Well, I guess I’m not a feminist then

I like much of what Steven Pinker writes, but I thought his book, The Blank Slate, was terrible for its black-and-white version of the nature/nurture argument. As a developmental biologist, I’m probably about as far to the plastic, environmentally-influenced side of the argument as you can get, and I don’t believe the human mind is a “blank slate”. I don’t know anyone who does (I’m sure they exist, spinning out endless wordy fables in humanities departments…but they’re not operationally significant at all in the biology departments).

Now Pinker gets cited by a British loon who wants to use his arguments as veiled racism, and of course he’s also anti-feminist. So he cheerfully cites Pinker in support, and unfortunately, this is Pinker setting up a false dichotomy…but it’s also Pinker writing wonderfully clearly and economically.

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive – power – and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups – in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.

Oh, man, where to begin…

First, that’s straight from Christina Hoff Sommers, the one ‘feminist’ (she’s more of an anti-feminist) writer the misogynists love to quote. I have heard so many raving nutcases throw around the terms “gender” and “equity feminism” as authoritative put-downs of any attempt to promote feminist issues, when what they really are are silencing tools to misrepresent people’s views.

Equity feminism, as presented in that quote, is nonsense. It’s like those people who claim they “don’t see color”, and therefore they aren’t racist and are treating all non-white people equally. You can’t pretend to be color-blind or sex-blind in a culture that privileges white maleness! Yes, we want to promote equal opportunity for all, but you won’t achieve that by pretending that the historical and social consequences of sex and race don’t exist. Respect human beings as male, female, or trans; as black, brown, or white. Recognize the realities of culture and biology, neither of which are as discrete and binary as postulated there.

It’s like we’re all running a hundred meter dash, and some people get a 95 meter head start, while others begin 100 meters behind the starting line…and we’re all going to agree to turn a blind eye to those inequities because we’ve sworn to pretend that everyone gets a fair start. So no, I’m not an “equity feminist”.

But now look at that definition of gender feminists. I’m sure such creatures exist — in a country with a Tea Party, we all know by now that caricatures do come to life — but look at the details there. Pinker lists 3 defining characteristics, and I don’t agree with a single one of them. 1) Men and women have different biological predispositions (which cannot be reduced to trite cliches, like women are good at housecleaning and men like football), 2) social interactions are complex and cannot be distilled down to a single factor, and 3) there are multiple levels of interaction — individual, race, sex, class — that affect motives and outcomes. Gosh, I differ because I think human interactions are actually complicated!

So I read that nice clear statement by Pinker, and I have to conclude that I must not be any kind of feminist at all.

Either that, or Christina Hoff Sommers is full of shit.

Maybe it will work!

This sounds so familiar. You notice a bias in the speakers at a meeting (an obvious bias that everyone notices), and so you start suggesting to conference organizers that maybe it would be a good thing to do a little more outreach, get a little more diversity. I was doing that to atheist meetings 5 or 6 years ago, or perhaps longer…it’s been a longstanding issue. So now in 2012:

So here is a plea. Next time you are involved in organizing a meeting – make some effort to have a strong representation of diversity of speakers and participants. For example, if you invite lots of women for example and all say no – try to figure out why and see if you can fix the issue. Offer travel fellowships for students. Offer child care or child activity options (even if you cannot pay for it – at least make it easy for people). Make sure to advertise/promote the meeting to groups/institutions with a high representation of underrepresented groups. Don’t give up if your first efforts don’t work. Sometimes it can be difficult to make sure diversity levels are high. But keep trying … it will help make the conference better and also will help the field in general …

That’s Jonathan Eisen, talking about genomics meetings. I hope it works out for him. I can say that atheist meetings have gotten much, much better at representing more women (the race issue, not so much, but it is slowly improving there, even).

The next stage after that success, however, is pushback from the white men who had previously been the sole kinds of faces on the stage. They can’t quite start screaming at the women to get off the stage — that degree of bigotry is a little too naked, usually — but they will aim their fury at the people who brought them to the sorry state of having women equally represented with men.

The only answer to that, of course, is to keep on fighting.

Holy crap, the BBC’s racist apologetics

I have completely tuned out the Olympics because the jingoistic, shallow American commentary makes me want to puke…but I was just sent this clip from the BBC coverage. Watch how it goes from Darwin to eugenics to Hitler to slavery in order to explain how so many black athletes excel at sprinting events…because, obviously, being able to survive shackling in a slave ship and a lifetime of menial stoop labor in the cotton fields clearly selects for genes of benefit in short foot races.

