Graham Linehan, Cowardly Ass

Sorry all, I’ve been busy. But I thought this situation was worth carving some time out to write about: Graham Linehan is a cowardly ass.

See, EssenceOfThought just released a nice little video calling Linehan out for his support of conversion therapy. As they put it:

Now maybe you read that Tweet and didn’t think much of it. After all, it’s just a call for ‘gender critical therapists’. Why’s that a problem? Well gender critical is euphemism for transphobia in the exact same way that ‘race realist’ is for racism. It’s meant to make the bigotry sound more scientific and therefore more palatable.

The truth meanwhile is that every major medical establishment condemns the self-labelled ‘gender critical’ approach which is a form of reparative ‘therapy’, though as noted earlier it is in fact torture. Said methods are abusive and inflict severe harm on the victim in attempts to turn them cisgender and force them to adhere to strict and archaic gender roles.

I response, Linehan issued a threat:

Hi there I have already begun legal proceedings against Pink News for this defamatory accusation. Take this down immediately or I will take appropriate measures.

Presumably “appropriate measures” involves a defamation lawsuit, though when you’re associated with a transphobic mob there’s a wide universe of possible “measures.”

In all fairness, I should point out that Mumsnet is trying to clean up their act. Linehan, in contrast, was warned by the UK police for harassing a transgender person. He also does the same dance of respectability I called out last post. Observe:

Linehan outlines his view to The Irish Times: “I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial. My position is that anyone suffering from gender dysphoria needs to be helped and supported.” Linehan says he celebrates that trans people are at last finding acceptance: “That’s obviously wonderful.” […]

He characterises some extreme trans activists who have “glommed on to the movement” as “a mixture of grifters, fetishists, and misogynists”. … “All it takes is a few bad people in positions of power to groom an organisation, and in this case a movement. This is a society-wide grooming.”

I suspect Linehan would lump EssenceOfThought in with the “grifters, fetishists, and misogynists,” which is telling. If you’ve never watched an EssenceOfThought video before, do so, then look at the list of citations:

[4] UK Council for Psychotherapy (2015) “Memorandum Of Understanding On Conversion Therapy In The UK”, psychotherapy.org.uk Accessed 31st August 2016: https://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/wp-c…

[5] American Academy Of Pediatrics (2015) “Letterhead For Washington DC 2015”, American Academy Of Pediatrics Accessed 19th September 2018; https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-an…

[6] American Medical Association (2018) “Health Care Needs of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Populations H-160.991”, AMA-ASSN.org Accessed 21st September 2019; https://policysearch.ama-assn.org/pol…

[7] Substance Abuse And Mental Health Services Administration (2015) Ending Conversion – Supporting And Affirming LGBTQ Youth”, SAMHSA.gov Accessed 21st September 2019; https://store.samhsa.gov/system/files…

[8] The Trevor Project (2019) “Trevor National Survey On LGBTQ Youth Mental Health”, The Trevor Project Accessed 28th June 2019; https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-c…

[9] Turban, J. L., Beckwith, N., Reisner, S. L., & Keuroghlian, A. S. (2019) “Association Between Recalled Exposure To Gender Identity Conversion Efforts And Psychological Distress and Suicide Attempts Among Transgender Adults”, JAMA Psychiatry

[10] Kristina R. Olson, Lily Durwood, Madeleine DeMeules, Katie A. McLaughlin (2016) “Mental Health of Transgender Children Who Are Supported in Their Identities” http://pediatrics.aappublications.org…

[11] Kristina R. Olson, Lily Durwood, Katie A. McLaughlin (2017) “Mental Health And Self-Worth In Socially Transitioned Transgender Youth”, Child And Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 56, Issue 2, pp.116–123 http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8…

What I love about citation lists is that you can double-check they’re being accurately represented. One reason why I loathe Stephen Pinker, for instance, is because I started hopping down his citation list, and kept finding misrepresentation after misrepresentation. Let’s look at citation 9, as I see EoT didn’t link to the journal article.

