Humans and men: there are differences

The tendency to equate men with humankind is an old one, evidenced by little things like the age-old icon of evolution seen here:

Bob McDonald, on his CBC show Quirks and Quarks, did a masterful job of talking about humankind without ever mentioning or speaking to a woman on his August 22nd “best of” show, which was a re-broadcast of his show from April 25th, 2009 (available in full here). In attempting to answer the question “Are we inherently violent, or are we a naturally peaceful creature trapped in a violent culture?” Mr. McDonald, not surprisingly, seeks out academic sources who support the former option.

The first person he talks to is Dr. Richard Wrangham, professor of “biological anthropology” at Harvard University and coauthor of the book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Dr. Wrangham describes to Mr. McDonald the incident in chimpanzee research that led to the idea that chimpanzees may be inherently violent; prior to 1974, the bulk of chimpanzee observation, primarily constituted by Jane Goodall’s work with the Gombe chimpanzees in Tanzania, had revealed that chimpanzees are only mildly violent, with most altercations being only minor (with the exception of one incident in which they stole and killed a human baby). In 1974, a group of chimpanzees was observed to silently approach a male member of a neighbouring chimpanzee community and then ambush and brutally kill him.  Since then, the same behaviour has been observed a number of times, and is in fact featured prominently in the popular BBC series Planet Earth. Prof. Wrangham explains that this behaviour is evolved as a way for groups of chimpanzees to expand their territory so as to have more resources to support more children.

The second person Mr. McDonald speaks with is Dr. David Carrier, a comparative physiologist at the University of Utah. Dr. Carrier points out that there is an energy cost to bipedalism, which suggests that there must be some evolutionary advantage to standing upright. This advantage is the ability of bipeds to use their forelimbs as weapons. Dr. Carrier rejects the notion that there might be other uses for one’s forelimbs that might offset the mechanical disadvantage of being two-legged, based on the two facts that a) Australopithecines had short legs, which would have given them a stabler base for hand-to-hand combat, and b) human hands are better-proportioned for forming fists than those of any other primates. [He really said this! I recommend to Dr. Carrier that he punch someone, and see how well-evolved his  metacarpals are.]

The third person invited on the show is Dr. Aaron Sell, an evolutionary psychologist from UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Sell did an experiement where he took male participants to the gym and had them lift weights to determine their level of strength, then they photographed the participants’ faces and had other participants look at the photos to see how well they could judge the strength of these people by their looks. As it turns out, “at least with men,” people were generally able to determine the strength of a person by looking at their face. Dr. Sell suggests that facial structures such as the brow and the jawbone are determined by testosterone, which is the same hormone that makes men big and strong; thus, men with low brows and big jawbones are more likely to be strong. That’s why, when someone makes an angry face, the muscles they use tend to accentuate the brow and the jawbone.

The fourth and final guest on the show is Dr. Craig Kennedy, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He noticed that trained male mice are able to learn a complex task (in this case, pushing a button) in order to get the chance at fighting with another male mouse. The same mice, with their dopamine receptors disabled, do not exhibit the same behaviour; this suggests that the mice’s brains release dopamine – the “pleasure chemical” – when they experience aggression. Dr. Kennedy wanted to see if humans were the same way, so he designed an experiment that involved young men watching things such as hockey fights and scantily clad young women. He found that watching a hockey fight and ogling a scantily clad woman had similar effects on the dopamine receptors in these men’s brains, thus supporting the hypothesis that watching violence is pleasurable. [He conventiently declined to remark on the effects of partaking in violence.]

Although they all have their flaws and quirks, these particular experiments and hypotheses are not what I have a problem with. I have a problem with the fact that Bob McDonald had four men on his show and used their observations about male behaviour as grounds for the conclusion that “humans are inherently violent.” It shouldn’t take a university degree to notice that the guests on Quirks and Quarks were only talking about half of humankind. Using evidence from a small and non-representative sample to make conclusions about a whole population is known in philosophy as a hasty generalization, the bane of inductive reasoning. It’s a scientists job to avoid making generalizations by using as representative a sample as  possible; with the exception of Dr. Carrier, who appears to have his own set of problems, all of these scientists do their job very poorly in this regard, as does Mr. McDonald.

