Drowning

This is a brief statement of my opinion on the Aziz Ansari case.  Content note: rape.

There’s a direct analogy between rape and drowning.  Drowning looks very different in real life vs the movies.  But nobody demands that people behave more stereotypically while drowning.  When people fail to behave stereotypically, still nobody denies that it was really drowning.  And nobody derails the conversation by insisting that nearby swimmers can’t be treated as criminals just because they don’t recognize drowning.

I understand that among SJ-oriented people, there is some controversy about the Aziz Ansari case.  A lot of people saying that it was wrong, but not sexual assault.  My stance is that it was a fairly typical story of rape, making it a troubling demonstration of people’s inability to recognize rape.  Yes, “rape” instead of “sexual assault”, because it was penetrative–that should be straightforward.  But the part that gives people trouble, is that Grace didn’t behave as they expected a non-consenting person should, and they think the typical person would have great difficulty recognizing the signs.  To this I say, okay, but please update your expectations.  This is what drowning looks like.

The felt sense model of consent

[cn: non-explicit discussion of rape and sexual consent]

I recently wrote a guide to terms relating to sexual violence, and I included brief descriptions of a few common models of consent. While I do not reject these models of consent, I do advocate a lesser-known model of consent. It’s known as “consent as a felt sense”.

This model was first described by maymay and unquietpirate, although I have serious disagreements with their framing, as I will discuss below. I would instead recommend coyote’s take, which was what first made the model click for me. If you want even more reading, Ozy has a critique of the model.

The communication vs the message

The standard narrative of consent is someone saying “yes” or “no” to a sexual proposition. This narrative isn’t entirely accurate. Studies show that saying “no” is a disfavored way to express refusal, and people commonly couch or soften their refusals, both inside and outside sexual contexts. It’s also well-known that consent can be expressed non-verbally. Once we get past the myths and legends, we see that consent isn’t about saying one particular word or another. It’s about communication, by whatever means are effective.

But the thing about communication, is that there is a message that we are trying to communicate. Perhaps the intended message is “I consent”, but this quickly devolves into recursive circle. “I wish to communicate to you that I wish to communicate to you that I consent.” Upon reflection, we come to the conclusion that “I consent” means “I am okay with this”.

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A guide to sexual violence terminology

[cn: sexual violence, including explicit references]

When I started out writing about sexual violence, I was confused about many of the terms surrounding it. I didn’t even know, until someone told me, that “sexual violence” was an all-encompassing term. So I’m writing a guide to terminology, of the kind I wish I had years ago. My aim is to go beyond a glossary, not just providing definitions but also commenting on connotations and practical usage.

Categories of sexual violence

Sexual violence – Sexual violence is a super-category that includes any sexual (or sexually charged) act that violates someone’s consent. That includes sexual assault, sexual coercion, sexual harassment, and child sexual abuse (all of which are to be defined later). Note that sexual violence is a term used by public health advocates and activists, not by the legal system; not all sexual violence is illegal.

In my experience, definitions of sexual violence can be confusing. For example, the NSVRC says sexual violence is when “someone forces or manipulates someone else into unwanted sexual activity without their consent,” and then proceeds to list examples which do not obviously fall under its own definition, such as spying on sexual acts. If you’re not sure whether to go with the explicit definition, or the list of examples, always go with the list, which has more consensus than the literal definition.

Sexual assault – Sexual assault is non-consensual sexual touching. Common examples include unwanted kissing, groping certain body parts, and rape. Sexual assault is also a legal term, although at least in the US, there is a distinction between assault (the threat of violence) and battery (the violence itself). Outside of legal contexts, “sexual assault” usually refers to what is legally called “sexual battery”.

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Why are there so few asexual men?

This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2015.  I made a few minor updates, but all the speculation still applies today.

In my analysis of the 2014 AVEN Survey of online asexual communities, I showed that only 12% of aces (aces = people on the asexual spectrum) are men.    According to my numbers, the fraction of asexuals who are men is similar.  [Update: The 2015 Asexual Census finds the same result.]  Someone asked me why that is, and I thought I’d make my answer public.

Extant data

In a community survey of AVEN in 2008, 28% of asexuals were men.  Another community survey in 2011 reported 13% of aces were men.  A Spanish-language community survey in 2013 reports that 36% of asexuals were assigned male at birth.

