Science (Or Not) – Page 3

Why date hot men?

What is fascinating about this evidence is that the authors find that if the man in the couple is very attractive and/or very masculine, the woman is significantly more likely to have an orgasm either at the same time as her partner, or just after. So the timing of orgasms for women with attractive partners coincides with the period that increases fertility supporting the argument that orgasms play an evolutionary function – women orgasm more frequently and with better timing when their partners have better genes.

Also, obviously, “on average, women have orgasms before men and that most frequently they involve some activity other than intercourse.” Science!

Guess who might be losing his job.

So tragic.

(And no, it’s not because the PC Police got him. It’s because he was promoting racist opinions under the guise of scientific research, and compromising the academic credibility of LSE).

Thanks, Xtina, for the update.

Assholery, like attractiveness, is usually subjective

Photo of Pan Grier — Objectively unattractive, right?

But sometimes, someone is objectively a total asshole. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist and the coauthor of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, fits the bill. See, for example, his latest article in Psychology Today: “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?”

There are marked race differences in physical attractiveness among women, but not among men. Why?

Add Health measures the physical attractiveness of its respondents both objectively and subjectively. At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2 = unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.

From these three scores, I can compute the latent “physical attractiveness factor” by a statistical procedure called factor analysis. Factor analysis has the added advantage of eliminating all random measurement errors that are inherent in any scientific measurement. The latent physical attractiveness factor has a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.

Recall that women on average are more physically attractive than men. So women of all races are on average more physically attractive than the “average” Add Health respondent, except for black women. As the following graph shows, black women are statistically no different from the “average” Add Health respondent, and far less attractive than white, Asian, and Native American women.

Example 4865730 of why “evolutionary psychology” is mostly crap. Over and over again, it’s a way for scientists to look at a particular set of cultural preferences and make up a reason for why those preferences exist (spoiler: the reason is always “evolution,” and “evolution” is apparently tied quite closely to “things straight white American men like”).

Kanazawa uses the term “objectively attractive” a bunch of times in the article, but never explains what that actually means, or how certain traits can even be “objectively” attractive. As far as I can tell, study participants were asked to rate photos of individuals on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 being the most attractive). From there, Kanazawa concludes that (1) women are objectively more attractive than men, and (2) black women are objectively the least attractive women.

Which is fine if you don’t care about the meaning of the word “objective.”

How a Fetus Gets Its Face

The coolest/weirdest/creepiest thing you will see today.

(And yes, there are pictures and descriptions of fetus-faces at that link, as the title would imply. So if you don’t want to look at fetus-faces — they look kind of like modern sculpture and then pigs? — I would not click).

Feminism makes boners sad.

That’s the argument put forward by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, writing in Psychology Today (thanks, Ariana, for the link). They start off here:

One sexual enigma perplexes both women and their clinicians: Why do so many American women have difficulties in bed?

Well, let’s see: Dudes who couldn’t find a clitoris with GPS and GoogleMaps? Women who are taught to be self-conscious about their bodies and especially their lady-bits? Dudes who assume that if they put it in they’ve done their part? Women who don’t feel the same sort of entitlement towards sexual enjoyment as men? Men who see sex as something that they “get” rather than as a dynamic and highly variable set of acts between two people? Women who are raised believing that being too sexual is slutty, but that sex is something that they have to do for men, and that sex is centered on male pleasure? The construction of sex as between men and women, and something men do to women, and purely penetrative, and beginning when the dude enters and ending when he ejaculates? The many wonderful but sometimes frustrating complications of the human brain and body?

Nope:

Though several factors specific to the design of the female brain contribute to this problem, there is one important psychological factor that may be unique to modern democracies. This factor is one of the unmentionables of sexual science, but since our book is filled with unmentionables, we’ll whisper it here:

The majority of women have submission fantasies.

…oh.

Why? Because Romance Novels.

From classic romance The Flame and The Flower to classic erotica The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty to Twilight BDSM fan fiction, submission themes are immensely popular in cross-cultural female erotica. The fact of the matter is that most heterosexual women are wired to find sexual submission arousing–and so are most female mammals.

Why? Because Rats.

