Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?

Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.
By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK

Published Jun 20, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jun 29, 2009

Among scientists at the university of New Mexico that spring, rape was in the air. One of the professors, biologist Randy Thornhill, had just coauthored A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, which argued that rape is (in the vernacular of evolutionary biology) an adaptation, a trait encoded by genes that confers an advantage on anyone who possesses them. Back in the late Pleistocene epoch 100,000 years ago, the 2000 book contended, men who carried rape genes had a reproductive and evolutionary edge over men who did not: they sired children not only with willing mates, but also with unwilling ones, allowing them to leave more offspring (also carrying rape genes) who were similarly more likely to survive and reproduce, unto the nth generation. That would be us. And that is why we carry rape genes today. The family trees of prehistoric men lacking rape genes petered out.

The argument was well within the bounds of evolutionary psychology. Founded in the late 1980s in the ashes of sociobiology, this field asserts that behaviors that conferred a fitness advantage during the era when modern humans were evolving are the result of hundreds of genetically based cognitive "modules" preprogrammed in the brain. Since they are genetic, these modules and the behaviors they encode are heritable—passed down to future generations—and, together, constitute a universal human nature that describes how people think, feel and act, from the nightclubs of Manhattan to the farms of the Amish, from the huts of New Guinea aborigines to the madrassas of Karachi. Evolutionary psychologists do not have a time machine, of course. So to figure out which traits were adaptive during the Stone Age, and therefore bequeathed to us like a questionable family heirloom, they make logical guesses. Men who were promiscuous back then were more evolutionarily fit, the researchers reasoned, since men who spread their seed widely left more descendants. By similar logic, evolutionary psychologists argued, women who were monogamous were fitter; by being choosy about their mates and picking only those with good genes, they could have healthier children. Men attracted to young, curvaceous babes were fitter because such women were the most fertile; mating with dumpy, barren hags is not a good way to grow a big family tree. Women attracted to high-status, wealthy males were fitter; such men could best provide for the kids, who, spared starvation, would grow up to have many children of their own. Men who neglected or even murdered their stepchildren (and killed their unfaithful wives) were fitter because they did not waste their resources on nonrelatives. And so on, to the fitness-enhancing value of rape. We in the 21st century, asserts evo psych, are operating with Stone Age minds.

Over the years these arguments have attracted legions of critics who thought the science was weak and the message (what philosopher David Buller of Northern Illinois University called "a get-out-of-jail-free card" for heinous behavior) pernicious. But the reaction to the rape book was of a whole different order. Biologist Joan Roughgarden of Stanford University called it "the latest 'evolution made me do it' excuse for criminal behavior from evolutionary psychologists." Feminists, sex-crime prosecutors and social scientists denounced it at rallies, on television and in the press.

Among those sucked into the rape debate that spring was anthropologist Kim Hill, then Thornhill's colleague at UNM and now at Arizona State University. For decades Hill has studied the Ache, hunter-gatherer tribesmen in Paraguay. "I saw Thornhill all the time," Hill told me at a barbecue at an ASU conference in April. "He kept saying that he thought rape was a special cognitive adaptation, but the arguments for that just seemed like more sloppy thinking by evolutionary psychology." But how to test the claim that rape increased a man's fitness? From its inception, evolutionary psychology had warned that behaviors that were evolutionarily advantageous 100,000 years ago (a sweet tooth, say) might be bad for survival today (causing obesity and thence infertility), so there was no point in measuring whether that trait makes people more evolutionarily fit today. Even if it doesn't, evolutionary psychologists argue, the trait might have been adaptive long ago and therefore still be our genetic legacy. An unfortunate one, perhaps, but still our legacy. Short of a time machine, the hypothesis was impossible to disprove. Game, set and match to evo psych.

Or so it seemed. But Hill had something almost as good as a time machine. He had the Ache, who live much as humans did 100,000 years ago. He and two colleagues therefore calculated how rape would affect the evolutionary prospects of a 25-year-old Ache. (They didn't observe any rapes, but did a what-if calculation based on measurements of, for instance, the odds that a woman is able to conceive on any given day.) The scientists were generous to the rape-as-adaptation claim, assuming that rapists target only women of reproductive age, for instance, even though in reality girls younger than 10 and women over 60 are often victims. Then they calculated rape's fitness costs and benefits. Rape costs a man fitness points if the victim's husband or other relatives kill him, for instance. He loses fitness points, too, if the mother refuses to raise a child of rape, and if being a known rapist (in a small hunter-gatherer tribe, rape and rapists are public knowledge) makes others less likely to help him find food. Rape increases a man's evolutionary fitness based on the chance that a rape victim is fertile (15 percent), that she will conceive (a 7 percent chance), that she will not miscarry (90 percent) and that she will not let the baby die even though it is the child of rape (90 percent). Hill then ran the numbers on the reproductive costs and benefits of rape. It wasn't even close: the cost exceeds the benefit by a factor of 10. "That makes the likelihood that rape is an evolved adaptation extremely low," says Hill. "It just wouldn't have made sense for men in the Pleistocene to use rape as a reproductive strategy, so the argument that it's preprogrammed into us doesn't hold up."

These have not been easy days for evolutionary psychology. For years the loudest critics have been social scientists, feminists and liberals offended by the argument that humans are preprogrammed to rape, to kill unfaithful girlfriends and the like. (This was a reprise of the bitter sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s. When Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson proposed that there exists a biologically based human nature, and that it included such traits as militarism and male domination of women, left-wing activists—including eminent biologists in his own department—assailed it as an attempt "to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex" analogous to the scientific justification for Nazi eugenics.) When Thornhill appeared on the Today show to talk about his rape book, for instance, he was paired with a sex-crimes prosecutor, leaving the impression that do-gooders might not like his thesis but offering no hint of how scientifically unsound it is.

That is changing. Evo psych took its first big hit in 2005, when NIU's Buller exposed flaw after fatal flaw in key studies underlying its claims, as he laid out in his book Adapting Minds. Anthropological studies such as Hill's on the Ache, shooting down the programmed-to-rape idea, have been accumulating. And brain scientists have pointed out that there is no evidence our gray matter is organized the way evo psych claims, with hundreds of specialized, preprogrammed modules. Neuroscientist Roger Bingham of the University of California, San Diego, who describes himself as a once devout "member of the Church of Evolutionary Psychology" (in 1996 he created and hosted a multimillion-dollar PBS series praising the field), has come out foursquare against it, accusing some of its adherents of an "evangelical" fervor. Says evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci of Stony Brook University, "Evolutionary stories of human behavior make for a good narrative, but not good science."

Like other critics, he has no doubt that evolution shaped the human brain. How could it be otherwise, when evolution has shaped every other human organ? But evo psych's claims that human behavior is constrained by mental modules that calcified in the Stone Age make sense "only if the environmental challenges remain static enough to sculpt an instinct over evolutionary time," Pigliucci points out. If the environment, including the social environment, is instead dynamic rather than static—which all evidence suggests—then the only kind of mind that makes humans evolutionarily fit is one that is flexible and responsive, able to figure out a way to make trade-offs, survive, thrive and reproduce in whatever social and physical environment it finds itself in. In some environments it might indeed be adaptive for women to seek sugar daddies. In some, it might be adaptive for stepfathers to kill their stepchildren. In some, it might be adaptive for men to be promiscuous. But not in all. And if that's the case, then there is no universal human nature as evo psych defines it.

That is what a new wave of studies has been discovering, slaying assertions about universals right and left. One evo-psych claim that captured the public's imagination—and a 1996 cover story in NEWSWEEK—is that men have a mental module that causes them to prefer women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 (a 36-25-36 figure, for instance). Reprising the rape debate, social scientists and policymakers who worried that this would send impressionable young women scurrying for a measuring tape and a how-to book on bulimia could only sputter about how pernicious this message was, but not that it was scientifically wrong. To the contrary, proponents of this idea had gobs of data in their favor. Using their favorite guinea pigs—American college students—they found that men, shown pictures of different female body types, picked Ms. 36-25-36 as their sexual ideal. The studies, however, failed to rule out the possibility that the preference was not innate—human nature—but, rather, the product of exposure to mass culture and the messages it sends about what's beautiful. Such basic flaws, notes Bingham, "led to complaints that many of these experiments seemed a little less than rigorous to be underpinning an entire new field."

