An Interesting Example of a Double Standard

This is just too precious. David Brooks writes for the NY Times and castigates the victims of sexual harassment by Herman Cain. But "Angry Black Lady" at the Balloon Juice blog takes to task for his double standard:

Why the New York Times continues to allow David Brooks to crap all over the opinion page, I will never understand.

...

Moving on:

Now we turn to ethical issues. My first question, and this is a genuine question, concerns the victims. Let’s detach ourselves from the specifics of the Cain case and consider a general question: If you are the victim of sexual harassment, and you agree to remain silent in exchange for a five-figure payoff, should any moral taint attach to you? In the old days, somebody who allowed a predator to continue his hunting in exchange for money would certainly be considered a sinner. I’m reluctant to judge people in these circumstances, but I’m inclined to agree. Am I missing something?

First of all, Brooks is never again allowed to use the word taint. Just don’t.

Second of all, everything Brooks said is victim-blaming bullshit. It’s the same argument that the uninformed and unenlightened make when they claim that rape victims have a duty to report their rapist lest they be held morally responsible should the rapist strike again. It’s a callous, anti-feminist, bullshit argument that has no place in public discourse, much less splattered on the New York Times by a person who could have simply googled it, and read one of a hundred blog posts written by feminists on the subject of victim-blaming in the context of sexual assault and harassment.

But here’s the kicker—David Brooks need not have even spent the fifteen minutes it would have taken him to discern that his “ethically responsible women don’t settle” argument is a load of horseshit because David Brooks himself has been the victim of unwanted advances.

In 2009, Brooks appeared on MSNBC with Lawrence O’Donnell to talk about a Republican Senator (whom he refused to name) making an unwanted advance on Brooks. He stated that during a dinner, a Republican Senator had “his hand hand on my inner thigh the whole time” and it made Brooks uncomfortable.

From Think Progress:

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you.

Brooks said that he has “spoken to a lot of young women who are Senate staffers and they’ll have these middle age guys who are sort of in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Emotionally needy, they don’t know how to do it and sort of like these St. Bernards drooling everywhere.”

You would think that a high profile person like David Brooks would be so shamed by being "outed" for such an egregious example of a double standard. But he won't. He gets paid lots of bucks to sit in judgement of others. A little fact like the fact that he is a hypocrite isn't going to stop him. But readers should stop reading him. I did. Several years ago. I can only take a certain amount of sleazy reporting and moral unaccountability before I decide I won't waste any more time reading somebody who commits to print his moral failings and feels no shame.

Sex and Ancient Humans

It was only a few years ago that the idea that Homo sapiens sapiens interbred with Neanderthals became thinkable. Now genetics no only demonstrates it but claims it delivered benefits.

Here is a bit from a Yahoo! News report:

Sexual encounters with archaic humans like the Neanderthals produced children who inherited key genes that have helped modern humans fight illness and disease, said a US study published Thursday.

"The cross-breeding wasn't just a random event that happened, it gave something useful to the gene pool of the modern human," said Stanford University's Peter Parham, senior author of the study in the journal Science.

Equipped with knowledge of the genome of the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, of whom a tooth and a finger bone were discovered in a Russian cave last year, researchers scoured the data for hints of what genes crossed over.

Scientists already knew that about four percent of Neanderthal DNA and up to six percent of Denisovan DNA are present in some modern humans.

This study took a close look at a group called HLA class I genes which help the immune system adapt to fight off new pathogens that could cause various infections, viruses and diseases.

Researchers traced the origin of one type, HLA-B*73, to the Denisovans, who likely mated with humans arriving in West Asia on their way out of Africa. The variant is rare in modern African populations but is common in people in west Asia.

"We think this had a lot to do with the pathogenic environment in different parts of the world," said Laurent Abi-Rached, a French researcher and lead author of the study.

"When modern humans came out of Africa, they were going into a new environment. This gave them an advantage. It was a rapid way of acquiring defense," he told AFP.

These ancient HLA genes have multiplied among modern populations and are seen in more than half of Eurasians today, said the study.

I love the way science slowly advances human knowledge. The world is a very interesting place and facts, for me, are far more fascinating than fiction.

I don't get excited about hyped "science" like the Ivanov experiments. But I enjoy sound science which breaks new ground such as the new genetics which allows hybridization with Neanderthals to come out of the murky world of speculation into the world of hard facts.

Basic Economics

Here are two bits from a fun article by Robert H. Frank in the NY Times. This looks at how female availability for marriage has ecomomic (and social) implications).

First, contemporary China where marriageable women are in short supply:

The Chinese government’s one-child policy, combined with a cultural preference for sons and technologies that permit selective abortion, have helped to create a large sex-ratio imbalance among young Chinese. For every 100 women in that group, there are now more than 120 men.

According to market models, the terms of trade in the Chinese marriage market should have shifted sharply in favor of women. And evidence suggests that young Chinese women and their families have in fact become much more selective in recent years.

They appear, for example, to focus more critically on the earnings potential of prospective mates. Because house size is often assumed to be a reliable signal of wealth, a family can enhance its son’s marriage prospects by spending a larger fraction of its income on housing. (Other families can follow the same strategy, of course, but when all families do so, the resulting homes are still reliable indicators of relative wealth.) Such a shift appears to have occurred.

For example, when Shang-Jin Wei, an economist at Columbia University, and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute examined the size distribution of Chinese homes, they found that families with sons built houses that were significantly larger than those built by families with daughters, even after controlling for family income and other factors. They also generally found that the higher a city’s male-to-female ratio, the bigger the average house size of families that have sons.

Second, the US in the late 1960s when marriageable men were in short supply:

In the United States, the end of World War II and the return of millions of troops set off the baby boom. In the second half of the 1940s, the population swelled by almost 14 percent, versus growth of less than half of 1 percent during the first half of the decade. By the mid-1960s, many of those babies were reaching the traditional marriage age.

At the time, it was American custom for women to marry men several years older than themselves. In a typical wedding in 1969, for example, the bride might have been born in 1947 and the groom in 1943. Because of that custom, women at the leading edge of the baby boom confronted a significant shortfall of potential marriage partners.

Economics teaches us that when there is excess demand for a good, its price rises. According to this model, excess demand for grooms should have caused the terms of courtship to shift in favor of men.

Before the 1960s, cultural norms encouraged celibacy before marriage. The breakdown of those norms has been widely attributed to the introduction of oral contraception, which gave women an unintrusive way to protect themselves against an unwanted pregnancy. The pill no doubt played a role — perhaps a very big one — but skeptics object that effective alternative forms of contraception had long since been available.

The supply-and-demand model bolsters the skeptics’ concerns. Biologists describe a fundamental asymmetry in the sexual strategies favored by males and females in vertebrate species. Males, whose sex cells are cheap to produce, tend to favor more transient sexual relationships, whereas females, for whom pregnancy and birth are far more costly, tend to favor greater commitment. The sexual revolution, which bent cultural norms toward male preferences, may thus be partly explained by the excess demand for grooms in the 1960s.

My skeptical nature holds me back from saying "this explains everything". But I do think the above is a significant factor in these sociological changes. We are victims of larger social forces that swirl around us, just as our ancestors on the African plains were subject to the preditor-prey ratios between lions/leopards and humans. Our cultural/mental world is powerful, but not all-powerful. Outside forces still rattle our chain.

Where are the Democratic Party Fighters?

Well... here's one. He would stand up to Republican "talking points". But he got thrown under the bus.



Sure Anthony Weiner was sleazy. But you don't force a politician to resign if he has bad fashion taste. Weiner didn't break any laws. He showed stupidity, but if that is your measuring stick, then 95% of the the legislators in the Congress should be forced to resign right now.

Weiner's own Democratic party forced him to resign. That's why there is no effective counter-weight to the Republican slime machine.

From Wikipedia, here are Republicans guilty of sex scandals much worse the Weiner and they weren't forced by their political party to walk the plank and resign:

• Chip Pickering, (R-MS) On July 16, 2009 it was announced that his wife had filed an alienation of affection lawsuit against Elizabeth Byrd, a woman with whom Chip allegedly had an affair. The lawsuit claimed the adulterous relationship ruined the Pickerings' marriage and his political career.


• John Ensign Senator (R-NV) Resigned his position as Chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee on June 16, 2009, after admitting he had an affair with Cynthia Hampton, the wife of a close friend, both of whom were working on his campaign. Under investigation, he then resigned his seat in Congress 20 months early. In 1998, Senator Ensign had called for President Bill Clinton (D) to resign after admitting to sexual acts with Monica Lewinsky.


