Music for Saturday, Instead of Paul Ryan Analysis

Because I'm still ignorant of recent American politics (o divine vacation!), I offer you instead the divine Nina Simone in a song which I find useful for the sublimation of all kinds of anger.

The Best Places To Eat

Appear to hang from heterosexual men's crotches if this Newsweek cover is to be taken seriously.

It's just asparagus, of course, and some people get funny-smelling pee from eating it.  Something to consider if you plan to follow the example of the female model on the cover.

I'm not actually bothered by attempts  to sell magazines through sex.  What bothers me is that the selling is so one-sided and so geared to the hidden desires of hetero guys.  Where's the guy/girl  who has just dumped his/her whole face into a luscious banana split with whipped cream and all? 

Today's Thought on Evolutionary Psychology

I recently got into a conversation where I was accused of being a creationist because I criticize evolutionary psychology of the misogynistic and simplistic type.  Indeed, I've seen variations of this argument from those very same EP researchers in their writing:  If you don't like their work you obviously don't believe in evolution at all.

Or in a more refined version:  If I believe that our bodies have evolved, how can I believe that our minds have not?

There is a logical error in those accusations, and that is very similar to this example:

If I don't believe in the horoscope I get from some magazine or newspaper as a guide to the future, does it mean that I don't believe we can predict any part of future events?  

Likewise, it's quite feasible to believe that our minds have evolved but not to believe that they have evolved into the particular cartoonish forms Kanazawa-type EP researchers offer us, especially given the almost total absence of actual data about the distant past and the social and economic arrangements which would have affected any sexual selection process.

Mmm.

On David Brooks, the Taliban and the Boy Crisis At School

What a way to get back into the saddle after a vacation!  Someone sent me a link to David Brooks' July column about the need to change schools so that boys do better.  Or perhaps that boys do better than girls, assuming that boys (excluding minority boys) are already doing quite well?

 Brooks' prescription is this:

Some of the decline in male performance may be genetic. The information age rewards people who mature early, who are verbally and socially sophisticated, who can control their impulses. Girls may, on average, do better at these things. After all, boys are falling behind not just in the U.S., but in all 35 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But the big story here is cultural and moral. If schools want to re-engage Henry, they can’t pretend they can turn him into a reflective Hamlet just by feeding him his meds and hoping he’ll sit quietly at story time. If schools want to educate a fiercely rambunctious girl, they can’t pretend they will successfully tame her by assigning some of those exquisitely sensitive Newbery award-winning novellas. Social engineering is just not that easy.
Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.

Bolds are mine.

Note the sly hint to the girls who would benefit from boot camps, too?  That there are boys who do better under the presumed cooperative model is ignored.  Assuming that it's cooperation at schools (is that the prevailing model?)  which causes the problem.  Also, I love the idea that using one model is social engineering, using the opposite model would not be.

But at last and at least here is one conservative writer who acknowledges that the boy crisis is not the fault of American feminists!  I've written myself sore on the topic, including the fact that more women than men graduate from college in Saudi Arabia and other similar places.  So kudos to Brooks on having learned enough to shift the goal posts a teeny weeny bit.  Perhaps next he will look at earnings statistics and realize that the reason more girls go to college is because girls must do so to earn as much as boys earn with just a high school certificate.  And so on.

I write about this now because of a piece of news about girls at school in an area of the world where the male values of competition, military hierarchies and a fierce desire to win are certainly dominant:

Far from fears that female education is on the decline after the Taliban campaign against girls’ schools, female students outclassed their male counterparts in the secondary school examination for 2012.
And participation itself was a success. In all 265,000 students sat the examinations, including 115,343 girls. The results were declared over a ten-day period earlier this month.
The results have come as a boost to authorities in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and nearby Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) regions of north Pakistan. “It’s great given the Taliban’s attitude towards female education,” KP Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain told IPS.
“About 700 schools were damaged by miscreants in the last five years in KP and FATA. Despite that girls have got top positions in the secondary school certificate (SSC) examination.” The top 15 positions went to girls. This meant an outright rejection of Taliban calls against women education, Hussain said.
In militancy-riddled Malakand division in KP, girls grabbed 10 of the 20 top positions. Malakand saw destruction of 181 schools from 2007 to 2009, among them 118 were girls’ schools.
“For one-and-a-half years I sat idle due to Taliban’s opposition to female education but since their defeat in 2009, I have been studying vigorously,” Farzana Bibi, who got second place in the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) in Swat, one of the seven districts of Malakand division, told IPS over telephone. “Now, I intend to become a doctor and serve the women patients in my area.” The BISE is the examining body conducting the SSC examination.
The results are dramatic given that the literacy rate for women in KP is 17 percent, and in FATA 43 percent, compared to the national Pakistani average of 68 percent.

Bolds are mine. The girl who ranked third best in the examinations wants to become a police officer so that she can protect the schools against Taliban.  (Sorry about the link being in Finnish.)

