Circumstantial evidence.

A vaginal photoplethysmograph. It knows what you like.
Even if you disagree.

I got about fifteen pages into Sex at Dawn before giving up. Partly because it seemed to be breaking down "monogamy is natural and therefore good" only to replace it with equally narrow thinking about "polyamory is natural and therefore good."  Partly because the opening chapter is viciously snarky about how everyone is unhappy and bad at sex these days because of their stupid monogamy delusion, which, even though I'm poly, grates on me like condescending sandpaper.  Partly because some of their evidence for universal bad-at-sex-ness is the frequency of Viagra use and female sexual dysfunction--apparently physical genital problems are just proof of your hang-ups, man.

Partly because there's a part where they make the argument that a woman's "copulatory vocalizations" are supposed to excite other men and invite them to have sex with her too, and... NO and EW and WHAT.

But mostly, I gave up on Sex at Dawn because it's full of a problem a lot of sex research suffers from--the love of circumstantial evidence.


Want to know why women moan during sex?  (Or, for starters, whether all women moan during sex?)  What would your first step in answering this question be?

Well, if you're a Serious Sex Researcher, some approaches you might take:
• Watch female chimps having sex.
• Gather media about fictional women making sex noises.
• Dissect female cadavers, searching for the sex-noise node of the brain.
• Read anthropological accounts of the sex-noise practices of women in isolated hunter-gatherer societies.
• Search the literature for historical mentions of women making sex noises.
• Hook up men and women's genitalia to "arousal-measuring" equipment and scan their brains while they listen to sex noises.
• Speculate at length about the sex noises of "cavewomen."

And one approach you would never, ever take because it's just hopelessly unscientific:
• Ask some women "hey, why do you moan during sex?"


Don't get me wrong, I don't think sex science should consist entirely of self-reports, or that cross-cultural and biological perspectives don't have a place in it.  But too often, sex research seems to consist of everything but listening to people about their own experiences.  It's the meticulous aggregation of every possible piece of circumstantial evidence--and no questions for the eyewitnesses.


I have a special hatred for vaginal photoplethysmography, and not just because it's very hard to type.  This is a device that measures bloodflow in the vagina, and therefore purportedly the sexual arousal of the vagina's owner.  Except that study after study shows that subjects' self-reports of their arousal tend to correlate very badly with their photoplethingy readings.  The photothingy says they're aroused, the human beings say they're not feeling a thing.  Naturally, this is reported in the pop-sci press as "Vaginal Blood Flow Not A Reliable Indicator Of Arousal, New Method Needed."

Haha, I'm just messing with you.  I've never seen that headline.  It's always reported as "Women Not Aware Of Their Own Arousal."  (The first link opens with chimps, too!  Oh, those fucking chimps.  Fascinating creatures and all that, but I don't understand the compulsion to study chimps to understand human sexuality, when actual humans are readily available.)  You couldn't get away with this in other branches of science.  If you measured water ice at 20ºC and declared "my thermometer is perfect; this ice must be defective," you'd get laughed out of the lab.  But when it comes to confirming gross old "they don't know what they really want" stereotypes about women, anything goes.

(Don't worry, though; if you have a penis, its degree of erection will also be trusted over your word.  Because no one ever got a hard-on when they didn't want to have sex, right?)



I'm a science nerd at heart.  I like the idea of applying science to sex.  (I'm still trying to find the right excuse to post the pictures from that time we measured my Kegel Power.  About half a kilo, by the way.)  I have no ambition to replace rigorously analyzed data and reproducible double-blind experiments with poems about lilies unfolding.  I think expanding our knowledge of human sexuality is a noble goal in biology, psychology, and sociology, and objective measures are necessary to achieve that.

But I also think that if you want to study humans, study humans.  If you want to study people's feelings, ask them about their feelings.  Cadavers and fMRIs and chimps should be secondary tools to validate what you learn from humans, not the other way around.

In nursing, the definition of pain is simply "whatever the patient says it is," and yet we've still been able to create a massive body of work about the causes, effects, and control of pain.  Our understanding of pain is human and subjective, and still manages to produce precise and meaningful data.  There's no reason we can't study sex this way as well.