• Vito Fossella, Representative (R-NY) Arrested for drunk driving. Under questioning, the married Congressman, father of three, admitted to an affair with Laura Fay that produced a daughter.


• Larry Craig, Senator (R-ID) Pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct following his arrest in a Minneapolis airport men's room in June 2007, on a charge of lewd conduct. Senator Craig had previously stated that "people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy - a naughty boy."


• David Vitter, Senator (R-LA): Took over former Congressman Robert Livingston's House seat in 1999, who resigned following revelations of an extramarital affair. At the time, Vitter stated: "I think Livingston's stepping down makes a very powerful argument that (Bill) Clinton should resign as well ..." Vitters' name was then discovered in the address book of the DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey. He admitted his adultery and withdrew from the 2003 gubernatorial race for governor.


• Jack Ryan, Senate candidate (R-IL) During sealed divorce proceedings in 2004, his wife Jeri Ryan accused him of forcing her to go to public sex clubs and described one as "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling."


• Don Sherwood, Representative (R-PA) Failed to win re-election following revelations of a five-year extramarital affair with Cynthia Ore, who accused him of physically abusing her.

Etc., etc., etc.

It is sad that the Democratic party has a leader, Obama, who thinks you lead by compromise, by giving the other side what it wants, then asks "What more can I give you?". Nobody in the Democratic party is outraged by the fact that unemployment is 9% and that millions are being foreclosed and tossed out of their houses because of Wall Street scam that -- really a crime that lured unsuspecting into signing papers that set them up to lose their house -- and when the economy blew up, the Wall Street banks got $700 billion of taxpayer money while the people being forced out of their homes get nothing. Where are the politicians who will fight for the ordinary people instead of selling their soul to big money?

Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence, founding father who helped write the Constitution, forced his black slave to have sex and bear him children. But he ended up being a president. Sure. What he did was a crime. But if you make people ineligible for political office because they have lax morals or are "on the make" you will be left with a handful of prudes and prigs to run your government. And I can assure you that you will hate that far more than allowed some morally questionable people -- who have been legally elected to represent their constituents -- do do their job and stop with all the moral prudery about sex and bad manners.

Something More Important than Weiner's Wiener

I get annoyed with how the media finds silly stuff, minor stuff, personal stuff far more important than really important political and economic stuff. There are 14 million people without jobs. That means there are roughly 30 million people hurting badly, struggling to put food on the table, or to keep a roof over their head. But the press makes all the time in the world for stories about immature idiots who sexting.

Here is a post by Paul Krugman which puts this in its place:

The Case of the Mystery Study

Oh, wow. From Greg Sargent:

The other day, the consulting company McKinsey released a startling study claiming that 30 percent of employers are planning to stop giving health insurance to their workers as a result of the Affordable Care Act. The study received a good deal of press coverage and was widely bandied about by conservative politicians and media outlets as proof that conservative warnings about the law are coming to pass.

But as a number of critics were quick to point out, McKinsey’s finding is at odds with many other studies — and the company did not release key portions of the study’s methodology, making it impossible to evaluate the study’s validity.

There’s now been a new twist in this story.

I’m told that the White House, as well as top Democrats on key House and Senate committees, have privately contacted McKinsey to ask for details on the study’s methodology. According to an Obama administration official and a source on the House Ways and Means Committee, the company refused.

One has to assume that there was something terribly wrong with the study. At any rate, nobody should be citing it until or unless McKinsey comes clean.

Oh, and if you ask me, this is a lot more important than some sex scandal.

Update: The plot thickens. Brian Beutler reports:

But multiple sources both within and outside the firm tell TPM the survey was not conducted using McKinsey’s typical, meticulous methodology. Indeed, the article the firm published was not intended to give the subject matter the same authoritative treatment as more thorough studies on the same topic — particularly those conducted by numerous think tanks, and the Congressional Budget Office, which came to the opposite conclusion. And that’s created a clamor within the firm at high levels to set the record straight.

“This particular survey wasn’t designed in away that would allow it to be peer review published or cited academically,” said one source familiar with the controversy.

All sources were granted anonymity, in order to be able to speak candidly about the controversy.

Reached for comment today, a McKinsey spokesperson once again declined to release the survey materials, or to comment beyond saying that, for the moment, McKinsey will let the study speak for itself. However, McKinsey notes that the survey is only one indicator of employers’ potential future actions — that the conclusions remain uncertain and employers’ future decisions will ultimately depend on numerous variables. The three authors of the report were not immediately available for comment.

Another keyed-in source says McKinsey is unlikely to release the survey materials because “it would be damaging to them.”

Both sources disagree with the results of the survey, which was devised by consultants without particular expertise in this area, not by the firm’s health experts.

This is a scandal. McKinsey is obviously putting together political propaganda to sabotage the Democrat's health care bill by putting out a rumour that private companies were abandoning their health care plans. This kind of "dirty tricks" campaign is sleazy. It should be getting top billing. But nope. The "media" has decided that idiotic can't-keep-it-in-their-pants behaviour deserves top billing. Oh, and the media has joined the pitchforks-and-torch crowd wanting to "string 'em up!"

Funny... here is a list of Republican Congressional sex scandals over the last half dozen years. In none of these cases did the Republicans mount a campaign screaming "you must resign!" and the media didn't join in hounding the legislator out of office. Why the uneven behaviour? Why is Weiner selected for "special treatment"?

• Chris Lee – was sexting pictures of himself, but he removed himself too quickly to let much public outrage build (this is the closest to the Weiner scandal)


• Mark Souder – had an affair with a staffer


• Chip Pickering – had an affair, didn’t resign, but chose not to run in the next election


• John Ensign -- he not only had an affair with a staffer, but he had his parents pay hush money to the husband!


• Vito Fossella – guilty of drunk driving, having extramarital sex, and fathering a bastard


• Larry Craig – caught for lewd behaviour in an airport restroom (he claims it was all a misunderstanding about his desire to have a ‘wide stance’), this was attempting to procure gay sex by a politician who publicly called for laws against gays!


• Mark Foley – who sent text messages to underage boys (like Weiner, but worse because it was both underage and it was “gay” sex which of course Foley publicly said was “unacceptable behaviour since the official stance of the Republican party is anti-gay)


• Ed Schrock – solicited sex from a male prostitute


• Don Sherwood – had an extramarital affair and on top of that he physically abused the woman!


• David Vitter - had an extramarital affair and his name was in the little black book of the infamous Washington DC madam Deborah Jeane Palfray while selling himself as a "family values" man who was for "abstinance education" and against gay marriage.

The above is taken from this long, long list of sex crimes by both Republican and Democratic parties.

For the braying crazies hot on Anthony Weiner's case:

1. Polls show that his constituents want him to stay in office and to continue to represent him. For anybody other than a constituent to try and deny the democratic rights of those citizens to be represented by a person of their own choice fails to understand the principles of democracy and the Constitution of the US.


2. All those Christian "family values" types who want to crucify Anthony Weiner should pull out their Bibles and read John 8:7 "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Hypocrites!

Why can't the media perform its real job: inform the public on important issues so that the electorate can wisely choose its representatives? Why feed the salacious in-the-gutter mind of the lowest common denominator? Why join in a partisan, one-sided attack? Why distract the electorate with a stupid sex scandal when much more important issues affecting 30 million people immediately that the whole society indirectly (via the recession and collapsing economy)?

Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jetha's "Sex at Dawn"

This was a fun read. Lots of sweeping generalizations. Lots of unique interpretations of facts. Lots of bold claims.

Previously I had written a review of this book and expressed some scepticism about the claims in this book. Now having read the book, I remain dubious about the more sweeping generalizations in this book. But I now will admit that the authors have gathered interesting facts to build their case. I simply think they make claims that go beyond the facts they have.

I'm willing to accept their argument that viewing monogamy as "natural" for humans is silly. But the same has been discovered for all those "virtuous" birds who were thought to be true to their mates but have been found cheating on the side. Sex and love are much more complicated than the standard account. This is amply demonstrated in this book.

I think variability in human societies and in human nature is wider than more standard presentations of "virtuous monogamy". But Christopher and Jethá see outliers and want to claim they represent the "true" nature of humans. I don't buy it. When they talk about wild sex and wife swapping among the pilots of WWII, I think -- but don't have the data to prove it -- that this was one reaction to the fear and stress of war and am willing to allow that this was a noticeable, sizable fraction of pilots, but I doubt it was anywhere near a majority. Christopher and Jethá go on to claim this was the birth of the wild swinger clubs of the 1960s. I can see it as a thread, one small feed-in to a movement that got popularized by the rise in interest in sex and "alternative" lifestyles during the 1960s. But I don't see it as evidence about the "true nature" of human sexuality.