Of 27 715 transgender survey respondents (mean [SD] age, 31.2 [13.5] years), 11 857 (42.8%) were assigned male sex at birth. Among the 19 741 (71.3%) who had ever spoken to a professional about their gender identity, 3869 (19.6%; 95% CI, 18.7%-20.5%) reported exposure to GICE in their lifetime. Recalled lifetime exposure was associated with severe psychological distress during the previous month (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 1.56; 95% CI, 1.09-2.24; P < .001) compared with non-GICE therapy. Associations were found between recalled lifetime exposure and higher odds of lifetime suicide attempts (aOR, 2.27; 95% CI, 1.60-3.24; P < .001) and recalled exposure before the age of 10 years and increased odds of lifetime suicide attempts (aOR, 4.15; 95% CI, 2.44-7.69; P < .001). No significant differences were found when comparing exposure to GICE by secular professionals vs religious advisors.

Compare and contrast with how EssenceOfThought describe that study:

They also found no significant difference when comparing religious or secular conversion attempts. So it’s not a case of finding the right way to do it, there is no right way to do it. You’re simply torturing someone for the sake of inflicting pain. And that is fucking digusting.

And the thing is we know how to help young people who are questioning their gender. And that is to take the gender affirmative approach. That is an approach that allows a child and young teen to explore their identity with support. No mater what conclusion they arrive at.

Compare and contrast both with Linehan’s own view of gender affirmation in youth.

“There are lots of gender non-conforming children who may not be trans and may grow up to be gay adults, but who are being told by an extreme, misogynist ideology, that they were born in the wrong body, and anyone who disagrees with that diagnosis is a bigot.”

“It’s especially dangerous for teenage girls – the numbers referred to gender clinics have shot up – because society, in a million ways, is telling girls they are worthless. Of course they look for an escape hatch.”

“The normal experience of puberty is the first time we all experience gender dysphoria. It’s natural. But to tell confused kids who might every second be feeling uncomfortable in their own skin that they are trapped in the wrong body? It’s an obscenity. It’s like telling anorexic kids they need liposuction.”

So much for helping people with gender dysphoia. If Linehan had his way, the evidence suggests transgender people would commit suicide at a higher rate than they do now. EoT’s accusation that Linehan wishes to “eradicate trans children” is justified by the evidence.

Unable to argue against that truth, Linehan had no choice but to try silencing his critics via lawsuits. Rather than change his mind in the face of substantial evidence, Linehan is trying to sue away reality. It’s a cowardly approach to criticism, and I hope he’s Streisand-ed into obscurity for trying it.

Rationality Rules is a Violent Transphobe

I thought I knew how this post would play out. EssenceOfThought has gotten some flack for declaring Stephen Woodford to be a “violent transphobe,” which I didn’t think they deserved. They gave a good defense in one of their videos, starting off with a definition of violence.

You see, violence is defined as the following by the World Health Organization. Quote; “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in, or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.”

EoT points out that controlling someone’s behaviour or social networks by using their finances as leverage can be considered economic violence. They also point out that using legislation to control access to abortion can be considered legislative violence, as it deprives a person of their right to bodily autonomy. And thus, as EoT explains,

When you exclude trans women from women’s sports you’re not simply violating numerous human rights. You’re designating them as not real women, as an invasive force coming to take what doesn’t belong to them. You are cultivating future transphobic violence.

Note the air gap: “cultivating violence” and “violence” are not the same thing, and the definition EoT quoted above places intent front-and-centre. EoT bridges the gap by pointing out they gave Rationality Rules several months to demonstrate he promoted violent policies out of ignorance, rather than with intent. When “he [doubled] down on his violent transphobia,” EoT had sufficient evidence of intent to justify calling him a “violent transphobe.”

At this point I’d shore up their one citation with a few more. This decoupling of physical force and violence is not a new argument in the philosophy and social sciences literature.

Violence often involves physical force, and the association of force with violence is very close: in many contexts the words become synonyms. An obvious instance is the reference to a violent storm, a storm of great force. But in human affairs violence and force, cannot be equated. Force without violence is often used on a person’s body. If a person is in the throes of drowning, the standard Red Cross life-saving techniques specify force which is certainly not violence. To equate an act of rescue with an act of violence would be to lose sight entirely of the significance of the concept. Similarly, surgeons and dentists use force without doing violence.

