Geneticist and paleoanthropologist John Hawks tackles arguments from a new book claiming that modern men are wimps. (It’s called Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male so there you go.) Anyway, Hawks says there’s a couple of yes-buts in there.

it is entirely true that our bone cross-sectional areas have greatly reduced, with consequent reductions in compressive and torsional strength. We don’t suffer the stresses of the past, and our bones are weaker than ancient peoples’ — at least in comparison to our mass.

That’s the complicated part of any comparison — men in Westernized nations today tend to be bigger than many ancient groups of people. If you’re going to compare “wimpiness” between Neandertals and living men, you have to understand the relative masses.

Read the quote in context here.

Americans aren’t just taller, we’re bigger than we were 200 years ago.

Did Neandertal women really have 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European men? At 60-80 kg in mass, Neandertal women were between the 5th and 50th percentiles for American white men (link).

Hawks also puts an assertion about the running speeds of Australian aboriginal from 20,000 years ago: estimates based on preserved footprints of six men running down prey suggest the fastest was able to sprint… about as fast as a good high-school track star: a little bit faster than a modern high-school girl, slower than a modern high-school boy.

Now I’m not saying that 37 kph isn’t an impressive speed — there’s no way I could run that fast, even if I were being chased by a Sasquatch. My point is just that there isn’t very much time separating a good high school athlete from the World Record. Sprinters spend an intense effort training to shave a miniscule fraction off their times.

...

But it’s hardly a knock against “modern males” to say that ancient footprints would have crossed the finish line a second slower than the fastest Wisconsin boys.

I don’t really have a lot of patience with “it’s been all downhill ever since.” Humans are very, very good at adapting to niches. We were great at it 20,000 years ago in Australia. We were really great at it in the wilds of Borneo. We were really good at it in the slums in London and New York. We were really good at it in deserts. We were really great at it in Tierra del Fuego even when we’d lost the technology for both fire and clothing (but not, significantly and not surprisingly, body decoration.) We’re also really great in suburbia, in war zones, in agrarian societies, in riparian ones, in hunter-gatherer ones, in nomadic ones, in monument-building ones, and even in darkened-surrounded-by-empty-cheetoz-bag ones.

And the funny thing is that more or less, if you dropped 100 modern human children into pretty much any human society (that would tolerate them) over the last maybe 1,000-100,000 years anywhere on the planet they’d almost certainly survive at… roughly the same survival and acculturation rates as the local children would. But also grow to roughly the same height, live only about as long, and accomplish about as much as their “ancient” peers. Same if you were to drop 100 “ancient” children from back there and then into any society today (that would tolerate them.) And, for that matter, run the 100-meter dash in roughly average time. On the other hand, drop 100 adults from either situation into either situation and either way they’d almost certainly have a rougher time of it.

It’s not that we’re not evolving, at all. (Hawks is a strong proponent of the still-evolving school of thought.) It’s that in evolutionary terms millennia are still pretty short intervals. And though culture has changed considerably from place to place and time to time, the culture in general has been a huge factor in whether and how we survive to reproduce for a very long time.

Financial journalism wizard Felix Salmon brings up a nice counterpoint to the prevailing wisdom that working women are coming out ahead of men in the current recession.

Chris Swann reports that, yes, men have suffered 75% of the job losses in this recession. But look at the last recession: they suffered 86% of the job losses in that one. And the recession before that? More than 98% of the job losses.

He said it here.

Looking at it that way women are being proportionally hurt more in this recession than previous ones. They account for 25% of layoffs today, 14% in George W. Bush’s recession, and only 2% of layoffs in George H.W. Bush’s recession in the early 1990s.

And, as Swann notes in his article, it’s not because there were fewer women in the workplace in the 1990s: women were 47% of the workforce back then.

Swann adds

Progress on the desegregation of the workforce and attitudes to gender roles have not advanced since the mid-1990s. This is despite the fact that women are now outpacing men academically — earning 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 60 percent of master’s.

Since superior academic performance doesn’t seem to be narrowing the gap, we need a renewed drive by government and companies to root out discrimination and create a more family-friendly work place. Although the United States has excellent anti-discrimination laws, enforcement is woefully underfunded.

Another necessary but more expensive step would be greater provision of childcare. Increasing the length of the school day, lowering the starting age and reducing school vacations would all help — as could more generous paternity leave. Larger employers should be encouraged to expand the provision of workplace nurseries — a reliable way of attracting highly skilled mothers.

As the slide in manufacturing and production tails off, male workers can expect some relief. The problems of many women in the workforce are far more ingrained and harder to deal with. Man-cession aside, it’s still a man’s world.

He said it here.

That sounds about right.

And just for the record, now that my own children are independent and my role as a stay-at-home dad becomes less necessary and more economically unfeasible I’m getting a real birds-eye view of the big thumping hit time out for kids has on one’s employment prospects, in or out of a recession, yes, but especially in one. If I can find a job it still has to be part-time, my resume has this giant gaping hole in it, I’ve got tons of (sometimes strikingly sophisticated) volunteer experience and a ton of skills associated with running a popular and successful but, um, anonymous (oops!) blog, but it doesn’t look that good on paper.

