In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Tag: Science (Or Not)

If this is true, then I’m possibly the smartest person in the world

Calling all small-waisted wide-hipped big-booty chicks: Ya’ll are smarter than the skinny bitches (and childbirth will definitely be less painful. Double score!):

Researchers studied 16,000 women and girls and found the more voluptuous performed better on cognitive tests – as did their children.

The bigger the difference between a woman’s waist and hips the better.

Other experts are skeptical because, well, it’s quite possibly a bullshit study:

“On the fatty deposits being related to intelligence front, it’s very hard to detangle that from other factors, such as social class, for instance, or diet,” said Martin Tovee of Newcastle University.

“And much as we logically like the idea that men are interested in the waist to hip ratio, it actually features relatively low down the list of feature males look for in a potential partner.”

And the “evidence” provided by the BBC reporter?

The findings appear to be borne out in the educational attainments of at least one of the UK’s most famous curvaceous women, Nigella Lawson, who graduated from Oxford.

Clearly, Natalie Portman cheated her way into Harvard.

Don’t you just love studies that pit women against each other in our eternal search for mates? Nothing warms my little feminist heart like an article that says something vaguely good about “curvy” women, but feels the need to bash thin women in the process.

Thanks to Fauzia for the link.

Questionable statistics

Yeah, I know, you’re sick of hearing about Matt Yglesias. But I want to address something that kept coming up in his posts and the comments thereto, as well as Ross Douthat’s defense of abortion criminalization. Namely, the idea that the Guttmacher study is flawed and those who say that criminalization does not affect abortion rates are wrong because “everyone knows” abortions in the US skyrocketed after Roe.

What Matt said:

In the United States, when abortion was legalized in the 1970s, the number of abortions went up.

What Ross Douthat said:

Whereas we know that when abortion was legalized in America in the early 1970s, the abortion rate went up dramatically;

Actually, we know no such thing. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of LEGAL abortions rose dramatically after abortion was legalized; there’s no data on the absolute number of abortions performed pre-Roe. From the note on page 4 of the report:

Prior to the nationwide legalization of abortion, information on the number and rate of abortions was not gathered, and estimates of illegal and self-induced abortions varied widely. In the years immediately following the Roe v. Wade decision, the number of LEGAL abortions grew rapidly for several reasons. The number of physicians trained and experienced in the procedure increased, and a nationwide network of outpatient abortion clinics developed that enabled women who would previously have had an illegal abortion, or would not have been able to obtain one at all, to do so legally in a medical facility.

Now, there was data on legal abortions prior to Roe because 15 states had legalized abortion or reformed their abortion laws by then. Naturally, when you go from abortion being legal in 15 states to abortion being legal in all 50, you’re going to see a dramatic rise in the number of legal abortions. But the data doesn’t support the conclusion that Matt and Ross have both drawn from it — that criminalizing abortion in the US would necessarily result in a dramatic drop in the absolute rate of abortion, rather than just a drop in the rate of legal or safe abortion.

So, what we have here is a case of a statistic that “everybody knows” is true being used to support a conclusion that really, when you go to the source of that statistic instead of relying on what you “know,” isn’t supported by that statistic at all.

OMG Teh Hysterical Feminists Again!

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Help! The radical feminists are coming!

Watching the responses to Zuzu’s post and other feminist responses to Matt’s piece has been… enlightening. It’s a classic example of how concepts like rationality and logic become gendered, with men automatically assumed to be exercising them when they’re challenging women, and women automatically assumed to be bypassing them when we challenge men or widely-held assumptions.

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New Rule: Bill Maher gets to eat in public unaccosted when babies do.

If you see Bill Maher consuming food in public, be sure to tell him that his horrible appearance deeply, personally offends you, and you think it’s totally disgusting that he would put food in his mouth in public. Eew. Also, remind him of the fascinating biological fact that people are mammals.

