Imagine for a minute that you’re a medieval European peasant. If it helps, I can wait here while you cover yourself with shit, have several children, and watch half of them die.
All set? Great.
Now, I’m not asking you to be stupid here. You’re one sharp peasant. You know all the prayers and hymns at church by heart, you have a startlingly accurate mental map of every farm and hillock for many miles, and nobody has ever out-dickered you for a sausage. You are on the ball, or would be if balls were widely available in your century. You are not, however, capable of being an atheist.
You have grown up in an environment where the absolute authority of the Church is taken for granted as an axiom of existence. Not only would you be offended or confused at the suggestion that the Church lacks authority, you’ve never met anyone in your life capable of formulating that suggestion. At your best and cleverest and most rebellious, you could think that quite possibly the Church is wrong in some way about the nature of God. But you can’t yet formulate the question “What if it’s all just made up?”
Not because you’re stupid, not because you’re not trying, but because you have a lot of stuff on your plate to deal with, and there are a lot of unspoken assumptions you absorbed from the cradle on. You don’t even know you have them, much less that they might be wrong.
It is my contention that this is the position many people are in today with regard to the market-transaction model of male-female relationships, wherein women are the effective sellers of sex and sexual intimacy, and men are looking to bid or buy.
This model is the intrinsic, usually-unspoken basis for every relationship-advice column Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health have ever published. It’s the basis for almost every dating joke in every sitcom and romcom you’ve ever seen. It’s the basis for “traditional marriage” and all its defenders. It’s the basis for all pickup-artist models, with their bizarre alphanumeric classifications of value. It’s the basis of every upset MRA who feels he’s been outbid for the sex he thinks he deserves. It’s the basis of an awful lot of feminist thought, too, and certainly a lot of sorta-feminist women’s literature. It’s the basis of Figleaf’s two rules of desire. It’s the basis of the lies about libido that I’ve ranted about in the past. It’s incredibly pervasive, and if you can go 24 hours without being exposed to it in some form, I have one question for you: what’s the rent on a Skinner box these days?
Here, then, is what you need to be asking yourself: What if it’s all just made up?
I cite the medieval-peasant example for a reason. I want to take away all the easy justifications you might have for believing, even implicitly, in the market model.
“If everyone believes it, there must be something to it, right?” Wrong. Entire societies have firmly believed flatly wrong things before. Indeed, that is the norm throughout human history.
“But there’s all these elegant models with Greek letters constructed on this basis, and their theory is very persuasive!” Put together all the world’s writing on pickup dynamics and beta males and all the rest of it, and you’ll still be nowhere near the brilliance and beauty of the writings of Thomas Aquinas or Teresa de Cartagena, or even fucking St. Augustine. If they could be wrong, I’m sorry, but so can the Situation.
“But it explains that thing that happened to me that time!” So what? People got healed at Lourdes. People are getting healed by miracles and faith healers right now while you’re reading this. Unless, of course, you don’t believe in faith healers, in which case something else made them better and they happened to connect it to a model they already believe in. Humans are prone to doing that, after all.
“But that model explains everything about male-female relations!” Okay, dude, seriously, this is you:
If you’re willing to ignore enough of the data, you can prove anything. In this case, if you throw out all the human experience that doesn’t fit the transactional model, the remaining collection of bad dates, TV commercials, and antique comic strips will, in fact, support your thesis. Congratulations.
So yeah. Take a minute to think about all the ways that basic buyer-seller model of relationships has influenced your life and your thinking, all the ways that you’ve tried to command or offer a higher price for sex, and ask yourself: What if it’s all just made up?
Here’s a counter-theory: every human being is a complex combination of drives, inhibitions, neuroses, and rationalizations. No two are alike, though many are similar. The potential number of combinations and interactions between any two or more people comes close to infinite. Short version: every person wants what they want. Under this model, two people who want to have sex with each other just… do. Both profit, because both get what they want: sex!
The thing about this counter-theory is that it can contain all the data that seems to support the old, wrong, transactional theory. Does the new model predict that you’re going to get some people who behave the way the old model thinks they should? Definitely, especially if we assume that those people are thinking in terms of the old model. The old model, however, cannot account for all the people who fail to fit it. It cannot account for me, or Holly, or Ozy, just to cast one eye around this blog. It can’t account for any non-heteronormative people, so gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans folks have to be deleted from the dataset. It can’t account for polyamorous married couples, it can’t account for millions of nights of passion and joy, it can’t account for this chart or this one or almost anything on this one.
It is very hard to detach yourself from something you know to be true on so deep a level that you’ve never even thought about it. It’s very hard to let go of a model that’s part of the basic conceptual vocabulary of your culture. It’s nearly impossible to admit that you’ve been flat-out wrong about something that’s been part of your thinking for your whole life. Nobody wants to say that all those people worked for decades and centuries to build a beautiful cathedral in honor of nothing at all.
But sometimes, it really is all just made up.
[If you’re a Christian and you’re upset by my example, please assume that I’ve been talking about medieval-era Taoism this entire time, which has even more and better writing about even weirder rituals. If you’re both a Christian and a Taoist, I don’t know what to tell you. Forgive me and go with the flow.]
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Great post, Noah – and you should be a comedy writer – that first paragraph was gold.
I have very little doubt that the sexual marketplace legacy is a fallacy bourne out of the slut shaming we do to women and the seduction championing we push men into. Ok, got that?
Anybody else have a problem with that? No? Can I take it a step further?
Based on personal anecdotes, my own personal experience, the experience of male and female friends who were close enough to tell me how they really feel, and my limited interactions with F-M transgender men (exclusively online) – I have to say I really think that hormones (or some biological widget) have a tendency to create spastic, risk-taking sexual hunger that is more present in men than women.
But I don’t think that would create many instances of men seeking sex when they really didn’t want to. What I think is that it’s not that “men are buying/women are selling” it’s that society has created a situation “men and women are buying but women are on a budget.”
Or are they are just framing it differently. Documentary films about female sex tourism to Asia, Africa and the Caribbien shows women describing themselves as in an relationship with the men – no matter how much transfer of money and/or goods. The narrative is also often framed as if these men seduce and exploit these women. The reverse – male sex tourist being seduced and exploited by sex workers is a narrative twist which is just about non-existent.
So it seems it’s more like “men are buying/women are selling” is a social construct while the reality is that “men and women are buying”.
@ easilyenthused: “I have to say I really think that hormones (or some biological widget) have a tendency to create spastic, risk-taking sexual hunger that is more present in men than women.”
Or maybe not. Maybe it’s socialization. No way to know, that’s the entire point of this post.
@Kita:
Well as someone who dealt with a hormone imbalance when he was ~12 that did everything from make me “cry too much” to “grow breasts” to “have erections lasting for days” I have to say I know first hand how much our hormones can dominate our behavior and physiology.
This attitude that we “can’t really know” bugs me for a few reasons. In the gendersphere, we like to throw around terms like “society” and “culture.” The reality is that we don’t live on a planet that is totally dominated by western civilization yet. We’re getting there, but we’re not there yet. In the meantime, we have ::cue German accent:: vays offt makingg hue taak …. ::end German accent::
Sociology, endocrinology, neurology and psychology have gotten really good and separating what we want from what we THINK we want from we THINK WE THINK we want.
People like to hide behind the placebo effect. “This group of people were TOLD they were taking testosterone and noted a 25% increase in sex drive and aggression!” The problem is that people who take hormone replacement therapy almost universally notice a change. Hormones DO things. And when we know that hormone levels have measurable, unconcious effects on people, it becomes a liability to forget that our biology has any role in our lives as humans.
Sure there are outliers to trends. I’ve known some fantastically “slutty” women in my life who are kind, caring, don’t have daddy issues, take fantastic care of their children while they hold down a really difficult job. They also don’t ever seem to be able to get enough sex.
Individually, there’s nothing wrong with them. But generally speaking, bell curves matter. When you’re trying to develop policies and procedures for people who need your help, marketing and messaging matters from a cost perspective.
Ideally, we could sit down with every individual person, find out their sex drive, find out all their proclivities and fetishes and give them perfect, individualized recommendations about their sexual and psychological health. But in the real world, we need to cater to the general populace. Did you know that not all men have penises? I didn’t! But we still have “Men’s Health” that talks about penises. It’s not “Penis-Owner’s Health.” We have to generalize most of the time.
@Noah:
I’m speaking as a victim of my own pituitary gland. I realize I’m biased. But I also think (and science backs me up) that our behavior is not entirely related to society. Our closest evolutionary relatives don’t have a “society.” They are a bunch of apes in the jungle eating bugs and fucking all the time. That said, the sexual behaviors of chimps and bonobos aren’t egalitarian. Some behaviors (I’m too lazy to find a link, this comment is already past my quota for the night) are primarily female and others are male. Homosexuality is a common behavior, but not a lifestyle, like it can be in humans.
I am personally saddened to see all the work that science has done to better understand “what it all means” that some of us have mismatching chromosomes summed up the same way that the immaculate conception is. But not because I think you’re insulting Christianity – but you’re insulting science.
Actually, I would say that the transactional model is rooted in past Western social history; Figleaf had a pretty good post (sorta-kinda) along those lines recently, here:
http://www.realadultsex.com/archives/2011/07/you-cant-understand-hypergamy-settling-and-male-worthiness-trap-without-first-under
Western society itself has moved on; woman have a great deal more social and financial autonomy these days, and people are now free to adopt a new, non-transactional relationship model . . . but we still have the old transactional model stuck in our collective heads. Darnit.
EE – “Our closest evolutionary relatives don’t have a “society.” ”
That is actually note true. Apes most certainly do have culture (if you mean something other than this by society, please correct me). Some people even argue that certain types of voles have culture.
(here is a popsci article on chimp culture, if you would like a more scholarly source I’ll find one for you – http://www.livescience.com/1587-chimps-pass-culture-humans.html)
That said, I agree with you that in the gender studies world biological responses do tend to get too downplayed. I’m often in the position of defending the importance of genetics when I’m with my friends and defending the importance of socialization when I’m with, say, my Republican relatives. The fact that FtM individuals know they are taking testosterone DOES cause a serious confound, but that doesn’t invalidate all of the research done in behavioral endocrinology – some of which suggests testosterone is linked to aggression (though it really is more complicated than that).
I think the big problem, which has sort of been alluded to, is that it’s really hard to study behavioral endocrinology in humans. It’s hard to run control experiments and find gene–>hormone/brain–>behavior mechanisms.
But it’s actually really, really easy to show how things like priming and stereotype threat influence behavior in a controlled laboratory setting. And it’s been shown to work in a variety of settings, with a variety of tasks, with a variety of demographics. So we can pretty confidently say that, for example, telling someone that “x-group-you-are-part-of typically does really badly on this test” will actually influence how well they do. Or even if you don’t explicitly tell them, but play off of common stereotypes – like reminding someone that they are a woman before taking a math test.
So, tl;dr: Genes and environment both matter, there MIGHT be neuro/bio/endocrines in males and females that cause them to have significantly different behaviors, or these differences may not matter all that much. It’s pretty conclusive that social factors influence behavior and cognition, and it’s hard to imagine that hormonal profiles don’t, but it’s just harder to study that in humans so we can’t really talk about it as confidently for any given hormone–>behavior pathway.
I was going to write a bit of a spiel about biological determinism and how “innateness” is a flawed concept when applied to animals (like humans and apes) who have such a well developed ability to adapt to their environment (both physical and social.) And then I remembered this blog post which explains it very well indeed. And saves me from thinking too hard at 3.40am.
http://enagoski.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/what-baboons-teach-us-about-culture/
(Aside: I do love the elegance of the fact that we have evolved such a fantastic ability to adapt our behaviour to our environment that the influence of genetics (in the sense that our genes can predict our behaviours) is increasingly small. Evolved adaptability: Fits theory of evolution, and theories of social learning. Who says Science isn’t an elegant thing of beauty?)
In reality I want to agree with you that we should change our society and I believe we should. But there are some things that are linked to biology as stated above. Evolutionary psychology might state that women are the gatekeepers of sex because women have the most to lose. They produce less eggs in their lifetime than men do sperm. They also have to carry a child from a given man in a time span of ten months. All of this naturally would make them more selective about their partner(s).
All of that said, there is an absolute discontent in our society between the way women present themselves and the way men do. It should be the men who are dressing all sexy and colorful in tight clothing and trying to get the attention of the female. The females should be the ones in plain baggy clothes and no make-up. Yet for whatever odd reason it’s the other way around. My only guess is that early on women relied on men for their survival. As a result they wanted to attract suitable providers while at the same time playing selective on who. In the modern world women no longer need to rely on men, which has taken away the only bargaining chip men ever had.
As a result we either go back to making women rely on men (which will never happen and shouldn’t) or we given men a new bargaining chip. Whatever that may be.
Yet for whatever odd reason it’s the other way around.
@Mike, that’s because it’s all made up. The evolved selectiveness, the bargaining chips… those aren’t real. They never were. If you’ve read much of it, you know that the bullshit-to-science ratio in evolutionary psychology is very high. So that entire gatekeeper model… it’s made up. The evolutionary-psychology explanation of partner selection… that’s just a story people made up to explain what they wanted to believe. It’s like Adam and Eve: a nice story to justify a belief, but with no predictive value in terms of real behavior.
It’s just made up.
“It should be the men who are dressing all sexy and colorful in tight clothing and trying to get the attention of the female.”
Should?
Do you mean In the sense that that’s what Evolution predicts?
“@Mike, that’s because it’s all made up.”
Which part is made up? You may be right. But even if it’s just an idea it’s a pretty logical idea from my point of view. I mean let’s face it, women do have more to lose. Unlike men who can just go around shooting seed into every piece of tail that looks good to them and walking away, women will be confronted with a potential pregnancy and child to raise. So being more selective is not just a choice but a way of life for them.
“Do you mean In the sense that that’s what Evolution predicts?”
Yes. If we are to believe the model I state above where women are the gatekeepers then it should be men seeking to beautify themselves to attract women. But obviously there are a lot of holes in this.
Click to access 71503.pdf
Noah, you are forbidden from ever mentioning the Middle Ages again until you read a book that was originally written in Latin. Where do you get your information on the Middle Ages, Ren Faires?
It’s true we get most of our information on atheism in the Middle Ages from the opposition, but the prevalence of the opposition tells us it was anything but rare. They didn’t spend so much time writing proofs of the existence of God in an environment where atheism was inconceivable.
I am massively suspicious of any argument or conclusion based on the presumption of huge ignorance in the other, I have yet to find one that stands up.
@Mike – While it’s true that women would more likely have stronger cost-benefit concerns in sexual situations where there’s a high chance of pregnancy (= greater biological investment), modern birth control methods go a *long* way towards leveling the playing field in that regard . . . and then see the above comments about human behavioral adaptability.
@Argyle – Very true. I almost brought that up myself. But I’m referring more to the entire history of humanity. The whole undoing of thousands of years or evolution and the human condition. Obviously modern science changes a lot of things. Which is why I stated that men need to find a new bargaining chip.
Hormones play a huge role. Just look at trangender women. Many will tell you they have had a decrease in sexual desire do to the female hormones. This is also true of cis-women in general. Not all women. But then we are making some generalizations because in truth all humans are unique. There are plenty of women with huge sexual appetites. But compare it with average men and the numbers are lower.
Younger modern women seem to be more sexually liberal. I’m not sure if this is due primary to women’s gain in freedom in modern society or less risk of getting pregnant because of birth control. My guess is a bit of both. Nature tends to work in parallels. Everything nature does has multiple routes and outcomes. Nothing is a single line. Which is why it’s sometimes so difficult to figure out. yet we humans try to continue to put things into single lines or boxes.
@EasilyEnthused:
I agree 100% with everything you said up until you wrote “@Noah.”
My commentary on the rest is long and detailed; the short version is, “I agree with you, but there are some things you might consider — don’t discount the fuzzy studies so easily.”
Forthwith the longwinded response of blather.
OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY
There was an incident a while back known as the Sokal Affair. If you’ve heard of it, I’m sorry for wasting your time, but if you haven’t, it describes a response to basically what you mentioned in your last paragraph: an attack on the scientific establishment from the LEFT.
Basically: the journal Social Text, and others like it, mounted a series of post-structuralist (briefly: there is no such thing as objectivity, everything is subjective and socially constructed) attacks on the scientific establishment, acting on the assumption that scientific findings, as published in journals, reflect a predominantly white-upper class bias (note: to an extent, there’s some truth in this — any time a community becomes established, it unconsciously creates measures to preserve itself; in addition, there’s the bit Noah mentioned about being so busy that you don’t question your basic premises). Unfortunately, a lot of their critiques of science were basically non-peer-reviewed muckballs of post-structuralist jargon that would make Jacques Derrida tremble (note: Jacques Derrida was once accused of “terrorist obfustication” — by Foucault, no less!).
Enter a physicist named Alan Sokal, who wrote and submitted a paper called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Basically, he used the same jargon to claim that the LAWS OF PHYSICS were socially constructed.
Social Text actually published his paper (it was apparently so thick with jargon that they published it just because they liked what they thought it said), whereupon he revealed his hoax. “Anyone who feels that the laws of gravity are socially constructed can feel free to test this hypothesis from my apartment window. I live on the 21st floor.”
PWNED.
Sokal’s point was that the standards of the scientific community, though as subject to corruption as those present in any community, are rigorous and DO tend to point out objective phenomena.
Which leads me to my point:
***Based on everything I know, reality is a spectrum between the objective and the subjective***
Towards the objective end of the spectrum, we have things like gravity that pretty much everyone can agree on — though Einstein’s relativity would like a word with you about that! There’s subjectivity present even in the most hard-core physics — that’s why there is such thing as a collapsing wave function. For some reason, no matter how hard you try, if you OBSERVE (measure) something, you INFLUENCE it.
So, even physics is not completely objective. But it’s 99% objective, in that we can usually measure stuff and agree on the results (except when measuring something changes the results. Aggh).
Consequently, SCIENCE WORKS. HORMONES WORK. As you demonstrated. Of course, HOW hormones work is dependent on a number of factors, including genetic receptivity.
If science has a weakness, it’s that it doesn’t do so well under circumstances in which there are so many stochastic variables that it’s impossible to make predictions and find a pattern. THE HUMAN PSYCHE IS ONE SUCH AREA.
Which brings to the subjective end of the spectrum, where you have things that are in the eye of the Beholder, like beauty. What’s beautiful to me prolly ain’t beautiful to you.
In addition, as far as I know, each individual person has a different sexuality, gender, and perspective: we’re all attracted to different things (if only SLIGHTLY different things), and we all have different relationships with our bodies. Certainly, they fall into broad categories (standard deviations and whatnot), but everyone’s different, owing to differences in genes, hormones, development, experiences, and nutrition (it’s awful hard to grow without raw materials, so nutrition during periods of growth is vital for human development).
Bottom line: sexuality and gender are PERSONAL and INDIVIDUAL, and there is no such thing as an “objectively correct” sexuality or gender. You can’t point to one person and say, “THAT! That’s the way things are SUPPOSED to be!” as though there is some ur-human out there waiting to be discovered and achieved for all of us. Likewise, there is no INCORRECT way of life, except insofar as YOUR way of life imposes on SOMEONE ELSE’S way of life in any way that is not appreciated and/or necessary for living.
Certainly, science can collect statistics about standard population groupings — which HELPS — but there are so many variables in play that science finds it difficult to predict how a given factor influences how a person turns out. Is it natal hormones? Is it development? Is it experience? Peer pressure? Nutrition? All of the above? If so, how do they combine? Science has a hard time answering that question not because it CAN’T, but because there are LOTS and LOTS of variables and so few ways to control them.
This brings us back to Noah’s point: that the whole “we pay for sex” thing is a social construct.
As I mentioned above, society and the constructs created thereby are but one of many variables that contribute to the development of human beings. A person with a solid family and lots of food on the table is going to react differently to social pressure than a person who does not have these things. A person with one pattern of genes and hormones will find certain social constructs to be a good fit; a person with another pattern of genes and hormones might not.
And what are social constructs?
They’re the little lies we’re told so often that we begin to believe them. They’re the premises we don’t question.
Some of the more obvious ones:
1). Boys wear blue and girls wear pink
2). Boys play sports, girls play with dolls
3). Boys are better than girls
4). Girls are supposed to wear makeup, boys aren’t
5). Boys are supposed to have body hair, girls aren’t
(My rebuttal to the above: http://www.crimethinc.com/tools/posters/gender_subversion_front.pdf)
You see a pattern developing here? All of these are ultimately arbitrary, socially constructed delineations about what IS and ISN’T “supposed” to happen. Certainly some of them have basis in dominant social groups and trends, but ask yourself: how did these groups and trends become dominant in the first place?
Example: Foucault suggests that Victorian social mores (which are present in America even today) are a direct result of the accumulation of property in the entrepreneurial class, and the need for secure heirs. This means being uptight about who has sex with whom, when, and whether or not it’s done in wedlock. Flash forward a couple hundred years and you get Victorian mores in America in 2011.
But social constructs will always exist, arbitrary or otherwise, because we are social animals and live in a social landscape.