Later studies, which got almost no attention, indeed found that in isolated populations in Peru and Tanzania, men consider hourglass women sickly looking. They prefer 0.9s—heavier women. And last December, anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan of the University of Utah reported in the journal Current Anthropology that men now prefer this non-hourglass shape in countries where women tend to be economically independent (Britain and Denmark) and in some non-Western societies where women bear the responsibility for finding food. Only in countries where women are economically dependent on men (such as Japan, Greece and Portugal) do men have a strong preference for Barbie. (The United States is in the middle.) Cashdan puts it this way: which body type men prefer "should depend on the degree to which they want their mates to be strong, tough, economically successful and politically competitive."

Depend on? The very phrase is anathema to the dogma of a universal human nature. But it is the essence of an emerging, competing field. Called behavioral ecology, it starts from the premise that social and environmental forces select for various behaviors that optimize people's fitness in a given environment. Different environment, different behaviors—and different human "natures." That's why men prefer Ms. 36-25-36 in some cultures (where women are, to exaggerate only a bit, decorative objects) but not others (where women bring home salaries or food they've gathered in the jungle).

And it's why the evo psych tenet that men have an inherited mental module that causes them to prefer young, beautiful women while women have one that causes them to prefer older, wealthy men also falls apart. As 21st-century Western women achieve professional success and gain financial independence, their mate preference changes, scientists led by Fhionna Moore at Scotland's University of St Andrews reported in 2006 in the journal Evolutionand Human Behaviour. The more financially independent a woman is, the more likely she is to choose a partner based on looks than bank balance—kind of like (some) men. (Yes, growing sexual equality in the economic realm means that women, too, are free to choose partners based on how hot they are, as the cougar phenomenon suggests.) Although that finding undercuts evo psych, it supports the "it depends" school of behavioral ecology, which holds that natural selection chose general intelligence and flexibility, not mental modules preprogrammed with preferences and behaviors. "Evolutionary psychology ridicules the notion that the brain could have evolved to be an all-purpose fitness-maximizing mechanism," says Hill. "But that's exactly what we keep finding."

One of the uglier claims of evo psych is that men have a mental module to neglect and even kill their stepchildren. Such behavior was adaptive back when humans were evolving, goes the popular version of this argument, because men who invested in stepchildren wasted resources they could expend on their biological children. Such kindly stepfathers would, over time, leave fewer of their own descendants, causing "support your stepchildren" genes to die out. Men with genes that sculpted the "abandon stepchildren" mental module were evolutionarily fitter, so their descendants—us—also have that preprogrammed module. The key evidence for this claim comes from studies showing that stepchildren under the age of 5 are 40 times more likely to be abused than biological children.

Those studies have come under fire, however, for a long list of reasons. For instance, many child-welfare records do not indicate who the abuser was; at least some abused stepchildren are victims of their mother, not the stepfather, the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect reported in 2005. That suggests that records inflate the number of instances of abuse by stepfathers. Also, authorities are suspicious of stepfathers; if a child living in a stepfamily dies of maltreatment, they are nine times more likely to record it as such than if the death occurs in a home with only biological parents, found a 2002 study led by Buller examining the records of every child who died in Colorado from 1990 to 1998. That suggests that child-abuse data undercount instances of abuse by biological fathers. Finally, a 2008 study in Sweden found that many men who kill stepchildren are (surprise) mentally ill. It's safe to assume that single mothers do not exactly get their pick of the field when it comes to remarrying. If the men they wed are therefore more likely to be junkies, drunks and psychotic, then any additional risk to stepchildren reflects that fact, and not a universal mental module that tells men to abuse their new mate's existing kids. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of Canada's McMaster University, whose work led to the idea that men have a mental module for neglecting stepchildren, now disavow the claim that such abuse was ever adaptive. But, says Daly, "attempts to deny that [being a stepfather] is a risk factor for maltreatment are simply preposterous and occasionally, as in the writings of David Buller, dishonest."

If the data on child abuse by stepfathers seem inconsistent, that's exactly the point. In some circumstances, it may indeed be adaptive to get rid of the other guy's children. In other circumstances, it is more adaptive to love and support them. Again, it depends. New research in places as different as American cities and the villages of African hunter-gatherers shows that it's common for men to care and provide for their stepchildren. What seems to characterize these situations, says Hill, is marital instability: men and women pair off, have children, then break up. In such a setting, the flexible human mind finds ways "to attract or maintain mating access to the mother," Hill explains. Or, more crudely, be nice to a woman's kids and she'll sleep with you, which maximizes a man's fitness. Kill her kids and she's likely to take it badly, cutting you off and leaving your sperm unable to fulfill their Darwinian mission. And in societies that rely on relatives to help raise kids, "it doesn't make sense to destroy a 10-year-old stepkid since he could be a helper," Hill points out. "The fitness cost of raising a stepchild until he is old enough to help is much, much less than evolutionary biologists have claimed. Biology is more complicated than these simplistic scenarios saying that killing stepchildren is an adaptation that enhances a man's fitness."

Even the notion that being a brave warrior helps a man get the girls and leave many offspring has been toppled. Until missionaries moved in in 1958, the Waorani tribe of the Ecuadoran Amazon had the highest rates of homicide known to science: 39 percent of women and 54 percent of men were killed by other Waorani, often in blood feuds that lasted generations. "The conventional wisdom had been that the more raids a man participated in, the more wives he would have and the more descendants he would leave," says anthropologist Stephen Beckerman of Pennsylvania State University. But after painstakingly constructing family histories and the raiding and killing records of 95 warriors, he and his colleagues reported last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they turned that belief on its head. "The badass guys make terrible husband material," says Beckerman. "Women don't prefer them as husbands and they become the targets of counterraids, which tend to kill their wives and children, too." As a result, the über-warriors leave fewer descendants—the currency of evolutionary fitness—than less aggressive men. Tough-guy behavior may have conferred fitness in some environments, but not in others. It depends. "The message for the evolutionary-psychology guys," says Beckerman, "is that there was no single environment in which humans evolved" and therefore no single human nature.

I can't end the list of evo-psych claims that fall apart under scientific scrutiny without mentioning jealousy. Evo psych argues that jealousy, too, is an adaptation with a mental module all its own, designed to detect and thwart threats to reproductive success. But men's and women's jealousy modules supposedly differ. A man's is designed to detect sexual infidelity: a woman who allows another man to impregnate her takes her womb out of service for at least nine months, depriving her mate of reproductive opportunities. A woman's jealousy module is tuned to emotional infidelity, but she doesn't much care if her mate is unfaithful; a man, being a promiscuous cad, will probably stick with wife No. 1 and their kids even if he is sexually unfaithful, but may well abandon them if he actually falls in love with another woman.
Let's not speculate on the motives that (mostly male) evolutionary psychologists might have in asserting that their wives are programmed to not really care if they sleep around, and turn instead to the evidence. In questionnaires, more men than women say they'd be upset more by sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, by a margin of more than 2-to-1, David Buss of the University of Texas found in an early study of American college students. But men are evenly split on which kind of infidelity upsets them more: half find it more upsetting to think of their mate falling in love with someone else; half find it more upsetting to think of her sleeping with someone else. Not very strong evidence for the claim that men, as a species, care more about sexual infidelity. And in some countries, notably Germany and the Netherlands, the percentage of men who say they find sexual infidelity more upsetting than the emotional kind is only 28 percent and 23 percent. Which suggests that, once again, it depends: in cultures with a relaxed view of female sexuality, men do not get all that upset if a woman has a brief, meaningless fling. It does not portend that she will leave him. It is much more likely that both men and women are wired to detect behavior that threatens their bond, but what that behavior is depends on culture. In a society where an illicit affair portends the end of a relationship, men should indeed be wired to care about that. In a society where that's no big deal, they shouldn't—and, it seems, don't. New data on what triggers jealousy in women also undercut the simplistic evo-psych story. Asked which upsets them more—imagining their partner having acrobatic sex with another woman or falling in love with her—only 13 percent of U.S. women, 12 percent of Dutch women and 8 percent of German women chose door No. 2. So much for the handy "she's wired to not really care if I sleep around" excuse.

