cultural blind spots

Questions From the Mouths of Babes: Do Evolutionary Psychologists Do Any Psychology

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2010-01-06 19:54

Summary: Having established that many evolutionary psychologists have studied no biology since high-school we turn to the question do evolutionary psychologists study psychology? Plus, challenging an accusation that criticism of ev-psych comes from “creationists.”

Via a tip from Twitter, reporter Kyle Wind of the Hudson Valley Daily Freeman says

NEW PALTZ — A SUNY New Paltz psychology professor attributes the evolutionary importance of maintaining close social bonds to his study’s finding that people are more upset by the idea of a spouse or significant other cheating with a friend or relative than with a stranger.

To conduct the study, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology in late November, researchers surveyed two groups of college students to explore infidelity in heterosexual relationships through the “identity of the interloper,” said Professor Glenn Geher, one of the academics behind the study and the chairman of SUNY New Paltz’s Psychology Department.

...

From a “strict evolutionist perspective,” Geher said, “one might predict that we’d be more OK with our partner cheating with, for instance, our brother, who shares 50 percent of my genetic combination, but that’s definitely not what happens.”

...

Researchers actually quantified the level of distress based on the identity of the person with whom participants’ partners would theoretically have sexual encounters by assigning rankings.

In the first sample, the group’s 194 women rated the thought of a partner cheating with their mothers as most upsetting, followed by, in order, daughters, sisters, friends, aunts, former lovers, nieces, cousins, co-workers, and strangers at the bottom of the list.

Similarly, the 65 men rated distress levels over the idea of their significant others’ sexual infidelity with their fathers at the top of the list followed by brothers, sons, friends, uncles, former lovers, cousins, co-workers, nephews, and strangers, according to the study.

Read the quote in context here.

I’m going to stop right there, having also left out a bunch of other… fascinating declarations about what Glen Geher says must be true about evolved behavior because one commenter, j2bryson, asked a really important question about the significance of that ordering.

“I wonder if this tells us anything about indentification with one’s partner, as these are the same people one shouldn’t one’s self have sex with.”

As usual I don’t have unpaid access to academic journals so I’m just going to assume that Geher meticulously documents how his experiment distinguishes ordinary social and psychological reactions to the prospect of near-incestuous relationships from evolutionarily-directed ones.

For instance while determining that his late-adolescent (i.e. university student) research subjects weren’t thrilled with the idea of a partner having sex with mom or dad did he he carefully control for differences in the same student’s reaction to the prospect of mom and dad having sex with each other? Because, dude, most young people cover their ears and go “la la la” about that.

For instance did he spend time discussing the peculiarly popular genre of written and photo porn with labels like “hot wife” and “loving wives” seem to have on middle-aged men? Did he assay the relative popularity of these stories based on the affinities of the approved-of interlopers who, as I recall, very often involve male relatives, best friends, and employers or employees?

And of course did he do any screening to answer j2bryson elementary question about people’s well-documented aversion to provide controversial answers to controversial questions?*

In other words while hopping all over the place trying to demonstrate evolutionary psychology did he do any psychology psychology?

Until proved otherwise I’ll assume, of course, that the answer is yes on all counts and that Geher’s confident that despite his small and narrow sample size he’s adequately filtered out all possible noise from his data such that the only possible explanation for his results involve inherited behavior selected for over many thousands of generations and preserved for many thousands more.

Ok, I’m not. I’m pretty sure he did none of those things. But if I find out he did all that, and that his findings are indeed incontrovertible, then you’ll see the retraction right here.

—-

What puzzles me is why evolutionary psychologists rarely investigate the almost certainly selected for tendency in humans, especially young adults, to gravitate towards group conformity that j2bryson. It’s easily reproduced (in fact it’s difficult to avoid.) It’s almost certainly less complex demonstrating a general human behavior than the kind of highly-contingent sexually dimorphic behavior. Especially since the gendered nature of that behavior often dissolves or even reverses as individuals age. But no, despite complexities that make their tasks almost exponentially more difficult it’s all sex or nothing at all with these guys.