Consider Rattus norvegicus, the Norwegian rat. The female performs stereotyped physical actions associated with sexual interest. First is pacing: running and stopping, inducing a male to chase her. This culminates in lordosis: assuming a submissive stationary posture with arched back and raised hips. Lordosis is controlled by a specific region of the hypothalamus, a subcortical brain structure. An analogous part of the brain controls submission postures in female primates.

In male rats, another part of the hypothalamus controls stereotyped dominance activity, such as mounting a female and performing intromission.

…and then there’s a picture of two rats totally fucking doggy-style, and it is so gross.

A fetus will “testify” about abortion bill

Oh wow. I would LOL because, seriously? But this is actually pretty fucked up:

A fetus has been scheduled as a legislative witness in Ohio on a unique bill that proposes outlawing abortions after the first heartbeat can be medically detected.

Faith2Action, the anti-abortion group that has targeted Ohio to pilot the measure, called the in-utero witness the youngest to ever come before the House Health Committee at nine weeks old.

Faith2Action president Janet Folger Porter said the intent is to show lawmakers who will be affected by the bill, which is opposed by Ohio Right to Life and abortion rights groups as unconstitutional.

An aide to committee Chairman Lynn Wachtmann said a pregnant woman will be brought before the committee and an ultrasound image of her uterus will be projected onto a screen. The heartbeat of the fetus will be visible in color.

“The youngest ever.”

(Until I show up swinging a bloody tampon. YOU THINK YOU’RE YOUNG, FETUS? MEET A FERTILIZED EGG. BAM. OWNED).

I’m Sorry

Study Shocker: Women apologize more than men.

If you think you hear women saying “I’m sorry” more than men, you’re right. Women apologize more often than men do, according to a new study.

But it’s not that men are reluctant to admit wrongdoing, the study shows. It’s just that they have a higher threshold for what they think warrants reparation. When the researchers looked at the number of apologies relative to the number of offenses the participants perceived they had committed, the researchers saw no differences between the genders.

“Men aren’t actively resisting apologizing because they think it will make them appear weak or because they don’t want to take responsibility for their actions,” said study researcher Karina Schumann, a doctoral student in social psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. “It seems to be that when they think they’ve done something wrong they do apologize just as frequently as when women think they’ve done something wrong. It’s just that they think they’ve done fewer things wrong.”

So it’s not just that women have a knee-jerk “I’m Sorry” reflex — it’s that men really don’t think they have anything to be sorry for.

Getting More Women to Tech

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Shira Ovide, one of its media reporters, about the lack of women in the leadership among tech companies and talked about the protests over the separately branded TEDWomen conference that was announced last month. Short version: There are too few women in tech.

Only about 11% of U.S. firms with venture-capital backing in 2009 had current or former female CEOs or female founders, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource. The prestigious start-up incubator Y Combinator has had just 14 female founders among the 208 firms it has funded.

Then, a response came from Michael Arrington in TechCrunch.

I could, like others (see all the links in that Fred Wilson post too), write pandering but meaningless posts agonizing over the problem and suggesting creative ways that we (men) could do more to help women. I could point out that the CEO of TechCrunch is a woman, as are two of our four senior editors (I’m one of the four). And how we seek out women focused events and startups and cover them to death.

But I’m not going to do that. Instead I’m going to tell it like it is. And what it is is this: statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs, because the press is dying to write about them, and venture capitalists are dying to fund them. Just so no one will point the accusing finger of discrimination at them.

Arrington is filled with some Real Talk: It’s not the men that are to blame for so few women in technology fields, it’s the women. He’s not going to “pander” to women or “cover [women-focused events] to death.” Sound defensive much?

All too often when discussions of diversity get opened up, it is those who benefit the most from current structures (usually white men from upper middle class backgrounds) demand they not be blamed for the lack of diversity. They’ve worked a lot to remedy the problem. But they give up! There’s nothing more they can do.

I recognize this is a well-intentioned approach, but it also comes from a perspective that is largely blind to greater forces at work. As the amazing Jamelle Bouie over at The American Prospect writes, “It’s less that there is a dearth of entrepreneurial talent among women, and more that women are socialized away from math and science at an early age.”