SurveyFail makes the WSJ.

[Three people sent this to me. I'm here to serve...]

In 2009, there was an event known in online fan circles as SurveyFail. Complete details are collected here, but the basics of it are that researchers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam conducted an online survey of fandom members that was incredibly shoddy in its construction and application. The complete survey can be found here and contains awesome questions like:

54. If you write m/m slash, how do you study male physiology in order to write more convincing stories? (Check as many as apply.)
I don't write m/m slash.
I use ideas from other slash stories.
I ask gay men for information.
I research details on the internet.
I watch gay porn for insight.
I'm a man, and can use my own experiences.
Other:

If you're thinking that's missing a few obvious possibilities, making a lot of assumptions, "steering" the survey responder toward certain stereotypes of the shallow young "gay men are so sparkly!" fangirl who's never had real sex, and generally a very unprofessional way to conduct psychology research, you're not alone.

Much of the concern stemmed from the fact that Ogas and Gaddam had explicitly stated that the purpose of their survey was to "prove" cognitive differences between men and women concerning romance and sexuality, and made delightfully quadruple-clueless comments like the following:

Well, slash is kind of the female equivalent of the straight male interest in transsexuals. That is, the opposite of what culture would predict. So it probably reflects a more direct subcortical effect.

Ogas and Gaddam claimed to be endorsed by Boston University, but BU actually had no affiliation with them and they had never cleared their research with BU's or any other university's institutional review board for human subjects. They also did not disclose to subjects that their answers would be published in a for-profit, non-peer-reviewed book (and now also a shit-ton of likewise non-peer-reviewed popular press articles), did not screen for underage subjects, and generally did not do anything to screen or randomize survey respondents. They were every bit as "scientific" in their conduction of the survey as a quiz on Facebook asking you which Ninja Turtle you are.

Less so, because at least the Facebook survey probably doesn't start with the assumption that all women are gonna be Rafael.

And worst of all, even after they were widely criticized for all this (and their survey can be assumed to have been fucked with eight ways to Sunday, although they discarded any critical answers as "sabotage"), they went ahead and published anyway!. Check the tags for, as the kids say these days, "lulz."

Now they're publicizing their "research" in the popular press as if everything was dandy and actual science had been accomplished. Which brings us to today's fisk:

The Online World of Female Desire
For women indulging their curiosity, Internet erotica is less about flesh than about finding Mr. Right.
Wow! Who knew that Science™ would confirm all the stereotypes we already had? Quick, now do expensive shoes or bad driving!

The female cortex contains a highly developed system for finding and scrutinizing a prospective partner—a system that might be dubbed the Miss Marple Detective Agency.
Science™! "And if you pull away the upper layers of the somatosensory cortex, you'll find the Miss Marple Detective Agency. Only in women, though. Men keep football scores there."

Also, I'm not convinced I use the same, um, brain structure when reading Internet porn as when seeking an actual partner. I know damn well that in real life Jack Sparrow wouldn't even smell good.

Using similar investigative skills, the female brain evaluates all available evidence regarding a potential mate's social, emotional and physical qualities to make an all-important decision: Is he Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong? Only if Miss Marple gives her stamp of approval do physical arousal and psychological arousal harmoniously unite in the female brain.
Dear God, how do I masturbate? I can't clear that shit with Miss Marple every night just to get my rocks off.

Female arousal is arousal. Sometimes it's based on all available social/blardy blah evidence. Sometimes it's based on a nice pair of forearms or a few nasty words whispered in my ear or the length of time since I last got laid. Sometimes it happens to me at random when I'm driving or in public and it's really inconvenient.

And for the love of God would these people please stop saying "the female brain" as if it was this exotic novelty and "females" were a recently discovered species? I have... er, I am a female brain and I don't appreciate this "intrepid explorers with pith helmets bring light to this unknown region" attitude toward my entire subjective existence.

