They just won’t let it go. Some evolutionary psychologists are determined to salvage the idea that “pink is for girls, blue is for boys” has a biological basis. Marco Del Giudice goes digging with Google’s ngram viewer to collect data on whether pink and blue actually have undergone a consistent shift in preferences by sex (something no one has claimed), and thinks he has found evidence to overturn an idea he imagines that EP critics hold. It’s an amazing miss.

The role of pink and blue as gender markers is a source of endless fascination for both academics and the broader public.

Dude. No. We don’t find this pink and blue nonsense fascinating at all. We find evolutionary psychologists constant struggle to find biological significance in cultural phenomena exasperating. What is it with your bizarre obsession?

Five years ago I documented how a narrative that I labeled the “pink–blue reversal” (PBR) had become entrenched in contemporary culture (Del Giudice, 2012).

First, every true American knows that PBR stands for Pabst Blue Ribbon.

But secondly, there is no entrenched “pink–blue reversal” narrative. What is confirmed is that some people have insisted that there is an absolute, biological difference in how men and women percieve the world based on no evidence at all, and they were routed by observations of cultural variations that reveal that these color preferences are not hard-coded by evolution at all, but are conditioned responses to social signals.

There are biases. Visit a toy store; they all have the notorious pink aisle, where toys intended for girls are an eye-burning wash of hot pink. There has been no reversal. The question is whether girls are biologically programmed to prefer pink, the better to pick ripe fruit or respond to blushing or fevers, and that’s been shown to be a hypothesis without any good evidence, and a lot of counter-evidence.

The entrenched narrative is that evolutionary psychologists are full of shit. This paper does nothing to show that’s wrong. Quite the contrary: it demonstrates they’re even more full of shit than we imagined.

The PBR maintains that, in the U.S., pink was associated with males and blue with females until the 1940s, when the convention underwent a rapid and complete reversal. At the time, the PBR was treated as established fact in the media and the scientific literature. However, its originator—American Studies researcher Jo Paoletti—never argued that the convention was reversed prior to the 1940s, but only that it was inconsistent (Paoletti, 1987, 1997, 2012).

Oh, look. The point is sailing over the author’s head. I think it’s achieved escape velocity.

Again, that’s the goddamned point. Evolutionary psychologists want to claim a perceptual bias honed by millennia of hunter-gatherer selection on the African plains; everyone else points out that color fads in fashion fluctuate on a time-scale of years or decades, so you don’t get to invoke genetics as a basis for them.

Evolutionary psychologists come back to claim that the inconsistency makes their opponents wrong.

So what does his irrelevant data look like? Here’s a plot of his discovery of pink/blue color references by sex in books, over the last 140 years. He multiplies the frequency by 10⁷ because the numbers are really tiny, but there is an initially small but steadily rising preference for claiming pink is a girl’s color and blue is a boy’s color over that time.

Clearly, this is evidence of a selective sweep for a pink gene in colors over the course of five generations. (No, it’s not). He argues that the UK was much more consistent in claiming that “pink is for girls”, and it’s just a few instances among those weird American books that claim “blue for girls”.

But wait. That’s from books. What about newspapers and magazines?

In total, the database of quotes from newspapers and magazines comprised 34 instances of standard coding and 28 instances of reverse coding. The combined data are plotted in Fig. 2. While the number of occurrences in the figure is too small to draw confident conclusions, the distribution of standard versus reversed gender coding looks approximately even, at least until about 1920.

(I love the way he labels “blue for boys” as standard coding and “blue for girls” as reverse coding, despite the fact that his own data shows that they’re approximately equal in frequency. Let your biases hang out!)

So the color assignments are basically equal by sex until about 1920, when suddenly the assignment of pink to boys plummets dramatically! An even faster selective sweep!

Del Giudice finds this significant.

The discrepancy between the two searches raises an intriguing historical puzzle. While the PBR account remains unsupported, quotes from newspapers and magazines suggest a pattern of variable and/or conflicting conventions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see the Appendix section). However, the marked inconsistency observed in newspapers is virtually absent from the books published in the same period; instead, the pattern found in books overwhelmingly conforms to the standard convention of pink for girls and blue for boys.

I repeat: this “PBR” thing is a strawman made of bullshit. What has been pointed out repeatedly is exactly what he says here: “variable and/or conflicting conventions”. His work confirms what EP critics have been saying all along.

He also thinks the difference between books and magazines is a mystery. No, it’s not. He’s talking about a period when color printing was becoming increasingly common.