When confronted by a social construct, ask yourself the following questions:
1). What are the moral, theoretical, and practical reasons behind a given social construct? Is it arbitrary or not?
2). What are its consequences?
And never forget that “good” and “evil” are subjective.
Bottom line: Noah is right in that the sexual economy of “buying sex” could very easily be a social construct. Whether or not it is arbitrary is still up for debate.
I’m inclined to think it’s arbitrary.
@Mike – evo psych is generally not a well respected field in either psychology, neuroscience, or evolutionary biology, largely due to its tendency for “just-so” stories and (a more common problem in psychology) the tendency to overexaggerate the implications of their results. Also, (personal peeve) they are often weirdly neglectful of neuroscience, which you’d think would be a logical area for them to look for evidence to support a lot of their arguments….
Here’s the thing. It’s really really easy to look at something and think of a reason why it would have made sense for it to be a product of evolution via natural selection. It’s also usually really easy to come up with conflicting hypotheses that explain your evidence.
Example: Women as gate-keepers of sex. Sure, it’s easy to argue that women could have evolved, via natural selection, neural structures which lead to the behavioral phenotype of being the “gatekeepers of sex.” But do you have any evidence, other than that it “makes sense,” and that in our culture women are/are perceived as gatekeepers of sex? What genes are involved in regulating this behavior? What neural structures and pathways?
Would it not also make sense, as Anthony mentioned, that humans (being social organisms and all) instead evolved the ability to adapt to their social environment? (btw, yes, there is a whole literature on the neuroscience of early learning/socialization, as well as some genetic work).
The thing is…I know I said this before, but it’s POSSIBLE that some of our social behaviors, even mating behaviors, are closely regulated by genetics. It’s possible. But there is not a lot of good evidence for this, not a lot of work that effectively addressing the G x E interaction. Actually, there isn’t really a lot of G work at all–but there is a whole lot of work that clearly demonstrates that the environment matters a lot.
So sure. Maybe women evolved via natural selection to be sexual gatekeepers. But until we have solid evidence for this (and not BS evo psych “I found a difference and THIS is why it makes sense ’cause of EVOLUTION” evidence) we should probably take it with a grain of salt.
Also (I’m sorry for the long post!) I want to reiterate that the self-reports of transgendered individuals have serious confounds when it comes to making big generalizations, and remind anyone not too familiar with how evolution works on a biological level that the amount of time we’ve had reliable birth control is not long enough for any evolutionary change to occur.
Also (I’m done after this, promise) I also want to add that it’s not a one-way road where hormones–>behavior. Environment–behavior, social factors, the mold in your walls–effects gene expression which effects hormone and hormone receptor synthesis. Just to keep things nice and complicated.
I’m kicking myself because I can’t find a really great article. It was in some sort of gender studies collection. The article was written by an FtM *trans person describing his psychological reactions to testosterone. His observations were fascinating – some were what you’d predict (increased sex drive and competitiveness), and some weren’t (how easily he began to associate everyday household chores with sex).
@theLaplaceDemon I’m willing to accept that. I have only done a small amount of personal study into evolutionary psychology. It hit home with me in that it made the most sense to me. But you make a good argument. It really is just “an idea” of how things could have developed based on what we see around us. Sort of like a scientific version of a religion.
I guess the only thing we can do is try to change society and make women act more sexually liberal like men. If they do we can say it was all societal. If not, there is something else involved.
@theLaplaceDemon — Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that modern birth control had in any way been around long enough to induce *evolutionary*/genetic changes. But I can certainly see it contributing to social-behavioral changes, which was my (poorly-stated) point.
In the words of a fictional (but inspirational nonetheless) character…
“Go beyond the impossible, and kick reason to the curb! ”
So even if I’m destined to be a sack of unthinking manflesh – I intend to say “fuck destiny” and live life to the fullest in whatever way I choose.
Baboons don’t listen to metal. Chimps don’t play guitar – and you wouldn’t find a bonobo posting on a message board about gender and human sexuality. This is why humans are great, and THIS thread is a win.
^^
Mike: Anecdotally, it works. I grew up in as close to a sex-positive environment as one can have in American society (I didn’t watch TV, didn’t go to movies very much, read a lot and got all my sex education from fandom and lurking on sex-positive blogs). The concept of gatekeeping makes no sense to me. I mean, obviously everyone’s a gatekeeper to their own bodies, but that works both ways. If a man isn’t attractive to me, I’m not going to fuck him, but if I’m not attractive to a man, he’s not going to fuck me either. And the whole idea of sex as a transaction is just weird to me. It’s a fun recreational activity! (And often more, of course– but at the base that’s it.)
Admittedly, generalizing from a set of one rarely works that well…
Noah,
very interesting post. It’s good this social myth of rationaly is no longet totally institutionalised. BUT that said, I think that, for all the social neuroses that inform our behaviour, there’s also, in the aggregate a difference in behaviour that is caused by diffeerent costs of different reproductive functions and reproductive strategies. That’s basically the logical corollary of having sexual reproduction with *two* sexes. And looking at the costs of that, at the relative value of sperms and ovaries, and at history, you’ll get to a standard setup that seems informed by a certain degree of polygyny and female choice, the corollary of which is a degree of female sexual scarcity, which, in turn implies that female sexuality has a higher value than male sexuality – in the aggregate – and that this is a culturally fundamental variable that any society had/has to deal with in one way or another.
There is no cultural determinism, of course, and if you look at, say, the matriarchical Mosuo tribe in China, it seems that that the women there have “bought” their social dominance in the way Bonobo females do it. By handing out casual sex which appears to largely reduce intra male competition (and ambition).
We’re not completely blank slates. We’re not very good at determining to which extent we are, and to which extent we’re not, because every argument in this discussion will be instantly politicized by someone, but that’s a different problem.
Relative sexual scarcity is, I believe, a, if not *the* most important variable for any social organisation. And even though the social myths of rationaly have shifted over time and will shift again, I believe that there is good reason to believe now that – in the social aggregate – different reproductive functions and according reproductive scarcitities for women and men have evolved into at least marginally different sexual strategies, which, in turn, have shaped the aggregate perception of relative sexual scarcities.
Ozy,
reading your comment I guess I should mention that I’ve been involuntarily celibate for what could have been the first about 15 years of sexual activity. I’ve worked hard on myself to become good with women, and I have, but everytime a women is attracted to me, even if only checking me out on the street, there’s still a moment in which I’m wondering if she’s kidding me.
So, yeah, as much as I’m willing to believe that my personal neuroses aren’t socially relevant, and as much as I believe my arguments are valid regardless of my personal history, I guess it is important to mention it, because it will likely be a factor.
Just wanted to chime in and say GREAT post (again), and interesting discussion following (especially Gaius’ and theLaplaceDemon’s comments).
Also, word @ “If you’ve read much of it, you know that the bullshit-to-science ratio in evolutionary psychology is very high.”
Bwahahahah! I love the women as their own “gatekeepers” theories in (pop) evolutionary psychology!
You know what I love the most about it? The people who defend that notion most passionately are also the ones most likely to blow gaskets at the slightest hint, rumor, or fevered fantasy that their woman would fail to keep their gates closed to anyone but them.
Furthermore, they’re often the same ones who cook up elaborate schemes to punish women who don’t keep those gates locked down tight.
And let’s not even talk about the cultural traditions wherein it’s absolutely critical for male relatives (fathers or brothers most often) to drag a sister or daughter out into the street and dash out her brains on the curb for… being seen with a boy without a chaperone!
Yeah, but the most logical explanation is that it’s women’s genes, developed over the course of aeons of natural selection that make them extremely choosy about why or whether they mate. Aeons of evolution as opposed to, say, absorbing the material object lessons projected to them in practically every confession at the end of a police procedural show, a soap opera, the lyrics of songs such as the Beatles Run for Your Life (“I’d rather see you dead little girl than to see you with another man”) or Tom Jones’ “Delilah.” And, of course myriad slut shamings, victim blamings, honor killings, and fulminations about cuckoldry.
In other words, even if the roles were reversed and it turned out that an optimal mating strategy for human women was to have anonymous, promiscuous sex with as many men as possible as often as possible, the cold hard reality of one father honor killing one daughter a year would be all it takes to maintain the illusion that all women are “naturally” strictly monogamous.
Or does anyone think I’m wrong?
Bottom line: oh yeah, you better believe women are gatekeepers. The question, though, is “who’s gate?”
In my opinion this may turn out to be the most deeply significant post NSWATM ever publishes. Nicely done, Noah.
figleaf
I can only give my impressions, but I’ve found the concept of a marketplace of relative value to be much more useful than many on the more socially idealistic end would have one believe. Sure, there are individual preferences, but there is enough coherence in attraction to speak of people being roughly more and less attractive than others.
On the other hand, I think it’s a largely symmetric marketplace and useless to assign genders “buyers” and “sellers”. If women are gatekeepers in any sense it’s probably only for immediate or anonymous sex, which men seem to have a greater appetite for.
Yes, yes, exactly, absolutely! And what’s worse, even once you’ve decided that the transaction model is bogus – as I have, being an egalitarian feminist and such – , it’s really really difficult to weed out its residues in one’s subconscious – I still catch myself wanting to “perform” as a “good girlfriend” and keep having to remind myself that my relationship is not based on me and my partner owing each other stuff!
figleaf,
“… the cold hard reality of one father honor killing one daughter a year would be all it takes to maintain the illusion that all women are “naturally” strictly monogamous. Or does anyone think I’m wrong?”
I don’t think so, actually. I think that’s more related to the myth of most men (except for “philosophers” who can master their sex drive) being latently sexually sociopathic, that social structure can only be maintained if male sexuality is kept in check, and that’s usually done through regulating access to female sexuality, with usually problematic consequences for women and men.
@Sam
But that myth wasn’t even the prominent one for many centuries. Once, women were viewed as sexually insatiable, and it was a manly trait to control one’s base urges. Now, those roles have switched in a time that can be measured in hundreds of years. Humans didn’t evolve differently in that relatively short amount of time, but social expectations sure have.
Long before I was a feminist, I found the transactional model of sex completely silly. I wanted sex after all, so why would some poor boy have to give me more things I wanted in order to participate in something I wanted in the first place? It made (and makes) no sense to me.
The problem is, that the counter-theory you are proposing is back to square one. It is basically stating “human social interaction is entirely random, is too difficult to understand and sometimes it just ‘clicks'”. You can’t really argue with this “romantic” model, since it basically does not state anything. You say it can include the market-behaviour, but that’s not really the point. Market-transaction model is a (not the) refinement, trying to make some useful generalizations and understanding regarding the behaviour of sizeable (arguably most) population of our species and several other similar mammals.
And the assumptions you make are a bit off. PUA stuff mainly evolved because the traditional market-thought of female hypergamy does not work that well within the liberated west, so they had to figure out new ways to generate attraction. So yeah, the old-school “females are there to get the best deal for their sexuality” ain’t practically used.
Market-theory ain’t good, but it is among the least-bad ones we have. Some derivatives of it (e.g. perceived value, asymmetric sypply&demand) are hugely useful in the world we are living in. And we actually understand quite a bit about human attraction to make (good) assumptions. We know a lot about how our bodies extract chemicals when we have those feelings. We know how our brain reacts for different stimuli. We know how the apes do it.
And with science (not to say that most of the internet-talk about market-values and pickup is very scienctific), it is never about who is right, but who is least wrong. They have more credible, refined and useful approach (for most scenarios) than you.
I can’t believe no one has said this yet.
“Who’s that?”
“Must be the King”
“How do you know?”
“He isn’t covered in shit like the rest of us.”
@Fingenieur: Maybe you’re right. The market-value model is absolutely worthless for explaining my own love life, so maybe I’m just privileging my own experience over the data again, and assuming it can’t explain anyone else’s either. There’s an awful lot of people in my position here, but the way you frame the market model does allow for a lot of statistical outliers; if I understand you, you’re arguing that the market model only has predictive value for the middle of the societal bell curve, and lord knows one standard deviation isn’t enough for a perverted statistician like me, so maybe I and all the other folks like me are just outside a working model, looking in. People do that.
Or, maybe you’re implicitly buying into something that’s taken as true on a cultural level, and confirmation bias is leading you to privilege evidence supporting what you already believe, and write off disconfirmatory evidence as outliers. People do that, too. Also, you’re obviously a smart fellow, and smart fellows tend to have an emotional attachment to elegant, logical systems. Your discomfort with the “people are complicated” model I suggest would tend to support this. You’re right that it is kinda square one, that it doesn’t provide a clear understanding in advance of how to interact with a person you don’t know. But then, atheism tells us nothing about the nature of God.
Ask yourself whether, when you see an incident or an anecdote that supports the theory you like, you feel a little dopamine hit, like you just scored a point. Ask yourself whether all the stories that don’t fit that model feel a little uncomfortable to you, like something you want to sweep under the rug. You’re easily smart enough to know what intellectual dishonesty feels like, but nobody is smart enough to catch themselves at it every time. If it were all just made up, how would you be able to tell? What would the world look like if you’re wrong?
Very interesting post, noah…and lots of good discussion. Like Ozy, I sort of grew up without the programming that instilled the transactional model of sex and oppositional gender roles, so I always felt like I was operating without the instruction manual when I was younger. I don’t believe in the transactional model because it has absolutely nothing to do with my personal sex drive, the things I find attractive in a mate, and my vision for how I have conducted my life, except when someone tries to check me by pointing out that I’m not conforming to type.
And honestly, I think “biology made me do it” is the new “the Devil made me do it” in a post-religious society. Same idea, different labels…but humans are still being humans. 🙂 And as a scientist, considering the absolutely nearly impossible chain of experiments and studies that one has to carefully design to tease out one particular insight into the gene expression/behavior/cause-and-effect/signalling pathway in single human cells (which are already way too complicated so we use simpler models like fruit flies and C. elegans), I see no definitive way to separate out biological and social influences on a single human being, much less of cultures of human beings throughout their life spans (at least the damn cell cultures turn over the next generation in ~18-24 hours, fruit flies in a matter of days, and even mice in a month). Of course we experiment and speculate because we’re fascinated with ourselves, but beware anyone who says they *know* what makes people tick….
@Fing: A theory that a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to prove is going to look better than competing theories even if it’s false.
That it still has obvious cracks even counting all the time society spends trying to prop it up is one of the main reasons I think it’s false. It doesn’t seem to have anything besides confirmation bias really going for it.
For one, I think if the transactional model was universally true you would see at least one person saying “my parents raised me without the transactional model but now that I’m grown up I prefer it” opposed to the (including me) THREE people who say “my parents raised me without the transactional model and now I’m grown up I think it’s silly”.
The problem here is with the obsession with truth. A theory with is false but is predicative 10% of the time is more useful than a theory which is true but is predicative 0% of the time.
Kaija24:
I see ways of doing such experiments but they rely on using human infants and doing things such as raising them with robots. You’d probably want a group of mixed sex, and two other groups of one sex each. You’d need 3 isolated and abandoned areas of land.
The robots would of course be programmed the same way and treat the children in all 3 of the groups the exact same way, no differentiation between girls and boys would be made , clothing provided would be unisex, etc. A cover story for the children would be constructed whereby the adults in the world are all dead. I suppose running the experiment for 30 years (to double triple make sure the brains of the former children are fully mature and capture that data) would be long enough before one would tell the subjects their true origin.
Anyway, even if we had such intelligent robots, I trust you see why such an experiment would never be done.
By definition of truth true theories are always more useful than false theories.
A theory is true if it can be used to accurately predict future events, and false if it can’t. Because of this there is no such thing as a false theory being more useful than a true theory, any more than there is such a thing as a placebo being useful than real medicine.
Brian:
I was raised without any models whatsoever except what I could pick up by contradictory cultural messages, I rather view the transactional model as a useful simplification.
It’s not useful, it’s picking out garbage patterns and making shit up based on said patterns. It’s really no different from any other kind of superstition.
Just because a superstition is endorsed by society doesn’t make it any more true. Lot of little kids believe in Santa Claus, but he doesn’t exist even one tiny bit more because of that.
Brian:
It’s very cute to start bringing out terms like “superstition” and “Santa Claus” but not just evolutionary psychology but whole branches of economics are based on this model as my link to the Baumeister paper above indicates. Why don’t you try bringing something to table instead of mere insults? I’ve personal found it useful and predicative; whether this is because its culturally condoned all over the world and practically everywhere, or because there IS a biological basis to it, or more likely there’s some truth to it and its a mixture, I don’t know.
Well, I have to run off to work, so I’ll make this short and maybe post a longer response a little later.
What I really want to say, especially to Kaija and Ozy is that I’m the flip side to your story. I grew up in a household so repressive regarding sexuality that it bordered on abuse. I grew up hearing nothing but that my penis was evil, I would physically hurt women by having sex with them and that pornography is on par with rape or murder. So … yeah. I also had very very few friends and my parents vetted them before I was allowed to stay over.
But guess what? Puberty kicked in, I had my hormone imbalance (my mother thought I might be possessed by the devil, natch) and I was off to the I-want-to-stick-my-penis-in-things races. It was HORRIBLE growing up in a culture that made me think that my constant arousal from 10 years old up was a sign I was going to hell.
So, by all standards of what we’re talking about – I should grow up a man with decreased sex drive and feeling guilty about wanting/needing sex. Although eventually I realized my parents were wrong (intellectually) that didn’t change the fact that I wanted lots and lots and lots of sex since as early as I can remember – and I acted on it whenever possible.
So what I’m saying is that if we want to blame our slut-shaming culture for the low availabilty of available female sex partners (as a heterosexual man speaking), then we also need to explain why the cock-shaming I grew up with didn’t result in me keeping it in my pants.
Please excuse the arrogance I’m about to express in the next sentence: If someone can explain to me how I was able to instinctually maintain my sex drive in the face of both earthly and eternal punishment – you might be able to explain to me how so very, very many women fall victim to slut shaming – creating the “sexual marketplace.”
And notice, hand-waving of the sort that says “Well, we don’t really know why some people reject their upbrining …” just pushes the same question back. If it was my biology that caused me to be unable to repress my sexuality (as we see with gay televangelists) then aren’t we back to proving that the sexual marketplace is at least PARTIALLY biologically constructed?
(And because I think I need to say this: I do think that culture plays a huge, huge, huge supermassive monumental big-ass motherfucking role in how we display/reveal our sexuality – but if our internal biological process is so closely tied to our ability to procreate – that’s a HUGE leap from saying that “humans are adaptable” and tying it to violence, fashion, sleep cycles, taste pallates, etc. This IS SEX we’re talking about.)
noahbrand:
By the way, your “medieval peasant” is a bit too simplistic, as has been pointed out above. The Bible itself mentions “unbelievers” and “heretics” and while your average peasant couldn’t read, the RC church would often use such themes in its services. Then there were the towns where your peasant might occasionally go to buy things or look around and occasionally be exposed to those strange foreigners. So no, it’s not true that the average peasant couldn’t conceive of an atheist but he or she might not tend to doubt that such a person was wicked, possibly possessed by the devil, and likely to go to Hell.
@Noah:
Of course the market-theory requires a cultural context to make sense. Just like most modern economic-theories (where being less bad does not mean they are good, QED) rely on assumption of somewhat free-markets and principles of trade. And even the observation (and the eventual hacking of the system caused by it) of certain patterns disturb them. And we can make a different system with different rules, of course. But then we need a serious argument with the benefits of alternatives. That the things have “evolved” to a certain state (and in darwinian sense, crushed competition) is arguably a very good argument for the state of being. Evolution usually works better than revolution.
You are building a lot of strawmen there. I’ll just say you are dead-wrong about my ideas pretty much about everything with your two latter paragraphs. (I’m not really smart. I just act like one.)
Personally, I don’t have a fucking clue what kind of model would work for my attraction and love-life. It is rarely never a choice I make on whom I get attracted to or not. There’s too much exceptions, times “I grew up”, errors and conflicting behaviour to make any good guesses on how it would fit some sociological model. Like if only 20% of my hookups are male, the sociologics would interpret it as a population is 80% straight. It is not appliable to individual level. Not any more than the decisions on whether we should have free trade, fiat/non-fiat currencies or Keyenesian politics affect much how an individual should handle their household-economy.
Of course it never works within individual level. Of course it is outright offensive if you are told “this is how you should handle your love-life/economics”. Even in the appropriate context, the theory is pretty bad. But it’s among the least useless. It can help one to solve “how I can increasy mah chances of scoring ‘sum booty in this imperfect world” -problem. Less “how I can have a satisfying love-life. or WTF it even is…”
“If it were all just made up, how would you be able to tell?”
I know I’m likely wrong about everything. And I know everyone else is. I assume I can be less-wrong by comparing presented evidence and reasoned arguments. With this case, you have the weaker ones. Just a non-reasoned rejection.
A lot of people (e.g. sunday-feminists) understand philosophical relativism wrong. Even though absolute truth might be unconceivable, that does not mean some viewpoints are more valuable and likely better than others.
@EE: Two things:
Number one, of course, is that you’re just one guy with one anecdote, and likely some other men would totally be able to repress their sexuality. Plenty of women aren’t able or aren’t willing to repress their sexuality, as some of the blogs on the blogroll make abundantly clear.