Yeah, Bill Maher is funny, but he’s a real ass when it comes to women. His latest tirade is against breast feeding, which he thinks is disgusting and compares to masturbation. But don’t get him wrong, he loves titties — as long as they’re attached to a thin female body, and as long as they’re there for his pleasure.

For all his complaining about conservative nutjobs attacking science and sex, he’s awfully willing to ignore the basic fact that human beings are mammals, and he’s awfully willing to shame women who don’t fit into his narrow ideal of human sexuality. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a TV talk show host) to figure out that the purity-obsessed anti-choice anti-sex misogynists aren’t coming from such a different place than the Girls Gone Wild woman-objectifying misogynists. In both viewpoints, women exist for men’s pleasure, and women’s bodies are public property. Women’s reproductive choices are up for legal and social regulation. The female body is dirty, and that dirtiness should be generally repressed — except in dude-approved settings.

I’m with Louise Marie Roth:

Given that it’s so good for their babies and themselves, why don’t more mothers breastfeed? One reason is that there is inadequate maternity leave for most women, making it hard for women who want or need to work outside the home to establish breastfeeding. Another reason is that many employed women don’t have enough privacy at work to pump milk. But we shouldn’t underestimate the impact of people like Bill Maher who are squeamish about the fact that humans are mammals. Coworkers who don’t want women leaving icky breast milk in the office refrigerator because it grosses them out. Those who can’t handle the idea that babies should also get to eat when the family is at Applebees, even if they are having something healthier than what’s on the menu. So Bill Maher says that breastfeeding mother’s are too lazy to plan ahead, presumably because they can arrange it so that their babies don’t need to eat while they’re out. Obviously he has never had to manage life within small windows of opportunity between feedings or he would know that timing a baby’s hunger is just not possible. Perhaps he would prefer that breastfeeding mothers never leave the house — another recipe for reducing breastfeeding rates. Sometimes people, especially those without children, seem to forget that mothers are people too — we need to have friends, social lives, and activities beyond the confinement of our living rooms.

Bill Maher obviously doesn’t understand the benefits of breastfeeding to public health, since he claims that breastfeeding is not worthy of activism. He says that it’s “petty and parochial.” Apparently he also doesn’t understand that supporting breastfeeding is not only good for public health, it’s also part of reproductive justice — along with the availability of contraception, the legality of abortion, the right to informed consent or refusal of medical procedures when giving birth — all rights that many women currently do not have. When he claims that women’s reproductive activities are yucky and should go underground, he is colluding with the people who want to control reproduction and sexuality — not normally the folks he counts among his friends (with the possible exception of Ann Coulter). He may be in favor of the kind of sex he wants to have with the kind of bodies he wants to have it with, but his attitudes toward women are stuck in the Dark Ages.

And did you know that “narcissistic” activists like the breast-feeding “lactivists” are the reason why the Iraq war is continuing? Crazy.

He also argues that women shouldn’t get “special privileges” just because they had a baby — which is so easy, even a dog can do it.* Who knew that feeding your kid was a special privilege? Or that eating in public (babies are people too, you know) is reserved for a particular class?

*Of course, if it’s so easy I’d like to see him try it.

Curly hair tangles less? Really?

This is kind of interesting, both for its counterintuitive findings and the fact that it was undertaken at all:

To learn which kind of hair truly is the snarliest, biophysicist Jean-Baptiste Masson at the Ecole Polytechnique in France had hairdressers count tangles for a week in the hair of 212 people—123 with straight hair and 89 with curls. Counting was conducted between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., so that hair had a chance to snag during the day.

Masson found straight hair got tangled nearly twice as much as curly hair—the average number of tangles was 5.3 per head of straight hair and 2.9 per head of curly hair.