Critics of evo psych do not doubt that men and women are wired to become jealous. A radar for infidelity would indeed be adaptive. But the evidence points toward something gender-neutral. Men and women have both evolved the ability to distinguish between behavior that portends abandonment and behavior that does not, and to get upset only at the former. Which behavior is which depends on the society.

Evolutionary psychology is not going quietly. It has had the field to itself, especially in the media, for almost two decades. In large part that was because early critics, led by the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, attacked it with arguments that went over the heads of everyone but about 19 experts in evolutionary theory. It isn't about to give up that hegemony. Thornhill is adamant that rape is an adaptation, despite Hill's results from his Ache study. "If a particular trait or behavior is organized to do something," as he believes rape is, "then it is an adaptation and so was selected for by evolution," he told me. And in the new book Spent, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico reasserts the party line, arguing that "males have much more to gain from many acts of intercourse with multiple partners than do females," and there is a "universal sex difference in human mate choice criteria, with men favoring younger, fertile women, and women favoring older, higher-status, richer men."

On that point, the evidence instead suggests that both sexes prefer mates around their own age, adjusted for the fact that men mature later than women. If the male mind were adapted to prefer the most fertile women, then AARP-eligible men should marry 23-year-olds, which—Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall notwithstanding—they do not, instead preferring women well past their peak fertility. And, interestingly, when Miller focuses on the science rather than tries to sell books, he allows that "human mate choice is much more than men just liking youth and beauty, and women liking status and wealth," as he told me by e-mail.

Yet evo psych remains hugely popular in the media and on college campuses, for obvious reasons. It addresses "these very sexy topics," says Hill. "It's all about sex and violence," and has what he calls "an obsession with Pleistocene just-so stories." And few people—few scientists—know about the empirical data and theoretical arguments that undercut it. "Most scientists are too busy to read studies outside their own narrow field," he says.
Far from ceding anything, evolutionary psychologists have moved the battle from science, where they are on shaky ground, to ideology, where bluster and name-calling can be quite successful. UNM's Miller, for instance, complains that critics "have convinced a substantial portion of the educated public that evolutionary psychology is a pernicious right-wing conspiracy," and complains that believing in evolutionary psychology is seen "as an indicator of conservatism, disagreeableness and selfishness." That, sadly, is how much too much of the debate has gone. "Critics have been told that they're just Marxists motivated by a hatred of evolutionary psychology," says Buller. "That's one reason I'm not following the field anymore: the way science is being conducted is more like a political campaign."

Where, then, does the fall of evolutionary psychology leave the idea of human nature? Behavioral ecology replaces it with "it depends"—that is, the core of human nature is variability and flexibility, the capacity to mold behavior to the social and physical demands of the environment. As Buller says, human variation is not noise in the system; it is the system. To be sure, traits such as symbolic language, culture, tool use, emotions and emotional expression do indeed seem to be human universals. It's the behaviors that capture the public imagination—promiscuous men and monogamous women, stepchild-killing men and the like—that turn out not to be. And for a final nail in the coffin, geneticists have discovered that human genes evolve much more quickly than anyone imagined when evolutionary psychology was invented, when everyone assumed that "modern" humans had DNA almost identical to that of people 50,000 years ago. Some genes seem to be only 10,000 years old, and some may be even younger.

That has caught the attention of even the most ardent proponents of evo psych, because when the environment is changing rapidly—as when agriculture was invented or city-states arose—is also when natural selection produces the most dramatic changes in a gene pool. Yet most of the field's leaders, admits UNM's Miller, "have not kept up with the last decade's astounding progress in human evolutionary genetics." The discovery of genes as young as agriculture and city-states, rather than as old as cavemen, means "we have to rethink to foundational assumptions" of evo psych, says Miller, starting with the claim that there are human universals and that they are the result of a Stone Age brain. Evolution indeed sculpted the human brain. But it worked in malleable plastic, not stone, bequeathing us flexible minds that can take stock of the world and adapt to it.

With Jeneen Interlandi
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789
© 2009

Thank you to Dr. Ron Levant, The Man of masculinity studies, for bringing this article to my attention.

Going Out as a Married Woman

Friday night my sister had a birthday thing at a bar that I've only been to once before. It's in a college town and this particular place is always loaded with coeds looking to get laid. It's the kind of place that makes me feel really old. 

So I brought friends along, who happen to be a married couple. I dressed up kind of cute, but nothing sexy unless you counted my shoes, which were mostly hidden by my jeans anyway. My engagement ring and wedding band were sparklingly obvious on my left hand. Apparently, that doesn't matter. 

We had been there for maybe an hour when some guy comes up to me and says "Hey, could I have a drag of your cigarette?" I gave him a weird look - I mean, who DOES that?? Then I politely said "No, I'd rather not."

He offered to buy me a drink in exchange for the drag, so I said sure and let him have a drag. This came only moments after a conversation I had in which I said "If someone asks me if they can bum a cigarette, I'm going to make them give me a dollar for it. These fuckin things are too expensive to just give away to strangers."

Anyway, so then he says "Do you remember my name?" I said no, and wondered if we had met before. Maybe he went to my high school or something, I have no idea. He says "It's Nick, I talked to you like 2 hours ago." Um, no you didn't, because I wasn't HERE 2 hours ago. He's obviously wasted and my response must have made him realize that, so he wandered off. 

He comes back an hour or so later and asks for another drag. I said "Where the fuck's my drink?" He said he'd go get it right away, asked again what was I drinking. I told him. He has a hand on my fucking lower back and I'm just waiting for him to try something so I can deck him. He took my cigarette, took a drag off of it and handed it back. He asks what kind of shot I want. I replied, "I'm driving, kid. No shots for me." So he asks what I want instead. I show him the bottle I'm holding.....

The fucker GRABS the bottle from my hand and fucking CHUGS like half of it! Had I not been completely stunned I would've broken the fucking thing over his head!

He puts it down on the table and walks away again. I was seriously shocked. All I could think was "He's not even fucking CUTE!!!" My friends look at me expectantly, waiting to see what I'm going to do. I wiped the mouth of the bottle with my shirt (there was still half a bottle left), made a disgusted face, and drank it, saying "Well, I'm probably gonna get swine flu now....."

They were like EWWWWW I can't believe you did that! I know, it was fucking gross. But I missed the chance to break it over his head, so I figured I might as well drink it. 

He comes back a third time when I'm in the middle of a conversation. I was preparing to punch him in the face as soon as I was done listening to the person I was talking to. Before I could, the husband of the friend I was talking to apparently was like "Where the fuck is her drink? You don't get to speak to her again until you come back with a brand new bottle in your hand for her." I guess he used many more choice words than that, but I only got the brief recap. He left me alone for the rest of the night. 

As I was settling out my tab at last call, I noticed him sitting next to me at the bar talking to two girls. I hear one of them say "You look like the kid from American Pie, you know, the one who liked to stick his dick in food products! Why don't you go home and find yourself some mashed potatoes?" I laughed my ass off. I am never that clever in the moment. 

Another guy came up to me at some point in the night and started a conversation. He had been at the door talking to the bouncer when I came in and had told me to smile. He starts talking about how he's from more than a few towns away and was only up there because his friend is one of the bouncers. He shows me a picture of his 4 year-old son, starts talking to my friends as well. I convinced him to go up on the mike and wish my sister a happy birthday from me. It was pretty funny. 

