If you’re multicellular, you can’t help but be mosaic

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.

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

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.

Never go back and read the books you liked as a youngster

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.

Why you shouldn’t let virginal sex-haters write sex advice

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.

Another piece that places the blame squarely on the science establishment, as it should

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.

Cloaking hatred with a thin veil of love

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is The Scathing Atheist, and it lives up to its name. One of the regular bits on the show is called the diatribe, where they just cut loose and fulminate for a few minutes on some subject that has sparked their rage, and while I don’t always agree with it, I do have to respect a righteous rant. Last week, they focused their fire on Ray Moore, and the topic of the diatribe was how Christianity has become, or perhaps always has been, a religion of hate. It has become a reliable motivator of evangelical Christians lately — they will throw away all their principles, cast off even the illusion of morality, and vote for whatever racist, sexist pig screams the loudest and angriest about Muslims or the gays or the liberals or the transgenders or the Chinese or whatever other has caught their eye this week. It has become an ideology that serves only tribalism, without regard for any positive belief.

I agree with that diatribe. Religion is not a benefit to mankind in any way, and we’d be better off without it — or more fundamentally, we’d be better off without this tribal thinking that divides humanity into Us and Them. But I also think the show didn’t bring up two other important points (which is OK, if they threw in everything the podcast would be longer than my gym time).

One is that religion is often a master of Orwellian subterfuge. You can point out how often religious thinkers are endorsing hate, but the true believer will simply look a millimeter deep at the holy texts and tell you that they are all about love. I’ve seen no clearer example of this than a recent declaration by the United States Council of Catholic Bishops. It’s all about love and understanding and forgiveness, don’t you know.

At the outset they make their position crystal clear.

As leaders of various communities of faith throughout the United States, many of us came together in the past to affirm our commitment to marriage as the union of one man and one woman and as the foundation of society. We reiterate that natural marriage continues to be invaluable to American society.

We come together to join our voices on a more fundamental precept of our shared existence, namely, that human beings are male or female and that the socio-cultural reality of gender cannot be separated from one’s sex as male or female.

We acknowledge and affirm that all human beings are created by God and thereby have an inherent dignity. We also believe that God created each person male or female; therefore, sexual difference is not an accident or a flaw—it is a gift from God that helps draw us closer to each other and to God. What God has created is good. “God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).

No gay marriage — it’s unnatural. There are only two genders, male and female, and you will accommodate yourself to the one God gave you. That, bluntly, is what this document is about: a gang of old celibates are here to inform you of the truth about sex and gender and identity, and in the name of love will tell you who you get to love.

But they’re going to surround their authoritarian perspective with a good amount of fluffy padding. The only difference between Westboro Baptist and the Catholic Church is the amount of pretense they package around their hate.

A person’s discomfort with his or her sex, or the desire to be identified as the other sex, is a complicated reality that needs to be addressed with sensitivity and truth. Each person deserves to be heard and treated with respect; it is our responsibility to respond to their concerns with compassion, mercy and honesty. As religious leaders, we express our commitment to urge the members of our communities to also respond to those wrestling with this challenge with patience and love.

Sensitivity and truth, patience and love…we know members of our communities are struggling with the complexities of identity and desire, and we’re going to listen attentively to you before we crush your concerns with brutal simplifications. And then we’re going to go all But the children! on you. You transgender men and women are hurting the children and destroying our society, but we love you anyway, if you’ll conform.

Children especially are harmed when they are told that they can “change” their sex or, further, given hormones that will affect their development and possibly render them infertile as adults. Parents deserve better guidance on these important decisions, and we urge our medical institutions to honor the basic medical principle of “first, do no harm.” Gender ideology harms individuals and societies by sowing confusion and self-doubt. The state itself has a compelling interest, therefore, in maintaining policies that uphold the scientific fact of human biology and supporting the social institutions and norms that surround it.

Religious leaders who claim their adherence to the scientific fact of human biology while dispensing fact-free ideological recommendations to medical institutions are disingenuous hypocrites. Fuck off, you frauds.

The movement today to enforce the false idea—that a man can be or become a woman or vice versa—is deeply troubling. It compels people to either go against reason—that is, to agree with something that is not true—or face ridicule, marginalization, and other forms of retaliation.

