Bi people who date one gender

Remember that time when the OKCupid blog claimed that most bisexuals on OKCupid were lying?  Although their interpretation is highly suspect, it is based on some rather interesting data.  Apparently (as of 2010), 41% of bisexual-identified people on OKCupid had only sent messages to men, 36% had only sent messages to women, and only 23% had sent messages to a mix.1

It’s possible that many people are lying, but are the numbers so surprising that we need to resort to such a conclusion?  Bisexual people are attracted to multiple genders, but they aren’t necessarily actively seeking dates with multiple genders.  For example, we can imagine someone who is a 4 on the Kinsey scale (”predominantly homosexual, more than incidentally heterosexual”) deciding that they should just focus all deliberate dating efforts on people of the same gender.2  Maybe if someone of a different gender came along, they would be open to a relationship, but as far as deliberately messaging people on OKCupid, it’s easier to just stick to one gender.

There are also many obvious differences between m/w, m/m, and w/w dating cultures, and differences in the social repercussions of those relationships.  It is easy to imagine that a person might prefer one or the other, even if that preference is limited only to a particular time in their life, or just to the OKCupid platform.

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Symmetrical coloring theorem

This is an appendix to my series about symmetry in origami. Here I will provide a proof that my construction of symmetrical colorings works.

While I try to make the series accessible to people who do not know much about math, I don’t think there’s much point in trying to make this proof broadly accessible. This is intended as a reference for people with some experience with group theory. (You need to know about cosets at the very least.)

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Origami: Cube Tessellation

A cube tessellation folded from a science poster

Cube Tessellation, designed and folded by me.

This model is a sendoff of my Ph.D.  It’s folded from a poster about my research, created while I was writing my dissertation.  It’s really big, about 25 inches (63 cm) across.  It’s the third tessellation I’ve made from one of my science posters, thus the title of this piece is “A Deconstruction of My Research 3”.

For this third model, I wanted to do something special, so I tried designing my own tessellation completely from scratch.  I was inspired by the Rhombille tiling, which looks a bit like a wall of cubes.  So I tried making a wall of cubes.  And after a long design process, I was able to perfect it.

Below the fold, I have diagrams and prototypes to document the design process.

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On work hours in academia

Since I’m looking for jobs, I need a little elevator speech for why I chose to leave academia. “The attitude in academia, is that you’re doing extremely important work, and it’s the passion of your life, and therefore you should be willing to accept terrible work conditions. I would rather have a less glamorous job about actually helping people in my immediate surroundings, instead of slaving towards a distant ideal.” How’s that sound? Eh, maybe.

Poor working conditions are hard to quantify, but one thing we can quantify are the work hours. How many hours do academics work? If the titles of news articles are to be believed, you do not need to work 80 hours a week. The title is hilarious because it suggests some people really do work 80 hours, but it’s just unnecessary. But yes, people tend to overestimate their work hours, and studies suggest that it’s really 50-60 hours a week on average for faculty. But how’s that for an absurd standard? Instead of arguing that we should be working only 40 hours like a normal job, people instead have to argue that the 80-hour week is a myth–or at the very least, unnecessary. This also tells me that even when people work 50-60 hours, they feel like they’re working 80, that everyone around them is working 80, and/or that their colleagues and students should be working 80.

Even when academics argue for a 40 hour work week, the main argument is that you can be just as productive in shorter hours. I appreciate that this is the argument people need to make. But now that I’m on the outside, I can finally say, fuck y’all. Forget productivity. How about being humane to your workers? I don’t know that much about the history of labor rights, but my understanding is that the 40-hour work week was a greater step forward for humanity than any of that stuff I did with superconductors.

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Drowning

This is a brief statement of my opinion on the Aziz Ansari case.  Content note: rape.

There’s a direct analogy between rape and drowning.  Drowning looks very different in real life vs the movies.  But nobody demands that people behave more stereotypically while drowning.  When people fail to behave stereotypically, still nobody denies that it was really drowning.  And nobody derails the conversation by insisting that nearby swimmers can’t be treated as criminals just because they don’t recognize drowning.

I understand that among SJ-oriented people, there is some controversy about the Aziz Ansari case.  A lot of people saying that it was wrong, but not sexual assault.  My stance is that it was a fairly typical story of rape, making it a troubling demonstration of people’s inability to recognize rape.  Yes, “rape” instead of “sexual assault”, because it was penetrative–that should be straightforward.  But the part that gives people trouble, is that Grace didn’t behave as they expected a non-consenting person should, and they think the typical person would have great difficulty recognizing the signs.  To this I say, okay, but please update your expectations.  This is what drowning looks like.

The felt sense model of consent

[cn: non-explicit discussion of rape and sexual consent]

I recently wrote a guide to terms relating to sexual violence, and I included brief descriptions of a few common models of consent. While I do not reject these models of consent, I do advocate a lesser-known model of consent. It’s known as “consent as a felt sense”.

This model was first described by maymay and unquietpirate, although I have serious disagreements with their framing, as I will discuss below. I would instead recommend coyote’s take, which was what first made the model click for me. If you want even more reading, Ozy has a critique of the model.

The communication vs the message

The standard narrative of consent is someone saying “yes” or “no” to a sexual proposition. This narrative isn’t entirely accurate. Studies show that saying “no” is a disfavored way to express refusal, and people commonly couch or soften their refusals, both inside and outside sexual contexts. It’s also well-known that consent can be expressed non-verbally. Once we get past the myths and legends, we see that consent isn’t about saying one particular word or another. It’s about communication, by whatever means are effective.

But the thing about communication, is that there is a message that we are trying to communicate. Perhaps the intended message is “I consent”, but this quickly devolves into recursive circle. “I wish to communicate to you that I wish to communicate to you that I consent.” Upon reflection, we come to the conclusion that “I consent” means “I am okay with this”.

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A guide to sexual violence terminology

[cn: sexual violence, including explicit references]

When I started out writing about sexual violence, I was confused about many of the terms surrounding it. I didn’t even know, until someone told me, that “sexual violence” was an all-encompassing term. So I’m writing a guide to terminology, of the kind I wish I had years ago. My aim is to go beyond a glossary, not just providing definitions but also commenting on connotations and practical usage.

Categories of sexual violence

Sexual violence – Sexual violence is a super-category that includes any sexual (or sexually charged) act that violates someone’s consent. That includes sexual assault, sexual coercion, sexual harassment, and child sexual abuse (all of which are to be defined later). Note that sexual violence is a term used by public health advocates and activists, not by the legal system; not all sexual violence is illegal.

In my experience, definitions of sexual violence can be confusing. For example, the NSVRC says sexual violence is when “someone forces or manipulates someone else into unwanted sexual activity without their consent,” and then proceeds to list examples which do not obviously fall under its own definition, such as spying on sexual acts. If you’re not sure whether to go with the explicit definition, or the list of examples, always go with the list, which has more consensus than the literal definition.

Sexual assault – Sexual assault is non-consensual sexual touching. Common examples include unwanted kissing, groping certain body parts, and rape. Sexual assault is also a legal term, although at least in the US, there is a distinction between assault (the threat of violence) and battery (the violence itself). Outside of legal contexts, “sexual assault” usually refers to what is legally called “sexual battery”.

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