Anyway, so he notices the rings on my finger and asks if I'm married. I say yes, then he asks my friends if they're also married (which they are). Then he starts lecturing us about how we should have kids because they're the greatest things in the world and blah blah blah. I never really got the sense that he was hitting on me, but if he was hoping to start something he sure as hell had a much better game going than the asshole with the cigarettes. My friend's opinion was that he was hoping to hit on me until he found out I was married, but after that point it just became conversation. 

When I was single, guys never ever approached me at bars, clubs, anywhere in public really. I mean, I met my husband by showing up at his house with some friends one night. But once I got engaged it was like all bets were off. Guys started crawling out of the woodwork. At first it puzzled me. 

My friends and I talked about it after we got back from the bar that night. Husband Friend said "I think it's an attitude thing. Girls who go out to bars looking to get hit on carry themselves completely differently than the girls who are married or engaged."

True, because I don't give a fuck. I have a wonderful husband, I'm head over heels in love, and I couldn't give a flying fuck less what anyone in that bar thought of me. I made an effort to look nice, but I certainly wasn't trying to flaunt anything. But it's still amazing to me how that works. 

And most single women, the ones who really want to meet someone, also don't seem to get how it works. But maybe it's impossible to have the "I'm married" air when you're not married. But it's interesting how so many young women believe that guys only want sex and not a relationship, when the girls who go to bars dressed like sluts are largely ignored by most of the guys there. I notice this now that I'm married - when I was younger and single I also saw a completely different scene. I saw these girls talking to the hottest guys in the place and assumed that the guys came up to them. Now from a detached perspective, I see that it's the girls going up to the guys - and the men walk away as soon as they have a chance. 

There are so many girls out there who believe that they must sell their sex on an open market in order to find a guy. But most guys aren't buying. 

My husband dated a girl while we were separated who is about 4 sizes smaller than I am, who actually has a chest to speak of, and who shares tons of little things in common with him. Like his tv shows that I consider to be incredibly stupid. Heroes, for example. She's not what I would call beautiful, but she's not unattractive either. She is, however, what I would consider a "club slut." One of those girls who tries too hard, who thinks that sleeping with someone quickly increases the chance of keeping him around. 

He ended it with her "because she couldn't carry on a conversation." She was devastated when he told her that he was getting back with me, and responded by saying "Does that mean I can't come home with you tonight?" Yeah, he told me this. I asked. 

Sure, on some level I hate her. But mostly I feel sorry for her. You won't find love by pushing your tits up and strutting your shit in a bar. By caking on the makeup and wearing shoes you can't walk in. Women have created this world for themselves in which they believe they need to be every man's fantasy in order to find a boyfriend or a husband. But men want a woman who is REAL. They're not as stupid as many girls think they are - they know Playboys are airbrushed, that Victoria's Secret models have sacrificed brain cells for big boobs. The real male fantasy of the 80's was Cindy Crawford - the brilliant woman who also happened to be beautiful. Men like Angelina Jolie because they believe they can perceive her personality - a sexy, smart, no-nonsense kind of gal with a rebellious streak. It's no coincidence that she landed Brad Pitt, a man who literally could have any woman in the world. I guarantee she didn't meet him at an LA club while wearing a leather corset and stilettos. 

Today's men, I believe, want a woman who can hold her own. She can get and keep her shit together and doesn't really give a fuck what anyone thinks. The kind of woman who can walk into a bar, club, restaurant, wherever, by herself and be perfectly confident of that fact. I think that's what us married women give off that attracts men so much. It is obvious that we have a life and thoughts and opinions beyond wherever we happen to be in that moment. 

The funny thing is, even when a group of married women go out together as a group, all dolled up and ready to party - they are STILL the first group to get hit on. It never fails! There is something about the fact that they aren't looking around, scoping guys and adjusting their cleavage constantly that makes them attractive. 

I don't mean to imply that self-confidence comes from being married. But there is some underlying anxiety that seems to dissipate when one gets engaged and ties the knot. I often have the thought that "I was chosen and I also chose." And I do think that this is freeing and your body language, manner of speaking, and the way you carry yourself are all affected by that sense of freedom. 

I wonder how much more successful these young women would be at meeting and dating someone if they could stop trying to force themselves into a mold of what they falsely believe men want. It reminds me of that hip-hop adage: "We want a lady in the street and a freak in the bed." 

I don't know. Thoughts on this?

Backlash by Susan Faludi: The Full Review

I finally finished it last night, and I'm tired of whining about grad school. So here it is. 

Backlash by Susan Faludi, copyright 1991. 

Faludi's book is about what she calles the "Backlash Era" of the 1980's. Her thesis is basically that all of the strides the women's movement made in the 1970's were met with a fierce backlash in the following decade that spread throughout all facets of American life in an attempt to undo all of the progress that women had made. 

It was a bit surreal for me to read this book. I was born in the early 80's, and therefore I was largely blind to everything about the world I grew up in. When you're 4 years old, no one is talking to you about a woman somewhere who was forced to undergo a c-section after a court decided that the rights of her fetus prevailed over her own. At 5 years old, I wasn't flipping through Vogue magazine and seeing all of the ridiculous little-girl fashions that designers were trying to force on women. At 6 and 7 years old, I was not aware of lawsuits being brought against chemical companies that forbid women to work unless they were sterilized because of supposed fetal risks. In other words, this book introduced me to a world I didn't know existed. 

Faludi appears to be incredibly comprehensive and thorough in her examination of women's rights and issues in the 80's and prior. In places, the book hammers you over the head with the same point so many times that you begin to feel dizzy. If she were making a case in a courtroom about whether this backlash existed, an opposing attorney would have a hell of a time proving her wrong. 

I spent many moments in incredible anger and bewilderment while reading this book. She shows instead of tells the hypocrisy of many of the public fugures that played prominently in the backlash. For example, she interviews a man who spent years trying to convince the public that women belong in domestic roles only and should defer to their husbands in all matters. When Faludi visits him at home, she describes how he must negotiate childcare with his wife, who works full-time, and as he sits there and tries to convince her that men should never perform domestic chores, his young son comes in the room with a frying pan and begs his father to show him how to cook an egg (or something), until the father gets up, dons an apron, and saunters into the other room to cook. All the while his wife is sitting there saying how she supports her husband's work. Faludi doesn't comment on this in the book - she doesn't need to. She brilliantly puts it all out there for us without casting her own judgment on the situation, and rests assured that we are all thinking "How do these people reconcile their beliefs with their reality?"

I was frustrated while reading this book. Throughout the entire thing I felt desperate for her to either write a new, updated edition, or write another book that looks at what has happened in the past 20 years. I wanted to know what I have been missing this whole time. I thought to myself "No woman would ever lose a lawsuit nowadays over being forced into sterilization only to lose her job anyway." But am I right? Do I actually know this to be true? No, I guess I don't. 

I wanted her analysis of the life I have known, not the life that came before my awareness of the public sphere. In the 80's, clothing companies and fashion designers suffered because they couldn't get women to wear the feminine clothes they refused to stop producing. Jockey for Women came out in response to female feedback that said they wanted comfort and practicality, not lace and bows, and the company took the vast majority share of the market because they listened. But I think about life now, and the women I know. Many of us eventually gave in - but how and when did that happen? Did it actually happen, or did we just compromise somehow?

I look at my closet, for example, and I see a decent amount of sexy, feminine clothing. I think to myself, "Yeah, we must have given in." But when I look at what I actually wear - tailored suits, jeans, basic cotton shirts, capri pants that are the most comfortable things I've ever worn in my life - what I'm wearing right now and what has become my at-home uniform: sweatpants and a t-shirt - I think "Have we really given in? Or have we just taken it as an option?"