This unconscious evaluation is the source of "feminine intuition." Though the female brain carefully processes many stimuli simultaneously, it is experienced only as a general feeling of favorability or suspicion toward a potential partner. This feminine intuition is designed to solve a woman's unique challenge of determining whether a man is committed, kind and capable of protecting a family.
Actually, I'm usually quite aware of some of the stimuli that lead to the "hottie, lets-be-friends, or creeper" determination. How could I not be? Is my brain supposed to erase things like "this one smiled at me in a friendly way, and that one gave me the bug-eye and 'accidentally' touched my butt"? It's really not that subtle. I may have been accidentally issued a male brain, because I seem to be sentient.

Female erotica demonstrates how the detective agency operates—and how it differs from the much simpler male brain.
Whoops, sorry, I forgot. Nobody is sentient.

Whereas two-minute video clips are the most popular form of contemporary erotica for men, the most popular form for women remains the romance novel, an artifact that takes many hours to digest.
I'm not much of a romance novel aficionado, but I'm fairly sure you don't masturbate the entire time. (Maybe a little on pages 213-215.) It's not a substitute for porn; it fulfills a different need.

There's also the issue of gaze. Very few two-minute video clips show the things a heterosexual woman might want to see, in terms of attractive men with their bodies emphasized giving respectful pleasure to women. And very few romance novels describe the heroine's heaving bosoms in the detail a heterosexual male reader might be interested in. You can argue about whether this is an effect of gendered preferences or not, but there's no doubt it's a cause.

I'm really sorry, non-heterosexual people, but you don't seem to exist. Do you ever?

All romance novels, whether written by the likes of Jane Austen, Nora Roberts or Stephenie Meyer, employ a narrative formula that follows the gradual elucidation of the hero's inner character, leading to an emotional epiphany between hero and heroine. On this journey, the heroine—and the reader—investigates the character of the hero.
Sure, sure (although frankly, you could read your Jane Austen a little more carefully), but you don't wank to it. It's entertaining because it's a novel, not because I'm imaginary-dating Mr. Darcy and need to know him inside and out before we may consummate our imaginary-love.

Fan fiction also reveals another fundamental difference between male and female sexuality. Men almost always consume pornography alone. But in the fan-fiction community, the online discussion of a story is as important as the story itself. This reflects one of the primary investigative techniques of Miss Marple: soliciting information from other detectives.
Oh, come on, ew. Fandom Wankers aren't literally masturbating together.

I'm not much of a fangirl these days, but I did my time in the Pit of Voles, and the point of discussing a story is... nngh, discussing the story! It's like developing any work of fiction, it's not a matter of collaboratively evaluating Harry Potter as a potential boyfriend. In any intelligent fan group, there's a lot more "this seems out of character" and "whoops, grammar fail" than there is "HARRY IS SO SENSITIVE AND CARING *hearts, stars, flowers*."

Do men and boys participate less in this kind of collaborative story-building? It seems that is the case, and that might be worth investigating. But that would mean investigating, not drawing a priori conclusions that this is all about sex and all about hardwiring.

Some female readers might be thinking, "This doesn't describe me at all!" And, in fact, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the visitors to the major pornography sites are women. Our data suggest that these women probably have a higher sex drive than other women and that they are more socially aggressive and more comfortable taking risks.
"Our research describes all women except the ones it doesn't describe! All women are alike, except the ones that are different!"

For most women, however, Miss Marple is the master sleuth. Her fact-finding mission must be completed before mind and body are united in sexual harmony.
Sure, sure, for harmony and stuff. But that doesn't mean I can't get off.




It's old news, every bit of it, wearing slightly new clothes and a shiny gloss of Science™. Men are from "I just stick my dick in a warm thing" Mars, women are from "I must feel nurtured in every cell of my complex fickle being" Venus, and none of this has any relation to anything that happens on Earth.



Edit: Whoa. I missed the forest for the trees here. The forest is: THEY SET OUT TO PROVE THAT WOMEN LIKE ROMANCE STORIES BY STUDYING WOMEN WHO LIKE ROMANCE STORIES. There was literally no way this "study" could have produced different results.

Using a self-reported shoddy online survey distributed only to left-handed women, I could prove that women are all left-handed.

