Joe Soucheray has a few words on the recent UM football scandal.

No player involved appears to have risen to the moral or ethical clarity required of any man whose instinctive character would have compelled him to say, “Wait a minute. Stop. This isn’t right. This has gotten out of hand. Everybody clear this building.’’

Any man of character — we call football players men — would have not only cleared the building but would have helped the woman, taken her to the hospital, for example. Actually, if there were men of character around that night the bacchanal would never have happened and the woman would not have required a hospital visit.

There was no respect for anybody in that apartment. There does not appear to be any awareness of physical or mental health at stake. There does not appear to be any awareness of safety.

Exactly right. It’s not enough to simply say you’re not going to rape or harass or take advantage; you also have to refuse to turn your back when others do so. Our football team is full of cowards who’d rather avoid conflict than correct an injustice.

Soucheray has a recommendation for the football coach:

But what Claeys should have really said is, “I don’t want any of these players on the team. These players will never set foot in this practice facility again nor will they ever wear a Gopher football uniform as long as I am coach. If you don’t like it you can take your poorly formed idea of due process and shove it where the sun don’t shine.’’

Maybe our overpaid coach should be shown the door, and the next candidates should have their moral compass measured and calibrated before any are hired.

The full EOAA report, and the police report, of the University of Minnesota football team scandal, have been released. It’s 80 horrible pages.

I can see now why the police aren’t pressing charges — the victim would be crucified in court, because she went along with some of the activities that went on in that apartment, out of fear or drunkenness. I can also see why the university is taking action against them, because the football players who participated were awful, ghastly, horrible, rotten young men. I am even less sympathetic with the other team members who are supporting them.

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One bit of good news: the other players have ended their threatened boycott. It’s not clear whether it’s because they read the EOAA report, or because UM just got awarded a bowl game.

They’re all amused that I don’t understand biology, as evidence by my criticisms of Boghossian’s blatant biases. Would you believe Jordan Peterson chimed in, too? Oh, how I tremble in terror and shame. I have roused a loud army of dumbasses (get used to it, Trump generation).

Except…I’m reasonably confident in my knowledge, and my opponents seem to be grossly ignorant and pandering to the twin trickster gods of prejudice and common sense. Never trust those guys. So I’ll keep it simple. They don’t understand that distinction between brute fact and social knowledge.

Here’s a brute fact: John produces sperm. Jennifer produces ova, sometimes. There’s no denying these simple, measurable observations. Further, we’ll stipulate that these are healthy eggs and sperm, and that I can extract these cell types in the lab and combine them in a dish and create a healthy, growing diploid zygote, that I could then implant in an individual who has a uterus and grow to adulthood. In fact, if I wanted to engineer a master race, I could go through the population and segregate out the individuals who make sperm and those who make ova and begin doing all kinds of interesting biological experiments.

Now, here are some social facts: John is a man. Jennifer is a woman. And Racist Twitter is saying, “Of course!” Except that that has taken a simple brute fact, the presence of organs that produce gametes, and extrapolated it into the socially loaded gender terms that carry huge amounts of baggage and imply lots of details in our heads that aren’t necessarily true. For example, you might then imagine John is a bit larger and physically stronger than Jennifer, which, on average, is probably true, but not necessarily so.

Or you might assume John would be a better scientist than Jennifer, which is not at all true.

In their study, Moss-Racusin and her colleagues created a fictitious resume of an applicant for a lab manager position. Two versions of the resume were produced that varied in only one, very significant, detail: the name at the top. One applicant was named Jennifer and the other John. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues then asked STEM professors from across the country to assess the resume. Over one hundred biologists, chemists, and physicists at academic institutions agreed to do so. Each scientist was randomly assigned to review either Jennifer or John’s resume.

The results were surprising—they show that the decision makers did not evaluate the resume purely on its merits. Despite having the exact same qualifications and experience as John, Jennifer was perceived as significantly less competent. As a result, Jenifer experienced a number of disadvantages that would have hindered her career advancement if she were a real applicant. Because they perceived the female candidate as less competent, the scientists in the study were less willing to mentor Jennifer or to hire her as a lab manager. They also recommended paying her a lower salary. Jennifer was offered, on average, $4,000 per year (13%) less than John.

Having functional testes is not a requirement for a lab manager, yet our society as a whole has this mental shortcut that categorizes the suitability of individuals to particular jobs on the basis of a raft of irrelevant, but usually easily detectable, characters. This is a reality that those who want to reduce people to a definition based on sex are ignoring. Even when a social fact is turned into a brute fact by social scientists like Moss-Racusin, they deny. It’s kind of depressing.