Violence in human affairs is much more closely connected with the idea of violation than with the idea of force. What is fundamental about violence is that a person is violated. And if one immediately senses the truth of that statement, it must be because a person has certain rights which are undeniably, indissolubly, connected with being a person. One of these is a right to one’s body, to determine what one’s body does and what is done to one’s body — inalienable because without one’s body one would cease to be a person. Apart from a body, what is essential to one’s being a person is dignity. The real dignity of a person does not consist in remaining “dignified”, but rather in the ability to make decisions.

Garver, Newton. “What violence is.” The Nation 209.24 (1968): 819-822.

As a point of departure, let us say that violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations. […]

The first distinction to be made is between physical and psychological violence. The distinction is trite but important mainly because the narrow concept of violence mentioned above concentrates on physical violence only. […] It is useful to distinguish further between ’biological violence’, […] and ’physical violence as such’, which increases the constraint on human movements – as when a person is imprisoned or put in chains, but also when access to transportation is very unevenly distributed, keeping large segments of a population at the same place with mobility a monopoly of the selected few. But that distinction is less important than the basic distinction between violence that works on the body, and violence that works on the soul; where the latter would include lies, brainwashing, indoctrination of various kinds, threats, etc. that serve to decrease mental potentialities. […]

We shall refer to the type of violence where there is an actor that commits the violence as personal or direct, and to violence where there is no such actor as structural or indirect. In both cases individuals maybe killed or mutilated, hit or hurt in both senses of these words, and manipulated by means of stick or carrot strategies. But whereas in the first case these consequences can be traced back to concrete persons as actors, in the second case this is no longer meaningful. There may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.

Galtung, Johan. “Violence, peace, and peace research.” Journal of peace research 6.3 (1969): 167-191.

This expansive definition of “violence” has been influential, Galtung’s fifty-year-old paper from above has been cited from over 6,000 times according to Google Scholar. “Influential” is not a synonym for “consensus,” however.

Nearly all inquiries concerning the phenomenon of violence demonstrate that violence not only takes on many forms and possesses very different characteristics, but also that the current range of definitions is considerable and creates ample controversies concerning the question what violence is and how it ought to be defined (…). Since there are so many different kinds of violence (…) and since violence is studied from different actor perspectives (i.e. perpetrator, victim, third party, neutral observer), existing literature displays a wide variety of definitions based on different theoretical and, sometimes even incommensurable domain assumptions (e.g. about human nature, social order and history). In short, the concept of ‘violence’ is notoriously difficult to define because as a phenomenon it is multifaceted, socially constructed and highly ambivalent. […]

Violence is socially constructed because who and what is considered as violent varies according to specific socio-cultural and historical conditions. While legal scholars may require narrow definitions for punishable acts, the phenomenon of violence is invariably more complex in social reality. Not only do views about violence differ, but feelings regarding physical violence also change under the influence of social and cultural developments. The meanings that participants in a violent episode give to their own and other’s actions and experiences vary and can be crucial for deciding what is and what is not considered as violence since there is no simple relationship between the apparent severity of an attack and the impact that it has upon the victim. For example, in some cases, verbal aggression may prove to be more debilitating than physical attack.

De Haan, Willem. “Violence as an essentially contested concept.” Violence in Europe. Springer, New York, NY, 2008. 27-40.

A major objection to this inclusive definition of violence is that it makes everything violence, creating confusion instead of clarity. One example:

If violence is violating a person or a person’s rights, then every social wrong is a violent one, every crime against another a violent crime, every sin against one’s neighbor an act of violence. If violence is whatever violates a person and his rights of body, dignity, or autonomy, then lying to or about another, embezzling, locking one out of his house, insulting, and gossiping are all violent acts.

Betz, Joseph. “Violence: Garver’s definition and a Deweyan correction.” Ethics 87.4 (1977): 339-351.

The problem with this objection is that it assumes violence is binary: things are either violent, or they are not. Almost nothing in life falls in a binary, sex included, so a much more plausible model for violence is a continuum. I’m convinced that even the people who buy into a violence binary also accept that violence falls on a continuum, as I have yet to hear anyone argue that murder and wet willies are equally bad. Thus eliminating the binary and declaring all violence to fall on a continuum is a simpler theory, and by Occam’s razor should be favoured until contrary evidence comes along.