Number two, probably more important, is that you say you had a hormonal imbalance AND the cock-shaming, meaning that you are in no sense an average man. If your libido is especially large of COURSE you’re going to be more able to resist shaming of your sexuality than otherwise. You have more reason to than most people.
@Fing: “With this case, you have the weaker [arguments]. Just a non-reasoned rejection.”
I could say the same about you.
“I sort of grew up without the programming…”
“I was operating without the instruction manual when I was younger.”
“I was raised without any models whatsoever…”
You guys honestly believe you were?
Fingenieur:
Yep. My parents taught me nothing of “how to pick up women” and I never had that “talk” in high school as I wasn’t popular and hardly ever hung out with anyone after school. The messages I got culturally included stuff from science fiction, popular culture such as MTV, feminist theory and a whole bunch of other stuff. Basically, I was a voracious reader who often didn’t have much control over what I read. So I was exposed to feminist arguments early. Oh don’t get me wrong: I was exposed to plenty of talk about history and “gender roles” in things I read, but there was nothing that dealt with sexual signaling, attraction, comparison of “dating” or “courting” behaviors among cultures or any of that.
So what the heck do you make of that mixture? Don’t ask me, I couldn’t see any “patterns”. I gave my first kiss at 21.
@Clarence: Besides the obvious fact that such an experiment would cross all kinds of ethics and humane treatment lines and would never be approved by an IRB or funded by any credible agency, the children raised in that manner would then be a product of the artificial culture and not the one that we live in; therefore the information gained would not be very useful or predictive for the greater culture as we would then not be able to know if an observed result (in itself a product of interpretation) was ‘universal’ or ‘biological’ or an artifact of the influences of the artificial culture (which would be exactly the main criticisms and questions raised by a reviewer of such a study)…a true chicken-and-egg conundrum as environment and social interactions influence biological expression and vice versa at many levels, from genetic expression to group behavior. BUT, as in many investigative efforts, the asking and mulling over of the questions and gathering information to illuminate the analysis is extremely worthwhile and necessary, even if getting to the Ultimate Answer is impossible.
If it were all just made up, how would you be able to tell? What would the world look like if you’re wrong?(Noah)
Seeing as the story(science) changes every couple hundred years I would say pretty much everyone cannot tell. What I do know is that humans sure love the drama of their stories. 😉
@Argyle – I figured that you knew, but I thought it might be a useful thing to throw out there because there’s no reason for most people to know or really think about it.
@Mike – Well, I don’t know about forcing anything, but even if it is true that women are genetically predisposed to be “gatekeepers” or whatever, making those of us who are more sexually liberal outliers…the slut shaming still has to go.
(personally, from a scientific standpoint I think it would be research on other primates that would mostly answer these questions for us…if we could find gene–>hormone/brain–>behavior pathways regulating sexual behavior in primates, such as sexual choosiness or promiscuity, it would put us in a good place to hypothesize about humans. That is, of course, that genes play a significant role in these behaviors. )
@easilyenthused – Well, having a sex drive period and being a sexual “gatekeeper” are two different things. Unless you think that being a sexual gatekeeper is simply a function of low libido*.
I will not presume to know what your childhood was like, but socialization is a sneaky beast that does come from much more than our parents. If you ever watched TV, read books, talked to other kids, talked to other adults, saw billboards, overheard people talking in the grocery store – those things contributed to your socialization. (Example: “Gender neutral parenting”. Lots of parents say they do it, very few do – there have been great studies where researchers interviewed kids who had been parented “gender neutrally” about what their parents would think if they did something that transgressed their gender roles, and they overwhelmingly said their parents would be unhappy).
Also…N=1. For your anecdote about overcoming a sexually repressive household, I can tell you the same stories about women I know. One of my best friends as a teenager grew up in a very religious household where sex was considered shameful and a sin, she in turn was a very promiscuous teenager. We can trade anecdotes all day, it is still not data.
*There are a lot of problems with this. Even if females, on average, have lower sex drives than men, much of the bell curves will still overlap.
I also want to second Fingenieur’s 7:25 post. Just because no one sat you down and said “Okay, sweetheart, this is how sex works. It’s like a transaction…” doesn’t mean that you didn’t pick it up implicitly. The vast majority of our learning is implicit.
I think that the power of anecdotes is in the endless variety…it helps to hear that there are lots and LOTS of ways that people grew up and that there are lots of ways they turned out. Just goes to show that A does not always imply B and all X are not always Y. There is the cultural messaging and then there are the personal confessions from friends and loved ones that really make you question the conventional wisdom…I love hearing about everyone’s difference backgrounds and influences and personal evolution…fascinating!
The Laplace Demon:
But you are assuming that:
A. People all have equal access (or I should say HAD equal access , back when I was a teen the internet was 10 years away) to the more common “social scripts” on dating and mating.
B. All social scripts are the same. This is not the case, esp as in the USA the country becomes more “diverse” (along with all the good and bad that goes with that).
C.People get “taught” this stuff in a coherent enough manner to make sense of it all.
I didn’t participate in the “dating game” at all for instance, until college. And that was a total of 3 dates with one young lady, during one of which I kissed her.
The culture (I’m not even sure if there is a larger dominant culture anymore) sends a variety of mixed messages, at least to anyone paying attention to it. Yet somehow this “sexual marketplace” model seems to emerge and not just in our society, but pretty much all over the world. That tells me there is something to it, even if it is not the “be all and end all” of human mating behavior.
The market value theories of course “explain” correctly the trivial cases of extremely popular individuals and extremely unpopular individuals. For the vast majority of the “dating market” they have no predictive power whatsoever and the ad hoc evolutionary psychology explanations have been built on even shakier ground. This article (which refers to actual real world social research) has been very eye-opening for me regarding what is really happening out there:
A quote:
“Sexual Strategies Theory did not fare well:
»By contrast, this research demonstrated some of the limiting conditions of SST. Sexual strategies theory clearly predicts that higher status proposers should be accepted by women more readily than low-status proposers. The fact that status did not predict women’s acceptance of casual sex offers is therefore a problem for SST. Neither status, nor tendency for gift giving, nor perceived faithfulness of the proposer (nor, more precisely, the interaction of any of these variables with gender) predicted whether a participant would agree to the sexual offer, contradicting SST. Likewise, if men’s central goal, as suggested by SST, is to transfer their genetic material to future generations, men should have a greater base rate likelihood of accepting a sexual offer from any woman than women have of accepting a sexual offer from any man, regardless of the proposer’s attractiveness (i.e., women should be choosier than men). SST does not predict that women would be equally likely to accept offers as men when (a) the proposers are very attractive, (b) the proposers are very unattractive, (c) the proposers are familiar people, and (d) the proposer and the individual are of the same sex.»”
TheAverageOutlier:
Hugh Ristic addresses that study here:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2011/03/11/gender-differences-accepting-casual-sex-proposals-noh/
To quote the ending:
agree with Conley that the CHSP is an unusual and suspicion-inducing scenario. I think she is quite correct to explore the question: how would women behave if they got casual sex proposals in a more favorable circumstance?
A better test of gender differences in propensity for casual sex would be do a more naturalistic study by having people receive actual or hypothetical sexual propositions in an environment where they might expect one, such as a nightclub, or on a date. Unfortunately, this study would be hard to perform in real life.
I would expect women to say “yes” at a rate greater than 0%, as found in the CHSP, certainly. But they would still be down for casual sex less than men. Judging by Conley’s friend proposal study finding a rate of 40% (vs. men’s 72%), I wouldn’t expect women to say “yes” any more than that. In various other domains, such as speed-dating, women are pickier.
Thankyou, Fingenieur! I can’t believe the naïvety (or is it denial?) of people who believe their parents formed their entire social environment.
@Anyone responding to Clarence above (8:23)
Are people who are arguing that sex marketplace ideas are “just made up” therefore saying that if we didn’t have cultural and societal pressures that the results of the CHSP would be perfectly 50/50?
Honest question, I really don’t think I understand.
Are people who are arguing that sex marketplace ideas are “just made up” therefore saying that if we didn’t have cultural and societal pressures that the results of the CHSP would be perfectly 50/50?
Nope, because all people are not the same and do not behave the same in any situation…I think you’d have people responding in lots of different ways based on their unique factors and personal proclivities.
@EE: If we didn’t have any cultural and societal pressures the idea of the CHSP would make no sense, because the main thing the CHSP measures in practice is cultural and societal pressures, and in particular who has sex partners approach them and who doesn’t.
I’m fairly sure that if both sexes culturally had sex partners approach them the CHSP would find that nearly nobody would accept an offer from an undifferentiated stranger.
@Clarence: I don’t find Hugh’s dismissal convincing. Among other reasons, though it’s always valid to say “let’s do more research”, you can’t say “let’s do more research in the hope of proving this piece of research wrong”.
Brian:
I haven’t been able to get a decent argument out of you yet, so I find your dismissal of Hugh’s dismissal unconvincing. I’d ask you to actually put up a critique, but in practice you never do. It’s obvious Hugh read the study for instance before he did his post on it.
I should clarify – not that people would say yes/no at a 50/50 rate – but that the number of men and women who said any one answer would be 50/50.
In other words: Are you saying that if we got rid of cultural/societal pressures that both men and women would be roughly equivalent in their answers if propositioned as in the study?
@Gauis 11.47 and @theLaPlaceDemon 11.50
Honestly, it becomes harder and harder for me to respond to any comment using Evo Psych to explain behaviour without simply saying “No. It’s wrong.” Both of these comments do an excellent job of articulating why, and I’ll probably refer back to them in future. Thanks!
This is the model I work from to understand behaviour (as jargon free as I can make it)
1) When a person is born, he starts with a set of behavioural predispositions that are a result of one’s genetic history.
2) Of these, by far the biggest predisposition is the one to learn and adapt in response to environmental contingencies. “Enviroment” is a very broad category, and every stimulus you encounter (including you own private verbal behaviour, ie “thoughts.”) is part of that.
3) The moment that you are born, enviromental contingencies start to shape the behavioural repertoire you started with. Our ability to learn and adapt is so great that even “instinctive” behaviours can be shaped, or even overturned. (For an extreme example; the survival instinct and suicide.) In turn, the changed behaviour repertoire means changed behaviour, which means changed results from your behaviour, which means different changes. You push against the world, changing it, and those changes push back, changing you. Constant dynamic back and forth.
4) Verbal behaviour makes all this even more complex, because it allows us to learn from more than just direct experience, and allows us to make social constructs and respond to them. This makes predicting someone’s behavior even more complex, because, unlike non human animals, you can’t simply look at their external, non arbitrary enviroment for the contingencies that shape behaviour.
EE:
I recommend you read Hugh’s critique of it. The study that Outlier quoted has data that partly contradicts its own message, and Hugh has been reading dating and mating studies for years. It’s kind of his “thing”.
“Are people who are arguing that sex marketplace ideas are “just made up” therefore saying that if we didn’t have cultural and societal pressures….”
We’re never not going to have cultural and societal influences on our behaviour. All we can do is change what they are. Theoretically, we could change the influences so that the results are 50/50.
The problem I have with many critiques of both the CHSP and the Conley study is the assumption that either of these studies are measuring some sort of evolutionary adaptation or biological predisposition to “women are more selective” when in actuality, although the study *may* be measuring a combination of biological and gender factors yes, it’s more likely that it is measuring social and cultural factors that shape people’s responses to such proposals; if this study was done in a variety of other cultures or even subcultures–e.g., Amish, Samoan, Swedish, Saudi Arabian–the results would reflect those cultures’ social views of such proposals more than all people’s desire for casual sex.
The interesting part of the Conley study is that women’s reasons for passing on casual sex tending to revolve around a) concerns about personal safety (not surprising, given the constant drum of fear and danger in US culture, which was where this study was done, and the messages given to women about keeping themselves safe, given that those messages are flawed) and b) the assumption of a lower probability of sexual pleasure from casual sex. I suspect that casual sex is much more appealing if you’re pretty sure it’s going to get you off (if you’re horny and looking to hook up in the short term and not looking for Twoo Lurve Everlasting). If there’s a high probability that the hookup is going to result in a woman getting all hot and bothered and then…end of encounter, the female equivalent of “blue balls” (all that blood pressure in the female tissues can be uncomfortable too as well as the psychoological effect of getting 70% of the way up the arousal hill and then stalling), getting yourself off or asking for some assist in getting off…then it just might be too much cost for not much benefit. And It’s not just “hey, women’s orgasms are so darn hard and complicated”…it’s that in casual hookups, the female orgasm is not a priority (as other studies have suggested).
This is not all the fault of men, just to head off the blame train. Many women don’t learn their own sexual responses and arousal patterns until later in their sexually active life if they’ve been discouraged from masturbating, instilled with sex-negative messages about their genitals and sexuality, suffering from unrealistic expectations about sex from religion or romance novels or whatever; if a women doesn’t know what gets her off, it’s not something that a guy is going to magically discover in 10 minutes of sex. It helps when women and men are able to communicate with their partners…ask for what they need to get off, be able to explain or suggest or guide in an appropriate way, and when partners are willing to listen and take that into account. Men in turn have to contend with overcoming their own cultural programming and negative or untrue messages about sex and pleasure and the cultural trope that “it’s all over when he’s finished”. It’s true that men and women DO like sex and want it to be pleasureable. Unlike movies and porn, where everyone appears to either all like the same kind of sex or have the ability to read each other’s minds, it helps to ask an individual woman or man what feels good to him or her and not assume that PIV is the one and only sex act that counts or that anything beyond what gets one partner off is “too much work”. Honestly, a lot of women I talk to say that “if I’m just going to end up having to get myself off in the end, I might as well just stay home and do that in the first place” and a lot of my male friends say that they find an unresponsive or uninvolved sex partner to be kind if disappointing. I believe that If we got rid of some of those very real, very influential barriers to mutual pleasure, there would be a lot more casual sex happening.
Then again, let’s not forget that casual sex isn’t appealing to everyone, regardless of gender and some of the “no’s” in the study proposals may very well come from people who feel or have figured out from experience, that casual sex just isn’t their thing and it doesn’t matter if it’s Brad Pitt or Joe Schmo, Megan Fox or Jane Doe, the answer to a casual proposal is going to be “no” or “not now, but maybe once I figure out if there’s some chemistry”.
@EE: Whatever answer most people gave, there would be no significant difference between men and women in the same way that there would be no significant difference between blondes and brunettes, in the absence of cultural and social pressure.
HOWEVER it’s rather difficult to do a scientific study without culture and society, so in practice we will never know exactly how people behave without cultural and social pressures at all. All we can do in practice is remove particular cultural and social pressures.
@Clarence: I’m aware that Hugh read the study before he commented on it. I mean, with a minimum of offense, what kind of idiot do you think I am? (Or, rather, I know he read the summary of it on Yes Means Yes; I’m pretty sure the actual study is behind a paywall.)
And I have read his entire post about it now and before and I still think the conclusions of the study are correct and the conclusions Hugh draws from the data are incorrect. Still don’t want to get into a full analysis(though I will if you ask), but one of the major problems with Hugh’s analysis is that the data is considerably more noisy than he’d need to draw his conclusions. The numbers the study gives are not exact and can only be assumed significant when there’s large distances between them.
So, for example, Hugh’s assertion that Jennifer Lopez was more attractive than either of the hot men is true but meaningless; the other hot woman was about as attractive as either of the hot men, and for some reason Donald Trump was rated .4 more attractive than Carrot Top. The reason for all this is not that Jennifer Lopez is actually so much more attractive than Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt but rather that there’s enough noise in the data that occasionally a data point will seem slightly high or slightly low without that saying anything meaningful about anything.
Another nitpick is that at one point he assumes that bisexual women skew towards lesbian. Why would they? In the absence of evidence for this he can’t make the assertion that they do; unfounded assumptions like this are exactly what Occam’s Razor is designed to cut. And if I went on with my nitpicks I could fill an entire post with these but I think having mentioned this one only is good time to cut off.
Fin and Laplace: I didn’t grow up without conditioning; I grew up with really weird conditioning. As an example: I honestly believed until I was fifteen or sixteen or so that women had a higher sex drive than men. It made sense! After all, women could have multiple orgasms, and women bought romance novels and wrote erotica and men just jacked off to Internet porn which was way less effort, and women put on makeup while men made no effort to get sex, and I was hella interested in sex and my male friends didn’t seem to be.
Presumably my conditioning was some combination of my complete lack of interest in popular culture, general friendlessness and tendency to hang out on the more sex-positive sections of the Internet. Not to mention that I probably naturally have traits like a high sex drive and lack of jealousy.
Kaija:
I mostly agree with your nuanced critiques and so I’m not responding directly right now. I do think you over imagine the influence of culture just a bit, I don’t think you’d find any where women were just down for casual sex any old time, certainly to the same extent as men, certain ideologically reported island cultures notwithstanding, though I suspect the rates would vary somewhat.
@Anthony:
I wasn’t aware that what I said was supportive of evolutionary psychology, or using evolutionary psychology as an argument. Bear in mind, I’m still a n00b at all this, but I was under the impression that evolutionary psychology essentially argues that our psychological development is wholly influenced by our evolutionary history as primates, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.
I’m certainly not an expert in anthropology, but I would think that humans take what happens 99% of the time in their experience to be “normal” for their context. Hi, I was born and raised in suburban America, so for me, getting your food at the grocery store (rather than growing it yourself) is normal. This doesn’t mean that I can’t conceive of growing my own food — like most human beings, I have the ability to posit a hypothetical and imagine growing my own food — but growing my own food is not THE NORM.
But not growing my own food is, in itself, a social construct — a product of the capitalistic division of labor. I would not be able to PAY someone ELSE to grow enough food for two people without an abundant source of free energy to pick up the slack (derived from petrochemicals).
…I really don’t know what I’m trying to say here, except that: yes, technically, I’m a descendent of primates, but I’m a descendent of primates who has grown up in a culture with various conventions, laws, practices, and institutions, some of which are arbitrary and some of which are grounded in practicality. But I don’t APPROACH these situations as a primate, I approach them as someone with my particular combination of upbringing, genes, and hormones and privilege.
Brian:
Please. More nitpicks. Because that is exactly what they are. Hugh, for example, stated it was his opinion (not a fact) that he thought it was a reasonable assumption that bisexual women would skew towards lesbian , that was hardly his main critique, and really , until you can deal with how significantly different the numbers for straight guys were (females proposing to males as opposed to every other type of pairing) you haven’t really disproved his critique. I think he did an admirable job of showing the limitations of that study and suggesting fruitful research in the future.
I have the original Conley paper (having access to a academic library service beyond the paywall) and there is much more detail, nuance, and critique of their own work and that of others, which is the expected standard in a peer-reviewed study, and leaves a lot of open questions and suggestions for future work. The results have gotten a little exaggerated in the telling, as is usually par for the course (like the childhood game of “Telephone”).
interestingly, some of the SST expected results–that het women would be more likely to accept proposals from high-status men and men would be more likely to accept proposals from young fertile women (if the hypothesis was that women are looking for a man who can provide resources for her children and men are looking to pass on their DNA)–were not supported by the study. There’s a lot more in the paper, which is 21 pages of very dense background material, metholodology, statistics, and cavaets.
@Clarence: I, in turn, think you overstate the influence of biology via gender and assume much more uniformity across cultures and time than exists, so we’re just going to have to agree to disagree 🙂
Shora,
“But that myth wasn’t even the prominent one for many centuries. Once, women were viewed as sexually insatiable, and it was a manly trait to control one’s base urges. Now, those roles have switched in a time that can be measured in hundreds of years. Humans didn’t evolve differently in that relatively short amount of time, but social expectations sure have.”
I also believe that cultural aspect are more important in that respect. But I believe that “female insatiability” was mostly a projection made by men (like the idea that they put the semen into the female to grow), the standard assumption about male sexuality was still the same – dangerous if released. I don’t think you’d need a lot of social mythology to get to that base assumption, average physical differences will be sufficient. If figleaf’s assumption about one honor killing being enough to lend credibility to the gate keeper theory, one rape will certainly be sufficient to justify the idea that male sexuality is latently sociopathic, if only because male physical strength means they *can* get away with sexual violence unless there’s some sort of social control. At that point, the mere *possibility* of sexual violence, apparent through perceivable body sizes, leads to all sorts of cultural activity. I think female sexuality only enters that equation on a secondary level, the “temptation level”, in which the men who are concerned about male sexual sociopathy as a socially destructive force are trying to eliminate potential triggers.
@easilyenthused 7:09 am
Looks like we grew up in similar conditions. It worked on me, as I explained above – I reckon what this shows is that there is indeed that actual behaviour is a complex blend of cultural, genetic, and psychological variables (which, of course, are also a dependent variable). Here’s what I think about that in a bit more detail –
http://www.realadultsex.com/content/shorter-no-sex-class-paradigm#comment-17675
Kaija24:
Yes, but you didn’t have to even read the paper to find out about the “High Status Males” thing and etc. You just had to read Thoma’s original post and Hugh’s critique of it. The point is the Conley paper doesn’t deal SST a deathblow in part because of those pesky heterosexual males and in part because the study was, in its own way, just as artificial as the one it was meant to debunk. It also doesn’t deal with different forms of selection, meaning that women tend to look for different things in a one night stand as compared to a long term partner. Many SST proponents would say that the females were acting exactly how they were supposed to act given the context.