Now put these two pieces together and what do you get?  A contradiction!   I very much doubt that the schools in the heartland of Taliban favor girls or promote a cooperative model of education.  Rather, girls are actively and violently discriminated against.  What is, however, true in both KP and FATA on the one hand and the US on the other hand is that women need education to have access to good salaries.  Men have other alternatives though of course education benefits them, too.

Brooks and other right-wing conservatives have this odd blind spot when it comes to their usual argument that all gender differences are genetic and that nothing should be done about them.  That blind spot is when the gender differences benefit girls or women.  That's the time to change the environment.  (If you don't believe me, just check conservative writing on women's dearth in science and mathematics.)

I must add the usual reminder that I want boys to do well at school.  What I don't want is this conservative game of pretending that the only way we can achieve that is by making it harder for girls to do well, too.

A Rant About Whoever Changes My Computer Stuff. A Repost.

From here.  My complaints still apply. 

They also  extend to Facebook and to all tools I use for blogging except for my machine itself, though the reasons are slightly different.  For instance, if Blogger won't take payment for me then I can't complain when Blogger decides to change the archiving system so that almost all old links to my posts are now decrepit or dead, right?  Or when blogger decides to change the address on my blog in other countries so that readers must scroll down like a million miles to find the first post on the page, right?   Or when the comments cannot be read by people in those countries, right?

Melissa did provide a remedy for that last problem.

I Have Returned

As one is supposed to say at a moment like this.  Sadly, my time clock thinks it's roughly 4am tomorrow and the poor avatar I (the goddess, natch) use has physically been traveling since about 4am yesterday.  Figure that one out!

But o my poor little blog!  What fickle thing is the love of readers, sigh.  Surely re-heated leftovers should have kept you all happy and eager...

Mostly just kidding there.  I'm glad to be back and actually look forward to writing again.

Women On Stilts. A Repost

A fairly recent one.

How The Buttocks Came To Be. Echidne Does Evolutionary Psychology.

This post is a very early one!  Most of the links are dead, sadly, and I don't have time to work on those right now.  It's just meant to be a funny example of EP thinking.

The Thirty-Percent Solution To Scarcity of Women in Politics. A Repost.

I wrote this post in the past and my views may have evolved slightly.   But I still agree with its basic arguments.  I have come to appreciate the Virginia Valian theory much more, however.  It really makes a difference if you are not the only woman in the room because then you look like WOMAN! instead of you.  And gender stops being a signaling factor when there are sizable minorities of the other gender.  That's one of the reasons why more stay-at-home-dads would make labor market discrimination against women of child-bearing age less likely:  The employers wouldn't use gender to predict who might quit to stay at home.  Because gender IS now used as part of that prediction, all women in that group will be treated as if they are a higher risk to the firm than men of a similar age.

A Repost: The Decline Effect

I recommend this as a complement to my critiques of EP studies and such.

Why Selective Popularizations of Gender Science Matter. A Repost.

Linked to the previous post and the earlier summer reruns of my gender science series, this post is well worth reading and thinking about. 

The Gender Studies Which Don't Get Popularized. A Repost.

This is a fun example of the kind of study we won't find screaming at us from every single channel when we wake up.

How To Judge Social Science Research

This post is still pretty much how I think of the salient points.  I should note that the promotion of papers before they are at all available is still ongoing, and that in at least one case  it has resulted in a widespread popularization of a working paper which seems not to have been published anywhere at all!   The most common reason for such non-publication is that the paper failed to pass peer-review.  Yet the popularizations are still available on the Internet!

Feel free to add any points I missed in my list.

On The Quest For Unattainable Perfection. A Repost.

 This rant is adapted from here.


The topic of this post is the view of eating and exercise as a moral or religious enterprise or a competition as to who can get closest to an almost nonexistent thinness without dying, without dying EVER!

These are two very different ideas and putting them together looks like an oxymoron. But it is not, or if it is, then life is full of oxymorons (oxymora?).

The first idea is the Puritanical one, still quite common in this country, the idea of life as a moral struggle against temptations, a religious walk through nonreligious sins. Everything, I have noticed, can be twisted into a moral failure by some people, often by experts. Who was it who said that only in the United States it is the fault of the elderly that they die? Because clearly, if you try hard enough, if you are earnest enough, pure enough, you will live forever. And your body will look like that of a twenty-year old, forever, too. If it does not you have sinned, and perhaps the health insurance shouldn't cover your sinning.

Why does this anger me so? Partly because I'm using my red-hot anger as a source of energy, but mostly because such sermons make life really horrible for those most vulnerable to its seductions. For note that the people who read articles on good eating and good exercise and how to take care of your health are not those sedentary and overweight Americans who might benefit from the advice the most. They are also, and perhaps most likely, those Americans who are already too thin and who already overexercise.

I've thought similar thoughts on the many articles on "good mothering" and the awful consequences of neglectful mothering. I'm willing to bet quite a lot that the wrong people are affected by these articles, people who already try too hard and feel too much guilt, and that the people who actually might learn something useful from them (and this does not only mean mothers) will not read the articles or if they do are not affected by them.

