From xkcd:

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues on September 29, 2007, 1:20 pm EST

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I’ve been tagged with a new meme by Mr. Hotty McNature Pants himself, and since he also happens to be my control in the Illuminati cell that runs this part of the tubes, I have no choice but to comply.

An interesting animal I had

I could go with the “most exotic pet” thing here, but in truth, when I think of an interesting animal I think of my late dog Katie. She was not only the most interesting animal I’ve ever known, but she was significantly more interesting than a lot of humans I’ve known. Smarter, too.

An interesting animal I ate

I’m not big on eating animals, but an interesting animal I almost ate was a soft-shelled crab.

My friend and I were in a tiny fishing village one day, and the only place to eat was a little crab shack down by the water.

“Whaddya got?” we asked the attendant.
“Soft-shelled crab sandwich.”
“Anything else?”
“Nope, just soft-shelled crab sandwich.”
“Okay, then, guess we’ll have the soft-shelled crab sandwich.”

The soft-shelled crab sandwich turned out to be two slices of Wonder bread, some Miracle Whip, and a big spider-looking thing.

“It’s a spider sandwich,” my friend and I whispered to each other at almost the same moment.

We ate the bread.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

Toured the country with the aforementioned Katie. We agreed that Mount Rushmore was an absurd monument to honky hubris, but we loved the Badlands. Other thrills included almost running out of gas on Pine Ridge reservation, almost dropping our car keys into the Grand Canyon, and herding the waves at Carmel beach.

An interesting animal in the Museum

The prairie dogs at the Prairie Homestead outside Badlands National Park. The original 1909 sodhouse is mesmerizing, but so are the prairie dogs popping in and out of their little hills. Oddly enough, Katie wasn’t even remotely interested in them.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

The mountain goats on the upper slopes of Mount Evans in Colorado. They had the raggediest coats I’ve ever seen, plus space-alien eyes and a weird fixed stare. Though maybe that was the altitude sickness getting to me.

(Note: Turns out Mount Evans isn’t really their natural habitat.)

I’m supposed to tag nine more people with this thing — nine! Oh man, at this rate we’ll have taken over the entire internet in four days. It’ll be like the Andromeda Strain.

Okay, consider yourselves tagged:

Ann Bartow
Burrow/Lost Clown
Echidne
Foilwoman
Professor Zero
Richard (aka Simply Wondered when he’s not pretending to be Dave Cameron)
The Lovely and Talented Timothy Shortell
Twisty (who typically eschews memes, but maybe this one will jolt her out of her writer’s block. I’m offering you a lifeline here, woman.)
Victoria Marinelli (when she gets back from doing important stuff)

And to all my readers who feel like chiming in — chime away. Use the comments to tell us about your animal encounters.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry on September 28, 2007, 11:54 am EST

14 Comments »

Neanderthal: bigger, longer, and uncut.

Yesterday in the comments we were having a bit of a giggle over the elusive genitalia of prehistoric male hominids. So I thought you all might enjoy this Neanderthal sculpture from the Neanderthal Museum in Germany. Usually he’s clothed, but the curators stripped him for a special exhibit earlier this year on “100,000 years of sex”:

He looks happy, doesn’t he?

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry on September 27, 2007, 2:39 pm EST

12 Comments »

Caveat: I’m under-slept and under the weather and I probably ought to be under the covers, so this post will suck. My brain is all sludgy and shit. Read on at your peril.

(And yes, goddamnit, even Spirits get sick. It’s a metaphysical thing. Deal.)

Okay, notice anything about this picture?

When I was a kid I was utterly enthralled with paleontology. I started out grooving on dinosaurs, but when Lucy was discovered (ah yes, I remember it well) my fascination switched to human origins. I wanted to be Donald Johanson, or at least Tim White; I wanted to go to Olduvai Gorge and dig up hominid fossils and make startling discoveries. Then I grew up and realized that squatting for hours in the sun picking at the dirt with a tiny toothbrush was not really my thing.