On Cavemen.

There is no such thing, in anthropology, as a "caveman." Some early human groups lived in caves, yes; others lived in tents or huts or plain old houses. I guess there's a bit less of the primitive-romance ring to "houseman."

But if by "cavemen" we mean hunter-gatherers without metal tools or formal government, here are some things you should know:

1. These groups exist today.
When metal tools and agriculture were invented, not everyone took them up. Or they took them up and abandoned them. These were not irrational decisions--being an HDTV-owning Westerner may be more comfortable than being a hunter-gatherer, but being a subsistence farmer (or factory worker, for that matter) isn't necessarily.

So "cavemen" aren't purely a matter of speculation and pottery shards. You can go out and talk to some. Ask them about their freewheeling matriarchal pansexual utopia or their animalistic primal male brutality.

...No, neither is the case. It's impossible to generalize about hunter-gatherers since I'm talking about completely separate groups in different parts of the world, but none of them are nearly as wacky sexually as "cavemen" have been made out to be. A lot of them even just have marriages.

2. Everything we know suggests that anatomically modern humans were also mentally and emotionally modern humans.
The jokes are about cavemen going "ugga ugga FIRE ug," but a better quote from the Paleolithic would probably be "Good morning! Let's go fishing; I just traded some pots my wife made to the guys across the river for some bone fishooks. Now I better bring back some big fish or she's going to be mad." (In caveman language, of course.) They were people, living people's lives.

Obviously not all of their cultural values were in common with modern Americans, but we're talking like foreign-country different, not like chimpanzee different. (And while I'm at it: even chimpanzee different is not irrational or pointlessly brutal. Chimps have structured societies and they only express agression under certain circumstances and there are tons of examples of them putting social cohesion over physical urges. Even animals aren't "animalistic.") You might not always have agreed with them, but you would have understood them. And not like "the male is providing for his mate to prove his genetic quality" understood. Like "yeah, I can see why he kinda owes his wife after selling her stuff" understood.

Here are some things we know Paleolithic people did: Care for the sick. Bury the dead. Make art. Wear jewelry. Keep dogs. Travel in boats. Trade with each other. Follow calendars. Play musical instruments.

Boats? Boats that could get to Australia. You take some trees and some rocks and sail to Australia. (And when you get there, ain't exactly a Foodmaster in the neighborhood, so you're going to have to pull some Bear Grylls shit. For your entire life. While raising children.) Then tell me about primitive cavemen following their animal instincts.

3. Human culture changes much faster than the human genome.
I mentioned above that hunter-gatherer groups are quite different from each other. Someone from the Pirahã people in the Amazon wouldn't have all that much to talk about with someone from the Sentinelese people in the Andaman Islands. But the genetic differences between them--and between either of them and you or me--are extremely slight. Their culture was shaped by their circumstances and their history, not by genetics.

So to call the process by which other hunter-gatherer groups started farming and specializing and forming civilizations and colonizing until they became you and me "evolution" is a gross misuse of the term. It's sure as hell not genetic evolution, at least. People who farm don't dominate the world because there's a "farm gene" that has become prevalent, but because farmers had more children and they taught those children to farm. Farmers having more kids is NOT "survival of the fittest" in the Darwinian sense; if you raise one of those kids in a hunter-gatherer society, they're not going to spontaneously plant a garden.

Things that are way, way too new to be codified in the human genome:
Farms
Money
Dating (arguably, my grandmother is older than modern dating)
Government
Law
Groups of people larger than your high school graduating class
Jobs
Written language
2011 standards of physical beauty (again, ask my grandmother)

Behaviors relating to these or other modern concepts are extremely, extremely unlikely to be directly "hardwired" into our genetics.

4. You are not a caveman, anyway.
Yeah. Don't sit there at your computer wearing your pants enjoying your central heating and tell me that sexuality is the one specific area of human behavior where people are helpless against their genetics.