“When color began to be added to the products themselves,” Banta writes, “advances in color printing and reproduction followed. Starting in the 1920s, American consumers went from a commercial world of white towels and black Model Ts to a range of products with a fantastic palette of hues from which to choose.”

Right. So it wasn’t genes. It was a shift that occurred as the media began to impose color conventions on the public. It’s exactly what we’d expect if sociocultural influences were fixing arbitrary preferences on us.

Thanks to Matt Lodder for bringing this crap to my attention and getting my morning off to a pissed-off start.

---

---

Del Giudice, M (2017) Pink, Blue, and Gender: An Update. Arch Sex Behav (2017). doi:10.1007/s10508-017-1024-3

The Illinois News-Gazette has an interesting twist in an editorial. Read it and let’s see if you can detect a bit of bias here.

One recent blot on the UI’s reputation, one that received statewide attention, was the disgracefully successful effort by a faculty ideologue to block a planned speech on cancer research by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. Alas, the faculty members who were so agitated by the Salaita episode were conspicuously silent about the cancellation of a talk by Dr. James Watson, an esteemed 89-year-old molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist.

Kate Clancy, a faculty member at the University of Illinois, is a faculty ideologue.

James Watson is an esteemed 89-year-old molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist.

Clancy is a well-regarded anthropologist with a commendable record of public outreach. Watson, on the other hand, as every biologist knows, has a reputation as a raving loose cannon with deplorable ideas about women and black people. You wouldn’t go to a talk by him to hear about new developments in cancer research, you’d go anticipating the moment when it would go off the rails and produce a spectacular crash, and you’d be disappointed if he managed to stay focused (which he wouldn’t). It would be very exciting in the way that a NASCAR race is — cars going around and around in circles, livened up with the occasional disaster.

That editorial is grossly misinformed about the actual situation, and the author is relying on superficial information with an authoritarian twist — Watson has a Nobel prize! He would never deliver a talk about oversexed African men, spiced up with slides of women in bikinis! Except that he did. I’ve had my own encounter with Jim Watson, and really…he’s not a good choice for a speaker anywhere.

Unfortunately, that misleading editorial has now led to online harassment, and for Clancy to fear for her safety. This looks trivial, but it’s actually rather chilling.

Why would you email someone, and then drive to their home and leave a note to tell them to check their mail? One reason: to let them know that you know where they live.

Clancy has a recommendation. Let this newspaper know how dishonest and dangerous they were by publishing such nonsense.

She has a fine statement on their fundamental dishonesty.

Now, he and his followers are acting as if me publicly calling him a “garbage human” is the equivalent to what he has done to me. In truth, he and his followers cannot begin to imagine what it is to have to constantly beg for and fight for your basic humanity in a culture that fundamentally refuses to acknowledge it. He cannot imagine what it is to spend years and years being the target of floods of harassment and hate, and then to still go out there and keep fighting. The companion of his who made that apology video I referenced earlier also tweeted that women are “powerful” enough to “deal with things like workplace harassment to rape.” As if power is in accepting a culture in which women are second-class citizens, in which misogyny and workplace harassment and rape are the norm. Fuck that. I’ll never settle for that. You’re damn right I’m powerful. After everything I’ve been put through by Carl and other men just like him, I’m still powerful enough to go out there and try to change it.

Just the fact that they’re trying to conceal their history and pretend to moral equivalence tells you that they’re a gang of smug goons.

I’m constantly spammed by the Weatherspoon Institute, one of those right-wing think tanks that is, as part of its mission, adamantly opposed to homosexuality, marriage equality, etc., and they’re notorious for having funded and guided the infamous Regnerus study that claimed that children raised by gay parents were at greater risk for all kinds of social ills.

It’s not my favorite organization. I didn’t personally subscribe to their newsletter, it’s just one of many that people who don’t like me sign me up for, thinking I’ll be horrified and offended by it, when actually I find it interestingly bad and sometimes browse to find weird stuff. Message to people who do that kind of thing: it doesn’t work. Would you believe that seeing the hate some people have for gay and lesbian people makes me sympathize with the homosexual population more?

Anyway, a recent newsletter highlighted this article, Why are so many lesbians getting pregnant?. I thought that was actually an interesting question. I’d like to know! It was also an interesting read because so much of it was discombobulating — that author would make some statement, I’d actually agree with it (or not), but then he’d make some mental leap in interpreting it that left me baffled. Like this claim at the very beginning:

One’s sexual orientation is supposed to be locked in and unchangeable, like sex, race, or ethnicity.