What annoyed me even as a kid, though, was the androcentric Early Man presentation of all the material. It was always man this and man that, and endless pictures showing an endless series of males — always males — marching into the future:

A visitor from Mars would be forgiven for thinking that somehow all of our ancestors were male. I think one reason I liked Lucy so much was because she was (probably) a she. Other female fossils had been found before, but she was the first to be named and popularized unapologetically as female. As Lucy, not as the Ape-Man of Afar.

As a young feminist I was confident that all the androcentric bullshit would soon fade away; it would have to. “Humankind” would replace “mankind,” people would talk about early humans instead of early man, and evolution illustrations would sometimes show female figures progressing from simian stoop to upright stride.

Some of that has happened, yes. A little bit. But not nearly enough. The image at the top of this post was published in 2005. “Meet the Folks,” it says. Wouldn’t you know, they’re all still male.

Last week I received my copy of The Last Human, the new book of hominid reconstructions sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. Since I’ve been feeling too sick to work for the past couple of days, I decided to cozy up in bed and read my new book. Jesus Fucking Christ, I should have made sure to have a puke bucket with me.

I’m too sludgy-brained today to go into all the problems with the book, but let me share a little of my joy with you. The nomenclature the authors have chosen for the lifeways scenarios is just horrendous. (The lifeways scenarios are the little fictional “day in the life” episodes designed to show how each of the creatures lived.) All the hominids are referred to as man-apes, apemen, or men, depending on the genus. This does absolutely nothing for clarity and simply sounds offensive. They go with the relentless man terminology even when the text is referring to females, so you have female men, or an ape-man and a female ape-man sitting next to each other (paging Samantha Bee), or a group of men, no modifiers, even though the rest of the story indicates that some of the “men” in the group are female.

But what’s even more bizarre is the chapter on Homo floresiensis. Back when H. floresiensis was discovered, all the big media outlets ran with the same illustration:

The only problem was, the type specimen was a female. “Flo,” the discoverers called her. The papers should have run with a reconstruction of a female H. floresiensis; that would have made sense. Flo, the little lady of Flores; Flo the hobbit. What’s wrong with that? Why was it necessary to transform her into a male? Do even prehistoric females have cooties?

In The Last Human, the H. floresiensis reconstruction is, thankfully, of a female, which is unsurprising given that these reconstructions are advertised to be as realistic as latex and human imagination will allow. Here’s a picture.
But dig it: the lifeways scenario they include in the text isn’t about her at all. Instead, the scenario is entirely about a male Homo floresiensis. In fact, the whole thing is unmistakably based on that bogus illustration that ran in all the papers, the one with the manly little dude carrying a giant rat. We are treated to the (imaginary) thoughts of this (imaginary) mature male as he goes about his day: catching the rat and slinging it over his shoulder, thinking about women (whom he regards as possessions that can be stolen), about his sons, about his mighty deeds as a mighty hunter — in other words, your basic 1960s-era male anthropologist’s Caveman Fantasy masquerading as science.

“Flo” — the real fossil, the little lady of Flores — is nowhere on the scene. I guess she’s one of those possessions waiting back in the cave for Mighty Man to bring home the rat.

2007 and they’re still doing this.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Random Pedantry on September 26, 2007, 12:08 pm EST

20 Comments »

Courtesy of the Times:

1. There is no homosexuality in Iran.

2. Women in Iran are “the freest women in the world.”

I was already up on the thing about how we need to devote serious research to sorting out the mystery of whether the Holocaust really happened.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Politics on September 24, 2007, 5:54 pm EST

4 Comments »

Ann Bartow David S. Cohen has been having a lot more fun this week than I have. She’s He’s been following the Quest for the Crockus over at Language Log, but I’m just now getting caught up.

Here are the week’s posts from Language Log, in order:

September 17: How big is your crockus? — The first appearance of the “crockus”! Mysterious brain-sex educator roams the country, distributing hand-outs!

September 18: High Crockalorum — A daring theory. Dr. Alfred Crockus is revealed!

September 19: Dr. Alfred Crockus and Crosley Shelvador, M.D. — A poignant trip down memory lane.

September 20: Crosley Shelvador comes in from the cold — A confession, and the search for Dr. Crockus continues!

September 21: Dr. Crockus in Central New Jersey — A fresh sighting!

September 22: The Crockus and the Bassoon — Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached Shatnervana.