Slightly off the caveman topic, but a thing I wanted to say:
5. Physical beauty does not indicate "quality genes" and sexual frequency does not indicate "fitness."
"Fitness" means the number of children you have who survive to reproduce themselves. To a lesser degree, the survival and reproduction of your other relatives and your tribe also increases your fitness. So being kind and responsible to your family isn't just ethical, it's adaptive. Considering the amount of work involved in raising a human child (particularly in preindustrial times), conceiving a bunch of embryos and running off doesn't necessarily get you a lot of grandchildren.

As for the "quality" of a hottie's genes, all you can really say is that the children are more likely to be hotties themselves. Doesn't make them more (or less) fertile, intelligent, healthy, aggressive, cooperative, or good at parenting. Mating with a square-jawed broad-shouldered dude who carries genes for asthma and has no malaria resistance is no way to ensure "quality" genes. That'll just get you a bunch of square-jawed broad-shouldered kids with asthma and malaria.

It may be super boring to suggest that being in a stable relationship with someone who's nice as well as healthy is the "fittest" thing for both sexes, but I think it's a hell of a lot better bet than a supermodel fucking an egomaniac.

Evolution, rape, ovulation, and how to get your opinions labeled "Science."

I should declare, before going on, that I just finished my period and haven't ovulated yet. So take the following with a grain of awareness that this is just my post-period-pre-ovulation opinion.



A reader sent me this link from Slate about how women have supposedly evolved to protect themselves from rape. It falls victim, severely, to the usual process of pop-evolutionary-psychology:

1. Get a little bit of data. A self-reported survey administered to fifteen undergrads (the portion of your 9AM class who returned the surveys) is more than enough.
2. Break that data down by sex. Make sure to never ever ever break it down by age, socioeconomic status, level of education, nationality, or any other way people could conceivably differ from each other.
(2b. Make sure that you treat gender as absolutely biologically fixed. Disregard the possibility of non-heterosexual subjects, or for bonus points, attempt to lump gay men in with straight women and vice versa.)
3. Search for differences and discard similarities. Ways in which men and women are alike could never be significant findings! For bonus points, design your study in a way that is incapable of finding similarities--only test one sex, or test two sexes in different ways without a control.
4. This is the creative step. A less brilliant researcher would find that, say, women have a higher pain tolerance than men (as tested by heat exposure to the skin), and publish a paper entitled "Gender and pain tolerance in heat exposure." You are better than that! Because you know how to speculate wildly! Make up a completely ludicrous story that could have produced the results you found, and present it as your conclusion. Be sure that this story references "cavemen," justifies stereotypical gender roles, and act like proof of your data constitutes proof of your story. In the example given above, your paper should be entitled "Women naturally adapted to cooking; cavewomen adapted to the heat of cooking fires while making their men a nice mastodon roast when the men were away doing important things."
5. Release your findings to the popular press with an air of "This is the proclamation of Science and henceforth must be considered objective truth." Promote the story you came up with as the headline and bury the boring ol' actual data.
6. Get read by millions of grandparents, chatty neighbors, and suburban ER nurses who are spectacularly susceptible to the appeal to authority fallacy, and respond to all objections with "but that's just your opinion, Holly, and this is Science."

So, the article.

Women, gather round, read carefully, because this gay man—who once, long ago, feigned sexual interest in your bodies—is about to shine a spotlight on some hidden truths about your natural design.
That's a heck of a weird opening. I thought opening a post with my menstrual cycle was weird, but at least I didn't get all "I used to act like I thought you were sexy, but no." Great beginning for a science article.

It's by no means a perfect system, but evolution has endowed you with some extraordinary, almost preternatural abilities to prevent your own sexual assault. And these abilities are especially pronounced when you're ovulating.
This is the main thesis of the article, and contains two different weirdnesses:
1. Wanting to prevent sexual assault is evolution, instead of, like, wanting not to be assaulted.
2. Being sexually assaulted when you weren't ovulating, well, that wouldn't be so bad.
Expect these two assumptions to go blissfully unquestioned as we continue.

There is some evidence that convicted rapists are physically unattractive, at least as judged by women on the basis of their mug shots.
There is also evidence that attractive men aren't as often convicted as rapists, because they have an easier time setting up date rapes and because juries figure it must've been consensual if he's all studly.

