Weird Stuff: Tiger Moms, the Koch Brothers And Makeup As The Cause Of Molestation of Women

This is like speed blogging on weird topics.  Some topics are truly weird, others are not weird but we are not supposed to notice them. 

First, the so-called Tiger Mom, Amy Chua,  has written a book with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld about which culture does the best child-rearing.  

Whether Jed Rubenfeld is a roaring Tiger Dad or just part of the decoration of the living-room is unclear from the preview of the book I've seen.  By all that I mean the age-old question whether fathers are to do anything more than open their wallets.

The book, Triple Package, is not out yet, so what I write about here is what one review argues the book tells us.  The review may be mistaken, in which case I'm going to have to apologize!

In any case, this is what the review tells:

In “The Triple Package,” Chua and her husband, co-author Jed Rubenfeld, gather some specious stats and anecdotal evidence to argue that some groups are just superior to others and everyone else is contributing to the downfall of America.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Chua and the Jewish Rubenfeld belong to two of the eight groups they deem exceptional. In no seeming order of importance, they are:
    •    Jewish
    •    Indian
    •    Chinese
    •    Iranian
    •    Lebanese-Americans
    •    Nigerians
    •    Cuban exiles
    •    Mormons
These groups — “cultural,” mind you, never “ethnic” or “racial” or “religious” — all possess, in the authors’ estimation, three qualities that they’ve identified as guarantors of wealth and power: superiority, insecurity and impulse control.

I wonder what those statistics could be.  If they have to do with income and education, say, it's important to remember that some recent immigrant groups to the US tend to have a lot more educational and other capital, on average, than some recent immigrant groups not included in that list.

For instance, it's very very difficult for an Indian family to get a work visa to this country unless at least one of the adults has a university degree or two, preferably a doctorate.  Similar arguments can be made about the recently immigrated Chinese, say.  And the Cubans, I have read, have on average been wealthier and more educated than other Latino immigrant groups on their arrival to the US.

Such differences probably account for at least some of the later differences in statistics measuring economic success here, whatever the parenting skills of various groups might be.

As a complete aside, my early upbringing consisted mostly of getting told not to get a big head.  I still got a big head.  So. 

Second, the financial reach of various wealthy conservatives looks to be enormous.  Digby writes about the Koch brothers' wallets in American politics.   And an article from last December summarizes a study which tried to find out the sources of funding for the climate change counter-movement.  Many of the sources are now hidden because they can be (yeah!), but the Koch Brothers have been busy in that field, too.

The role of money in American politics is one of those things which really should be written about a lot more, but it's not, because the people with the money are so powerful, and they are not going to fund anything which disses them.

Third, one survey in Saudi Arabia about the "molestation of females" gives us this:

Saudi men believe women are to blame for the rising cases involving molestation of females on the grounds they are seduced by women’s excessive make up.
The findings were included in a survey conducted by the Riyadh-based King Abdul Aziz Centre for National Dialogue and involved 992 males and females.
The survey, carried by Saudi newspapers, found that 86.5 per cent of the men polled believe that women’s exaggeration in wearing make-up is the main cause of the rise in molestation cases in public places in the conservative Gulf Kingdom.

No way of knowing if the survey is any good in terms of being representative. But those findings do echo other types of statements we have heard. 

Just as sexual molestation can be "caused" by wearing short skirts and tight tops, it seems that it can also be "caused" by wearing eye makeup with a niqab.  Taken to the extreme, this thinking boils down to women causing all molestation by just being there. 

Today's Bowl of Gender Research Granola

This is one of those studies which we will not see spread over the front pages of newspapers anywhere in the world:

Carothers and Harry Reis, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, analyzed data from 13 sex-difference studies over the past few decades. The studies included data from more than 13,000 research volunteers, most of them college students. They also examined studies of adolescents and mature adults.
The pair analyzed 122 different qualities such as preferences over how to spend their free time: golfing or scrap booking? Bath or boxing? They also looked at the so-called Big Five psychological traits: extraversion (sociability and enthusiasm); agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellect. Other analyses examined how men and women chose sexual partners and mates.
Instead of scores falling along neat lines between males and females, like height or physical strength differences -- psychological indicators fell on a spectrum for both genders.

There are average differences, but they are not large enough to classify men and women as consistently separate gender categories. Reis said that their statistical analysis shows that it's hard to tell men and women apart, even when it comes to sexuality.
"Many people act as if men and women are different species," Reis said. "The message to me is that these qualities don't belong to one sex, these are human differences and any given individual can have more or less than any of them."

I haven't looked at the original study for the purposes of criticism.  I will do it when it's discussed as widely as these kinds of studies.

That's the granola in your bowl.  Let's add some raisins (though I detest raisins, you are to regard these as yummy ones):  An analysis of the earnings of male and female economists, fresh out of the PhD oven, suggests that those who are partnered fare differently based on their gender:

Marriage, the research finds, benefits men and hurts women – if one judges by salary. Men who are married at the time they earn their doctorates see a 15 percent salary boost during the first five years of employment, compared to single men. And men who get married during that period see a 25 percent boost.
The picture is different for women. For them, getting married is associated with a 23 percent penalty in salary growth, compared to single women. The paper speculates that this reflects “compromises incurred in a two-career search.”

(Note that the comparison here is not between men and women, but between partnered and not-partnered (heterosexual?) individuals within each gender, and the percentages are not about salaries themselves but about differences in how they grow.) 

It's possible that the two-career job search explains this if men's careers are prioritized, but for that we would have to know what that other partner is doing.  For example, are the married male economists here mostly married to someone who isn't having a career (as opposed to a job)  or isn't having a paid job?  Without analyzing the data I can't tell if the other possible explanation is taken into account here.  That would be having children and how that affects men and women differently.

Finally, some honey or sugar on all that (and milk or cream, but I only have three stories): One study suggests that greater flexibility in working hours could reduce the gender wage gap in earnings:

Goldin was seeking to explain why 25 to 69 year old women working fulltime made 77 percent of what men earned. The median pay gap expands with age and differs by occupation, yet it's smaller than it once was as women have become more educated and worked more, she said on Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Philadelphia.
The pay gap in industries with more flexible work schedules, such as technology, science and health, is smaller than in those with more rigid workdays, including financial and legal professions, the study found.

Once again, I should warn you that I have not looked at the original study, so I can't tell if the study controls for all the other relevant variables.  But if it does, it would be interesting to know to what extent the rigid workdays in some industries are truly necessary and to what extent they are a simple inheritance from times when the stereotypical worker was assumed to be a man with a functioning support system at home.

From another point of view the greater need for flexible working hours for women can also be seen as a direct consequence of the gendered division of labor at home:  It's the women who are expected to need that flexibility for childcare and for the care of the elderly.  Which is to remind us that the total paid working hours are not the same thing as the total working hours.

Speed Blogging, 1/6/14. From daycare, abortion policies and rape to progressive economic policies and the Neanderthals.