I think about the election last year. A woman ran for president and had a very real chance of winning. I didn't vote for her in the primary because I didn't believe that she was the most qualified person for the job. But I was proud that she was in the race. I don't believe she lost because she was a woman - I believe she lost because when all was said and done, we just liked Obama a hell of a lot better. I think about Sarah Palin. I don't believe she was railed against because she was a woman. I think she was railed against because she is a fucking idiot, and we all saw through what the Republican party was trying to do by putting her on the ticket for VP. Did she face sexism? Yeah, of course. But we didn't vote for her and McCain because she did not represent us - she was against abortion rights and spoke about traditional values even as she supported her deadbeat husband. She represented to us all of the things that are wrong with the right-wing - if abstinence is the only way to go, for example, why is your teenage daughter knocked up and being forced to marry her high school boyfriend? 

As I read the book I wanted to know what Faludi thought of all this. I wanted to know - does all of the progress I believe women have made since I was a child really exist? We're not even remotely there yet - true equality is a long way off. But are we at least still moving in the right direction?

I highly recommend that everyone read this book if you haven't already. It casts light on all the ways in which women's rights can and have been challenged, and will hopefully make us all more vigilant. It's not a man-bashing book. It does not call out any specific enemy that we need to fight. Indeed, she says multiple times that the backlash was not a conspiracy. But she says at the end of the book that the backlash occured because the men knew just how much power the women were gaining and how their world could have been overthrown had we remained organized and focused. The problem, she says sadly, is that the only people who were unaware of this power were the women themselves. 

I finished this book feeling stirred, angry, and hopeful. If we want government-mandated paid family leave policies, we need to fight for them. If we want goverment-sponsored daycare and in-house nannies, we need to fight for it. If we want equal pay for equal work, we need to fight for it. The book reminded me that we are half the population, and the only thing that keeps us from having the things we want and need is ourselves. 

The takeaway message from this book, for me, was to stop being afraid to be labeled a feminist, and to recognize that push-back is a sign of progress. I think we all need to be reminded of that every so often. So do yourself a favor and go get your hands on a copy of this book. Maybe you will be the one to write the next installment. 

As for me, once I finish reading the book I am on right now, I will move on to Stiffed - also by Faludi only the focus this time is on the men. 

Gender Differences in Sex Drive: Top 25 Part 1

Many of us would probably agree that it is considered common knowledge that men have a stronger sex drive than women. But what kind of science exists to back that up? This is the question that Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Catanese, and Kathleen Vohs set out to answer using a meta-analysis of the literature on sex drive: 

Baumeister, R. F., Catanese, K. R., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Is there a gender difference in strength of sex drive? Theoretical views, conceptual distinctions, and a review of relevant evidence. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(3), 242-273.

Differences in sex drive can lead to problems in relationships. If one person wants it all the time, while the other partner is willing to do without for long periods of time, friction results. (Pun intended.) The authors consider this an important implication of studying sex drive - if we can figure out what's going on, we may be able to improve romantic relationships in that area, leaving couples to focus on other things. Other issues they list include the reliance on norms and societal expectations in self-evaluation, and deepening our understanding of social exchange and interaction in relationships. 

For the purpose of this study, the authors defined sex drive as the motivation for sex, more precisely defined as desire. They write, "A person with higher sex drive would be one more intense or more frequent desires, or both, for sex." They caution that they are not using the term "drive" to refer to instinct or an innate mechanism, writing "Any findings of gender differences in sex drive (motivation) should not automatically be interpreted as reflecting innate differences and especially not immutable differences."

They also delineate sexual capacity as the maximum amount of sex a person is capable of having, and sexual enjoyment (which on the face appears self-explanatory, but how does one measure this? More on this later). 

The authors performed a massive search of all articles published on the above concepts since 1965. They excluded studies on nonhumans, unpublished dissertations, case studies, narrowly-defined populations, and most studies that included only one gender. 

So, what did they find? Originally I wrote this post with a summary of every sub-topic they looked at, but then I decided it was not only BORING and predictable, but it was way too freakin' long. Therefore, I will summarize more succinctly (without the proper use of semicolons, I know).

The authors examined the following areas: Thoughts, Fantasies & Spontaneous Arousal; Desired Frequency of Sex; Desired Number of Sex Partners; Masturbation; Willingness to Forego Sex; Emergence of Sexual Desire; Seeking Versus Avoiding, Initiating versus Refusing; Liking for Various Sexual Practices; Sacrificing Resources to Get Sex; Favorable Attitudes Toward Sex; Prevalence of Low Sexual Desire; and Self-Rated Sex Drive. 

Across all of these areas, evidence strongly supported that men have higher sex drives than women. If you want specifics, ask me, but it was a 33 page article and summarizing it just got way too cumbersome. 

Some of the data cited in this paper that I find interesting:

• Women tend to report that they are satisfied with the amount of sex in their marriage. Men, on the other hand, on average wish for a 50% increase. 
• Gay men report a much higher frequency of sex than lesbians, regardless of length of relationship or other variables, eliminating risk of pregnancy as a possible confounding variable. (Theoretically.)
• When college students were asked how many partners they would like to have in their lifetime if disease, legal implications, or anything else were not a factor, women on average said 2.7, while men said 64. 64!!!! Outliers were not deleted for this study, and the median for both groups was 1, but that still means that the "promiscuously-inclined minority" of men was still significantly different from that of the women. 
• When asked to report actual numbers of partners, men consistently report higher numbers than women. Some believe this is due to men tending to overestimate to obtain higher numbers, where as women may undercount in an attempt to keep numbers low. 
• 47% of women report that they have NEVER masturbated, compared to 16% of men.
• 20% of men report orgasm as the most important part of the sexual experience, compared to only 2% of women.
• 8th grade boys, on average, report having twice as many sexual experiences as 8th grade girls.
• When men and women were approached by a moderately attractive confederate who invited them to have sex later that evening, 100% of the women refused, compared to only 25% of the men. 
• 80% of men report having gone beyond kissing and hugging with a person they met the same day, compared to 59% of women.
• 72% of men report having sexual intercourse with a person they met the same day, compared to 49% of women.
• 45% of men, but only 29% of women said that they find receiving oral sex "very appealing."
• 34% of men, compared to 17% of women, said that giving oral sex was appealing.
• Men rate their penises and partners' vaginas more favorably than women rate their own sex organs and their partners.
• Men report being slightly more eager than women to have to a baby, regardless of whether they are single, in a relationship, or married. 
• The authors did not find a single study that found women to have a higher sex drive than men. Not one. 

So, WTF Ladies? 

The first thing that strikes me about some of the data included in this study is that numbers don't add up/make sense logically. For example, 80% of men are going beyond first base with someone they just met, but only 59% of women are. Either someone's lying, or there are some very busy women out there. Same thing with the 8th grade boys. 

The authors contend that societal standards are harsher against boys masturbating than girls, etc. They eliminate fear of pregnancy as a possible explanation by studying lesbians and gay men. 

No matter which way you slice their data, it looks like men have a higher sex drive than women. 

The question is, WHY? 

I want to open this up for discussion. My thought is, if evolutionary forces have anything to do with it (which they likely do), it doesn't matter if you're a lesbian or not. Evolution has reduced a woman's sex drive due to pregnancy investment. What I wonder is when the advent of birth control is going to affect evolution - will the Pill stop being as effective? Will women get super-duper sexual to counteract the effects of using birth control?

But I don't think it's that simple. Why aren't women masturbating? Sure, you could use the same evolutionary argument and say that it's to keep a woman's sex drive in check, but that's the simple explanation. 

And here's the kicker - women are capable of having sex more often, for longer, and experiencing multiple orgasms without a refractory period. Why would we have this ability if it wasn't meant to be used? 

AND - you can only get pregnant ONCE at a time - WTF would it matter how many times or with how many different partners you had sex? 

The authors talk about prostitution, the porn industry, the sex toy industry, and magazines when referring to sacrificing resources to get sex. One thing I noted - most magazines talking about sex to women have headlines including lines like "How to Please Your Man" and the like. 

I THINK (as the social psychologist that I am) that women are socialized to believe that sex is something we do for men, not ourselves. I think that's why there are so many who don't masturbate (or don't admit to it), why we report not liking oral sex as much, why most of us don't watch porn, etc. If you watch movies that are considered "sexy" or even pornography, most things that women would do for pleasure are done for the benefit of men. Think of "Girls Gone Wild" - all these college girls getting it on with other girls for the cameras - rather than enjoying it as sexual experimentation, they do these things to get attention from the guys. 