I mention this in part to counter a conceit, forwarded by a number of Evolutionary Psychologists including Prof. Gher (pdf) that the only alternative to their specific variety of evolutionary psychology_ is either religious fundamentalism or…

...a new kind of creationist (Ehrenreich & McIntosh, 1997), so to speak, rooted in secular intellectualism. These so-called new creationists are, in fact, very different from fundamentalist Christians in their ideological foundation. The new creationists may be conceptualized as academics and scholars who study varied aspects of human affairs from the perspective of the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM; Pinker, 2002), a model for understanding human behavior which is largely premised on the notion of the blank slate.

First of all, sorry, whatever else one might call Barbara Ehrenreich she’s got enough history of science credentials to deserve better epithets. Second of all, as I think I demonstrate pretty consistently including in this post above, one can be entirely sympathetic to the notion of natural selection on behavior… while still being completely impatient with sloppy methodology, conclusion overreach, and unbelievably consistent status-quo-oriented selection bias in subject matter in the face of almost no basic research. That professors and department heads must resort to accusations of secular “creationism” in order to fend of criticism from other scientists speaks volumes.

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Expanding What We "Know" About Men and Children Through Personal Experience

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-12-08 14:45


Photo “Figleaf and Son – 1997”
by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me!)
Chrisj of At My Soiree, taking to task yet another rendition of the you can run but you can’t hide from the genetics of gendered behavior points anecdotal evidence produced by Kay Hymowitz to support her contention that women are just “naturally” driven to choose children over career. After addressing an anecdote about journalist Hanna Rosin Chrisj turns to a second anecdote.

The other story is by Katie Roiphe who describes an “‘addiction to her newborn baby that left her indifferent to work.”

Read the quote in context here.

Not to put too fine a point on it but by the end of my first (sleepless) night with my infant son (and, later, daughter) I was indifferent to work as well. I wanted to inhale him, to hold him when he slept, to carry him against my heart or on my back or shoulders. Work can be worlds of fun, and you can’t really do without the paychecks or invoices, and because I worked from home I found ways to fit it in. But for all the challenges and rewards of work there’s nothing like having a new human being in your hands, one who trusts you and needs you and squeaks and drools and blows out his or her diaper and wakes you up and wears you out and… eventually… lights up like sudden dawn when they catch your eye with theirs.

Maybe it runs in the family because when I mentioned it to my father he said he’d felt the same way with each of his children.

The difference, he said, is that whatever he felt he did what he was told and believed he was supposed to do: go back to work, be a breadwinner, and leave the child rearing to my mom.

He also told me, one day, when he was visiting and we were at a playground, that looking around at some of the other dads with their children he felt terribly sad that he hadn’t had more time… and that we couldn’t know how lucky we were in our generation to get to be a part of the family and not just the supply boat.

So here’s the deal on gender and evolutionary psychology: I don’t know, maybe they can prove that the incredible bonding I felt, and the bonding my father says he deeply missed, is a different bonding pathway than women have. Maybe so, though I’m more inclined to think any actual, innate difference might just be one of degree.

And who am I to imagine how Hannah Rosin or Katie Roiphie or Kay Hymowitz… or anyone else, woman or man, feels about their infants? All I can say, though, is that the connection and desire to be there that I felt for my children went right through me, to the point where early on I’d hear the sound of her breath in the wind in the trees and the rhythm of his sighs when I was sharpening a knife and then all I’d want to do was make a cradle for them in the crook of my arm and hold them.

If evolutionary psychology says no, that can’t be innate because of my Y chromosome then, well, fine, so much the harder for them. Because the other explanation for such a powerful, overwhelming bond would be… social or experiential conditioning. Which they’d then have to factor out in their further estimations of selected gender differences. When they can persuasively say their methods have grown subtle enough to account for that I’ll be ready to listen.

Till then? My children will be home from school soon, and I don’t have much patience to wait.