I’ve got straight hair, but during a few years of my early adolescence, I started getting a GIGANTIC mat at the back of my head. My hair still looked straight, and my mother was intensely irritated by the mess and used to painfully rake a brush through it every night. Which did nothing to stop the matting. She blamed it on my hair now being longer than it ever had been; for some reason, my sister was allowed nearly waist-length hair, while she kept mine short, in a “Dorothy Hummel” ‘do. It was cute, but I always wanted longer hair, LIKE ALL MY FRIENDS HAD, WHAT WITH IT BEING THE 70S AND ALL. So when I hit my pre-teens, I put my foot down and refused to keep getting it cut to suit my mother.

Aaaaand the mats started.

I finally got dragged to a hairdresser, whom my mother directed to cut it all off regardless of what I wanted. Fortunately, the hairdresser saw what was going on: I had a bunch of very fine, very curly hairs at the back of my head that were shorter than the straight, thicker hairs around them. Matting was inevitable, she explained, and the only thing that cutting it short would accomplish would be to make the mats more obvious; at least with longer hair, I could comb the non-matted hair over the matted hair and disguise it a bit.

Mom was Not Happy.

Fortunately, it turned out to be just some kind of weird stage my hair was going through, and eventually the curly hairs stopped growing there and my hair went back to being straight. So that explains my initial surprise at these findings — IME, curly hair means tangles and pain. OTOH, when I really think about it, I get tangles all the damn time, especially on windy days.

But here’s the real fun part: the computer models Masson developed to explain the tangling mechanism may have an application in improving Velcro:

Masson noted that Velcro essentially involves hairy fibers getting tangled up with each other, and that his findings could lead to advances “in Velcro-like technology,” he told LiveScience. For instance, researchers could try increasing the tension of Velcro fibers, essentially making them straighter.

Which is fabulous, because Velcro came about after George de Mestral got a little sick of pulling burrs off his dog’s coat, and finally took a good look at them. I love when simple observations become cool technology.

Unsurprising study of the day

The brain activity of self-identified liberals demonstrates that they are more open to new experiences and that they tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives.

Conservatives have long complained about certain sectors (academia, science, media, the arts) being dominated by progressives. This study confirms the basic arguments that many liberals have been making in response: It’s really hard to do well in any of those disciplines if your world view is steeped in obedience to authority, hostility to change, and inability to accept ambiguity. Of course, there are certainly people who vote Republican or who identify as conservative that aren’t any of these things, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the Republican party and conservatism in general is based on hierarchy, tradition, and a black-and-white bullheadedness.

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why do I fuck thee? let me count the ways

All 237 of them. Although they simplify the hundreds into 4 meta categories, researchers Cindy M. Meston and and David M. Buss have attempted for the first time to catalogue all of the reasons that humans have sex. (You can read the original article here. WARNING: PDF) By breaking motivations for sex into 4 huge categories (physical, goal attainment, emotional, and insecurity), Meston and Buss endeavor to explain the complexities of what was originally thought to be a pretty simple question. Researchers long assumed that there were three basic reasons that people have sex: to reproduce, to experience pleasure, and to relieve sexual tension, but no more. Their list includes things that seem incredibly obvious (I was attracted to the person) to the things that never would have occurred to me (to give my partner an STD). And some of them seem really, really redundant. What’s the distinction between “I was sexually aroused and wanted the release” and “I was ‘horny'”? Or “I wanted the pure pleasure” and “I wanted to experience the physical pleasure”? Hell, what even really distinguishes those four? I have no idea.

As it is, the article has some significant rejoinders to conventional wisdom. For example, the authors refute what one might call the gold digger myth: that women have sex to obtain resources and to sink their claws into an unsuspecting man’s wallet. Men were far more likely than women to admit to having a sexual relationship for purposes of getting a promotion, a raise, or a favor. They were also far more likely to cite the importance of proverbial arm candy in explaining why they were having sex.

While Tierney focuses on the points that either confirm or deny conventional wisdom, I find both the authors’ explanations of their results and possible sources of error to be the most fascinating part. (I mean, was I really supposed to be surprised that people do have sex because they feel obligated to do so? Or because they want to express affection for a partner?)

