A graphic designer, Katherine Young, redesigned a girls’ magazine cover to highlight the implicit assumptions we all tend to make about women:
I ran across this on Facebook, where someone posted it approvingly, and I agree — why shouldn’t girls and boys be reinforced for a wide range of abilities? You can be pretty, or you can be smart, or you can be strong, or you can be brave, or you can be sensitive…or you can be all of those things at once, even, although then I’ll hate you for being so much better than me. No! That’s not it! We should give everyone opportunities to be all those things, and others as well, and avoid channeling them down a single acceptable path.
But then someone commented on that post, and it was fascinating. I’m used to criticizing creationist for appallingly bad reasoning abilities and misuse of scientific theories, but here’s a magnificent example of someone babbling pretentiously in favor of some narrow scientific concepts, and applying them as a justification for his gender biases. It’s kind of horrifying. It’s also painfully common.
So this person (all names removed to protect the guilty) asks for a clarification. He doesn’t get one, but that doesn’t matter, he’s on a roll.
it seems to me that you are suggesting that is immoral or at least somehow improper for females to be evaluated using physical characteristics that highlight fertility such as facial symmetry, skin texture, hip to waist ratio, etc. and that instead they should be judged on mental abilities that enable them to have a career. is my understanding of your intent correct?
The implication being that the females
should be judged on the basis of their potential fertility, where fertility is the most desired quality, but things like intelligence make no significant contribution to their maternal abilities.
I wonder if he’d make the same demands on boys: we should be evaluating them on symmetry, penis length, sperm count, and combat ability, because those contribute to men’s purpose in life, which is to crush their competitors and impregnate females. I didn’t ask, because I was afraid that he’d say yes, and also think those are good things.
Because of course what he claims to be driving his ideas is an objective position on evolution.
given the great demands placed on the female body during homo sapiens’ lengthy gestation and lactation period, would it be wrong for me to suggest that encouraging males to select mates based on characteristics that enable the female to generate wealth independent of a mate rather than on their ability to bear children may have long term negative effects on the species. or is that just the crazy in me talking?
Oh, man. A couple of problems here: evolution doesn’t care what’s “good” for the species. It’s all about short term responses for individuals and their progeny, and different strategies work for different individuals. One size fits all is not a smart plan for a diverse population.
Humans have complex lives and a difficult maturation process. It also wouldn’t benefit us if females
were reduced to a shapely, symmetrical uterus perched atop some wide, sexually attractive hips. Maybe benevolent evolution should be shaping men to be uxorious and devoted stay-at-home fathers so their mates can focus on that beauty thing, for the good of the species?
I should also point out that this idea that we men, from our limited perspective, can actually assess what traits are “good for the species” has an unpleasant history. That’s the basis of eugenics, the idea that we can control the complex genetic interactions involved in our development, physiology, and behavior, and that we can predict what traits will be directly beneficial for future generations. We can’t. That we can’t doesn’t stop people from over-simplifying the problem and pretending that they know exactly what’s best for everyone else.
It’s pointed out to him that he’s making the fallacy of composition. Does he care? Of course not! Because evolution. And because he cares about these girls <shudder>.
that may be true but i would caution throwing the baby out with the bath water and ignoring the evolutionary reasons behind our obsession with beauty, not just because of the long term impact on the species as a whole, but also because of the individual impact on the mental well being of young girls
Again with the “species as a whole” argument! How does he know what’s good for the species as a whole? For example, right now we’re seeing a long term pattern of decline in sperm counts in many human populations. Would he favor artificial selection for fecundity in boys for the “good of the species”?
He also seems to think he knows best what is good for the mental well being of young girls, and that is to focus on beauty and appearance and fashion. Some girls will be happy with that, and of course they can follow that course…but others are not. What are we to do with them, for the good of their mental health? Tell them to shape up and memorize cosmetics brands, so they’ll be happy and well-adjusted? I never faced that specific pressure, but I was told as a kid by my peers and teachers that I, as a boy, was supposed to like sports, and should turn out for baseball and football. I was judged because I wasn’t good at sports (maybe some of you experienced the same phenomenon), and it wasn’t good for my emotional well-being. I liked to read books instead. All I needed in my life was some jerk trying to explain to me that my interests in science were not good for the species, and that they had an evolutionary justification for why I needed to butt heads with the big boys on a grassy field.
