You know all these accusations emerging about how famous (or not so famous) men are harassing and abusing and ignoring boundaries and being world-class jerkoffs? Some of you are not being dissuaded at all. I’m suspecting that you might be thinking that being an inconsiderate ass is kind of macho, or maybe you’re just oblivious to the idea that trampling all over a woman’s dignity is a bad thing. Welp, you ought to read this explicit,
detailed description of a bad date with Aziz Ansari. She spills the beans about everything. It’s very TMI.

But here’s the deal. Yes, this woman is explaining how Ansari ignored all of her requests to stop, from gentle hints to clear “NO”s, and awkward attempts to extricate herself from the ‘date’. But again, maybe you don’t care about her desires. But here’s what ought to stop you cold, even if you are a card-carrying member of the MRA/caveman/gorilla school of sexual encounters.

Grace reveals, in cringe-inducing detail, that Aziz Ansari is bad at sex. Clumsy, bumbling, childishly-demanding, needy, with weird quirky behaviors that no one wants to hear about. She doesn’t do it in a vindictive way, either: she’s just objectively reporting what Ansari tries to do on a hot date.

Your performance is being evaluated by outspoken women who won’t be shy about broadcasting everything to the whole wide world. Especially if you’re incapable of respecting them.

Adam Lee has a good take on the “believe women” trope.

The call to “believe women” isn’t an assertion that women’s claims ought to be held to a less rigorous standard of evidence. It’s a rejoinder to the sad reality that, for most of history, women were held to a more stringent standard than men and their claims were reflexively disbelieved.
Read more at

It’s also not a claim that women are incapable of lying. It’s just that, in general, you should trust that people are mostly telling the truth, unless you’ve got good reason to doubt them, and being female is not one of those reasons.

Which means that when a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, says she did not have sex with Donald Trump, you should believe her, barring any solid evidence to the contrary. It is a non-story. At its worst it might be a tale of consensual sexual interactions between two people, one of whom is sleazy and repellent (it’s not Daniels I’m talking about)…but as long as it’s consensual, it’s only their business.

This is nothing but an attempt to harm Donald Trump, an activity I might approve of, by associating him with the unfair disrepute of sex workers. All it can do is further damage the standing of sex workers in general and Stormy Daniels in particular, to no good end.

And really, in a single week in which we’ve got Trump flaunting unmitigated racism and another rambling, incoherent, arrogant interview in the Wall Street Journal, don’t we have better things to do?

Remember Mario Batali’s clunky apology for harassment that included a pizza dough cinnamon roll recipe? We found it hard to believe how inappropriate and off-key the whole thing was.

Welp, someone made the pizza dough cinnamon rolls. It’s beautifully angry. Everything about it — the sloppy, incomplete recipe, the bad combination of pizza dough and a pastry, the terrible result — is a bitter metaphor for the institutionalized sexism women have to deal with all the time. I thought the apology was bad, but now I’m sure the celebrity chef is bad, too.

Guy. Guy. Guy. This is ridiculous. Your 15 minutes are up.

Signed,
The Internet

Damore is suing Google.

The author of the controversial memo that upended Google in August is suing the company, alleging that white, male conservatives are systematically discriminated against by Google.

James Damore was fired as an engineer after the manifesto, which questioned the benefits of diversity programs and suggested women may be biologically inferior engineers, was widely passed around the company. In a new lawsuit, he and another fired engineer claim that “employees who expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google’s employment policies and its business, such as ‘diversity’ hiring policies, ‘bias sensitivity,’ or ‘social justice,’ were/are singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google, in violation of their legal rights.”

You know, women only hold 17% of the tech jobs at Google. Conservatives control the federal government. Most of the top executives at Google are men. Google is currently being sued for wage discrimination against women. How can you possibly argue that men are being oppressed?

Also, the memo that got you fired was a crock.

Now I’m getting chewed out for questioning the innocence of Jerry Sandusky.

After Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne comes out with an abhorrent blog post defending Jerry Sandusky.

Check this out @danarel @steve_shives https://t.co/rwwTBwhe3F

— Sacha Saeen (@S_Saeen) January 7, 2018

The best response is this one:

So..in cases of sexual assault we can now add “found guilty at trial” to the list of kinds of evidence that are unacceptable in making any judgements on the accused. Got it.

