social assumptions

Schrödinger's Ski-Jump: Sport or Game Depending on Whether Women Can Out-Compete Men? Yeah, Right

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2010-02-24 00:26

Well this is just amazingly, self-defeatingly dumb! While thoroughly shredding the International Olympic Committee’s determined resistance to letting women ski-jumpers compete (current record-holder on the main ski jump in Vancouver? Lindsey Van) Angry Mouse of Daily Kos unearths the following rationalization from David Whitley at a website called Fanhouse. Here’s Angry Mouse’s quote of Whitley

...once girls start performing as well as boys — or better — it’s not even a sport anymore. Just look at what women have done to bowling!

[Fred] Barnes was beaten by a woman, giving him immediate entry into history’s Male Ridicule Club.

How could a guy lose to a girl in an athletic event?

Simple, really.

Bowling isn’t an athletic event.

Rule No. 1 in determining whether an activity is a sport: If the best female in the world can beat the best male in the world, it doesn’t qualify.

Read Angry Mouse’s post here.

We’ll leave aside the whole daring provocateur trope so common in “journalism” (remember, all publicity = good publicity, thus no direct link to Whitley’s post from here.) Instead let’s examine the question in the context of other, similar “last stand” sort of claims.

If you ever had to read Karl Marx (along with Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman in a freshman survey course, as I did) then you may dimly recall (as I do) the story of a skilled laborer bragging to an industrialist that while he might be able to invent a machine for turning axe-handles on a lathe he’d never invent one that could turn rifle stocks as quickly or accurately as a skilled human. The industrialist quickly rose to the challenge and the lathe operator lost his job… as did, no doubt, every other lathe operator in the factory. This version of the “man can not be beaten by…” wasn’t very durable.

If you ever had to take a combined computability and cognition in the 1980s, as I did, you may dimly recall (as I do) the informed assertions and alleged proofs that a computer could never beat a human grandmaster at chess. That took a little longer to build Deep Blue, which beat Gary Kasparov in the 20th Century than it took the industrialist to beat the lathe operator in the 19th, but down Kasparov went. This version of the “man can not be beaten by…” was only slightly more durable.

If you had to read a newspaper almost any time in the 19th, 20th, or 21st Centuries you may vividly recall the assertion that not only are humans not a product of evolution but evolution itself never happens and indeed isn’t possible. This latter one seems like a pretty durable argument, but more because it’s pretty passionately held than because the accumulation of evidence hasn’t been drawing the circle of denial tighter, and tighter, and tighter. (Same, by the way, for the even loopier notion that the earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old.)

And now this “It’s not a sport of a woman can beat a man at it” business.

The problem with each of these assertions is that they diminish those who resist far more than they do their challengers.

Care to go on? Speaking of the Olympics, Adolph Hitler and his minions were diminished when Cornelius Cooper Johnson one the gold medal for the high jump in Munich. And goodness knows the tobacco companies were diminished (to the tune of half a trillion $!#%!@#% dollars) when their efforts to “prove” cigarettes are harmless finally failed. (Surely a fraction of that money would have been better spent developing a variety that was either not addictive or else not carcinogenic or preferably both.) And don’t forget the loopy, and sometimes still-prevalent notion that women are “naturally nurturing” and therefore ought to be consigned to all child-rearing duties during, and in the event of divorce, after marriage.

As far as I can tell (weather conditions — heat, snow, wind seem to alter where people start their jumps) the actual Olympic contenders this week mostly handily beat Lindsay Van’s earlier record on the hill. But many did not. For instance she finished ahead of most or all the men on the American team. Which, I guess, in David Whitley’s interesting logic means that ski-jumping is a sport for some men… but not the American ones who’s best wasn’t as good as Van’s.

Which is of course stupid. Again, the false premise driving his logic demeans and diminishes everyone.


