Sexual politics

This Atlantic Monthly “piece”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/195711/sex-college/ from 1957 on sex and the college girl is quite entertaining, in the ways that you might expect it to be entertaining. My favorite paragraph:

Even more complicated to deal with is the intellectual-amoral type of man, who has affairs as a matter of course and doesn’t (or says he doesn’t) think less of a girl for sleeping with him. He is full of highly complicated arguments on the subject, which have to do with empiricism, epicureanism, live today, for tomorrow will bring the mushroom cloud, learning about life, and the dangers of self-repression, all of which are whipped out with frightening speed and conviction while he is undoing the third button on his girl’s blouse.

Like several other contributors at Crooked Timber, I have little patience for evolutionary psychological explanations of the Sunday colour supplement variety. A couple of commenters suggested a couple of weeks ago that this was inconsistent with my “suggestion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/10/engineers-of-jihad/ that Diego Gambetta’s paper on suicide terrorism and engineering was ‘fascinating.’ The intimation, as I understood it, was that I was prepared to give a free pass to dubious explanations that fit my ideological priors while giving a hard time to equally (or perhaps less) dubious explanations that didn’t. As it happens, when checking out Gambetta’s website again (I’m trying to engage his arguments about the Sicilian mafia extensively in the book that I’m finishing), I came across an interesting link that draws out the actual contrasts between Gambetta’s work and the preponderance of the popular ev-psych literature.

Some of you may remember an article entitled “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature” by Miller and Kanazawa that got some attention in the right-blogosphere a few months ago. Among other dodginesses, this article completely misrepresents the work of the aforementioned Diego Gambetta.
[click to continue…]

Over at Brainiac, Josh Glenn discusses the theme of “the intellectual, slightly mysterious rock-and-roll woman,” as a recent book calls it, running throughout songs from the Boston scene over the years. All those smart but fragile girls that Jonathan Richman sang about with the Modern Lovers, for example.

Josh suggests that there is a strain of hipster misogyny in this: the revenge of the sophomore spurned, no doubt. And he reads Mission of Burma’s “Academy Fight Song” as a response to that kind of thing –its lyrics “written from the point of view of a cool, educated young woman who was sick and tired of the obsessive attention paid to her by a would-be boyfriend….”

This seems plausible. But it would not be the first song from the Boston scene to approach this archetype (or whatever it is) from the inside. I’m thinking here, of course, of “Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess” by Ultimate Spinach.
[click to continue…]

A few months ago, Nina at Infinite Thought offered an appreciation of the difference between the playfulness of vintage European porn films (from roughly 1905 to 1930) and the more industrialized contemporary product:

The first thing you notice is the sheer level of silliness on show: sex isn’t just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville. Men pretend to be statues of fauns for curious women to tickle; two seamstresses fall into a fit of giggles as their over-excited boss falls off the bed; a bawdy waitress serves a series of sexually-inspired meals to a man dressed as a musketeer before joining him for ‘dessert’. This kind of theatrical role-play pre-empts many of the clichés of contemporary pornography, of course: nuns, school-mistresses, the ‘peeping tom’ motif, and so on. But the beauty of these early short films lies in the details, the laughter of its participants and the sheer variety of the bodies on parade: the unconventionally attractive mingle with the genuinely pretty; large posteriors squish overjoyed little men. The fact that the rules of pornographic film-making haven’t yet been formally established, as well as the rudimentary nature of the film equipment, means that often the filming cuts off before any sort of climax, which only adds to the amateurish, unstructured, anarchic charm of it all.

At Quick Study, I’ve posted a short response to another recent Infinite Thought item developing this line of reflection.

It has prompted a discussion touching — so far — on Sade, Steven Marcus, and the days when everybody in a pornographic novel would recharge their orgy batteries by stopping to listen to a lecture on Enlightenment philosophy.

If this sounds like it might float your boat, stop by. Quick Study is my personal blog, and I’ve been averse to pushing here at Crooked Timber, but what the hell….Diffidence gets you no traffic. (But the start of the semester sure did; it seems that freshmen Google the words “quick study” in an effort to increase the amount of time they can spend getting wasted.)

This week in evolutionary psychology fun and games (and via Marginal Revolution), I engage in the most shameless piece of dumpster-diving yet. A commenter on last week’s post picked me up for a tendency to pluck out the most ridiculous things I can find and present them as representative of the entire field of evolutionary psychology, rather in the manner of those irritating “Crazzzeeeee Postmodernists!” articles that you used to find in the National Review during the 1980s (or on “Butterflies and Wheels” now). I suspect that commenter is unlikely to be impressed with the latest find, because it comes from that world-renowned centre of evolutionary genetics research, the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. On that age old question of “Do Sexy Waitresses Get More Tips?”.

Attention conservation notice / Irritation advance warning: If you think I’m going to get through this without making at least a few puerile jokes and maybe more, you’re probably wrong.
[click to continue…]

Larry Craig, who has withdrawn his intention to withdraw from the Senate and now intends to finish his term, is trying to withdraw his guilty plea for disorderly conduct. According to this AP story, his lawyers intend to argue: 1. that “Minnesota’s disorderly conduct law is unconstitutional as it applies to his conviction in a bathroom sex sting”; 2. that “the judge erred by not allowing Craig to withdraw his plea”; and 3. that “the judge who sentenced Craig to a fine and probation never signed anything saying he accepted the guilty plea.” These last two seem pretty trivial, but the first point is serious. The AP story is never exactly explicit concerning the constitutional issues at stake, but it helpfully points out that “an earlier friend-of-the-court filing by the American Civil Liberties Union argued that Craig’s foot-tapping and hand gesture under a stall divider at the Minneapolis airport are protected by the First Amendment.” That sure seems right to me, but is that actually the argument that Craig is going to make? Recall that his explanation at the time [pdf] and (as far as I know) since has been that there was absolutely, positively, really and truly no speech involved – he just happens to have a “wide stance when going to the bathroom” and that he “reached down with his right hand to pick up a piece of paper that was on the floor.”