1.  An interesting piece on daycare in Quebec, because it also addresses the economic framework.

A snippet:

Even limited spaces, though, have allowed Quebec to meet one major goal: to get moms working and lift families out of poverty. And that’s gone a long way toward paying for the system itself.
In 1997, women 25 to 44 in Quebec were less likely to be in the labour force than those of any province outside Atlantic Canada. Ten years later, their participation was among the highest in the nation – an about-face especially notable among those with children under 12.
The number of mothers with jobs went up across the country. But unlike places such as Newfoundland, where oil was fuelling some of those hires, Quebec employment rates aren’t tied to an obvious change in the job market. Quebec economists, such as Pierre Fortin, a professor at the University du Québec à Montréal, ascribe the boost to childcare. According to Dr. Fortin’s work, in 2008 alone, the program accounted for 70,000 newly employed moms.

2.  Content warning:  Horrible sexual violence

In India, protests erupt as the police still has trouble with how to handle rape cases.  Those protests are a good thing, showing change.  If we look far back in the history, the police has probably never taken most rape cases very seriously in most countries.  Recent US examples exist, too. 

3.  Texas and its abortion policies.  Lindsay Beyerstein did research on what is going on.

In somewhat related news,  Marlise Munoz lies brain dead in a Texas hospital.  Her husband, Erick Munoz,  is not allowed to take her body off life support because she is nineteen weeks pregnant, even though he states that this would have been her preference and is his preference.  This is because of a Texas law, according to some experts.  Others state that the law doesn't cover brain dead individuals.

4.  Jesse Myerson plays the bad cop in the good-cop-bad-cop setup of getting political change done by offering a rather extreme progressive list of economic changes that young people should support. That list includes guaranteed jobs for everyone with living wages and a universal basic income for everybody, whether working or not.  The latter is like being able to retire the minute you are out of the school system.

Well, I think Myerson intends to play the bad cop here, but I could be completely wrong.  Still, it's good not to always play defense when it comes to economic policies.

5.  The Neanderthal genome is finally mapped, we are told.  Interesting stuff, but always remember how small the samples are that researchers must be working with when it comes to ancient species.  This article is good at reminding us about that when it talks about the possible incest stuff:  Finding that one specific individuals was probably the result of what we would call incest does not mean that that's what all Neanderthals practiced, everywhere. 

But more generally, if you had the time to go back and see how earlier findings have been reported you would come away with a firm new year's promise to always take all new results with a small pinch of salt, not because they are necessarily wrong but because the next set of new results could be quite different or at least change our understanding again.

We Are Number One!

The "we" would be the Nordic countries, and what the winning is about is coffee consumption.  Here's the pic*:

What's the reason?  Probably the cold and the dark.

Added later:  The traditional Finnish way of serving coffee at parties was with seven different types of cookies and/or cakes.  You had to have seven types or more.


-----
*hat tip to Quentin Compson

On Wars And Resources

Yesterday I got depressed by checking out all the parts of this world where wars and violence are prevalent right now.  Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, just to list the three that first cropped up on my Google news. 

The reasons for wars are always complicated, but many seem to ignite when access to resources changes in a way which leaves one group in greater poverty or when groups disagree about how to share newly-found resources.  That those wars also have other explanations, including long-held grievances between tribal or religious or ethnic groups or between countries, say, doesn't change the possibility that a war might have been averted without a particular resource problem cropping up. 

Even the problems in Egypt are partly caused by the great discrepancy between the amount of arable land in that country and the traditional (and still recent) large size of the farming population, the combination of which has placed a large percentage of the population into poverty, and the antecedents to the Syrian situation point out the reduced resources (possibly caused by global climate change)  as an important cause.  The Israel-Palestine hostilities are also partly based on access to resources, such as access to water for farming.

All this is obvious.  But when a war breaks out somewhere, the peace initiatives tend not to focus on the resource/population question to the extent they perhaps should.  We might get peace faster if that was done?  Could wars be prevented by an international economic policy approach?  Is there a willingness to address such issues?

Then there are the wider links to global climate change and its impact on available resources, the unequal distribution of resources on the worldwide level, with its Western domination,  and the question of what human population size is sustainable in a world where all individuals should be able to enjoy a fair standard of living while leaving some nature for the other species.

You Never Guess What I Found Today!

The Upworthy trick in making linkable posts by using certain headlines!  Check out this slide show, especially slide number 7.  I saw that yesterday and today I've spotted the Upworthy trick all over the Internets!

To be quite honest, I have sometimes used the reverse trick to make sure that a post I write isn't easily found by trolls:  A long-and-boring headline.

Still, it's funny how easily I've been manipulated.

Speed Blogging, 1/2/2014. Assorted Topics.

1. This New England Journal of Medicine article is useful reading.  It is about how anti-abortion legislation affects what is expected of physicians.

2. This is the  kind of piece about gender differences in the brain which doesn't get pulled out and dissected under the glaring lights of the popular media.  When certain studies are ignored and others pushed we get a false impression of what it is that research actually is establishing.  My New Year's promise is to try to cover stuff more fairly.

3. A piece which reminds us about certain oddities in federal voting behavior by state.  The red (Republican flavor) states are more likely to be net recipients of federal aid, the blue (Democratic flavor) states are more likely to be net donors.  It's not the direction of the transfers which matters here but the way the voting patterns go in its reverse.

4. Rhode Island did something good:

With the new year came the implementation of a new bill: Rhode Island’s paid family leave legislation, passed in July, is now in effect. That means that three states have paid family leave programs in place, as Rhode Island joins California, whose law went into effect in 2004, and New Jersey, which started its program in 2009.
Rhode Island’s law expands its previous Temporary Disability Insurance program, which only covered those who needed time off for work-related illnesses or injuries. Temporary Caregiver Insurance will now offer paid family leave, covering about 80 percent of the state’s workforce. Workers can now pay into into the program through a payroll deduction, which would cost someone who makes $43,000 a year 83 cents a week. They can then take up to four weeks of paid leave, although that number will climb to six weeks next year and eight weeks by 2015. The minimum weekly payment someone could receive is $72, while the maximum is $752.

As I've written before, American workers need proper annual paid vacations and proper parental and related leaves.  Many other countries have them already and manage to compete in the international markets.  Besides, well-rested and less stressed workers are healthier and more efficient workers.

5.  On the Ani DiFranco debacle.  This is the gist of what happened:

Singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco has officially canceled her four-day “righteous feminist songwriting retreat” after fans and non-fans alike rightfully took issue with the event’s location — the Nottoway Plantation, one of the largest former slave plantations in the South. DiFranco posted a lengthy message on her Facebook page announcing the cancelation and offered a pretty weak explanation for why the retreat was ever scheduled at such a historically problematic location in the first place.

DiFranco has offered a second apology, the one that should have been her first apology.

For more views on this (also on Ani's Facebook page), check here, here, and here, and, for the sake of covering all views, here. 

Living Off Tips

This piece and the attached video are worth thinking about.  The federal tipped minimum wage, the wage restaurant servers get before earning any tips, is $2.13 an hour in direct wages.  Here's how it's supposed to work:

An employer of a tipped employee is only required to pay $2.13 an hour in direct wages if that amount plus the tips received equals at least the federal minimum wage, the employee retains all tips and the employee customarily and regularly receives more than $30 a month in tips. If an employee's tips combined with the employer's direct wages of at least $2.13 an hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference.