While I only talked about one sentence the rest of ChrisJ’s post is pretty cool too. Go check it out.

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What Are Your Favorite Creepiest-In-Retrospect Pop Song Lyrics?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-10-13 22:15

Sex educator and sex-ed education professor Karen Raye of Adolescent Sexuality has a cool post up about “romantic” pop song lyrics. Check it out.

Tonight I am preparing for a class tomorrow morning on gender.  I start all my college classes with a song that is relevant to the topic…

As so often happens when we start listening to music on YouTube, we veered dangerously off track into talking about songs that have a different connotation now than they did at the time.  Two that jumped right to mind were Baby It’s Cold Outside and Every Breath You Take.  In the event that it’s been too long since you’ve heard these songs to hold a good conversation about them, you can read the lyrics from the links above or listen to them below.

Baby It’s Cold Outside was seen as playful banter, and Every Breath You Take was seen as a romantic ode.

But why?

When you look at the lyrics, they’re both excessively issue-laden songs that portray unhealthy attitudes about sex and relationships.  Baby It’s Cold Outside is particularly rife for deconstructing in a class on healthy sexual communication (as a negative example, of course).

Read the quote in context here.

Every Breath You Take can be read as stalking and/or isolation-abuse. And in case you’re unfamiliar with it, the old show tune “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is about straight-up date rape.

For the record even in 1949 the subtext of Baby It’s Cold Outside wasn’t lost on the comedy duo Homer and Jethro. I can’t find the lyrics online (and they’re complex anyway) but YouTube has a video from the 1960s, reunited with June Carter Cash, that wickedly gets the point across! (Caveat: even though the slapstick in the video is consciously over the top it could be triggering.)

I always thought Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night” had the outright creepiest — “Stay away from my window / Stay away from my backdoor too?” “Let me pour ya a good long drink?” “Don’t say a word, my virgin child?” Yikes! But then I always thought that.

The Four Seasons’ “Cherish” seemed pretty cool at the time but a few years ago I realized “You don’t know how many times I wished that I could hold you / You don’t know how many times I wish that I could / Mold you into someone who would cherish me as much as I / Cherish you” is somewhere between grooming and outright manipulation.

Then in the 1970s Smokey Robinson had a string of loner/stalker/sexual-harasser hits like “Take a Letter Maria,” “Just My Imagination,” and “Knock Three Times.”

The one-hit wonder “In the Summer Time” had “if her daddy’s rich / take her out for a meal / if her daddy’s poor / just do what you feel.”

And then there was Paul Anka’s “Havin’ My Baby!” (“What a lovely way of sayin’ how much you love me.”)

Then there were John Lennon’s early lyrics like “Run for Your Life” from Rubber Soul. M’yeah, baby!

The list goes on.

On the upside, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere if you closely read “Stand By Your Man” it’s full of veiled contempt for both monogamy and male supremacy.

Anyway, since many of those songs were written for the emergent-adolescent market, where generally speaking the audience was trying to process new emotions and hormones around things they hadn’t yet actually experienced the results could easily have been as pernicious as the accusations made against exposure to porn at the same age.

What’s your “favorite?”

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A Completely Different Perspective on "Man-Only" Unemployment in the Current Economic Downturn

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-10-06 15:40

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.

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Pastors, Parishioners, People and Sex: After 2000 Years Why Keep Pretending We're Surprised?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2009-09-11 19:15

Vanessa of Feministing discussing a Washington Post column about the general problem of sexual advances on parishioners (they only mention women in this story) by pastors references a particularly troubling instance (emphasis hers.)

The piece has a story of a young woman who was sexually assaulted by her pastor at her Evangelical Lutheran Church – when seeking spiritual guidance, he told her that having sex with him was ordained by God. Even after years of therapy, she still has a hard time walking into a Church.

She said it here.

