So even if you only read USA Today you may have heard about yet another variation of the how-often-men-think-of-sleep study. Where (naturally, it's always strongly implied) almost all men think about sex more often than almost all women do. Lassoing popular press accounts and bringing them back to earth, Emily Nagoski passes along the following five points.

My favorite part is on page two of the Psychology Today article, where Brian talks about problems in the media’s coverage of the study, which parallels my thinking on mainstream journalism reporting science:

1. Writers were either confused or deliberately choosing the more extreme, less representative central tendency (the mean rather than the median) to report.

2. Writers emphasized the central tendency, to the exclusion of standard deviation, when one of the most compelling results of the study was the wide variability among subjects.

3. Writers also emphasized the sex part, paying inadequate attention to the fact that thoughts about sleep and food were as frequent as thoughts about sex.

4. Writers emphasized population-level differences between men and women, neglecting to clarify that there was lots of overlap so that, even though the men on average reported more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep), many of the individual women had more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep) than many of the individual men.

5. Writers generalized the results to All People, rather than recognizing the delimitations of the population studied: college students, who are likely to be WEIRD.

What can we really conclude about frequency of thoughts about sex? We think about sex about as often as we think about food and sex, and we vary a great deal from each other in all three topics.

Source: Emily Nagoski :: sex nerd ::

Perfect.  Nagoski says the actual paper's legit (within its constraints) and I'm inclined to agree.

Other than that I've got one question and one observation.  First of all, why do I remember reading about an almost identical study a year or so ago (same basic shape: men think about sex more, but also think more about food and sleep.)  Is this one a new study or is the old one just making the rounds again?

Second, I'm not sure who mentioned it last week, but someone referring to this same study pointed out that men don't actually think about sex every seven minutes.  As I said I can't find the original source but I got that similar link via Em & Lo.

Anyway, bottom line.  The study shows that men tend to think about bodily functions more often than women do; there's considerable overlap not only within sexes but between them.  As always, good to know.

Heads Up: This is a long post with lots of triggery stuff about representations of sexual assault in movies, particularly in comedies.  There's a clip of from the movie at the bottom of the post.

Summary: This one's about a particularly graphic one played for laughs in last year's Judd Apatow vehicle, Get Him to the Greek.  Looks like dozens or hundreds feminists from minor Tumblr blogs to the L.A. Times stood up for the male victim.  For all the "but men get raped too" derailment you see when feminists mention women victims the man-o-sphere remains remarkably silent.

Asexual activist Ily digs into the (top grossing!) 1947 Bing Crosby and Bob Hope misogyny and date-rape fest Road to Rio and then lobs the ball back into the 21st Century's court with a dissection of Judd Apatow's extremely popular Get Him to the Greek.

[F]ast forward to recent years. "Road to Rio" would probably not be written. Of course, the 40's were just more sexist times...right? However, today, we're expected to laugh at a man being raped (not to mention having his bodily integrity violated in countless other ways). Stuff like this has led some people to believe that feminism has gone too far, and now women are holding privilege over men. But I don't think these folks are aware of why we are supposed to find male rape funny. I think it's for the same reason that we're supposed to find men in dresses funny--being raped is feminizing, and therefore embarrassing. At the same time, men are so sex-crazed that being raped (at least, by a woman) is not a big deal to them emotionally. There are a few assumptions here:

...

So yes, I believe that bell hooks was very much correct. Patriarchy does hurt everyone. In a truly post-feminist world, Jonah Hill's friends in Get Him to the Greek wouldn't have laughed off his rape experience. He could have admitted that yeah, there were times when he didn't want sex*, and the other men wouldn't have mocked him for that. And we, the audience, wouldn't be expected to laugh, either.

Source: Asexy Beast

And who, you might be asking, would be making fun of men being raped? In, um, certain quarters the knee-jerk reaction is that it could only be feminists. In this case? Not so much. But they'd be so far wrong radar couldn't find them: the movie was made by Judd Apatow's all-men, no-women-at-all creative team of directors, writers, and producers.  Director? Nicholas Stoller. Writers?Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel. Producers? Judd Apatow, David L. Bushell, and Rodney Rothman. Co-Producer? Jason Segel. Executive Producer? Richard Vane. Associate Producer?Phil Eisen.  Not a feminist in the bunch.  Not a woman in the bunch.  Not even a "feminist man" in the bunch.  It's dicks and balls all the way down till you get to the casting coordinator.