What is it about pleasure and enjoyment of life that is so very bad? Think about it. If your daily meals can't give you enough pleasure, because they have become part of the Puritan "religion" of striving, where are you going to get your good feelings from? And if all you see when you look at your children are the many ways you might fail in bringing them up correctly (did you play enough Beethoven? did you eat a pickle while pregnant?), how are you going to enjoy them and the time you spend with them?

And if moving and exercising and dancing are not making you feel a little like one of God's little acrobats, because you are busy writing down your pulse rate and your calorie consumption, when are you ever going to feel that divine breath on your nostrils? Or take sex. If sex is all about counting weekly frequencies and how good your orgasms are, when are you going to have fun?

All this confuses the trip with its destination, and as none of us knows the destination, why not enjoy the trip?

My plea is for moderation, of course, not for becoming a morbidly ill couch potato. But I don't really see the urgings of the fitness and health industries as pleas for moderation, most of the time. There is a slippage towards one extreme or another, all the time. And come to think about it, "moderation" isn't the right word, either, because it conveys the idea of temptations successfully avoided. We need a better word for what I think of as living life as a human being, eating wonderful and healthy (and sometimes not-so healthy) food, moving enough for your body to stay limber, enjoying the gifts this can give you in pure enjoyment of life. We need a word that makes it quite clear being alive is not just a time given to you so that you can leave the stringiest body possible when you die. And die you will.

So much for the first paradoxical idea. The second one has to do with the role of all this in the lives of women, in particular, rather than in the lives of people, in general. There is a whole sub-genre of writings and programs aimed at making women feel in the need of improvement. This sub-genre serves firms very well, as a worried woman is more likely to buy that expensive face-cream or that educational toy for her child or that Victoria's Secret bra for her husband's ogling enjoyment. The guilt industry, I sometimes think it should be called.

The guilt industry works especially well in affecting women, because the sub-genre is not that novel. You read the Bible and find Eve at fault. You watch movies such as "Educating Rita" and you find women in need of improvement. You read fashion magazines and find your body needs fixing. You read articles on child psychology and find that you are walking across a mine-field where every wrong step will cause your child to become a drug abuser who will hate you, the mother in later life. You read anti-feminist writings and find that some argue that women shouldn't have been given the vote. You read other anti-feminist articles and find that women are already ruling the whole world and that this is destroying EVERYTHING. You read articles about women in Afghanistan getting killed by their families for the crime of having been raped by some strangers first. You read articles about how the selfish and uppity women in Europe refuse to have enough children to perpetuate the White Ueberrace (and you wonder how much damage they would have done to those nonexistent children by forgetting to play Beethoven while pregnant). And so on.

It's one way of making a person into a pretzel. (And don't come in here giving me counterexamples or scolding me for my intemperance. I'm on a roll.) Even a woman can become a pretzel, and that is a painful process. So what's a girl to do? It's not that hard to see that on some subconscious level many women think that they can somehow prove that they are not so bad, that at least they, if not other women, can be good and upright and ordinary citizens. Maybe working on the body will help. Or committing to Motherhood. Or saying that YOU agree about how terrible other women are, but that YOU are one of the women with a mental penis. YOU are ok. You are not Britney Spears  or Hillary Clinton or Condie Rice or any of those other nasty uppity women who for some reason are seen as a stand-in for all women.

Added in 2012:  This comes across as a bit extreme, right now.  But getting immunized against the guilt industry is a very good idea for all of us.

A Repost: Why Would Wal-Mart Hire Any Men?

This is actually a pretty important post because a commonly heard argument from some people is that women can't be discriminated against!  Because if they were, the god of free markets would sweep in and turn all bigoted firms into bankruptcies.

The thinking goes like this:  If a man and a woman are equally good workers but the market pays the woman less than the man, just because of gender, what profit-making firm in its right mind would ever hire any men?

The simple answer is that things are much more complicated than that.  The proper answer can be found here.

A Repost: Your Inner Glass Ceiling

This post also addresses the possible reasons for the gender gap in wages.  Like it's your own fault and so on.

There Is No Gender Gap in Wages, Silly Women. Part 2.

The second post in this series can be found here.

There Is No Gender Gap in Wages, Silly Women! Part 1

This is the first of two posts which add to the arguments in the gender gap series.  It's based on more recent political debates than the series itself and also addresses some poorly made studies.

The Gender Gap Series: Addressing the Wingnuts and the MRAs

The third and last post in this series discusses the politicization of the gender gap concept and why almost all the treatments of it are tainted in political debate.  If you have waded through the two previous posts you will understand this much better.

In hindsight, had I known about the MRA arguments in 2006 I would have addressed some I don't in this post.  But despair not,  the next series will get into some of that!

The Gender Gap Series: Empirical Evidence

In this one I look in great detail at one study.  It's somewhat outdated by now but the point of the post is to explain how these kinds of studies are done and interpreted, and the study I picked is a fairly proficient one.  That it also tried to find no discrimination and failed in that is noteworthy.