There’s a pretty long critique of the SST and other hypotheses in the Conley paper as well as a critique of their own results; no deathblows are ever dealt in or by a single study, but the big picture is pretty fascinating. It includes the possibility that sexual selection via unconscious evolutionary factors and conscious pleasure-seeking may be somewhat overlapping and acting in concert on different levels or completely separate via individual present behavior via longer-term population behavior or something in between rather than “either-or”. I’m not terribly familiar with either critique that you mention, but I read the Conley paper when press releases came out about it in the science and popular news and I still haven’t read either a good summary or a “takedown” of it that isn’t oversimplifying or overcomplicating the actual study itself.
However, I think the GOOD news is that it seems that there are barriers to pleasureable casual sex that can be dealt with, and those are things we can work on and influence, because all of us human beings seem to be pretty interested in sex. 🙂
@Clarence 8:16AM –
“A. People all have equal access (or I should say HAD equal access , back when I was a teen the internet was 10 years away) to the more common “social scripts” on dating and mating.”
Can you elaborate on this? I really don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you saying that in the absence of the internet telling you that sex is transactional means you didn’t learn it, therefore it was innate? if so, please refer to my comment above about implicit learning.
“B. All social scripts are the same. This is not the case, esp as in the USA the country becomes more “diverse” (along with all the good and bad that goes with that).”
Again, I’m confused about how this relates to anything I said. If my argument was “all behavior is always 100% socialized always ever” this MIGHT be a valid criticism, but 1) that’s not my argument and 2) different socialization can still lead to the same behavioral phenotype.
If we have a predominant narrative – and I think, in our culture, something like the transactional model may be that narrative – it makes sense that a large proportion of people would implicitly pick up on the idea that this is just the way we do things/the way things are without ever examining it more closely. People are very good at living up to the expectations of others, no matter how positive or negative. So if you are a woman and you implicitly pick up on the fact that others expect you to be the gatekeeper of sex, you will often (though not always! shit is complicated) fulfill this role. If you are a man and you implicitly pick up on the fact that you are expected to always want sex and always be the initiator, you will also fill this role (same caveat as before).
It’s true, there is diversity in culture. And it’s also true that not all people act out the sex-as-transaction model. Ozy is one example of this–she was unusually socialized, and her experience is far from the stereotypical female gatekeeper role. An anecdote, certainly. But an example of the fact that female sexual behavior is not 100& homogeneous across environments.
“C.People get “taught” this stuff in a coherent enough manner to make sense of it all.”
You don’t need to consciously make sense of anything. Yay implicit learning. Which is how we learn most of our social behavior – implicitly, from observing others. Pick up any textbook on child psychology for more on this one.
Again, I really feel that the burden of proof is on the people insisting that the female sexual role of gatekeeper is genetic. The social psychologists have done a good job demonstrating how environment influences attitudes, expectations, and behavior. That doesn’t mean socialization is the whole story, but to the people supporting evo psych theories:
1. Please describe in specific detail the behavior you are proposing is genetic.
2. Please indicate which genes are involved in the regulation of this behavior.
3. Please draw a mechanisms map for how these genes lead to a behavioral phenotype. Which hormones are involved? Which brain regions? At what point in development does this differ between males and females? How are the genes in question regulated?
These are the sort of questions that real evolutionary biologists and behavioral endocrinologists attempt to answer in their research. Until evo psych can start giving me some of that, I will continue to view it at best as a very soft science, and more commonly as a pseudoscience. It’s one thing to find a difference between two populations (say, men and women) and another entirely to explain why that difference is there.
@Clarence 10:28: How about Italy circa the Renaissance? Not such an alien culture to us, and yet one of the earliest known joke books hails from there and is full of jokes about women’s high libidos and propensity for cheating.
Also, how about Ancient Greece? Apparently Aristophanes, at least, thought that women had just as high sex drives as men, as evidenced by the scene in Lysistrata where the leaders of the sex-protest-against-the-Peloponnese-war have to physically restrain some of the younger women from fucking random men.
Plenty of other examples from Western culture, as well. Figleaf has more in this post from a while ago.
@Clarence 10:33: Ok, full rebuttal it is. Because it’ll be long, I’ll dedicate an entire post to it.
@theLaplaceDemon:
I’m not a genetic biologist, but I’d like to give a shot at your 3 questions. Feel free to dismiss if they’re gibberish:
1. The behavior in question would be the decision to pursue/engage in sexual conduct after feeling desire. I believe that the “safety” mechanism in men tends to be more likely to “fail” when presented with a “risky” sexual opportunity. This “faulty safety mechanism” has a higher tendency to be passed down to men (like male pattern baldness.)
2. (I obviously can’t name a specific gene, but I can make up one name: Whambammaamete) Whambammaamete is triggered by the hormone Wannabone during gestation.
3. MS Paint is broken, or else I’d draw you a real purty flow chart that is probably completely broken.
Why is everyone getting hung up on “behavior” being genetically motivated. All our behavior is physical desire processed through our societal values then intelligently reasond through.
Could we just identify a gene that is identified like male pattern baldness that creates poor decision making with regards to sexual outlets? I don’t think the core is that women have lower drives than men. I think it’s more likely that when women do the mental calculation about “is it worth it?” they regularly come up deciding “no” whereas men decide “yes.”
I expect centuries of BC/abortion availabiltiy will begin to sway things the other way – especially if child support options for men don’t change.
It’s not about “sex drive” – both sexes could have equal sex drives – but the risk-taking mechanism that causes women and men to say “no thanks, I’ve got better things to do” seems to be more faulty in men and male animals in general.
@Kaija: “[T]he assumption of a lower probability of sexual pleasure from casual sex. I suspect that casual sex is much more appealing if you’re pretty sure it’s going to get you off (if you’re horny and looking to hook up in the short term and not looking for Twoo Lurve Everlasting). If there’s a high probability that the hookup is going to result in a woman getting all hot and bothered and then…end of encounter, the female equivalent of “blue balls” (all that blood pressure in the female tissues can be uncomfortable too as well as the psychoological effect of getting 70% of the way up the arousal hill and then stalling), getting yourself off or asking for some assist in getting off…then it just might be too much cost for not much benefit.”
Ooh, I wonder if this has anything to do with the “women just want to cuddle” and “women need more cuddling after sex” theories. Because I remember reading that over and over in sex manuals from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, but when I began having sex it seemed so intermittently true that I wondered where the idea came from.
One could be that I’d over-interpreted the message and all they really meant was “women don’t want to leap out of bed two seconds after orgasm.” Which I’ve never particularly wanted to do either.
Another could be that sex manuals written in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s were necessarily written by men (it was almost always men back then) who were born roughly between 1910s (Albert Ellis, William Masters), 1920s (Alex Comfort) and maybe 1935 (David Reubin). If so then they would have grown up in an society that was barely getting over its century-long medical anxiety about male “semen depletion” as the cause of everything from weak eyesight to tuberculosis. In which case, again, the difference they saw really was a lot about still very real male guilt, anxiety, and aversion after sex. And so the admonition for aftercare of one’s partner was more about not jumping up or rolling over immediately after sex and pretending it never happened.
Or… maybe as you said, Kaija, it’s that anybody who’s gotten wound up but doesn’t get that orgasm is going to want to continue contact after her or his partner is satisfied… and stops.
The reason I’m inclined to believe it’s the last item is that women who’ve had an orgasm (or enough of them) are often able to shift gears pretty quickly. On the other hand, even as a teenager I often had difficulty having orgasms (it was easy during intercourse but when I was fertile and psychotically distrustful of condoms intercourse was off the table.) And several of my partners have been the woman version of “premature ejaculators” where they’ve been able to get to orgasm very quickly — well before intercourse and sometimes before our clothes were off. And as I mentioned just now, once they’re done women seem as ready to switch gears as anyone else. Anyway, the result has often been that when a partner has had an orgasm and I haven’t then I’ve been the one who wants to stay “intimate and comforting” after sex.
I like that last explanation quite a lot. First because it fits my experience, and second because it matches a lot of anecdotal and statistical data.
And since “the end of sex” is almost always defined as “male ejaculation, however long that takes” researchers collecting data are likely to overlook or discard cases where he never ejaculates at all.
Meanwhile, since, especially when the old guys were writing their sex manuals the idea that women had orgasms was still somewhere between inconceivable and intolerable, there wasn’t a whole lot of effort… or even conscious thought… put into making sure women had their turn after their partners were done.
Anyway, the upshot might be (might be, I’m proposing a hypothesis, not a conclusion) that the idea that women need more cuddling after sex than men might be because at the time women rarely had completion orgasms when or before their partners did. But that in reality anybody left hanging by their partner is going to at least appear more affectionate, smoochy, and “needing intimacy” even if the don’t mind that they’re not going to come.
@EE: Why is everyone getting hung up on “behavior” being genetically motivated. Well, a small cynical part of me thinks that some proportion WANT there to be a genetic or biological basis for Behavior Q so that they can throw up their hands and say “See? There’s nothing we can do…this is just the way it is so we have to deal with it even if it sucks” instead of wrestling with the conundrums of life amidst other human beings. Others want the “cause” to be some external factor because that would preclude them from having to take a cold hard look at the internal factors that they may have to adjust or change in themselves. But the more dominant idealist in me just thinks that scientific advances and biological/genetic research have become very timely topics and powerful developments in modern life and people are interested, which is good. 🙂
The practical problem-solver in me sees it like this: Instead of waxing philosophically over pet notions of whether women are innately more picky about casual sex, whether men are evolutionarily programmed to play the numbers game, and how much of it is biological or social or whatever–which are interesting to think about and are a rich source of internet argumentation–we might get farther by taking on some of the very solvable obstacles to getting people together for happy naked time, which regardless of sexual orientation or gender seem to center around wants like safety, pleasure, lack of stigma, and cultural support for a diversity of choices. THOSE are things each one of us can work for and advocate for in daily life if we really want to change things, a key value of the contributors here and many of the commenters as well 🙂
EasilyEnthused –
“Why is everyone getting hung up on “behavior” being genetically motivated. All our behavior is physical desire processed through our societal values then intelligently reasond through.”
I more or less agree with this, though as I’m sure everyone has noticed I have a healthy respect for the cognition that happens unconsciously.
“Could we just identify a gene that is identified like male pattern baldness that creates poor decision making with regards to sexual outlets? I don’t think the core is that women have lower drives than men. I think it’s more likely that when women do the mental calculation about “is it worth it?” they regularly come up deciding “no” whereas men decide “yes.””
But you still have to come up with a mechanism for why they come to that “no.” It is extraordinarily unlike that this would be a single gene (which is why I made the point of saying “genes involved in the regulation of” and not “the gene that controls”). This is a challenging thing to do, if you insist on working with humans exclusively (which most evo psychologists seem to do, for some reason) but as I said before, using primates or other social mammals that show vaguely similar sexual behavior could at least give you a place to start.
But the thing is, fully or at least mostly answering those three questions is really important if you want to make the case for something have a primarily genetic basis. Just because it’s hard to do doesn’t give you a free pass to make unsupported conclusions (like, “I found this difference between population X and population Z…and so here is the evolutionary explanation for it!”)
(btw, I apologize if I am casting your beliefs in a more extreme view than is warranted…I’m also sort of indirectly responding to other arguments made in the thread. Feel free to point out anywhere I’ve accidentally put words in your mouth.)
“It’s not about “sex drive” – both sexes could have equal sex drives – but the risk-taking mechanism that causes women and men to say “no thanks, I’ve got better things to do” seems to be more faulty in men and male animals in general.”
Also, for the risk-taking hypothesis…It’s also possible that, if this is an evolutionary adaptation, that it evolved due to selection pressures unrelated to sexual behavior and any influence on sex is just a byproduct…just throwing that out there, too, ’cause it’s the sort of stuff you have to ask yourself if you’re an evolutionary biologist.
There has been some research done on genetic influences on risk-taking behavior. Not sure any work has been doing looking at sex differences/effect on sexual behavior, however.
@EasilyEnthused: “So, by all standards of what we’re talking about – I should grow up a man with decreased sex drive and feeling guilty about wanting/needing sex.”
Actually no, according to the model Noah, Ozy, Kaija, Holly, plus plenty of other people, plus I am proposing is that you’d still have 100% of your sex drive but be either unwilling or unable to express it directly out of shame, fear, or frustration.
That’s not the same thing at all as being acculturated to having an actually decreased sex drive.
figleaf
@ EasilyEnthused 11:41 am
“It’s not about “sex drive” – both sexes could have equal sex drives – but the risk-taking mechanism that causes women and men to say “no thanks, I’ve got better things to do” seems to be more faulty in men and male animals in general.”
Could we not say faulty here? As that is pretty close to the core of different reproductive strategies of women and men, cf.
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions
@Fig: “I sort of grew up without the programming…”
“I was operating without the instruction manual when I was younger.”
“I was raised without any models whatsoever…”
You guys honestly believe you were?
I did not grow up with much of the TYPICAL programming that most people in North America seem to assume is the default. When I ran up against these (to me personally) weird ideas e.g., the “men are ___” and “women are ____” or what I *should* be looking for in a guy and how I *should* feel about sex, children, casual sex, non-monogamy, etc., they just didn’t work for me and I considered all of them but rejected most of them. Much easier to do if you’re not terribly invested in them in the first place, for sure.
“Hormones play a huge role. Just look at trangender women. Many will tell you they have had a decrease in sexual desire do to the female hormones. This is also true of cis-women in general. Not all women. But then we are making some generalizations because in truth all humans are unique. There are plenty of women with huge sexual appetites. But compare it with average men and the numbers are lower. ”
I’m here to contradict that notion. I *probably* have a pretty good resistance to T (and especially DHT), but apparently not enough for doctors to consider me intersex (they dismiss anything not immediately super obvious visually as not even worth testing).
Yet, I also had no libido whatsoever, and despite what seemed like a normally functional penis, no intention to masturbate until I was heavily questioned for NOT doing it. Then I tried, and quickly decided it wasn’t for me. Oversensitive (beg to stop soon enough), AFAIK anorgasmic organ, and about just no interest.
That (masturbation) didn’t change with estrogen and nullifying my testosterone, since 5 years ago. But I have more of a libido.
“I did not grow up with much of the TYPICAL programming that most people in North America seem to assume is the default. When I ran up against these (to me personally) weird ideas e.g., the “men are ___” and “women are ____” or what I *should* be looking for in a guy and how I *should* feel about sex, children, casual sex, non-monogamy, etc., they just didn’t work for me and I considered all of them but rejected most of them. Much easier to do if you’re not terribly invested in them in the first place, for sure.”
Same here, but it seems the easy rejection without a cost-benefit analysis about how others might see me, rather on the argument itself, is very aspie of me.
So, the first thing we need to identify is the hypothesis we’re testing. What would we predict from this experiment if SST was true, and what would we not predict if SST was true?
Well, SST is the theory, in layman’s terms, that men are less selective than women because women have to invest in pregnancy and men can spread their sperm around. So, we would predict, if SST is true, that men want more sex partners than women, and so men are more willing to sleep with bad sex partners than women.
According to Conley, do men want to sleep with worse sex partners than women? No, men reject unattractive partners at the same rate that women do*. Men also accept attractive partners at the same rate women do*. The only differences between genders are not when they encounter partners of differing attractiveness but when they disagree about the attractiveness of an undescribed partner.
According to Conley, do women want to sleep with higher status sex partners than men? Absolutely not; all the sex partners in the study had the same status, and not only do they explicitly say they don’t want to sleep with higher status men, they really don’t rank obviously high status Donald Trump enough higher than less obviously high status Carrot Top for it to be significant. More importantly they don’t rank either of them higher than a random stranger with no status.
So, in light of this, Hugh has to prove that Conley is evidence that this hypothesis is true, or at least that it isn’t evidence that it’s false
—-
The first thing Hugh goes after is whether it’s the gender of the proposer that’s important or the gender of the selector. This might be a challenge to the hypothesis, so it in theory works to claim that the gender of the selector is important; if the gender of the selector is important it might be that women are more selective than men.
Unfortunately the first thing he focuses on is the CHSP, which we’ve already established isn’t a particularly good measure of anything. We’ve already proved that women think of a random stranger different than men do; why does the random stranger matter if we’re trying to make conclusions on whether men will be more willing to have sex with an equivalent sex partner to women? If women are thinking of uglier people than men of course they’re going to want to have less sex with them, without any bearing on whether men would accept sex with a less attractive sexual partner than women.
Of course, the data that does measure equivalences directly contradicts Hugh; for the celebrity data, again, men are no more willing to have sex with an agreed-upon ugly person than women are.
—-
After the part on pleasure theory, which isn’t relevant to the hypothesis, we get to the part on Conley’s assertion that men and women were equally selective when attractiveness and familiarity were controlled for. This, if true, would contradict SST so Hugh has to prove it wrong to defend it.
His first assertion is that Jennifer Lopez beat both of the hot men. I don’t know why he thinks this is significant. Angelina Jolie didn’t beat either of the men, at least not by a significant amount. If Lopez proves women are more selective, surely Jolie must also prove that they’re not?
Second is that the reason Carrot Top is as unattractive as the stranger is due to floor effects. Well, possibly, but that’s an assertion without evidence, and as I’ve said twice before those are verboten. If he’s asserting that women think Carrot Top is really more attractive than the stranger he’ll have to come up with separate evidence to prove it; until then Occam’s Razor says that we have to take the study at its word when it says women rated Carrot Top as unattractive as a stranger.
Then he tries to minimize the effect of the claim on SST. Not so fast there; this claim is a direct contradiction of the hypothesis, his protests to the contrary. Though he’s right that whether men and women have the same amount of sex with attractive people is mostly irrelevant, he also goes on to quote Conley that “when women are presented with proposers who are equivalent in terms of safety and sexual prowess, they will be equally likely as men to engage in casual sex.” Well, clearly this implies that if women are presented with an ugly proposer, they are no more likely to reject him than men presented with a similarly ugly proposer. Direct contradiction of the hypothesis, and thus of SST.
Since he hasn’t managed to prove this false, and he needed to, I could just skip to the end here but for rigor I’ll cover the rest.
—-
Finally Hugh gets to his last point: according to him women might have a higher standard for sexual prowess than men.
Now, this is mostly a lot of hypothesis-constructing with not much data, and as such is a weak objection to begin with. But he does have some data here that I need to address before I can dismiss this part for lack of data.
First is the assertion that “women orgasm 35% the amount men do”. This seems very low to me, and when I check the footnote on how Hugh got it he says it is “based on the R-squared values”. The R-squared value is a measure of how much of the variation in one set of data is explained by its correlation with another set of data. I can’t see how you could ever get “women orgasm 35% the amount men do” from an R-squared value, and especially not without knowing what data sets it’s measuring.
But even supposing it was derived reliably, this implication that women get 35% of the pleasure from sex must be false because it being true would imply that the rest of the study is false. After all, most of the variation in sexual partners was explained by sexual prowess, and so if women had such a difficult time achieving orgasm Johnny Depp should have a lot more difficult time getting a woman to orgasm than Angelina Jolie. But these women apparently are just as willing to have sex with Johnny Depp as men are with Angelina Jolie, and say that the reason they do is because of his sexual prowess. Clearly therefore they don’t seem to believe that sex is any less pleasurable for them than for men. (As a note, this does hold for the next data point, though less strongly because it’s less extreme)
The other piece of data Hugh cites to support his argument is that women rated their casual sex partners 0.75 lower than the men did theirs. First of all, this is not much of a difference even if it says what Hugh thinks it says. 0.5 is about enough to be considered noise on this scale for the purposes of the rest of the data.
But the real problem with this statistic is: how is this evidence that women derive less pleasure from sex than men? The assertion that it does is itself without proof; it could, for example, be that men are not as good at sex as women. It could, for example, be an accident of the sample. It could be any number of things, and so this single data point is really not sufficient to support his hypothesis at all.
So because he hasn’t managed to give any solid proof, he doesn’t have any evidence that women derive less pleasure from sex than men. Meaning, of course, that that assertion gets cut by Occam’s Razor, and Hugh’s argument doesn’t have any further legs to stand on.
—-
*: I would give exact numbers, except that Yes Means Yes only gives numbers for the first comparison, and Hugh only gives numbers for the individual celebrities, so I can’t get any numbers on the Rosanne vs. Carrot Top comparison, or the Jennifer Lopez vs. Brad Pitt comparison
@Laplace:
No worries, I’m more or less playing devil’s advocate here to better understand my own biases, anecdata and ability to reason. I don’t care if I’m wrong in this particular issue – as a matter of fact, I HOPE I’m wrong – that would mean we have an even stronger reason to go after our unfair gender system – because it then becomes one that actively creates imbalance in sexual release for both parties to such a great extent that our entire notion of sexual imbalance is one created entirely by culture and that has created suffering for all – although I do think men have it worse (I’ll expound if anyone challenges this.)
@Figleaf:
Right, exactly that. I’ll say it simply (again?): Society has created a widespread pressure on women to turn down sex for reasons unrelated to desire.