Quick! Reopen all the molestation cases against Catholic priests! Those boys be lyin’!

I quite liked this article by Emily Willingham on the male/female brain: she points out something that is obviously true, that individual brains are a complicated mosaic of traits, and that you simply can’t reduce all of the variety to a simple binary.

Humans want tidy patterns, to have things link up neatly and make sense. Our brains strain to make these connections whether they are genuine or not. What’s more difficult is looking past illusory patterns and thinking more deeply about what we’re really seeing. As tempting as it is to collapse a human’s entire being, including the brain, into a single term – male, female – an honest look at how we really behave makes such reductionism look shallow, at best.

The most observant among us manage this in-depth examination. These acute observers are not the scientists, who can be remarkably myopic and rigid within their corners of research, but the storytellers. You can’t tell a good story about people if you’re not a keen observer of human behaviour, and it’s in our storytelling traditions that we find example after example of an inherent if unconscious understanding of the mosaic brain.

It was good, but the article didn’t go in the direction I expected it to go — I guess I’m more reductionist than I thought. When I started reading about brains being a mosaic of different properties, I first leapt to the idea of epigenetic variability in the regulation of of “male” and “female” genes. (Isn’t that where you go, too?)

Here’s the deal. You know that there is this beautifully intricate process called X-chromosome inactivation, or dosage compensation, in which individuals with more than one X chromosome epigenetically shut down most of the genes on all the additional X chromosomes. It’s a really cool process — think about it, the molecules involved have to count chromosomes, and I don’t understand how they do that — but it’s also leaky. About 15% of the genes on the X chromosome escape inactivation, by unclear mechanisms. And further, some of those genes are variable in how frequently they escape inactivation.

For a given gene, escape from X inactivation is not necessarily consistent between individuals or between tissues and/or cells within an individual. A comprehensive survey in human confirms the original observation that some genes only escape X inactivation in subsets of cells. Interestingly, many genes (∼10% of X-linked genes) behave in this manner, resulting in potentially variable expression levels between female tissues and individuals. Whether, in turn, this generates female phenotypic variation is an interesting possibility that remains to be explored. Partial or variable escape from X inactivation is in agreement with progressive incorporation of genes into the X up-regulation/X inactivation systems once the Y paralog degenerated.

Female brains are literally mosaic in their patterns of gene expression — some cells will have one X chromosome active, others will have the other X chromosome switched on, and further, there is a random pattern of genes on the X chromosome that are variably silenced, and different patches of the brain will use different alleles.

And guys, don’t think you can escape this phenomenon: epigenetic regulation is simply a little bit sloppy, and so your brains have random inactivation of some undetermined set of regulated alleles. It’s not as simple as having a boy set of genes and a girl set of genes that are uniformly and universally working in a predictable way in every brain.

But that’s only adding to Willingham’s points. Male and female are clearly insufficient labels to pigeonhole the complexity of the human brain.

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By the way, if you want to see the inverse of this argument, take a look at this inane tweet.

Starting to suspect that non-binary, feminism, and transphobia discussions in my family became disconnected from MSM’s version a few years ago.

From my sister-in-law, exiled Prof. Heather Heying: https://t.co/mGtZVOSn9t

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) December 26, 2017

Among sexually-reproducing multicellular organisms, nearly every species has two distinct gamete types (“anisogamy”).

Female: big, cytoplasmically rich, sessile.
Male: small and mobile.

That is true. If only we could reduce human beings to single reproductive cells, the gender binary would be valid. Unfortunately for their perspective, it isn’t. Our brains are not single-celled gametes, and I would hope don’t even contain any gametes, which would be creepy and icky.

I have fond memories of reading James Michener’s The Source as a teenager — in case you are unacquainted with that author, his schtick was to pick a geographical place and then write a long episodic novel covering its fictional history over thousands of years. The Source is about a mound in Israel, so he writes a chapter about a family at the dawn of agriculture growing wheat there, a small town and their Ba’als, a crusader castle, a group of soldiers in the Arab-Israeli War, you get the idea. It’s a series of vignettes in the long history of this region.