What I do know is that the radical left in the late 19th century had their adherents to "free love". This was mostly men of status seeking access to impressionable women in "the movement". But that's the same old story of the alpha male getting access to concubines in Biblical days.

My simple-minded view is that monogamy is the choice of about 80% of the population. But within that 80% there is an unhappy half who fall into divorce, affairs, and serial monogamy to deal with their unhappiness. At the same time there is a peripheral 20% who evidence the variability in human sexuality. These are the swingers, the bi-sexuals, and the homosexuals and even the chastity fanatics of religion, the fetishists, and the mentally deranged sex killers.

Science of complex phenomena like people, institutions, and societies is not the hard science of physics and chemistry. The subject matter of the soft sciences is simply too complex to be nailed down with simplistic laws. The fact that you can find polygamous and polyandrous societies as well as group sex societies simply proves there is a lot of variability.

I do accept Christopher and Jethá's argument that sexuality changed as humans moved from foraging to agricultural societies.

Here are some bits from the book that I found interesting:

If it's true that multiple mating was common in human evolution, the apparent mismatch between the relatively quick male orgasmic response and the so-called "delayed" female response makes sense (note how the female response is "delayed" only if the male's is assumed to be "right on time"). The male's quick orgasm lessens the chances of being interrupted by predators or other males (survival of the quickest!), while the female and her child would benefit by exercising some preconscious control over which spermatozoa would be most likely to fertilize her ovum.

Prolactin and the other hormones released at orgasm appear to trigger very different responses in men and women. While a man is likely to require a prolonged refractory (or recovery) period immediately after an orgasm (and maybe a sandwich and a beer as well), thus getting him out of the way of other males, many women are willing and able to continue sexual activity well beyond a "starter orgasm."

It's worth repeating that primate species with orgasmic females tend to be promiscuous.

And this:

Before the war on drugs, the war on terror, or the war on cancer, there was the war on female sexual desire. It's a war that has been raging for longer than any other, and its victims number well into the billions by now. Like the others, it's a war that can never be won, as the declared enemy is a force of nature. We may as well declare war on the cycles of the moon.

There is a pathetic futility animating the centuries-long insistence -- against overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- that the human female is indifferent to the insistent urgings of libido. Recall the medical authorities in the antebellum South who assured plantation owners that slaves trying to break out of their chains were not human beings deserving of freedom and dignity, but sufferers of Drapetomania, a medical disorder best cured with a good lashing.

And this:

Our journey into deeper understanding of the "feminine soul" begins in a muddy field in the English countryside. In the early 1990s, neuroscietist Keith Kendrick and his colleagues exchanged that season's newborn sheep and goats (the baby sheep were raised by adult goats, and vice versa). Upon reaching sexual maturity a few years later, the animals were reunited with their own species and their mating behavior was observed. The females adopted a love-the-one-you're-with approach, showing themselves willing to mate with males of either species. But the males, even after being back with their own species for three years, would mate only with the species with which they were raised.

Research like this suggests strong differences in degrees of "erotic plasticity" (changeability) in the males and females of many species -- including ours. ... Greater erotic plasticity leads more women to experience more variation in their sexuality than men typically do, and women's sexual behavior is far more responsive to social pressure. This greater plasticity could manifest through changes in whom a woman wants, in how much she wants him/her/them, and in how she expresses her desire.

And this:

In Hierarchy in the Forest, primatologist Christopher Boehm argues that egalitarianism is an eminently rational, even hierarchical political system, writing, "Individuals who otherwise would be subordinated are clever enough to form a large and united political coalition, and they do so for the express purpose of keeping the strong from dominating the weak." According to Boehm, foragers are downright feline in refusing to follow orders, writing, "Nomadic foragers are universally -- and all but obsessively -- concerned with being free of the authority of others."

Prehistory must have been a frustrating time for megalomaniacs. "An individual endowed with the passion for control," writes psychologist Erich Fromm, "would have been a social failure and without influence."

This book is interesting and is well worth reading. I would simply warn the reader that the authors have an agenda that colours their presentation of the facts. They are right to attack narrow-minded "monogamous only" theories of human sexuality, but then they over-sell the idea that humans are built for wild group sex. I would agree that some are, but not everybody. They've identified variation and then latched onto an extreme to declare it the "new normal". It isn't.

Dowd on the Dirty Deed

I love it when Maureen Dowd gets hold of a good sex scandal and roughs the rogue up with her racy rants:

Your Tweetin’ Heart

Tweetin’ ain’t cheatin’.

In his sensationally surreal apologia, a weepy Anthony Weiner had only one thing to brag about: “I’ve never had sex outside my marriage.”

No congress for the congressman. In the new, mega-political Internet sex scandal, the 46-year-old New Yorker downplayed his phone sex and salacious sexting with female strangers as “you know, almost a frivolous exchange among friends.”

Scrabble is a frivolous exchange among friends. Taking a picture of your deal, as David Letterman dubbed it, and blasting it into hyperspace to women you’ve never met is, you know, something more creepy and compulsive.

Go read the rest of her NY Times op-ed on Weiner's wiener.

I find it funny when Dowd takes on the "world weary" viewpoint:

In five decades, we’ve moved from the pre-feminist mantra about the sexual peccadilloes of married men — Boys will be boys — to post-feminist resignation: Men are dogs. And there’s no point in feminists wasting their ire at women being objectified because many women these days seem all too ready to play along.

We’ve traded places with France. There, after D.S.K., a spirited feminism has blossomed, an urge to stop covering up seamy incidents of droit du seigneur. Now we’re the world-weary ones, with little energy to try to reform relations between the sexes: Is there any point, really, in trying to fix men?

She's so much better than this. I love her when she gets into a hissy fit and takes the boys down. This new Dowd filled with a jaded acceptance just isn't as fulfilling as the old outraged in-your-face Dowd.

In this article Dowd has let her rant run down into a meow...

In her book, Elizabeth Edwards wrote that she would have bet her big house that her husband would not fall for a cheesy line like the one Rielle Hunter tossed at him: “You are so hot.”

But clichés work. As Weiner wrote to Weiss: “What are you wearing?”

I want the fire back. I want Dowd to come out with all her lively lexicographic girlish rage and gut Weiner. Flay him for his failings. Sadly, in this article she waxed world weary. Oh well.

Matthew Yglesias on the Power of a Union

Here is a post by Matthew Yglesias on his blog at Think Progress that makes it clear just how a union empowers people:

Harassment Incentives

Penelope Trunk:

These women have nothing to lose when they report men who cross the line sexually. So the maid reported. And then, it turns out, all sorts of women in higher up positions spoke up against Strauss-Kahn. The women wouldn’t report the harassment on their own. They don’t want to suffer retribution. But now there will be no retribution, so it’s safe to come forward.

This is why men are going to focus harassment at the higher ranks of the corporate ladder. These are the women who have to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep climbing the ladder.

But God help the guy who harasses a women with nothing to lose.

On the other hand, Steven Greenhouse reports that various kinds of harassment and assault of hotel maids are extremely common. Is it true, after all, that a maid has “nothing to lose”? Perhaps that would be true if the economy operated at a permanent full-employment state. Even if you did get fired, you could find some other hotel to clean in. But when unemployment’s 9 percent it seems to me a low-wage worker has a huge amount to lose. Unless she’s represented by a strong labor union, which was the case for the maid at the Sofitel in question.

The truth is that Dominique Strauss-Kahn's past sexual assaults were covered up not because the women he assaulted "had something to lose" but because the women he assaulted did not belong to a labor union. Think about this as Republicans continue to assault unions in the US. These political ideologues are destroying an institution that gives the powerless one small bit of power to fight back against the immensely powerful.

McDonald's Shows Its "Values"

Sadly. McDonald's is more concerned about repressing facts and maintaining a synthetic "image" than in letting truth be told. They fired an employee for releasing a video of a savage beating in a McDonald's restaurant. Obviously McDonald's policy is: pretend that their restaurants are a haven from the real world with McFood as a synthetic substitute for reality.

Here is a bit from an article by Maureen Dowd in the NY Times. I've bolded the key bit:

April is the cruelest month for Chrissy Lee Polis.

The 22-year-old stopped by the Rosedale, Md., McDonald’s, just east of Baltimore, last week.

Two patrons, an 18-year-old woman named Teonna Monae Brown and a 14-year-old girl, seemed to come out of nowhere and began ferally assaulting Polis.