By all means, do read the entire series. It’s delightful.

Of course, if you’re the kind of person who reads things like this, you’re probably not the kind of person who needs to read things like this. You’re probably not the kind of person who buys books on “brain sex” and sends me unintentionally hilarious messages telling me that it’s an “established scientific fact” that men and women’s brains are wired completely differently, and that I just need to get over my hysterical pink self and yield to scientific rigor.

P.S. I need to change the name of this category to make it more inclusive, because this story isn’t about ev-psych, exactly, but rather the closely related fields of “craptastic pop neuroscience” and “cashing in on the brain-sex craze.” Any suggestions?

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Ev-Psych Bullshit on September 23, 2007, 12:08 am EST

13 Comments »

The undead Nelson Mandela.

Mandela still alive after embarrassing Bush remark.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Just Impeach the Stupid Freak on September 22, 2007, 1:22 am EST

3 Comments »

Yesterday I came across a comment by Sam Genderberg that was so arresting I asked her if I could quote it here. She was referring to this video, which (WARNING) is very disturbing:

Sam’s comment (just the first part):

Making the blog rounds this week is a video of a man verbally and physically abusing his wife. Feminists are unanimous in their opposition to the man saying to the woman before he physically assaults her:

“Look at me bitch”
“You little slut”
“You enjoy getting your ass whooped, yes you do”
“Stupid-ass heifer”

I watched the video and thought how different the feminist reaction would be if he was raping her while saying all that and worse stuff unacceptable for primetime tv. Then it would be pornography.

Feminists would no longer be unanimous that scenes of him saying all those hateful things to a woman while doing specifically sexual violence to her on film were abuse. Some would defend it as sexual freedom. Some would praise it as transgressive BDSM erotica and therefore pro-woman.

No feminist has expressed they believe it is that woman’s free choice to accept the non-sexual violence and verbal abuse he is throwing at her, so why do so many insist prostituted women in pornography make the choice to be physically assaulted and verbally harassed with:

“Look at me bitch”
“You little slut”
“You enjoy getting your ass whooped, yes you do”
“Stupid-ass heifer”

Most women in pornography are as cowed into submission as this woman was but unfortunately when men call them bitches, sluts and stupid-ass heifers then sexually abuse them on film it’s defended as the woman’s right to allow herself to be called such hateful terms, to accept men slapping her, to make the choice to be choked.

Some of you will read that and immediately say, oh but pornography is a willing performance, this video is a real-life record of a woman who wanted out, mis-matched fruit, etc. Never mind that for now.

Some others of you will read that and immediately say, oh but a lot of pro-porn feminists don’t approve of the really bad stuff, and they don’t approve of women being abused in the porn industry, red herrings circling strawmen, etc. Never mind that for now.

I want you to put those things aside for a moment so I can tell you why Sam’s comment affected me so powerfully.

What Sam’s comment captures for me is the cognitive dissonance I’ve been dealing with ever since I started educating myself about modern pornography. Until that time, my sole exposure to hetero porn was some Playboys and Penthouses from the 70s, and a few minutes of a strange little video called Crocodile Blondee that my gay roommates rented one night as a joke back in the 80s. I assumed that all porn movies were like the scene in Crocodile, with stilted actors engaging in basic coition and trying to look as if they were fond of each other.

Perhaps you can imagine how stunned I was to discover what modern pornography is like. And my reaction to it was, and is, pretty much the reaction the average porn consumer would probably have to a video of someone abusing a child or a dog. Not, I note, abusing a woman, because obviously people who watch modern porn are quite used to that. So I have to say “child” or “dog” to convey the sense of horror I feel, since only a porn-naive person like me could possibly still be horrified by images of women being abused.

Modern porn is shocking to me, in a way it probably cannot be to those of you who have grown up with it, who have been exposed to it throughout your lives — or throughout pornography’s evolution from Crocodile Blondee to BangBros. I’m reminded of boiling frogs.

When I read Sam’s comment, in my mind I substituted “people” for feminists. I was thinking of our entire culture, which has fetishized abuse in a way that boggles my mind. Any cruelty is acceptable now as long as sex is involved; the male orgasm legitimizes everything.