The other major objection is that while not every human society agrees on what constitutes violence, all of them agree that physical violence is violence. Sometimes this objection can be quite subtle:

Albeit rare, there are cases of violence occurring without rights being violated. This point has been made by Audi (1971, p. 59): ‘[while] in the most usual cases violence involves the violation of some moral right …there are also cases, like wrestling and boxing, in which even paradigmatic violence can occur without the violation of any moral right’.

Bufacchi, Vittorio. “Two concepts of violence.” Political Studies Review 3.2 (2005): 193-204.

That quote only works if you think wrestling is paradigmatic, something everyone agrees counts as violence. Wrestling fans would disagree, and either point to the hardcore training and co-operation involved or the efforts made to prevent injury, depending on which fandom you were querying. Societies definitely disagree on what physical acts count as violence, and even within a single country physical acts that are considered horrifically immoral to many today were perfectly acceptable to many a century ago. This pragmatic argument can also be turned on its head, by pointing out that if violence is binary then we wouldn’t expect a correlation between (for example) hostile views of women and violence towards women. If a violence continuum exists, however, such a correlation must exist.

Studies using Glick and Fiske’s (1996) Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, which contains different subscales for benevolent and hostile sexism, support this idea. Studies have found that greater endorsement of hostile sexism predicted more positive attitudes toward violence against a female partner (Forbes, Jobe, White, Bloesch, & Adams-Curtis, 2005; Sakalli, 2001). Other studies of IPV among college samples have found that men with more hostile sexist attitudes were more likely to have committed verbal aggression (Forbes et. al., 2004) and sexual coercion (Forbes & Adams-Curtis, 2001; Forbes et al., 2004).

Allen, Christopher T., Suzanne C. Swan, and Chitra Raghavan. “Gender symmetry, sexism, and intimate partner violence.” Journal of interpersonal violence 24.11 (2009): 1816-1834.

At this point in the post, though, I was supposed to pump the breaks a little. People have certain ideas in mind when you say “violence,” I’d say, and would likely equivocate between physical and non-physical violence. This would poison the well. Of course you can’t change language or create awareness by sitting on your hands, so EssenceOfThought were 100% in the right in arguing Rationality Rules was a violent transphobe, but at the same time I wasn’t willing to join in. I needed more time to think about it. After finishing that paragraph, I’d title this post “Rationality Rules is a ‘Violent’ Transphobe” and punch the Publish button.

But now that I’ve finished gathering my sources and writing this post, I have had time to think about it. I cannot find a good reason to reject the violence-as-intentional-rights-violation definition, in particular I cannot come up with a superior alternative. Rationality Rules argues that the rights of some transgender people should be restricted, via special pleading. As I point out at that link, Stephen Woodford is aware of the argument from human rights, so he cannot claim his restriction is being done out of ignorance. That gives us proof of intent.

So no quote marks are necessary: I too believe Rationality Rules is a violent transphobe, for the definitions and reasons above.

A Revealing Experiment

Consider this scenario.

ME: “Hey, thanks for coming over! If you’re thirsty, I’ve got your choice of Pepsi, A&W Root Beer, and Mountain Dew.”
YOU: “I’d prefer Mountain Dew, but I’ll take anything.”
ME: “Gotcha, I’ll be right back!”
ME: [leaves, then returns with a Pepsi]
YOU: “Thanks. Too bad you ran out of Mountain Dew.”
ME: “Oh no, I’ve got tonnes.”
YOU: “… but it was too tough to reach, right?”
ME: “No, the Dew was right next to the Pepsi.”