And I made a mistake there – what I said is not what I meant to. What I meant to say was:
““So, by all standards of what we’re talking about – I should grow up a man with decreased sex drive and feeling guilty about wanting/needing sex to the point that I changed my BEHAVIOR to include less sex than I would otherwise have.”
(Goalpost shifting with this edit is completely unintentional, I recognize it and ask for forgiveness.)
Let’s for a moment have a hypothetical adventure into the brain of one of the women in the study being propositioned by random man.
At the very bottom level of her brain, immediately after the question is posed – she would unconciously begin a query of overall sexual desire.
(How much would I like to have sex right now or in the immediate future?)
Let’s say her desire is on a 1-10 scale. 1 means not her dream man would be accepted, and 10 means she’d do Hobo Joe in the middle of the quad that second.
This is number A.
Next, she judges this situation for likelihood of sexual “fufillment.” This is a highly subjective category that involves her tastes in men, the amount of time she has at that moment to run off and have a sexual experience that is long enough in duration for her to feel fufilled, and maybe a few others.
This is a highly subjective number between 1 and 10. 1 would be an extremely unattractive man (or someone not of the sex she is interested in) who propositions her as she’s walking to meet her parents at the train station. (Wrong person, no time.) 10 would be her ideal man asking her on an evening while she had no plans (right person, perfect timing.)
Call this number B.
Next, she judges the “risk” of this situation on a 1-10 scale. Risk could include everything from STDs from the act, to the likelihood that this is a Candid Camera practical joke and her “slutiness” be discovered. This is best summed up as “what’s the worst that could happen?”
1 to 10 scale. 1 being almost certain rape, std and pregnancy and 10 being zero chance of rape, std, pregnancy risk.
Call this number C.
Lastly, she judges the risk to her “image” both internal and external. 1 being a chaste girl who values her virginity with friends who would abandon her if they found out and 10 would be if she took pride in each sexual partner she had and her friends cheered her on.
Call this number D.
A+B+C+D=Z
If Z equals more than, let’s say 32, she says yes.
I think that men’s biological tendency towards risk-taking behavior creates a scenario more like this:
A+B+(C+8)+D=Z
If Z equals more than, let’s say 32, he says yes.
What would we see if men tended to have faulty risk-taking moderation? We’d see men with more injuries due to self-inflicted accidents (check). We’d see men with more speeding tickets and car crashes (check.) We’d see men in prison more (check.) We’d see men saying yes to sex with strangers (OMG gay male community) We’d see men more likely to have gambling addiction (check.) We’d see men more likely to pick fights just to save face (check.)
None of the above are exclusive to men (hell, almost nothing is) but when casual sex is so closely tied to disproportionate risk for men and women – the results aren’t surprising in the least if you embrace that males risky behavior is most likely biological – because risk isn’t something people (usually) consciously calculate.
@Gaius I wasn’t saying it was, I was actually saying the opposite – or at least that your initial post articulated the problems with biological determinism in general.
@LaPlace Ninja’d again! (Yay for derived relational responding/implicit learning!)
@EasilyEnthused: Regarding your model:
I’d say yes, definitely one of the things that the brain is built to do is to calculate the probable outcome of behaviours and try to do things that either 1) Cause a reinforcing consequence 2) Avoid a punishing consequence. In that sense, its “biological.” It’s innate, wired right in there. However, a persons history (with society, with culture, with actual experience of consequences… everything they’ve ever experienced) affects that calculation, and even what can be considered a reinforcer or a punisher.
The assumed duality of nature/nurture and body/mind is a problem underpinning a lot of this debate. The mind is biological. Behaviour is biological. And what biology has given human behaviour is a level of adaptability that the only thing our biology definitely predicts about our behaviour is that it cannot be predicted outside the context of the environment that biology is built to adapt to. And the environment, as it effects any one person, is massively complex, not least because everything that persons does (I include “thinking” as behaviour, and “thoughts” as verbal stimuli, BTW) changes the shape of the environment at the very same time the environment is changing our behaviour.
@EE
Check……Mate…….;)
@EE: “None of the above are exclusive to men (hell, almost nothing is) but when casual sex is so closely tied to disproportionate risk for men and women – the results aren’t surprising in the least if you embrace that males risky behavior is most likely biological – because risk isn’t something people (usually) consciously calculate.”
I think you might be able to use one equation for both men and women if you changed D to a simpler question of “how will my status be affected by a decision to have sex with the proposer?” Where 1 is “your peers consider you a slut” and 10 is “your peers consider you a stud.”
But if you do then the obvious risk/reward balance gets thrown way off in part because for men the risk and the reward are mutually amplifying (eliminating the need for the additional 8 in your equation) but for women the risk and the rewards are mutually antagonistic.
A quick test of the risk-taking/reward dimension: I’m always surprised — really surprised — at the difference in people’s responses when you request vs. dare them to do something. (For a neutral example compare most people’s reaction if you offer them a pickle vs. dare them to eat one.) The difference, I strongly suspect, is that putting something as a dare pushes the risk-taking button you mention. And there’s something about the dynamics of a dare that makes people assess status in a way a simple request doesn’t. Particularly when challenged to a dare people enter a situation where their status is affected if they accept (with the risks that might entail) but also affected negatively if they don’t (“chi-chi-chicken!”)
Even when status loss for declining would be quite low (as in the case of particularly outrageous dares) most people are still more somatically stimulated by at least the prospect of accepting.
More interesting still, in the context of a dare the reputational impact of the challenged act itself tends to be set aside by the challenged person, the challenger, and bystanders alike.
Now. With all this in mind, plus your (modified) formula, how do you think a woman might react differently to a request vs. a dare to engage in a particular sexual activity? How might their reaction affect the assertion that men are more likely to engage in risk-taking behavior?
Personally I think you’d still see men taking greater risks than women overall. But I also think you’d need to revise your experimental methods to examine and/or filter out differences in the rates at which men and women tend to be challenged to engage in risky behavior. And I suspect that once you did that you’d find that while again there’d still be differences they’d be smaller, and possibly much smaller, than unfiltered observations tend to suggest.
figleaf
@Figleaf:
At the risk of being a witling, I think you just kinda owned yourself a little.
In the second paragraph of your post at 4:03 PM, you measured status of “1” as “slut” and status of “10” as “stud.”
Now, maybe it’s just me, but “slut” is not a term I hear associated with anatomically male people very often. Likewise, “stud” is not a term I associate with anatomically female people very often.
So, your very word choice demonstrates a bias. Now, maybe that’s just because English lacks complimentary words for sexually successful folk with female anatomy (I can’t think of any off the top of my head), but in all seriousness, why is your status gendered?
I’m not trying to suggest we all be politically correct, and I’m sure you wrote it quickly, but still, it’s suggestive of EE’s point, yes?
I’ll leave the serious arguments to the rest of these folk, who appear to be more capable than I.
DISCLAIMER: I use the term “female bodied” and “male bodied” because human beings exhibit physical sexual dimorphism in terms of genitalia, but I continue to stipulate that our relationships with our bodies are personal and individual.
Ahem. *clears throat*
In the fourth paragraph of my reply above, I meant I couldn’t think of any WORDS for sexually successful women — not that I couldn’t think of any sexually successful women!
Sorry, I’m on dangling modifier patrol.
@Gaius: “So, your very word choice demonstrates a bias.”
Well yeah! I actually carefully chose those gendered words to anchor the spectrum for three reasons. First, to put both male-signified and female-signified people on it (where “signified” means how others perceive you.) Second because for better or worse (I say worse) we don’t really have (positive) words for women with sexual prowess and we don’t really have corresponding words for meticulously chaste men. And three, to highlight the Catch-22 nature of how society tends to rank men vs. women who take on sexual risk.
It’s the Catch-22 rather than anything “innate” or “genetic” that in my opinion accounts for quite a bit of women’s vs. men’s choices when it comes to risk.
figleaf
@Brian,
Thanks for taking the time to address my critique of the Conley study. Unfortunately, most of your claims are off-base, though it’s not completely your fault because you haven’t read the study. It’s going to take me a few comments to reply to you properly, since I’m going point-by-point.
I managed to find a PDF of the study after it came out. If you want the full text, drop a comment at my blog, and I’ll send it to whatever email address you use.
It’s not meaningless. I brought it up to refute Conley’s claim that response to a casual sex proposal depends more on the gender of the proposer than on the gender of the receiver. Men were more likely to accept proposals across the board, which suggests that gender of the receiver of the proposal is still important.
Furthermore, I wanted to discuss Conley’s notion that men and women respond “similarly” to proposals from famous people, at least in the case of attractive famous people.
In study 2a, Johnny Depp got 4.09 (likelihood of response to proposal) and Angelina Jolie got 4.16, and Conley found that the result was no significant (e.g. it could have easily been due to chance). However, in study 2b, Brad Pitt got 3.63 while Jennifer Lopez got 5.17, and this difference was significant at the 8% level. Given that these celebrity results are so different, I think her methodology is flawed because her sample size of celebrities is too small, even though she did do a pilot study to pick which ones to use.
Brian, please be as rigorous with your own posts as you are with mine. I never “assumed” that women who identify as bisexual skew towards interest in women. I don’t know which way bisexual women lean, on average. The point is that Conley doesn’t know, either, which sheds doubt on her results, when she claims that men are generally viewed as unattractive proposers. Gay men find men to be moderately attractive proposers (though not as highly as heterosexual men find women).
@Brian
That’s not quite how the SST puts it. I recommend people reading it. The SST says:
Sex differences in acceptability of bad sex might follow from the SST, but they aren’t discussed by it.
Note that the SST also says that “Different contexts trigger which strategy, or combination of strategies, is pursued.” This principle will become important later.
But, at Conley acknowledges, there could have been floor effects. It could have been the case that men rate Roseanne at a 1, while women would rate Carrot Top at a -2 if the scale would go that low. A 1-7 scale doesn’t distinguish between “no,” and “hell no.”
When Conley talks about “attractiveness,” she means likelihood of accepting a casual sex proposal from someone. But that’s not what most people mean by “attractiveness.” The study does not show that equally undesirable men and women are equally likely to be rejected as sex partners, because we have no idea whether Roseanne, Carrot Top, Trump are equally unattractive.
Buuut as I explained in my previous response, that’s not what Conley actually found in her 2nd celebrity sub-study. She found a marginally significant sex difference between responses to Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lopez. Conley’s numbers tell a different story from her writeup.
I disagree completely with the Conley study that taking a small handful of celebrities and rating them on a 1-7 scale shows very much about people’s responses to celebrities, or to people they know. After seeing that study 2a (Johnny Depp vs. Angelina Jolie) found no sex difference, while study 2b (Brad Pitt vs. Jennifer Lopez) did find a sex difference, I’m absolutely not confident about what would happen if we picked another attractive male and female celebrity and asked people who they would be more likely to have casual sex with. The results could have easily been skewed by characteristics of the celebrities (e.g. Trump has a big stigma for being an asshole).
Just as there could have been a floor effect with responses to unattractive celebrities, there could have been a ceiling effect with responses to attractive celebrities: there may be a maximum proportion of people wanting to have sex with a celebrity.
Conley’s study doesn’t really give a very good measure of status. Conley’s status items were taken from SST research, but they are primarily financial:
The problem is that this is a study on short-term mating preferences of college students. We wouldn’t expect financial prospects to be so important to college students in a short-term context. There are plenty of other studies finding that wealth matters outside college and/or in long-term mating contexts. (Conley does throw in “good heredity”, but there is no guarantee that participants were interpreting it as “good genes” as opposed to “good family.”)
SST predicts that wealth would be important to women mainly in long-term mating contexts. One of the main hypotheses is “Different contexts trigger which strategy, or combination of strategies, is pursued.” Right out of the SST (emphases mine):
Conley’s findings on status are incredibly weak as a disconfirmation of the SST.
Back to you:
Do you really think that response to sample size of 8 celebrities (Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Donald Trump, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lopez, Carrot Top, Roseanne Barr, and Christie Brinkley) is really a good measure of people’s responses to status? Or even of their responses to celebrities? I don’t think Donald Trump, Roseanne, and Carrot Top especially are very representative of high-status celebrities, because they are widely hated and considered obnoxious, which would lower their status.
1. Floor effects
2. The fact that women don’t rank obnoxious unattractive high-status men above random strangers doesn’t tell us how women would rank non-obnoxious unattractive high-status men relative to random strangers.
Conley’s results are mostly in line with the SST. When it appears to contradict the SST, I can cast doubt on Conley’s methodology. Let’s review.
– Men were more likely than women to accept a hypothetical sexual proposal from a random stranger = in line with SST
– Men and women were equally likely to accept a hypothetical sexual proposal from an unattractive celebrity = out of line with SST, BUT (a) floor effects, (b) small sample size of celebrities
– Men and women were equally likely to accept a hypothetical sexual proposal from an attractive celebrity in study 2a = out of line with SST, BUT (a) ceiling effects, (b) small sample size of celebrities, (c) study 2b found a difference
– Men were more likely than women to accept a hypothetical sexual proposal from an attractive celebrity in study 2b at the 8% significance level = in line with SST
– Men were more likely to accept a hypothetical proposal from a friend (2.84 vs 1.97 on a 1-7 scale) in study 2c = consistent with SST. The fact that anticipation of pleasure explained the gap did not contradict the SST.
– Out of people who had received at least one casual sex proposal, men were more likely to accept than women (73% vs. 40%) = consistent with SST. Of course, this figure doesn’t tell us the actual probability of someone accepting a proposal, because it doesn’t ask people how many proposals they received in the first place. A man who gets 1 proposal and accepts one is counted the same as a woman who gets 3 and accepts 1, even though the woman would be pickier. If Conley had asked people how many proposals they had received, vs. how many they had accepted, that would be a more interesting figure.
@Brian:
It’s significant because it undermines Conley’s claim that “men and women respond similarly to proposals from famous people.” That was only the case in study 2a (Johnny Depp vs. Angelina Jolie), but not 2b (Brad Pitt vs. Jennifer Lopez) where there was a difference of 5.17 to 3.63 out of 7, which was marginally significant. The point is that these sub-studies found different results, which should make us doubtful of Conley’s conclusions. Her sample size of celebrities is too small, and there is no guarantee that they were matched in attractiveness in the first place.
It’s not an assertion. It’s a possibility, a possibility that Conley even acknowledges. She asked people to rate the likeliness of saying “yes” on a 1-7 scale. 1s and 2s are pretty unlikely. You’re right, we don’t have evidence that Conley’s study was hitting a floor effect, but the possibility that she was is a limitation of her study and should make us less confident in her results until someone with better methodology replicates it.
It’s not my job to prove that sort of stuff. It’s Conley writing the study, so it’s her job to demonstrate her conclusions. The burden of proof isn’t on me to “prove” her wrong. I’m not trying to establish anything, I’m shedding doubt on her attempts to establish her claims by pointing to potential limitations in her methodology.
Occam’s Razor does not demand that we ignore possibility methodological flaws in studies. Do you really go believing every bad study that you read until someone proves its conclusions false? Our beliefs should only be influenced by a study proportional to the quality of the study; the Conley study left open many avenues of attack, so it shouldn’t shift our beliefs very much.
Yes, yes, the unattractive celebrities being equally repulsive at least appears to contradict the SST. But I am justified in protesting due to floor effects, and due to the low sample size of celebrities, and lack of controlling for their attractiveness.
Ugliness is not the same thing as lack of sexual prowess. So do you actually mean “if women are presented with a proposer they perceive to be sexual incompetent, they are no more likely to reject him than men presented with a proposer who they perceive to be similarly sexually incompetent?”
That’s not a contradiction of the SST. The SST says that women are predicted to be pickier. It doesn’t claim that they are pickier in the specific situation of equally incompetent partners. If women are pickier because they anticipate less pleasure, that doesn’t contradict the SST at all, because the SST doesn’t predict the specific psychological mechanisms that would produce greater female selectivity.
As for “ugliness” vs. attractiveness, Conley never measured participants perceptions of the ugliness or attractiveness of her proposers. If she had controlled for it, her study would be a lot more interesting.
Brian, I hate to tell you, but you got the footnotes confused (sorry about the small text). The R-squared value refers to footnote 3, whereas the 35% figure relates to footnote 4, where you will see the citation for a study cited by Conley finding that women orgasm 35% of the time men do in first-time sexual encounters.
That’s not the right way to think about it. The 35% figure is a across a sample; it doesn’t mean that women would have only a 35% chance of orgasm with Johnny Depp. Women could well expect that Johnny Depp will give them orgasms. Or they might think that other aspects of the sexual experience with him will be valuable, because sex isn’t just about orgasms, especially with highly attractive people.
If you read the full text, you would see that this difference is highly significant (i.e. it’s not just “noise”). The Cohen’s d is 0.56, a medium-sized effect, which means that women’s responses are 0.5 standard deviations different from men’s.
Yes, the result could be because “men are not as good at sex as women.” Or it could be because women are harder to please, due to physiological and psychological differences. Or it could be some combination of the two. The point is, we don’t know!
Conley can’t control for sexual capability meaningfully, because being “good at sex” with women is not the same thing as being “good at sex” with men.
For instance, let’s take a man and women who only know missionary and cowgirl. Yet during intercourse, the man has orgasms, and the woman doesn’t. So who is “better” at sex? They are engaging in the same activities. For these sorts of people, women would indeed anticipate less pleasure than men. But that’s not because the guy is “worse at sex,” it’s because the bar he needs to meet is higher.
Now let’s say that the guy learns oral, and gives the woman a similar rate of orgasms. Now she anticipates equal pleasure from sex. So does that mean they are “equally good” at sex? Maybe if you look at the outcome, but if you look at the skills involved in the process, the guy has more skills (PIV intercourse, oral) vs. the woman (just PIV). If you teach the woman oral, then the guy is probably back to having more orgasms.
For men and women to anticipate the same amount of orgasms from sex, the men probably need to have a larger amount of skills, experience, and/or toys.
And no, orgasm isn’t the only source of pleasure from sex; it’s just an example. I’d argue that it’s difficult to give women in other ways, too, because anecdotally women on average are more selective about which parts of their bodies are touched in which order.
I don’t have to prove anything to shed doubts on Conley’s conclusions. All I have to do is show reasons to reduce our confidence in her results and conclusions in a quite typical way of critiquing studies. I am shedding doubt on her notion that you can control for perceived sexual capability, given that “sexual capability with men” and “sexual capability with women” aren’t the same thing (though there is of course overlap).
When you strip away Conley’s spin, what she found is that women are more selective than men about sexual proposals, consistent with the SST. Her finding that this difference is partially explained by differences in perceived sexual competence of the partner is interesting, and should give us hope that improving men’s sexual capabilities will make casual sex proposals more attractive to women.
My point is that it’s unlikely that changing men’s sexual capabilities can close the gap completely. To get women to be as likely to accept casual sexual proposals as heterosexual men are now, we would have to get men to be around as sexually attractive and capable as Brad Pitt.
Comment stuck in moderation due to more than 1 link. Suggestion: raise the amount of links are tolerated before a comment is auto-moderated? Thanks.
I’m arguing that sex marketplace ideas are horribly misguided, since there is no valid measure of sexual success, unless we only look at who actually ends up spreading their genes, which is a very limited approach to sex in a society where contraception is widely available and widely used. It might well be that without the cultural and societal pressures the CHSP (or some more realistic scenario) results might well be very close between men and women, but this is irrelevant. We live in a world where those cultural and societal pressures exist, and no one can really escape them. Even rejecting the norms explicitly outright is a way of adapting to them.
The thing about the marketplace analogy that bugs me the most is the fact that the “sexual / dating market” is extremely illiquid, and in general the “trade” is very thin. I suspect more than 90 % of sexual activity happens in some kind of a relationship. A one night stand as a product is clearly very different from a life long monogamous relationship, and there is no one scale on which relationships can be compared to each other. I have been in two long relationships where there was a sexual component, and they were so different from each other even in the sexual aspect that I couldn’t tell which one was more sexually satisfying for me if my life depended on it. And there was much more to the relationships besides sex.
My real life sex/dating potential is not measurable by “how large part of my target group I would be able to seduce / attract” but by “do my social circles include people who are available, are part of my target group, and might be interested in me”. Because of this, anyone can trivially improve their chances just by including more people in their social circles. (This does not come without cost, but the cost is usually superseded by the benefits of having many friends.)
TheAverageOutlier,
I think you’re mixing up two versions of “marketplace”. There’s the attractivity marketplace and then there’s the OP’s suggestion that the social assumption that sex as such involves a value transfer, ie, specifically, women have it, and men want it, so they have to come up with something to balance that equation, is wrong.
A few days ago I was writing what ended up being a very long post on the short comings of the social sciences and specifically in regards to human sexuality. But after too much editing and not enough time what I finally ended up posting, although a lot shorter, didn’t convey my ideas very well. You can see it here:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2011/07/20/the-internalized-conflict-of-%E2%80%9Cmasculinity%E2%80%9D-noh/#comment-177510
I agree that “it’s all made up”. And although I have a few quibble points I think the original post and many of the comments ‘defending’ the OP were pretty much inline of what I was trying to say. At times I was even like, “yes, yes, YES! YES!! exactly!”