How can people look at videos of women being abused and insulted and humiliated and not see something wrong? When did this become acceptable? When did this become “sexy”? Did the water change from cold to hot so slowly that you just couldn’t see what was happening?

Do you still not see what’s happening?

I want to add one thing — not about pornography but about domestic violence. People always say, “why didn’t she just leave?” This comment at Feministe is the most eloquent answer I’ve ever seen.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Pornography, Recommended on September 21, 2007, 3:49 pm EST

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“Just in case you have been living under a rock,” the columnist begins, and I think well, not a rock exactly, but the Spirit Smoking Lounge does involve a certain level of disconnectedness. With no death, taxes, or cable TV, it’s easy to drift. Also, infinity totally fucks with your internal clock.

Still, even here in the Smoking Lounge we’ve heard about the Jena 6.

Today is the Jena 6 National Day of Action. There will be rallies all over the country to show support for the accused and to protest racism. A bunch of people are even taking buses to Jena for a big demonstration there. Although the conviction of Mychal Bell was vacated last Friday, the case is far from over:

Bell remains in jail, and the prosecutor, District Attorney Reed Walters, has stated his intention to press on with an endgame of appeals. Plus, the other five black students who were involved in the fight–Robert Bailey Jr., Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis and Jesse Beard–are still awaiting trial on similar charges. None of their cases will be directly affected by Friday’s ruling, which addressed the jurisdictional problem of trying Bell, a juvenile at the time of the fight, as an adult. (Beard is being prosecuted as a juvenile; the other four of the so-called Jena Six were 17, the age of majority in Louisiana.)

Here’s how you can help. Even if you’re not going to a rally, you can sign the petition online or make a donation.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry on September 20, 2007, 7:45 am EST

5 Comments »

One by one, the charges are being dismissed against the officers involved in the Haditha massacre. The latest is Capt. Lucas McConnell, who wasn’t on the scene of the massacre but had been charged with failure to report and investigate it. Not any more.

His attorney made a couple of fascinating remarks, which I suppose might make sense if he were talking about some other massacre in some other war, in some other galaxy long, long ago. This one, not so much.

“From our perspective he had been the public whipping boy, along with the rest of the Haditha Eight, for a year and a half,” said McConnell’s lawyer, Kevin McDermott.

The defense attorney said the proper focus should be on military commanders who set the basic rules of engagement for U.S. forces.

He wants it to sound sympathetic, like “don’t blame the GIs who are just following orders,” but note that he’s talking about field officers. Field officers are supposed to exercise initiative and to bear responsibility; they’re supposed to be accountable for their actions.

As for making the generals in Washington answer for the “basic rules of engagement,” hey, I’m all for it. Anybody want to take bets on the likelihood of that happening? Ever? For chrissake, in the Abu Ghraib case the charges against everybody above the level of photogenic torturer were dismissed. The message in that case was that accountability only applies to the grunts; the officers can’t possibly be held responsible for what those lower-level types get up to. Gosh, it’s just all so confusing. If I were a cynical person I might think that no matter who is charged in one of these horrific military misdeeds, the argument will be made that somebody else needs to be held accountable.

But back to McDermott, who is just chock full of interesting perspectives:

“You don’t want the lance corporal, the 19-year-old kid with the M-16, thinking twice about pulling the trigger for fear that he’ll end up being investigated if in fact he reasonably believes there are insurgents involved with the attack upon him,” McDermott said.

Oh, is that what happened at Haditha? Just some scared kids making do-or-die decisions to shoot at big bad insurgents? I could have sworn it was this:

During a subsequent search of the house, Mendoza said he received an order from another Marine, Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, to shoot seven women and children he had found in a rear bedroom.

“When I opened the door there was just women and kids, two adults were lying down on the bed and there were three children on the bed … two more were behind the bed,” Mendoza said.

“I looked at them for a few seconds. Just enough to know they were not presenting a threat … they looked scared.”

After leaving the room Mendoza told Tatum what he had found. “I told him there were women and kids inside there. He said ‘Well, shoot them,’” Mendoza told prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Sean Sullivan.