But now we get into the religious argument. This is an example of uninformed religious dogmatism.
it seems to me that you always turn the natural order of things upside down! sometimes i am not sure if you are serious or just playing with me :)
not everyone can be smart and win the google science fair. suggesting to young girls that they have to be smart in order to have a meaningful and successful life might not be the best way to go.
natural order of things
is a dead give-away. How do you know? Why is it that the natural order of things
is always a matter of a guy informing girls that they are supposed to make themselves attractive to him?
And that last line…has he considered that suggesting to young girls that they have to be pretty in order to have a meaningful and successful life might not be the best way to go? Probably not.
One last quote…
when i was young and naive, the vanity of women frustrated me. especially because i was a slob, i could not understand their obssession with adorning themselves with all kinds of paints and bows and ribbons and shiny trinkets, but now that the passions of youth that blind objective contemplation have been reduced a few dimly glowing embers buried in a pile of ashes, i understand there are evolutionary forces behind these obssessions and i can accept them as the natural order of things.
The hypocrisy…he was a slob, but he knows best what women should do. He thinks women as a whole are vain. But now that he has found Jesus evolution, he understands the reason why women should be working so hard to make themselves beautiful — it’s to enhance his ability to reproduce, and theirs, too, because the only way a woman can improve their fitness is with a good hip-to-waist ratio, while he can get away with being a pompous slob.
I am not fooled at all. This is a man using poorly understood sciencey buzzwords to justify his culturally supported biases.
RE: “The Dunning-Kruger effect”
If someone tries to collect a debt from Freddie, threatens to take him to court unless he pays up, is the creditor… [drum roll, please]… is the creditor DUNNING KRUGER???
natural:
An appeal to tradition, usually made on the basis that the speaker has no real argument. Implied is the unsupported argument that anything claimed to be “unnatural” should automatically be perceived to be bad.
Even if evolution did work the way this ignorant twit imagines, how would it help “the species as a whole” for girls to spend so much time learning to fake the things that supposedly highlight a superior ability to bear children? Wouldn’t that lead to men getting lured off by inferior “females” with dead-end uteruses?
Surely the best thing for the species would be to encourage all the misshapen uggoes of the world to stay plain and learn to “generate wealth independent of a mate.” That way, men wouldn’t get tricked, but could still use those “females” for making a paltry number of inferior bonus children that the “female” would then support on her own, leaving the man free to devote all his resources to his far more symmetrical mate and their bountiful brood.
That redesigned cover is pretty awesome. My daughter loves it!
The cover on the right puts in all the things parents would wish their kids (boys and girls) would focus on. Things like: eat your broccoli, study hard and do your homework, don’t worry about your boyfriend/girlfriend problems because they don’t matter, etc. That’s all great stuff! … but this comes of as a parody. When I was a kid, I was highly tuned to adults trying to pass of education as entertainment and the cover on the left would definitely get my spider-sense going – “Thanks Mom for giving me a magazine that tells me how great doing homework is!”. Kids have tastes. I spent money on video game magazines and comics. My sister spent money on vapid teen celebrity magazines.
The magazine on the left exists because there’s enough interest from teen girls to create a market for it. The magazine on the right doesn’t exist because there is no market for it (apart from well-meaning parents who wish their kids would focus on things that really matter). Publishers are amoral. They’ll put out anything that will sell.
Going back to the STEM issue, what are you arguing for exactly? Are trying you trying to say every profession and every career should have equal male and female representation? Is that even a reasonable expectation given that reality tends to be messy. For example, basketball is popular within the American black community because the basketball-meme just so happen to have went viral there and not because there is some genetic predisposition of black Americans to liking basketball. This results in black Americans being over-represented in the NBA. Nobody would try to claim there is something nefarious going on. And I don’t think anyone would attempt to argue that every sports league needs to have demographics that match the wider population. Maybe something similar is at play in women being over-represented in humanities and under-represented in computer-science?
Speaking of people reading their own biases into something: the redesigned cover says nothing about eating your broccoli. It talks about things many kids already like to do. It supports kids’ interests.
No one has said the goal of diversity in STEM is to get exactly 50-50 representation, either. We’d be content if people would stop fucking discouraging girls from pursuing their interests.