Hohle Fels Venus reveals more about modern times than ancient ones

A 35 ooo-year-old ivory figurine discovered in a small cave in Germany this past September has proven to be the oldest known piece of figurative art in the world, beating the previous record-holders by 5 000 years. Disappointingly, but not unsurprisingly, the archaeologists who made the discovery revealed their modern prejudices by describing the figurine as ancient porn. Violet at Reclusive Leftist elaborates:

…the Science Now article, the archaeologist who found the figurine is talking about pornographic pin-ups: “I showed it to a male colleague, and his response was, ‘Nothing’s changed in 40,000 years.’” That sentence needs to be bronzed and hung up on a plaque somewhere, because you couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of the classic fallacy of reading the present into the past. The archaeologist assumes the artist who created the figurine was male; why? He assumes the motive was lust; why? Because that’s all he knows. To his mind, the image of a naked woman with big breasts and exposed vulva can only mean one thing: porn! Porn made by men, for men! And so he assumes, without questioning his assumptions, that the image must have meant the same thing 35,000 years ago. No other mental categories for “naked woman” are available to him. His mind is a closed box.

Sad, but true.

Prolegomena to any future dumb questions about Women’s Studies

Someone asked me the other day, with a straight face, if there are women’s studies conferences. Being the diplomat that I am, I said, “Yeah, of course”; in response to his comment that perhaps women’s studies would be better off if there was a man teaching courses along with the “five” women professors, I feebly replied, “our department has like 30 professors!” I would have liked to pursue an extended diatribe about the ignorance that it takes to completely overlook the contributions of the forty-year-old department not just to academic knowledge but to real women’s lives all over the world,  about how our department receives a yearly $1 000 000 endowment for the Ruth Wynn Woodward chair, has eight full professors and 18 additional faculty members, and joins 44 degree-granting Women’s Studies programs in Canada, 900 Women’s Studies programs in the United States (this many that offer graduate degrees alone) and 250-odd programs worldwide to teach tens of thousands of students every year, how the Canadian Women’s Studies Association is a member of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and American Women’s Studies programs are overseen by the National Women’s Studies Association, which has been around since 1977, that a professor from my department recently published a column in the Georgia Straight, that everyone should read, about the ongoing importance of Women’s Studies .

It did get me thinking, though, about what the hell is wrong with the modern university that would allow one department to be so oblivious about what is going on just down the hall, or just across the quad, or on the other side of the student union building. And unfortunately I don’t have any good answers that extend beyond woebegone sentiments. I do have a theory, though, that I’m hoping has been taken up in detail by some clever scholar, and that I will one day stumble across in a thick tome dug up from the back corner of a used bookstore that will answer all of my questions once and for all. My theory is that the humanities and social sciences, especially the humanities, somehow project a perception toward laypeople that no special training is required in order to achieve proficiency. This is not to say that people aren’t aware that there is the possibility of graduate and post-graduate education in the humanities, or that people can and do devote their lives to studying things like “power” or theorists like Bourdieu. Rather, there seems to be a perception that even though this is the case, a layperson can still engage in a conversation with a humanities scholar and assume that they have all of the knowledge and competence that is required to formulate an argument about a topic in the humanities to a degree that is appropriate to engaging the arguments of the scholar on a peer-to-peer basis.

There is a stark contrast, then, between how laypeople approach the sciences versus how they approach the humanities, and more importantly, how people in the sciences versus those in the humanities regard these laypeople who are trying to interpret the work done in their fields without the necessary competence. Let me give a quick example. A quick Google search of blogs coming out of the sciences reveals a vast distaste with the way that science journalists handle science topics (Language Log, Bad Science, and Neuroskeptic, for instance, are highly critical of science journalists misinterpreting science stories). While some of their complaints can be attributed to laziness on the part of journalists, many of them can be more accurately attributed to science journalists having poor or deficient knowledge of the subject matter, which leads to them misinterpreting things that would be obvious for anyone proficient in the field. The humanities, on the other hand, don’t have a well-embedded and -accepted body of critique of the way that laypeople (e.g. journalists) misinterpret humanities topics, even though such misinterpretations happen all the time.