Have I done anything wrong here? No, at least technically. You said you were fine with any soft drink, and I gave you a soft drink. At the same time, though, you expressed a preference for Mountain Dew over the other choices. I could be forgiven for ignoring your preference if I wasn’t able to fulfill it, or doing so would have been inconvenient for me, but in this fictional scenario both of those were off the table. My choice to hand you a Pepsi instead of a Mountain Dew reveals something about me, most likely that I think other people should prefer Pepsi over other soft drinks. You could point to the ordering of my list as further evidence: I’d be more likely to list my preferred option first, as it would be more prominent in my mind than the other choices, and then rattle off others as they came to me. This isn’t strong evidence, but you’d be justified in suspecting my motives as you enjoyed your Pepsi.

robbe de Boer: Hey EOT, I had a question not related to this video, what pronouns do you prefer? I couldn’t find anything real quick.
EssenceOfThought: They. But I’m fine with both she and he as well. It’s all on the channel description/Facebook page ‘About’ section. 😛

By merely existing, EssenceOfThought has set up a very similar situation. They have a pronoun preference, and when listing their pronoun choices put “he” last, but also say they aren’t offended if you pick another reasonable one. The difficulty in typing two extra letters is practically zero, and “they” as a singular pronoun has been in the English language for six centuries, so there isn’t any obstacle to its use beyond your hang-ups. Hell, even the guy who became famous for refusing to use transgender people’s pronouns is perfectly capable of using singular “they.”

Jordan Peterson: I don’t recognize another person’s right to decide what words I’m going to use, especially when the words they want me to use, first of all, are non-standard elements of the English language and they are constructs of a small coterie of ideologically motivated people. They might have a point but I’m not going to say their words for them.

So if we encounter someone calling EssenceOfThought “he,” we’re justified in raising an eyebrow. While they’re not technically in the wrong, the use of “he” is suggestive that they’d overrule someone’s pronoun preference if they thought they could get away with it.

Steve McRae: Essence of thought bullies Rachel Oates and demonstrates himself to probably one of the worse humans ever to be on Twitter or YouTube.

[12:00] Noel Plum: The truth of the matter is, is that effectively in saying what he’s saying, Essence of Thought has said, to the majority of people who have sided with him, you are transphobes. Your position is, transphobic unless you adopt this position that anyone who identifies as a woman gets to compete in this category, then you are holding a transphobic position. And his masterstroke is that it seems to have done the trick, and nobody’s arguing – none of his supporters are arguing with him.

Rachel Oates: In regards to Essence of Thought calling the police and claiming to be the ‘only one’ actually helping me. It didn’t. He called the police. Who apparently turned up at my old flat, broke the door down and then they wasted hours and many resources trying to find me. Meanwhile, I was at home with my friends around me, having all my Youtube friends send me love and support and check in on me. My family phoned me. People were there for me, helping.

The analogy isn’t a perfect fit. In there, I asked for your choice and received it. EssenceOfThought will mention their preferred pronoun if asked, but does not put it on blast nor do they bother to correct people who don’t pick their preference. Ignorance is more of an option than the analogy presents.

Provided, of course, these people were ignorant. Some of them claim to care about transgender people, though. They should know not to screw up someone’s pronouns, and thus be willing to do a little extra legwork to get things right. Even if they only use “he” because their friends and peers do so, that means their social circle is overwhelmingly dominated by transphobic people or people with a high tolerance to transphobia.

Rachel Oates: Also, I’m really sorry if I got EoT’s pronouns wrong in this thread – I’ve heard different things about which pronouns they prefer & may have slipped up here.

A good way to rule out ignorance is to correct them on EoT’s preferred pronouns. If that person responds with something like this…

Noel Plum: If he drops the “he” then I will drop it too. As it stands he accepts he, she or they. I couldn’t give a toss which he “prefers” as i don’t like him.

EssenceOfThought with their hands raised.… then you’re pretty justified in believing the “cloaked transphobia” hypothesis.

“He” is also a strange choice given how EssenceOfThought presents. You see someone with no facial hair and long flowing locks in front of a transgender flag, and you immediately jump to “he?” C’mon, even Rationality Rules splits the baby and uses “she.” These people didn’t settle on “he” by accident, their choice reveals something about their internal opinion of transgender people, their peer group, or their ignorance.

And it isn’t very refreshing.

Deep Penetration Tests

We now live in an age where someone can back door your back door.