I just thought it was funny that I was struggling to write something good and at the same time there was this awesome thread going on.
@Hugh: Since that was QUITE long, I hope you won’t mind if I don’t respond to each part individually. Though I could it would mostly be repeating the same criticism over and over, which I don’t think is worth balooning this out for pages.
Brian, please be as rigorous with your own posts as you are with mine. I never “assumed” that women who identify as bisexual skew towards interest in women. I don’t know which way bisexual women lean, on average. The point is that Conley doesn’t know, either, which sheds doubt on her results, when she claims that men are generally viewed as unattractive proposers. Gay men find men to be moderately attractive proposers (though not as highly as heterosexual men find women).
But you can’t even assume that that’s a thing until you test for it! You have no idea which way bisexual women might skew, and unless you know that, any criticism you give based on the way bisexuals skew is utterly without evidence, and gets itself Occam’d immediately.
[skipping a bit to your summary at the end of the post]
Conley’s results are mostly in line with the SST. When it appears to contradict the SST, I can cast doubt on Conley’s methodology. Let’s review.
See, this is the problem. You have no solid evidence that anything she did was wrong, which is why I’m not going to consider any of your methodological criticisms. In the absence of actual counterevidence against her results, the results stand; you could in theory make up any kind of reason for why the results were wrong, but if you don’t have any actual evidence that they are wrong I have no reason to privilege your criticisms above the data.
I agree that one study cannot be used as solid proof for anything, but you don’t seem to add any doubt past that principle.
@Sam,
You are probably correct in that I’m mixing things up; it’s very likely that these ideas should be tackled separately.
The value transfer idea is correct when an actual payment is being made (in a monetary or some other form). But while men using female prostitutes’ services is significantly more commonplace than vice versa (I think the cultural pressures come into effect here), both kinds of transactions do happen. And agreed-upon sex trade is a very small part of all sex.
I accept that even entirely consensual sexual acts can sometimes be very unidirectional, with one partner doing a favor to the other. But instinctively I can not think of a reason why, even with all those cultural and societal pressures, the balance would be exceedingly heavily tilted in one direction. In my view the “intrinsic value” of sex is very much about endorphins and oxytocin and the psychosocial consequences thereof. I can not see why women would be inherently less “into” these. Evpsych handwaving about incentives does not really convince me if there’s no real-world biological mechanism that works in agreement with those theories. While there has been research on the biological mechanisms of human mate selection, I have been left with the understanding that this research has largely been centered around pheromones.
@Brian,
No need to respond at length, because I think the core of our disagreements are easy to find.
There is evidence that she did something wrong in her own study. One of the celebrity sub-studies found that men and women were equally likely to accept proposals from attractive celebrities; the other celebrity sub-study found that men were more likely to accept proposals. If it’s indeed true that women and men are equally likely to accept proposals from attractive celebrities, then something was wrong with the second study which didn’t find that result.
I disagree that we should throw out plausible methodological criticisms of studies, even when there is only a small or moderate possibility of them being true, as long as they aren’t highly improbable.
Would you have also looked at the original Clark-Hatfield study and believed it’s conclusions? Or would you have looked at its methodological problems and said “hey, maybe this study means that women are more sexually selective, but a proposal from a stranger in the middle of the day isn’t a good methodology for measuring sexual selectivity in real world situations, which makes me lower my confidence in the idea that this study shows a sex difference in selectivity?”
We didn’t need to wait until the Conley study to have methodological objections to the Clark-Hatfield study, and we don’t need to wait to have methodological objections to the Conley study, either. Occam’s Razor would demand us to abandon sufficiently low probability objections (e.g. Conley was manipulated by the flying spaghetti monster), but suggesting that Conley’s conclusions about celebrities are unreliable due to a low sample size of celebrities (8) is many orders of magnitude more probable. Sufficiently low sample sizes leading to unreliable results is not a novel hypothesis that is subject to Occam’s Razor.
All I’m saying is that methodological objections should decrease our confidence in the results of a study, depending on how probable those objections are. If you don’t think my objections are probable, and that (a) you are 100% confident that bisexual women are at least as attracted to women as men, that (b) Conley’s results with 8 celebrities are representative of people’s sexual interest in celebrities in general, and that (c) you are sure that men and women are equally easy to please sexually, then yes, you should throw away my objections and not let them influence your belief in the study. But if you have doubts about any of those notions, then those doubts should extend to any conclusions based on them in the study.
I may be inexperienced when it comes to debate, but I am of the opinion that you are grasping at straws, Brian. Also, you seem to be overly reliant on Occam’s Razor. Which requires that all statements you are applying the law of parsimony to, be of equal merit other than their complexity. It’s not JUST “Simplest one wins”
I’d start in on the rest of it, except I don’t feel like searching the web and reading a bunch of dry psychobabble so I can remove your personal biases and debate rhetoric from the issue.
@The OP
As Sam observes, there are actually a lot of models of sexuality that use some sort of market or economic metaphors. Some of these make more sense than others. When addressing these ideas, I’d suggest not just slapping down the cruder versions of them, but also asking what is the best version of the argument that could be made.
Across the literature on mating preferences, there are consistent findings of women on average having greater selectivity*, and stronger preferences for social status and wealth.
* sex differences in selectivity are narrowed for long-term relationships, small groups, and other unusual situations (e.g. researchers force women to approach men)
These sex differences, combined with a denial of female libido, often lead to economic metaphors. A very common metaphor is that women “give” sex in exchange for access to non-sexual benefits from men, like social status or money. Although this transactional model describes sexuality in some contexts (e.g. prostitution), it’s not a preferable or necessary model.
However, if sex differences in sexual selectivity and preferences for certain traits (e.g. social status, wealth, education, intelligence) exist, even with highly overlapping bell curves, then surely those differences have an impact? Some sort of economic metaphors or concept of market forces may be helpful to describe this impact.
For instance, let’s imagine that in a typical situation where a man and a woman are dating, he will know that he wants to have sex with her before she knows she wants to have sex with him. Another way of thinking about it: when men and women are dating, the person who knows they want to have sex first is usually the man.
If such a sex difference exists, it could easily lead to women being seen as “gatekeepers,” even if men’s and women’s libido’s are equal in magnitude. Strictly speaking, they both have gates, his just opens first (on average), so it’s her gate that finally determines whether they have sex.
It’s no more outlandish to talk about a sexual marketplace in sex than it is to apply economic metaphors to, say, musical duets (to expand on Thomas’ example from YMY). You could say that a duet involves a trade of musical abilities.
Pickup models are often opaque, non-rigorous, and confusing, but there is a lot of truth in them, especially as applied to mainstream culture.
Let’s take the most reasonable version of the “alpha male, beta male” concept and try to translate it into more accessible language. The root of the concept is that a man’s masculinity, social status, and social skills have an effect on his success with women.
“Alpha male” roughly corresponds to male with “hegemonic masculinity” with social skills and social status. “Beta male” corresponds to a male without “hegemonic masculinity,” and with lower social skills and social status.
These qualities, along with physical attractiveness, are anecdotally pretty good predictors of success with women in the mainstream, and there is plenty of research consistent with these ideas.
In alternative subcultures, things work differently, and I don’t feel that “alpha male” makes sense as a way to describe men who are most successful with women in certain subcultures. But as far as the mainstream goes, these concepts are not just completely made up.
Btw, pickup artists contain some of the loudest protestors against what figleaf calls the “no-sex class” paradigm, where female desire and male attractiveness are inconceivable. Pickup is a far better framework than feminism for destroying the no-sex class paradigm in mainstream culture, because pickup artists have way more knowledge of mainstream female responses and mainstream male attractiveness than feminists do.
You must have done a really big survey project of MRAs to be able to make this statement.
Personally, I’ve currently suspended judgment on sex differences in libido, because I haven’t yet done a literature review. The fact that many people expound on this topic without doing the research (regardless of the direction of their conclusions), speaks of bias and wishful thinking.
Everyone wants what they want? That’s not a theory, it’s a tautology.
The only theory in your theory is the notion that people having sex are doing it because they want sex. That refutes the no-sex class transactional model, where men pay to compensate for a lack of female desire, but it doesn’t refute any of the other marketplace ideas.
For instance, let’s say that women are average place higher importance on social status because they find it attractive in mates. Women and men would want sex equally, but women on average only want it with higher status men. This situation might look like an exchange of status for sex, but what’s really going on is an exchange of sex for sex, or sexual desirability for sexual desirability, where women on average are simply attracted by men’s status. Yet if women desire more status than men, then there will be less demand for male sexuality than for female sexuality at each level of status, all else being equal.
Your models is always right because it never sticks its neck out to make any real predictions. That also makes it not very useful for any other purpose than refuting the crude no-sex class transactional model.
Here’s my model (short version):
In mainstream culture, people are gender-typical, and desire people who are gender-typical. On average, men prefer women with above average femininity. On average, women prefer men with above average masculinity. (“Masculine” means having traits that are more common in men than in women, while “feminine” means having traits that are more common in women than in men.) Women are more selective than men. These sex differences are lowered for long-term mating.
In some alternative subcultures, people are less gender-typical. They are more androgynous, and more open to date people who are less gender-typical. Sex differences in selectivity are reduced.
It’s easy for me to imagine how someone in one of these subcultures might think that all these ideas about sex differences in mating, and the idea of a sexual marketplace, are just made up.
If you and the people you are dating want similar things in each other, then it hardly looks like any sort of trade is occurring in a marketplace. If you and the people you date have equally stringent criteria, then you will be less likely to experience a lack of demand for your sexuality.
But sexuality for gender-typical heterosexual mainstream people doesn’t work like that.
“But sexuality for gender-typical heterosexual mainstream people doesn’t work like that.”
Is there really such thing as a gender-typical heterosexual mainstream person?
I think that’s an artificial social construct that does not really exist in the wild, and no one really is entirely that, even if some (I’d gather very few) people might identify as such.
@Hugh:
So, just to check… if these factors vary between mainstream and subculture, then you’re saying you believe it is cultural, rather than biological?
Hugh,
“It’s easy for me to imagine how someone in one of these subcultures might think that all these ideas about sex differences in mating, and the idea of a sexual marketplace, are just made up.”
but aren’t you making the OP’s point here? *IF* the recent appearance of social and sexual subcultures (and that is certainly a recent appearance by any historical standard) was sufficient to undo the myth within these cultures then aren’t such subcultural mating patterns indicative of the OP’s suggestion being correct? I mean, it’s not like he said social myths of rationaliy aren’t embodied in people’s preferences and aren’t “real” in the way in which people in the medieval felt that the axioms of their life were. But *if* some subcultures demonstrate that the mechanism is not inherent in human mating, and you agree with that, then you are, in my opinion, basically agreeing with the OP.
You will probably disagree about how to deal with the social myths causing the current setup individually, depending on how interested either of you are in mating with mainstream women and to which extent you’d be willing to accomodate their wishes relative to your own, and thus depending on the extent to which you experience the “reality” of the embodied myth, but that would be a disagreement on a secondary level, don’t you think?
Is there really such thing as a gender-typical heterosexual mainstream person? I think that’s an artificial social construct that does not really exist in the wild, and no one really is entirely that, even if some (I’d gather very few) people might identify as such.
I think this is the crux of the issue, for me personally. I think that there is a LOT more diversity in social behavior and in dating and mating than we are led to believe, as a consequence of mistaking the statistical norm or average as the “normal” behavior for the entire distribution as well as the influence of media and marketing, which does its level best to chunk big groups of people together for business efficiency. I suspect that a great number of people look around at the conventional/current model of “gender-typical heterosexual mainstream” behavior and feel that it doesn’t quite fit and is sort of constraining, but think that “well everyone else seems to be ok with this so I must be the oddball” when really, we’re just a collection of different kinds of oddballs; so each one of us feels like an oddball and think that we’re the only ones, when secretly, everyone else is feeling similarly.
It’s like the difference between individual men and women trying on this season’s clothes (skinny jeans for both genders!) and feeling like there is something wrong with them and their bodies because the clothes don’t fit or look right when it’s the actually clothes themselves that aren’t right for everyone’s body, and in fact, are right for only a small proportion of bodies, yet marketed as the MUST HAVE for everyone.
To the people who disagree with Hugh’s “mainstream” valuation:
Do any of you work retail at a major national chain? Do you work boring 9-5 cubicle jobs? Do you live in the suburbs? Do you spend a lot of time around “average people?”
How many of you drive minivans or SUVS with the little white stick-people on the back that have a man, woman, two kids and a dog?
Do you all realize who you are? You’re people on a Web site dedicated to gender issues – you’re already a TINY PORTION OF THE POPULATION THAT REALIZE GENDER ISSUES EXIST. Beyond that, you’re the even smaller portion that realize men have a stake in things.
Let’s not forget this – just because no one true hegemonic male/female might not actually exist – it doesn’t mean there isn’t a vast majority of the population that comes damn close. I know, I work and live with them every day.
gender-typical heterosexual mainstream people
@Hugh, your entire counterargument rests on this concept, but you never explain what it means. Like I said, if you throw out enough data you can prove anything, and you’re throwing out an AWFUL lot by insisting on a notion of “mainstream” that clearly has meaning to you, but looks to me like its definition is “whatever doesn’t contradict the theory I’m fond of.” But then, perhaps I’m being unkind.
So, who exactly are these true Scotsmen? What is this mainstream you describe, and how do you tell when you’re in it other than “attempts to schtup in a market-based way”?
Pickup is a far better framework than feminism for destroying the no-sex class paradigm in mainstream culture, because pickup artists have way more knowledge of mainstream female responses and mainstream male attractiveness than feminists do.
This made me laugh, so well done. A cultish and widely-disliked subculture is better at “mainstream” than one of the leading modes of social thought of the past century. Well, okay, I suppose that’s not impossible. Given the recent studies indicating that feminists have better sex, though, I can’t say that it seems very well-supported.
Do any of you work retail at a major national chain? Do you work boring 9-5 cubicle jobs? Do you live in the suburbs? Do you spend a lot of time around “average people?”
How many of you drive minivans or SUVS with the little white stick-people on the back that have a man, woman, two kids and a dog?
@EasilyEnthused, are you describing actually-average people, or the notion of “average people” one sees in sitcoms, TV ads, and Cosmopolitan articles? Because it looks to me like the latter. Again, how much of the data are we willing to throw out to pretend that there’s a “normal”? Because if it’s suburbanite cube jockeys in SUVs, we’ve just eliminated most of the population.
@Noah
I guess your “normal” isnt EE’s “Average”, I do know that my world is slightly more slanted to EE’s though I am aware of the others. 😉
@EE Mmhm but do you know what those people in their SUVs get up to when they arrive home and shut the bedroom doors? My experience of attending some very, uhm, non-normative events is that there are a lot of “regular people from the suburbs” who turn up.
And, as others have suggested, “regular people from the suburbs” aren’t necessarily the definition of mainstream anyway. I realise that the suburbs and small towns and so on make up most of the land mass*, but the actual population is so dense in the inner cities, that in terms of population it’s way more balanced.
(* in America at least. Remember, life is very different elsewhere and, since you’re throwing around how-much-experience-have-you-had? arguments, I’d ask how much have you travelled and lived outside of the US?)
Also, if we’re talking mainstream, Johnny Depp tops hottest-male-celebrity charts on a regular basis, and while his look varies he’s definitely got some androgyny going on there (even more so when he was younger). I mean, he’s not at Andrej Pejic (yum!) levels of androgyny, but he’s not exactly the hypermasculine figure that you would expect to top the mainstream charts based on this model.
@Sam I think is getting at the idea that when we say “What if it’s all made up?” we don’t mean it doesn’t exist. I believe christianity is all made up. I don’t believe in god. But churches clearly exist, as do priests, bibles, people flocking to them* in SUVs to sing hymns. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it was all made up, a cultural artefact. One that many people subscribe to — something like a billion catholics worldwide? — but still neither universal nor factual. I feel like a lot of the arguments here are “pointing at churches” which we already know exist, but don’t prove the existence of god.
(* again, in the US. Here in the UK, the official state religion is Church of England and its attendance levels are only 3% of population; including all the other churches brings attendance up to just 10%)
My “normal” is WAY off from that described by EE, which explains why all the PUA and mainstream gender roles and “this is what people do and everyone knows it” stuff just doesn’t compute in my head. My friends tend to be queer-leaning or kinkster or poly or anti-consumerist or child-free with a whimsical disregard for gender binaries, cultural scripts, and labels of any sort and we’re pretty geeky/nerdy. I do think that EE is only something in that the people talking on this blog are a minority in that we are aware of and critical of gender issues that are trivial to invisible to a lot of people (and their hot button issues may be trivial to invisible to us, so no value judgment implied there). However, I really like talking with people from different worlds and getting an insight into other perspectives, so I really do enjoy the variety of input here. 🙂
Look, I’m not going to be able to describe “average” in any meaningful way in a comment box, or a blog post or even after 10 years of daily writing.
First of all, how are you evaluating people?
A)The way they present themselves to the public
B) The way they present themselves to people close to them (lovers)
C) The things they desire/feel but don’t tell anyone
D) The things they cannot admit to themselves that they desire/feel
From an omniscient point of view, farther down that rabbit-hole you go, I’m sure you might find the truth that there “is no average” but when you deal with people at those very high, external levels of interaction in real life, you can never know how deep their rabbit hole goes and what might be down there.
Therefore, when I meet a 45 year old father of two who runs a small sales department in Saginaw, drives a BMW 3-series, has a sweet, attractive wife, 3 kids and regularly goes to church, I don’t presume that he’s secretly wife swapping and enjoys dressing in women’s clothing when his wife is out of the house.
Cheradenine brings up a very good point: people who challenge social constructions are not denying their existence. Money is a good example..total social construction, however it is very real and issues that involve money have very real consequences. The good part is that any social construction, no matter how well entrenched at present, can be deconstructed or replaced with a different construction. To continue with the example, money itself has changed from hunks of precious metal to paper checks to purely electronic transactions between computers, and the fluctuation in the value of a dollar (the recent drop in the value of the US dollar?) or an asset (the US housing market crash?) shows that money is what we believe it is rather than having an inherent value of its own. Gender roles and dating/mating customs are even more mutable (honestly, I’m really glad I don’t live in a time or place where my parents chose my mate for me sight unseen…yikes!).
@Noah,
“This made me laugh, so well done. A cultish and widely-disliked subculture is better at “mainstream” than one of the leading modes of social thought of the past century. Well, okay, I suppose that’s not impossible. Given the recent studies indicating that feminists have better sex, though, I can’t say that it seems very well-supported.”
I’m not sure any of that is mutually exclusive.
All the debate about masculinity and feminism that we had over at Clarisse Thorn’s blog over the last 20 months indicates to me that feminists don’t really understand mainstream dating/mating and the desires of women who are mainstream in their desires whether they identify as such or not. I mean, look at the responses from mainstream female friends I mentioned here – noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/cocks-rock-part-four-mysterious-genitals/#comment-5404 – and I have tons of those stories. Tons. Feminists don’t have a vocabulary for that fundamental genedered interaction beyond talking about “nice guys”, “consent”, and “sexual violence”. All very important, but not at the center of most people’s gendered experiences, which appears to be more about attraction than anything else. But they do hold the discourse hegemony in the field.
At the same time I believe that feminists (except for those who are sex negative) will have better sex because they’re more aware of the dimensions of their desires and thus better able to communicate them.
And I would say that, while academic feminism as a model of social thought has been fashionable throughout the past century, it is not particularly important philosophically compared to its political and social impact. Whatever you look at in feminist philosophy, it’s been there before, from radical feminists’ misapplied Marxism to Judith Butler explaininig Hegel to postmodernists.
Kaija24:
“More mutable” does not mean “infinitely mutable” and this is where I think feminism and queer activists as a whole make their biggest mistake.
I completely confess that I have had little experience outside the U.S. Inside the U.S. I have lived in many communities (small town, big cities, small cities, rural farmland) east of the Mississisisisiissipppi. I wish I could attach a tag to my name that said (Note, EE has balls all idea what he’s talking about outside the U.S.)
I’m going to try not to lose my patience here – but I may feel. It’s possible I’m not being clear, as what I’m going to say seems to me like something that should be obvious when it comes to “Middle Class Kink.”
No snark, no sarcasm:
People who can go to non-normative events are going to be people who A) have enough money/time to engage in organized kink events and B) not famous enough to be recognized (like CEOs, politicians) at said events.
So, if 10% of the population is into some subset of “non normative event” then you shouldn’t be surprised that people with extra time/money (money for a babysitter if nothing else) but not sooooo much time/money so as to attract public attention would show up at that stuff.
Does that make sense? Please tell me you get what I’m saying.
@Noah: “This made me laugh, so well done. A cultish and widely-disliked subculture is better at “mainstream” than one of the leading modes of social thought of the past century.”
Ha, this made me laugh. Surely you realise that most mainstream people consider feminists to be a cultish and widely-disliked subculture? I love how most feminists lives seem dedicated to exposing the patriarchy yet when the idea of a mainstream culture and way of life doesn’t suit their needs suddenly you’re all about questioning whether a mainstream culture exists at all. I love reading this stuff.