I think this is for a couple of reasons. First, there is no clear demarcating line between academic humanities topics and non-academic ones: academics talk about ideology, for example, but so do Republican talk show hosts. To a layperson, there is no reason to assume that what the academics are talking about is any different from what Rush is talking about, even though the difference is enormous. Similarly, academics talk about feminism, and so do our hippy moms; to the layperson, there is no recognition of the vast gulf that exists between the meaning of the term as it is used by academics and the meaning of the term as it is used by your mom (let alone the differences between academics). The second, related reason is that humanities jargon is often homonymous or heteronymous with everyday words. There is no reason for a layperson to assume that the word subculture has a different meaning in a cultural studies context than it does in an MTV context, or that the word competence has a different meaning in a literature studies context than it does in a Starbucks conversation context, or that the word problematic has a different meaning in a conversation about Althusser than it does in a conversation about a leaky faucet, or that the word imaginary has a different meaning in a sociology context than it does in a Disney context. Thus, when laypeople hear humanities scholars using the words problematic and imaginary as nouns, they get accused of being opaque for the sake of appearing erudite, when they are actually using terms of jargon that have decades-long histories of definitional specificity. Third, the humanities and social sciences, by their very nature, do tend to deal with issues that come up in people’s everyday lives, topics that are often dealt with by laypeople in Starbucks conversations and Disney movies (to some degree). However, scholars tend to use different tools and approaches to analyse these topics, and they often come at them from different approaches and have different goals than the laypeople. And not surprisingly, the approaches they use, and the arguments they formulate, require a great deal of training and specialized knowledge to create and comprehend. A person in the welfare lineup might have a lot to say about poverty, but they are not going to be saying the same things as someone in a graduate-level seminar about the same topic.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a topic of much debate, but it is a thing nevertheless. The salient difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences/humanities is that the natural sciences are known to be “private” for the most part, in the sense that the inner workings of science tend to take place behind closed laboratory doors rather than out in public, and they deal with issues that are usually only of interest to specialists in the field; the humanities deals with issues that are public to begin with, so the divide between public issues and “closed door” social sciences/humanities is hard to distinguish, and thus specialist knowledge is considered, or appears to be, public property.

This is both fortunate and unfortunate at the same time. It is fortunate because many social science/humanities types are wary of the way academic institutions separate scholars from the people and situations that they are studying. It’s hard to feel good about capitalizing on the experiences of the person in the welfare lineup by writing a thick dissertation on poverty and getting a cushy, well-paid tenure track professorship while the welfare recipient keeps receiving welfare. At the same time, this disparity between the natural sciences and the social sciences/humanities is unfortunate because we live in a world where institutional legitimacy goes a long way; it’s tough being in a department that has limitless potential for improving people’s lives, and seeing that potential go down the drain because academic success is so incumbent on the pretense that quantitative knowledge is unassailable. But I digress. The meat of my theory here is that people ignore the legitimacy of the social sciences/humanities because of a fundamental difference in the way that the two poles are conceptualized by laypeople. Science is considered Scientists’ Business, and humanities is considered Everyone’s Business; this dichotomy erases the existence of the specialized knowledge and training that forms the basis of research in the humanities and social sciences. What’s the solution? More education for everybody.

Now where’s that book?

Whoops!

I just discovered that my post about ovulars has been featured on the “ultra” anti-feminist blog aggregator Masculinisme. I can only assume that my post was picked up by some kind of automated web-crawler that noticed the words “Christina Hoff Sommers,” because linking here deliberately would be embarassing.

Long live feminism! Men are all assholes!

Grope therapy

Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors posted about groping on public transit on Wednesday. She quotes at length a post by Heart at Womenspace, which wonders about the possibility of women groping men:

I wonder what might happen if, when groped, women groped back?   I think if women groped back, men might hit them and hurt them. I also fear that if women groped back, men might rape them and would then call what they did “consensual sex.”  After all, she returned the grope, that must have meant she was up for it!  I think the only way the power dynamic around groping might change would be if women started randomly groping men whenever they got the chance– not groping back, but instigating the groping, so that men and boys never knew when or under what circumstances they might be groped and could not predict who would grope them.  After all, men grope women they already want, for whatever reason, to touch; touching them back just gives them more of what they wanted in the first place.  But women assuming “agency” and groping men they wanted to grope without concern for what the men wanted– that’s something different.  That is, in fact, what men do to women when they grope us.

An angry commenter, Psyck, wrote in reply:

Only a man would think or entertain the thought that women should start randomly groping men. Should we start raping men and boys so they’ll stop raping women and girls? Women and feminists don’t want a “tit-for-tat” game, we want men to stop deliberately and consciously hurting women.