And oh well, one might be inclined to say, it was a comedy for goodness sake, maybe it was portrayed as daffy slapstick. If one did one would be disappointed. While the event is supposed to be just one more bit of physical comedy that befalls a sad-sack character from a police-procedural standpoint it wouldn't be a minor incident at all!

Instead, when the Arron character is physically incapacitated by alcohol but still able to clearly express his absolute lack of consent the woman pins him down, exposes herself to him when he manifestly does not want her to, aggressively and repeatedly forces his attention up her skirt, yanks off his pants, straddles his groin, pulls a large phthalate-laden dildo out of her purse, aggressively rubs it in his face, slaps him with it, forces it into his mouth, and then reaches back and jams it between his legs in a manner that strongly (if anatomically-improbably) implies she's inserted it in his anus.

The most disturbing part to me about the scene is the breezy familiarity with which it's set and directed, as if the producers were... a little too familiar with the way rape committed by drunk people on drunk people actually goes.  (And no, this isn't accusing Apatow, Stoller, or Segal of committing gross sexual assault on drunken victims.  They may have or they might not.  If you asked me I'd guess one or more of the creative team has been on the receiving end either from another man or from a woman.  And, sort of like the victim in the film, they're not resolved to it because of a couple of really fundamental misconceptions of who can be perpetrators and, even more particularly, who can be victims.)

One thing that doesn't seem realistic? Right after the anal penetration the camera cuts away to what appears to be the Arron character's love interest, wearing hospital scrubs at a desk in what appears to be a hospital nursing station, is listening to the entire event on her cell-phone. Her reaction? To shake her head angrily, hang up, and move to put away the phone.  Ha ha, just one more way that poor schlub Aaron I'm pretty sure

And who do we find writing critical reviews of this movie? Ily, an asexual woman,

Alicia Sowisdral of Feminist Review.

Sarah M at the feminist anti-rape site SaferCampus said

I’m pretty used to rape being used as a punchline, especially when men are the victims. This usually comes in the form of jokes about prison rape, but I’ve also seen more than enough films in which a guy is basically forced into having sex with a woman or is really uncomfortable with it (like, he’s in a relationship and she’s seducing him!) and it’s supposed to be funny because ya know, women can’t rape men LOL! And prisoners deserve it! That’s bad enough to me. But this was just so beyond explicit—the guy is sodomized with an object while saying no and then uses the word rape to describe it—that I was genuinely shocked. I actually can’t even imagine an explanation of how this is funny outside of the fact that a man being raped is SO IMPLAUSIBLE to folks that it’s just laughable. You’re not watching a “rape scene” because call it rape all you want, it couldn’t be real rape, so it’s funny.

Lauren Brachman at Equal Writes put the consequences in black and white

[I]f that is the way we view rape and sexual assault, aren’t we doing a disservice to men? The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) reports that 1 in every 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Do we emasculate the men who survive sexual assault because our culture constantly reminds us that real men do not get raped? Are these assaults as funny as the rape of Aaron Hill in Get Him to the Greek?

You might argue that women are not the only assailants of the sexual assault committed against 3% of all American men. Often, men assault other men. But don’t worry – Get Him to the Greek is an equal opportunity exploiter! Aldous Snow, one of Green’s “best friends”, also assaults him. This time Aaron Green is coerced into inserting a balloon of heroine into his anus. Later Aldous Snow digitally penetrates Aaron Green, violently ripping out the balloon. Was there an outcry in the theater when we all witnessed this assault? Not that I could over hear over the laughs and guffaws of my classmates.

I found a Tumbler post that's nested three deep with women harshly attacking the idea that rape of a man could ever be funny, with the angriest denunciation of playing male rape for laughs coming from a (now deactivated) Tumblr blog called thehumorlessfeminist.

Sigh.

For all the men that show up saying "but men get raped too" anytime someone starts complaining about rape culture in movies you'd think there's be a few more men chiming about, you know, men actually getting raped in movies.

Holly addresses the "damage" a Toronto family is allegedly imposing on their 4-month-old child by... refusing to disclose his or her gender to... other people who really, really want to know. So that they can decide whether to behave towards the four-month-old infant as if he is a "bruising boy" or she is a "blushing girl."