The savage pair may have been disturbed at the prospect that Polis was transgender. “They said, ‘That’s a dude. That’s a dude. And she’s in the female bathroom,’ ” Polis told The Baltimore Sun.

The attackers spit on her, threw her on the floor, kicked her in the face and back, punched her in the nose, ripped her earrings out of her earlobes, dragged her by her hair across the restaurant and only stopped when she began to have an epileptic seizure and an older woman in a white track suit intervened.

A McDonald’s employee, who captured it all on his cellphone, was fired after his video went viral on YouTube.

Baltimore is the scene of multiple crimes:

• Sexual bigots savagely attack a transgendered woman because they didn't personally approve of this "lifestyle". (I'm waiting for people with perms and hair colouring to be beaten to a pulp by the Puritans who think this kind of cosmetic alteration insults God. In the good old days this got you into the stocks and I'm sure some are ready to put the offenders on faggots and set them afire so that the smoke of the offering can loft up to the heavens and please a most jealous God.)


• The good people of Baltimore who "witnessed" the assault acted more like Romans at the Coliseum watching a gladiatorial fight or Christians being fed to the lions. I'm surprised that the news report didn't identify whether the onlookers offered a thumbs up or thumbs down for the vicious beating.


• McDonald's management tops the list of infamy by deciding that fiction is more real at McDonalds that truth. If you dare show something inside their restaurant that undermines the corporate "image" you get fired. Truth be damned. It is the burnished image that counts.

I find this bit comical:

The suspects have been charged with assault and the Baltimore County state’s attorney office is determining whether it classifies as a hate crime.

I wonder what qualifies as a "hate" crime in this county if this beating doesn't. I can only guess that Baltimore county officials are "hard at work" trying to figure out what "policy position" they should take. On the one hand you have bigots beating somebody to a bloody pulp. But on the other hand, I guess there are just so many transgendered beatings in this county that it is hard to decide if this one is "special" and should be treated as a hate crime, or is just one of any number of run-of-the-mill beat the gays, beat the transgendered, beat the mentally retarded, beat the blacks, beat the foreigner, beat the homeless crimes that go on in that blighted part of the world. It must be tough to pick out "hate" crimes when you have so many to choose from. Right?

The good news from Maryland is that this story helps announce "open season" on beatings:

A week before the attack, Maryland’s Senate shelved a measure extending anti-discrimination protections to people who openly change their gender identity even though, as The Sun editorialized, “It would have sent a powerful signal that transgender people are not fair game for bigots.”

Wonderful. The legislators in Maryland have decided that it is discrimination if you beat up the handicapped and mentally retarded or the homeless, but it isn't a crime if you beat up the transgendered. I guess that since Michael Vick is out of the dog fighting business, maybe the more "progressive" elements of the Baltimore business community figure they can attract tourists to watch the transgendered beatings. Maybe move these from McDonald's to a bigger arena, sell tickets, and put Baltimore on the map as a tourist "destination" for non-hate crime beatings. I can see that the legislators are going to be busy trying to figure out that since transgendered beatings don't qualify as a "hate" crime, what else can they add to the mix to make for a more exciting offering to attract tourists. Maybe beatings for midgets or fly in Finns from Europe that can be put into a ring and beaten to a pulp to excite the tourists. The possibilities are endless!

The US's Troubled Race Relations History

Here's a bit from Tom Ricks' The Best Defense blog:

... I didn't know until last weekend that baseball great Jackie Robinson, in 1944 a lieutenant in the Army's 758th Tank Battalion, was court-martialed back then for refusing to move to the back of an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas. He was acquitted on all charges and honorably discharged later in the year.

He also had been turned away when he tried to play for the baseball team at Ft. Riley, Kansas. He was told to report instead to "the colored team" -- which didn't exist. A big joke.

Ricks addresses the DADT (Don't Ask, Don't Tell) policy for "handling gays" in the military. Sadly, the US has a long history of bad decisions and a slowness in meeting the rest of the world's standards in human relations. England eliminated slavery long before the US. Most Western countries got rid of bans on gays in the military years ago, but it drags on in the US. Worse, hypocrites like John McCain, have the power to drag their feet and prevent change. It reminds me of the fillibusters and long harangues by politicians in the late 1950s and 1960s over racial integration. There is something in the water in the US that encourages digging in heels over social issues. (Actually, it isn't the water, it is the fundamentalist Christian religion spread amongst a number of denominations that creates the problem.)

You would think a people would look at themselves in the mirror, feel shame, and make a pledge to "never again" behave in such a unjust, socially backward way. Sadly, that never seems to happen. Instead, the give ground grudgingly and dig in their heels just a bit down the road on the next "issue" and refuse to give ground.

Choosing to be Straight

This is funny. This street interviewer catches a lot of people in the hypocrisy of their views about "choosing" to be gay...



My old philosophy days remind me that the world first "big name" philosophy, a guy called Socrates, got himself killed for asking "inconvient" questions like the above interviewer. Sadly, most people prefer to remain complacently ignorant about their prejudices and ignorance. The Athenians got so pissed off with the probing questions of Socrates that they killed him.

Oh... I guess to be completely honest, I think Socrates was killed partly for his annoying inquisitiveness. But a big factor what that he was the teacher and confidant of a large number of high visibility aristocratic plotters who eventually did overthrow the Athenian democracy.

Richard Wrangham's "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human"

This is another excellent book by Richard Wrangham. I loved his book Demon Males. This is just as good. It opens up a new way of looking at old subjects: human evolution, pair bonding, food. His thesis is simple: it wasn't the old story of "fire changed us from apes to humans" or "hunting changed us from apes to humans". Instead he has a more elaborate tale to tell with cooking playing a central role.

His claim is that cooking played a big role in evolution because it allows humans to expand their diet, get more nutrition from what they eat, changed the physiology of humans (shrank the gut and teeth while allowing the brain to get bigger), and created a unique pair-bonding in humans based on an economic unit in which the woman cooks and the male guarantees the security of property for the woman, the children, and the family. Oh, and it created the problem of male dominance and wife beating.

He points out that raw food is not only nutrition poor, but it gobbles up a lot of calories to support digestion. By moving to cooked food, the heating changes the nature of the food, makes it taste better, creates more easily digestible nutrition, and cuts the metabolic costs of digestion. He proposes a change to the story of evolution. For him, the split with chimps/gorillas was because humans took up hunting and became australopithcines. The change from australopithcines to habilines came with the adoption of cooking. The change to sapiens came as habilines fought over food and forced the females to switch from independent members of the troop to a dedicated domestic responsible for cooking while the male took responsibility to enforce the private property of hearth and home. It is an interesting story. It probably has elements of truth in it. It will be interesting to see how critics work this theory over and how it evolves over the next few decades.

Here's the argument that mastering fire transformed australopithcines into habilines:

But when eating muscle, chimpanzees are forced to chew it more slowly, taking as much as an hour to chew one-third of a kilogram (three-quarters of a pound). They can get as many calories per hour by chewing fruits as they can by chewing meat. The habilines would have faced the same challenge. If they had relied on unprocessed meat for as much as half their calories and had eaten their meat as slowly as chimpanzees, with certain cuts of meat they would have to spend several hours a day chewing it. The digestive costs likewise would have been high, since the gut would have been busy digesting for many ours.

...

I have offered that Homo erectus originated as cooks, the expensive tissue hypothesis suggests that eating cooked food caused their brains to grow. Once cooking began, gut size could fall and the gut would be less active, both trends reducing the cost of the digestive system.

Here is his argument for cooking as the step that created sapiens:

The proposal that the human household originzed in competition over food presents a challenge to conventional thinking because it holds economics as primary and sexual relations as secondary. Anthropologists often see marriage as an exchange in which women get resources and men get a guarantee of paternity. In that view, sex is the basis of our mating system; economic considerations are an add-on. But in support of the primary importance of food in determining mating arrangements, in animal species the mating system is adapted to the feeding system, rather than the other waqy around. A female chimpanzee needs the support of all the males in her community to aid her in defending a large feeding territory, so she does not bond with any particular male. A female gorilla, however, has no need for a defended food territory, so she is free to become a mate for a specific male. Many such examples suggest that the mating system is constrained by the way species are socially adapted to their food supply. The feeding system is not adapted to the mating arrangement. The consequences of a man's economic dependence takes different forms in different societies, but ... his needing a wife to provide food is universal among hunter-gatherers. Food, it seems, routinely drives a man's marriage decision more than the need for a sexual partner.