The dollar will collapse no later than one week from today. As of noon on October 15, you will not be able to buy a loaf of bread for $100,000. That’s the optimistic scenario. The crash may come sooner than that. It might be Thursday. It sounds like Thursday will be bad.

Yeah, things are heating up again in LaRouche-land. The Youth Movement kids haven’t been out in force singing on Capitol Hill much over the past two or three months. But it’s clear that supporters are now being pushed into a frenzied state, more even than usual. At the website where ex-members get together, plans are being made to send one true believer a loaf of bread as soon as the deadline for disaster passes.

No doubt it is an utter and total coincidence that The Washington Monthly will soon publish an in-depth article on recent developments in the organization.
[click to continue…]

Since it’s highly unlikely that Scott is going to link to his fascinating _IHE_ column on the work and life of Laud Humphries, writer of a famous study of anonymous sex in men’s rooms, _Tearoom Trade_, I’m going to do it myself. It ain’t just Larry Craig either – the ethical issues surrounding Humphries’ research are pretty interesting:

The book was also widely discussed because of the ethical questions raised by Humphreys’s methodology. It would be an overstatement to call Tearoom Trade the main catalyst for the creation of institutional review boards, but debates over the book certainly played their part.

At issue was not the sexual activity itself but how the sociologist (then a graduate student) investigated it. Posing as a voyeur, and never revealing that he was there for research, Humphreys was accepted as “watchqueen” by the social circle hanging out at the restroom. He was entrusted with giving a signal if the police came around. He took notes on the activity taking place – including the license plates numbers of men who came around for fellatio. Through a contact in the police department, he was able to get their home addresses.

After a year, and having disguised himself to some degree, he visited them under the pretense of doing a survey for an insurance company to gather more data about their circumstances and opinions. Humphreys states that he was never recognized during these interviews. He kept all the documents generated during this research in a lockbox and destroyed them after his dissertation was accepted by Washington University in St. Louis.

This reminds me of Kieran’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/11/wanting-to-know-everything/ from a while back about the little megalomaniac living inside every academic researcher (and every NSA bureaucrat). Anyway, plenty more “here”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/12/mclemee.

Recently in Geneva, I was filling out this visitor card in a hotel. Notice anything peculiar?

[click to continue…]

What do we think of Mike “The Most Feared Man On the Hill” Rogers, and the ethics of outing? Defend your answer from first principles, if you would be so kind.

“Megan”:http://fromthearchives.blogspot.com/2007/08/sampling-bias.html of _From the archives_ won’t be surprised that “this _NYT_ article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, claiming that:

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5. But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

is already “getting”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/08/i-caught-a-fish.html “play”:http://www.chrishayes.org/blog/2007/aug/13/im-back/ in the blogosphere. The only thing is that it _isn’t_ logically impossible, at least as the author presents it. Ask “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/08/medians.html

Jeff’s response: MEDIANS??!! Indeed, there’s no reason the two distributions should have the same median. I gotta say, it’s disappointing that the reporter talked to mathematicians rather than statisticians. (Next time, I’d recommend asking David Dunson for a quote on this sort of thing.) I’m also surprised that they considered that respondents might be lying but not that they might be using different definitions of sex partner. Finally, it’s amusing that the Brits report more sex partners than Americans, contrary to stereotypes.

I thought this news item involved several of those colorful British idioms that I never quite get exactly. But no – these are real birds.

A pair of gay flamingos have adopted an abandoned chick, becoming parents after being together for six years, a British conservation organisation said Monday.

I have been meaning to write an update to my post of last month. When I skimmed the first accounts of the captured British sailors’ time in Iran I was under the impression they had been subjected to full-on mock execution, of the Dostoyevsky type. That is, told they were going to be executed, lined up and blindfolded, etc. Reading more I learned that it was more of a confused situation (still very alarming, no doubt), in which they were blindfolded and cuffed and could hear weapons being cocked. So, not actually torture (and some people pointed this out in the thread at the time.) It was scary as hell, no doubt, and I hope I’m never in that situation, or at least that, if I am, John Derbyshire is there to rush the armed soldiers and bite their throats out. I’m still ready to go nuclear, though, and I actually learned a lot reading that not-flamewar comments thread.

On the other hand, I thought that the comments to Kieran’s post on Megan’s difficult situation were unusually useless for the most part. This from John Quiggin was good, though:
[click to continue…]

Nora Ephron remarks somewhere that a baby is a hand grenade thrown into the middle of a relationship. But there are a lot of people looking for someone to pull the pin:

bq. So if some men think my urgency for kids is unappealing, FUCK THEM. In the first place, it is not something I can control, neither the wanting nor the fact that maternal age matters, and you can not shame people for what they can’t control. In the second place, they are fooling themselves about having an indefinite period of healthy sperm and energy for young kids and young women willing to be with them.

That second point reminds me of another Ephron line:

Sally: It’s not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was seventy three.
Harry: Yeah, but he was too old to pick them up.