Analysts believe there are currently on the order of 10 billions Internet of Things (IoT) devices out in the wild. Sometimes, these devices find their way up people’s butts: as it turns out, cheap and low-power radio-connected chips aren’t just great for home automation – they’re also changing the way we interact with sex toys. In this talk, we’ll dive into the world of teledildonics and see how connected buttplugs’ security holds up against a vaguely motivated attacker, finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at every level of the stack, ultimately allowing us to compromise these toys and the devices they connect to.

Writing about this topic is hard, and not just because penises may be involved. IoT devices pose a grave security risk for all of us, but probably not for you personally. For instance, security cameras have been used to launch attacks on websites. When was the last time you updated the firmware on your security camera, or ran a security scan of it? Probably never. Has your security camera been taken over? Maybe, as of 2017 roughly half the internet-connected cameras in the USA were part of a botnet. Has it been hacked and commanded to send your data to a third party? Almost certainly not, these security cam hacks almost all target something else. Human beings are terrible at assessing risk in general, and the combination of catastrophic consequences to some people but minimal consequences to you only amplifies our weaknesses.

There’s a very fine line between “your car can be hacked to cause a crash!” and “some cars can be hacked to cause a crash,” between “your TV is tracking your viewing habits” and “your viewing habits are available to anyone who knows where to look!” Finding the right balance between complacency and alarmism is impossible given how much we don’t know. And as computers become more intertwined with our intimate lives, whole new incentives come into play. Proportionately, more people would be willing to file a police report about someone hacking their toaster than about someone hacking their butt plug. Not many people own a smart sex toy, but those that do form a very attractive hacking target.

There’s not much we can do about this individually. Forcing people to take an extensive course in internet security just to purchase a butt plug is blaming the victim, and asking the market to solve the problem doesn’t work when market incentives caused the problem in the first place. A proper solution requires collective action as a society, via laws and incentives that help protect our privacy.

Then, and only then, can you purchase your sex toys in peace.

The Crossroads

Apparently I know the solar system very well?

I attended a lecture on Carl Sagan, hosted by the Atheist Society of Calgary, and part of the event was a trivia challenge. While I wasn’t the only person at my table offering answers, my answers seemed to be the ones most consistently endorsed by the group. Assisted by some technical issues, our team wound up with a massive lead over the second-place finisher. The organizer from ASC surprised us all by saying everyone at our table could pick up a free T-shirt. I wasn’t terribly keen on wearing their logo, but I wandered over to the merch table anyway.

Sitting among the other designs was one that stopped me cold.

[Read more…]

Rationality Rules is an Abusive Transphobe

Abuse comes in more forms than many people realize. Take financial abuse, where someone uses economic leverage to control you, or reproductive coercion, or this behaviour.

Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse where the abuser intentionally manipulates the physical environment or mental state of the abusee, and then deflects responsibility by provoking the abusee to think that the changes reside in their imagination, thus constituting a weakened perception of reality (Akhtar, 2009; Barton & Whitehead, 1969; Dorpat, 1996; Smith & Sinanan, 1972). By repeatedly and convincingly offering explanations that depict the victim as unstable, the abuser can control the victim’s perception of reality while maintaining a position of truth-holder and authority.

Roberts, Tuesda, and Dorinda J. Carter Andrews. “A Critical Race Analysis of the Gaslighting against African American Teachers.” Contesting the Myth of a” Post Racial Era”: The Continued Significance of Race in US Education, 2013, 69–94.

A small but growing amount of the scientific literature considers gaslighting a form of abuse. It’s also worth knowing about a close cousin of gaslighting known as “DARVO.”

DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle blower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation. […]

In a 2017 peer-reviewed open-access research study, Perpetrator Responses to Victim Confrontation: DARVO and Victim Self-Blame, Harsey, Zurbriggen, & Freyd reported that: “(1) DARVO was commonly used by individuals who were confronted; (2) women were more likely to be exposed to DARVO than men during confrontations; (3) the three components of DARVO were positively correlated, supporting the theoretical construction of DARVO; and (4) higher levels of exposure to DARVO during a confrontation were associated with increased perceptions of self-blame among the confronters. These results provide evidence for the existence of DARVO as a perpetrator strategy and establish a relationship between DARVO exposure and feelings of self-blame.