I happen to agree with Psyck that feminists aren’t out for retaliation, but I disagree with the claim that Heart was asserting as much. I think Heart was making the point that I was clumsily trying to make in this post, that there is no analogue in the realm of men’s experience for the vulnerability that women feel when they’re being groped (generally speaking), especially since tit-for-tat retaliation would ultimately make women more vulnerable in other ways. Thus, it would indeed be fascinating to see how men react on Women Grope Men day, but it would not be practical to institute such a day because of the pervasive social and economic vulnerability that women experience in other parts of their lives.

Anal vulnerability

Getting humped by a dog:

I personally find it fascinating how demeaning and humiliating it is to get humped by a dog. A dog jumping into your lap or leaning against your leg might be endearing, but once it starts thrusting its hips, all cuteness gives way to revulsion – the dog is no longer being affectionate, it’s using you to get its rocks off. How much more humiliating it must be, then, to have a human hump you on a crowded subway train, because the threat of sexual vulnerability then is not so symbolic.

I bring this up because of an article I read by Calvin Thomas, which links men’s sexual invulnerability to the conception of men’s impenetrability. It’s not uncommon to hear men claim that men who engage in sexual relations with another man are not gay unless they are being penetrated (see for example here); this would indicate that there is something significant about the act of penetration that defines masculinity in opposition to pseudo-masculinity (male homosexuality) and femininity.

This, Thomas suggests,  serves as part of the reason that men shit in stalls but pee out in the open; it’s not a matter of modesty or embarrassment, but rather an admission that exposing the anus is a central focus of male vulnerability. Additionally, he suggests that perhaps, in order for men to consider themselves feminists, they should first be fucked in the ass, because being fucked in the ass is incumbent on being able to comprehend the magnitude of vulnerability that is associated with penetration.

So why am I talking about vulnerability when I started by talking about humiliation? Because sexual vulnerability is gendered (except in prison), whereas humiliation is not. Getting humped by a dog serves as a good link between sexual(ized) humiliation and sexual vulnerability, in a society where not many men can make that link. I’m not trying to trivialize sexual harassment or rape by comparing it to getting humped by a dog, nor am I claiming that men can never feel sexually vulnerable; I merely think that getting humped by a dog is symbolic of a more general feeling of sexual objectification, and I think it deserves more attention.

Surprise! Dora outrage mischaracterized by internet news media

Mattel recently teamed up with Nickelodeon to create a doll based on an updated, more grown-up version of the popular cartoon character Dora the Explorer.

Parents got up in arms about the transformation, and as news outlets picked up the story, they published stories about people characterizing the new Dora as “too sexy.” Here are some samples:

Huffington Post:

Did Mattel turn Dora The Explorer into a tramp?

…parents fear that the shapely shadow suggests well, a real tease.

The cute girl with bangs and baby fat that kept their kids company is being replaced with a scary harlot cloaked in shadow.

Entertainment weekly:

While there was plenty of excitement, it was more of the “How dare they turn our beloved-if-squeaky heroine into a little hussy?” variety.

Yahoo News:

Dora the streetwalker.

Now, I can understand why parents might get upset about a bilingual child explorer being turned into a fashionable tween, because it buys into certain feminine stereotypes about the importance of looking cute, having an expensive hairstyle, and buying fashionable accessories. But since when has it been reasonable to refer to someone as a tramp, a harlot, a hussy or a whore based on what they wear? When these people see young preteens walking down the street wearing leggings and flats, it this what goes through their head? Is a woman not free from accusations of sexual promiscuity unless she is unattractive? Most of the complaints about Dora that originated from real parents, such as the ones associated with the petition at Packaging Girlhood, were reasonable and had very little to do with the sexualization of the new character – they tended to focus on the doll’s advocacy of consumer culture, the erasure of her Latina identity, the capitalist implications of the transformation, and the environmental implications of moving Dora from the jungle into the “city,” effectively. However, it’s sad and distressing to see this twisted around by the news reports who mock the parents’ concerns by reproducing and exacerbating, in a horribly offensive way, the very stereotypes that the parents are conscientiously fighting.

Read this

I often wonder how much the severity of what has been termed “post-abortion syndrome” is influenced by the support services that putportedly exist to treat it. If a woman who has an abortion seeks help from such a group, and is bombarded with one-sided views deriding women for abortion and pathologizing and chastising the whole process, it’s no small suprise that she would end up feeling bad about herself and her decision. Consensus among empirical researchers seems to be that post-abortion syndrome is a crock; for example,  a 1990 study published in Science¹ found that 76% of women felt relief and happiness after a first trimester abortion, that most women are more phychologically distressed before the abortion, and that post-abortion syndrome is all but undetectable in women whose anxiety or depression doesn’t have another verifiable cause (such as lack of support from family members); a 1993 study² similarly indicated that 80% of women felt “relief and satisfaction” after an abortion. It would be interesting to see a comparative study between women who seek help from a pro-life support organizations and those who seek help elsewhere, to verify whether the attitudes espoused toward women during pro-life “post-abortion counselling” have a negative impact on women’s emotional wellbeing.