It is? Who says? Keep in mind this article is talking about teenagers and sex; I suspect sexual orientation has a fair bit of flexibility, at least if you’re not brought up in a family or peer group that imposes severe costs on deviation from expected behaviors. I can believe that there are distinct biases in individual preferences from an early age, but that they’re also shaped by experience. Witherspoonians seem to be trying to argue that their critics are complete gender absolutists, while they are open-minded about the fluidity of sexual response, probably because they’re the kind of people who want to promote a “gay cure”. I think. There are many hidden premises in this article that I don’t share.

Then the very next sentence confuses me.

But high pregnancy rates among lesbians confound that narrative.

Why does it confuse the narrative? Does the author think sexual orientation and pregnancy are in lockstep? That lesbians should be incapable of pregnancy? That pregnancy is always a matter of choice and preference? So many assumptions implied by that little sentence.

But then he’s going to deploy logic. Too often this is a dangerous sign, as it proves to be in this case, that the author doesn’t understand logic, except to know it’s a good thing.

It makes for an illogical syllogism.

Premise A: Lesbians are sexually attracted to women only.

Premise B: Women cannot impregnate women.

Conclusion: Lesbians have higher pregnancy rates than non-lesbian women.

It’s contrary to all reason, but it’s true. Lesbians have significantly higher pregnancy rates than their heterosexual peers.

Hang on there, guy. You’ve somehow linked “sexual attraction” and “pregnancy rates” as if one is a logical consequence of the other. You know they obviously aren’t, right?

This smacks of the common argument that evolution implies that homosexuality cannot exist, because gay people would be unable to breed or spread their gay genes, except that it’s in reverse. It’s got the same logical flaw, though, the assumption that sexual orientation, a product of the brain, is inflexibly linked to biological reproduction, a product of the gonads.

The logic is also flawed by sloppy definitions all around. What is a “lesbian”? Is it any woman who prefers the company of other women? A woman who only ever has sex with other women? Does a lesbian who is raped immediately stop being a lesbian? And how about defining “woman”? He seems to think of women as a pair of functioning ovaries, but again with the disconnect between gonads and brains — what about women who have functioning testes?

(We will pause for a moment to give those, even those of a liberal bent, who seem to be incapable of dissociating minds from genitalia, time to wipe up the saliva they just spluttered all over their computers.)

Are you back now? OK. Another thing about that syllogism — we can rework it in lots of different ways. Another interpretation might be that teenage women who get pregnant develop an aversion to men that makes lesbianism a much more appealing label. Or that this should be a discussion about unwanted pregnancies, rather than sexual orientation, and it’s mangling causally unrelated issues to routinely associate desire with reproduction.

I’m trying to puzzle out what point the author is trying to make, though. There are interesting observations in here, but they seem to avoid testing alternative interpretations.

Multiple studies with samples drawn from various nations find that sexual-minority youth aged fourteen to nineteen have pregnancy rates two to seven times greater than their heterosexual peers. Their pregnancy rates continue to rise, even though the overall teen pregnancy rate is declining in the United States.

So I actually read the paper cited to support the “two to seven times” data. Seems kosher. But the important point is glossed over by our Witherspoonian.

Over half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended – that is, they are mistimed (occurring earlier than the woman wanted) or unwanted (not wanted at any time). In addition to derailing life plans, these pregnancies are commonly linked to a variety of negative health and well-being indicators for women and their children, including lower levels of prenatal care and breastfeeding; and higher levels of premature delivery, low birth weight, child abuse, intimate partner violence, and maternal depression and anxiety (accounting for background characteristics).

Over half of all pregnancies are unintended or unwanted — that is for all women of all ages. It’s almost certainly much higher for teen pregnancies. This sounds like the basis for arguing for a greater expansion of abortion rights and sex education than it is for some peculiar conservative reaction against homosexuality. It also makes a complete hash of those fallacious arguments that certain sexual behaviors are “natural” or “right” for human beings — a heck of a lot of heterosexual behaviors seem to be undesirable and unpleasant for at least one of the people involved.

But wait until you see his conclusion.

Lesbianism and gayness are more different than they are similar in very fundamental ways. The gay male is more likely to stay in one lane for life, even while his sexual desire is generally more aggressive and he seeks greater diversity in partners than do women. However, judging by the pregnancy-risk data, younger men who identify as homosexual appear to be much more fluid in their actions than has been previously assumed. Does this mean that male same-sex attraction is more developmental than it is fixed? We don’t know.

But it’s a question worth researching. This has important policy implications for today. When we establish certain rights and accessibilities based on one’s sexual orientation and identity—and thus the punishment and severe public shaming of those who violate them—we are operating on ground that is more subjective than many would like us to believe.