If DARVO seems vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s a popular tactic in the far-Right. Brett Kavanaugh used it during his Congressional hearing, this YouTuber encountered it quite a bit among the Proud Boys, and even RationalWiki’s explanation of it invokes the Christian far-Right. DARVO may be common among sexual abusers, but it’s important to stress that it’s not exclusive to them. It’s best to think of this solely as an abusive tactic to evade scrutiny, without that extra baggage. [Read more…]

The Crisis of the Mediocre Man

I was browsing YouTube videos on PyMC3, as one naturally does, when I happened to stumble on this gem.

Tech has spent millions of dollars in efforts to diversify workplaces. Despite this, it seems after each spell of progress, a series of retrograde events ensue. Anti-diversity manifestos, backlash to assertive hiring, and sexual misconduct scandals crop up every few months, sucking the air from every board room. This will be a digest of research, recent events, and pointers on women in STEM.

Lorena A. Barba really knows her stuff; the entire talk is a rapid-fire accounting of claims and counterclaims, aimed to directly appeal to the male techbros who need to hear it. There was a lot of new material in there, for me at least. I thought the only well-described matriarchies came from the African continent, but it turns out the Algonquin also fit that bill. Some digging turns up a rich mix of gender roles within First Nations peoples, most notably the Iroquois and Hopi. I was also depressed to hear that the R data analysis community is better at dealing with sexual harassment than the skeptic/atheist community.

But what really grabbed my ears was the section on gender quotas. I’ve long been a fan of them on logical grounds: if we truly believe the sexes are equal, then if we see unequal representation we know discrimination is happening. By forcing equality, we greatly reduce network effects where one gender can team up against the other. Worried about an increase in mediocrity? At worst that’s a temporary thing that disappears once the disadvantaged sex gets more experience, and at best the overall quality will actually go up. The research on quotas has advanced quite a bit since that old Skepchick post. Emphasis mine.

In 1993, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party centrally adopted a gender quota and imposed it on all the local branches of that party (…). Although their primary aim was to improve the representation of women, proponents of the quota observed that the reform had an impact on the competence of men. Inger Segelström (the chair of Social Democratic Women in Sweden (S-Kvinnor), 1995–2003) made this point succinctly in a personal communication:

At the time, our party’s quota policy of mandatory alternation of male and female names on all party lists became informally known as the crisis of the mediocre man…

We study the selection of municipal politicians in Sweden with regard to their competence, both theoretically and empirically. Moreover, we exploit the Social Democratic quota as a shock to municipal politics and ask how it altered the competence of that party’s elected politicians, men as well as women, and leaders as well as followers.

Besley, Timothy. “Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden.” THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 107, no. 8 (2017): 39.

We can explain this with the benefit of hindsight: if men can rely on the “old boy’s network” to keep them in power, they can afford to slack off. If other sexes cannot, they have to fight to earn their place. These are all social effects, though; if no sex holds a monopoly on operational competence in reality, the net result is a handful of brilliant women among a sea of iffy men. Gender quotas severely limit the social effects, effectively kicking out the mediocre men to make way for average women, and thus increase the average competence.

As tidy as that picture is, it’s wrong in one crucial detail. Emphasis again mine.

These estimates show that the overall effect mainly reflects an improvement in the selection of men. The coefficient in column 4 means that a 10-percentage-point larger quota bite (just below the cross-sectional average for all municipalities) raised the proportion of competent men by 4.4 percentage points. Given an average of 50 percent competent politicians in the average municipality (by definition, from the normalization), this corresponds to a 9 percent increase in the share of competent men.

For women, we obtain a negative coefficient in the regression specification without municipality trends, but a positive coefficient with trends. In neither case, however, is the estimate significantly different from zero, suggesting that the quota neither raised nor cut the share of competent women. This is interesting in view of the meritocratic critique of gender quotas, namely that raising the share of women through a quota must necessarily come at the price of lower competence among women.

Increasing the number of women does not also increase the number of incompetent women. When you introduce a quota, apparently, everyone works harder to justify being there. The only people truly hurt by gender quotas are mediocre men who rely on the Peter Principle.

The like ratio for said talk. 47 likes, 55 dislikes, FYI.Alas, if that YouTube like ratio is any indication, there’s a lot of them out there.