Many states have higher tipped minimum wages.  But note that the federal tipped minimum wage (that two bucks and thirteen cents) was set in 1991 and this Wikipedia article suggests that sixteen states are still using it as the basis of server compensation packages.

The linked Crooks&Liars piece suggests that employers might not make up the difference when the minimum wage and the tips fail to come up to the federal minimum hourly wage.  But even if they do,  the labor contract here  tilts the usual ideas we have about the entrepreneurs being rewarded for risk-bearing and the workers being protected from it by earning fixed wages:

If I understand this right, the employer will never have to pay more to the wait staff than whatever the relevant hourly (state or federal) minimum wage might be.  If the business is booming and the servers make enough in tips to earn the relevant hourly minimum wage or more, the employer only needs to pay that tipped minimum wage (say, $2.13 an hour in some states).  If the business is not booming, the employer will end up having to pay all of the federal or state minimum wage rate.  But that's it!

The servers, on the other hand, cannot predict their overall earnings that easily, because they depend mostly on the tips, and though there are conventions about what the right amount for a tip should be, a customer who simply refuses to pay for the work of a server cannot be made to do so.  In a sense, it is the servers who are the risk-takers here, and that can make life hard for low-income workers who try to schedule the payment of rent and utilities.

The push, as I understand it, is for a higher federal tipped minimum wage, given that the current one was set in 1991, probably before the birth of many who work today as servers.

Other countries might have something to offer here, too.  In some the tip is routinely included as a certain percentage of the total invoice.  Tipping above and beyond that is only for some extraordinary services.  This practice doesn't completely isolate the serving staff from the business risks of the restaurants but reduces the ability of a customer to walk away without paying.

Communication Thoughts

This will all be silly stuff as I'm not wearing my Echidne helmet today.  First, Leonardo da Vinci's Michelangelo's grocery list for his servant who may not have been able to read.

How we communicate depends on the context.  And every context is fraught with dangerous possibilities of misunderstanding.  The context itself can be interpreted that way.  Michelangelo is privileged (he can write), his servant, less so.  Or perhaps not, because we don't truly know what their lives were like, and because most people then were  illiterate, so communication, as such, wasn't based on the ability to write.

Then there's communication with other species of animals.  Humans tend to regard that as happening when the other animal species are taught to understand human language.  Think of the cue cards for chimpanzees or how we teach our dogs and cats commands.

The reverse way of looking that is for us to learn the language of other animal species.  I speak very little dog, for example, but what I do understand came from the patient teaching of my dogs.  Still, I speak a lot more dog than most people who put, say, what's supposed to be an angry dog into a movie, and then we hear a dog happily barking a welcome to someone but are expected to understand that the dog is angry.  A double translation!

Internet communication.  That is a very different kettle of fish from face-to-face communication, partly because we cannot see facial expressions and we cannot hear the tone of voice and also because it is very easy indeed to forget that the other participants are living, breathing human beings.  Even if they appear to be utterly wrong and misguided in their arguments.  (That part was a joke).

Then there's that 140-character limit on the Twitter.  Too bad that few complicated issues can be properly and precisely distilled into 140 characters.  Twitter does better with emotions and jokes than with substantive discussions.

All this led me back to this piece:








It is both a joke (on many levels, note that the pianist doesn't play at all) and a comment on Wittgenstein's theory.  But it's also true about many debates, not because the terms didn't have a meaning one could communicate, but because the meaning of those terms is quite different for people with other frameworks of life.  And unless we are willing to take time to clarify what we mean and to understand the frameworks different people mean the chances of increased clarity from communication are minimal.  Indeed, sometimes silence is more conducive to real understanding.

Not that I will necessarily shut up now, sorry.

Happy New Year!

May 2014 be good one for you and yours.

I have no talent for end-of-year retrospective assessments, because, as my car mirrors tell me, the objects in the mirror are closer than they seem.  Spotting patterns takes more time for me.  Note that I said "patterns."  Every year has its own major news items and major events, but whether they are evidence of some permanent change takes longer to spot.

Watching the new year in:

On US Beliefs About Evolution

Pew Research Center has a new survey out on that (n=1983 adults).  It has been written up in various ways, but the major result people talk about is the finding that those who believe humans were created exactly as they are now are more likely to be Republicans now than in 2009:

There also are sizable differences by party affiliation in beliefs about evolution, and the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown. In 2009, 54% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats said humans have evolved over time, a difference of 10 percentage points. Today, 43% of Republicans and 67% of Democrats say humans have evolved, a 24-point gap.

The researchers looked at a lot of stuff to account for the change, but couldn't completely do that:

Differences in the racial and ethnic composition of Democrats and Republicans or differences in their levels of religious commitment do not wholly explain partisan differences in beliefs about evolution. Indeed, the partisan differences remain even when taking these other characteristics into account.

That's weird.  My first guess for an explanation would have been that Republican Party is now more religious than it was in 2009, in the sense of having more fundamentalists in it.  Perhaps "differences in their levels of religious commitment" doesn't account for that aspect?  On the other hand, the change from 2009 could be just getting a non-representative sample by accident, either that year or now.

Sex And Personal Responsibility For Orgasms

Blow jobs. I bet you never thought you'd read something like this on my priggish blog!  And this is definitely not safe for viewing in public.

By "this" I mean an interview about how a woman can learn to teach herself to orgasm while giving BJs, even while deep throating (work on that gag reflex, you irresponsible woman!).  The trick is to work on your thoughts, to learn sexual meditation and then --- presto! --- you can orgasm while doing something completely different!  It's your responsibility to get in touch with what your body wants, after all.

If you work on it, you can orgasm while giving BJs.  Or while scrubbing the floor.  Or while you vacuum.  There's an interesting aside in that piece to how hard the work of BJs is on your knees:

Prioritizing your comfort also might mean avoiding the typical kneel-and-worship approach to blow jobs. “One of the hard things about being on your knees is there’s only so long that that’s comfortable,” says Van Vleck.

There's nothing much wrong with that piece if it's one in a series where the next one teaches all the same skills to people who do cunnilingus on someone else.  If that's not the case, my impression is that the piece contributes to the currently common narrative that sex is defined by what heterosexual men like (from porn, say) and that this is what we all should learn to truly enjoy.

I'm not ridiculing the obvious fact that one can enjoy giving pleasure to a loved one in sex, that the so-called foreplay aspects of sex can be enjoyable in themselves.  I'm not even saying that a woman couldn't orgasm from giving BJs or from peeling potatoes or whatever.  But there's something inherently tilted in Van Vleck's idea that personal responsibility for one's orgasms means something like nobody else having to do anything for you.

What Happens When You Say Something Bigoted in Public?

The confluence of events sometimes teaches us  what might happen.  First, take the case of Justine Sacco:

Roxane Gay writes about it:

PR executive Justine Sacco wrote an offensive tweet before boarding a flight from London to Cape Town, South Africa. “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” she said. Between the time Sacco tweeted and when she landed in South Africa twelve hours later, the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet trended worldwide. A great many of the tweets including the hashtag were downright hilarious. Even Donald Trump, a paragon of ignorance, chastised Sacco on Twitter, saying, “Justine, what the hell are you doing, are you crazy? Not nice or fair! I will support @AidforAfrica. Justine is FIRED!” 