Read that paragraph again. Who is facing ridicule, marginalization, and other forms of retaliation? It’s not the frequently bullied transgender boys and girls, or the young people who are asexual or bisexual or androgynous or queer. These old assholes fear that acceptance of people’s identities will lead to them being ridiculed for trying to enforce a false binary. They are the victims, in their heads. How troubling!

We desire the health and happiness of all men, women, and children. Therefore, we call for policies that uphold the truth of a person’s sexual identity as male or female, and the privacy and safety of all. We hope for renewed appreciation of the beauty of sexual difference in our culture and for authentic support of those who experience conflict with their God-given sexual identity.

They desire health and happiness for all who accept the narrow dictates of the Church, who ignore the sexual identity expressed in their minds, and adopt one of two (and only two!) gender roles, the traditional masculine and feminine. And the genitals you were born with had better well align with those roles!

This is all counterfactual assertion and raw denial, with the intent of condemning and ostracizing the people who refuse to conform to their rules. It is a call to the tribal majority to reject the outsiders, the weirdos, those strange Others who do not accept their arbitrary rules, or their supernatural justification for them. But notice how they mask it all with the language of kindness and love. I’m sure the Inquisition also thought the thumbscrews were a loving way to bring heretics to the grace of God.

Hey, there’s a second point I wanted to make, but it’s one I’ve made before, and maybe I’ll let it rest with just a brief mention. If we’re going to rail against the hateful tribalism of religion, we should do likewise with atheism. There’s a significant component of the atheist movement that has sent it sliding off the rails: those atheists who equate reason and rationalism with hating Muslims, all Muslims, or with contempt for feminism. This represents a cheap appeal for popularity that is as vile as Catholic bishops spitting on gay marriage, and on transgender men and women — it’s an attempt to fuel the movement with hate. It might just work, as far as growth goes. But it also produces a framework for thinking that I don’t want to be a part of.

Can atheism, at least, be an idea that is willing to accept people for who they are, rather than trying to wedge them into ill-fitting pigeonholes?

Is “celebrity” synonymous with “hemorrhoid”?

I’m beginning to think so. The latest asshat to have used his influence to engage in sexual harassment is “celebrity” chef* Mario Batali, who then issued an apology for his behavior as his business and reputation flamed out with spectacular rapidity. He’s resigned from his multiple restaurants, he’s lost his TV appearances, and Walmart and Target aren’t selling his line of crap anymore. I’m a little exasperated with the big rich guys who suddenly decide an apology after the fact will rescue their crumbling empires, but Batali took it to the next level. His apology starts out well, but then…

How can you possibly hold groping unconscious women against me? I give you pizza dough cinnamon roles! Delicious!

Do the substitution. Hemorrhoid Chef Mario Batali. You’ll never want to eat there again.

How to purge yourself of The Gay

I was darned close to a perfect 0 on the Kinsey scale, exclusively heterosexual. But let’s face it, we’re all able to experience some degree of same-sex attraction — even I could feel a little internal tremor when I saw Jason Mamoa. But no more. I have achieved a perfect 0. You might ask how, how can you too drive yourself to Absolute Heterosexual Manliness? And I will tell you.

I started reading this interview with Matt Damon, who I might once have said was reasonably attractive in the right light. But as I read deeper, I first felt that there was something mildly disturbing here, like, how can he be so self-centered about accusations of harassment? Then when he starts rationalizing about how we ought to forgive Louis CK because he has been punished enough, the self-loathing started to well up. And then by the time he says his response to a hypothetical accusation against himself would be to lawyer up and buy her off, my journey was complete: I now hate all men. Jason, I’m sorry. I couldn’t bear to spend any time with you now.

I thought that was enough. I was now pure. But I didn’t know that Tom Hanks — sweet, avuncular, gentle Tom Hanks — was going to speak up.

He he told the New York Post newspaper’s Page Six column: If you threw out every film or TV show that was made by an a**hole, Netflix would go out of business. I think you do just have … to wait because this is a long game.

Fuck damn. I’m thoroughly suffused with the spirit of misandry now. All of my Y chromosomes are cowering in a dark corner of my nuclei. This might be sorta like a massive autoimmune reaction, and I might die.