He’s right: Even though two-thirds of both boys and girls say they like science, the numbers of women who earn degrees in the traditional STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) drops sharply as they get older, according to a sociological study [PDF] Kristine De Welde, Sandra Laursen, and Heather Thiry. Though women earn the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the biological and agricultural sciences (sometimes referred to as “soft STEM“), women make up far less than half in physics, math and statistics, computer science, astronomy, and all forms of engineering. One notable exception is chemistry, where women earn roughly half of all chemistry bachelor’s degrees.

It’s true that the numbers, especially of degree-seekers, has improved in the last few decades, but still “men outnumber women (73% vs. 27% overall) in all sectors of employment for science and engineering.” Furthermore, when you get into high levels of academia, women seem to disappear, “At higher levels of STEM education, the percentage of women continues to decline; this is the so-called “leaky pipeline.” For example, though women earn nearly half of mathematics bachelors’ degrees, they earn only 27% of doctoral degrees.”

There are also other pressures at work: Women aren’t often found in leadership positions, often because women are socialized away from taking on leadership roles. I can’t tell you how many talented women I’ve talked to who have told me something along the lines of, “I want to do more behind-the-scenes kind of stuff.” The White House Project recently released a report on women’s leadership [PDF] to coincide withe the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment last week. They found that across all industries, despite the fact that nearly 90 percent of Americans said they were comfortable with women leaders, “today women account for only 18 percent of our top leaders.” This was true across all industries, “from academia and business to media and the military.” There’s little doubt that there’s a dirth of women’s leadership generally, not just among the tech industry.

Arrington’s not wrong that when you want to highlight women’s leadership — especially in the tech industry — those who want to diversify how it looks can quickly become frustrated. It is true that there just aren’t that many women. But just noting that tells only part of the story. Even from my own experience, I can how women are discouraged from science and math. I took advanced math classes each year and excelled at them. But when my 9th grade geometry teacher suggested I pursue a career in math, I didn’t even consider it. Somewhere I got the message that girls don’t do math. Those messages are sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle.

Getting more women into fields science, math, and technology is going to take time and a lot of work. Those numbers are slowly improving. This might be, in part, thanks to an increase in awareness of girl geek culture. Other sites like Skepchick and Geek Feminism try to support and encourage women in non-traditional industries like math, science, engineering, and technology. Rachel Sklar, of Mediaite, co-founded a group called “Change the Ratio” that seeks to encourage women to make their presence felt at tech events. These are just some of the ways tech women are working to support other tech women.

The important thing here to remember is that pointing out the lack of diversity in a field isn’t an attack on those white men — even if they feel that way. Men may have benefited from the structures to deter women from tech fields, but that then means they’re in a good position to also help change that culture. Creating more diversity isn’t a zero-sum game, even if some people view it as such. I understand Arrington’s frustrations, but he’s not the only one who’s frustrated. Plenty of women are, too. They just want to do something about it.

That’s some morality you’ve got there.

praying-hands-and-rosary-posters — Good Medical Care

On the heels of the nun who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for saving a woman’s life comes this post about how good Catholic medical care basically involves crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. At least when it comes to women.

But the position of the church is actually born from humility, from daring to believe that God knows what he is doing. The church is not blind; she sees with eyes that are not fixated on the corporeal. Her perceived narrowness of perspective is actually so broad, it reaches into mystery. Far from being unnatural, she remains supernatural. She dares to trust that God’s plans really are “of fullness, not of harm.”

Although details are scarce, we are told there was an “urgency” to this 11-week pregnancy, and that there was a “nearly certain” risk of death to the mother. “If there had been a way to save the pregnancy and still prevent the death of the mother, we would have done it,” the hospital told The Arizona Republic. “We are convinced there was not.”

The adverb is the bugaboo. A “nearly certain, risk” is where reason, faith and ethics collide. Man trusts what man knows (in this case science and human flesh) and because he likes that illusion of control, he ignores the qualifier and calls the risk “certain.” It is easier to move on a pure certainty than on a “near” one that muddles everything up.