I think many of us are stopped by the idea of being a "whore" and don't engage in things that we might enjoy because of this label. But I do believe that it is very likely a combination of biology and socialization - not one or the other. 

What do you guys think?

Gender: A Question of Diagnosis?

It is pretty much considered common knowledge that women show higher rates of depression than men. 

But what if that's wrong?

Some food for thought/discussion, taken from Terrence Real's book I Don't Want To Talk About It:

"In national figures on mental disorders, women outnumber men by two to one among those diagnosed exclusively as depressed. The lifetime incidence of a major depressive episode in women is 21.3% of the total population, while in men, the disorder strikes only 12.7%. But if we factor into the equation "personality disorders" and chemical dependency, the totals even right back out again. Antisocial personality in women runs at 1.2% of the total population, while in men it is 5.8%. Drug dependency in women runs at 5.9% of the total population, while in men it is 9.2%. And alcoholism in women runs at 8.2% of the total population, while in men it is 20.1%. When the incidence of these disorders is added to the incidence of depression, it balances the level of pathology in each sex" (p. 84).

Here is my best representation of the chart included on the same page of the text:

Lifetime Incidents of Mental Disorders

(as percentage of the population)

                              

                                                        Men        Women        Both

Affective Disorders

Major Depressive Episode                                   12.7          21.3            17.1       

Manic Episode                                                         1.6             1.7              6.4

Dysthymia ("mild depression")                            4.8            8.0            6.4

Anxiety Disorders 

Panic Disorder                                                         2.0           5.0             3.5

Agoraphobia                                                             3.5           7.0             5.3

Social Phobia                                                           11.1          15.5             13.3

Simple Phobia                                                          6.7          15.7             11.3

Generalized Anxiety                                                3.6            6.6              5.1

Substance Abuse Disorders

Alcohol Abuse                                                         12.5           6.4              9.4

Alcohol Dependence                                              20.1           8.2            14.1

Drug Abuse                                                                5.4          3.5              4.4

Drug Dependence                                                     9.2          5.9              7.5

Other Disorders

Antisocial Personality                                              5.8           1.2             3.5

Nonaffective Psychosis                                             0.6          0.6            0.7

Totals                                                                       48.7       47.3         48.0

It seems too simple, doesn't it, to just total it all up and say men and women must be equal. Keep in mind here, that I am not stating any of this as scientific fact based on experimental data - by rules of ethics, any data dealing with mental disorders must be qualitative in nature. But to get you thinking out of the box on this stuff, I present you with Real's argument regarding men and depression.

The first concept to understand is that of "overt" versus "covert" depression. They mean exactly what they sound like. Overt depression refers to the kind of depression that is fairly easy to spot - fitting the "mold" if you will, of a major depressive episode. Click here for the DSM IV criteria for major depression.  Covert depression, by contrast, does not fit the model put forth by the DSM IV. It is largely hidden from those around the person and often from the person him/herself. I, personally, would add to this the idea that the characteristics of covert depression are often believed to be part of the personality of the sufferer. It is also called "masked depression," "underlying characterological depression," and "depression equivalents" (p. 41). 

Keeping in mind the chart above, consider the following:

"A number of studies looking at who gets labeled as being depressed have been carried out nationwide. Some, like the Potts study involving no less than 23,000 volunteer subjects, have been conducted on a massive scale. The results of most of them show a tendency for mental health professionals to overdiagnose women's depression and underdiagnose the disorder in men.

In a study of a different nature, psychologists were given hypothetical psychiatric "case histories" of patients with a variety of complaints. Only one variable was changed, the sex of the client. Consistently, psychologists diagnosed the depressed "male" clients as more severely disturbed than depressed "female" clients. On the other hand, women alcoholics were viewed as being more severely disturbed than their male counterparts. These conflicting results show that an overlay of gender expectations complicates the judgment of clinicians. It seems that they are punishing clients of both sexes with more severe diagnosis for crossing gender lines. If it is unmanly to be depressed and unwomanly to drink, then a depressed man must really be disturbed, just like an alcoholic woman"(p. 40). 

I do not doubt that gender roles and expectations play a large part in diagnosing mental disorders. It is easy to chalk the numbers up to biological sex differences, but we can't get an accurate picture of what is really going on until we remove the bias in diagnosing patients. But there is also the socialization factor to account for:

"The problem with this well-established psychiatric tradition is that it ignores the effects of gender. In our society, woman are raised to pull pain into themselves - they tend to blame themselves, feel bad. Men are socialized to externalize distress; they tend not to consider themselves defective so much as unfairly treated; they tend not to be sensitive to their part in relational difficulties and not to be as in touch with their own feelings and needs....When researchers compared the high rates of externalization in men with their low rates of depression they speculated that men's capacity to externalize might somehow protect them from the disease. But while the capacity to externalize pain protects some men from feeling depressed, it does not stop them from being depressed; it just helps them to disconnect further from their own experience" (p. 82).

We know that there are many more women in this country in therapy than there are men. Why might that be?

"The withdrawn depressed girl in the back of the classroom is seen as somehow less troubled than the acting-out, disruptive boy in the front row. Because psychotherapy since Freud has been 'talking cure,' it relies on the patient's insight into his or her problems and feelings as its chief therapeutic agent. One difficulty with such a methodology is that it is much more in keeping with the traditional skills of woman than with those of men. Men do not have readily at hand the same level of insight into their emotional lives as women, because our culture works hard to dislocate them from those aspects of themselves. Men are less used to voicing emotional issues, because we teach them that it is unmanly to do so. Even a cursory look at gender socialization in our culture indicates that a man would be far more likely to act out distress than to talk about it, while a woman would have the skills, the community, and the ease to discuss her problems. Having forcefully pushed our boys and men away from the exercise and development of these psychological skills, we add insult to injury when we turn around and label them more disturbed and less evolved than women who have been encouraged to keep them" (p. 82).

This reminds me of PhizzleDizzle's comment about boys being diagnosed with ADHD for acting out. I am not implying that many of these boys do not truly have ADHD that requires medication. But one has to wonder if at least some of these boys are suffering from depression that goes unnoticed because of their inability to verbalize what they are experiencing. 

Real and many other men's studies experts believe that the substantially higher rates of substance abuse and addiction in men result from undiagnosed depression which, quite frankly, makes sense. It is a form of "acting-out" negative feelings through self-medication. If we attempt to treat the substance problem without treating the depression, very low success rates will be par for the course. 

Those of you who have some training in psychology courses might recall that Freud's psychoanalysis was done almost exclusively on women. Every single form of psychotherapy has its roots in Freud's work, no matter how differently it may appear from the outside. One could argue that psychology was based in the idea that women needed help in coping with life. Freud set off the chain belief system that male coping skills were the norm, and that women were the exception. 

There are a couple of problems with this, obvious sexism aside. 

First, it means that the very foundation of psychotherapy requires that a client/patient be able to effectively verbalize the difficulties that they are having. If you can't say "I'm really sad" or "this really upset me" - you are at a severe disadvantage in talk therapy. This suggests to me that a large portion of the population out there is unable to get the help that they need. In order to remove the "women as overly-emotional and unstable" stigma, we need to find ways to connect with men who have mental health issues. 

Secondly, it is extremely difficult to change the foundation of psychotherapy as talk-based. We know that psychotherapy is helpful and valuable to those who have access to it. But like anything else, you can't fix something unless and until you know it's broken. Try to imagine for a second what mental health treatments would look like if they were not based on self-reporting. Can you? Because I can't. Only YOU know when you're not feeling right. It would be easier for our society as a whole to start raising boys who are not only self-aware, but who are also able to express themselves to others than it would be to try and find ways around verbalization. 