Who authorized that kind of drivel to even be made? It’s bad science and bad history.

The Jack D. Ripper School of Reproductive Biology

So I got in this odd twitter argument — arguing against a point so stupid, so against reason and biology, that I didn’t bother to bring it up here. The source of this argument was an MRA site, AVoiceForMen (home to the odious JohnTheOther and Paul Elam, if you recall), and the discussion was about the relative biological cost of sex. The standard biological view is that sex is cheap for men, and expensive for women; men produce numerous small, cheap gametes, most of which are disposable and thrown away, and do not have to bear the cost of pregnancy and lactation, and can often dodge the bother of child-rearing altogether, while women produce very few large, metabolically expensive gametes, and by necessity bear all the costs of pregnancy and lactation. And of course, in our culture, they also get saddled with most of the work of raising children.

The MRA argument was a perverse inversion of reality. It argued that men are the costly sex, because they have to ejaculate their precious sperm during intercourse, while the ladies just lie there and have fun.

We have this attitude toward hookup culture because we are convinced that male sexuality has no value. Not even no value, we think male sexuality has negative value.

Men sow their seed hither and yon; women guard their vaginas like Fort Knox.

But is this true?

Let’s think about it logically. With each act of sex a male ejaculates semen into the female. This is an investment of physical resources that takes time for the male to replenish. So male animals are limited in how often they can have reproductively viable sex. Female animals, on the other hand, are not. The sex act has zero cost to them.

Now, the reason this obvious truth is invisible to us is because we lump in the cost of carrying young with the cost of sex. Yes, carrying young is high female investment but the sex act itself is higher male investment.

It really is the ‘precious bodily fluids’ argument presented seriously. Men are the ones who should guard their essence, while women shouldn’t care.

Why? Because, quite simply, his sperm is in limited supply. He wants to prioritize delivery of sperm to a.) high quality females and b.) less mated females.

I don’t even…

Men spontaneously produce approximately 100,000,000 sperm cells per day. We make them whether we have sex or not. They have a limited shelf life; there is good evidence that mature internally stored sperm begin to decline in quality after about a week.

There is no sperm shortage at all.

Women, on the other hand, produce one gamete per month. If you want to make the “limited supply” argument, and an economic claim that a scarce commodity will be marketed much, much more carefully, it ought to be applied not to the menz but to the womenz. And also note that the only way the author can make her (yes, her) claim at all is by intentionally neglecting all the costs of pregnancy.

There are a couple of commenters there arguing with this patently bogus rationalization — it would be hard not to, it’s so absurd — but other commenters are just unbelievably gullible.

Epicness sauteed in awesomesauce!

As long as you ignore the fact that it’s, like, wrong.

And if you’re fond of word salad, how about this?

Best written post on Female’s Hypergamy & their polyandrous relationships, Female sexuality is pretty much distorted, When sexual revolution was forced on to become the social and cultural norm, WOMYN in majority never repelled it or rejected it, they gladly accepted it and have made it their daily routine (To fuck more men) their so called pair bonding in ancestral time was “Forced” pair bonding but with new innovations like “NO FAULT” divorce and incentives, cash prizes and child custody they are now pretty busy shaking up more dicks after breaking up with their “now” ex’s.

But overall MGTOW are catching up with that, Maybe PUA are mindless drones but even though male sexuality is also becoming more like female sexuality, Even more males are now calling out their inner “ape” or “gorilla” because of this new CULTURAL and SOCIAL Norm of sexual revolution, but as i said Women were the starter of all this insanity and they are now reaping what they sow.

I’m sorry, but I feel queasy at the thought of linking to AVoiceForMen (officially declared a hate site by the SPLC!), but here’s another article that effectively shreds their idiocy. Read that instead.

The only abortion argument that counts

We can make all the philosophical and scientific arguments that anyone might want, but ultimately what it all reduces to is a simple question: do women have autonomous control of their bodies or not? Even if I thought embryos were conscious, aware beings writing poetry in the womb (I don’t, and they’re not), I’d have to bow out of any say in the decision the woman bearing responsibility has to make.

This Is My Body from Jason Stefaniak on Vimeo.

For the sake of your sanity, do not read the comments. The Catholics have descended upon it.