Internet sleuths figured out which flight Sacco was on and when she would land. Her work and cell phone numbers were uncovered. Her entire online footprint was revealed. She had made inappropriate tweets before. She had Instagram and Facebook accounts. These have all been deleted but nothing on the Internet really disappears. The digital echoes of her mistakes will endure. Sacco’s former employer, InterActiveCorp, immediately distanced themselves, condemned her words and she was fired. During her flight, Sacco gained thousands of Twitter followers, an audience raptly waiting, somewhat gleefully, to see what would happen next. Justine Sacco unwittingly scripted a gripping, real-life soap opera and she wasn’t even there to watch it unfold. 

Here was instant comeuppance for someone who said something terrible. Here was comeuppance for a white person generalizing shallowly about Africa, the continent, as if it were one large country with only one story to tell. Here was a woman reveling in her whiteness and assuming that her whiteness was some kind of shield against a disease that does not discriminate. I was amused by the spectacle. I followed along even though something in my stomach twisted as the hours passed. It was a bit surreal, knowing this drama was playing out while Sacco was at 38,000 feet.

Sacco's tweet was racist and stupid.  What happened next?  This:

At first the discussion around her tweet was relatively trivial, with people wondering if Ms. Sacco’s account had been hacked. Yet as soon as it was clear that she had made similar comments in the past, the Internet turned into a voracious and vengeful mob. Ms. Sacco was tried and judged guilty in a public square of millions and soon attacked in a way that seemed worse than her original statement.
Within hours, people threatened to rape, shoot, kill and torture her. The mob found her Facebook and Instagram accounts and began threatening the same perils on photos she had posted of friends and family.* Not satisfied, people began threatening her family directly. The incident was a trending topic on Twitter and a huge forum thread on Reddit.

That was Justine Sacco.  Now compare this to the case of Phil Robertson, the patriarch of "Duck Dynasty," cable television's largest show.  Robertson has expressed opinions which many would call bigoted.  For instance, in a recent interview he states:

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men," Robertson said before paraphrasing a Bible verse. "Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
Though he's worried about the state of this country, Robertson seemed even more concerned about non-Christian cultures.
"All you have to do is look at any society where there is no Jesus. I’ll give you four: Nazis, no Jesus. Look at their record. Uh, Shintos? They started this thing in Pearl Harbor. Any Jesus among them? None. Communists? None. Islamists? Zero," Robertson explained. "That’s eighty years of ideologies that have popped up where no Jesus was allowed among those four groups. Just look at the records as far as murder goes among those four groups.”

And:

As a devout member of the Church of Christ, Robertson has been a frequent speaker and preacher around the country, especially since gaining fame from the highest-rated nonfiction series in cable TV history. Anyone who takes the time to watch those videos will find plenty of things to discuss and debate.
Check out these nuggets:

....

A good woman is "hard to find. Mainly because these boys are waiting until they get to be about 20 years old before they marry 'em. Look, you wait till they get to be about 20 years old, they only picking that's going to take place is your pocket. You gotta marry these girls when they're 15 or 16, they'll pick your ducks. You need to check with mom and dad about that, of course." -- Speaking at Sportsmen's Ministry in Georgia in 2009.

And:

In a recent interview with GQ, Robertson made anti-gay comments that sparked his indefinite suspension from “Duck Dynasty” by A&E. In the same article, in remarks that haven’t gotten as much attention, Robertson also talked about growing up in Louisiana before the blossoming of the civil rights movement, saying  “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

That indefinite suspension Robertson got?  It's already over:

A&E announced Friday that it will "resume filming" the hit reality television show "Duck Dynasty" with star Phil Robertson following his indefinite suspension from the network last week for comments he made in an interview with GQ Magazine about gays, non-Christians, and African Americans. The network also promised it would work with Robertson to promote "unity, tolerance and acceptance among all people." A&E announced the decision to end Robertson's suspension with a statement provided to the Hollywood Reporter.
"Duck Dynasty is not a show about one man's views. It resonates with a large audience because it is a show about family… a family that America has come to love. As you might have seen in many episodes, they come together to reflect and pray for unity, tolerance and forgiveness. These are three values that we at A+E Networks also feel strongly about," the statement said. "So after discussions with the Robertson family, as well as consulting with numerous advocacy groups, A&E has decided to resume filming Duck Dynasty later this spring with the entire Robertson family."

I have no deep conclusions to draw from this comparison, and I am not implying that there's some conspiracy that would explain why the two cases, somewhat similar, resulted in such very different outcomes. 

Money matters in the Robertson case ("there's no such thing as bad publicity"), but it's also true that social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, have broken through the brick wall which we used to imagine was erected between the public and the private sphere. That brick wall is still around those who exist in the public mainstream (commercial) space, but not in the social media more generally.   
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*A different example of unrelated individuals getting harassed is given here:

In October, after an Ohio University woman was photographed receiving oral sex in public and later filed a report saying she was assaulted, “men’s rights” supporters attempted to harass the women in question. They incorrectly identified her as a different Ohio University student, and posted that student’s contact information online. After she was flooded with messages calling her a liar, she withdrew from her classes and was afraid to leave her home.

The Christmas Scrooge. Wal-Mart.

The honorary Scrooge of this year's Christmas is  probably Wal-Mart:

U.S. companies, forbidden to give money directly to political action committees, are taking advantage of controversial federal rules allowing them to ask employees to do it for them in exchange for matching charitable donations.
It’s legal and gives businesses from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to Coca-Cola (KO) Co. to Hewlett-Packard Co. a way to fund their PACs, which direct money to political candidates. The matching contributions provide an incentive for employees, most of them managers, to contribute to the PAC.

Got it?  So Wal-Mart management-level employees give money to pro-business political candidates (of both major parties) while Wal-Mart reimburses them by giving to charities on their behalf.  But wait!  There's more:

Employees receive no tax deduction for the donations, as they do by giving to a charity directly. When soliciting employee contributions to PACs in exchange for charitable donations, companies typically say they want to increase voluntary participation in the political process and support pro-business candidates. Many companies offer a one-for-one match and donate the money to a charity of the employee’s choosing. Coca-Cola and HP both do this.
Wal-Mart goes further. It offers a two-for-one match, and the contribution must go to the Associates in Critical Need Trust, or ACNT, a charity the company started in 2001 to help its own store workers facing financial distress. Wal-Mart gave the ACNT about $3.6 million in double-matching funds in the year that ended January 31, according to an audit of the charity’s financial filings.
“It’s rare for a corporate PAC’s charitable match program to be restricted to a charity that the corporation wholly controls and finances,” Laurence E. Gold, an attorney at Trister, Ross, Schadler & Gold, a Washington law firm that handles campaign-finance issues, said in an e-mail.

Bolds are mine.

All that sounds stinky to me.  The problem?  Employees are persuaded to both support certain candidates which might be better for Wal-Mart than for a particular employee and then they are persuaded to make up the shortfall in the wages Wal-Mart pays its floor-level workers.  A win-win for Wal-Mart.