Because of how you were born, little Storm, there are clothes you can't wear, clubs you can't join, ways you can't talk, toys you can't play with, sports you can't play, names you can't use, haircuts you can't get, and entire ways of being and acting and expressing yourself will be closed off to you! For no particular reason!

Have fun out there, and remember, don't do the things half the other kids are having fun doing, or you'll get in big trouble!"

Now that's permanently damaging.

Source: The Pervocracy

It always takes me about 10 times longer to say it, but it's usually not as easy to read. But, yeah, basically it's the nature of "gender" (as opposed to biological sex) to work not by enhancing things about one's own sex but by having things that are (currently) believed to be inconceivable and/or intolerable for your sex to do. Like driving a car, as in Saudi Arabia where it's against the law for women to drive... even women who drove perfectly well while attending college somewhere other than Saudi Arabia. Women can in fact drive a car but since it's not "feminine" to do so it's forbidden.

Meanwhile when I was in 7th grade there was some sort of pre-computer-era scheduling screw up that got me put into a typing class instead of wood shop. Now at that time and in that location, a boy getting assigned to a typing class was as major a catastrophe as a girl getting assigned to wood shop. It simply had never happened before.

And how could it!?!?!? It not being "masculine" to type, boys simply couldn't learn how!

Now by "couldn't" I don't mean "were physically incapable." Instead I mean "couldn't" as in absolutely weren't allowed to. Yeah. I dunno either. Possibly because it would make them gay.

I was only in 7th grade so to be honest I don't know how I wound up staying in the class. But despite the fact that it's just not "masculine" I actually a) learned how to type at approximately the same rate everyone else did, and b) didn't turn gay.

Ironically, if I hadn't learned how to type, I probably wouldn't have taken a computer class in the late 1970s. And if I hadn't done that I probably wouldn't have been hired a few years later by a small but soon-to-be-very-large west-coast software company. And if I hadn't done that then I'd probably be a Walmart return-sales clerk somewhere.

The laugh riot now, of course, is that if you're male and you were born any time after roughly 1970... or actually if you're male and able to enter the URL for this blog... it has never occurred to you that typing would be a girls-only activity.

And of course it's not.

Because society is no longer amputating that skill set from boys in order to "make them a man."

For what it's worth, the same time I got put into a typing class a 7th grade girl was slotted into a woodworking class. Again, I was in 7th grade so I wasn't really following what happened in woodshops. But my guess would be that like... pretty much every boy who took wood shop in the 1970s it didn't materially prepare her for the technology boom that was just beginning to show on the horizon.

But at least it didn't amputate her ability to use a hammer, saw, sandpaper, or linseed oil to make shoe racks in order to insure her "femininity" remained intact.

Gender. It's for morons.

Lori Adelman says (emphasis mine)

Insofar as it’s true that the tale of the falsely accused rapist is a man’s worst nightmare, it’s also a feminist’s worst nightmare. False rape accusations- and false accusations of any kind, really, aren’t good for anyone. They shouldn’t be framed as an anti-feminist issue any more than sexual assault should be framed as solely a feminist issue. It’s when the quest for justice becomes an anti-woman bashing session that feminists have to step in.

Source: Feministing

This is not only entirely obvious but entirely true.

Quick question: who's more likely to file a false rape report?  A radical feminist, a mainstream feminist, a "I'm not a feminist but..." feminist, or a woman with no notion of feminism except maybe a second-hand anti-feminist-inspired belief that whatever feminism is it's bad and wrong?

I mean, what exactly are the common accusations of false rape supposed to be based on here?  According to even the bitterest proponents of false-accusation theory say the primary motivations for those who admit* they filed false accusations are

• Needed an alibi to explain shame or embarrassment over pregnancy, STI, other evidence of sexual activity, truancy, etc. (50%)
• "Rage, revenge, or retribution" against a real or perceived wrong, rejection, or betrayal by the accused (27-44%)
• The remainder is a mix of attention-garnering disorders like Munchausen and borderline personality, criminal extortion, and "unspecified."

