gender imbalances

More Traditional Values is to Women's Blues After Sex as More Cold, Wet Bedding is to Hypothermia

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2011-04-04 14:52

Uggh! Hugo Schwyzer says

My friend Monica sent me a link to this MSNBC story: Post-coital blues plague a third of young women. Based on a very small sample of 200 young Australians, researchers at the Queensland Institute of Technology found that 1 in 3 women had felt post-intercourse melancholy at least once, and 1 in 10 experienced it regularly.

It’s easy to point out the obvious problem with the study: the sample is very small, for instance, and the focus on intercourse to the exclusion of other forms of sexual activity is problematic. But the real impact of these studies is in how the mainstream media report them, and the danger here is that a small and relatively inconclusive project can get framed as “sex makes women sad.”

Source: Hugo Schwyzer

Hugo nicely dismantles the inclination that makes conservatives say "but of course!"

I'd like to briefly dismantle the logic:

My guess is that a report saying instead that between two thirds and nine tenths of all women usually or always feel good after intercourse — or even that they just don’t feel bad — would make an awful lot of tradition mongers somewhere between unhappy and outright angry.

But let’s take the assertion as a given and spend even five seconds reflecting on how “traditional” attitudes might affect women’s experience of intercourse. I can think of three right off the bat.

First: the traditionalist model of sex as transactional — women “sacrifice” sex, gratifying their husband’s “needs” in exchange for financial and even physical support. And since under that model women’s experience of sex is intended to fall somewhere on a spectrum from the obligation to pay rent and the chore of mopping the kitchen the surprise is not that a third would feel depressed but that two thirds wouldn’t! (And let’s not even talk about the letdown women are supposed to feel if the task of “pre-marital” intercourse doesn’t shorten the time to a marriage proposal.) Ugh!

Second: there’s not much margin for success in the traditionalist model of sex as romantic fulfillment of True Love wherein if bells don’t ring, especially the first time, then something’s wrong with the relationship.

Three: in the traditionalist model of sex women aren’t the “gatekeepers” of MRA mythology but goalies against which men may only win by “scoring” or at worst tie by not scoring whereas women may only lose by being “scored” against or at best tie by preventing a score. Thus in the traditional model the same act that leads a man to celebrate leads to women’s shame.

And yet in each case the conservative traditionalist’s proposal is more tradition — more sense of fee for service, more romantic idealism, and more shame and loss. No surprise then that their proposed solution for poverty is more privation.

Screw that!

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Where 67% of the (Non-Matriculating) Boys Are

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-04-01 16:39

Amanda Hess says of competing "satire" college paper articles about "dwindling straight-male college populations" from George Washington University and American University

Less hi-larious: Despite an apparent deficit of straight guys on D.C. campuses, both American and George Washington manage to keep electing them as student body presidents. Perhaps women are just too busy beating each other over the head with high heels—and gay men "shitting glitter"—to run a viable campaign.

Source: TDB

The fallacy, of course, being that even if there are fewer straight men on campuses most colleges I'm aware of have this thing called "off campus." Which based on my own extensive experience as a straight male who wasn't in college is one of the places women who are in college go to meet men.

Or am I missing something really obvious here?

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The Two Rules of Desire and "Girls Suck at Math"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2011-03-08 10:10

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

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

Link: Inoculation Against Stereotype (Inside Higher Ed)

Source: Geek Feminism Blog

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Brazen Careerist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Of Course Besides Hypergamy Another Component of Patriarchy is Hyperbooty-amy

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2011-02-14 10:44

Hypergamy, according to it's Wikipedia entry, is defined this way

Hypergamy (colloquially referred to as marrying up or gold digging) is the act or practice of seeking a spouse of equal or higher socioeconomic status, or caste status than oneself.

The term is often used more specifically in reference to a perceived tendency amongst human cultures for females to seek or be encouraged to pursue male suitors that are comparatively older, wealthier or otherwise more privileged than themselves. Hypergamic behaviours can be explained in terms of genetic economic necessity, in which societies with high levels of gender inequality are more likely to have women who "marry-up" for the benefit of their children, and more likely to have men who "marry-down" to ensure that their mates have a higher incentive to remain faithful.

Now hypergamy, as I just pointed out, is a tool of patriarchy. It's not the only tool, however. Another would be... well... I can't think of the term at the moment so I'm going to call it "hyperbooty-amy:" the act or practice of seeking a spouse or partner of equal or higher.