Micro-Posts for Boxing Day 2013

1.  Two Pussy Riot members have been freed which is good news.  But read about their experiences in prison.

2.  Why the Republican Party has a tiny problem with  women:  Their main pundits find women really yucky people unless properly controlled.  The question why those are the main pundits deserves a much deeper post than this but you can figure the answer for yerselves.  Also check out what Fox News thinks of the frightening wussification of America, because that, too, is linked to the Republican war against womenfolks.

3.  Contents:  Violence.
This series of pictures on mass killings at USAToday earlier in December is informative.  But one of the pictures (the second under "suspects") and the attached text are utterly weird.  The picture tells us the percentages of mass killing suspects who are men (94%) and the percentages of mass killing suspects who are women (4%). Yet the text goes: "While both men and women commit mass killings, their choices of weapons and the outcomes of their cases are different."

That is truly weak tea, to ignore the difference in the percentages.  An occupational field with those percentages would be regarded as almost totally sex-segregated, for instance, and there could be something we can learn from that gender difference, and that something could help in reducing mass killings more generally (better social support for men in trouble?  less access to guns which kill quickly and easily? different ideas about what masculinity means?)

4.  On economic inequality:  Is that the greatest economic challenge of our time?  That's the debate which took place during December 2013.  Brad Plumer threw a pebble into the churning waters by writing about the various theories explaining how inequality could hurt economic growth and the fact that research hasn't been able to decisively prove those hurts.  Ezra Klein argued that unemployment is the real challenge today, not economic inequality.  Paul Krugman and Kathleen Geier vote for inequality as the most urgent underlying problem.

I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this debate, only that the impact of increasing economic inequality on our political outcomes shouldn't be ignored in it.  Given the way the US political system is financed, rising inequality is likely to a) increase the relative power of the 1% over the 99% and of firms over workers, and b) to the extent people want their own interests to be considered when they donate money, the political outcomes are going to produce more inequality, not less, because the higher the inequality in wealth and income becomes, the more the concerns of the wealthy and the less wealthy will diverge.  Or that would be my guess.

Music

If you celebrate Christmas, have a very happy one.  If not, enjoy this end of the year.  To all of you, a wonderful 2014!

The Default Gender in Politics and Science

President Obama reads political columnists.  His top ten list*  is 90% white and 100% male.

That's probably not because he would have explicitly chosen to focus his reading on white men's thoughts.  Most political columnists in the US are white men, after all.  But it's also true that being male and white looks like the default race and gender to most of us in the US.  That's how it works.

I'd guess that the reasons for the default race and gender are slightly different, however.  Though both of those may also be based on the societal ranking orders, it is true that whites are still the numerical majority in the US, so there will be more columns written by white people than by people of color.

The default gender is based on something different, given that men and women exist in roughly equal numbers.  Think of these kinds of pictures:

We don't interpret them as being pictures of white men but being pictures of "man."  That's because male is the default gender in most societies in that it stands for both the general humanity and for human males.  Pictures of women in the same contexts would only stand for human females.

Which brings me to an interesting post Andrew Gelman wrote about the recent Douthat column (I blogged about that here and here).  A snippet from Gelman's post:

Here’s the story. The other day on the sister blog I reported on a pair of studies involving children and political orientation: Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that, in Great Britain, parents of girls were more likely to support left-wing parties, compared to parents of boys. And, in the other direction, Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher found with survey data from the United States that parents of girls were more likely to support the Republican party, compared to parents of boys.
Both these studies came out a few years ago (and I blogged on them way back when), but the Conley and Rauscher paper got a new burst of attention following its recent publication in a sociology journal.
We haven’t reached the fallacy yet, but we’re getting closer.
One thing I noted in my sister blog post was an oddity in the reporting of the Conley and Rauscher paper:
There’s something oddly asymmetrical about how these results are presented, both by the authors and in the media. Consider the following headlines:
“The Effect of Daughters on Partisanship and Social Attitudes Toward Women”
“Does Having Daughters Make You More Republican?”
“Parents With Daughters Are More Likely To Be Republicans, Says New Study”
“Parents Of Daughters Lean Republican, Study Shows”
“The Daughter Theory: Does raising girls make parents conservative?”
To their credit, the study’s authors and many of the journalists make it clear the the claims are speculative (consider, for example, the question mark at the end of the New York Times headline given just above). So that’s all good.
But here’s my question: Why is it all about “the effect of daughters”? Why not “Does having sons make you support the Democrats?” It looks to me like having sons is considered the default.

Bolds are mine.  And yes, I think Andrew got the reason.  Daughters are seen as the deviance from the norm, sons as the default.

As one commenter at Gelman's blog noted, researchers have studied (pdf) this tendency in scientific articles.  Here's the abstract of the linked study:

Androcentric thinking assumes maleness to be normative and attributes gender differences to females. A content analysis of articles reporting gender differences published between 1965 and 2004 in four American Psychological Association journals examined androcentric pronouns, explanations, and tables and graphs. Few articles used generic masculine pronouns to refer to both women and men. However, explanations of gender differences within articles that mentioned such differences in their abstracts and titles referenced attributes of women significantly more often than attributes of men. Most tables and graphs depicting gender differences positioned males’ data before females’
data, except when gender differences among parents were concerned. Psychologists have ceased to use male-centered pronouns, but female and male psychologists continue to report, explain, and depict gender differences in androcentric ways.

Another way of putting that is to realize that when a study is about gender it tends to report how women differ from men, not how men differ from women.  Though the message is ultimately the same, the emphasis most of us adopt means that how men are is assumed to be the default, and what needs to be explained is how women differ from that default.

I once drew a picture of this particular way of thinking, this one.  The top picture shows the actual reality (in very simplified ways), the bottom picture shows the common thinking pattern:

 




-----
*I'm not quite sure if Obama has handed out that list or if it was collected from articles about his reading habits.

Technical Problems...

I've had those with the computer and the modem today, and earlier I had problems between the incompatibility of my old scanner (it scans but now saves just rectangles of black) and the Maverick operating system I downloaded.

All that made me think of the dependency technically more elaborate systems create, the impossibility of guaranteeing the absence of all bugs, lice or mice, the difficulty of getting  help from actual human beings (even when one pays for something) and the general helpless frustration I've felt today, trying to fix a problem two days before Christmas and while mostly talking to a very nice robot who can't understand my accented English. 

Or suppose that you pay for a program which then malfunctions.  You go to the website for help and find that there is NO WAY of sending a message that a person with at least one eyeball would read.  Instead, you are told to go to the discussion forum where people who ask for help often post the oddest stuff ever and even if they don't,  are just ignored.  But of course you can get human help!  Only you need to pay extra for it.

Another way of putting all that is to note that when you get a technical problem you better set aside about eight hours of your own time and labor first.  Now price that at the going wage rate for you and then add the cost of that times the average number of failures per year to whatever you are paying for the program.

Those troubles do not mean that the cyberspace and what it offers wouldn't be wonderful in many ways.  But imagine if car trouble was treated this way.  Computer systems are now as complicated as cars, yet ordinary people are mostly expected to sort the problems out on their own.

Anyway, back to our regularly programmed contents now.

Winter Solstice Music

From the very north of Europe

Campus Sexual Assault Policies in the US. Whom Do They Favor?