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Finding the Clitoris is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2010-02-23 19:41

Froth of harshly indicts contemporary sex education

For five years I was given “sex education”. It mostly consisted of periods and condoms. It didn’t talk about consent. It didn’t talk about the actual mechanics of sex, about arousal and lubrication and oscillation. It didn’t tell me a single thing about relationships and it didn’t tell me I had a clitoris.

...

That makes me angry. What makes me even angrier is the certainty that there are other girls like me, being “educated” in sex by their schools and their local health providers, and given so little information about their bodies that only luck and stubbornness will ever give them the ability to have orgasms.
That makes me furious.

Read the rest (which is equally well-said) here.

Froth titles her post “Sex Education, or, What Boys Will Want From You,” which is pretty much the no-sex class construction you’d expect from a curriculum based on 1950s notions of gendered (coughwomen’scough) responsibility… and gendered (coughmen’scough) irresponsibility… plus denial, squeamishness about enjoyment, the high premium placed on womens’ utter inexperience, and the blunt pragmatics of the undesirability to parents and teachers of teen pregnancy.

That boys would have no idea what they’d want from girls, except the sports-analogy affirmation that comes with “scoring” was never considered either, of course. With the result that in addition to not telling women about their clitorises or that there are myriad ways to effectively have shared, parallel, or individual orgasms, the curricula also rarely covers ways boys can manage their own orgasms, to communicate their own wants and needs and vulnerabilities, or, for that matter, to say no when they feel pressured to “perform.”

It’s just taken for granted that enjoyable for boys is “easy,” even automatic, even unavoidable. So don’t bother teaching them anything. And that girls are “hard” so… again don’t bother!

For nearly four years the most popular post at Real Adult Sex, by far, has been How to find someone’s clitoris (if you don’t already know). As Froth points out, for men and women both that’s just the tip of the ignorance iceberg.

What’s the one thing you really wish had been covered in your sex education classes? Assuming you had classes at all?


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Elizabeth Gilbert on Valentines, Romance, and the End of Real "Traditional Marriage"

Posted by figleaf on Sun, 2010-02-14 23:40

Transcript of audio of Elizabeth Gilbert on a Valentine’s Day show episode of NPR’s Studio 360

Q: Do you have a position on the official love holiday?

A: Oh wow, you know what, it’s interesting because I was doing a little research in preparation for this. It was curious for me to discover that it wasn’t until the mid-19th Century that the whole practice of giving and receiving valentines happened in America. And that’s really curious because I just wrote this book about marriage, and it wasn’t until the mid-19th Century that the whole practice of getting married for love came into being

Q: Right…

A: Or the mass market of romance happened in America. So it all happened around the same time. A time that has to do with the industrial revolution and the invention of the middle class. And the fact that people had the luxury to be able to choose partners on the basis of love instead of on pragmatism. So it seems like you could sort of say romance was invented in the middle of the 19th Century.

Gilbert’s the author of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia and, more recently, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage


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The Two Rules of Desire As a Problem With Not Restating "All Men Are Potential Rapists"

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2010-02-03 01:49

Speaking of restating “all men are potential rapists” as “to a woman, any man can be a potential rapist,” I’d like to talk for just a second about what I think is an overlooked problem with the traditional phrase.

If I can just try it out for a second it goes something like this:

1) The overt obstacle for men… even more so for progressive ones… is that to acknowledge being seen as a potential rapist goes against everything we’re taught to believe as Americans, as progressives, etc., about the evils of stereotyping and blanket oppression of members of a class.

2) The covert obstacle for men is that the accusation blends seamlessly with the way we perceive ourselves anyway — it’s just one more obstacle we believe we have to “seduce” our way through anyway if we want to be in any sort of relationship with women at all (not just sexual ones!)

3) Consequently the grammar of all “but I’m an exception, I’m not a rapist” is identical to every other attempt to form a heterosexual relationship, with the additional and particularly nettlesome layer for men of “well great, not only do I now have to demonstrate first that I’m not a loser and second that I’m not a cad but also third that I’m also not a class-one felon.”

