interesting. But... probably because it would involve learning something about male sexuality... either nobody bothered mentioning it or, more likely, nobody's even bothered to try.

It's not that nobody's interested.  But most of the time it's not very integrated -- people generally seem to study a) female arousal, b) female arousal, c) female arousal, d) male arousal, e) female arousal, f) gay male arousal, g) female arousal, etc.  But you only occasionally see the same experiements conducted on both men and women. 

I still think the problem is that since everybody already "knows" everything you could possibly know about male sexuality (e.g. 90% of men masturbate and the other 10% are liars) there's no real reason to look... to see what if any of what we "know" is true.


Tags:

User login