And spousal rape is most likely to occur when the husband finds out (or suspects) his wife has been unfaithful, suggesting that he is attempting to supplant another man's seed.
Or suggesting that he's, you know, angry and jealous and attempting to punish her or reassert his possession. I don't think you need to resort to speculative evolutionary psychology when psychology-psychology has you pretty well covered.

Furthermore, UCLA psychologist Neil Malamuth and his colleagues found that one-third of men admit that they would engage in some type of sexual coercion if they could be assured they would suffer no negative consequences, and many report having related masturbatory fantasies.
Since these men were certified to have no families, peers, schooling, culture, life experiences, or media exposure, clearly evolution is the only explanation.

We've heard the argument that men may have evolved to sexually assault women. Have women evolved to protect themselves from men?
The thing I can't help thinking here is, you know, male and female genomes cross over every generation. It's not like these are two species evolving in parallel. Obviously there are traits that are expressed in one sex more than the other--hello, vagina--but I would suspect that for a trait to evolve in only women is more complicated than evolving in all humans. For the physical traits, there tends to be at least vestigial crossover--female clitorises, male nipples--and a significant portion of males who develop breasts and females who develop chest hair. So while of course males and females do express different traits, the image of us competitively coevolving like cheetahs and antelope is at best oversimplified.

1. When threatened by sexual assault, ovulating women display a measurable increase in physical strength. In 2002, SUNY-Albany psychologists Sandra Petralia and Gordon Gallup had 192 female undergraduate students read a story about either a female character being stalked by a suspicious male stranger in a parking lot (ending with: "As she inserts the key into her car door she feels his cold hand on her shoulder …") or a similar story in which the female character is surrounded by happy people on a warm summer's day (ending with: "She starts her car, adjusts the stereo, and as she pulls out of the parking lot those nearby can hear her music blasting"). The researchers measured the handgrip strength of each participant before and after she read the story, and compared the scores. [...] Only the ovulating women who read the sexual assault scenario exhibited an increase in handgrip strength.
I'd like to see the results of a third group that read a story about being threatened by, say, a wolf. (We would specify it was not a horny wolf.) I suspect that would do a bit for your handgrip too. Without that third scenario, we can't really distinguish between "ovulating women are protecting the purity of their sexy ladyparts" and "ovulating women are protecting their freakin' hides."

I also think the undergrad should become formalized as an SI unit of lazy psychology research. "We performed a 1.92 hectoundergrad study..."

2. Ovulating women overestimate strange males' probability of being rapists. [...]The researchers showed 169 normally ovulating women videotaped interviews with various men and asked them to rate the men on several dimensions, including their tendencies toward sexual aggression, kindness, or faithfulness. The more fertile the woman was at the time of her judging, the more likely she was to describe the men as "sexually coercive." Ovulating women didn't see these men as being less kind, faithful, or likely to commit—only more inclined to rape them.
I read the original study for this one (and I'm grateful that there actually was a direct link), and you know what, I'm going to break with Pervocracy tradition and buy it. Not as The New Immortal Truth About Women, but their methodology and results sound fairly plausible to me. In my personal anecdata, I do get noticeably hornier during ovulation (which is saying something believe me), and that means more aware of sex in general, and thus more likely to project sexual motivations onto people.

3. Ovulating women play it safe by avoiding situations that place them at increased risk of being raped. [...] At least two studies have demonstrated that women at the peak of their fertility are less likely than their peers to have engaged in high-risk activities such as walking alone in a park or forest, letting a stranger into the house, or stopping their cars in a remote place over the preceding 24 hours.
Walking alone in a park is a high-risk activity? Stopping your car? MOTHER OF GOD. I'm a fucking extreme adventurer and I didn't even know it. I've gone years engaging in high-risk activities every day! Twice a day sometimes when I couldn't get a ride in the morning and had to walk through the park both ways.

I don't even know what to say about the ovulation connection or whatever here. I'm just stuck on the implication that being outdoors while female is a high-risk activity. You know, this Monday I was planning on going for a nice long walk in the snow out in the boonies, maybe taking some photos, maybe doing some journaling, and I really didn't add "but of course I have to take the rape factor into account" to my plans. Until now.