4) In other words minus the perceived criminal allegations the entire relational interactions take place on ground heterosexuals… at least heterosexual men… have already worn into deep, familiar ruts.

5) The problem with all “but I’m not a rapist” arguments is there’s a tacit “unlike all the others who probably are.”

6) With the really problematic… well… problem with number five being yet another tacit clause: “... but I nevertheless feel no obligation to do anything about.”

That last one’s a doozy and, I think, cracking it is one big key to solving the problem with, on the one hand male defensiveness and on the other male indifference. I think rhetorically restating the problem as “to a woman, any man is a potential rapist” makes shirking that obligation a lot more difficult. Not impossible, no*, but definitely more difficult

—-

I ought to mention that the lightbulb for this went off for me after reading Britni Daniell’s post of A Different Defense of Schrodinger’s Rapist. In which she responds to previous objections by Champagne and Benzedrine and extensively quotes Hugo Schwyzer (from here and here.)

* Because another thing that shakes out of the construction, above, is you know how men appear to value a relationship in proportion to how hard he thinks he has to work for it? Well, to the extent that’s true he’s going to be personally frustrated by the additional layer of mistrust but… I wonder if he’s going to feel more “worthy” if he can “win” a woman over in spite of that? If so then it’s definitely not a good dynamic.


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Restating a Contentious Assertion: To a Woman, Any Man Could Potentially Be a Rapist

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2010-02-03 01:27

Britni Daniell of Oh My God That Britni’s Shameless and Champers of Champagne and Benzedrine have been having a really good extended conversation about the reality underlying the shorthand phrase “all men are potential rapists.” Oh yeah, and the considerable heat the phrase generates.

Lately (in A Different Defense of Schrodinger’s Rapist for Britni and On Missing the Point for Champers) the friction has stopped producing as much heat and is starting to produce more light instead.

It’s started enlightening me anyway.

Here’s Champers

The large part of the ongoing discussions involve people either defending the phrase ‘All Men are Potential Rapists’ or arguing about how stupid, offensive and inadequate it is. Sadly, this has meant the the meat of the discussion – about how women feel that they’re forced to view every man as a possible sexual predator – has been utterly ignored.

He said it here.

Actually not so much ignored as set aside in order to spend a lot of time saying, basically, “did not/did to.” Which is the nature of a lot of blame-assigning arguments.

Champers’ proposed rewording, one that I also agree wouldn’t apply the “wait a minute” brakes when men hear it, goes like this

To a woman, any man could potentially be a rapist.

I don’t know if you want to call that a semantic difference, or a perspective difference, or a more traditional-gender-friendly difference or what.

But I think it’s a really big difference.

The biggest difference, by the way, is that whatever else you can say about it, that construction steps around the considerable problem of reflex reaction to stereotyping, period, let alone the problem of feeling stereotyped.

At least as importantly, at least to me, is that it’s spoken from the perspective of a woman trying to make the distinction (“to a woman…”) rather than from the perspective of the man who (even if he really is a rapist!) is going to either be put or actively go on the defensive.

Actually let me make that last point another way: by saying “to a woman, any man could potentially be a rapist” is also way harder to refute. For one thing there aren’t a lot of ways to say a woman couldn’t feel that way. And if you foolishly do go there you’re immediately obliged to explain not why you’re not a rapist but how she could be mistaken for her feeling. And… I’m pretty sure a minute or two after you do you’re going to find yourself saying something like “...well, I see your point about…”

Which, when you think about it, is the purpose of good rhetoric.

One further, minor adjustment I’d want to make to that restatement though.

To any onlooker, any man could potentially be a rapist.

That might generate a little more resistance but there’s a point: I might know (accurately or mistakenly*) that I’m not a rapist. But unless I’m someone’s conjoined twin it’s exceedingly unlikely that I can be sure the next guy to my left or right isn’t a possible rapist. Unless you settle for complete extremes (all for, say, Andrea Dworkin, none for, say, Heather MacDonald) then pretty much however you define it some men are rapists** and the vast, vast, vast majority of them don’t exactly advertise it. Which, after all, is the problem noted in the statement in the first place.