These are all community surveys conducted online, and they only tell us about people in the various online communities.  They do not tell us about asexuals or asexual-spectrum people in general.

However, there was also an academic study conducted in 2004, based on a national probability sample in the UK in 1994.  In that study 35% of asexuals were men.  In theory, this should tell us about asexuals in general, although there are many reasons to worry about systematic biases.

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Luck in grad school

I am continuing my blogging series on why grad school sucks.  This series has only had one entry so far, in which I talk about how bad physics talks are, and how this worsens impostor syndrome.  Today I will talk about how scientific success is based on luck.

If you have ever read any popularizations of science, you’ve likely heard that many scientific discoveries are made by serendipity.  This makes sense, because if a discovery isn’t a big surprise, then it’s not much of a discovery, is it?

We have one of these stories in the field of superconductivity too.  Kamerlingh Onnes is credited with the discovery of superconductivity in 1911.  But that’s not what his work was really about.  His real accomplishment was being the first person to liquefy helium.  He just tried cooling a bunch of things, and that’s how superconductivity was discovered.  That’s serendipity!  Kinda?

The thing is, serendipitous discoveries might make for a fun story, but it’s garbage to actually live through.  If you go to grad school, will you hit upon something truly interesting?  Or will you just produce a bunch of unremarkable studies that nobody cares about?  Nobody knows!  But your career success depends on it!

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Things that bug me: gluten

As I sift through the ruins of organized skepticism, I recall something that always bugged me.

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder that causes a bunch of chronic gastrointestinal problems.  The treatment to celiac disease is to switch to a completely gluten-free diet.  However, people with celiac are not by themselves the cause of the many gluten-free products sold in stores.  Many people buy those because they believe they have a different condition, Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity (NCGS).  They believe that when they go on a low-gluten or gluten-free diet, they have fewer gastrointestinal symptoms (e.g. they feel less bloated).  I say “believe”, because there is no consensus that NCGS exists.

The standard skeptic’s line on NCGS is that there is no evidence that it exists, and there is no reason for people to go on gluten-free diets unless they think they have celiac disease.  One study that has been used in support of this position, is a paper from 2013, which says in the title “No effects of gluten in patients with self-reported non-celiac gluten sensitivity“.

The interesting thing about this paper is that it says that people who report NCGS do experience a significant reduction in symptoms when they change their diet.  However, the important change in their diet is not the elimination of gluten, but the elimination of another category of chemicals, known as FODMAPs.  FODMAPs are generally present in the same grains that include gluten, so it’s easy to get them confused without having a study designed specifically to separate them.  In other words, it is possible that people who believe they have NCGS are correct about having symptoms that improve with a change in diet, but incorrect about the source of those symptoms.

I recall that back in 2013, skeptics were saying, “This is another confirmation of what we’ve been saying all along: NCGS doesn’t exist.”  And I recall reading the news reports and thinking, wait.  This means we were wrong.  People who thought they had NCGS were correct to change their diets.  We were wrong.  Why weren’t skeptics acknowledging that they had been wrong?

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Link Roundup: January 2018

A smaller link roundup this month because I wasn’t really paying attention over break.  But here are a few things.

Recovered Memories and Sexual Assault – It’s true that with persistent and coercive questioning, you can cause people to “recover” memories of traumatic events that didn’t actually happen.  On the other hand, it’s very common for memory of traumatic events to be impaired.  It’s also common for people to report sexual assault a long time after the fact–not because people repressed the memories and later recovered them, but because many people don’t initially conceptualize sexual assault as such, and because there are many obstacles to reporting.  If you hear an account of sexual assault a long time after the fact, and involves some confused memories, it is completely wrong to conclude that therefore these are an example of fabricated “recovered” memories.

Philippines Extends Martial Law in South for Another Year – The fight with Islamist militants is already over, but they’re still extending martial law.  WTF.  I’ve said this before, but the Philippine president Duterte is easily worse than Trump.  This is a guy who has favorably compared himself to Hitler, no joke.

Sicklit Literally Traumatized Me – Books about people with cancer don’t appeal to me.  But apparently this is more than just a matter of taste.  Miri says that this genre tends to sensationalize the suffering in a way that can be actively harmful to readers with cancer.