Did you read about the MRAs (Men's Rights Activists) who bombed Occidental College with false rape reports?  Think Progress:

Occidental College has been flooded with over 400 false rape reports this week as internet trolls have attempted to prove a point about the school’s anonymous reporting system, according to college officials. Now, administrators are being forced to weed through the barrage of reports to determine if any real sexual assaults were reported during that time.

Members of the online communities Reddit and 4Chan, many of whom identify themselves as “men’s right activists,” started spamming Occidental after a user complained that it’s too easy to abuse the college’s anonymous reporting system. “Feminists at Occidental College created an online form to anonymously report rape/sexual assault. You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge. The ‘victim’ never has to prove anything or reveal their identity,” a user in the “Men’s Rights” subreddit wrote, and provided a link to the school’s form.

...

But the Los Angeles Times reports that the anonymous reporting form in question isn’t actually a result of that recent push to hold Occidental accountable for its sexual assault policies. It was first implemented back in 2009 to encourage more victims to come forward. The allegations are reviewed by campus administrators and primarily used to track patterns, since the individuals who commit sexual assaults in college are typically serial rapists.

“The challenge for the college is not false reports,” a spokesperson for Occidental College explained. “Our experience is those are rare. The challenge for the college is getting the survivors to report, either to the college or police or both. Sexual misconduct is underreported everywhere, and we’re interested in providing as many options as possible.”
...

Despite the fears fueling “men’s rights” supporters, false rape reports are very rare. Just 2 to 8 percent of reported rapes are based on false claims, and the women who file false claims often receive punishments that are far worse than the consequences for actual rapists. For instance, at Occidental College, some students who have been charged with rape have allegedly received punishments as light as being assigned a five-page book report.

Friday Musical Interlude

The a cappella band is called Rajaton (limitless, infinite, without boundaries or borders).

Playing with The Comments

I have changed the default avatar in the comments, so don't be frightened that it's part of a snake.  If you find that bothersome I will change it back.

Camille Paglia: "It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be."

Our old misogynist pal Camille Paglia wrote an article for Time with the fetching title "It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be."  That has been Camilla's schtick from the very beginning.  She is  the only self-avowed feminist whose idea of feminism is the exact reverse of feminism!  Well, hatred of women, in any case. Other than herself.

Her argument, this time, is that feminists argue [sic] that men are obsolete, but that men will never become obsolete, that  the end of men is nowhere near, that men have invented everything worthwhile and do all the shitty and important work in the society, and that when the society once again collapses it is men who will defend women and get food and water.*  It's time for feminists to give them credit for that:

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S. is, despite their putative leftism, an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused, clerical and managerial skills of the upper-middle-class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity. Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive.

But the triumphalism among some — like Hanna Rosin in her book, The End of Men, about women’s gains — seems startlingly premature. For instance, Rosin says of the sagging fortunes of today’s working-class couples that they and we had “reached the end of a hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back.” This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history’s far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal. 

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

That's funny.  Let's take a few bits out of that quote.  How about this one:

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf.

Hilarious!  I'm not denying the important role of men as roughly half of the human race.  But come on, Camille, have you never read anything about prehistory or more recent nomadic tribes?  The women don't sit cowering in a cave somewhere.  They go out to forage, they trap small animals, they fish.

Fetching water?  That, sweet Camille, is a female job in African tribes.

And that defending of the home turf?  Well, it's unlikely to be against hordes of Amazonian survivalist gals.  Then there's the much deeper point that there never was a time when men weren't needed.  More about that below, but for the time being it suffices to say that Hanna Rosin sewed that "end of men" out of whole cloth.

OK.  Here's another bit worth looking at:

Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

OOh.  I like that false generalization of men being "absolutely invisible to most feminists."  It really is a silly thing to say.

But I quite agree with Paglia that we should all be thankful for the people who do the hard infrastructure work, including the men she mentions.

Let's add to that list all the women who take care of the sick in nursing homes and the elderly both in those homes and outside them, all the women who cook meals, all the women who sew clothes, all the women who take care of infants and children, all the women who teach at schools so that the next generation has the skills necessary to function, all the women who clean and scrub (in most countries this is a female occupation) etc etc.

And the men who do those things and the women who do the kinds of things Paglia mentions.  She makes her point by distorting facts.  Perhaps certain groups of people are absolutely invisible to her.

The dirty jobs are not solely done by men, either.  Most bottoms, whether belonging to infants, the sick or the frail elderly, are wiped by women, those who wash corpses in funeral homes in many countries are women, the nurses who clean the sores of the sick are mostly women, the people who scrub disgusting toilets and wipe vomit stains are usually also women.

I thank all those workers who do the necessary dirty chores.  But Paglia's list forgets the women who do such work altogether, and people in her comments agree.

What about the dangerous jobs?  Most of the listed ones are predominantly male occupations, but, as I have written before, prostitution is a very dangerous and overwhelmingly female job.  It is not legal in most countries so it is not included in those statistics.  It differs from other types of criminal occupations, however, by being regarded as legal in some countries when there is no trafficking.

And one reason there are not more women in dangerous jobs such as fishing is that women entering into blue-collar male dominated professions face anger and harassment.

The Holiday Story: Cecil Williams and His Guide Dog, Orlando.

I love this story, sniff.  It has everything:  miracles, a lovely Labrador retriever, a charming gentleman, kind folks:

Cecil Williams, 61, and his Labrador Orlando both escaped serious injury when train slowed to pass over top of them.

Gallant guide dog Orlando, a black Labrador retriever, bravely leapt on to the tracks at a Manhattan subway platform on Tuesday after his blind owner lost consciousness and tumbled in front of an oncoming train.
Cecil Williams, 61, and Orlando both escaped serious injury when the train passed over top of them – a miraculous end to a harrowing ordeal that began when Williams began to feel faint on his way to the dentist.
“He tried to hold me up,” an emotional Williams said from his hospital bed, his voice breaking at times.
Witnesses said Orlando began barking frantically and tried to stop Williams from falling from the platform. Matthew Martin told the New York Post that Orlando jumped down and tried to rouse Williams even as a train approached.
“He was kissing him, trying to get him to move,” Martin said.
Witnesses called for help and the train’s operator slowed his approach as Williams and Orlando lay in the trench between the rails.
“The dog saved my life,” Williams said.

But wait!  There's more!  Sadly, the day when the accident happened was almost the last day of Orlando's working career.  He is eleven, and expected to retire.  Williams will get a new service dog.  But what will happen to Orlando?  Williams hoped that a good home could be found for him as he himself couldn't afford to keep him.

What happened next?  This:

A blind man who tumbled onto subway tracks in Manhattan with his guide dog declared "there's still good people in this world" after he was told anonymous donations will make it possible for him to keep the animal after it is retired next month.
Cecil Williams, 61, appeared with the black Labrador, Orlando, at the hospital Wednesday, after telling the AP in an interview a day earlier that the beloved pup would be forced to retire due to his age in January. His insurance wouldn't pay for a retired dog, Williams said.

The organization Guiding Eyes for the Blind, which provided the dog to Williams seven years ago, announced at the press conference that donations had covered the cost of the dog for life after his retirement.
An emotional Williams thanked strangers for their kindness.
"Orlando, he is my best buddy, he's my pal," Williams said. "The spirit of giving, Christmas ... it exists here and it's in New York."