Point being that constructing it more broadly strengthens rather than weakens the assertion. And, even better, increases rather than decreases sympathy for the position.

The final benefit of the restatement, either Champer’s specific version or my more general one, is that it locates the problem where it needs to be: a subjective problem for women based on an objective problem in assessing men.

It just feels more like you can do something with that. Do something, anyway, beside insist till you’re blue in the face that a) not all men are rapists (which is perfectly but unhelpfully true) b) that some women are rapists (also true but unhelpful), c) it’s sexist (true under some, but not all, definitions), or especially d) I have a totally socially-conditioned reflex against stereotyping of which “all men are potential rapists” is only a single instance. Oh, and also something even less-helpful than usual, e) to go all Freudian and start proclaiming what awful penalties should be rained down on men if and after they’re caught and convicted… since first of all that’s too late and second of all it doesn’t address anything at all in Champer’s statement of the problem: the penalties simply couldn’t be more draconian than the have been at times in the past and guess what? It was still the case then that “to all women, any man could be a potential rapist.”

Which leaves us with what, exactly? Well, it leaves us, us men especially, pretty much where we are now — not really doing anything about it. Or it leaves us with a good idea where to look for solutions: on the subset of men who are dragging all the rest of us down with them.

(Incidentally, because that whole “well women can be rapists too” keeps coming up, and because some people are going to very reasonably point out that there’s probably no way, ever, to stop all men from being rapists, I’ll just pitch for a combined objective: I’ll say that the problem as stated will be largely resolved if the objective is simply to get the rates at which men are rapists down to the rate at which women are now. At which point, whatever that might be, we can at least stop talking about it as if it was a purely gendered issue and start talking about it as a general one… that, I’m guessing, would tend to have more general solutions.)

—-

Footnotes:

* Important note: by linking to bmkinney I’m not at all agreeing that the correct construction is to require proof of a negative. —fl
** This is still true even when, as many people reflexively posit, women can be rapists too. —fl


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Holly Pervocracy's Critical Assessment and Formal Restatement of "For Every Jack There's a Jill"

Posted by figleaf on Sun, 2010-01-10 14:40

Holly of The Pervocracy on the problem with beauty standards. You should read the whole thing. Here’s a snippet.

Individual preference isn’t the only problem with standards. The other problem is that it’s really unhealthy to create the idea of the perfect mate in your head and then try to find humans who match. I didn’t know that short blond men were sexy to me until I met Tommy. In fact I still don’t know that they are—I just know that Tommy is, and I think a tall dark Tommy would appeal to me more than a short blond random guy. We don’t live in a world of types but people.

So “standards” suck, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to find everyone equally attractive. That’s silly and it’s not going to happen. Plus it leads to creepers going “you can’t find me unattractive, that’s discrimination!” This also doesn’t mean that “everyone’s got someone”; the vast majority of people do but I can’t make you promises. What it really means is that sexiness is the chemistry between individuals. “Society” isn’t going to date me no matter how thin and busty I am; the intersection of one person’s unique appearance and one person’s unique and malleable preferences is all that ever matters.

Asking if I’m “sexy” is, ultimately, like asking if I’m “a friend.” The answer isn’t yes, no, or even “depends by what standards”; it’s “to whom?”
She said it here.

This is a great example of the practical application of metaphysics and “just semantics” to sex. Oh and while it sounds like it ought to be a pun, if Holly covers the metaphysics of sex here, Geoffrey K. Pullam covers the metaphysics of violins at Language Log.


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Big Toe Complications for Thumb-Fingered Evolutionary Psychology

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2010-01-06 17:39

Zacharoo of the amusingly named but academically inclined Lawn Chair Anthropology points to a study of the evolution of human (ok, ok, hominin) hands and feet with some… interesting implications. The sticky point is that morphologically hands and feet derive common (ok, ok, serially homologous) sets of genes, which is a complicated way of saying that depending on whether primary or regulator genes respond to selective pressure then, say, development of big toes may produce changes (ok, ok, involve pleiotropy) to the thumbs as well. Or possibly vice versa.