Then again, I'm not ovulating, so of course I didn't.

4. Women become more racist when they're ovulating. At least white American ovulating women do when it comes to thinking about black American men.
Hoo boy.

Those are the jaw-dropping, politically incorrect findings of Michigan State University's Carlos Navarrete and colleagues.
Quick note: can we stop using "politically incorrect" to mean "harsh truth?" It really just means harsh.

While we're at it, can we stop trivializing decency in discourse by labeling it "political correctness"? Avoiding discriminatory and hurtful language isn't some partisan posture. It's just a basic step in not being a dickhead. Characterizing black men as rapists of white women isn't a daring rebellion against oppressive thought police, it's just racist.

White, undergraduate females were evaluated for race bias using several variants of an implicit association test, which asks participants to perform a word-matching task that indicates the relative accessibility of certain stereotypes. The women who happened to be ovulating scored especially high when it came to fear of black (as opposed to white) men, a fact that the authors interpret as reflecting an evolved disposition to avoid so-called "out-group males," who "may not have been subject to the same social controls as in-group members and would have constituted a threat in antagonistic situations." In this case, skin color serves as a convenient marker of group identity.
The entire history of American racism, washed away in a beautiful evolutionary flood of "it's perfectly reasonable not to trust the out-group!" The fact that this particular out-group has been specifically libeled with "coming after our white women" since the end of slavery has nothing to do with anything ever, since culture does not exist.

Stereotypes about the particular out-group being prone to violence may also play a role, so, at least in American society, cultural transmission works alongside evolutionary biology in promoting racism.
Oh, okay, culture exists. Oh my god, how to deal with this? Think... think... aha! Perhaps it merely works alongside my pet theory that explains everything!

Above is a set of astonishing truths that, had an evolutionary approach to studying complex social behavior not been adopted so rigorously over the past quarter-century and applied to human sexuality, would have gone entirely unnoticed—not least of which by a Kinsey-6 gay man who wouldn't know what to do with an ovulating woman if she came with instructions.
So now they're not studies suggesting certain things. They're "truths". A study showing that a limited population of young white women had negative associations with black men while ovulating is now somehow the TRUTH that ovulating women are racist (and they're right to be).

No. This is not how science works. A high p value doesn't mean all possible implications of a study are True. It means that the study itself--as in, the actual population tested and the actual tests done, not the various things they might symbolize--showed a correlation unlikely to be chance alone. You may have suggested something about women and the way they think, but you have only proven something about white undergrad American women in Michigan and the way they take implicit association tests. That's the only thing you can call truth. Everything else is somewhere between guessing, generalizing, and making shit up.



In conclusion, I'd like to say that I'm bisexual but more attracted to men. I hope this clarifies my views tremendously.

Unfit.

My cousin Sam is raising another man's child. His wife already had a young daughter when they met, and as Sam and his wife became closer and got married, the daughter gradually came under his care. Now she lives in his house and calls him Dad and pretty much adores him, and they're a happy little family. Sam is investing huge amounts of money and time into another man's daughter, giving up his chance to have any genetic children of his own, and he's happy about it.

My other cousin Lucy has a simpler story. She just doesn't have any children and never plans to have any.

So they're two out of millions of people who have voluntarily given up on evolutionary fitness. Sam and Lucy's genes are going nowhere because of the choices they've made. And they're what I think of when I read those "evolutionary psychology" articles about how everything humans do is all about maximizing our fitness and making sure our kids are ours and our seed is spread. (These articles, incidentally, and I'd provide links if I had a proper computer to type this on, have a charming tendency to think fitness consists of getting laid, rather than getting laid and conceiving a child and raising them to adulthood. Steps 2 and 3 there are actually pretty significant.) It seems ridiculous to me to suggest that Lucy is somehow subconciously attracted to men with good genes for her children, when she very consciously isn't using anyone's genes for anything. Or that Sam and his wife's relationship is based in ensuring the fatherhood of children, when they know damn well he's not the genetic father.