“And what did you say to him?” Sullivan asked. “I said ‘But they’re just women and children.’ He didn’t say nothing.” Mendoza said he returned to a position at the front of the house and heard a door open behind him followed by a loud noise. Returning later that afternoon to retrieve bodies, Mendoza said he found a room full of corpses.

But that’s old news. We have a whole new set of corpses. We need to hurry up and finish not finding anyone accountable for the old massacre so we can move on to not finding anyone accountable for the new massacre.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under War on September 20, 2007, 5:19 am EST

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From the “Birth to 12 months” girls’ section at Toys R Us: The Little Princess Big Favor Pack. Includes pink tiara bag, Little Princess stickers, pink princess pen, glitter nail polish, birthday bubbles, marabou tiara, and daisy swirl lip gloss.

Whenever the conversation turns to ev-psych, some chump or two (or twenty) shows up to insist that any test score differences between male and female teenagers must reflect an underlying innate disparity between the sexes. Apparently it is widely believed by chumps everywhere that there is no such thing as socialization, that boys and girls are all raised in identical featureless plastic bubbles and are treated exactly the same by their caretakers. Maybe it’s like that in your neighborhood, but I’m not seeing it.

Eight years ago, the Renfrew Center found that “90 percent of commercial toys and dolls for girls age 2 to 10 emphasize beauty, shopping and dating.”

What’s changed since then? That would be nothing, Bob.

In 2005 Sudie Hofmann did a study of children’s toys and found the same thing. Girls’ toys: beauty, shopping dating. All pink. Boys’ toys: war, weaponry, and educational toys. That’s right — the challenging word games and chess sets and science kits were all in the boys’ section. Hofmann couldn’t find a single female pictured on a science kit, nor a single science kit in the girls’ aisle. Not even a pink one.

But Hofmann did find one area of girls’ toys that the Renfrew Center didn’t mention: housework! That’s right, pink housework toys. For when the girls grow up.

And for all the Larry Summers types out there who insist that these toys are just mirroring children’s behavior rather than shaping it, let me quote this long section from Hofmann’s excellent article:

The girls’ area, or should we say fantasyland, is well stocked with vanity mirrors, combs, brushes, nail kits, makeup, and polyester hair extensions. The focus is on being popular with boys. The shelves are overflowing with Mattel Barbies and endless paraphernalia, including Barbie’s scale, set at one weight: 110 pounds.

Shopping is a focus of many of the girl toys such as Lil Bratz Fashion Mall, which warns girls, “Don’t forget to stop at the makeup shop.” Packages provide fashion advice and tips about how to be trendy and get noticed. Crowns, pompons, and phones in lavender and pink hang on the separate carousels near the small, upholstered furniture. Jump ropes, umbrellas, tea sets, and sticker books are in abundance. Unlike the colors used on the panels of the boys’ toys, pastels reign here. The edges of the letters are smooth and an i or a t is dotted or crossed with a heart, butterfly, or star. Glitter is on everything — from the packaging to the product itself. The copy usually includes words such as “kitten,” “princess,” “fairy,” “precious,” “wish,” “dream,” and “wonder.”

The girls’ section does not have many board games that stimulate creative thinking or require higher-order reasoning. It has bingo and simple activities such as coloring books and car or travel games. Although the female area appears to be a pink fantasyland, the dream soon ends. After getting the guy, by playing Milton Bradley’s Mystery Date or through sheer vanity and competition, the girls get the brooms, mops, vacuums, diapers, and plastic food. And they are smiling in every packaging photo.

Boys are noticeably absent from any of the advertisements, promotions, store posters, or packaging for toy household cleaning products, kitchen items, or childcare toys such as baby dolls and strollers. The product lines do not model social acceptance for boys to play homemaking or parenting.

When young boys engage in dress up, pile on the necklaces, enjoy painting their nails or select other girl toys, cultural norms or homophobia often correct the behavior immediately. In fact, in Fisher Price Playlab studies where staff members observed children behind one-way glass, they found that boys will play with “girl” toys if they think they are in a safe environment.

My students frequently offer supporting evidence about boys crossing these gender lines, from their part-time jobs at after-school programs. They believe that young boys relish the chance to get their nails painted and have their hair styled when girls are doing it as a special activity. As one student told my class recently, “I think boys just like the closeness of being with a staff member, being touched while we paint their nails, and talking with us.” Perhaps it is the tactile, calming aspect of this activity that draws boys and girls to it. However, sex roles are reinforced very early in boys’ lives, and toys play a part in that socialization.