Furthermore, I snuck in another social fact in that paragraph introducing John and Jennifer. Did you notice?

Why is the sperm-producing person named “John”, and the ovum-producing person named “Jennifer”? These are arbitrary signifiers that we associate with a gender, and then to their roles in culture, and to traits like their qualities as lab managers. Imagine if I’d started that paragraph “Jennifer produces sperm. John produces ova, sometimes.” Many people would be confused. They’d think I’d made a mistake. I’d created a conflict between their social assumptions and the brute fact of biology. But there are people named John who have ovaries.

Hmm. I wonder how good they are at lab management?

By the way, allow me to introduce Jessie^*. Jessie doesn’t produce sperm or ova, or maybe they do, but their behavior intentionally prevents reproduction. They do not dress in a socially conventional way for either gender. They do not engage in any of the standard courtship and mating customs of their culture. They ask you to use the non-gendered plural pronouns when addressing them.

But…but…there are only two sexes! We will struggle internally to fit Jessie into one of the two gender boxes convention allows. We must. We need to find some indication to help us accommodate our stereotypes.

Then we learn that Jessie is employed as a lab manager, and we are relieved. Jessie must be a “man”, then. We’ll be polite and continue to use the non-gendered pronouns, though. Or perhaps we’re an asshole like Jordan Peterson, and we’ll insist on forcing them into our biased pigeonholes.

And thus do we close the loop in our stereotypes and maintain the fiction of a binary reality, despite all the complicating evidence otherwise.

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^*Note that I snuck in yet another social fact for you to deal with: I chose what we consider a gender-neutral or ambiguous name for this person. But it can also be that someone named Jane or Joe chooses to defy those gender stereotypes, and then what happens? Everyone assumes Jane is female, of course. Even if Jane has testes hidden away under their school uniform. Because the gender binary must be served.

P.S. I forgot to mention the other criticism they’re shouting at me: “Myers is all ideological!” They’re completely oblivious to the fact that their position is blatantly ideological, too.

I admit to it. My ideology is to consider all of the evidence, even the stuff that makes my understanding of a situation more complicated.

Their ideology is to always make the evidence conform to their prior assumptions.

Case in point: Kasich has signed a law outlawing abortion in Ohio after 20 weeks.

Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is not a moderate or a doctor, today vetoed Ohio’s proposed “heartbeat bill,” which would have effectively banned abortion altogether by outlawing it at six weeks of pregnancy, when many women don’t know they’re pregnant. This isn’t good news, by the way, just a distraction from Kasich’s decision to sign off on another ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. And because we live in the Republic of Gilead now, the ban includes only one limited exception for the health of the patient—but not for cases of rape or incest, or for fetal abnormalities.

The 6 week bill was insane — not only are most women unlikely to know they’re pregnant, but even if they are, they’re unlikely to have any indications of potential problems, and some of the tests that can detect subtle problems take weeks to process…and you’re not going to have them done if you think it’s a routine pregnancy.

The 20 week bill isn’t much better. The standard recommendation for prenatal care is a check up once a month, and that check up is typically a simple pelvic exam and a measurement of external growth — it will detect gross problems in development but not the sneaky ones that will become apparent later. You might get one ultrasound examination, but it depends on your goddamn insurance. If you’re poor or have lousy insurance, you’re going to get nothing but the routine checkup, and we already know what Republicans think of health care.

The first fetal movements the mother can detect are at 13-16 weeks. Say there’s a problem; Mom and her doctor are going to be unconcerned if there is no quickening at the 12 week visit, but the doctor is going to get worried at 16 weeks and might give the pregnancy extra scrutiny, and might ask for extra tests (if the insurance will let you), but the alarm bells might not start ringing loudly until that 20 week visit. I kind of expect Ohio doctors will be putting a lot of extra effort into the 16 week visit from now on, but even then, it’s hard to justify extra tests if there are no apparent negative indications. Maybe Kasich is also investing much, much more money into prenatal care and screening for all Ohioans to catch problems earlier? (Hah. We know that’s not going to happen.)

There are going to be a lot of poor Ohio women — and well-off women whose pregnancies develop late problems — who are going to be told their pregnancy is life-threatening or non-viable, and who are simultaneously told that it can’t be terminated because it’s past the arbitrary deadline John Kasich decided would be the time he could get away with legally forcing them to host a dead or dying fetus. This is extreme ratfuckery. It is heartless and arbitrary. It is the act of an ignorant dumbass and a Republican…but I repeat myself.