Obviously humans are evolved animals, and our history has selected for those who passed on their genes. But in our case selection has led us toward intelligence, and that complicates things. It means that human behavior really can't all be explained in terms of reproduction. It has to be seen in light of us being human.

Science says!

Any time you're using the construction "science says..." as a way of being debate-endingly authoritative, you're pretty much an idiot. Because there's no "word of science," it's not one thing. There's just a community of scientists. A lot of them disagree, some of them do crappy research, and a ton of them do research on something very limited that gets turned into a huge generality in the popular press. A study titled "Daily cycles of mating frequency and melatonin levels in female mice" almost inevitably turns into "WOMEN ARE HORNIER AT NIGHT, SCIENCE SAYS."

Which is why, even though I love Cracked dearly and have nothing but respect for their handsome and brilliant writing staff, I'm really annoyed by this:
6 Absurd Gender Stereotypes (That Science Says Are True)

So what does Science really say?

Women Can't Drive and Park For Shit
Actual research: "In one [test], volunteers had to swim through an underwater maze to find a hidden platform, while the second involved exploring radial arms projecting from a central junction to receive 'rewards'."

Men Are Freaking Slobs
Actual research: "Female subjects whose odour sensitivity was tested many times, were able to detect the cherry-almond smell of benzaldehyde and a few other odours at progressively much lower concentrations. Male subjects taking part in similar tests never improved their ability to identify odours with experience."

Women Are Wimps
Actual research: "Scientists tested analgesic drugs on mice unable to produce the GIRK2 protein. [...] male mutants had lower pain thresholds than normal male mice. Female mutants exhibited a tolerance comparable to that of their normal counterparts, however, suggesting that GIRK2 is responsible for sex differences in pain sensitivity."

Women Love to Talk (and Talk)
Actual research:"The volume of the superior temporal cortex, expressed as a proportion of total cerebral volume, was significantly larger in females compared with males (17.8% increase; P = .04). This was accounted for by 1 section of the superior temporal cortex, the planum temporale, which was 29.8% larger in females (P = .04). In addition, the cortical volume fraction of the Broca area in females was 20.4% larger than in males (P = .05)."

Women See Mauve, Men See Purple
Actual research: "The current study presents nucleotide sequence analyses and tests of neutrality for a 5.5-kb region of the X-linked long-wave “red” opsin gene (OPN1LW) in 236 individuals from ethnically diverse human populations. [...] Our results suggest that subtle changes in L-cone opsin wavelength absorption may have been adaptive during human evolution."

(Also, see xkcd's amateur but actually-relevant take on the subject.)

Women Are Lightweights
Actual research: The renowned scholars at www.bloodalcohol.info. No derivable link to published research.



Science doesn't say this shit. People get preconceptions from eighth-graders and sitcoms, selectively look for research that says something sort of relevant to the general topic, then feel free to say ridiculous shit and back it up with "it's not an opinion, it's a FACT because SCIENCE SAYS."

Let me put it this way: if you had absolutely no preconceptions about male and female driving, and you read the study about people swimming through underwater mazes, would you spontaneously cry out "Why, this must mean women can't drive!"?

If your logic doesn't work forwards... you're a sexist idiot and you also eat poop. I know that might sound harsh, but it's not me saying that, it's SCIENCE.*





*Pervocracy, H. (2010). Coprophagy, verbal reasoning, and appreciation of Gloria Steinem in the domestic guinea pig. The Massachusetts National American Northeast International Journal of Science, 531-8008.

Bingo!

Via LabRat:

Evo Psych Bingo!

As LabRat says, there is legitimately such a thing as evolutionary psychology, but going around saying we should have 1950s gender roles and/or promiscuous polygyny, because science and because cavemen is not how it really works.

(I always wonder if "1950s gender roles" even really existed in the 1950s. They do show up in the media of the time, but when I talk to people who were alive then they always paint a much more nuanced picture, with a lot of working mothers and non-nuclear families and non-useless fathers. I suspect that the "housewife, breadwinner, Junior, and Sis" family model was somewhat more prevalent in the 1950s, but hardly universal.)