Jackson Katz in Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity, a Media Education Foundation video, explores the ways boys are taught to be tough and how they’re encouraged to define manhood in ways that hurt themselves and others. Katz provides an insightful analysis about how boys are socialized to be solitary, independent, and often violent through toys, video games, and Hollywood movies. According to Katz, the cultural message is that emotional connections are for sissies. Beyond the obvious problems of violence and aggression that many of the toys engender, even the science-based toys are solitary and don’t present opportunities for verbal or social development. Packaging hints at being the best or creating and building superior models or designs. There is little evidence that toys help boys in social and emotional development or in Katz’s words, help boys to be “better men” some day.

Toys for girls implicitly urge them to find husbands in order to get their dream lives. Girls are taught to compete with each other for male validation. One makeup kit states, “Wait ’til they see you.” Female rivalries, jealousies, and other negative behaviors such as bullying and harassment pose a host of problems for girls. Yet girls’ toys promote unattainable physical perfection and materialistic values. Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, a groundbreaking book about the emotional lives of adolescent girls, including depression, eating disorders, and declining self-confidence, refers to contemporary society as a “girl poisoning culture” and offers many empowering approaches for addressing issues of self-esteem. The toys available to girls typically strengthen the cultural messages of inferiority and second-class status that have influenced and continue to affect self-image and academic performance for many girls.

Socialization? What socialization?

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Gender Issues, Ev-Psych Bullshit on September 19, 2007, 2:13 am EST

34 Comments »

That was what jumped out at me as I was reading about the OJ Memorabilia Quest this past weekend. Some report referred to his “girlfriend of 11 years,” with a picture of her and everything. Since I’d rather clean the men’s room at the local Exxon Quik Stop than keep abreast of goings-on in OJ land, this lady’s existence had escaped me. “A girlfriend?” I thought to myself in a brief moment of forgetting what planet I’m on. “Who the fuck would fuck him?”

But of course he has a girlfriend. In a world where some woman drove across country to Tex Watson’s jail cell so she could persuade him to marry her, of course OJ has a girlfriend. According to this item from four years ago:

Prody, 28, entered OJ’s life in 1996. She met him after standing outside the gate of his Rockingham estate in Brentwood, California, wearing sexy clothing to get his attention.

[Insert appropriate feminist analysis.]

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry on September 18, 2007, 1:37 am EST

12 Comments »

This is from an invited address at the APA conference in August, delivered by Roy F. Baumeister, in which he explains that men rule the world because they are naturally more creative, adventurous, and intelligent than women:

Hence religion, literature, art, science, technology, military action, trade and economic marketplaces, political organization, medicine — these all mainly emerged from the men’s sphere. The women’s sphere did not produce such things, though it did other valuable things, like take care of the next generation so the species would continue to exist.

Actually, taking care of the next generation seems to be the only “valuable thing” Baumeister thinks women have done, and they’ve barely managed that:

Giving birth is a revealing example. What could be more feminine than giving birth? Throughout most of history and prehistory, giving birth was at the center of the women’s sphere, and men were totally excluded. Men were rarely or never present at childbirth, nor was the knowledge about birthing even shared with them. But not very long ago, men were finally allowed to get involved, and the men were able to figure out ways to make childbirth safer for both mother and baby. Think of it: the most quintessentially female activity, and yet the men were able to improve on it in ways the women had not discovered for thousands and thousands of years.

It is astounding that in the year 2007, hate speech like this should be delivered in the context of an invited address at a prestigious medical/scientific conference. I went to the conference page of the APA to see if they’d issued some kind of apology for this thing, but no. They actually refer to it as “a provocative look at the motivational differences between men and women.”

How did this happen? How is it possible?

