But of course there is no such thing as rape culture

This just makes me sad. It’s a line of underwear for women under development to prevent rape, a kind of voluntary chastity belt. Women should do what they feel necessary to stop rape, but it’s too bad that we live in a world where some find they have to lock their vaginas behind armor to feel safe.

I’m sure the makers are trying to make it as comfortable as possible, but it’s still a case where we’re expecting the potential victims to jump through hoops to prevent a crime, while the criminals get no onus placed upon them. So clearly what we’ve got do do is mandate that all men wear a Stephenson Spermatic Truss or a Jugum Penis or some other cunning instrument of torture to prevent rape. That would wake people up to the absurdity of using genital gadgets to end a problem of behavior and attitude.

bear trap for the penis

I just saw the worst-passing skeptic leader ever

It was on Facebook. I knew it would be insulting, but I had to take a picture.

DJ Grothe judges a transsexual.

No hyperbole: I just saw the worst-passing transsexual I’ve ever seen in the lounge here. It was so disruptive that I am forced to believe it was an intentional way to protest against rigid gender binaries. Or so I’d like to think.

Just beware, transsexuals: you must meet DJ Grothe’s high standards before appearing in public. You will be judged.

Isn’t it sweet that 12 people like his comment?

The libertarian mindset on proud display

I hope you aren’t working on dinner right now, because watching John Stossel and Steve Doocy flaunt their inability to empathize with anyone but their own selfish interests will cause you to lose it.

Stossel is outraged that he has to pay the same insurance premiums as a woman — they go to the doctor more! It’s not as if regular checkups might actually reduce health care costs, you know — he’s saving money by skipping on the maintenance and waiting for the catastrophic disaster.

As for smug little twit Doocy: “I’m in my 60s. Why should I pay for your maternity care?”

Hey, I’m in my 50s, why should I subsidize your greater health care needs, old man? My kids are in their 20s, they shouldn’t have to pay for any insurance, ’cause they’re healthy and young!

Maybe because someday I, and they, will be in our 60s, too. And maybe somebody Doocy loves will need maternity care (oh, wait, no, that can’t be can it? These are Fox News goons, they can’t possibly love a woman, ever.)

Stossel, by the way, is 66. Why the hell is he still employed, still insured, still supported by anyone? Isn’t it way past time for society to stop subsidizing the old geezer, shuffling him off to pasture so young people can move up?

Or is it possible that a responsible society values all of its members and gives them all lifelong equal citizenship?

White supremacists are getting a facelift?

At least, that’s what this guy Richard Spencer is claiming that he’s doing, trying to add a little intellectual respectability to a small gang of bigots. From this account of a conference the racists recently had, though, it sounds like the same old crap.

“If you cannot be for your own people, who can you be for?” one young man who gave his name as Helmut Schmidt said as a reason for attending the conference. “The reality is when white people are the minority in this country, it is going to be real bad.”

But really the conference was open to any number of overlapping topics that might attract disaffected white youngsters. Jack Donovan, an anti-feminist writer and “advocate for the resurgence of tribalism and manly virtue,” served up his shtick.

Donovan has argued that feminists are trying to create  “gender-neutral utopias” that will make men into “doughy bonobos and chunky Chaz Bonos playing out their endless manic-depressive melodramas in a big bean-flicking circle of sterility, sickness and desperation.”

“Do black people as a group care what happens to white people as a group? Does a Mexican dad with three babies care about whether some white kid from the burbs gets a summer landscaping job? Of course not,” Donovan said during his presentation, adding later, “You cannot play fair with people who don’t care if you get wiped off the map.”

Turn that last sentence around. Why should anyone play fair with white chauvinists who only care about brown people as nannies and gardners?

One message I got, though, was that the facelift seems to involve adding resentment against independent women to the stew of racial hatred that they usually tap into. It’s always been there, but in this story it’s pretty overt: white women must support the race by bearing lots of white babies.

You can find much more about the unsavory Richard Spencer at the SPLC. He’s currently head of the National Policy Institute, a racist think-tank founded by William Regnery, the far right wing publisher who also publishes a great many books by the Discovery Institute authors like Wells, Wiker, Richards, Gonzalez, Weikart, etc. It’s rather ironic that they love to publish books accusing evolution of being a Nazi plot fomenting Hitlerian ideas of eugenics, while at the same time promoting racial ideas that would have been right at home in Hitler’s government.