The authors of the study suggest that in very early hominins pressure to walk upright may have been greater than pressure to manipulate things with our hands.

Much hilarity ensues. (Their emphasis, not mine.)

... [Then] the authors did some crazy simulations, to see what kinds of selection regimes on the hand and foot may have led from a chimp-like morphology to the morphology we humans enjoy today. I’ll need to reread this section a couple times, but it looks like selection on the big toe is one of the most important aspects of hominin hand/foot evolution. And it would not be impossible for evolutionary changes in the human hand to be largely by-products of selection on the foot, due to the nature of covariation (integration) of the hand and foot. Whoa!

The implication, which the authors seem to like, is this: given a chimp-like ancestral morphology for the hand and foot, it seems that the two major hominin/human traits given above (bipedalism and tool-use/manual dexterity) are largely due to selection simply on the foot. That is, because of the developmental integration of the hand and foot, selection for a bipedally capable foot indirectly induced the evolution of a hand conducive to manipulation. Ha, the hand was just along for the ride! Get it, because the feet move the body, and so the hand… but also evolutionarily… Dammit.

Read the quote in context here.

For the record the first sentence of the next paragraph begins “Anyway, that’s nuts!” Which is entirely possible, and I’m not one to judge since I don’t even play a paleontological morphologist on TV! Also I don’t know if they mean nuts methodologically or nuts conceptually.

But nuts or not the question of untangling the relationship between the development of the thumb and big toe very nicely illustrates a big problem I have with questions like “why do women have orgasms” with answers that go something like “well, obviously because men have to have orgasms and genitals develop from common fetal tissue.” Because, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it’s not clear why men need orgasms either, or at least ones as big as we have, since many animals seem to manage just fine with what seems a lot closer to “movement that satisfies like scratching an itch.” No further genetic self-conditioning required.

And something like having big orgasms can at least be traced to (relatively) large-scale morphology. Questions become even more problematic when folks try to claim certainty about why, or even whether, specific, sophisticated, but not at all universal social or psychological behaviors might have evolved under direct selective pressure.

Women have “shopping/gathering” genes that evolved distinctly from men’s “beach-combing” ones? Um, yeeaahtellyawhat, let me know when you’ve got evidence that’s even as clear cut as whether thumbs or big toes came first and we’ll talk about “just so” stories.

Remember, I’m not saying behavior doesn’t evolve. I’m just saying that evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists tools are even less granular, and suffer from more cultural “background noise” than do anthropologists. Consequently the good ones (a.k.a. the ones you’re almost certain never to hear of in the popular press) are going to be even more cautious about extrapolating from their conclusions than the authors of the aforementioned studies.


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Note to G-Spot Debunkers: It Would Pay to Read the Original Book First Guys

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2010-01-05 00:13

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon has a very cool and fairly generous analysis of the, um, controversy over the existence, or lack thereof, of the “g-spot.” (Controversial not least because of some… interesting theories coming out of the same research shop. Via Debbie at Body Impolitic their theory was that women are supposed to have an evolutionary hard time having orgasms in order to test men’s prowess. Seriously. But I digress….)

Anyway, as part of her discussion Amanda correctly, I think, says

It’s interesting to consider if the G spot only occurs in some women, which would explain the huge gap between experiences without further shaming of women who don’t have G spot orgasms.

This is just a snippet, almost an aside. Read the rest of her post here.

For the record that’s what the original authors thought as well.

I’ve mentioned this before but I remember from Beverly Whipple, Ladas, Perry, and company’s original The G Spot: And Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality that the introduction goes specifically into that exact issue that not all women can expect to have them, and that if not they specifically shouldn’t worry about it.

In fact the book as a whole said more about handling expectation and shame than about any kind of tissue stimulation at all.