Yes, I know I usually write like a robot on crack, and that I'm all opposed to sentimentality and fuzzy thinking and letting any feelings out from under my war helmet.  I even know that a few wonderful and heart-warming stories don't change the balance of the scales on human cruelty and indifference.

But sometimes we need stories which make us renew our faith in humanity, which make us think that there could be a different way if we only tried.  And having a Lab in the story is as good as chocolate.

 

Speaking of the Douthat Column

You want to read this take on how Ross uses one book to draw his conclusions about women in the society.  The article is called "Welcome to Ross Douthat's Book Club.  It is funny.

On The Trivers-Willard Hypothesis and Ross Douthat. A look at the Conley&Rauscher Article on Party Affiliation And Having Daughters.#

 
This post is about the study Ross Douthat was so very happy about:  "The Effect of Daughters on Partisanship and Social Attitudes Toward Women" by Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher.  The article is behind a pay-wall, sadly, though an earlier working paper, available on the net, gives you a flavor of its arguments.

Rather shockingly, the Conley-Rauscher paper is not about conservative parents cherishing their daughters or traditional morality, as Douthat interprets it.

It is about evolutionary psychology, my dears!  Specifically, the paper argues that the Trivers-Willard hypothesis should explain US party affiliation by parents who have more daughters than sons or vice versa in one data set, published in 1994.  This data set appears to be the only one on US data which has questions about both political affiliation and the sex of the respondent's children.

What is the Trivers-Willard hypothesis (TWH)?   

In evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, the Trivers–Willard hypothesis,^[1] formally proposed by Robert Trivers and Dan Willard, predicts greater parental investment in males by parents in "good conditions" and greater investment in females by parents in "poor conditions" (relative to parents in good condition). The reasoning for this prediction is as follows: assume that parents have information on the sex of their offspring and can influence their survival differentially. While pressures exist to maintain sex ratios at 50%, evolution will favor local deviations from this if one sex has a likely greater reproductive payoff than is usual.

Trivers and Willard also identified a circumstance in which reproducing individuals might experience deviations from expected offspring reproductive value—namely, varying maternal condition. In polygynous species males may mate with multiple females and low-condition males will achieve fewer or no matings. Parents in relatively good condition would then be under selection for mutations causing production and investment in sons (rather than daughters), because of the increased chance of mating experienced by these good-condition sons. Mating with multiple females conveys a large reproductive benefit, whereas daughters could translate their condition into only smaller benefits. An opposite prediction holds for poor-condition parents—selection will favor production and investment in daughters, so long as daughters are likely to be mated, while sons in poor condition are likely to be out-competed by other males and end up with zero mates (i.e., those sons will be a reproductive dead-end).
The hypothesis was used to explain why, for example, Red Deer mothers would produce more sons when they are in good condition, and more daughters when in poor condition. In polyandrous species where some females mate with multiple males (and others get no matings) and males mate with one/few females (i.e., "sex-role reversed" species), these predictions from the Trivers–Willard hypothesis are reversed: parents in good condition will invest in daughters in order to have a daughter that can out-compete other females to attract multiple males, whereas parents in poor condition will avoid investing in daughters who are likely to get out-competed and will instead invest in sons in order to gain at least some grandchildren.

Bolds are mine.


I'm not sure if the interpretation as given here can be directly applied to human mating habits.  That would assume that human men and women are basically part of a polygynous (one male mating with several females) species, and it seems to ignore the alternative theory that very bad conditions (such as a species almost being wiped out) could trigger an excess of female births and fewer male births simply because that is the way for the species to survive.  Once times are better, a larger share of male births offers the benefits of greater genetic variety.

Whatever the case might be, those who apply the TWH to humans seem to argue that social class, say, can stand in for the kinds of conditions that apply to red deer.  Thus, people who belong to higher social classes are theorized to have more sons and daughters and to treat their sons better than daughters (more food for sons, more education for sons etc.).  People who belong to lower social classes are theorized to have more daughters than sons and to treat their daughters better than their sons (more food for daughters, more education for daughters etc.).  This is not what one observes in general, of course.  And whether, say, the low social classes in a western country are in the kind of "bad condition" that the TWH might apply to can be seriously debated.


Never mind.  Conley and Rauscher grab their version of the hypothesis with both hands.  Thus we get (from the article behind the pay-wall):

One such counterargument is the Trivers-Willard hypothesis (TWH), which suggests that parental investment in sons and daughters depends on parental status (Trivers 1972; Trivers and Willard 1973). Specifically, in order to maximize reproductive fitness (i.e., number of grandchildren), higher-status individuals will devote more resources to sons while lower-status individuals will favor daughters. In other words, parents with low status should favor females, whose reproductive chances are less risky and depend less on external conditions (Hopcroft 2005). In contrast, parents with high status should favor males according to this hypothesis, because their sons will have an advantage in competing for mates and should be able to produce more children than high-status daughters. If these strategic preferences manifest in political preferences, the TWH would expect daughters to produce different political responses depending on parental status. 

Because sons can potentially generate high numbers of grandchildren if they have a competitive edge against other men, they may induce preferences for more libertine social norms and policies—ones where paternal investment is low and restraints on male fecundity are minimal. Meanwhile, daughters may elicit grandparental preferences for a world in which male sexuality is constrained and paternal investment in offspring is greater. 

In summary, in contrast to much previous research we hypothesize that daughters may increase preference for conservative policies in the general population. In the United States, because the Republican Party is generally more conservative than the Democratic Party with respect to family values as well as social and fiscal policies, we predict that daughters will increase parental identification with the Republican Party. 

However, according to the TWH, this relationship should be conditional on parental social status. Among low-status parents (and the general population in contrast to Congress members), more daughters should promote Republican identification. Among high-status parents, daughters should yield no effect unless parents have no sons and expect no further children (which is difficult to measure, but could shift their strategy to favor daughters).

Bolds are mine.

This is not the same as the TWH which has nothing to say about party affiliation.  It is Conley and Rauscher who argue that the Democratic Party platform makes it easier for men to spread their sperm freely and that the  parts of that party's platform which make it easier for women to bring up their children (more support for single mothers, more access to the job market for women etc.) somehow don't cause the hypothesis to reverse.  After all, IF people were actually (unawares) in the business of maximizing the number of grandchildren  then logic suggests that the party which offers more financial support for child-rearing might be the one parents with many daughters would support.

What Makes Ross Douthat Happy?

That would be finding research results which reinforce his own views.  Don't we all like those findings?  But some of us have a bigger pulpit to popularize the ones they like.  For instance, Ross Douthat does.

This time he uses that persuasion pulpit to tell us not only that he was so pleased to find a study which matches his opinions but also this:

Or the pleasure that I took recently from the headline: “Study: Having daughters makes parents more likely to be Republican.”
Why pleasure? Well, because previous research on this question had suggested the reverse, with parents of daughters leaning left and parents of sons rightward. And those earlier findings dovetailed neatly with liberal talking points about politics and gender: Republicans make war on women, Democrats protect them, so it’s only natural that raising girls would make parents see the wisdom of liberalism ...
But the new study undercuts those talking points. Things are more complicated than you thought, liberals! You can love your daughters, want the best for them, and find yourself drawn to ... conservative ideas! Especially if you’re highly educated, which is where the effect was strongest! Better dust off a different set of talking points — maybe something about the family as the source of all oppression and how deeply internalized patriarchal norms make parents subconsciously inclined to tyrannize their female offspring and then we can argue about that!