Problems with this, none of which get a lot of discussion:

  • Even as he seduced her the pastor’s message to his victim was that whatever sex meant for him, sex for her had to be a sacrifice... an obligation... something ordained to happen to her. In other words even as he was trying to have sex with her he was perpetuating the No-Sex Class paradigm’s Rule of Desire #1: it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.
  • What the (literal!) Hell are these guys doing, being on the one hand evangelical (with a small “e,” the WaPo article says it’s prevalent in all denominations) and on the other not just leading others into temptation but using the language of Heaven as leverage to push others into transgression. Jesus spoke to it, of the hypocrites who will not only never enter the kingdom of Heaven but will bar the way to Heaven to others through their behavior. I mean, if ever anyone should understand “hate the sin, love the sinner” it ought to be those who accuse liberals and progressives of hating religion. It’s not that we hate religion! Quite the opposite for me and many, though not all, other progressives. It’s that we can’t stomach those who shroud themselves in sanctity while reaching back and wiping their own filthy cracks on it. Setting those conscienceless examples bars the door of faith to those of conscience.
  • Another thing that’s missing from all this: a complete lack of theological doctrine or protocol for this kind of stuff. It’s not new (Paul groused about in-congregation sex in his New Testament letters) and I’m… pretty sure it’s well recognized if not well understood in churches. But 2000 years of ignoring it hasn’t really made it go away. So why the continued expressions of indignation, dismay, and most of all surprise. Or it’s cynical counterpart “what did you expect?” It seems like denial, from both parishioners, clergy, seminaries, and the general public isn’t working.

In other words the scandalous part isn’t the nominal scandal of adults wrestling with different degrees of attraction, attention, pressure, and resistance. That happens every weekend in bars, backstages, banks, and bath houses every weekend. But for those other situations we tend to have scripts, narratives, experiences, and culture for dealing with it. Pretending church is different isn’t just not working, it’s putting people — pastors, congregants, and passers by who might otherwise find faith at risk.

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Guess We Have To Turn to Fashion Websites For News of *Non* Sex Trafficking Victims

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-09-01 13:09

Part 1: The setup on the conclusion of a two-year human-trafficking trial

From Joe Ryan at the New Jersey Star-Ledger

“And the girls were not allowed to keep any of the money they earned?” asked Shana W. Chen, an assistant U.S. attorney.

“No,” said Afolabi, a burly man who sat shackled before U.S. District Judge Jose Linares, wearing a dark-green jail uniform.

He said it here.

(Note: I found Joe Ryan’s article after reading the following piece. Read on.)

Part 2: The context

Laura Kenney of AOL’s StyleList fashion site uncovers a straight-up classic case of international trafficking of children as young as 10 into the United States.

The worldwide epidemic of human trafficking has reached the beauty industry.

A West African immigrant has pleaded guilty to running a human trafficking operation that forced women to braid hair for up to 14 hours a day in Newark and East Orange NJ, reports the New Jersey Star Ledger.

In a case prosecutors equated to modern day slavery, Lassissi Afolabi, 46, told a judge he headed a ring that smuggled victims from villages in Ghana and Togo. He brought twenty women, age 10 to 19, to New Jersey, where he seized their passports, forbade them to learn English and make friends, and planted them in salons where they were forced to work up to 14 hours per day, 7 days a week.

Though not as horrific as sex-trafficking, this story brings to light the exploitation of innocents who want to find a better life in the US. And this is only one case — we wonder how many more women are being made to work against their will in salons across the country?

She said it here.

Part 3: False Distinctions

Not being a sex-trafficking case this case of trafficking, with coerced sex, hasn’t yet showed up on the standard sites for hand-wringing for sex-trafficker/prostituteders. Because for most of them the real crime isn’t the trafficking or coerced labor it’s sex work. (Why else would so many of them insist that even self-selected sex-workers equals trafficking.)

Which is sort of a shame, as I’ve said fairly regularly. Because it’s not like only trafficked sex-workers have coerced sex. Here’s the Star-Ledger again.

During yesterday’s hearing, Afolabi admitted trying to have sex with one of the girls, who was under 18, during a trip to North Carolina, where he hoped to open a hair-braiding salon.