I say hold on to your horses for that first paragraph: it assumes considerable uniformity in how gays and lesbians behave, erases a lot of individual preferences, and ignores the contributions of a culture that generally condemns all homosexual behavior. Those aren’t necessarily human universals, but rather a consequence of complex interactions between society and psychology.

But then that last bit that I highlighted — I agree 100%! We should not restrict rights to individuals on the basis of sexual identity. Gay and lesbian couples should have all of the same rights and privileges as heterosexual couples, without question.

But here is where I get hopelessly confused. The author of that commendable statement is Glenn Stanton, who works for…Focus on the Family Patriarchy. GLAAD has a page of quotes from Stanton. He opposes same sex marriage because it not only redefines marriage wholesale for everyone, but it actually deconstructs humanity itself. I don’t know how he reconciles that with his view above that using sexual orientation to establish rights is inherently subjective.

But even worse, he said “it was shameful, manipulative, and not good parenting for two dads to allow their daughter to make a video defending her family”. So non-traditional families don’t even have the right to defend their choices?

And of course he’s a fundamentalist/evangelical Christian.

All sexual sin is wrong because it fails to mirror the Trinitarian image, but homosexuality does more than fail. It’s a particularly evil lie of Satan because he knows that it overthrows the very image of the Trinitarian God in creation, revealed in the union of male and female.

I now have the feeling that I’m missing some secret coded message in that admirable final sentence from his article, because it doesn’t jibe at all with his ideological stance elsewhere, the position of his organization, or the typical sectarian views of his Christian cult.

I’m confused so much now, because I’m a biologist and this sociology/psychology stuff is so dang complicated and messy and hard. But at least one thing I got out of it was one useful datum I can bring up when people make that stupid “homosexuality can’t evolve” argument.

Bill Cosby is out, and of course he has a plan for his life: to lecture young men on how to avoid getting caught.

Bill Cosby will organize a series of town hall meetings to help educate young people about problems their misbehavior could create, a spokesman for Cosby said Thursday.
Cosby is eager to get back to work following a deadlocked jury and mistrial in his sexual assault trial, spokesman Andrew Wyatt told Birmingham, Alabama, TV station WBRC.

“We’ll talk to young people. Because this is bigger than Bill Cosby. You know, this, this issue can affect any young person, especially young athletes of today,” Wyatt said. “And they need to know what they’re facing when they’re hanging out and partying, when they’re doing certain things they shouldn’t be doing.

This is exactly what the rapist has been doing for years.

Lecturing isn’t new for Cosby. In recent years, the comedian and actor became known for scolding fellow African-Americans for poor grammar, sloppy dress and not valuing education, critiques that drew fire from some as elitist.

He’s just going to add one more item to his repertoire: how to use a date-rape drug with sophistication.

I’ve seen this happen so often, and not just to women. You’re on a panel; it’s not a debate, but an opportunity for a group of people who supposedly respect each other to discuss a topic. Then there’s one guy (and in my experience, it’s always a guy) who’s practically vibrating with enthusiasm and is eager to interrupt at any point with his point. He may not even disagree with other panelists — he’s just absolutely certain that he can explain everything better than everyone else. A prime example of this occurred at the World Science Festival. Here’s the perspective of one attendee.