And before you question my previous post ask yourself how many times you’ve heard about a normal person use the phrase “I’m not a feminist but…”
On “average” and “normal”…
These are useful terms for describing how groups of people behave. Excellent when you’re into marketing, or trying to accrue votes in an election. They, however, do not describe individual persons. They describe a distribution. They describe the shape of how a group of people vary.
There is no bell curve without variance. People are more or less likely to fall under areas under the curve.
Normality is a tool for modelling the behaviour of a group.
It is not a useful tool for predicting the behaviour of an individual, or a very small group.
So it’s a pretty useless concept to apply in sex. Since that involves a pretty small sample size even for the most successful epicureans of hedonism.
As an aside, a model that (normatively, sorta) fits the data isn’t all we need. We need one that articulates the causal mechanisms. See Brain Gym: Some positive effects on educational outcomes. Total BS explanation of why. Getting the “why” right matters, because we cannot effect change without a proper causal model.
@EE Actually no, I don’t. Partly because having to worry about being ‘exposed’, or about finding money for a babysitter, doesn’t mean that person isn’t interested in the same things; and partly because UK-specific message boards (no babysitter required, very low risk of CEO-exposure) show a very representative cross-section of the UK class structure; but also just because you’re plain wrong, based on the people I have actually met at actual events 🙂
Remember that here in the UK, “class” is a much more overt, defined, stratified thing. It’s not just about disposable income or broad lifestyle choices, there are strong cultural aspects that we’re very nuanced at picking up on — accents, mannerisms, clothing choices, all sorts of things. Which is pretty sad in a way (I’d rather class boundaries were blurred a lot more than they are) but in this particular instance means I can say without a shadow of a doubt that plenty of people from different classes turn up.
Oh, and, CEOs do appear in the tabloid press for kinky stuff (eg google “max moseley”). And “the upper classes” (by which I mean historical nobility) have always had a reputation (whether justified or not) for being extremely sexually non-normative behind closed doors, perhaps precisely because they were required to be so rigid in public.
So, no, we’re not talking about “middle class kink”. I just think you’re making unwarranted assumptions both about the kinds of people we encounter, and about what ‘normal’ people are like.
@Antony: I had just written a qualification apologising for the word normal, in case anyone took offence, when I saw your post.
The important thing to remember about bell curves is that most of the population in near the middle (expect extremely ‘flat’ ones I suppose :)). Therefore it is possible to model the behaviour of most (mainstream) people, with the proviso that the model doesn’t apply to everyone. Saying that a majority of people behaviour in a way that is expected of those in the middle of the bell curve, with only minor variation, is perfectly valid.
As for the ‘why’. While it would be good to know why, a purely descriptive model can still be used to make predictions etc. And it’s a good starting point to improve on; to develop a better theory.
@Adibat:
My point is, however, that we’re still talking about areas under the curve in which people probably fall. That is, even “bell curve normal” includes a range of variation, and you can set your parameters arbitrarily as to what the “normal” segment of the bell curve is. The number of people who fall on the actual median line is far smaller than the number of people who would be considered “outliers” (i.e. the top and bottom 5%)
Purely descriptive models can’t really make predictions about anything. They’re a snapshot of the present data set.
To make predictions, you need a model which identifies the factors involved, that weights those factors appropriately, which requires at least an a priori idea of the whys and hows.
@Adibat:
It’s a bit more vague than that, usually. The “mode” is certainly in the middle, but the “long tail” adds up to a lot of people.
@Cheradenine:
Great link!
Thread hop:
Would you have also looked at the original Clark-Hatfield study and believed it’s conclusions?…
Not alone, which is why I’ve been quite clear that I’m not accepting this study as a 100% god given truth:
“I don’t find Hugh’s dismissal convincing. Among other reasons, though it’s always valid to say “let’s do more research”, you can’t say “let’s do more research in the hope of proving this piece of research wrong”.”
“I agree that one study cannot be used as solid proof for anything, but you don’t seem to add any doubt past that principle.”
Again, I’m not saying that Conley’s study is absolutely certain to be true, I’m saying that nothing you’ve said has convinced me to doubt it any more than I did to start with.
@Cheradenine:
I wasn’t saying that people of all classes, races, genders etc. wouldn’t be represented in kink groups. Is that what you think I was saying? I wasn’t saying that there are more people of any subset interested in kink groups.
What I’m saying is that groups with the resources to engage in something more fully are more likely to be OVER-REPRESENTED in those groups.
Like I said (it seems you didn’t see this when I wrote it originally):
into = interested
I said it right there – I’m giving as fact that an even distribution of the population (entire population) would be interested in this kink.
Now, if we assume that 10% of the population (A)(number pulled out of my rear) is predisposed (socially, culturally or biologically) to said kink, then people (B) with the opportunity to discover said kink.
Then, further magnifying the problem, people who had the original opportunity to discover the kink, will be whittled down to the subset of the population (C) who believes they have the ability to particpate in the kink.
Even further, THAT group of people will be whittled down by the subset of the population (D) that has the real-world physical resources to physically engage in the kink.
So I said all that to say this:
When you talk to people who engage in a kink – you’re talking to a subset of a subset of a subset OF A SUBSET of the general population. I’m saying that those folks don’t give you a good view of the demographics of humanity as a whole.
Aside:
Not all As are Bs. Not all Bs are Cs. Not all Cs are Ds.
However, all Ds are also As, Bs and Cs. All Cs are also As and Bs. And all Bs are also As.
To use specific examples, (A) would include people who grow up unintentionally sheltered from said kink. They don’t know they’d like it because they’ve never seen it.
(B) would include people who see it and realize they like it, but don’t think or believe that they are “allowed” to engage in it (I.e. someone who thinks they are incapable of participating for physical, cultural or other reasons “that’s just a fantasy, I could never do that.”)
(C) would include people who see it, like it and would allolw themselves to participate, but for economic or other reasons, cannot participate (I.e. their partner isn’t willing or they can’t afford the “equipment” or don’t have a weekend off work to go to a meet-up)
(D) would be the subset of people that have overcome (either through effort or fortune) the above obstacles – and end up at the actual events or participating in the kink.
So when you think about it this way, people who are educated, worldly, have self-confidence to embrace their sexuality, physically attractive and with the money/time are going to be … middle class. Hence, they will be over-represented on online message boards and at local meetups.
Not all of that was supposed to be bold. My bad.
Also, in my quote “kink of ‘non-conforming event'” was supposed to be “kink OR ‘non conforming event'”.
Now to this “average” nonsense:
Do you really want to know what the “average” American is like? Here is the census to tell you what an “average” American is like.
The hypothetical average American is an white woman in her late 30s who lives in a city (but not a big city!) in California with her husband but no kids, has a high school diploma only and makes somewhere around $30,000 per year. (Which means by the way that she almost certainly does NOT own an SUV.) So, uh, if you can get anything about sexual preferences from my statistical homunculus, be my guest.
But the main point I wanted to make there is that my statistical homunculus is a homunculus; the number of late 30s women in California with no kids yadda yadda is of course very small, even though all those traits individually are the most common ones. So there’s no way to say that there is even such a thing as “normal”, when any way you define “normal” it becomes a much smaller percentage of the population than all the not-normal people out there.
@EE, sorry, but while you start off making a perfectly valid argument (the people who turn up at an event are a subset of a subset of a subset — which I have never contradicted), when you then make the sudden leap to “and therefore those people are middle-class/educated/worldly/self-confident/with money/time”, you’re just flat out wrong. Theorise all you like but please stop telling me who actually turns up to events that I have been to and you haven’t, based on your presumptions!
And I’d like to back up a notch further and say, how does any of this invalidate my original argument, which is that you have no idea “what those people in their SUVs get up to when they arrive home and shut the bedroom doors”? You keep focusing on who does or doesn’t turn up to some random event or another (about which you know nothing, I haven’t even described what kind of thing it is) but you’re just deflecting attention away and not answering the original point.
The fact is that you are assuming, with no evidence that just because you live and work every day with people who “drive minivans or SUVS with the little white stick-people on the back that have a man, woman, two kids and a dog”, that somehow that means you know what they prefer sexually. Most people tend not to talk about that, and if they do say anything, they tend to just go along with cultural norms for fear of being ostracised.
(To those who might be confused by the below, this is a reply to a comment in another thread, that was off-topic there. Please direct any follow-ups to that comment, here, where they belong.)
@EE: The thing is, what releases hormones into the bloodstream? Oh yeah… structures in the brain (amygdala, pituitary gland, etc). Which, though mostly not under conscious control, are nonetheless subject to thought processes. Anyone who’s ever had a panic attack (which involves the release of the hormone adrenaline into the bloodstream), triggered by their fears or other psychological stresses, knows that.
Hormones certainly affect behaviour, but there are very, very, very complicated feedback loops, with knotty interactions between different hormones, different people’s bodies and their sensitivity (or lack of) to those hormones, and their psychology, culture and localised social pressures.
Chickens lay eggs. This is true. Saying that chickens hatch from eggs is also true. Neither answers the question of “which came first?”
I know I’m getting in late on this discussion so my apologies if I am taking this discussion a few steps backward or if I go over things that have already been ‘settled’. There’s a lot of information to gather up here on this thread and I definitely may have missed some key elements. Furthermore it is not my intent to dismiss or disparage anyone if I choose to use some terms or phrases that have a lot of ‘historical baggage’, if I talk about things that invoke a ‘no-duh’ sentiment, or if I fail to acknowledge that a point I am making has already been said So there…my quadruple apology.
I think it’s important to note that science is a tool. More than just a method, science is a process that helps us separate good ideas from bad ideas. Science is not the pool of accumulated knowledge. Maybe this is obvious but I state this because it’s a good starting point.
I think it’s entirely appropriate to use science to help us understand things about reality that may not (in the end) provide definitive answers. For example, how many birds are in flight, right now, over the earth? Oh wait, it just changed. Hurry, it just changed again! So even though we as humans don’t have a definitive answer to this question we can still use science to come up with an approximation. There is value in this even though the answers might only give us a partial and tentative picture. So it’s not quite right to suggest that just because there are so many variables at play, and since we probably could never get the whole picture or provide definitive answers, that we can’t use the process of science to explore aspects of reality that are tough to pin down.
The problem I have with the social sciences is that even though it’s uses the process of science it suffers from ‘garbage in, garbage out’. This is why the social sciences are sometimes considered ‘soft’ and the physical sciences are considered ‘hard’. In physics one can measure and isolate the variables, like distance or time. Sure there are rounding errors and a lot depends on the instruments used, but it comes down to precision. However, with the social sciences the variables are too often measured with surveys or interviews. These methods of gathering data are imprecise. This isn’t an issue of social scientists being bad scientists or being disingenuous about their data. Most, I think, are aware of the limitations they face and most really do make very sincere attempts and go through extraordinary efforts to gather data and isolate variables as accurately as possible. So when I say “garbage in” I am not merely dismissing the whole endeavor off. In many ways the so called ‘soft sciences’ have it harder than the ‘hard sciences’.
‘Garbage out’ however, is a lot more problematic. At best (and I have no doubt this will change as technology flourishes) social science can construct models about how humans interact or how the mind works. Not theories in the strict scientific sense where one can make accurate predictions about the physical world. Models aren’t true statements about reality. Models are useful representations of what occurs in reality. Models are simplified constructs that only help represent a more complex reality. It’s far too easy to take imprecise data and start speculating about why the data is such that it is (modelling). It’s then even easier to take this model and try to apply it as if it were a scientific theory. This is were much of the social science ‘soft’ nature shows and betrays itself.
I know it seems like I’m picking on social science but that’s because social science is the topic (at least somewhat) of this thread. There are many instances of the soft sciences coming up with valid theories and the hard sciences coming up with only models. Science is ongoing and I have no doubts that someday much of what is considered soft science will cross over into the realm of the hard science. And yes, I believe that some hard science has already slipped into the realm of soft science. So it’s not just a one way street. Granted, at this time, there’s more traffic on one side of the street than the other.
@Cheradenine:
I’ve said nothing of the sort that I have any idea what goes on behind the bedroom doors of the folks with the SUV.
Also, for the love of god, tell me where I told you “who actually turns up to events” – because I have no fucking clue whose been to your “events” I don’t even know what your event IS!
This is so completely the opposite of what I’ve been saying (or trying to say) and completely irrellevant to my point that I don’t even know how to respond.
MY ENTIRE POINT OF COMMENTING ON THIS POST, MADE BACK AT 10:05AM:
We are people with gender “enlightenment.” As people with gender enlightenment – we are also probably more likely to recognize and be able to discuss and be open to non-conforming sexualities. By being folks who don’t stigmatize kink – we are more likely to embrace kink if we feel the desire to do so.
We are a subset, of a subset OF A SUBSET. We can’t use OUR anecdata to project to the LARGER POPULATION.
That’s what I’m saying about the lady driving the SUV with the stickers on the back.
You think I’m saying “She doesn’t engage in kink.”
I’m actually saying “You can’t know if she engages in kink.”
You said:
You say that “regular people from the suburbs” make up a larger portion of your kink group than they do in the general population, no?
To which I responded “certain types of people will be over-represented in your SUBSET because of blah-blah blah”
And now you’re accusing ME of knowing what goes on behind other people’s closed doors? You’re the one who is claiming that your “experiences” mean something! You’re the one claiming that you have some insight into the number of “regular people from the suburbs” who engage in kink!
You’re extrapolating from a subset of a subset of a SUBSET!
@Cheradenine:
I apologize for the off-topic post in the other thread. I am frustrated by inconsistency, but that’s no excuse.
My argument in regards to the biology is not radical: I thoroughly reject that our behaviors are completely unrelated to our biology – I have never proposed that we are slaves to our hormones – but the way that our developed brains handles input is some blend of nature/nurture that science hasn’t discovered yet.
My parsing of some language in this thread regarding behavior is that “because we don’t know how much biology has to do with our behavior, it’s reasonable to imagine that biology has nothing to do with it,” which, for reasons above, I heartily reject.
If anyone wants to argue with the point in quotes above – feel free – but I don’t want to re-hash old arguments with slightly different words.
@EE: But… that’s not anyone’s argument?
In the absence of good evidence that biology has something to do with our behavior, we should assume that biology has nothing to do with our behavior. I have never seen any good evidence that biology has anything to do with gendered behavior, so I have to assume that biology has nothing to do with gendered behavior.
And I mean, not strictly nothing; it probably does a little. But it doesn’t have much, and it’s very suspicious to me whenever biology is claimed to have something to do with a behavior that just happens to be exactly the cultural norm.
@Brian
I certainly hope that isn’t anyone’s argument. Glad to hear it.
That said, your argument doesn’t seem more likely to me. I think we have plenty of evidence that biology has something to do with our behavior:
Put simply – I propose if you took two infant animals, one male, one female of every species on the planet – raised them in captivity with identical treatment of the males and females – that they would exhibit different temperaments and behaviors. Some species genders would be extremely different (horses) and others would be less so (mice).
Therefore, I think it is more likely that humans (being animals) are like all the other animals on the planet, rather than being unique and lacking a trait that all other animals on the planet have – gendered behavior differences.
I know I’m coming across strong here, but I’m really open to having my mind changed – can anyone think of any mammals that don’t exhibit gender behavior differences in captivity?
Humans are animals.
@EE:
OK, right here:
Moving on…
And yet, you say:
and then continue:
Which sounds a lot like saying (s)he doesn’t engage in kink. (Even though we weren’t actually discussing kink). It’s also rather elitist… “we” might know the technical jargon of ‘gender enlightenment’ and be able to name-drop scholars and papers and stuff… but popular culture is more genderfluid than you seem to think. I might do a post at some point on genderfluidity in mainstream popular culture (starting with Blur’s massively successful Boys & Girls).
I really don’t think you do, you just think you do. I mean, I’m not doubting you work and live with the kinds of people you say you do, I am only doubting how representative they are of the wider population and that you only see their ‘outer persona’ and don’t know how quote-normal-unquote they actually are.
And you have no idea of the kinds of people we do or don’t associate with, either. You keep pointing out how rarified you think this group of people on this blog are, but you’re here too, and you say you “live and work with them every day”, why do you think we don’t?
No, I don’t.
No, I’m not.
@EE “Therefore, I think it is more likely that humans (being animals) are like all the other animals on the planet, rather than being unique and lacking a trait that all other animals on the planet have – gendered behavior differences.”
Two words: Verbal Behaviour.
Humans are not like other animals.
There must be some massive sort of mis-communication/misunderstanding here, because your latest response seems out of synch with your previous comments.
Look, I’m vanilla and very straight. When I was in college – there were a few times my gay friends would tease me and try to eke some gayness out of me – and although they were my friends, I found it to be almost as offensive as I find it when straight people try to convince gay people that they “aren’t really gay.” The more and more I was welcomed into wider and wider gay circles (because I was seen as a “strong gay ally”) the more I was pressured.
After college, as similar experience happened with an ex who was into some sort of sexual vampirism. I wasn’t turned on by it – and I told her and her friends this – but I was still curious and not “disgusted” by it – I was very accepting. Eventually, the longer our friendships went on, the more I endured teasing and doubts about my vanillaness – I’d be asked probing questions until they could figure out what my kink was.
It has gotten to the point now where I essentially expect that if I come across as accepting homosexuals or accepting of kink, it’s only a matter of time before my straightness or vanillaness will be brought into question.
So perhaps I read too much into what I thought you were saying “most of those SUV driving women are closet kinks” … I read it as much of the same sexuality-shaming and vanilla-shaming I endured from my friends.
If you had been claiming (which I see now that you were not) that most of the folks living their suburban lifestyle were actually closet kinks – that would’ve been as offensive as my gay/queer friends saying “no body is actually straight, it’s just the weak people who can’t stand up to society and embrace their true sexuality.” Which is pretty fucking offensive to straight folks.
I’m sorry – I guess that was triggering to me? Although at the time I didn’t see their comments as … oppressive? (I don’t know what the word is – I suppose I took their treatment of me to be comical on its face, like a black person harassing a white person, but meanwhile it was hurtful. No one deserves to have their sexuality marginalized.)
Re-reading your quotes with more charity and I see what you actually meant. I owe you an apololgy. I’m sorry – I wasn’t intentionally misreading you.
@Anthony
I was referring to a trait that humans lack that all other mammals have. I don’t deny that we have unique traits other mammals don’t.
Right… one thing first… AVERAGE IS NOT NORMAL! Thanks.
—–
Cheradenine, it might be different in the UK. But on the other side of the pond? I think EE’s got it closer than you.
Disregarding everything but his main point (the rest of the debate was you two arguing over degrees). “We are a subset, of a subset OF A SUBSET. We can’t use OUR anecdata to project to the LARGER POPULATION.”
By the very stint of being a commenter on this blog, YOU ARE NOT NORMAL. Your exposure to the population is probably not normal, nor is it widely reaching. None of our experiences are particularly “normal”.
@ Brian/EE
I think it’s not that nobody can agree that hormones affect behavior. Instead I think that it’s a matter of degree. Nature vs Nurture, Mind over Matter, etc. People use them BOTH as excuses.
I’m of the opinion that they both play important parts, or the entirely of intersex people that had their gender assigned and their physical appearance matched to that assignment? They would still think they’re men/women. Gender isn’t a 100% social OR biologically derived construct. (Notice ‘derived’?)
@TomeWyrm
I can’t find myself able to disagree with anything you’ve said here.
(Simplespeak: I am resistant to your message, but unable to find any specific part of which I disagree, therefore I concede defeat and am forced to agree.)
@Tonewyrm: Couldn’t you use that argument on any blog population? I mean, I’m pretty sure there’s not more than 100 people that post on Kotaku regularly, and yet a solid minority of every Western country plays video games.
Or even better, I’m sure that not that many people posted on Barack Obama’s campaign website, yet apparently a majority of the population likes him. Or at least, prefers him to John McCain.
—-
@EE: About your experiment:
I would say that there are fewer (VASTLY fewer) animals that you could sex by observing their behavior than there are animals that you can’t. Especially if you ignore mating or childrearing, which are kind of giveaways; there’s no reason a male dog wouldn’t feed the puppies if he had the milk glands.
What’s really the difference between a male cat and a female cat? I’ve had a lot of cats, and there really hasn’t been much.
What’s really the difference between a male dog and a female dog? You can’t really tell without someone telling you, can you?
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Which argument? That the people who post here are a sub-sub-subset? If you tried to use a Kotaku poster to extrapolate the feelings or motivations of a random Joe or Jane on Main Street USA, don’t you think you’d have a bit of trouble? You said they’re part of a minority. And what the **** does Obama’s campaign website have to do with anything?
Oh and I can tell the differences between male and female dogs by behavior and some physical differences, same with cats, horses, and many primates. I was raised around them (except primates that aren’t human), so I’ve got a bit of an unfair advantage on that front. For instance, tabby cats have to be female. I don’t always have to check the genitals, but it’s simply a quick and easy unambiguous method to sexing.