“And she begged you not to do it — “You are old enough to be my father,’ “ Chen said, quoting the alleged victim.

“Yes,” Afolabi said.

He pleaded guilty today to forced labor, aggravated sexual abuse and traveling with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor.

The point being that just as not all sex work is coerced, neither does all non-sex trafficking involve no sexual coercion. Failing to get this has multiple consequences. The two biggest being that resources are spent to “protect” people (those sex-workers who are autonomous) who don’t need it and resources don’t protect other people (a substantially larger number who are trafficked, yes, and like Afolabi’s hair-braiding victim definitely sexually exploited, but who very often not the least bit “sex-trafficked.”)

Part 4, which seems to be growing into its own post, will be about a peculiarity in what I’m going to call, cynically, “benevolent trafficking” that makes prosecution, and even identification more difficult. The two-bit version is that four of Afolabi’s victims dispute that they were exploited and others report that their families at home are scorning and/or shaming them for complaining. The peculiarity being that Afolabi was actually treating his victims fractionally better than they would have been treated at home, with the result that they and their families felt they were getting a pretty good deal while… on the other hand he was treating them appallingly, and illegally, by U.S. standards and pocketing the difference between what they and their families expected them to earn in their home country (nothing) and what he was able to charge for their services (contemporary U.S. beauty-salon prices, which is quite a lot.)

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Setting Expectations and Locating Responsibility No Matter How Culture Defines "Victim"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2009-07-27 07:36

In comments to my previous post about the universality of victim blaming, Christina B, who’s studied rape in the context of warfare made clear the piece I realize I was missing

I studied (not extensively) the effect of rape on the social fabric and the reason why it is being used as a tool of war in the context of Darfur, which is a shame based culture.

I don´t want to generalize to all ¨shame based cultures¨, but in the context of Darfur it is the responsibility of the woman´s guardian (father, brother or husband) to keep her safe and pure. It is part of his masculinity, his identity as a man. Hence, when a woman is raped or has consentual sexual relations outside of marriage, culturally, her ¨guardian¨ is seen to have failed in his charge of protecting/controlling her. He has failed as a man, which is why it brings shame on the family. This is the basis of rejecting women/girls who have been raped. It isn´t really about ¨blaming¨ the victim. It is about the man´s inability to ¨be a man¨.

Of course, this particular view of masculinity is based in the idea that women are inferior and that men can´t control themselves sexually. However, the specifics are different than in ¨guilt based cultures¨, and I think it is important to keep that in mind.

She said it here.

In some patriarchal cultures (ahem, America would be one of them even though Christina was speaking specifically about Darfur) rape is used not only to injure and humiliate the actual victim but to humiliate and degrade the men who’s identities are tied up in protecting “their” women. In other words in many cases in the eyes of the rapists the intended victims include the real victim’s custodial men.

And in that context (and against our particular core values) killing, assaulting, or shunning the woman is perceived as a way for the male victims to mitigate their humiliation.

But rather than absolving those male “victims,” (who incidentally may indeed feel victimized) their actions double the horror.

1) Because not only are they totally, um, missing the point, they’re acting in a context where it’s still the victim who’s blamed rather than the perpetrator.

2) However culturally determined, murdering, assaulting, shunning the real victim (or, in America, just declaring she must have “asked for it”) in no way changes the universal dynamic that however broadly the culture defines “victim” it’s the victim that’s being held responsible and being blamed. When, instead, responsibility lies with the perpetrator(s)!

Getting that through our collective thick skulls is gonna take some work, and might take different forms in different cultures, but since its a universal fallacy we can legitimately criticize and oppose it no matter how it manifests.

And the reason I keep beating on this is that getting away from the idea that “she was asking for it” or, I guess in some cases that the custodial patriarch or family was asking for it is necessary in order to move towards the general case of setting expectations for men and holding them responsible for our sexual and sex-linked behavior.