I’ll tell you how: Ev-psych. Baumeister, whose Ph.D. is in Social Psychology, is allowed to extrude this crud in public because he wraps his misogyny in the pseudo-scientific cloak of EP. His one precious factoid is the same one all the other ev-psych sexists cling to: that some cognitive test results show a wider distribution of scores among men than among women, with males occupying the extremes at both ends. (To an ev-psycho, of course, the statistical distribution of these particular results is a perfect mirror of innate human capacity. There is no possibility of test bias or performance differences based on gendered expectations or socialization or anything else, nor any question about just what external reality the test might be testing. It’s a funny thing, but evolutionary psychologists don’t actually seem to know much about psychology.)

But Baumeister’s statistics will only take him so far, because there’s the pesky fact that overall women’s scores are pretty much the same as men’s. So he adds his own fantastically cockamamie twist: that women are inherently “unmotivated” to use their brains. True, they do have the grey matter, and if someone plops a woman down in an office (invented by a man, of course) she’ll fire up the neurons and eventually figure out what to do, but otherwise females are content to function at about the level of lizards sunning themselves on a rock. Then Baumeister straps on his seven-league boots and leaps over a couple of mountains of logical absurdity to reach his promised land: men naturally rule the world because a) the smartest people in the world are always men, and b) women are lizards. And not only that, but (hang on if you’re an anthropologist because you’re about to vomit) men created all human culture.

Missing from this thesis is any knowledge of history, culture, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, genetics, biology, human origins, or pretty much anything else that you would think might come in handy in terms of understanding the history of our species, much less a social structure like patriarchy.

Oh, but wait — “patriarchy,” according to this thesis, doesn’t exist. The very notion that women have ever been systematically oppressed is a feminist conspiracy theory. According to Baumeister, women have never been discriminated against or oppressed or excluded from anything. They’re just naturally at the bottom of the social order because they’re so fucking dumb unmotivated. At one point in the speech he actually wonders aloud why women didn’t become composers in the 19th century, even though they had pianos at home and plenty of time to practice, and argues that the fact that they didn’t is clear evidence of women’s innate lack of creativity. That’s the level we’re dealing with here, folks.

Yet the faddish popularity of ev-psych makes it possible for this ignorant misogynist to expel his toe-curling fumes in public — at the goddamn APA convention! — without being shouted off the stage by an outraged audience.

You know, just the other night I was re-reading the excellent chapter on human origins research in Sarah Milledge Nelson’s Gender in Archaeology. I was chuckling along with Nelson at the ludicrousness of the field in the 60s and early 70s, the era of “Man the Hunter,” when male anthropologists argued that men had driven all of human evolution, that humanity itself was defined by the exclusively (so they thought) male occupations of hunting and flint knapping, and that all women did was sit around in the caves waiting for their pelvises to evolve so they could give birth to big-brained sons who would bring them meat.

Thirty-five years of feminist anthropology has beaten that shit to shreds*, but now ev-psych has come along to replace it. And that’s really all ev-psych is: another patriarchal just-so story explaining why modern male dominance is universal and natural and inevitable. Patriarchy always tells these stories. They’re justification myths — like the Greek legend about how the women of Athens lost power as a sop to Poseidon, or the Bible story that has women eternally paying for the apple thing. The modern version just talks about genes instead of gods and “gender motivational patterns” instead of apples. Same shit, different century.

*From my own comment in the thread below: “And as for the creation of culture, the notion that this was somehow a male-only venture is unsupportable on any grounds. From our primate predecessors to Palelolithic tool makers to the Fiber Revolution to the invention of agriculture, all the evidence is that females have been as much culture-creators as males (if not more, actually, given the way research is going).”

As for the historical restrictions on women (such as, to take the example of “women composers,” the fact that until recently women were actually barred from higher education and musician unions and orchestras, and were ostracized and denied support and publication when they did compose), I feel sure my readers know all about that. Far better than this Baumeister clown.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Recommended, Ev-Psych Bullshit on September 17, 2007, 3:27 pm EST

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I saw this image over at Echidne’s and was instantly captivated. She’d lost the credit for the picture, so I hunted around a bit and found that it was taken by Hungarian nature photographer Bence Máté. The two grey herons were fighting over a fish (they both lost — the fish fell to the ice and another heron snapped it up).

All I can think is: they look like such dinosaurs! Just so gratifyingly dinosaury.

Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry on September 15, 2007, 9:50 pm EST

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