So I’d just like to a) echo Swann’s points about what’s needed for the economy to benefit from the (overwhelmingly if not exclusively) female two-track workforce and b) tip my hat to journalists like Swann and Salmon for shining some light on the issue. (Yes, women, and some men, have been saying it for years. It’s been an exceedingly rare item in business publications though so this is a good thing. Due, I might add, in part thanks to the rise of the new generation of business and labor journalists. But I digress…)

I’d also like to say that to the extent I’m likely to get back on my feet career-wise it’ll be thanks to pioneering, sometimes harrowing and humiliating efforts begun by 2nd-wave feminists 30 years ago to clear a path for “mommy-track” and re-entry women back into the workforce. Even if you’re not affected by the recession chances are you’re benefitting from it too — part-time work, flex time, employer-offered childcare (if you can get it), family leave, job sharing, resume footnoting, even white-collar contracting and telecommuting… and even the possibility of men taking time off to raise their children… are available thanks almost entirely to feminism and the rise of women in the workforce.

Karen Rayne of Adolescent Sexuality, who teaches both sex education to early adolescents and sex-ed instruction to education majors has an interesting take on summer/vacation flings for teenagers.

Vacation flings can range from more emotional connection and no physical connection to an exclusively sexual experience.  They can last a weekend, or a week, or several weeks.  Some of them are remembered and some are forgotten.

But what’s the point of these little affairs?  Are they essentially good or harmful for teenagers?  Should parents encourage them or discourage them?

As I have mentioned before, teenagers are in a place where they are discovering who they are, who they want to be, and how much choice they really have in the matter.  To go through this process, most teenagers need to experience themselves in a variety of situations and acting in a variety of ways.  It’s a healthy thing for them to date around and learn what kind of a partner they want to have.

Vacations often offer a safe place to experiment.  The relationship is generally, by circumstance, limited in length. If the match is not a beneficial one, the parents (and the teenager) can take solace in it ending shortly. The teenager can experience a different side, a different personality, a different kind of relationship, with a firm expiration date attached. If the teenager likes this new sense of self, it can be brought back home, but if the teenager does not like the new sense of self, it can be discarded and left behind. Very convenient, no?

She said it here.

As my blog name suggests I’m not enthusiastic about sex and young people. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they shouldn’t be sexual. I hope it’s obvious that I support sex education (I believe age-appropriate sex education should begin very early.) It’s just that since adulthood actually lasts a really long time, and that a healthy, non-pressured, non-sexualized adolescence lays a great foundation for… well… real adult sex I don’t think one “misses out” by waiting till you’re already a adult instead of imagining it’s sex that actually makes you a man or woman.

Where I part company with the abstinence/chastity crowd, of course, is that don’t see adolescence as a rearguard attempt to hold off on relationship formation till one finds their “one true love.” So I agree wholeheartedly with Rayne that casual or transitory relationships are important precursors to serious and long-term ones.

See also: Debby at My Sexy Professor has a post about How to Make Casual Flings Work. The four main headings: know thyself, come prepared, safety first, and have realistic expectations nicely illustrates the difference between adolescent and adult relationships and further illustrates how learn to crawl before you walk and learn to walk before you run extends to learn to navigate relationships before you have sex.

It takes time to “know thyself.” “Come prepared” tends to assume you already know what to prepare for. “Safety first” sounds self-evident, and to be honest in our hyper-vigilant culture of parenting it’s the rare child who hasn’t been stuffed brim-full with it from birth. But the transition to “independently assessing potential partners and opportunities” is a pretty big step up from “don’t put your fingers in the fan.”

Which takes me to Debby’s last point about having realistic expectations: Good expectations need to include the point that at least half of all college freshmen are still virgins! Even though something like 85% of freshmen believe only 15% are… and that, naturally, they’re part of that 15%... and that, naturally, that makes them losers. Which evidently, even in college, in turn makes it harder for them to get a serious grip on know thyself, come prepared, and safety first.

Which in turn goes back to the message Karen Rayne, and Deb Haffner, and Heather Corinna and countless other professional sex educators come back to again and again: the point of real, comprehensive sex education isn’t just to get us ready for sex (a big concern of “traditional values” types that Rayne beautifully refutes here) but to help us get ready to get ready to have sex as well.

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

Random observations I posted yesterday to Twitter from my phone while waiting for other family members and friends to rendezvous after a day at the nearby water park.

After a day at a water park I’m afraid John Derbyshire is right. One-piece suits are hotter than bikinis. That’s what he meant, right? :-)

Water park observation #2: by the end of the day all suit bottoms are baggy, suggesting relevant ad photo shoots happen in the morning. :-)

Waterpark observation #3: hairy backs are far more common on older men. As previously reported. And no not because younger men shave more.

Waterpark observation #4: “porn” poses and postures have almost no relation to just-hanging-around. Body language is huge WRT this. (Duh!)

Waterpark observation #5: past a certain point body hair, or type of suit could be a more reliable gender marker than body shape. (Added: It’s not that women have boobs, it’s that a lot of men do too. It’s not that men have narrow hips, it’s that a lot of women do too. There’s a lot of variation in humans compared to, say, penguins or even other primates. There’s a lot of overlap overlap.)

Waterpark observation #6: there was far less ogling, let alone cat-calling, than I remember from summer culture when I was a kid. Could this have anything to do with #4, above? (Added: The highly mixed age/race/class crowd, from military to working poor to middle class, wasn’t what Fox News types would call genteel, effete, or elite so that’s not it. Also, there was plenty of… um… fixed gender behavior, just no ogling, headswivelling, male-gazing, cat-calling, or “woo” plus grinning head-shakes between men after women walked past.)