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Blame Where Blame is Due: Cross-Cultural Edition

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2009-07-26 09:03

Following up on my previous post and cultural sensitivity an even shorter way to say it might be that while different cultures often have different values, and even value systems, and while (as a minor fan of Ruth Benedict) I’m aware that it’s difficult for someone with one cultural value system to make moral declarations of another, I think its safe to say blaming victims of sexual assault is pretty universal.

And so to the extent blaming the victim is a universal cultural value (as common to Louisiana as Liberia, as common to feminists as anti-feminists) there’s no need to tiptoe while confronting victim blaming.

Yes, we should strive to be sensitive in our approaches to changing the narratives from blaming victims to blaming perpetrators. And so it might be necessary to recognize that in more overtly patriarchal “shame-based” or “honor-based” societies it’s not just the victim herself but her father and family who are blamed. And that the patriarchal connection to victim-blaming is only more subtly veiled, but no less solid, in nominally “1st-World,” and/or “guilt-based” cultures like, oh, say, Maryland.

But at the end of the day the responsible parties are the parties that commit the fucking crimes and not the victims of those crimes. Thus regardless of culture it’s long past time to hold the perpetrators rather than victims (however broadly or narrowly one chooses to define “victim”) responsible.

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Distinguishing Casual Flings from Casual Sex

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-07-21 09:53

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.

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The First Rule of Digging While Trapped In a Hole...

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2009-04-15 08:55

In an earlier post I twigged the anti-feminist conceit that men would be better off without feminism by pointing out that uber-anti-feminist Afghanistan isn’t exactly a male paradise. A bit after I posted that I ran across Twisty Faster’s perfectly accurate (but not, in this case, terribly relevant) point that patriarchy might be more genteel than places like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan but is still well-entrenched in places like Texas or Washington State.

Anyway, in my post I’d linked to a disgraceful law originally backed… but now backed-away-from… by U.S. supported Afghan President Karzai designed to make life suck even worse for, particularly, religious-minority Afghan women.

Megan of Jezebel cuts to the heart of something I only alluded to…

Of course, Mohammad Asif Mohseni, the law’s primary architect, disagrees, and wants us all to butt out of it.

“The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights,” Mohseni told reporters in the capital, Kabul…

Mohseni argued that women and men are very far from equal in today’s Afghanistan and should not be treated as such. He pointed out that many rural women are illiterate and would not be able to find work if they were asked to provide some of the family’s financial support. Men are typically the breadwinners in Afghan households, expected to provide for their wives and children.

“It is not possible for all women to pay the same amount of money as men are paying. For all these expenses, can’t we at least give the right to a husband to demand sex from his wife after four nights?” he said.

Yes, since women are prevented from education and working — by the law Mohseni wants, in fact — they should give it up as recompense for their living expenses.

She said it here.

Exactly! Whatever else one can say about the culture relative to others, there’s no denying that thanks in large measure to cultural norms Afghanistan has terribly low opportunity rates for women (Megan cites a local who says that at 13% Afghan women have the lowest literacy rate in the world.) Not surprising since the Afghan equivalents of Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin routinely incite their cohorts to murder female school children and their teachers. (Twisty’s right that the Malkins and Becks of the 1st world lack differ only in their lack of opportunity rather than of means or motivation to do likewise here.)

But look at the self-referential result! Mohammad Asif Mohseni feels sorry for the poor men who must work twice as hard because… their wives are forbidden to work at all. To them their anti-feminist paradise is no paradise at all! And yet the solution he proposes is… to make things even worse! Worse for women, obviously, but remember the motivation for making it worse for women is the evidently sincere believe the system is so bad for men! The assumption being, evidently, that if you keep digging you’ll eventually come out at the antipodes and you’ll be on top. Meanwhile the men might be slightly less deep than women but everybody’s still in a hole! That men, complaining bitterly all the while no less, are actively digging.

A more obvious solution would be to stop digging at all and begin climbing out instead. A lesson as valuable for men and women outside of Afghanistan as in.

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