Is this going to be another thread where you promote your own bigotry while not bother to listen to anyone else? If so, save us all the trouble and fuck away somewhere else now.
of course that is the point of those magazines and fashion mags and many specialty mags in the first place to sell and sell only. Everything in them is based on that and centered on that from cover to cover. Little else is to be found within there is little news or objective information at all. All the “articles” are slanted toward that end nothing that would be seen as negative by their advertisers is allowed. They invented product placement.
The same can be said for most “men’s magazines” like the gun magazines and car’s . The only difference between travel mags and travel brochures is one is usually focused more narrowly They all feed on and must foster insecurity always, often somewhat indirectly, but they have the answer right here buy this stuff and do this stuff (which sometimes includes buy this stuff and always this stuff is great)).
A pox on all of them.
the national sports leagues and the big time sports have been one of the few areas in recent history that were open to minorities that offered some chance success and it’s wealth and fame. nothing to do with evolution or cultural memes going viral the same goes with women not in stem
open your eyes take a real look around and see what is really going on instead of what “you think” is going on.
uncle frogy
OK, I’ve heard this part before and it always gets to me:
{QUOTE}…be evaluated using physical characteristics that highlight fertility such as facial symmetry, skin texture, hip to waist ratio, etc. …{/QUOTE}
I raise livestock. Occasionally I take an animal in to the vet to have it evaluated for fertility. Guess what? The vet does not give a flying shit about “facial symmety, skin texture, hip to waist ratio” at all. In fact the vet does not even look at those parts. This works on humans too: when my cousin seemed unable to conceive the doctor never once brought up her facial symmetry or skin texture, let alone hip to waist ratio. None of these things have anything at all to do with fertility. And I would suggest that Mr. Facial “Symmety” (lol) is not actually interested in fertility.
GAH… tag failure, sorry…
The person PZ quoted is another fellow who thinks the beauty standards he finds appealing are the only ones that have ever existed, and since they’re “correct” are the product of the “hidden hand” of evolution.
Danny Husar @5:
The magazine on the left exists because that’s what is considered acceptable for teenage girls to be interested in. There’s been a market for womens’ clothing with pockets since about the time pockets started getting put on clothing, yet finding womens’ clothing with pockets that’s actually for sale is insanely hard. The free hand of the market is not a perfect balancing force, producers are still humans and still biased. The reason you don’t see the magazine on the right for sale isn’t because of a lack of interest in such magazines, it’s because the advertisers, AKA the group that really directs the content of such magazines, want to run their ads in magazines that feature tips about makeup and hair accessories, not articles about higher education and scientific breakthroughs.
Among the many untrue things Danny above said, there’s the gem “parents want all the same for their kids, boys and girls”. It appears evident Danny hasn’t talked to too many people, because parents want wildly different things, and some – though not all – have different wishes for daughters and sons.
In particular, I was a girl who was forced by her parents to spend time and fake interest in fashion, elegant deportment, music and suchlike, while at the same time ignoring or at least hiding my natural curiosity towards STEM fields in general and mathematics in particular. Going away to college was a blessed relief.
As mentioned before, the physical characteristics mentioned are unrelated to the ability to bear children. On a more personal note, I have a visibly asymmetrical face, my waist to hip ratio never dropped below 0.9, yet when I tried conceiving I discovered that, uh, how shall I put it, I’m exceedingly, embarrassingly fertile. Maybe it’s because of my fabulous hair?
Yeah, I’m going to ask to see the studies here that any of these physical characteristics in any way highlight fertility.
I think these asshats keep mistaking “fertility” with what is to them “fuckability”.
Funny thing, given how easily I got pregnant and birthed my babes, the guys should be tripping over themselves to woo me. I should be the absolute beauty ideal possible.
But somehow guys keep telling me how absolutely unattractive I am…
Microraptor:
No shit. I’ve given up, and started putting pockets into everything myself.
1. There are women’s interest mags that put a wider range of topics on their covers than that Girl’s Life cover atrocity (e.g. Vanity Fair, which publishes some of the world’s best analytical journalism as well as style tips and fashion news).
2. Vanity Fair has a circulation of >1 million, so it’s doing pretty well getting people to buy it. So much for the “the market has spoken” argument in defence of Girls’ Life. Oh, and the original criticism came from Huffington Post, another financially successful venture.
Even if that is true, why do you think teen girls have that interest?
Because every fucking teen girl magazine is telling them they must have it.
Jesus fuck, some people really have no clue, do they.