The study he mentions here is worth a post on its own, because although its conclusions are those Douthat loves (though a lot messier), the study is not really about what he thinks it is about (love of the daughters as persons).  All that will be covered in a later post right here on this popular blog.  But for the time being it suffices to point out that other studies have found the exact reverse of this study (which uses data collected in 1994*), even quite recently, though not for the US which appears to have no other data on this, and  I'm pretty sure that Douthat didn't popularize those studies.  Because he didn't like their findings.

This aspect of popularizing research is in itself under-researched and popularized.  Guys like Douthat and Brooks, both with Big Pulpits, never popularize a study that goes against their beliefs.  The New York Times should really hire the same number of liberal people to talk about all the studies out there.  And the same goes for all the other newspapers and websites.  If we are going to have bias of this kind, let's have the reverse bias, too.

Where was I?  Oh, Douthat's theory.  This is what he believes explains the findings:  Young (heterosexual) men want all the sex they can get and don't want commitment.  Young (heterosexual) women have a limited fertility window and need commitment earlier. Young men can wait.  The breakdown of traditional morality has made it possible for young men to get all the sex they want without commitment.

This is not good for young women, Douthat believes.  Women should sell sex (yes, that's what demanding commitment for some nookie means) only in exchange for a promise of marriage and support for the future children.  Thus, Douthat believes in the sexual goal-keeping by women as the best solution of how to fix that sexual ice-hockey game where some men are always on the attack and if you leave the goal without the goalie, well, they will score and skate away.  In Douthat's world, all the female players are goalies.

That last paragraph is my interpretation of what Douthat writes.  But that's what he means:

"Traditional" sexual morality means that women must be sexual gate-keepers.  Men can do whatever they wish because their drives are natural and ignored in the Republican telling of the tale.

Because the Republican Party is for banning abortion, discouraging contraception and in general attacking the idea that young women might have sex outside marriage without getting pregnant, that is the best party for anxious parents who have daughters!  The Republican policies raise the cost of extramarital sex for women.

All this is why some educated parents would turn Republican when they have daughters.  I guess the reverse explanation would work for the corresponding finding in the study that some parents seem to turn Democratic when they have sons (or when their first child is a son**):  The parents want their sons out there scattering their seed widely, without any commitments.

But the two parties differ in many other ways, too.  An obvious difference is in the focus on law-and-order, say.

What does the Republican Party do to bring back "traditional" sexual morality?  I see Purity Balls, mostly for daughters, where the daughter agrees to be a virgin until marriage.  I see "courting." based on parental permission among the extreme fringe of that party.  I see no focus on changing the behavior of young men. I see strong attempts to ban abortion altogether and some attempts to reduce women's access to contraceptives. And I have read many, many Republican pundits warning young women of their soon-withering ovaries and telling female college undergraduates that they would really be better off if more of them gave their college places to men because that way they could marry.

Indeed, the Republican Party is a busy beaver when it comes to various plans to restrict the lives of women.  Whether that goes under protection depends on how you regard the pretty much complete absence of anything which would discourage those men from predatory behavior who wish to engage in it.  But in any case, the study Douthat leans on didn't argue for that particular explanation.

To put this particular study into a wider framework, another study found that boys who have sisters are more likely to become Republicans than boys who don't.  I haven't looked at that particular study (only so many hours in a day even for goddesses), but this write-up gives rather different reasons for that finding:

So why are boys with sisters more inclined to identify with the GOP as young men? Researchers have found that sisters are more likely than their brothers to help wash the dishes, sweep the floor and do other traditionally gender-stereotyped tasks around the house.  For example, in the data they examined, about 60% of boys but 82% of girls 10 and older with younger siblings told interviewers they were expected to help with the dishes. 

This early exposure to gender stereotyping, the researchers argue, translates into more socially conservative views in later life.

It's unlikely that the same explanation would apply to parents whose first child is a daughter, say, or so I fervently hope.  What could explain that (if an explanation is needed) remains a mystery, I believe***.  But note that all of Douthat's talk about daughters can be reversed for sons, because what we are looking at here is a difference in political affiliation based on the sex of the first child or the mix of children. The authors of the study Douthat uses chose to look at daughters, but the treatment could easily be reversed.  Then the study would be about what makes parents of sons more likely to choose the Democratic label.   Think how Douthat would explain that.

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*This data set appears to be the only US one which asked questions both about the sex and birth order of children and about the parent's political views.  That can be problematic in two ways:  First, it would be good to see data from different sources before making permanent conclusions, just in case this particular data set is a fluke, caused by bad sampling luck.  Second, the two parties were not what they are today in 1994, though that date is close to the start of the Republican Party as the American Taliban.
 
**Or rather, the study argues, for example,  that in 1994 a higher percentage of parents declared their party affiliation Democratic when their first child was a son and a higher percentage of parents declared their party affiliation Republican when their first child was a daughter.

***My top two guesses are a) bad luck in sampling (more about that in the next post) and b) the law-and-order hypothesis:  Having daughters might make parents more likely to worry about crime (rape etc.), having sons would not have that effect.  The Republican Party is seen as the law-and-order party.  The sexual protection motive is not impossible, of course, only the Republican Party does nothing to keep the foxes away from the chicken-coop, but just argues for a stronger coop.  Then there is the whole question how people thought about the two parties in 1994 and what they stood for then.  

 

The Weird Research Glut. What I have Covered in The Last Month.

I deserve a break.  In the last month I have written on the bitchy women stuff (which has already seeped into all the comments threads everywhere, while my posts on it have no impact), the Girl Brainz and Boy Brainz stuff, how medical research assumes that procreation is only about women, how sexual regret differs by sex because of evolution.  

And I still have this piece waiting, all about how a great evolutionary adaptation for women is to present themselves as sexually exploitable, to appeal to those men who have evolutionary adaptations for exploiting such women.  Just a liiittle bit like explaining rape as a shared adventure.

And now Ross Douthat has dug up one particular piece of research and pontificates on what it tells us.  The sad thing (VERY sad thing) about me is that I then had to go backwards and backwards in the links to the original study.  And then I had to read it!   Now I have gastritis.  It's like battle wounds from all the stress and it is crap.  So send money or chocolate (which I can't eat right now).

I also have a plan of a wonderful "look-back-in-time" piece about one famous popularizer of research who has for at least ten years picked out all the research which shows how terrible women are.  I made files of all those pieces!  That was a lot of work, and intended to be presented here so that your holidays would be less joyous but more clear-sighted.

Of course I don't have to write about any of that.  It's all internalized bullshit and that stern librarian I have residing in my brain, the one with pinched lips and hair in a bun, the one who climbs up and down library ladders all day long and brings me stuff to cover, with stern advice about how I'm avoiding my duty if I watch "Miss Miller Investigates."

And neither do I have to complain about this to you.  But what's a personal blog for?

Sigh.  I will try to write more about our dear Russ and his concern for daughters everywhere and the evolutionary psychology study which lit his fire.