Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Echidne of the Snakes raises and issue dear to my heart: the obsession some people have with “proving” the gender status quo.

There’s no field called ‘the study of gender or sex similarities’. No fledgling assistant professor will make tenure or get promoted by publishing an article which points out that men and women really are rather similar in some characteristic. Just imagine the sensation that would be caused by a book titled Men Are From Baltimore. Women Are From Philadelphia. Snores.

She said it here.

It occurs to me that what’s weird about researching sex differences is that so many sex differences are so freaking obvious! Like, gee, the metabolic requirements for growing eight to eleven pounds of incredibly complex new human being, and modifying and sustaining the associated maternal organs during and after pregnancy have functional impacts on other body systems including (temporarily) cognitive functions? Or that kicking a man in the groin will induce higher subsequent risk-avoidance behavior than in women? Do tell!

Some of those differences are even genetic. (The Y chromosome codes for critical-to-fetal-male-differentiating increased testosterone… and hairy ears. The X chromosome not so much. Case closed.)

Problem is no matter how much research you do you’re only going to further refine the good… oh… let’s be generous and say five percent of human biology and behavior can be explained by innate gender differences in the first place. Leaving…

The other 95 percent of commonalities that are generally overlooked. Overlooked not least by the absolutely unexamined assumptions that men and women are as different as night and day, Mars and Venus, or the deceptively convincing black and white symbols of yin and yang.

There’s a possibly-apocryphal but instructively popular anecdote about construction of one of the early cyclotrons. These are large circular machines, dozens, sometimes hundreds of feet in diameter back then, with tons of magnets that physicists use to accelerate subatomic particles to high speeds. Controlled collisions of such particles can reveal quite a lot about the nature of matter, but in order for such machines to function properly they have to be circular. Really, really, millimeter-perfect circles.

Anyway, the story goes that builders of the cyclotron measured everything meticulously at every step, using micrometers to insure that each part was aligned perfectly with its neighbor. When they turned it on… nothing happened. So they got out their micrometers again and measured and adjusted, measured and adjusted, eliminating even the fractional variations they found. And when they turned it on… nothing happened again! So out came the tools, this time even more precise… and… again nothing happened.

And, the story goes, a janitor/carpenter/passerby/kid got a stick, a string, and a pencil put the stick in the middle of the big ring, tied the string and the pencil together, and traced a big circle and found… the measured-by-millimeters circle was actually more than a foot out of round.

The point of my little digression being that, like the alleged cyclotron builders, gender-difference researchers who spend months looking for minute (or even possibly imaginary structural differences in features of the brain) might ask themselves if our brains are really so different why is it so hard to distinguish them, even with really sophisticated instrumentation, from all the parts that aren’t different…

...when the social-sciences equivalent of a stick and a string can tell you that the genes for growing noticeable-to-passers-by boobs, in combination with other individuals with genes for growing bigger muscles, in combination with social structures that historically have treated people with boobs as exchangeable commodities might explain more than you (well, not you but too many others, evidently) want to hear about the basis of significant gender differences in people with very, very similar brains?

Echidne adds,

Why does any of this matter? First, because these studies are always a defense of the status quo. That status quo is always “the worst of times and the best of times” for women; the worst because the studies have established that women really can’t (and don’t even want to be) be equal with men due to all those hard-wired (by some prehistoric electrician) sex differences, and the best because the current arrangements in the society are the best women really can hope for. But of course the status quo of the different-humors theory was different from the status quo of the late nineteenth century which is different from the status quo of today.

Second, bad just-so theories about the difference between men and women affect more than what people talk about at cocktail parties. They affect the culture and its norms, and they affect the beliefs, aspirations and self-confidence of girls and boys yet not born.

Hear, hear. Despite the decidedly non-catchy title Men Are From Baltimore. Women Are From Philadelphia would actually be a much more interesting book! Just for starters, it would start to explain how and why men, women, and those in between use the same parts of their brains to respond to differential environmental and social inputs.

There are a million different possibilities but, this being ostensibly a sex blog… and since “sex sells,” such a book might contain inquiries into (nonexistent as far as I know) studies into how heterosexual male college students react when they’re considerably outnumbered on campus by increasingly sexually-assertive heterosexual women. It might contain data about women’s reactions to partners who are sexually cooler than they are. It might compare and contrast stereotypical beliefs against the realities of men who have a hard time having orgasms and women who come “prematurely…” and lose interest before their partners are done. And in general it might spend a lot of time looking at (also next to nonexistent as far as I know) studies explaining how men, women, and people in between respond to situations where their socialized gender conditioning is screened or filtered out.

Again, I’m not saying men and women are identical — see genes for boobs, hairy ears, above. And so I’m not saying explorations of the similarities would turn up only similarities. I’m just saying I expect science to try and tell us stuff we don’t know, not to reinforce what we do. And, as I’ve said elsewhere, a great way to do that would be to begin with the assumption that we’re the same instead of different and see what comes out of that.

Photo by Flickr user Broken Piggy Bank. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Echidne of the Snakes asks of John Tierney’s latest sociobiological/“ev psych” thesis

At the same time, I do not have the resources that someone who actually works in the field would have and, once again, I plead for the professionals to step in.

So here we go: Tierney’s thesis is that the more gender-equal a society is the more men look like they are from Mars and the more women look like they are from Venus. Men are competitive, aggressive, emotionally flat, and women are cooperative, timid and emotionally curved I guess. Yet the reason for these differences is not our different planetary roots but our different roots in prehistory!

And that prehistory must have had a division of labor between men and women though we don’t have any direct fossil evidence from it. And that division of labor must have meant that women gathered and men hunted though we don’t know if that’s actually the whole truth. And somehow gathering required cooperation and hunting did not though it’s fairly easy to imagine how finding a really good spot for juicy roots would be something you’d keep hidden from the other gatherers and though it’s also fairly easy to imagine how hunting for big game would actually require cooperation between the hunters.