I wish I could c&p Real's entire book into the pages of my blog, but not only is it entirely impractical, it's illegal. So I implore all of you - if you are a man or you have a father, a brother, a husband, a son, any man in your life period - pick up a copy of this book and read it cover to cover. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with Real, it will make you think.

And isn't that why we're all here, anyway?

Gender Part 2: Feminism Broadly (no pun intended)

On my Sugar & Spice post, the ever-lovely PhizzleDizzle brings up a great topic. In the comments, she writes:

"So I wonder, how can I be a feminist that espouses choice for everyone, if deep down I feel like my choice of selectively rejecting certain feminine traits is "better"? There's a whole lot going on here in this here brain of mine."

And my favorite blogmale DuWayne writes in response:

"It's not the underlying reaction that's a problem. It's when assumptions are made and accusations are made that it becomes a problem. Feeling like she made the wrong decisions, that the decisions were not really "feminist" decisions is just fine. But turning around and accusing me of trying to subjugate my children's mom, or accusing her of bowing to the whims of the patriarchy, would be entirely unreasonable and ultimately antithetical to the notion of feminism."

I love my brilliant blogpals. :) And so the inspiration for this post was born. 

I hesitate to call myself a feminist because the term implies that I value women's issues and rights over that of men. You should be able to tell by now that this is not the case. 

But what is feminism, really? The problem is that there are many contemporary variations of feminism. From Transformations: Women, Gender & Psychology by Dr. Mary Crawford (UConn):

"Socialist feminism emphasizes that there are many kinds of divisions between groups of people that can lead to oppression. Socialist feminists believe that acts of discrimination based on social class, race, and gender are equally wrong. Moreover, it views these forms of discrimination as inseparable.

Woman-of-Color feminism, or womanism, began with criticism of the white women's movement for excluding women of color and issues important to them: poverty, racism, and needs such as jobs, health care, good schools, and safe neighborhoods for all people.

Radical feminism emphasizes male control and domination of women throughout history. This perspective views the control of women by men as the first and most fundamental form of oppression. 

Liberal feminism is familiar to most people because it relies on deeply held American beliefs about equality -- an orientation that connects it to political liberalism. From this perspective, a feminist is a person who believes that women are entitled to full legal and social equality with men and who favors changes in laws, customs, and values to achieve the goal of equality....It emphasizes the similarities between men and women, maintaining that given equal environments and opportunities, they will behave similarly. 

Cultural feminism emphasizes differences between women and men. This perspective stresses that qualities characteristic of women have been devalued and should be honored and respected in society. 

Global feminism focuses on how prejudice and discrimination against women are related across cultures, and how they are connected to neocolonialism and global capitalism."

Dr. Crawford continues:

"However, feminist perspectives share two important themes. First, feminism values women as important and worthwhile human beings. Second, feminism recognizes the need for social change if women are to lead secure and satisfying lives. Perhaps the simplest definition of a feminist is an individual who holds these basic beliefs: that women are valuable and that social change to benefit women is needed.....Therefore, perhaps the simplest definition of feminism is one proposed by bell hooks (1984): It is a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression.

Feminist perspectives in general can be contrasted to conservatism. Conservatives seek to keep gender arrangements as they have been in much of the recent past, with males holding more public power and status and women being more or less defined by their sexuality and their roles as wives and mothers."

This last paragraph is where many of us start to have problems. If we believe that it's just fine for a woman to express her feminine sexuality, to be a wife and mother, to be a "girly-girl" - then how can we be a feminist? And if we don't believe that those things are just fine, then how can we be a feminist?

The real issue that I choose to focus on as a feminist is the freedom of choice. The freedom for a woman to  choose how and when to express her sexuality and to what extent it defines her. The freedom for a woman to choose career over family or vicer versa as it suits her needs and goals. The freedom for a woman to choose to wear high heels, lipstick, and get breast implants if it makes her feel good about herself. 

But because I value equality of ALL people, I (as I said earlier) hesitate to actually call myself a feminist. Therefore, I prefer to consider myself a humanist: someone who firmly believes in the inherent equality, worth, and value of all people, regardless of sex, gender, race, social class, age, etc. 

With respect to PhizzleDizzle's comment, it can be difficult not to look at stereotypical "girly" choices with disdain. With respect to DuWayne's comment, it can be difficult not to look at stay-at-home moms as having sacrificed their own fulfillment in order to fill a traditional role in the home. 

What we have to remember is that the most important element here is that of choice. If  a woman chooses motherhood over her career or vice versa, that's fantastic. Because she had the option. If a woman chooses to be a "girly-girl" and decorate herself with pink and bedazzles or dresses in man's clothing and plays football, that's fantastic. Because she had the option. 

It's not about agreeing with, liking, or disliking the choices another person makes. It's about respecting the fact that they made a choice for themselves. That, in my opinion, was what the women's movement was meant to achieve before it became a convoluted mess of contradictory beliefs. 

Here's a controversial analogy for you: abortion. I am pro-choice. Period. That means that I believe a woman has the right to have an abortion if she believes it is the best move for her to make given her life and circumstances. I would never, ever, ever vote to have that right taken away. 

I, however, would not judge a woman whose religious or personal views led her to decide that abortion was not an option, and chose an alternate path whether it involved raising the child herself or giving it up for adoption. The freedom to choose abortion also MUST include the freedom to choose NOT to have one. 

Likewise, the freedom to choose a career must also include the freedom to choose NOT to. The freedom to choose to subscribe to feminine values that include motherhood, fashion, being a stripper or an escort, whatever, must be supported as well. 

So for PhizzleDizzle - it doesn't matter whether or not you agree or like women who are girly. Don't feel guilty for "throwing up a little" in your mouth when you see frighteningly pink images of little girls' rooms. The important question for you to ask yourself is whether, if your daughter wanted to surround herself with the color pink, Barbie dolls, and little girl make-up, if you would allow her to make that choice for herself. If the answer is yes (despite your vomit), you are a feminist (just not a radical one). 

For DuWayne (and you already know this) you are not a misogynist unless you create an environment in which it is impossible or otherwise incredibly undesirable for the mother of your children to choose anything other than staying home with your boys. If the man makes more money than the woman, has more job security, both partners want the children to be raised by their parents instead of daycare, and both partners agree to the solution - that is a feminist act as long as she has the choice. 

Remember in an earlier post I said I would continue to emphasize a certain point? Here it is again:

We must ALL be FREE to be who we ARE. Period.

Gender Part 2: Sugar & Spice

Gender Part 2: Chapter 2: The Girls

In my WTF Do I Do post, I briefly mentioned the imposition of gender onto infants and children through gender-typed clothing and toys. In continuing my discussion of women and girls, I would like to elaborate a bit more on that topic. 

Imagine a typical little girl's room. Chances are, the image that comes to mind looks something like this:

In addition to the god-awful amount of pink, what else do you see? Toy baby doll with stroller and swing. Lots of Disney princesses. 

How about this one:

The first thing I want you to notice about this image is the CRIB. Yes, this room is for a baby girl. And yet.....we have another baby doll set up with accessories, some fancy dress up clothes, and again - LOTS of pink. 

Sure, it's all very cute. I love pink on little girls as much as the next person. But what does this all MEAN?

Let's start with the baby dolls. What is the purpose of a baby doll? Little girls basically learn to be moms to their plastic babies. It is teaching them caretaking skills. Some might argue that it's making them learn caretaking skills. 

Think about it. Picture 2 shows a baby's room. That child has already been given a baby doll to play with, long before she even learns what it is or whether it's something she might want to play with. Most of us probably had some sort of house-playing toys when we were little as well. I know I had the big plastic kitchen complete with dishes and fake food. 

But you know what else is out there for little girls' toys?

This image used to be much bigger, but it seems the pink toy washer/dryer has been removed from the market since I first wrote this post, and none of the links are valid anymore. Hmm...

Yup. A toy washer and dryer set and a toy vacuum. 