Furthermore, food relationships appear to be more tightly regulated than sexual relationships. Among the Bonerif, husbands disapproved of their wives having sex with bachelors, but the bachelors did it anyway. Husbands were relatively tolerant of their wives having ssex with other husbands, perhaps because promiscuous sex involved less threat of losing her economic services than did promiscuous feeding. As in many other hunter-gatherer communities, Bonerif attitudes toward premarital sex are particularly open-minded. One girl had sex with every unmarried male in the community except her brother. But when a woman feeds a man, she is immediately recognized as being married to him. Western society is not alone in thinking that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

... The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony. Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits. But for women, the adoption of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerabililty to male authority. Men were the greater beneficiaries. Cooking freed women's time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.

The world of cooking and sitting around a fire had even more profound effects:

Even our ancestors' emotions are likely to have been influenced by a cooked diet. ...

... Among the eaters of cooked food who were attracted to a fireside meal, the calmer individuals would have more comfortably accepted others' presence and would have been less likely to irritate their companions. They would have bheen chased away less often, would have had more access to cooked food, and would have passed on more genes to succeeding generations than the wold-eyed and intemperate bullies who disturbed the peace to the point that they were ostracized by a coalition of the calm. A version of this system had probably already started before cooking, when groups of habilines clustered about a meat carcass.

... Thus the temperamental journey toward relaxed face-to-face communication should have taken an important step forward with Homo erectus. As tolerance and communication ability increased, individuals would have become better at reaching a mutual understanding, forming alliances, and excluding the intolerant. Such changes in social temperament would have contributed to a growing ability to communicate, including the evolution of language.

It is a fascinating book with a distinctly different take on human evolution. It is well worth reading.

How to Improve Your Sex Life

From this post by Dan Ariely on his blog, it is obvious that my sex life is stunted because I don't have an iPhone. He scientifically "proves" that if I get an iPhone I will have 10 women as sex partners.

Better yet! His research demonstrates that women with iPhones are especially promiscuous and on average have 12 partners. So obviously all I have to do is find a woman with an iPhone and sex will be a cinch.

Who says science has no benefits? Obviously science is the path to better sex.

Don't bother me with quibbles about causality versus correlation. I don't have time for all that yucky math stuff and stultifing science-ese. I just want "the facts". And Ariely "proves" that finding a woman with an iPhone is practically the same as crawling into bed with a sex-starved woman. I can't miss!

Now... for the scientifically illiterate, Ariely provides the pictorial proof:

Click to Enlarge
Who needs facts when you have a picture? Science illiterates of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your innocence. Your gullibility will ensure you are the consumate consumer. If one iPhone gets you some sex, then obviously a dozen will give you a veritable harem. So why stop at one phone?

Life Story

Here is a wonderful short video that gets at the essence of life and love. It is a very tender story...



This is one of the little jewels you find as you wonder around the Internet. I found it on a posting by a sex educator in the UK despite the fact that it was produced by PBS in the US and I'm sitting in Canada watching it.

By the way, the blog posting with this video has some wonderful advice on dating. The posting is by Dr. Petra Boynton and it is relaying information she picked up attending British Science meeting. Here's the key bit of advice (which is mostly just common sense, but people pay good money buying "advice" books to get the following):

‘Scientific’ dating advice – do any of these work?

We often see dating advice given in self help books and relationships features in magazines, but do any of the following tips have any basis in science?

“Be yourself”

This message is often presented as a ‘dating fact’ yet is hard to track down with any origins in research. Indeed it only works if you feel confident and like yourself – or like the person you are when you are attempting to meet and date other people. A more accurate message may be ‘be comfortable with yourself before you begin dating’. It’s worth being very sceptical of dating advice that simply tells you to ‘be yourself’ as it often is not based on any sound science and is overly simplistic, telling you what to do but not how to do it. (For fun you could run an n of 1 trial and go on dates as you and on dates as an alter ego and see who has the most success)

Self affirmations

Repeating messages about how wonderful you are is often recommended to boost self confidence and assumed to work to get you onto the dating scene as a confident person. However scientists disagree over whether (and how) this approach works. Critics of self affirmation, see them as frequently used by people with low self esteem who are trapped by their lack of confidence and cannot believe the affirmations they are repeating. Others argue they can work if used realistically and as a means of boosting confidence – or if requested as genuine feedback from friends or family.

Internet dating – can work but not if you expect to find ‘the one’ (see above). It can help you build confidence, practice talking to people and get used to meeting, chatting and being rejected.

Getting used to being let down – based on behavioural method of ‘exposure therapy’ or ‘flooding’ approach the idea you expose yourself to rejection is often suggested by self help gurus (although whether they actually know what their advice is based on remains questionable). In theory it can work if done appropriately. If you put a lot of emphasis on being accepted and are fearful if one person rejects you that it’s a sign you’re unlovable then facing rejection over and over can prove to you it’s something you can cope with. The theory is you can then get out and meet more people because the fear of rejection diminishes. Unfortunately if you are struggling with low self esteem and don’t tackle that aspect of your life it’s likely this dramatic approach could do more harm. So it may be worth doing your dating homework and even seeking professional support before going out and dating if being rejected is something you cannot currently cope with.

Widen your friendship group – this one does seem to make sense. The more people you mix and socialise with the more chances you have to meet and get to know different people which in turn can build your confidence and allow you to enjoy socialising. It won’t work if your entire motivation is based on finding ‘the one’ and if you only widen your circle each time you feel rejected or a date doesn’t work. [Although not specifically about this topic Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s book ‘Connected: the surprising power of social networks' has some fascinating insights into how we interact in real life and online]

Confidence/assertiveness courses – these can work, particularly if you are struggling with self esteem issues. However what we don’t know is whether it’s the action of attending a course, setting aside time to do it and paying for a course that makes a difference – or the contents of the course itself. We also don’t know whether simply reading a self help book could be enough. More research is needed to identify how confidence courses compare with other forms of dating advice.

Dating agencies/singles nights/speed dating – do seem to work but (as mentioned above) is unclear exactly how since independent evaluation and long term follow up pretty much impossible with commercial enterprises.

Check/change your appearance – the idea that you get more people interested in you if you have a ‘makeover’ or revamp your wardrobe is pretty core to a lot of advice for would be daters. Intuitively it makes sense that checking your appearance, personal hygiene and looking like you’ve made an effort when meeting other people is important. However, this can often be misinterpreted by daters (particularly those on a low income) that you have to have a budget to buy a new wardrobe before you can even enter the dating scene. Certainly my experience of doing dating classes with mental health service users indicates the fear of not ‘looking right’ or not having enough money to buy a new wardrobe (or pay for dates) is a major barrier in considering dating others.

The take home message here is a lot of advice is given about how to date, presented as ‘fact’ but often with little or no basis in science. It’s particularly telling how much dating information is presented as being for everyone and yet tends to really be speaking for younger, affluent, heterosexual and able bodied audiences. This is evidently a major barrier for many people seeking dating advice who don’t fit into this narrow category. [It’s also a clue that much advice presented as ‘factual’ is nothing but since it excludes more people than it talks about]

She finished her post with an interview of her done by another woman at the science meeting. So you get a peek at Dr. Petra in this video:



If you are interested in this topic, there is a lot more in this post and you can nose around on her blog. But it appears that most of her postings are directed at sex education and not so much at the issue of successful dating techniques.

Update 2010sep26:Here is an interesting "psychological insights" for online dating from the PsyBlog blog:

Somewhere between one-third and three-quarters of single people with internet access have used it to try and meet someone new. But, over the years, we've heard conflicting stories about how successful it is.

Believe the internet dating companies and it's all sweetness and light, with wedding bells ringing in the distance; believe the media scare stories and it's all lying, cheating, perverted social misfits. The truth is somewhere in between, but where?

Fortunately, now there's enough research to suggest what's really going on. So, here are my 10 favourite psychological insights on internet dating.

1. Internet daters are not losers

Contrary to the stereotype, there's little evidence that internet dating is the last resort of social misfits or weirdos.

In fact, quite the reverse. Internet daters are more likely to be sociable, have high self-esteem and be low in dating anxiety (Kim et al., 2009; Valkenburg, 2007). These studies found no evidence that people use online dating because they can't hack it face-to-face. It's just one more way to meet new people.

People's motivations to start online dating are many and various, typically involving a triggering event like a break-up, but overall Barraket and Henry-Waring (2008) have found that people's motivations are less individual and more social. People aren't using online dating because they are shy but because they have moved to a new city, are working long hours or don't have time to meet anyone new.

2. Online daters do lie (but only a little)

Although 94% deny their internet dating profiles contain any fibs (Gibbs et al., 2006), psychologists are a suspicious lot. Toma et al. (2008) measured the heights and weights of 80 internet daters, as well as checking their driving licences for their real age.