Under patriarchy, even when men and women have equal opportunity to select partners, the rates of pay were and sometimes still are traditionally skewed in favor of men and at the expense of women. Among other things this creates the very unpleasant situation where a woman who married a male colleague with the same experience, same qualifications, and same job as she is nevertheless engaging in "hypergamy." Point being that under patriarchy, women have been structurally obliged to at least be aware of men as the dreaded "walking wallets." Whether they want to or not. Even, at times, with professional equals.

At the same time men are denied virtually all hint that they might be sexually or possibly even romantically desirable to women. Similarly women have been actively discouraged from acknowledging that men might be anything other than "good providers," let alone dare to hint that just looking at any but the most glamourous (read wealthy, famous, and/or accomplished) men might stir their loins.

Men, on the other hand, who assess potential partners in terms of anything but their boobs, their butts, their booties, their blowjobs, or (for the more sedate) their ability to bear children (call it the five B's) are slandered with all manner of suspicion and slur. A gigolo if she earns more than he does. A liar if he admires her "for her mind." And, alternately, "under her thumb," or "she must be really something in the sack," or maybe just "he must be really desperate" if she's less conventionally attractive than his "worthiness" is deemed to warrant.

Let's not even mention the lip-service-only scowls at starter wives.

Men's rights activists deplore, I think correctly, the Patriarchal tool of hypergamy and not, I think also correctly, that hypergamy doesn't get the attention it deserves from most feminists (relative to its patriarchal implications anyway.) Under patriarchy there's a second, less considered phenomenon in which attention and concern are reversed. Call it "hyper-booty-amy" where feminists quite naturally notice and deplore the social dismissal of women who aren't conventionally attractive and... men's rights activists rarely give it any thought. This too is a shame considering that this too is a tool patriarchy uses to manipulate men and women to its own ends.

When someone says of a woman "she could do better," they're encouraging hypergamy. When someone says "he could do better," they're encouraging hyperbootyamy. And when comment-thread gadfly Eurosabra deplores that a) the top 20% of "high status" men "get" the top 20% of conventionally attractive women he thinks he's merely complaining about hypergamy. Instead he's celebrating both hypergamy and hyperbootyamy and merely complaining that he's not in that top 20%. He's not alone.

At the end of the day, though, you can't consistently complain about the one without the other. At least not once it's pointed out.

See also Two Rules of Desire

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Hypergamy Being a Tool of the Patriarchy, Feminists and Men's Rights Activists Should Work Together to Smash Patriarchy

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2011-02-13 15:24

So in comments on my post about the egregious Pepsi Max Superbowl ad tu quoque, who's pretty hostile to feminism, replied to one of my previous replies that

"Feminist believe that the strictures of gender are cause by patriarchy.

MRAs, for the most part, believe they're caused by female hypergamy."

I think that's perfectly true, but also almost perfectly non-contradictory.

Roughly 90% of female hypergamy, a.k.a. seeking a husband or partner of a higher social class or position, is a product of patriarchy.

Consider the disgraceful situation where parents use infanticide to control any "surplus" of girl children. Same with situations where parents murder daughters who are perceived to be flirting or otherwise interacting with boys who aren't of their parent's choice. Same for the not-so-ancient American and European tradition of paying men more than women on the blunt assumption that "men must support their family" while women are... if not outright chopped liver then certainly economically obliged to find a male partner who (by convention) makes more than she can.

In none of those situations is it the girls and women who are creating "hypergamy." In pretty much none of those cases is it the (underpaid, sequestered, or outright dead!) girls and women who are making those choices.

And since the system of patriarchy is a system wherein heads of household and potential heads of households decide who may and may not marry (or, in some situations, live!) then patriarchy is indeed the source of nearly all hypergamy.

Thus MRAs who think hypergamy sucks should make common cause with feminism.

In fact, I'll go one step further: one of the most common denominators of feminism is a belief that everyone should have the right to life, liberty, and equal social, political, and economic power, the very last thing actual feminists want is hypergamy. Thus feminism ought to be interested in making common cause with MRAs as well. Patriarchy and hypergamy go hand in hand.

I'll go one step further and say if you smash patriarchy you'll destroy hypergamy. Similarly without hypergamy patriarchy is almost meaningless.