Delusional pseudoscientist thinks with his testicles

So this morning I got tweeted a belly laugh.

Frost @FreedomTwenty5
Excellent atheist/rationalist critique of evolutionary denialist @pzmyers – http://www.thumotic.com/2013/10/28/spot-price-forward-contracts-and-maturity-transformation-in-the-sexual-marketplace/ … #science

“Evolutionary denialist”? What, me? So I followed the link.

I can only assume that Myers, with whom I am otherwise unfamiliar, is some sort of evolution-denying Young Earth Creationist, or perhaps a Scientologist. The concept of human sexual choice has been well-established by David Buss and more recently, Geoffrey Miller. To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised, in this day and age, that we still have people such as Myers, who deny the evolutionary origins of human behaviour.

It would be crass to mock Mr. Myers’ religious beliefs, even while they prohibit him from acknowledging the role that evolution and biomechanics play in human behaviour. I will just say, Mr. Myers, that there are many Christians groups which have done a far better job than the YECs, or whatever sky-fairy-worshiping sect you belong to, of reconciling The Bible and the observable empirical fact of human evolution. I encourage you to broaden your horizons good sir, and I recommend the excellent community over at r/atheism as a good place to start.

Heh. He doesn’t know me at all well, I guess.

We’re already primed for some awesome stupidity with that introduction. Predictably, this tripe is from one of those MRAs — specifically, one of those manly men wallowing in an overdose of masculine machismo.

The typical 21st century western male is not a man. He is a limp-wristed mangina, a coward, a collaborator and a fool. He is an embarrassment to the thousands of generations of his ancestors who lived lives of struggle and sacrifice, just so that he can sit on his arse and wait out death in a perpetual state of quiet desperation.

The modern man lives a life that his ancestors would consider sad, pathetic, and deeply unnatural. The excuses he offers would make them laugh. His fatalistic, self-pitiful posturing would make them cringe.

Thumotic is a place for men who reject this path. our society’s flight from traditional manly virtue. It is a home for men who are unashamed of their masculinity, their pride in themselves, and their lust for excellence in all facets of their lives.

Reminds me of Kronar (NSFW!).

What’s caused all this outrage, and an unpleasant ugly bolus in my email traffic, is my criticism of that ridiculous sexual market value graph, the one with no data behind it, but that tried to cloak its sexist bigotry behind a false veneer of quantitative, empirical assessment. It was all just a lie, of course, propped up by rigged surveys and purely subjective curve fitting.

Here’s how the manly man rebuts my complaints about the evidence: by ignoring my central issues, and vomiting up a cloud of self-referential assertions about the truth of the graph, despite the absence of any data for it. Every sentence, practically every clause, is garbage — not because I’m ideologically committed to equality, but because the premises are bogus and the evidence that they airily claim is backing it isn’t there.

One can easily dismiss the arguments of PZ Myers, Demand Curve Denialist, because the graph at which he ignorantly scoffs is not meant to represent [Wrong. It’s supposed to represent something. What?] a perfectly defined quantitative [That’s a good part of my complaint. It’s intended to give the illusion of quantitative measurement, but no measurements were made. It is a lie.] relationship between price [And that’s another complaint! You can’t relate human relationships to “price”. That’s not how they work.] and demand [Again, the chart is a failure. You’re trying to make an argument for what people look for in a partner, are stupidly equating that to demand for sexual satisfaction, and further, are reducing it to a single parameter, age. It’s pure nonsense.]. Rather, it is an analytical [With no legitimate analysis!] and pedagogical [I’ll agree with that part. It taught me that MRAs are ignorant assholes] tool which we use to convey a basic truth: People buy more of a good when the price goes down [Stop digging a hole. You are pretending that relationships are bought and sold. Except maybe in the kinds of superficial, transient exchanges MRAs engage in, that simply isn’t true.]. If the Manosphere were to start building complex mathematical labyrinths [Grr. You can’t, because you don’t have the data. You certainly can’t make more complex models when even your simplistic model is built on air.] purporting to explain every intricacy of the sexual marketplace, and hold faith in those models despite a long history of predictive failure… well then, we would be frauds and fools and worse [Yep. You’re already there.]. Fortunately we are all Austrian sexual marketplace economists, here at Thumotic.