I can guess at the political calculus going on right now. Women are less likely to vote for Republicans anyway. Pregnant women are only a small fraction of all women. Pregnant women with serious fetal problems are even rarer, so this is a negligible fraction of the electorate. Meanwhile, white male evangelicals who reflexively reject any expectation of bodily autonomy among their feeemales are the major electoral force that must be appeased. So, balancing intense, acute suffering of a few women vs. fostering the smug piety of Christian men, we know which one wins in Kasich’s mind.

As if that mind can empathize at all with women, that is.

I am simultaneously surprised and not surprised. Michael Shermer tweeted this:

Inez Milholland was a prominent suffragist, so it’s good to acknowledge her. But…

• He’s using her to promote an article by Christina Hoff Sommers, who is about as much of a feminist as I am a Republican.

• This article is about how it is inappropriate and weak for feminists to be dismayed about the election of Donald Trump. Don’t worry, girls, the patriarchy doesn’t exist!

• The article ends by accusing modern feminists of being hyperbolic and harping.

• You know what’s just not right? To use one feminist to berate a different feminist. We can see right through you guys: your beef is with feminism, period.

• Insulting modern feminists with slurs like fainting couchers is directly analogous to the insults given to the suffragettes of Milholland’s time.

• Somehow the only good feminists in some people’s minds are the feminists who died a hundred years ago.

• It’s telling that the “good feminist” is the beautiful white woman on a white horse wearing white robes. Dead symbols are so much easier to deal with than fractious, real, complicated people.

• The 1913 march is also known for it’s blatant segregation of black women who wanted to join in — they were sent to the back of the line. Unlike the old feminists he likes, “fainting couchers” now are intersectional.

• Over 100 women in that march were hospitalized for injuries they received from harassing men. But Shermer accepts Sommers’ claim that there is no patriarchy, women aren’t in any way oppressed?

Just to add arsenic icing to his poison cupcake, his next tweet praises Ben Shapiro. He later declares that he disagrees with Shapiro that transgender men and women are mentally ill, but never walks back the fact that this Shapiro fellow he’s praising is also homophobic, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-abortion, and doesn’t accept global climate change. But he’s sharp! Just the kind of guy a skeptic would like!

I put up a sign saying that I didn’t want their racist rag delivered to my door any more, and that I’d bill them $5 for each copy they trashed my office with. This morning: three copies delivered. Ka-ching!

Except…I don’t seriously believe they’ll pay up. Just like I don’t think their declaration on the cover, First Copy: FREE. All subsequent copies are $5 is realistic or valid. Therefore I’ll consider their trash to be fair game for trashing. Since they don’t take my demand seriously, I won’t take theirs seriously, and obviously they don’t even take it seriously. It’s SATIRE, don’t you know.

I did glance inside as I was hauling them off to recycling, and I see they’re still maintaining high journalistic standards. Their recent thrill was a visit by Little Ben Shapiro, which they described in an article titled Ben Shapiro Visits UMM, Discusses Trannies and Freedom. Charming. We learn exactly what Shapiro thinks of the topic.

Transgenderism is a tragic, horrible mental illness that people suffer from. It should be treated with nothing but sympathy. The idea that you can magically change a man into a woman or a woman into a man is anti-biology and anti-fact and foolish.

What I consider anti-biology is this prejudice that every human being must conform to one of only two types with regards to phenomena as complex and psychologically and socially fraught as sexual behavior and gender roles. But what do I know? I’m just a biologist, while Shapiro is a professional right-wing bozo and utterer of simplistic bigotry.

The article unfortunately says next to nothing about free speech, except to say that Shapiro is annoyed by the exercise of it: he doesn’t like being labeled a “racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe”. The whole thing is almost entirely about those awful “trannies”.

But he doesn’t want to be called a bigot or homophobe. Go figure.

I look forward to disposing all of the future copies of this vile thing that cross my path. Don’t worry. I’ll do it satirically.

I had no idea how hard it would be on my masculine self-esteem.

These videos are very nicely done, but entirely NSFW — they are intended for children in Norway, though, which is impressive. The narrator is simultaneously enthusiastic and not at all salacious, a tough line to draw.

I’d have shown these to my kids, if I’d had them available back in the middle ages.

Here, learn about the vagina:

And for balance, here’s the penis:

This is a story about sex dolls — specifically, male sex dolls. By the way, totally NSFW.

I was horrified and offended. Not by the sex dolls, though, or the fact that some people really want these things — that’s fine, whatever floats your boat — but by a comment the owner makes. She’s asked by the reporter where these dolls are most popular, and she says “Texas, Minnesota, and Michigan…Republican states“.

I will have you know that Minnesota is not a Republican state.

I may have to sue for the damage to our reputation.