I had a cheap copy of this book I hadn’t read in decades, and just started skimming the beginning. The framing device in this novel is the story of the archaeological excavation at the site led by a man named Cullinane, digging up artifacts that are then used as the centerpiece of each story. And that is the problem. It’s unreadable. It was published in 1965, and it shows.

The first sign of trouble is the characters, who fit awkward stereotypes of The American, The Israeli, The Palestinian. The members of a kibbutz are helping with the labor of the site, and the story spends way too much time talking about how beautiful and scantily-clad the young women are. An Israeli woman named Vered Bar-El is a Ph.D. with substantial credentials as Israel’s “top expert in dating pottery”, but the story starts going in a strange direction. Cullinane is day-dreaming about marrying this petite, pretty girl with flashing eyes working at his side — she has given him no signals anywhere in the story that she’s at all interested in him romantically. In fact, we learn that she’s engaged to another scholar working there…a fellow that Cullinane tries to convince himself is not right for her. And then, suddenly, with no real reciprocal development between the characters,

And then one night in mid-July as he inspected the dig in moonlight he was alerted by someone moving along the northern edge of the plateau, and he suspected it might be a worker out to steal a Crusader relic; but it was Vered Bar-El, and he ran to her with a kind of release and caught her in his arms, kissing her with a vigor that astonished both of them. Slowly she pushed him away, holding on to the lapels of his field jacket and looking up at him with her dark, saucy eyes.

WTF? And this is treated as perfectly ordinary behavior in the field? She, a scholar with a fiance, is not at all shocked at this unprofessional behavior by her team leader? Michener was apparently incapable of imagining this scene from a woman’s perspective.

It makes me sad. I read this book in my teens and it went right over my head, and I just thought archaeology sounded neat and fun and interesting. I wonder how a teenaged girl would have felt about the discipline if they read that — dig leaders get to fantasize about the women working with them, and abruptly give them vigorous kisses.

Now I’m also wondering how common this casual dismissal of women was in the popular literature that might have influenced people’s choice of careers.

From Reddit:

The common mode of sexual intercourse is not even natural. Our genitals are not for pleasure, they are for procreation, and that occurs when two people are very much in love and wanting to reproduce. Nature takes its course when the couple are asleep laying naked and embraced. Procreation occurs by the vagina acting as a vacuum, drawing the flaccid penis inside to a climax and eventually, ejaculation.

The vagina then releases the penis, all the while not disturbing the peacefully sleeping couple.

Forceful sexual intercourse is unnatural.

Before you start screaming “POE!”, note that I don’t give a fuck about poes. If they’re saying it, they’re saying it. I also looked into this person’s posting history, and this is all they write about, how yucky sex is.

For years we’ve been seeing women rise through the training ranks of academic science, experiencing fearsome attrition, but we said that men were also being weeded out by grad school and post-doc positions and the harsh competition to land a tenure-track position. And then we noticed that a smaller proportion of women were actually getting those jobs, so we mostly shrugged our shoulders and said, well, it’s a painful grind to get there, so it must be fair (how intolerable it would be if we all suffered unnecessarily, after all), and so the ladies must simply be less capable of handling the rigors of a career in science — said rigors being the same obstacles that the Men of Science created and put in place. We talked about estrogen and “nurturers” as if those were inimical to doing science, instead of irrelevant (although I try to imagine a culture of science that were more nurturing and supportive and cooperative, and can’t help but think that that would be so much better). We try to pretend that hey, these differences in outcomes are purely biological or genetic or hormonal, and gosh, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, maybe we’ll answer the question of how it happens later, if we just throw more men at the analysis.

I think the question has been answered repeatedly. People have written at length about the answer. It seems that every month there’s another piece that summarizes the real source of the problem — the latest, and it’s a good one, is in Marie Claire magazine. The answer, as always, is the same.

Male scientists are the product of a misogynistic culture, and they like to pretend that they’re objective, self-aware participants in that culture, even when they’re oblivious, and see exploitation of women as their due. It’s droit du seigneur for the 21st century. We’re not going to fix it until more men wake up, or, since that’s unlikely, more women crack the ranks of science and slap the men awake.

Or we can just wait for the old male scientists to die off.