The SMV graph is a visualization of the fundamental truth that a woman’s desirability tends to peak in her teens and early twenties, while a man’s peaks in his thirties. This will be true, on average, whichever scale we use, whatever quibbles we might have about the precise shape of the curve, and whatever exceptions might exist to the broad trends. [How do you know this is true? Because you invented a graph that fits your preconceptions. That’s it.]

How do these people fail to recognize that they have no legitimate objective evidence backing up their claims…that they can’t even imagine how to test their arguments? It’s hopeless when this is their big argument:

95% of modern American women will angrily reject the wisdom in this post. Even a majority of men will feel that it is somehow wrong to acknowledge the reality of rapidly declining female sexual value with age. And yet, nothing I’ve written would be controversial in any traditional society that has ever existed, or currently exists. Take this article to the Middle East, Russia, China, Japan, or any European or American city before 1960, and you will find few who disagree with this analysis. Either they are all deluded, dear twenty-first century American liberals, or you are.

So if you go to a sufficiently sexist, patriarchal society, and take a vote of the guys in charge, they’ll all agree that they like nubile young women to service them sexually. Well, la-de-da, who knew that this is a matter settled by popular vote among the characters portrayed on Mad Men?

Don’t you hate those ninnies who abuse biology to defend their sexism?

Listen to Gavin McInnes rant. He makes up statistics, he raves that having women work goes “against 40,000 years of evolution”.

Women are forced to pretend to be men. They’re feigning this toughness. They’re miserable. Study after study has shown that feminism has made women less happy. They’re not happy in the work force, for the most part. I would guess 7 percent [of women] like not having kids, they want to be CEOs, they like staying at the office all night working on a proposal, and all power to them. But by enforcing that as the norm, you’re pulling these women away from what they naturally want to do, and you’re making them miserable.

His gut tells him that women prefer to live domestic lives. He berates others for citing mere ‘anecdotes’ while declaring that his twisted, baseless view of how the world works to be the absolute truth. McInnes really is committed to his unfounded views about sex roles.

Here’s the cold biological truth: (And it’s not based on fear or sexism or anything else you like to argue about in a classroom) Women’s bodies are not as good at making babies after 30. The hourglass turns upside down at that age and the sand keeps coming out until 35 when it is gone. Yes, I know you can still make babies after that. My mother had my brother at 40 and my youngest boy came out when my wife was 39. These are EXCEPTIONS. Liberals seem to think that one piece of anecdotal evidence completely wipes out mountains of evidence to the contrary. When discussing the vast majority of women, they TEND to prefer family to career and they TEND to want to make babies and they TEND to need to create them in their 20s / early 30s. This isn’t my opinion. It’s a general truth and the fact that simply stating it is controversial, shows how far the pendulum has swung into Crazy Town.

Mary Anne Franks did a great job rebutting him. If you watch the video, McInnes comes off as a total emotional bro-ron; Franks is calm and rational. Jennifer Raff has a much more thorough take-down.

Clearly, McInnes is suffering from excessive testosterone. Damn biology and the way it torments us men with these constant high hormonal levels!

Missing an opportunity

Given that computer science is one of the majors with the best job prospects, that it’s still a growth industry, how do you account for these proportions?

Computer science is an incredibly promising major, especially for a young woman. That and engineering are among the college degrees that can offer the highest incomes and the most flexibility — attributes widely cited for drawing many women into formerly male-dominated fields like medicine. Writing code and designing networks are also a lot more portable than nursing, teaching and other traditional pink-collar occupations. Yet just 0.4 percent of all female college freshmen say they intend to major in computer science. In fact, the share of women in computer science has actually fallen over the years. In 1990-91, about 29 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer and information sciences went to women; 20 years later, it has plunged to 18 percent. Today, just a quarter of all Americans in computer-related occupations are women.

Something is dissuading women from pursuing careers in computer science. I wonder what it is? Maybe it has something to do with bro culture.

Ow, cringing

Yikes, this is an awkward story. A teaching assistant mailed her students personal, nude photos of herself instead of homework answers. If it was a genuine mistake, and I assume it was, I feel for her — she’s going to get some unfortunate student feedback.