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Em & Lo on Rejecting Romantic Overtures: It's a Lot Easier to Be Polite About it if You've Ever Reversed Roles

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2010-12-18 09:57

As usual these days I'm decades behind in my reading.  But just in case you haven't seen it, or perhaps have forgotten it, I just want to give a big shout to Em & Lo for their December 2 post about how to politely reject overtures.  What's golden is the perspective (and advocacy) they bring to it for hetero men and women.

A note to straight guys: You are less frequently hit on, and thus you have less practice at rejecting an unwelcome pick-up. Which means you’re frequently awkward and weird about it. But women especially need to be encouraged in their attempts at seduction — if only because you guys are constantly complaining that they don’t make the first move often enough! Don’t go along with a hook-up just to avoid hurting her feelings, but don’t treat her like a desperate Donna either. She’s not desperate for hitting on you (who made off with your self-esteem, anyway?), she just knows what she wants and goes after it when she wants it. And ladies, don’t take it personally if he blows you off rudely; he’s just had less practice than you.

A note to the straight gals: You are less frequently the picker-upper, and thus you’re less familiar with the sting of rejection. (Which is why all of you should attempt at least one pick-up to experience it first-hand, in the same way we should all wait tables at least once in order to empathize with servers the world over.) Approaching a stranger in a bar takes more bravery than root canal surgery or listening to a Celine Dion album in its entirety. So be gentle, ladies. And guys, don’t take it personally if she blows you off rudely; she’s just heard a lot of dirty catcalls and cheesy pickup lines in her time and is used to putting up walls.

Source: Em & Lo

It's true -- once you've been part of a pickup situation where the traditional gender roles are reversed you get not only a ton of perspective but also a great deal of sympathy.

Also it's just a darn good idea to kick to the curb most of the assumptions underlying the he asks / she answers tradition of dating.  They were really nasty assumptions back when we could assume that nearly any man had more economic and social power than nearly any woman.  And while it's 100% true that we don't yet have real gender parity it's also 100% true that the difference is small enough that the nasty logic of tradition no longer holds.

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But Ranking Men By Looks and Women By Income Would be Both Inconceivable and Intolerable!

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2010-10-28 08:43

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

Amanda Hess The Daily Beast says

The Daily Beast has produced a slideshow on “Baseball’s Sexiest Teammates,” ranking baseball platers’ “wives and girlfriends” on their physical attractiveness and other conspicuously gendered categories (“Number of Scheduled Breast Implants: 1; Number of Breast Implants Carried Out: 0”). But the Beast knocks this one out of the park with the apparently unironic juxtoposition of the slideshow with this “Baseball’s 10 Richest Players” feature. Men succeed by hording resources like currency and attractive women! Women succeed by being horded by successful men!

Source: Amanda Hess

She suggests that for balance the Daily Beast should produce a slideshow of her male colleagues hair plugs and beer bellies and rankings of her female colleagues salaries and partner’s looks. Naahh. Ranking women by income and men by their attractiveness would be both inconceivable and intolerable!

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Reducing Gender Selection for Supreme Court Nominees to a Coin Toss... In a Good Way

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2010-05-12 20:23

Ezra Klein does the arithmetic on the thuggishly stupid question from Kathryn Jean Lopez of Donna M. Hughes’s publisher National Review Online. Lopez tweeted “Are men allowed to be nominated to the Supreme Court anymore?“ Klein posted in reply

Assume that men and women are about equally capable of serving on the Supreme Court and there are about equal numbers of them in the country. The chance that two women in a row might be selected? About 25 percent. That is to say, it’s the same as the chance that you might flip a quarter and see it come up heads both times. And because the two events are theoretically independent (at least in our hypothetical), once a woman has been chosen for the first slot, the chances that a woman will be chosen for the second slot are 50-50. So Kagan, or someone of her gender, had an even shot.

Two women in a row just isn’t very unlikely in an equal world. The 34 male justices we had after women got the vote? Rather more unlikely. The calculator says 0.000000000058. Yipes.

He said it here.

Yup to the math: as equality increases selection really should be expected to approach coin-toss frequencies.

And yup to the reminder that you can judge Donna M. Hughes, women’s studies professor, by the integrity, honesty, intelligence, and commitment to parity of the company she keeps.