An interesting aspect that emerges from the empirical studies is that women who give up their children for adoption often experience greater emotional difficulty than women who have abortions. An essay recently posted at Shakesville expresses this fact anecdotally, and raises the question of why post-giving-up-your-baby-for-adoption depression is virtually unheard of anywhere, despite it’s apparent prevalence. (Of course, I think we all know the answer.)

I have given a baby up for adoption, and I have had an abortion, and while anecdotes are not evidence, I can assert that abortions may or may not cause depression – it certainly did not in me, apart from briefly mourning the path not taken – but adoption? That is an entirely different matter. I don’t doubt that there are women who were fine after adoption, and there is emphatically nothing wrong with that or with them; but I want to point out that if we’re going to have a seemingly neverending discussion about the sorrow and remorse caused by abortion, then it is about goddamn time that we hear from birth mothers too.

Read the full article here.

———————————————

1. Adler, Nancy E., et al. “Psychological Responses After Abortion.” Science 248 (Apr. 1990), 41-44.

2. Sachdev, Paul. Sex, Abortion, and Unmarried Women. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 1993.

Obligatory International Women’s Day Post

See title.

Colloquial Language and Orthography

Although feminist researchers tend to pride themselves on such things as inclusiveness, awareness of power disparities, careful introspection, and so on, some of them apparently don’t know how to go about it, and seem incapable of differentiating good research from bad research through the fog of feminist methodological ideology.

I came across this example in Shulamit Reinharz’s book Feminist Methods in Social Research, where she is discussing the “display” of interview research. Marianne Paget, who undertook a study of female artists, depicted their interview transcripts using spelling that was intended to reflect the colloquial, non-“correct” iteration of her participant’s spoken words. According to Paget, such a formulation of her participants’ speech was necessary to depict “the inner turmoil of the self in solitary discordant discourse with its own voices.” In the quoted passage in Reinharz, Paget writes:

“I decided it was tiime that I ghot into the real worldn art ws the fake one,” or “its not productive n it n n I’m hh ah parasite to: society becuz I’m not contributing anything that can be utilized.” Of course, these are not just her own voices. They are the voices of her family and friends, the voices of her peers, other women’s voices, the voices of her countrymen and her man. She didn’t just do this to herself. Though she says, “I put myself thru that,” she was trained.

The practice of using orthography to represent certain styles of spoken dialect is known as eye dialect, and it comes in two common forms, helpfully differentiated by Arnold Zwicky at Language Log:

The problem here is that there are two distinct but related concepts, and we have only one widely used term to label them.

One concept is the OED’s: a representation of dialect (or colloquial) pronunciations via unusual spellings.  It would certainly be useful to have a term for this, and “eye dialect” is a nearly transparent candidate for the purpose.

But there’s another tradition, in which the term is used for unusual spellings for perfectly ordinary pronunciations, functioning to suggest that the speaker is uneducated or crude — the sort of person who would spell the words that way.

As you can see, Paget’s treatment of words like “because” and “through” falls into the second category; there is no functional difference in pronunciation between the words because and becuz, or between through and thru, yet the latter forms are represented by Paget as being “true” representations of her participant’s speech. Ironically, Reinharz posits this formulation of the speech transcript as enabling “the speaker’s meaning and multiple voices [to] come through.” But of course, the eye dialect that falls into the second category has no relation to the participant’s speech whatsoever, and is purely and wholly imposed on the speech by Paget herself.

According to Reinharz, open-ended interview research is preferable to survey research or other quantitative methods due to its ability to allow for greater depth of understanding on the part of the researcher, to allow the participant’s voice to come through unadulterated by the voice of the researcher, to allow participants active involvement in the construction of data about their lives, and to counteract the mainstream tendency for women’s voices to be mediated by the voices of men. Considering these four posited characteristics of feminist interview research, Paget’s work seems like an egregious breach of feminist research ethics, and it reflects very poorly on Reinharz that Paget’s passage was selected uncritically as an example of an unadulterated representation of a participant’s speech.