The introduction mentions specifically that women who read Freud in the 1940s and 1950s were expected to feel guilty for having orgasms from clitoral stimulation, and then later, after reading Masters & Johnson they were expected to feel guilty for having orgasms from vaginal stimulation. The authors thought that was… unfortunate.

Later there’s a whole chapter devoted to the principle that “the best is the enemy of the good,” by which they meant specifically that if people tried to obsess over having or (worse, I think) giving g-spot orgasms they were likely to wind up disappointed with their ordinary old eye-rolling, breathtaking, toe-curling ones. And, sure enough… But be darned if anyone should blame the original authors for that.

Oh, and another thing, the same book also introduced the idea of prostate stimulation in men. Gee, wonder why that idea wasn’t greeted with such widespread enthusiasm? And gee, wonder why men who can’t have them aren’t judged as losers the way women who don’t do the g-spot thing are. And finally, gee, wonder why no researchers are doing twins studies to try and debunk prostate sensitivity. But again I digress.

G-spots and prostates notwithstanding, another big contribution the book made was to introduce the importance of the pubococcygeus (a.k.a “PC muscle”) for both men and women’s genital health and sexual enjoyment. The authors were pretty adamant that Kegels and other pc muscle exercises were pretty important both for increasing the strength of orgasms (of any kind but especially g-spot ones) but also for reducing incontinence and prolapsed uteruses. Their proposed exercises for women are well known but less well-known are the ones for men which involve draping rolled-up towels and making them, um, bob.

Hmm. The book’s not actually that much about the actual g-spot. It was actually pretty radical (and thus most everything but the squirting parts have largely been ignored.) I highly recommend it. It used to be a huge best seller and I’m guessing you can still find copies in used-paperback bookstores. I imagine, could those researchers in the U.K. had they been interested. Just saying.

Bottom line, though, is that if you or your partner has one then great, cool. As long as you’re enjoying yourself and not stressing about it don’t worry about what researcher say. And of you or your partner doesn’t have one then, well, that’s great too. As long as you’re enjoying yourself and not stressing about it don’t worry what researchers say.


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Why Kelly Diels Blogs (Subversively) About Sex

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2010-01-04 11:06

For some reason I’m suddenly discovering all these cool bloggers who’ve been well known for years. To everyone except, seemingly, to me. Oh well, I’ve alway been a slow learner. For instance…

Kelly Diels of Cleavage recently wrote so passionately about why she blogs about sex that it made me wish it was why I did.

The first time I had sex, I said, Let’s do that AGAIN!

Read the quote in context here.

She talks about how unflappably happy she was in her newfound discovery of herself, of her partner… of what can be done, of her transformation.

Slings and arrows and fashion digs aside, I glowed all day. I wondered if it was obvious I was glowing. I glowed about glowing.

And all these flowing, glowing paragraphs of giddiness she writes of has a lovely, polemical, political purpose… to confront how uncomfortable societies can be with such newfound ecstasy.

Virginity, she says, can not be lost because there is no loss, there is only gain.

Feeling uncomfortable yet? I have to admit little winces here and caveats there — oooh, it’s not so wonderful for everyone. Oooh, he could get a disease. Ooh, she could get a reputation. Ooooh, they could be exploiting each other. Oooh, the first time isn’t so great for lots of people. You know what I mean, right? You read something as obliviously joyous as that and you find yourself thinking “that’s wonderful, hon, and sure it’s like that for some people but…”

And as if in anticipation, and maybe to illustrate on of her main points, she writes

This, of course, is why there are so many rules about sex. Sexuality is a basis for power and agency and awe. Stepping over the divine line into the miracles of body and self makes you wonder: what else is possible? What could possibly be impossible?

This is why cults encourage celibacy or polygamy. Dyads are dangerous to cult authority. They give you an ally. Directing your passion towards the cult with celibacy or fracturing your affection across multiple relationships is a great way to ensure that your first loyalty is your guru. Religions, too, encourage celibacy or monogamy or rigidly circumscribed polygamy. How would the Vatican get rich if priests had families? Families tend to accrete resources rather than direct them to the Church. In any case, in any system, the first order of business is to regulate sexuality.