When this data was compared with their profiles, it showed that nine out of ten had lied on at least one of the attributes measured, but the lies were only small ones. The most frequent offender was weight, with daters either adding or shaving off an average of 5%. Daters were more truthful about their age (1.5% deviation) and height (1.1% deviation). As expected women tended to shave off the pounds, while men gave themselves a boost in height.

These lies make little difference in the real world because the vast majority of fibbing would have been difficult to detect in person. Most people want to meet up eventually so they know big lies are going to be caught.

3. Photo fallacies

The saying 'the camera never lies' is bunk. Even without Photoshop to iron out the wrinkles, camera angles and lighting can easily change perceived attractiveness.

People instinctively understand this when choosing their profile photo so Toma and Hancock (2010) took photographs of internet daters, then judges compared these to the real profile photos.

Although less physically attractive people were the most likely to choose a self-enhancing photo, overall the differences were tiny. The lab photos were only a little less attractive than those chosen for online dating profiles (about 5% for women and 4% for men). Once again, internet daters weren't lying much...

4. Your best look

Clues to which types of profile photos work come from one online dating site which has analysed 7,000 photographs in its database (oktrends, 2010):

Women had higher response-rates when they made eye-contact with the camera and looked flirty. Conversely the least successful pictures for women were looking away with a flirty face.
Men's best look was away from the camera, not smiling. But guys should avoid a flirty face, which was associated with a drastic reduction in messages.
They then looked at which photos were associated with the longest online conversations. These were where it showed the dater:

Doing something interesting
With an animal
In an interesting location (travel photo)
The photos associated with shorter than average conversations were (in increasing order of conversational deterrent):

In bed (associated with slightly shorter conversations)
Taken outdoors
Having fun with friends
And the most likely to deter interactions: drinking! (associated with the shortest conversations)
(Remember, these are all associations so we can't be sure about causality.)

5. Opposites (still) don't attract

Even amongst a diverse population of online daters, people still prefer someone who is similar to themselves.

When Fiore and Donath (2005) examined data from 65,000 online daters, they found that people were choosing based on similarity to themselves.

In this respect online dating is no different from offline dating. On average people are looking for someone about the same as themselves. Indeed there are now many dating sites aimed at narrower demographics such as sports fans, Jewish people or those with particular medical conditions.

6. Internet dating encourages some diversity

To examine internet dating diversity, Dutton et al. (2009) surveyed 2,670 married couples in the UK, Australia and Spain. In this sample internet daters were more likely to have a greater disparity in age and educational background compared with those who had met in more traditional ways.

Although opposites don't tend to attract, by its nature internet dating does encourage diverse matches. The authors argue that it is changing the face of marriage by bring together types of people who previously never would have met.

7. Keep the first message short

Getting a response online can be a hit-and-miss affair. An online dating site has gauged the response rate by analysing more than 500,000 initial contacts sent by their members (oktrends, 2009). Recipients answered only 30% of men's messages to women and 45% of women's messages to men. The percentage that lead to conversations is even lower (around 20% and 30% respectively).

The one-third response rate, which is backed up by academic research (Rosen et al., 2008), is partly because many internet dating accounts are dead.

oktrends also found that longer messages only yield a small improvement in response rate for men and nothing for women. So, don't waste your time writing an essay. Say hi and let them check out your profile.

8. Emotionality is attractive

In a study of online dating, Rosen et al., (2008) found evidence that more intense emotionality, e.g. using words like 'excited' and 'wonderful', made a better impression on both men and women.

This study also looked at the impact of self-disclosure. While the results were more variable, overall people preferred relatively low-levels of self-disclosure.

9. After screening, 51% meet face-to-face

For many, but not all internet daters, the aim is to meet someone new in the flesh. In a survey of 759 internet daters, Rosen et al. (2008) found that 51% of people had made a face-to-face date within one week and one month of receiving replies to their online overtures.

This first meeting is often treated by internet daters as the final part of the screening process (Whitty & Carr, 2006). Is this person really who they say they are? And, if so, is there any chemistry? It's only after this stage is complete that people can get to know each other.

10. Relationshopping

Despite all the positive things the research has to say about internet dating, there's no doubt that it can be unsatisfying and aversive. 132 online daters surveyed by Frost et al. (2008) reported that they spent 7 times as long screening other people's profiles and sending emails than they did interacting face-to-face on real dates.

Part of the problem is that people are encouraged by online dating to think in consumerist terms (Heino et al., 2010). Users are 'relationshopping': looking at other people's features, weighing them up, then choosing potential partners, as though from a catalogue; it's human relationships reduced to check-boxes.

This is more of a criticism of the technology currently available than it is of the general idea of internet dating. Frost et al. (2008) argue that this will change as online dating services move towards more experiential methods, such as virtual dates (see: why internet dating is aversive).

How well does it work?

There's only limited data about how well internet dating works and most of this research examined heterosexual daters. Still, Rosen et al. (2008) found that 29% of their sample had found serious relationships through internet dating. Dutton et al. (2009) found that about 6% of married couples had met online in the UK, 5% in Spain and 9% in Australia. Looking at just younger people the percentages were much higher:

In the US, 42% of couples between 26 and 35 first met online.
In the UK, 21% of married couples between 19 and 25 first met online.
If a long-term relationship is what you're after, we can certainly say that it's working for some people.

Many are no doubt put off internet dating by the scare stories, especially because these stick in the mind. Some will find the box-ticking, relationshopping aspects off-putting, or get caught out by the tensions between representing their actual and idealised selves online. Still others will find that low levels of response kills their enthusiasm.

The research, however, suggests that most internet daters are relatively honest and, for some at least, it can be successful.

A Species with 10,000 Sexes???

I once got into a vigorous debate with a computer scientist who simply refused to believe me when I said that some species have more than two sexes. The example I was thinking of was slime molds. Here's a bit about their odd sexuality (from Wapedia):

Q: I seem to remember a high school bio teacher once telling me that slime molds have close to a dozen genders? is that right?

A: even worse, according to [[1]]: "in fact it’s a slime mold (genus Physarum), an otherworldly creature with 29 variants of sex-controlling genes, dispersed among eight different types of sex cells. To ensure genetic diversity, each slime mold sex cell can only fuse with a sex cell that has completely different variants of genes than its own. If you calculate all the possible combinations of genes and sex cells, you will find that Physarum have more than 500 different sexes." (ZooGoer 33(2) 2004. Copyright 2004 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.)

But fungi as a group are full of the wonders of mind-boggling sex. Here's a bit from a post on the fascinating Cornell Mushroom Blog entitled "A fungus walks into a singles bar":

The trickiest concept for discussing fungal sex is “gender.” In humans, there are men and there are women (from a strictly reproductive point of view), and it takes one of each to make a baby. The male donates some genetic material (a gamete, the sperm), which is received by a female gamete (the egg), and those gametes get together to form a new human. We trust you’re all familiar with this scene.

Among fungi, any individual can donate or receive genetic material–so you can already see we need to let go of the concept of gender. Let’s talk instead in terms of what mycologists call mating types. A fungus simply needs to find a mate of a different mating type. Of the fungi you might be familiar with, hmm, most species have only two mating types (they’re bipolar), and some have four or more possible mating types (they’re tetrapolar). Any particular individual of a species is just one mating type, of course. Most molds have two; many mushrooms and bracket fungi have four or more. A few fungi, like the unassuming split gill, Schizophyllum commune, have more than ten thousand!

In the same way that our genders are controlled by our genetics (Kathie has two X chromosomes; Bradford has an X and a Y), mushroom mating types are determined by genes. In mushrooms, either one or two sets of genes control the ability to mate. Mating type genes in fungi don’t confer secondary sexual traits like facial hair or Adam’s apples; they do control 500 to 1000 genes involved in the development of sexual structures and spores. Shockingly, either fungus partner can get pregnant (by making a mushroom), or be a dad (by delivering a gamete), or both. The whole division of labor thing is an animal quirk.

Now here is where it gets really crazy. If you haven’t shed your attachment to gender, now’s the time. In many large, charismatic fungi, genes at two different locations on the chromosomes control what’s called a tetrapolar mating system. In these fungi, two individuals must differ at both loci to make a good match. Now let’s say you’re one of these fungi. If at location MAT-A you have the A2 mating type allele, and at location MAT-B you have the B1 mating type allele, then your mating type is A2B1. You must find a partner who is different than you at both locations (may I suggest A1B2?). Your beautiful baby spores will be this mix: A1B1; A2B2; A1B2; and A2B1. If your babies should get together and try to mate (perish the thought), they will only succeed 25% of the time. Hello? You with me?