Having subjected these difficult, seemingly no-win situations to serious and prayerful thought, the Catholic Church gleans that—in obedience to God—this is where trust, that most difficult thing, must enter into the picture. She teaches that as we are all loved into being (and precious in the sight of God) a mother’s life, and the life of her baby, are of equal value; therefore each circumstance—and all available treatments and possible outcomes— must be individually considered.

Where both mother and child will surely perish—as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy threatening to burst a fallopian tube, or a uterine cancer or hemorrhage necessitating the whole removal of the uterus—the death of the child is a secondary (and unintentional) result of the life-saving treatment. This “indirect” abortion is made distinct from a “direct” (and therefore illicit) abortion, by intention.

This description is kind of muddled, so let me clear it up: If you have to take out a woman’s entire uterus or remove her entire fallopian tube, and there’s a fetus or a fertilized egg in there, that’s ok. But if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy that threatens to burst her fallopian tube — a pregnancy that will never result in a baby — you cannot, under Catholic doctrine, simply terminate the pregnancy. You have to remove the whole fallopian tube, so that the death of the embryo is merely incidental. It is possible, in many ectopic pregnancies, to remove the embryo without removing the tube. It’s preferable, in most cases, because it helps to preserve the woman’s fertility and, you know, doesn’t remove her entire fallopian tube unnecessarily. Catholic doctrine requires doing harm to the woman’s body if she wants to not die. Similarly, if a woman has uterine cancer, you can remove the whole uterus with the fetus in it so that the death of the fetus is incidental, but a doctor could not, for example, remove the fetus in order to operate and preserve the woman’s uterus. Some have even interpreted Catholic doctrine to say that you can’t be treated for cancer if you’re pregnant and the treatment would harm the fetus. Even if that harm is incidental.

So what happens when it’s clear that the woman is going to die if she remains pregnant, and that the only way to save her life is to end the pregnancy? Well… since you can never be totally 100% sure that someone is going to die (God could save them!), you kinda just cross your fingers and hope for the best.

“Hook-Up Culture,” this time with Science(tm)

Researchers at a university in the Southern United States asked a fairly small sample of students about their dating preferences — whether they preferred “traditional” dating, or whether they just wanted to hook up. The data shows that “Overall, both genders showed a preference for traditional dating over hooking up.” But guess how the story was reported.

As hooking up takes over from dating as a means of heterosexual interaction on university campuses, more women than men continue to prefer dating whereas more men than women rate hooking up above dating.

I understand that’s more interesting than “most of the people surveyed preferred dating, regardless of their gender,” but it seems a little… irresponsible? Misleading? The article continues, focusing on the Amazing Gender Differences That Confirm Our Expectations:

However, of those students who strongly preferred traditional dating, there were significantly more women than men (41 percent versus 20 percent). Of those who showed a strong preference for hooking up, there were far fewer women than men (2 percent versus 17 percent). However, context mattered: when considering the possibility of a long-term relationship, both women and men preferred dating over hooking up; however, when the possibility of a relationship was not mentioned, men preferred hooking up and women preferred dating.

On the whole, men and women agreed on the benefits and risks of dating and hooking up.

However, there were some notable differences:

Women more than men seem to want a relationship. They fear, both in dating and hooking up, that they will become emotionally attached to a partner who is not interested in them.

Men more than women seem to value independence. They fear that even in hooking up relationships, which are supposed to be free of commitments, a woman might seek to establish a relationship.

So Science Says that women still want relationships! Men must be lured in!

Except, sadly, Science is not quite so clear as the article would suggest. From the study itself:

A limitation of this—and indeed most research on hooking up—is that our sample was a convenience sample composed primarily of White, heterosexual, first-year college students. Indeed, very little research has been conducted on samples from other populations. Further research needs to address whether the preferences for dating versus hooking up remain consistent across the college years and occur with equal frequency across non- college students of the same age, of other racial and ethnic groups, and with other sexual orientations.

A convenience sample, as I understand it, can’t really be applied to the broader population — it is pretty much only relevant to the surveyed individuals. So the finds of this study are, essentially, that these 150 women and 75 men have certain preferences. And these 150 women and 75 men are from a pretty narrow segment of the population. In other words: Non-findings.

Ugh, Science, you are so hard.