Correction: the original redesigned Girls’ Life cover came from the website Women You Should Know, not Huffington Post…but the point still stands.
I could be wrong, but the one on the left looks like it’s been photoshopped to ‘enhance’ the model’s beauty. So I imagine our ancient ancestors evolved the use of image manipulation software in order to enhance their fertility.
Girls Life targets “tweens and teens.”
Since the “females” referred to are CHILDREN, then, yes, that would be correct.
That’s not even counting this fool’s other bizarre assumptions.
The only thing facial symmetry might suggest is a healthy immune system that resisted most if not all childhood diseases; yes a good immune system is a desirable trait in a mate, but it says nothing about their fertility.
So hear me out…
First, this cover was created based on a comparison to a Boy’s Life magazine cover, which while having a similar name is a periodical issued for Boy Scouts. So of course the latter has the emphasis on science, technology and stereotypically adventurous fields like firefighting. It’s not an equivalent magazine to one generically advertised to tween girls, and might I note despite being an issue about careers the boys mag never mentions fashion, teaching, nursing, secretarial work, the service industry or other stereotypically feminine industries on its cover.
Second, the modified magazine replaces articles on topics genuinely important to most tweens and teens of both sexes like looking good, making friends and dating. Those are just parts of being human, especially at that period when your social circle is becoming independent of parents and sexual feelings are beginning. Anyone thinking the average tween or teen is going to buy a magazine about AP classes, working hard or helping the community, for fun, is being unrealistic. And again, the Boys Life cover doesn’t mention these either.
Third, teen girl magazines do often contain the kinds of content PZ would probably approve of. The most recent issue of Girls Life has articles on racism, gender issues, free speech and teen suicide. Teen Vogue is especially big on social issues and has a very liberal stance I largely agree with. Their latest issue features a BLM activist, the rise of diverse Marvel Comics heroines, female authored fiction, The Resistance and LGBTQ drag ball culture.
Thus I think the artist of the mock magazine cover basically created a parody of their position, ignoring the social reality of twens’/teens’ (and adults’) lives and the actual content of such magazines. And the author whose cover comparison this is based on never noted that the boys magazine cover left out social issues or ‘feminine’ jobs.
Mickey Mortimer
While boys – and people in general – have at most a shallow interest in waking up pretty, almost everybody in the tween and teen target is interested in how the world works.
Fuck your false equivalence.
Even in pop sci, when you want an example of how evolution isn’t always to the good of the species, the go-to is usually runaway sexual selection. Male birds wasting energy on enormous tails and bright colors to compete with one another, male elk with over-sized horns, even when it makes them less likely to survive. If you actually thought humans were going down the same road*, it would hardly be something to cheer as essential for our long-term existence.
* Except of course you would not assume it’s males that are the disposable showy sex like in so many dimorphic animals, because all evolutionary psychology must be based in solid observation of humans as made by 1960s comedians.
Canadian folk group Stringband, back in the 1970s, had a minor underground hit with their song “Show Us the Length” about a young woman challenging recruitment for a beauty pageant with those words. Underground, due to the language of the chorus:
Yeah, there was no way that was getting airplay in the 1970s.
I note his attitude is all about how the magazine should be judged on how it serves men and how girls live to be judged by men.
My daughter is beutiful and likes to dress up for cos play. She also plays a pretty savage foghter in DnD. And she is doing hpnours in neurochemistry and micro biology.
reitpluim @23- “While boys – and people in general – have at most a shallow interest in waking up pretty, almost everybody in the tween and teen target is interested in how the world works.
Fuck your false equivalence.”
I don’t think that’s true. A good percentage of tweens and teens (and adults) have very little interest in how the world works beyond its immediate effects on their lives. And I think you’d find the vast majority of people in these categories value looking attractive in their social lives as more important. I disagree with your proposal @17 that these disparities are due to society enforcing them, and instead believe they reflect how humans work and interact. We’re social and visual creatures that have little reason to learn about “how the world works” broadly in our daily lives. I mean, it would be great and generally beneficial if everyone cared about science, but any given person can get along just fine as long as enough others in society care about it enough. As much as I’m a nerd, I think it’s a nerd’s fantasy to think that ‘shallow’ things like beauty, sex and fashion are only/mostly popular because of society, and if only we enforced being curious about science and doing well in school as values, kids would be different. Kids would just rebel against society (as they always do) and magazine sales would plummet.