The Hayek revelations

Good grief. I just read Salma Hayek’s piece in the New York Times. It’s a horror through and through — Harvey Weinstein is a terrible human being. There was the familiar constant pressure for sex, and his anger when denied, but what’s new here is how Weinstein, who had a reputation for sponsoring great art movies, was in active force in compromising the art. What he did to Hayek’s movie, Frida, was unconscionable.

Halfway through shooting, Harvey turned up on set and complained about Frida’s “unibrow.” He insisted that I eliminate the limp and berated my performance. Then he asked everyone in the room to step out except for me. He told me that the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie. So he told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role.

Frida Kahlo did many self-portraits, and her striking appearance was part of her identity, and Weinstein wanted to reduce her looks to something more conventional? She was afflicted with polio as a child and severely injured in an accident in her teens, and lived her whole life with a disability and chronic pain, and Weinstein wanted to erase that in a biography? How clueless is he, and how many of the good Weinstein-produced movies were made in spite of his interference, and how much better would they have been if he’d never been allowed to say a word?

He offered me one option to continue. He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman. And he demanded full-frontal nudity.

Christ. Hayek gave in on that demand, reluctantly, and with much anguish. But now you’ll need to keep this in mind next time you watch Game of Thrones or some cop show which features a stroll through a strip joint. The nudity isn’t some critical part of the story, or even a part of the atmosphere added for verisimilitude. It’s probably because some guy high up in the production likes the power of being able to compel the women acting in his show to expose themselves. It’s not that nudity and sex can’t be a natural part of a story, but that there’s so much of it, and it’s almost entirely gratuitous.

It sort of turns out well, with regard to the movie, at least…except for the part where Hayek’s success was added to the Weinstein luster, and that he then intentionally stunted her career.

Months later, in October 2002, this film, about my hero and inspiration — this Mexican artist who never truly got acknowledged in her time with her limp and her unibrow, this film that Harvey never wanted to do, gave him a box office success that no one could have predicted, and despite his lack of support, added six Academy Award nominations to his collection, including best actress.

Even though “Frida” eventually won him two Oscars, I still didn’t see any joy. He never offered me a starring role in a movie again. The films that I was obliged to do under my original deal with Miramax were all minor supporting roles.

It seems just to me that Weinstein’s reputation as a patron of the arts is going down in flames, along with his reputation as a decent person.

All the 14 year old girls in America just burned me…and probably you

It’s OK, though, because this open letter in McSweeney’s is entirely accurate and honest, and also hilarious. The girls explain that they don’t want to have sex with us.

But it’s not just about us. It’s about you, being ancient. You still think you’re so young, don’t you? Yeah… no. Each and every one of you is just wrinkled, withering proof that mortality comes for us all. If you remember where you were on 9/11, you’re too old for us. Did just thinking about that make you feel old? That’s because you’re old. You’re all a thousand to us. Your faces make us sad.

And you know what? Even if we seem interested — even if we SAY we’re into you — here is a cool idea: Don’t listen to us! Who lets an eighth grader just do whatever she wants? We also want to drive cars. We want to drink beer. We want to slap peanut butter on a Pop-Tart and call it a well-balanced breakfast. This Roy Moore guy, 100 percent, is the kind of dad who wouldn’t let his own daughter wear eyeliner, for fuck’s sake. So like, be the adult in the room. Okay? Don’t make us be the grown-ups here. We hate that.

All it takes is a little self-awareness to understand this. I wonder who lacks that? Only one of the creepiest guys in the country.

It’s a start

I’m not going to praise Time magazine, since they’re just another tool of the conservative establishment, but they did make a wise choice in their selection for their Person of the Year cover, “The Silence-Breakers”, all the women who have started a wave of change against a culture of harassment.

Donald Trump gets several mentions in the article, and they aren’t flattering. He must be fuming. Frame it and put that on the wall of your golf courses, Donnie boy. I hope these women are part of the reaction that tears you down.

I hope this recognition is a small part of a change that’s beginning — just beginning. There’s a long way to go. I’m just reminded of how disgracefully our social media has been shaped to be a tool enabling harassers to thrive: how Facebook is openly discriminating against women who protest, while I know of a great many men on Twitter who are notorious abusers, and still are given a platform. Like Donald Trump.