I'll grant you that I am guilty of having desperately wanted a Dyson for Christmas. (And got it.) But a little girl wanting a toy vacuum cleaner? Or washer and dryer? Really??? What the hell is fun about pushing a plastic vacuum around?

Don't get me wrong. If a little girl WANTS these things, I have no problem with that. But the ages of the children these toys are appropriate for suggest that they are most likely being given as gifts. 

Social learning theory suggests that the reason little girls play with toys like these are because they see their mother using the grownup versions. If they identify themselves with their mother (as they should identify with the same-gender parent), and their mother does the majority of the household duties, then little girls view these things as gender-appropriate toys. They are a means to "be like mom." 

I would like to see toy preferences in children where their parents' gender roles in the household are switched. If mom does all the fixing, will little Sarah ask for a pipe wrench for her birthday? 

The point here, though, is that little girls learn the skills of caring for others and taking care of a household from a very, very, almost obscenely early age. This becomes cemented in their identity as women. There are very few women in this world who were never given a toy doll to play with as a child. And chances are that if, as a little girl, you didn't own Barbies - you were ostracized to some extent by your peers. In my childhood, whoever had the most Barbies and various other Barbie shit was always the most popular girl in the neighborhood. It was never me. :(

JLK's closet never looked like this. 

I did have this though. Albeit without the remote control.

Gender Part 2: The "Real" Female Fear

Gender Part 2: Introduction: The Women & The Girls

I have some reading that I want to brush up on before I really delve into the gender issues surrounding women, because I have been away from these books for some time. What I hope to accomplish with this post in particular is to give you some thoughts to chew on before we get into the heart of the discussion, and to introduce you to some really amazing texts that I think should be mandatory reading for EVERYONE, male and female, young and old. 

First, I would like to quote to you from Jean Kilbourne's book Can't Buy My Love, a treatise of (mostly) depictions of women in the media. The images alone will shock you. Social psychology has shown time and time again that we are ALL affected by advertising and the media, even when we firmly believe that we aren't. When you take some of these images, slogans, commercials, etc. out of their context in a magazine or tv channel, we begin to SEE the messages that are conveyed. Normally they slip past our conscious awareness, but when you really look at what's there, you will likely be stunned. Google Jean Kilbourne to see some of these images. Her speaking engagements can be found on YouTube. Here is a sample summarizing the major themes of her lectures:

But here is a (long) quote from her book that really, deeply struck me when I read it:

"When men objectify women, they do so in a cultural context in which women are constantly objectified and in which there are consequences - from economic discrimination to violence - to that objectification. 

For men, though, there are no such consequences. Men's bodies are not routinely judged and invaded. Men are not likely to be raped, harassed, or beaten (that is to say, men presumed to be heterosexual are not, and very few men are abused in these ways by women). How many men are frightened to be alone with a woman in an elevator? How many men cross the street when a group of women approach? Jackson Katz, who writes and lectures on male violence, often begins his workshops by asking men to describe the things they do every day to protect themselves from sexual assault. The men are surprised, puzzled, sometimes amused by the question. The women understand the question easily and have no trouble at all coming up with a list of responses. We don't list our full names in the phone directory or on our mailboxes, we try not to be alone after dark, we carry our keys in our hands when we approach our cars, we always look in the back seat before we get in, we are wary of elevators and doorways and bushes, we carry pepper sprays, whistles, Mace."(p. 279-280)

When I read this paragraph, it was like a light bulb went off in my head. Men (in general) truly do not and cannot understand what it's like to have that constant fear. My husband doesn't check the backseat of his car before he gets in it. He's not afraid of being in a parking garage at night. He doesn't understand why I feel the need to firmly latch and lock every window and door in the house before going to sleep at night when I am alone. It's not that he doesn't sympathize, it's just something he doesn't GET. 

Now the flip side of this, of course, is that it's unfair for women to immediately be wary of all strange men. The men's movement hates the idea that they are all labeled as potential attackers until proven otherwise, but they also understand that this MUST be the case. At least for now. 

This will come up again in the subsequent posts regarding transgender and intersex individuals, but Sandy Shoes and DuWayne mentioned the concept of the unisex bathroom in the comments on a previous post. 

For a woman, transgender, or intersex individual, a multi-stall, public, unisex bathroom is a scary place. It is out of public view, it has locks on the stall doors and often on the outside door as well. Unless we know every single person well who uses said bathroom, it is simply not a safe place to be. If a woman in an office goes into a supply closet that locks from the inside, and a male co-worker who she doesn't know very well enters this closet, she is going to feel uncomfortable. A unisex public bathroom is no different from the closet, except our pants are usually already down while we're in there. 

Should it be that way? Absolutely not. 

But women are raised with a heightened awareness of possibly threatening situations and places. We are taught from a very young age to avoid them whenever possible. 

The mentality of fear that women possess is often silent, extremely subtle, and most of us are not even aware of it until it is pointed out, such as in Kilbourne's book. But it is very real. No amount of feminist rhetoric can make it go away. 

"Nonetheless, the rate of sexual assault in the United States is the highest of any industrialized nation in the world. According to a 1998 study by the federal government, one in five of us has been the victim of rape or attempted rape, most often before our seventeenth birthday. And more than half of us have been physically assaulted, most often by the men we live with. In fact, three of four women in the study who responded that they had been raped or assaulted as adults said the perpetrator was a current or former husband, a cohabiting partner, or a date."(p. 280)

Quite often, what we are taught to fear in the outside world is what we ought to fear in our own homes, schools, and social events. 

But what we see in the media is much more often violence at the hands of a stranger. What follows is the most disturbing portrayal of violence against women that I have ever seen in my life. I cried when I watched it, because it shook me to the absolute core. (The first minute or so is just the beginning of the scene. Bear with it.)

****Advisory: This is very explicit, very violent, and very disturbing. Please do not watch when children are present****

(I couldn't find it on YouTube, YouTube failed to convert it when I tried to upload it, so please go to the following direct link to watch):

Watch video.

Now, assuming I haven't upset you too much (I personally can't watch it again), here are the books I highly recommend that deal with the material I will be covering in subsequent posts about women:

Ethics in Fertility

We've all heard about this woman, Nadya Suleman, and her octuplets. Most of us probably know that she already had 6 kids before the birth of 8 more (one of whom is autistic), that she used fertility treatments, lives with her parents, has no spouse/partner, and no income. 

First of all, I want to say the following:

1. I believe that all women have the right to decide how many children they have. 

2. I believe that financially stable single women have the right to seek fertility treatments in order to become mothers if that is what they choose. 

3. I believe that women have the right to choose whether or not to selectively abort any or all of the fetuses in their body. 

4. Nadya Suleman is certifiable. A complete wackaloon, in my opinion. 

Okay, now most of you know I have some experience with fertility medicine and what not.

It is my opinion that fertility treatments need to be administered with the same level of caution as adoption procedures. What do I mean by that? Well, a single woman or man cannot adopt a child unless they can prove that they are financially secure and stable and, quite frankly, can afford to raise a child on their own. Period. It's to ensure the quality of the environment for the child to be raised in. This woman has no income and already had 6 children, all of them living with her parents. She would not have qualified for adoption, she should not have qualified for fertility treatment. 

Secondly, it was completely fucking irresponsible for the clinic to have implanted 8 embryos in her uterus. They should be shut down for that fact ALONE. You implant 2, tops. If neither take, you implant 2 more. 8 is ridiculous. 

Thirdly, she is quoted as saying she afforded it because she "got paid for it." Since when does someone get paid for harvesting and freezing their own embryos? When I donated eggs, I signed a mandatory contract which stated the couple I donated to would own all the rights to the eggs harvested, for whatever purpose they deem appropriate - another child, donating to stem cell research, etc. How the fuck did this chick get paid for what she did? Was it experimental or something? How come no one can find out who she received these treatments from?

Now this woman has 14 children, no one to help her care for them, and no income. If she wanted to spend time with 14 kids, she should've started a daycare. Completely fucking irresponsible. All I can do is hope that none of these children suffer because of her stupid fucking decisions.