Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Echidne of the Snakes, riffing on anti-feminist angst over women’s armpits, says something deep and true about what the “shaving” wars say about the effort required to construct gender from the mostly-undifferentiated material of corporeal humanity.

I would love to stop discussing the “to shave or not” topic in feminist circles and to start focusing more on what the ridiculing opposition is really saying. Just think about it for a few seconds. Their message is that it is not nature that defines what a woman is, but they, the namers and deciders. And they have decided that a woman in this culture should be without body hair but with very large and perky breasts and basically no hips. It is not some historical or theological concept of womanliness but a purely cultural one, and it is based on the accentuation of gender differences, with a few cultural quirks thrown in.

I see an analogous case in the discussion about cognitive differences between men and women. The anti-feminist point is always to try to make women and men into two quite different species, two “opposite sexes” as the saying goes, whereas the evidence I’ve studied and my life experiences all suggest that men and women are like two overlapping Venn diagrams in almost everything. Partly different and partly the same. This messiness, like armpit hairs on women, is unacceptable to the patriarchal mind.

She said it here.

Once again it’s not that there are no differences between men and women. It’s that the real differences are enough. Oh yeah! And hooray for all of our respective orientations and our shouldn’t-be-surprising discernment of those we’re drawn to. By which I mean there are enough differences that it’s foolish, willful, conceited, and fundamentally insecure about or orientations and of those around us to require more than nature gives us.

And once again it’s not that there’s no need nor interest in decoration of ourselves, others, or our environs. Quite the opposite — decoration appears to be a fundamental quality of humanity!

But while referencing the expectation that we participate in gender construction, Echidne puts the problem in context (even more emphasis mine)

...we all know how a real man will not wear pink (in this culture and time period) or lace (in this culture and time period) or skirts (in this culture and time period).

Sticking with hair for the moment, the classic example being that in some cultures in the world today men can be punished for having a beard on the one hand (in most of the U.S. military, for instance) yet be punished for not having a beard in others (in most of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance.) Another being that for women to have no body hair is considered sexy in some parts of the world (white America for instance) because of its association with high-status femininity while in other parts of the world (white/European South America for instance) women’s body hair is associated with high-status femininity because “native” South American women are believed to have relatively sparse body hair.

In each case, in each culture, in each time, in each location, gender might be constructed, yeah. But if it’s constructed differently in different places…

Sigh.

You know what’s most peculiar of all? For roughly 99.999% of the .001% of cases where for whatever reason someone else’ biological sex really matters, but where for some reason you’re not able to tell, you can usually ask.

In comments on an early post, It’s About Putting Shoes On Both Feet, Not On the Other Foot: Courtney Martin on the Myth of the Fairer Sex, Zilla proposed a great mathematical model for why it makes sense to make preferential microloans to women (and by extension to, well, extend differential preference to underserved demographics of any sort) despite there being no essential difference between sexes.

Leaving out the gender essentialism arguments (either side) and the culture arguments, I’d say that when you target the microloans to women, you get more bang for the buck, because there are more good investments as-yet unfunded, on the women’s side of the divide.

The men have historically had more access to those resources, so far more of their good investments have already been found and funded. The odds of getting good return by investing in a woman, are higher because the women have been historically under-invested.

Suppose you have 10 men and 10 women. 8 out of 10 men will do good things with investment money, and 2 will waste it. And say that women are exactly the same: 8 good, 2 bad. Randomly select 5 men to invest in, and ignore the women. Of the men invested in, 4 succeed with their investment, and remove themselves from the pool. The 1 who wasted the money still has his hands out in round two. So now the people seeking investments are:

Men: 4 good, 2 bad
Women: 8 good, 2 bad

If you again invest in five randomly chosen men, your returns are statistically unlikely to be as good, as they would be if you invested in five randomly chosen women.

The more rounds of investment are targeted to men alone, the more extreme the disparity becomes, and the better a bet on women looks. With successive rounds targeted to women, the effect will fade, but I think there’s a long way to go before that happens.

Zilla said it here.

It’s a nice, closely-reasoned explanation for what I was only able to say intuitively. It’s also generalizable to almost any situation where prejudice artificially distorts economic, social, or political access. It’s not that women are inherently better investments, it’s that thanks to discrimination the men who are better investments will tend to have already been invested in whereas the pool of women who would be good investments has not had access.

It also helps highlights why any argument that we’d be better off just putting women in charge instead of men… or keeping the status quo instead… will fail: to do so would only switch the pools of the under- vs. over-covered; it wouldn’t increase overall coverage. And finally, it demonstrates rather nicely why, in the long run as power equalizes, arguments of gender essentialism or exceptionalism would tend to evaporate. As would incentives for “preferential” treatment.

Further down in comments Zilla adds

Even if you believe men are inherently superior, this works as a mathematical argument that women are the better investment bet in any culture that has historically favored men.

That too! It works even if you think men have situational superiority due to, say, greater experience or the benefit of traditional narratives for dealing economically, or socially, or politically, or whatever. (For instance microloans for women tend to be a lot more boot-strappy — more conditions, more use of network effects for enforcement, more initial attached education and supervision, etc.)

I happen to think economists have a bit too much veto power when it comes to assessing social interactions. But they do. So it’s nice to see an economic/mathematics rather than political or moral argument for doing the right thing anyway.

Update: The case is obviously, obviously not just about microloans. See also Stubbornella’s post, Women in Technology, plus comments there on the topic of Google’s decision to sponsor female students to attend JSConf. (Via Geekfeminism.)

Thanks to the Two Rules of Desire and other conventions, that men must automatically know more than women do about sex. This affectation is not without its consequences.

In a lovely post titled “Don’t be a slut, you prude,” Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon calls out slut-shamer Susan Walsh for claiming it’s tawdry and irrelevant to discuss how many partners women should have, a.k.a. their “number” when in fact Walsh has discussed it. All well and good.

I’ve got a question though. In her post about numbers Walsh makes the claim that

Your number is too high. OK, fine, you don’t want any guy who cares about how many people you’ve slept with. Problem is… that’s most guys.

Read the quote in context, and follow the links, here.

Is that true? More specifically is that universally true? Is it true only for inexperienced or insecure men? Is it also true with sexually experienced men? Is it…

Well, admittedly an awful lot of men are sexually inexperienced, and a surprising number of experienced men are still insecure. At at this year’s Sex 2.0 conference Veronica Monet mentioned that when she was a sex worker a man paid her nearly $15,000 to help him learn how to give his partner an orgasm. Nor was he the only customer to pay her for similar advice. This, presumably, because they were anxious about asking their partners directly. For fear, it sounds like Susan Walsh would say, that they might know.

Anyway, seriously, what possible legitimate reason should real adult men have for caring about their partner’s “number?”

Coke Talk seriously nails a problem with men’s reaction to “date rape” that’s less well understood but real and highly gender-bound.

Your boyfriend is using denial as a coping mechanism. It’s easier for him to insultingly believe that it never happened than it is for him to process the truth emotionally.

Call your boyfriend out on his denial, and tell him how insulting it is for him not to believe you. Let him know that the truth does not obligate him to act on your behalf. In other words, you’re not asking him to go confront the rapist or defend your honor. All you’re asking for is understanding and respect.

She said it here.

Yup. The social construction of masculinity makes it paradoxically very difficult to do anything but a) go off on a manly rampage or b) go into complete denial. And part of that denial often includes what? Did you say blaming the victim? Right in one!

Clue #2: Contrary to both tradition and English Common Law, when it comes to the male partners of rape victims his honor has nothing to do with it.