It got a little complex there, didn’t it? The deal is, a fungus just has to find a mate of a different mating type. So actually, when a species has a lot of mating types, it’s EASIER for an individual to find a mate, because the odds go up. In contrast to humans–a human can typically mate successfully (have kids, I mean) with about half the people in the room. But a fungus might find that nearly everybody on the dance floor is a potential mate. See?

Homosexual fungi? Well, not exactly. At least in the human version of homosexuality nobody’s going to get pregnant without some outside input. But there are some fungi that are self-compatible (homothallic)–they can have offspring without a partner. There are two ways to do this. One is to have copies of all the needed mating type alleles in each nucleus (in the majority of mushrooms, a spore contains only a single nucleus, and a haploid one at that). The other way to go is to pack two different, compatible nuclei into a spore, ready to mate. This latter method is how the common supermarket button mushroom does it. I know! It seems like such an ordinary mushroom.

You gotta love those wacky sexy fungi! It is a little mind-blowing to think of the 10,000 mating types of the Schizophyllum commune!

Oh... definitely you must visit the Cornell Mushroom Blog post above to watch the fascinating movie of dog stinkhorn effloresce, so to speak.

From Out of the Past: Wild Sex

Here is a bit from a review of the book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá published in Seed Magazine:

When we think of the first swinger parties most of us imagine 1970s counter-culture, we don’t picture Top Gun fighter pilots in World War II. Yet, according to researchers Joan and Dwight Dixon, it was on military bases that “partner swapping” first originated in the United States. As the group with the highest casualty rate during the war, these elite pilots and their wives “shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual” and had an unspoken agreement to care for one another if a woman’s husband didn’t make it back home. Like the sexy apes known as bonobos, this kind of open sexuality served a social function that provided a way to relieve stress and form long-lasting bonds.

The article is filled with strange facts presumably from the book under review. The problem with an article like this: how can you tell what the truth is?

For example, I find this factoid completely unbelievable:

As an example they detail how in 1902 the first home-use vibrator was patented and approved for domestic use in the United States. Fifteen years later there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes.

Sorry, that doesn't fit my knowledge of that era. Sure there were groups and cults of "free love" but the majority of people were living under a Victorian view of sexuality and vibrators just didn't fit that mind set.

Assuming I ever get my hands on the book I would expect it to be heavily document to back up its claims. But my prejudice is that it isn't or that the references are obscure and not credible.

While I'm for removing the heavy hand of repressive sex laws, I this this is over the top:

Among apes the only monogamous species are the gibbons whose infrequent, reproduction-only copulations make them much better adherents of the Vatican’s guidelines than we are. In this way, Ryan and Jethá argue, repressing our sexuality should not be confused with reining in an “animal” nature; rather, it is denying one of the most unique aspects of what it means to be human.

I think sex researchers need to get out into the broader community. I do know that Alfred Kinsey had a problem with signing up over-enthusiastic sex fanatics as the "subjects" of his supposedly scientific study of human sex. So his data is skewed. It strikes me that this couple suffer the same problem with their data. Simply put: humans don't behave like Bonobos. We don't behave like Chimpanzees either. My judgement: We are mostly monogamous with some extra-marital copulations and with a significant subset of the population (single digit percent) who are hyper-sexual.

I simply don't think there is real data to back up this claim:

However, by looking at modern indigenous societies and comparing the findings of anthropologists with the latest results in behavioral psychology and biology, Ryan and Jethá piece together a remarkably coherent pattern from an otherwise fractured understanding of human sexuality. From societies that believe that multiple men are necessary for a successful pregnancy (what researchers refer to as “partible paternity”) to those where not having an extra-marital tryst will cause a man to be labeled “stingy of one’s genitals” by his female suitors, the authors conclude that marriage may be an established social arrangement among many hunter-gatherers but it’s one in which sexuality is decidedly fluid.

This reminds me of the claims that Margaret Mead made in her "study" of "primitives". Her claims have since been debunked. She "found" the answers that matched her prejudice (and her wish to find "exciting" new human relationship styles). It wasn't science. But it made popular reading. I suspect this book is more "popular reading" and not much real science.

This is one book I would be especially skeptical about its claims. It is too easy to publish sensationalistic "material" to boost sales (or to boost a career).

I find this conclusion by the reviewer to be telling:

While the authors’ conclusion that healthy relationships can be both committed and open may come as a shock to some readers, others will likely find it refreshingly honest.

In short, the reviewer sounds more like a propagandist for a point of view expressed in this book that an objective scientist. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Update 2010aug11: Here is a bit from a quickie review of the book Sex at Dawn on the Gizmodo blog site:

In Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá put to lie the notion of sexual monogamy as something intrinsically human, arguing we gave up sexual novelty for agriculture. "Agriculture" probably means "beer". We gave up orgies for beer?

The "review" is a bit light hearted, but it takes this book seriously and at face value. It doesn't question the claim that at heart we are sexy Bonobos who got side-tracked by agriculture into an over-zealous commitment to monogamy. Here's how Gizmodo distills the message:

Our genes, still tuned toward sexual novelty, cause us to really hate being monogamous, but societal pressures—including centralized codified religion—force men and women into an arrangement that brings with it just as many problems as it solves. Men cheat, women wither in sexual shackles (or, you know, cheat), wars erupt over resources or sexual exclusivity, cats and dogs almost start sleeping together except they're afraid the neighbors might find out—Old Testament, real wrath of God-type stuff.

I don't buy it. We are basically monogamous with an alpha male hierarchy which gives a dash of polygamy to our "nature" since dominant males can cut corners and redefine rules to their favour.

Update 2010aug15: Here is a bit from an article by Carl Zimmer that establishes that humans have less "wild sex" than chimpanzees. This goes contrary to the thesis that Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá are advocating in their book:

Scientists have noted for a long time that the Y chromosome has been shrinking for hundreds of millions of years. Its decline has to do with how it is copied each generation. Out of the 23 pairs of our chromosomes, 22 have the same structure, and as a result they swap some genes as they are put into sperm or egg cells. Y chromosomes do not, because their counterpart, the X, is almost completely incompatible. My Y chromosome is thus a nearly perfect clone of my father’s. Mutations can spread faster when genes are cloned than when they get mixed together during recombination. As a result, many pieces of the Y chromosome have disappeared over time, and many Y genes that once worked no longer do.

Scientists have discovered that Clint and his fellow chimpanzee males have taken a bigger hit on the Y than humans have. In the human lineage, males with mutations to the Y chromosome have tended to produce less offspring than those without them. (This is a process known as purifying selection, because it strips out variations.) But the scientists found several broken versions of these genes on the chimpanzee Y chromosome.

Why are chimpanzees suffering more genetic damage? The authors of the study suggest that it has to do with their sex life. A chimpanzee female may mate with several males when she is in oestrus, and so mutations that give one male’s sperm an edge over other males are ben strongly favored by selection. If there are harmful mutations elsewhere on that male’s Y chromosome, they may hitchhike along. We humans are not so promiscuous, and the evidence is in our Y chromosome.

You can add to this the fact that there is less dimorphism between males and females in the human species which is another indicator that we are a fairly strongly monogamous species.

As far as I know, male genitalia size is not an indicator of much of anything. The only "fact" that I know is that gorillas have a small penis because the males control a harem so there isn't much sperm competition. Human genitalia indicates that there is some limited sperm competition, but we all know this "fact" already from stories about marital infidelity. But infidelity isn't rampant. For all the claims that humans are a "sexy" species, I don't see the evidence of that. You don't trip over humans copulating in the hallways or behind the door of every closet. Copulations are pretty rare.

Carole Jahme on Sexual Jealousy

The Guardian newspaper has a blog written by Carole Jahme that addresses typical "advice column" questions but with a twist, she write from an evolutionary psychology perspective. It has a lot more science in it than your typical advice column, so I enjoy it for its snippets of science applied to "ordinary experiences":

Psychologists use several terms to describe the various forms of sexual jealousy, including pathological jealousy, erotic jealousy, morbid jealousy, conjugal paranoia, jealous monomania, and psychotic/non-psychotic and obsessional jealousy.

Jealousy is seen in all human societies, and field studies of wild primates have shown that sexual jealousy is not peculiar to humans. Sexual jealousy, control and coercion are especially common in primate species where males control harems of females, such as langurs, baboons and gorillas.

Because sexual jealousy is universal, human societies have established baselines of behavioural jealousy that are widely tolerated and accepted as "natural". (In Texas, up until 1974, if a man found his wife in bed with her lover it was considered "reasonable" for him to shoot them both dead.)