Which gets to what motivated me to blog about sex: if you pay attention you begin to notice, as Diels does, that pretty much all the negative consequences of sex derive from our negative attitudes about sex. Even religious ones. Even feminist ones. Even irresponsible, over-the-top exploitative ones. Even 70’s-style mafia-tainted pornographer ones. Even mine. Even yours.

STIs? Unwanted, unplanned pregnancy? Exploitation? Yep. “Love-em-and-leave-em?” Yep. Sexual assault and rape? Yep. The extraordinarily banal way that sex as selling is smeared across magazine cover after billboard after police procedural after liquor bottle? Yep, yep, and yep. (I’ve skipped the details but if provoked I can bloviate about them for… longer than you probably care to read about it.)

Even things claimed by “natural law” conservatives like that whole homophobia business are frowned on for exactly the same reason contraception and abortion are: it short-circuits sexual scarcity, without which… um… well, trust them when they say the end of sexual scarcity would be a Really Bad Thing. And, really, if you didn’t trust them there wouldn’t be anything bad about sex at all.

All of which makes Diels’ orthodoxy anathema even to people who grin grimly and assure us they’re “sex positive:”

Sex is a language. Kisses and touch and connection are the vocabulary of personal, heartfelt, libidinous expression.

Despite what our culture tells us – that chick flicks and chick lit and pursuit of romance and love are frothy and frivolous – relationships can provide a grammar for growth.

And that’s why I write about sex. I write about sex as an antidote to the titillate and condemn, titillate and condemn, again-and-again pornification of our world. I write about sex because sex is a school and love is an ashram. They are sacred sites for learning, laughing, growing, stretching, unfurling.

It’s ok if such unbridled exuberance makes you a little nervous. But if it does please take a little time to ask yourself why. Especially if you think it’s obvious why.

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Along similar lines see: Amanda Marcotte’s “The ‘Sex Addiction’ model isn’t harmless“ or Heather Corinna’s “With Pleasure: A View of Whole Sexual Anatomy for Every Body“


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Tyler Cowen on Babies: If You Ignore Women as Economic Contributors Extra Babies Are Pretty Cheap

Posted by figleaf on Sun, 2010-01-03 11:04

While cruising through an otherwise bland and unexceptional discussion of how we in the west have tended to disregard positive economic trends in India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, and much of Africa Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution hits a reef.

Expounding on his latest New York Times opinion column he says

1. Babies are pretty cheap to feed.  In the short run, if your economy grows, and at the same time produces more infants, the adults are still better off.

Read the quote in context here.

Hmm… any unstated assumptions in that assertion? My own experience of babies was that my partner’s economic productivity was radically curtailed for approximately six months each time — three months before birth as she became less and less able to work, and three months after while feeding the baby and regenerating her body.

So yeah, assuming you’re a working Ozzie Nelson with wife Harriet and Ethel the Maid staying at home with the children then the marginal cost of one more baby is low. In much of the world — outside, say, suburban northern Virginia where Cowen lives — babies don’t come out of economic black-box vending machines, they come out of economic contributors, a.k.a. working human beings. Point being the cost of pregnancy to women isn’t limited to the cost of feeding babies.

Seriously. “Babies are pretty cheap.” Yeah, they’re cheap if and only if one artificially limits or (as with Cowen’s brand of economics) completely ignore women as economic contributors instead of domestic baby factories.

Question: if “babies are pretty cheap” why is it so many women in Africa, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere prefer to take contraceptives when they’re available and affordable rather than not take them? By Cowen’s thesis they should be “better off” limiting pregnancy only when the cost of feeding babies exceeds the cost of the contraceptives themselves. By his thesis the cost of feeding babies should, in fact, be the only consideration when women assess whether they wish to use birth control. Right? And yet we find… nothing could be further from the truth.

Seriously! I mean, seriously!


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