So, after thinking about this over night, I’ve decided to share something that happened at the WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL yesterday afternoon in NYC that changed me. Or rather made me step into who I am in a larger way.
As some on my feed have seen, I was live-feeding the beginning of the panel discussion on FB. That panel was made up of some of the greatest and most famous minds in the world in Inflationary Cosmology, String Theory, Cosmology and Physics based Philosophy. The panel was made up of 5 men and 1 woman. And the moderator was a science writer and journalist for The New Yorker.
In the first hour of the panel discussion you can see clearly, if watching the video, that Veronika Hubeny, the only woman on the panel is barely given any opportunity to speak. And the Moderator, Jim Holt even acknowledges this.
In the last 20-30 minutes of the 90 minute discussion Jim Holt finally pushes the conversation to Hubeny’s field of expertise, string theory, and this is what ensued:
He asked her to describe her two theories of string theory that seem to contradict one another.
And THEN, without letting her answer, proceeded to answer for her and describe HER theories in detail without letting her speak for herself.
We could clearly see that she was trying to speak up. But he continued to talk over her and dominate the space for several minutes.
I should say that this panel was taking place in a large auditorium as it is an extremely high-profile and always sold-out event. And the panel discussion was being live-streamed across the world and they say that millions of people watch these videos after they are made public. (Which they already are).
So at this point, after seeing very clearly that she was not going to be given space to speak and in fact having her own theories described to the audience by the moderator, I am in full outrage. My body is actually beginning to shake. The sexism is beyond blatant. It is happening on stage and NO ONE, not a single other physicist or panelist is stepping in to say anything about it. And I can hear other audience members around me, both men and women becoming more and more agitated with what is happening. Jim Holt, even at one point, asks Veronica a question and she laughs because he has been answering his own questions about her work…and he makes fun of her for ‘giggling’.
So at some point while he is Still talking about Her theories, I just can’t handle it any longer.
With my hands shaking,
I finally say from my seat in the 2nd row of the audience, as clearly, directly and loudly as possible;
“Let. Her. Speak. Please!”
The moderator stops.
They all stop.
The auditorium drops into silence.
You could hear a pin drop.
And then the audience explodes with applause and screams.
Jim Holt eventually sat back, only after saying I was heckling him
And he let her speak.
And of course, she was brilliant.
———————–
So, the panel discussion ends.
My hands are still shaking. I’m still upset by the incredible sexism that has been demonstrated this afternoon. But I also realize that I just spoke up in an auditorium full of people that are listening to people that are considered gods in the international science world. I was just overwhelmed by it all
We get up to leave.
And then it happens.
Person after person come up to me. Both men and women.
The first woman, right behind me, reaches over and embraces me and says, “Oh my god. what you said was the most important thing that was said all day. Thank you. Thank you.”
And then people start filing out of their aisles and wind their way over to me:
“Was that you? Thank you so much for speaking up. Thank you.”
“Was that you? Oh god, what he was doing was horrific. Thank you. I wanted to do something but didn’t know how”
“Was that you? I wish I had the courage to say something, thank you! Thank you so much”
“Was that you? You said what everyone here was thinking. Look I had even been writing in my notebook what you eventually said (shows me his notebook with ‘let her speak’ written over and over.) But you said it. You said it. Thank you.”
“Was that you? Thank you! I felt so powerless to do anything.”
And on.
So we were all thinking this.
—-
So I walked out. And my friend who was sitting about 8 rows behind me, came up to me with a huge grin and said
“That was you, wasn’t it? Of course it was. YES!!!!! I will be telling this story for years.”
And the whole time, my hands are still shaking. And I’m felling light-headed. And I just want to scream out into the lobby “WHY IS THIS SEXISM STILL HAPPENING? WHY, does someone like me, with No status in that room, have to be so extraordinarily bold and speak up? And why was it so frightening to do so?”
And I’m thinking. “God, please god let this be an opening for those that were here today and the tens of thousands that watched the live-streaming of the panel yesterday and the hundreds of thousands that will watch the video this year- to speak up when we see this happening. And please let me not be afraid to do this again
…and again
…and again”
Because it was scary.
Please keep giving me courage.

I’m going to be on a bunch of panels at Convergence next month. I’ve done this many times before. When I’m on these panels, I tend to be very conscious of time and opportunity — I’m mentally measuring everyone’s contribution, to both make sure I get my turn with my very important opinion, and also to make sure I’m not dominating the conversation. It’s OK to say your piece and then sit back and listen.

The problem is particularly severe when you’ve got a chatty moderator who does his job of setting up a question and giving each panelist their moment to shine, but then can’t shut up and insists on explaining his perspective and interpretation of everything. Moderators should be there to smooth the flow of discussion among the panelists; they are not King Hot Stuff of the subject. Learn this: if you’re the designated moderator, it’s because you’ve been asked to serve the panel, not because you are the greatest expert who deserves the most time.

Moderators are not the show. They’re the guy who shines the spotlight on the people who are the show.

The plans have been leaked. We now know what will happen at the woman-only screenings of Wonder Woman. Gal Gadot is going to turn to the audience, and…

“Man’s time is over,” she said. “They have done all that they will do, all they are capable of doing.” And then she grabbed Chris Pine by the hair and slit his throat with a big double-edged axe that we’re pretty sure was not in the comics but that’s Hollywood for you.

“This is the labrys,” she told the audience as Chris Pine sputtered and choked on his own blood. “A symbol of woman’s power. It cuts away that which is false. It is a problem and a solution. Look under your seats.”

Each woman pulled a similar double-edged axe from under her seat. We do not know where they came from. We did not put them there. The Alamo Drafthouse did not arm the first Amazon Death Squad. We want to make that perfectly clear.

I’m hoping my wife likes me enough to keep me around to do the cooking and cleaning, but if she doesn’t, I have to look at the current occupant of the White House and agree, we fucked up badly.