Whether or not this group of people is a subset of a subset is completely irrelevant to the main point, which is “is the sexual marketplace idea socially constructed?” It is perfectly possible that this group of posters is not normal and the sexual marketplace is socially constructed (the posters’ social conditioning didn’t take so well) or biological (the posters are severe outliers genetically). It is also perfectly possible that this group of posters is relatively normal, or that humanity is composed of so many small subgroups that the concept of “normal” is completely useless, and the sexual marketplace is socially constructed (see? It doesn’t describe the sexual experiences of a large population of humans) or not (some groups are more in denial of their place in the sexual marketplace than others). The whole argument is completely irrelevant to the post.
and some physical differences
That’s cheating. Only behavior.
For instance, tabby cats have to be female
That’s also cheating and I’m pretty sure false. Though I don’t remember the exact coat pattern of every cat I’ve had, I’m pretty sure I have had at least one male tabby cat.
Offtopic: Tabby cats can indeed be either male or female. Tortoiseshell pattern is the one that implies female sex, or a chromosomal aberration such as XXY.
ozymandias,
Noah says that notions of a sexual marketplace don’t make sense. Don’t make sense to who? These ideas make sense to many people in the mainstream (i.e. not in some subculture). So how do we explain the discrepancy? Maybe Noah is right, and people who subscribe to economic sexual metaphors are just like medieval peasants.
Alternatively, there really could be sex differences in preferences in the mainstream that affect supply and demand for certain sexualities, which could usefully be described by economic metaphors. If there are, then Noah might reasonably ask why he hasn’t run into them. Well, maybe he hasn’t run into them because he is hanging out in an alternative subculture with unusual gender dynamics.
I’m going to urge the bloggers here to attempt to try to understand where gender normative people are coming from before calling them “peasants.” If you aren’t a gender conforming person yourself, then you may have to look outside your immediate experience, and those of your friends.
Posters’ social conditioning didn’t take so well? Was it just an accident the social conditioning didn’t succeed with some people, or could there be some factor contributing to whether it succeeds or not? Here’s an idea: biology. (Btw, biology doesn’t just refer to genetics, it also includes prenatal factors.)
This study found that prenatal exposure to androgens predicted adult women’s gender conformity. Yet it was also related to socialization: lower androgens made women more susceptible to feminine socialization. The researcher comments:
Biology appears to be a factor in people’s susceptibility to gendered socialization.
@noahbrand,
I’m having trouble believing that a concept of “mainstream” is so outlandish to you. For instance, I’m sure you have a concept of “gender normativity,” and a concept of “vanilla”, which are related.
I’m using the word “mainstream” to refer to people who are closer to the average, or who are similar to the majority of people (or at least, largest minorities).
As for “gender-typical,” for now let’s just say “gender conforming.” Maybe it’s just me, but most people seem to mostly be gender-conforming, while a minority of people seem extremely non-conforming.
I think many people here will be interested in this study, which found that people fell into two groups based on their sexual orientation and gender conformity scores. They found that 5-10% of women and 12-15% of men answered the questions different from the rest. Most of the queer people were in this gender noncomforming group, though most of that group was heterosexual.
Well, it’s hard to tell you what to look for, since the mainstream likes to present itself as “default.” You can probably Google up “punk clubs” in your city, but you can’t Google up “mainstream clubs” (similar to how you can probably Google up “black clubs” in your city,” but not “white clubs”).
Chances are, if a club isn’t associated with any subculture, then it’s probably pretty mainstream (unless perhaps it’s hipster, since hipsters are almost mainstream in cities). To see gender dynamics in mainstream clubs, you could watch a show like Keys to the VIP.
Music? Listen to the radio. Movies? Watch box office movies. TV? Watch reality TV shows. Dancing? You might be in a mainstream (white) club if the guys kind of shuffle back and forth and have their arms up at their chest or down by their sides because anything else is considered gay (the “white boy shuffle”)… if they even dance at all. If they dance like this or this instead, you probably aren’t in a mainstream club.
Fashion? If you are surrounded by guys wearing tight clothing or makeup, you are much less likely to be in a mainstream scene. If everyone has dreadlocks, then you aren’t in a mainstream scene. And if everyone has both makeup and dreads, then you definitely aren’t in a mainstream scene.
Does that begin to answer your question?
@EE
This. Let’s face it, the percentage of people who are so unhappy about gender issues that they are willing to spend time arguing about it on the internet is pretty damn small. If someone is so unhappy with ideas about gender in society, then they are probably more likely to be gender nonconforming themselves, and consequently less able to relate to people who are gender conforming.
@TomeWyrm
This (except substitute the word “typical” for “normal”). Another example is that people who post here are pretty smart. Well, it turns out that intelligent men tend to be more stereotypically feminine, and intelligent women tend to be more stereotypically masculine. We should expect that highly intelligent people are less gender conforming, which might give them trouble relating to more gender normative people.
High-IQ people who are some combination of poly, kinky, or queer like many of the folks who post on this blog are probably not representative of the general population.
I think it’s great that a minority of gender nonconforming people can see outside the box on the subject of gender. But let’s not go calling everyone else “medieval peasants” who have a vastly different experience.
@Hugh: That’s a weird subculture you just described, but sure, I’ll buy that it’s what’s presented as “normal” in mass media. Here’s the thing, though: you can’t possibly argue that the set you just described, the set that we’ve previously established is the only one where the market model can be said to have any predictive value, is anything other than a social construct. The White Boy Shuffle is not genetically coded, I’m sure we can agree. In other words, as I said in my original post, despite the pervasiveness of the market model and it’s being aggressively presented and sold as “normal”, it really is all just made up. Someone can turn their back on it and just walk away, come join the rest of us outside its walls. It might not be easy, the way someone who leaves Catholicism may still have weird guilt issues, but you can reject the market model, because it really is just made up.
Brian: Interestingly that you want to exclude mating and childrearing behaviour in cats when talking about behavioural differences between them, and that in a discussion which very much is about mating in humans. I am pretty sure no-one here argued that there were any biological dependent behaviour differences of men and women when
Cats and dogs have very different behaviour by gender when in heat and mating so to use them as an argument that there is no biogical dependent behavioural differences between men and women (in the context of mating) would rather seem to bolster the opposite of your point. Avoiding this by excluding mating and childrearing among the cats and dogs were, well, let’s say creative.
Oops. The missing part of the last sentence in the first paragraphs should be:
…they lounge on their favourite sofa (which in my experience is the most common behaviour among domesticated cats 🙂 ).
So many comments…
@Cheradenine: Unless you’re claiming that the ‘mainstream’ people who attend your events make up a significant proportion of all mainstream people then I can’t see what your observation adds to the debate. That there are people who pretend to be mainstream to fit in, but secretly are part of a subculture? I’m sure there are, but unless you’re arguing that this applies to most mainstream people I fail to see its relevance. A mainstream still exists even if there are people who pretend to be mainstream but aren’t.
@Anthony: “Purely descriptive models can’t really make predictions about anything. They’re a snapshot of the present data set.”
I don’t really know how to reply to this except to say “you’re wrong”. Not the most sophisticated response I admit. A descriptive model tells us the way something works, even if we don’t fully understand how. We can use this to predict how things will work in the future. For example, classical physics can make a multitude of accurate predictions without needing to know the underlying quantum mechanics.
“That is, even “bell curve normal” includes a range of variation, and you can set your parameters arbitrarily as to what the “normal” segment of the bell curve is. The number of people who fall on the actual median line is far smaller than the number of people who would be considered “outliers” (i.e. the top and bottom 5%)”
A model wouldn’t only explain those that fall exactly in the centre of the distribution but also explain a certain amount of deviation. It depends on the shape of the bell curve. I don’t see a problem with a model that applies to, lets say for sake of argument, 90% of the population. The important thing is not to insist that it applies to absolutely everyone. That way lies gender policing etc.
@Cheradine: “The “mode” is certainly in the middle, but the “long tail” adds up to a lot of people.”
In the first graph of this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution) the blue plot has little variance and the yellow one has a large variance. Considering that most people seem to have a good idea of what mainstream is I believe that the variance isn’t too large for the topic at hand. It is possible to describe the dating dynamic for mainstream people.
To be honest I’m finding this denial that there’s a mainstream puzzling. How are you reconciling the idea that there isn’t a mainstream with the idea that a patriarchy promotes gender norms and they are propagated and maintained by gender normative people? Or do you reject patriarchal theory, as the two ideas are incompatible?
@Tomewyrm: “Right… one thing first… AVERAGE IS NOT NORMAL! Thanks.”
Well, technically normal is conformance to an average, and a social norm within sociology is an expected pattern of behaviour. If you exhibit the expected average behaviour you are normal. But I agree that it’s not a useful term which is why I apologised for using it. The problem is that even though I used it accurately in a technical sense, the connotations of calling someone “not normal” or “abnormal” aren’t very nice (even though there’s nothing wrong with not being normal in my opinion). Therefore ‘typical’ or mainstream are better terms to use. So I guess we agree for different reasons.
@Noah
I think perhaps I wasn’t understanding what you meant by “all made up.” I thought you meant “doesn’t make sense.” If you meant “socially constructed,” then I agree with you. Though in that sense, all human ideas about sexuality are made up.
Which market model? That’s something I’m still fuzzy on what you mean by that. I can think of at least three market models, and try to give them names:
1. The no-sex class transactional model
This model is that women don’t experience sexual desire for men (figleaf’s “no-sex class” model), so men must trade something else for sex to sweeten the deal. This model is deeply broken and undesirable.
2. The sexual bartering model
This model suggests that both women and men experience desire, and that they “trade” sex for sex, or attractiveness for attractiveness. In this model, you want to have partners who are as attractive (to you) as possible who are interested in having sex with you. The “price” people command for sex is that the other person be desirable, preferably at least as desirable as they judge themselves to be. This model can apply to anyone male or female, heterosexual or queer.
2a. The gendered sexual bartering model
Between men and women, sex is a trade of male attractiveness and mating effort for female attractiveness and mating effort. Consequently, this trade is asymmetrical. To command a high “price” (in terms of partner attractiveness and mating effort), a man must have traits that some female partners will demand, and a woman must have traits that some male partners will demand.
While the first model is deeply broken, the second model isn’t so bad, and it doesn’t only apply to men and women.
For example, a gay man could say to his boyfriend: “you aren’t so attractive than you can just take days to call me back… I’m going to dump you because I can do better!”
The concept of “doing better” presupposes a competitive sexual marketplace, where he feels he can command a higher price (where price is paid with attractiveness and mating effort), and where he feels he can attain a mate of higher value (to him). Another interpretation is that he is saying that the boyfriend is trying to charge too high a price (not getting called back is costly in time spent worrying) to be worth his level of attractiveness. Yet in a sparser sexual marketplace (where he didn’t think he could get with someone as attractive as his boyfriend who is also attentive), he might choose to put up with the flakey boyfriend.
Can you see how these economic metaphors of “price” and “value” might be useful to people, even for negotiating mutually enjoyed sex? They are helpful for people finding partners who they are well-matched with.
The first model described as very harmful, and it’s not even necessary in the U.S. mainstream. But getting rid of the second concept of people bartering with their sexualities in a sexual marketplace for other sexualities seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
To all the people saying variations on a theme of “By the very stint of being a commenter on this blog, YOU ARE NOT NORMAL”… Please. Stop. For several reasons:
1. I’m well aware of this, thanks. Try to remember I’m the person who wrote an article at least partly on this very subject and have been making points along those lines even in the discussions while the blog was being set up.
2. At no point have I argued that I, or my personal preferences, kinks or experiences represent the mainstream. I thought I made that clear, so let’s try again: I’m quite well aware of just how ‘strange’ I am, thanks, and don’t make assumptions that my experiences reflect the wider culture.
3. As Ozy points out, this is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
4. It’s patronising both to us, and to “the mainstream”, making flawed assumptions on both ends, and reminds me strongly of the Privilege argument: “you’re not mainstream, therefore I am ignoring anything you have to say on the subject”.
Is that all clear? Can we move on from that point now? Please? Because this drum beat is getting boring.
So. Let’s actually talk about the mainstream.
Lady Gaga. If you try and tell me she isn’t mainstream, I’ll laugh in your face. Sorry. She’s sold nearly 70 million singles already, & 22 million albums, and was named one of Time Magazine’s top 100 influential people in the world. Forbes rank her #1 in their celebrity list, and the #7 most powerful woman in the world.
Do you think Lady Gaga is gender-normative? A Google search for “is lady gaga a man” gives more than 600,000 results and is so popular Google auto-completes it for you after just typing “Is L”, and the video to her single Telephone explicitly references the gender controversy.
It’s interesting that Lady Gaga wasn’t suspected for being a man because she was masculine in any way. It seems to stem from her over the top performance of feminity more associated with drag queens.
Brian, I’m going to abstain from further debate on this topic.
Thank you TheAverageOutlier. I’m not much of a cat person, pretty much the whole family except me is allergic to them.
Adiabat, Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t aiming at you specifically, merely the people using the term interchangeably and with varying degrees of precision. I do like typical and mainstream better.
@OP, Ozy, Noah, and Hugh
What about human social behavior and the models used to predict them AREN’T social constructs?
Why are social constructs bad?
So what if the model doesn’t apply to 100% of the population?
Can you say that a model that seems to fairly accurately predict current mainstream reality is useless?
Do you know of any better models that are actually predictive? “Every person wants what they want” while true is not predictive, it’s a tautology. The moon is colored like the moon! I just gave you another one. How useful was it if you didn’t know the color of the moon?
This reminds me of the Sir Winston Churchill quote “Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”
@Cheradenine
Which mainstream? Her performances are a part of mainstream culture, yes. But she herself is a celebrity. They’re not mainstream or typical. They’re kinda different by definition. That whole “famous” thing. More importantly… how is this still on-topic?
@TomeWyrm: Of course Lady Gaga’s personal life experiences are different by definition. I’m not discussing her life experience. I’m discussing the preferences of her fans, the fact that she is adored by many many millions of mainstream people. An even better example might be Justin Bieber (“is justin bieber a girl” = 46,000 hits). It’s on-topic because if you ask a random collection of teenage girls if they’re attracted to boys who look like girls, they’re probably going to say “no” because angst over homophobia is high amongst that population (“if I say I like girly-looking boys, will they think I’m a lesbian?”). But if you ask them if they fancy Justin Bieber, a lot of them are going to say yes. And it’s not because they’re part of some marginalised subculture in which “sex differences in selectivity are reduced”.
I’m really surprised Lady Gaga is being considered some revolutionary gender bender.
Really? Is she revolutionary?
http://tinyurl.com/3zut36c
Really? Is she anything new?
http://tinyurl.com/43qffdp
Justin Bieber is just a result of the feminization of attractive men in mainstream media. The days of “attractive men” being hairy, bearded, balding men with box-like torsos is over – and Justin Bieber just happens to have the benefit of extreme young age to help him pull off the “new hotness.”
And Lady Gaga is uber-femme, not gender bending. She’s a parody of feminization – but let’s not forget – she is a character – she is not Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – the woman – she’s Lady Gaga – the performer.
When our REALITY TV SHOWS are filled with gender-queer folks, THEN you can say that it’s getting “mainstream” but Lady Gaga is a freak in a sideshow tent. People will bob their head to her music – but no one RELATES to her.
I don’t recall anyone saying Lady Gaga was a revolutionary new gender-bender, @EE. By citing other examples, you’re just confirming, rather than rejecting, my point.
I still see plenty of guys meeting more traditionally masculine definitions of attractiveness. This whole “feminisation of men” thing strikes me as yet another myth and definitely hoists warning flags when I hear people mention it.
You might be gawping at Lady Gaga as a sideshow freak, but the Little Monsters disagree. You don’t get that intensity of fandom without relating. But “freak” or no (and that’s pretty offensive), her tent definitely isn’t in the sideshow: it’s front & centre, in the main ring.
*sighs* Once again trans people get in the way of a grand theory of social construction of gender… shall we just show ourselves and our non-conforming brainstems out?
As I’ve said before, any way you define “the mainstream” it’s too small to consider. There is no one “mainstream” that the people in this thread are not part of.
If you divided the world into “people who gender conform” vs. “people who don’t gender conform”, which group would be larger would depend largely on how strictly you defined “gender conform”. If we’re talking “cissexual”, then yes there would be more people who gender conform than don’t. If we’re talking “perfectly follows their gender role circa the 1950s”, there would be many, many more people who don’t gender conform than those who do. Any other division would be somewhere in between.
“Believes in the sexual marketplace” I suspect would get people distributed similarly to “believes in Christianity”. Most people do, but only a few people do seriously; the rest believe in it as a sort of cultural default belief.
Trans people get their own theories of “gender” , Valerie, that somewhat overlap with the mainstream theories and sometimes don’t.
I agree with Easily Enthused as far as Lady Gaga. Even people who like her- and I know many- don’t want to be LIKE her.
Lady Gaga is an interesting and popular “freak” whose popularity is, in part, based on her ability to be the new David Bowie, to twist “gender” and sexuality, and to do so in interesting ways to the younger set who mostly haven’t seen this stuff before, and the relatively small “queer” contingent of the larger culture. I like 3 of her more popular songs, but if I was to go to her shows it wouldn’t be for anything other than to see that lovely sexy female body and maybe to see some of her antics.
Justin Beiber may not be an uber- masculine man, but he’s clearly a male and not a little boy anymore, nor would anyone confuse him with a girl.
@Clarence: “justin bieber looks like a girl” = 138,000 hits in google. Whether you confuse him with one or not — and sure, he’s no Andrej Pejic — way to move the goalposts. It’s not about whether you think he looks like a girl or not, it’s about the fact that he very clearly is non-gender-conforming enough to trigger thousands, if not millions, of people’s gender-policing reflexes, while still being both enormously popular and considered highly attractive to girls in the mainstream. It’s about people saying, “yes, he’s a boy, but he shouldn’t X” (where X is some “girly” trait, eg “have hair like that” or whatever), yet X neither lessens his attractiveness to girls nor his mainstream success.
@EasilyEnthused: Ah, you’re right, Justin Bieber being a teen heartthrob does prove a new phenomenon. Back in the old days, teen heartthrobs were burly, macho types like Johnny De… hm. Well, in the 80s, you had George Micha… hm. I guess before him there were the Bay City Roll… hm. Well, before that, there was Davey Jo… hm. Well, those are a bit over-marketed, what about a naturally talented heartthrob like Paul McCart… hm. Surely the little girls of the “Greatest Generation” must have adored a big muscular guy like Frank Sinat… hm. Maybe if we go a little earlier, we’ll find Rudolf Valentin… hm.
“Teen heartthrob” is a JOB, EE. It’s nothing new, and it’s always some skinny boy, and it’s always the role of teenage boys to go “Ew, gross, he’s gay! He looks like a girl! He is insufficiently performing masculinity!” So let’s not get too excited that the exact same thing is playing out in the exact same way, shall we?
Cheradenine:
You might want to consider finding the results of your search by date. He clearly was more “non gender conforming” a few years ago.
@Chera
What I was getting at with Madonna and the flappers is that trends for gender non-conformity come and go. Madonna and Lady Gaga both used sexuality as a shock tactic to attract attention to themselves – I don’t think there is any weight behind their antics. I don’t think gender non-conformity is getting much better in the mainstream – and I was trying to show that by showing that Madonna did essentially the same thing 20 years ago and … things still stink. Flappers cut their hair short and bound their breasts almost a 100 years ago, and things still stink.
Therefore – I propose that a better measure for acceptance of gender non-conformity in our culture would be politicians, athletes and newscasters (Maddow, Cooper FTW!) who don’t gender conform. (Performers like musicians and actors are able to put on roles as part of their job, so they don’t count.)
@Noah
Justin is far younger than Johnny Depp (et al) was when he got his start. That was my only point regarding him. Justin was 13 when he started going up on little girl’s walls in poster form, Johnny Depp was 24.
This is such a thought-provoking blog. I really love it.
@Noah: Johnny Depp is maybe not a burly muscleman, but he is still clearly masculine. But then again, he was never really a teen heartthrob.
That many teen heartthrob performers aren’t traditionally masculine just makes me wonder if women or men are the ones that have the most say in “traditionally masculine” and whether age has anything to do with it. Androgyny has been popular for a long time, the Italian Renaissance, Ancient Greece.
In this following paragraph, I’m using the popular press, and general internet majority for sources of what men and women think. It’s probably inaccurate. But it’s what I’ve personally observed as well. What men say they think women are attracted to, and what women say they’re attracted to don’t line up. Men say they think women are attracted to “traditional masculinity”, but women say those traits don’t matter much.
I still want to know why a predictive model that is all made up, but works a significant portion of the time, is such a bad thing.
So last night I went out again. And in the club I went to, the standard dynamic was palpable. I looked around myself and I saw women trying to demonstrate availability while being gatekeepers and guys demonstrating restraint while trying to get lucky.
Let’s not stop this discussion here. Assuming *it is all made up* yet still real for everyone – what do we do with that knowledge? How do we go about it. Explaining to a woman that she’s actually not a gatekeeper and should really chase me/some guy probably won’t do the trick. And neither will telling guys to lean back and let the women work 50% of the time…
So assuming the hypothesis is correct – where do we go from here?
Start hanging out and meeting women in places other than clubs? Cuz seriously, the dynamic you describe I don’t see in my daily life AT ALL, in any of the places and groups I hang out in. But I have seen it in clubs, the 3 or so times I’ve ever gone…
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