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!

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."

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.

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!