But to everyone giggling over it, I would say, grow up. Adults are sexual beings. They will have sex lives; they aren’t going to sacrifice that so students can pretend they’re all alabaster statues. This was an unfortunate error, but it doesn’t mean she’s something unusual: educated people, like your professors, tend to have rather adventurous and interesting sex experiences. They just don’t usually expose them.

But most of my cringing is reserved for the commenters at the link who are making much of the fact that the woman was of Asian descent, and are throwing around jokes built on offensive stereotypes. There is no shame in a person having sex. There ought to be quite a bit of shame in being a bigot.

Do better. Please just do better.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks in the community of science bloggers, with the abrupt downfall of Bora Zivkovic, a very well liked (I consider him a friend) and influential leader. If you haven’t been following it, here’s a summary and timeline of recent events. The simple version of the whole story is that one of the major pioneers of science blogging and one of the people most instrumental in forging a community online has been found to have abused his privileges to sexually harass women members.

I’ve been processing how I feel about it all. As I say, Bora is a long-term friend; I remember when he joined us at Scienceblogs, and I also remember meeting him for the first time — he was a genuinely enthusiastic proponent of bringing people together and building a new platform for science communication. So this is a real tragedy that he has managed to undermine his own talents.

At the same time, though, here’s what I feel now: discouragement and despair and cynicism. We’ve been through this before in the skeptic/atheist communities. It was beginning to be my expectation that any grand attempt at building new organizations and improving communication was eventually going to collapse into the sewer of patriarchal sexual politics — that this pattern of sexual inequity was hardwired into the culture as a whole, and anything rising up out of it was going to be infected with the taint and eventually succumb to it. Same ol’, same ol’, I thought — the hard slog is never going to end.

But I was surprised: the science community’s response has been strong and appropriate. There’s no excusing his behavior, and rising up and demanding better is exactly what needed to be done, painful as it was. And they did it. There’s hope? Really? The struggle might actually lead to progress?

There has been a lot of writing on this topic in the last few weeks, but I thought Scicurious captured it particularly well.

Bora is not the man I thought he was. And the science communication community was not the place I thought it was.

The whole week has been full of downs. But toward the end. I started to see #ripples of hope. Not just the hashtag (though that alone is brilliant), but from other bloggers, saying, we can, in the future, be better. We want to be better. We WILL be better. People taking decisive action.

And I have been incredibly impressed with many of my colleagues. Yes, people fought, and jumped to conclusions, and etc. But there have been no death threats or rape threats, and compared to some communities I’ve seen…well I’m impressed. I always thought I wrote with and worked with some amazingly good people. Now, I KNOW it.

I contrast that with the atheist community. We also have some amazingly good people — as I travel around, I run into them all the time, at all levels of organization, and all doing good work — but we also have a substantial number of amazingly awful people…and as it turns out, it doesn’t take many sexist jerks clawing at the structure of your organization to distract and disrupt and impede progress. We have enough atheist asshats to provide shelter and support to exploiters — and too many of us are willing to overlook the content of our leaders’ characters, as long as they are willing to say the right words about the sacred atheist cause.

I’ve been astounded at how many people demand that we plaster over an atheist’s human flaws simply because, well, he’s The Man. We’ve been building up a body of revered saints, rather than recognizing that every one of us is human and needs to be held accountable. Face reality: if Bora had chosen to be a leader of the atheist community, rather than the online science community, right now there would be a huge battle going on, with loud voices shouting that “He only talked to these women; aren’t they strong enough to resist?” And the women who spoke out would be flooded with death threats and rape threats, and would be endlessly lampooned on our little hate nests scattered about the internet. Youtube would be full of videos expressing outrage that a Good Man should have been chastised by the Shrill Harpies of Feminism.

We’ve all seen it. Every atheist woman who dares to challenge the privileged status quo and ask for a little respect gets the treatment: just ask Rebecca Watson, or Jen McCreight, or Ophelia Benson. So I feel mixed: there is the despair at the failure of atheism to motivate real change, and hope that the science online community will set a model for everyone to follow.

But I also fear that atheism’s problems are rooted too deeply. This community is full of people who are already convinced that they are better than everyone else. But to be a good person, you have to always want to be better than yourself right now.