None of those reasons rank really high on the old feminist agenda.  Not even the Rush-Limbaugh-fueled "feminazi" one!  In fact, I'm... pretty sure you'll never find exactly zero feminists who advocate filing false rape reports.**

Adelman continues

[I]t’s frustrating to me that there’s such a strong relationship between false rape activists and anti-feminists, because in reality feminists and those trying to reduce instances of false rape accusations have a lot of overlap and a lot in common. We both want a fair and effective justice system. We both want to reduce stigma and discrimination around cases of sexual assault. We both want to find ways to facilitate more honest and truthful dialogue around rape, sexual assault, and violence in our communities and justice systems.

Same here.  It's 100% bullshit for anyone to "cry rape."  It's also 100% bullshit for an actual rape victim's account be, well, discounted. Because...

Ok, another quick question: what percent of rapes that aren't reported are actual rapes?  Ooh, that's kind of an oxymoron isn't it?  And if you figure that even opponents acknowledge that most "real" rapes go unreported we're still looking at a fuck of a lot of unpunished actual rapes and sexual assaults that false-rape activists and feminists alike have a definite and mutual interest in bringing to justice.

Now Adelman brings an accusation that while perfectly accurate is only 50% complete

[M]any men’s rights groups take up the cause of false rape accusations with great gusto, but that their enthusiasm for seeking justice through the law rarely extends to victims of sexual assault.

Again, this is as perfectly true as MRA accusations that feminists don't bring as much enthusiasm for extending sympathy for those who really are falsely accused of rape as they do for seeking justice against those who are legitimately accused.

And I'll just go out on a limb here and say that a) anyone who doesn't take the falsely accused seriously (too many feminists) or b) anyone who doesn't take the falsely disbelieved seriously (an astonishing percentage of anti-feminists and MRAs) needs to step up and see this as two sides of one single problem.

Look, I can see both sides of this issue really, really clearly.  A European immigrant friend was falsely accused of sexually abusing his pre-school-aged daughter based on bathtub photos that a clerk in a Mississippi River town Walmart thought looked suspicious.  (The photos in question wouldn't have warranted a second glance on either coast.)  The process of defending himself basically bankrupted him, nearly ruined his reputation, and tied his extended family in knots.  He wasn't allowed to see his daughter without "supervision" until middle school!  So yeah, false accusations disfigure and burn like acid in the face.

But then again I've sat and talked through the night with women friends who sure as shit were raped and weren't believed, or were so afraid they wouldn't be believed, or knew the family of the rapist*** had enough money, influence, and reputation to first publicly drag her scruffy, lower-class, not-a-virgin self through the mud and then get their son acquitted anyway.  And yeah, true accusations that nobody will take seriously are also symptoms of a deeply, disgracefully diseased society.

So I'm going to put this really simply: if you're an MRA who doesn't put as much heart and soul into insuring all real victims of rape are heard, believed, taken seriously, and see justice done then you're actually not serious about resolving the problem of false accusations of rape.

Meanwhile if you're an activist who doesn't put as much heart and soul into insuring that false accusations of rape is universally understood to be as intrinsically and inextricably deep a manifestation of rape culture as rape itself then you're not serious about resolving the problem of rape not being taken seriously either.

Rape is sexual violence and it happens often enough that everybody should take it seriously.  False accusations of rape and sexual assault are also sexual violence and while not at all as common as rape (since, remember MRAs, most real cases go unreported) and should also be taken seriously.

The problems are nearly inextricably linked, and they'll remain linked till they're addressed head on by advocates for victims of both.

* Probably a really bad idea to pick those who've just been pressured to plead guilty to lesser charges though.  Turns out that can really backfire.

** In fact you might find the opposite! A California anti-rape activist from the 1970s quoted in one of the old Whole Earth Catalogs recommended that rape victims tell police that their assailants only indecently exposed themselves.  Her reasoning went like this: rape victims are almost never believed unless they've got stab wounds, when charges are filed rape defendants are acquitted, when rape defendants are convicted they're often treated with respect by fellow prisoners, and when they get out of jail they're out of jail and that's usually that.  Meanwhile, though, accusations of indecent exposure are taken very seriously, accusers are almost always believed, defendants are rarely acquitted, if convicted of indecent exposure they receive virtually zero respect from fellow prisoners, and at least in California at the time anyone convicted of indecent exposure (but weirdly not, at the time, those convicted of rape) must register as a sex offender every time he moved for the rest of his life.

*** The same very-wealthy surgeon's son who years earlier had assaulted and nearly raped me and did rape the other boy he cornered me with.  And no, neither of us reported it either.