In short, I fail to see how cooperation would have become the selected-for characteristic more often in women than in men, and I also fail to see how it wouldn’t have benefited both sexes to be able to be both cooperative and competitive, depending on the situation. In any case, only a guy who keeps his distance from women altogether could assume that women are not intensely competitive when needed.

Read the quote in context here.

Here’s a for-instance from Tierny’s article (as excerpted in Echidne’s post)

To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

Yeah, boy, you’d have to have some pretty sophisticated gene sets, or as yet undetected but extraordinary selective pressure in humanity’s past, to get gender to express more distinctly during periods of gender equality and subside otherwise. So its nice that Tierny acknowledges the problem.

But couldn’t you just dip instead into almost any post-elementary-school feminist text for that bit about how beyond a certain, pretty-low-level baseline gender is socially constructed* based not on survival-driven genes but by observation and social interaction? And since the examples he uses (India vs. Zimbabwe vs. Netherlands vs. the U.S.) tend to also lie on a continuum of affluence and opportunities for leisure wouldn’t you think that residents of the Netherlands are going to have more leisure time** will also have more opportunity to construct more elaborate distinctions?

Oh, one more thing about how gender differences might be more exaggerated when gender equality is greater from a highly unusual source. In her epic The Origins of Totalitarianism, in her section on antisemitism, Hannah Arendt made a fascinating and relevant observation about England’s Victorian-era prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was from a thoroughly assimilated family of Jewish ancestry. Baptised and raised much like any other affluent Anglican he nevertheless capitalized on his “exotic” origins. The tricky part? As Arendt dryly puts it

Disraeli, who never denied that “the fundamental fact about (him) was that he was a Jew,” had an admiration for all things Jewish that was matched only by his ignorance of them.”

Pg. 71

Arendt says Disraeli, having next to no actual experience of Jewishness, distinguished himself by having his tailors cut his suits, and his barber cut his hair, in ways that he imagined made him look “more Jewish.”

And when I think about Tierney’s finding that differences become more exaggerated as meaningful equality increases I’m left wondering if… maybe… y’know… you might have had the sort of social breakdowns that, oh, say, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English mention in the early chapters of For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women, or Shulamith Firestone brings up in The Dialectic of Sex. You know, where after the industrial revolution destroyed the ancient, necessity-driven sex roles people started having these identity crises about “what it means” to be a man (Hemmingway, Robert Service, Hammett, Kipling) or a woman (Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ellen Swallow Richards) with the result that they tended to, um, emulate what we imagine are the most distinctive characteristics.

Nah, all that’s a total coincidence. It’s waaaay easier to say evolution does it, right? :-)

[** Please note Thorsten Veblen’s observation that the construction of leisure does not imply effortlessness. In fact quite the opposite. —fl]

So! Is a Toyota Prius “more” of a car than a Honda Accord? Is an oboe “less” of a musical instrument than a bassoon? Is a potato more of a vegetable than a carrot, or a squash, or a scarlet runner bean?

Those might seem like ridiculous questions but a) I’m certain they’re not and b) I’m not the only one raising them.

Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog, reflecting on a 1954 “masculinity rating” quiz from It’s A Man’s World, a history of mid-20th-Century men’s magazines, says

OK, so this dates from some time ago. But I thought it was an interesting example of how men’s adherence to masculinity has been hysterically policed. It’s all set out there – ‘real men’ don’t sew, hate dirt or sleep with other men.Read the rest of her post and check out some of the questions, and required answers, here.

It was fun coming downstairs to find this post in my newsreader while the coffee machine was heating up. That’s because as I was waking up I’d been thinking about the notion of masculinity again and how… peculiar comparison inside gender is.

Because what, exactly, makes one individual “less” of a woman, or another individual “more” of a man?

It would be silly to ask questions like what makes a spatula more of a kitchen utensil than a slotted spoon. And yet we do!

What bugs me about gender isn’t femininity or masculinity per se. It’s that the opposite of masculinity is supposed to be femininity; the opposite of femininity is supposed to be masculinity.

So in other words if you don’t have a manly voice you’ve got a womanly one. If you don’t have feminine shoulders you’ve got “mannish” ones. If you don’t have a masculine walk you’ve got an “effeminiate” walk.

Oh right, and if you’re not really one or the other then it’s because you’re “in the middle.” Which is sort of like claiming there are only two opposite flavors, sweet and sour, and that therefore chocolate, horseradish, and salmon can exist only somewhere on the sweet/sour continuum, and that since chicken broth isn’t sour it therefore must be sweet.

The point being that just as asking for more than two flavors doesn’t invalidate either sweetness or sourness, neither does asking for more qualities than masculine and feminine doesn’t particularly invalidate those either.

That seems like an odd request (at least to Western sensibilities since the beginnings of the Modern Era) it evidently it hasn’t always been so obvious. I’m reading a nifty book, George L. Mosse’s The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Studies in the History of Sexuality), that suggests earlier forms of organization that we might call “masculinity” or “an ideal of manhood” would probably have seemed more congruent with, say, nobility, aristocracy, or perhaps just the well-monied. For them what we’d call binary “masculinity” might have been better understood as well-cultured and highly cultivated and therefore might have been better documented by Thorsten Veblen than John Wayne. Think, maybe Chief Executive Officer or Celebrity

Now one might or might not agree with the previous nobility/wealth distinctions any more than one does with the modern, but! Before the emergence of masculinity as an emulatable ideal the large portion of humanity, while perfectly male or female, were not locatable on a continuum from “femininity” at one end and “masculinity” on the other.