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Current 60/40 Ratios and Long-Term Gender Parity: Bad News for Maureen Dowd, Superbowl Ads, Good For Everyone Else

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2010-02-11 17:08

Speaking of the dumb idea that recent male/female imbalances on campus are a social catastrophe, Echidne of the Snakes nicely illustrates just how empty the complaint really is.

Can you imagine reversing this? Take something like the military which is predominantly male. Do you see articles written about how the poor men must suffer, not having any women to date? How they can’t get married, due to the predominantly male environment? How they therefore should allow more women in and possibly relinquish their own jobs in consequence?

You don’t see those articles, and neither were reversal articles of this type written when colleges were filled with nothing much but men. Nobody worried that those poor men couldn’t be able to find a wife or a date for the weekend, nobody. And this has never been a concern with all-male colleges even today. It is only a concern when women have become the majority of college students.

She said it here.

The reason, of course, that people didn’t worry about skewed balances of men improving their prospects is that right down to rules about wearing or removing hats society was structured around men with earning power finding and keeping women with none.

What needs to change isn’t the ratios of women to men in college, or in the workforce. What needs to change are those seriously obsolete ideals about who should support whom, who should earn more than whom, how men should value themselves and each other only by their net worth, and how women should value themselves and each other by their ability to “catch” partners with greater earning potential.

Aside: while I almost always pin responsibility for gender issues on men (not least because, as a man, that’s my responsibility) this is an area where women are really going to have to give it up too. The Maureen Dowd’s laments are no less dangerous to gender parity than those moronic Superbowl commercials about “pussywhipped” men.)

For what it’s worth this 60/40 ratio is almost certainly an artifact of just one or two generations of women’s efforts to bootstrap themselves, and their daughters, out of the income, education, and employment imbalances of the status quo prior to around 1980.

If nothing else, those same lower-to-upper middle-class women who are now either graduating at higher rates or finding service jobs at higher rates than their husbands and brothers aren’t going to let their sons sink below their daughters. But neither are they likely to let their daughters fall back behind either.

So minor generational fishtailing notwithstanding men’s and women’s earnings, accomplishments, and standing are going to come closer and closer to even. Since that’s actually going to be good for pretty much everybody maybe now would be a good time to stop whining about it.

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Former High-School Dropout Figleaf Puts the Dread 60/40 Sex Ratios On Campus Into (Off-Campus) Perspective

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2010-02-11 14:30

Matthew Yglesias points to a couple of places in the world where there really are fewer men than women — American inner city neighborhoods where prison and murder take their toll, and Iceland where much of the male population is often literally at sea — and then jumps on the much-buzzed-about notion that the higher number of women enrolled in college compared to the lower number of men is a social/dating/marriage/settling catastrophe. (Yglesias, for instance, points to an article in the New York Times, um fashion section that addresses this very serious social issue!)

He also points to a post by big-L Libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution Never one to shy away from evolutionary economist psychology explanations involving hypothetical supermarkets giving away hypothetical $100 bonuses that, Tabarrok claims, perfectly explains “the predictable consequences on dating.”

Yglesias, like many other intelligent people, smells red herring.

...most of the hand-wringing about this seems silly. It would be bizarre to start admitting fewer women to college in order to make it easier for the remaining women to find steady boyfriends. Things like improved labor market opportunities for blue collar women and improved college preparation for low-income men would help resolve the imbalance, but those things would be goals with pursuing even absent the gender balance on campus issue. What’s more, there’s a large-scale shift toward people getting married later that’s rendering a lot of these ideas about meeting your future husband in school obsolete anyway.

He said it here.

There’s a bit of difference between 60-40% women and men in college and 60-40% men period. For instance, yes, if you’re dead set on marrying someone in your econ 101 course then with that sort of on-campus ratio a woman’s going to be at a disadvantage relative to men in the same class.

Probably not so much at an off-campus coffee shop. Or bar. Or church. Or local alt-weekly or on-line personals.

When I was an evidently charming but distinctly non-college-bound young vagabond back in the 1970s I found no more but also no fewer opportunities relationships in women’s-college college towns as general-admission college towns. Nor did other charming but non-college bound young vagabonds in my circle of friends consider their prospects to be better in those places. I know, I know, plural of anecdote is not data and all that but still, 60-40 mixes aren’t anything compared to the three, four, and five to one (straight) women to (straight) men ratios on and near college campuses that had traditionally been women-only back in the day.

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