However, a turn of the screw beyond this socially accepted level of sexual jealousy we start to see behaviour that teeters on the edge of obsession. Any intensification from this point onwards and the jealousy can be considered pathological.

A further increase in intensity and the jealousy becomes delusional, where the jealous partner is convinced their accusations of infidelity are correct. This is sometimes referred to as Othello syndrome. This form can further intensify with aggressive, unjustified interrogations and excessive sexual demands. The delusional behaviour may continue for years and is a likely manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). No amount of reassurance, pleading or begging will placate the paranoid delusional spouse.

Sexual jealousy is the most common motive for a man killing his sexual partner. It appears to be behind the attempted murder of Samantha Stobbart and the murder of her partner. At the time of writing the suspected gunman and former boyfriend of Stobbart, Raoul Moat, is still at large.

It has been theorised that a mate-killing module has evolved in the brain to control females and restore the social status of the cuckolded male. In some Muslim societies females live in fear of an accusation of infidelity and subsequent "honour killing". Female langur monkeys live in fear of new males taking control of the troop by force and killing their babies. Violent acts by controlling males have, over aeons of evolution, ensured that the genes of these males are passed on to the next generation.

In modern human society, however, it is clear that much of this evolved behaviour is counterproductive. Would a rational male deliberately physically and psychologically damage his spouse and the mother of his children? The future success of the next generation hangs in the balance when a jealous, patriarchal male uses aggression to control the females in his life.

Most people would find the idea of a man increasing his reproductive fitness at the expense of the happiness of his spouse and an infant abhorrent. A woman sexually coerced and harassed by a jealous partner will not make a good mother, so a jealous male only harms himself when he harms his family.

I had a great uncle who suffered the consequences of the local law that lets a husband kill a man found in bed with his wife. For 50 years I was told that the great uncle was killed by an anonymous member of a hated ethnic minority. But the truth came out many years later. He was killed by an outraged husband. So I not only understand the above story of sexual jealousy. I also had a rub-your-nose-in-it experience with racism and how an underclass is blamed for non-existent crimes. That's another "foible" of people. They love to blame "the other", expecially an oppressed minority, for their ills. This spreads the racism on the back of a lie. Tragic.

I found that education didn't "cure" racism in my family. Just time & death. As the older generation died out, the racism has slowly died out. Another lesson in life: you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But you can save the younger generation from the prejudices of the older generation.

An Eye for An Eye

Biblical justice... does it work?

Not if you follow the science. Here is a nice summary by Satoshi Kanazawa in his Psychology Today blog The Scientific Fundamentalist:

In the United States, the death penalty is a sensitive political issue. Many of the hotly contested issues are moral and philosophical in nature, so they are outside the purview of science. At least one issue, however, is purely scientific, the question of whether the death penalty has the intended deterrent effect. Does the knowledge and prospect of execution deter potential future murderers from committing the crime?

While the political and public debate continues, the preponderance of scientific evidence, both from cross-sectional (comparing states with and without the death penalty) and longitudinal (examining the same states before and after the introduction of death penalty) studies seem to indicate that the death penalty does not have the intended deterrence effect. It does not appear that there are fewer murders, at different places and times, as a result of the availability of the death penalty as a possible punishment for convicted murderers.

Why is this? There is no greater criminal punishment than the death penalty. Why does it not deter murder?

The fact that the death penalty does not deter murder is a puzzle for the social scientists, especially rational-choice microeconomists. From a microeconomic perspective, each actor makes a deliberate and careful cost-benefit analysis before making any decision. The lack of deterrence effect of the death penalty is therefore puzzling from this perspective, unless the probability of detection, arrest, prosecution, and conviction is infinitesimal. No matter what the actors want, they cannot pursue and consume it if they are dead. So, from the microeconomic perspective, there should be very few occasions where it makes sense for rational actors to decide to commit murder at a realistic risk of execution.
From an evolutionary psychological perspective, however, the lack of deterrence effect of the death penalty is not a puzzle at all. First, contrary to microeconomics, murder in most cases is not a deliberately planned action. It usually begins with “trivial altercations,” where one man insults another by questioning his honor, status, and reputation. They begin a fight, which escalates to the point where one man ends up dead. The death penalty does not deter murder because there is very little forethought and cost-benefit analysis involved in it. Men usually do not consciously decide to commit murder. The death penalty may deter other types of criminals, who make a deliberate decision to commit a crime, or fictional murderers on Columbo, but not most real-life murderers. Most real-life murderers are not like those we see on Columbo and other whodunit shows. For one thing, they are very seldom highly intelligent and successful men and women.

Second, and more importantly, once again contrary to microeconomics, there is something worse than death. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, life – and everything in it – is a means to the ultimate end of reproductive success. So death is not the worst thing; complete reproductive failure is. If some men face a very dim reproductive prospect and a distinct possibility of ending their lives as total reproductive losers, it makes perfect evolutionary sense for them to be violent toward other men, in an attempt to eliminate them as intrasexual rivals for mates by killing or maiming them. It also makes perfect evolutionary sense for men who cannot gain legitimate reproductive access to women to attempt to do so illegitimately through forcible rape. This is why most criminals – especially murderers and rapists – are poor, uneducated men of few means and low social status who face very grim reproductive prospects.

I generally find Kanazawa a little to simplistic and "fundamentalist" for my taste, but he does a good job of popularizing ideas from the field of evolutionary psychology.

Exploring the Oddities of Sexual Preference

Here's a self-test from an article in New Scientist that explores the strange world of sexual selection:

Which face is more attractive? If you chose the face on the left, you share the tastes of most heterosexual men. It is a composite face, or "morph", made from the faces of eight women with unusually small feet. The face on the right is a morph of eight women with unusually large feet.

It's quite a difference, isn't it? Women with smaller feet have prettier faces, at least according to the men who took part in this study. So do women with longer thigh bones and narrower hips, as well as women who are taller overall. And the contest isn't even a close one. "These are the most strikingly different morphs I've ever seen," says Jeremy Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University at Albany, New York.

Go read the article to learn more strange preferences by men and women. Funny, I wouldn't have considered this, but with a bit of science you can uncover these strange sexual selection pressures in the mating game.

Republican Hipocrisy, Part 2

There has been another outbreak of sexual hypocrisy the the Republican right...

Here is an article in Vanity Fair by Avi Zenilman about Mark Souder, a Republican Congressman from Indiana, famous for being a staunch advocate of abstinence education and family values:

Politico is reporting that longtime Indiana congressman Mark Souder, a socially conservative Republican who railed against consensual sex outside of marriage, is resigning because he had an affair with a female aide. He is a married father of three.

Oops. Souder frequently meddled with CDC research into at-risk behavior, and made life difficult for medical researchers of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. For example, in March 2004, Souder hauled Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, a former C.D.C. officer and S.T.D. specialist at Hopkins who happens to be my father, before his committee and proceeded to lecture him on the sins of condoms and sex outside of wedlock and its liberal enablers.

This story is right up there with the George Alan Rekers scandal. Rekers is a Christian minister, a founding board member of the Family Research Council (a non-profit Christian lobbying organization) along with James Dobson and Armand Nicholi Jr., and he is a former officer of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization offering conversion therapy intended to change homosexuals into heterosexuals, from Wikipedia:

The Miami New Times reported on May 4, 2010 that three weeks previously, Rekers had been photographed at Miami International Airport with a twenty-year-old "rent boy" using the name "Lucien" (later identified as Jo-Vanni Roman). Roman was available for hire through the "Rentboy.com" website. Rekers acknowledged hiring Roman for the 10-day European vacation as a "travel assistant" and denies any impropriety. He explained that Roman was there to help carry his luggage since he had recent surgery and was unable to carry it himself. Rekers was quoted as commenting, "If you talk with my travel assistant ... you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail."

Here is the way that Maureen Dowd puts it in her NY Times op-ed column:

... the resignation of Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana, a goober who preaches sex-abstinence and couldn’t abstain from sex.

The conservative Christian lawmaker is both morally and physically repellent. But he effortlessly benefits from Henry Kissinger’s dictum about power being an aphrodisiac. He had an affair with a younger babe who worked for his district office — “part time,” he ludicrously stressed. They had assignations in state parks and boat launches, and in a particularly delicious bit of hypocrisy, the pretty mistress even interviewed him on a promotional video about the importance of abstinence.

Another case of a family-values politician thinking he knows what’s good for everybody else but exempting himself.

These Republican "pillars of the community" are excellent at the ethics of "do what I say, not what I do". Or, better put, at hypocrisy.