A gender-role perspective might explain this finding in terms of differences in the gender appropriateness of sexual constraint (i.e., females should be more restrained than males). If having sex (and lots of it) is something that society and evolution* have deemed successful men do (i.e., agentic, powerful, competent), then acting in this manner would be consistent with societal expectations for men. For women, however, endorsing reasons for having sex other than love, commitment, and reproduction would be inconsistent with societal expectancies. Thus, in order for a woman to do so, and to report doing so, she would necessarily need to be less concerned about social dictates and this might reflect an underlying cold and dominant personality style. In support of this explanation, disagreeableness (a trait linked to coldness and dominance) was strongly associated with each of the subfactors for having sex.

As with all self-report studies about sexual behavior, there is always the question as to whether or not your respondents are being truthful or conforming to expectations, and I think this part of the authors’ analysis is spot on. Questions about sex are loaded with cultural expectations and it can be difficult to get people to admit that they’re not within the acceptable range of behavior. The authors go on to point out that women who score higher on personality tests for disagreeableness and unconscientious are more likely to report more sexual partners, which at first makes it sound like only mean and irresponsible women have lots of partners, but really just illuminates the fact that if a woman doesn’t care what people think, she’s far more likely to buck expectations.

As far as reporting issues go, I am also concerned about the article’s discussion (or lack thereof) of rape. The article uses the word rape one time in the body of the paper and the term wasn’t included in the survey itself. (There were several choices: “I was afraid to say no due to the possibility of physical harm”, “I was physically forced”, “The person demanded I have sex with him or her”, “I was pressured into doing it”, “I was verbally coerced into doing it”.) Further, when talking about rape, the authors specifically only mentioned the two responses which address physical harm or threats. Given the overall significance of rape, particularly in their study population: mostly undergraduate and graduate students, I would have thought that this point required more inquiry.

And then there’s this, which made my stomach turn:

Men showed significantly greater endorsement of having sex due to physical reasons, such as “The person had a desireable body”; “The person was too hot (sexy) to resist”; and simply because the opportunity presented itself: “The person was available”; “The person had too much to drink and I was able to take advantage of them.

(Emphasis added)

It’s a little jarring to read an admission of rape in a scholarly article, but there you have it.

*One: this shouldn’t be phrased as a hypothetical. Two: evolution doesn’t “deem” anything. It’s not an agent.

And now for your daily Misuse of Science…

Courtesy of Broadsheet, our attention is brought to an article in the Calgary Herald, charmingly entitled:

Do hunky men make women smarter?

I once worked in close proximity to a major urban news desk. I’ve written news stories, and been on the other side too, with a stint as a magazine editor. But I still can’t stifle my urge to throttle idiotic editors and kerning flunkies who make up headlines like this. Of course, the story is actually about mice, not people; it’s about potential medical advances that could repair the damaged brain tissue of victims of strokes and accidents, not “making women smarter.” Even for the mice, it’s not about being “smarter,” it’s about very specific mating behaviors.

I can’t entirely blame whoever wrote the headline though, unless they also crammed this ridiculous lead onto the top:

It’s not just the muscles, or the confidence, or the chiselled cheekbones. Nor is it the flashy sportscar or the charming arrogance. No, the charms of the alpha male — the guy who stands out above lesser mortals — may actually help women become smarter.

Whoa, stop the presses! We’d better issue an Are Your Children In Danger? alert immediately on this one! I mean, with all the pressure on middle-class suburban teens these days to excel and get into college, this could cause your daughters to run down to the nearest Gold’s Gym and start HUFFING ON BODYBUILDERS to try and improve their SAT scores. Don’t think it couldn’t happen!

On second thought, maybe we should have a little recap of some Science Facts, and simultaneously expose all of you to my mania for numbered lists:

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