Think of it as evolution inaction
Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale, believes that human evolution is still happening because, after all, some couples have more children than others, thereby changing the frequency distribution of alleles in the gene pool. So he and his colleagues went over some statistics from the Framingham Heart Study (going back to 1948) and discovered a few heritable traits that were associated with higher fertility [PDF]. From this, they vaulted into the pages of Time magazine with this stunning extrapolation:
If these trends were to continue with no cultural changes in the town for the next 10 generations, by 2409 the average Framingham woman would be 2 cm (0.8 in) shorter, 1 kg (2.2 lb.) heavier, have a healthier heart, have her first child five months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later than a woman today, the study found.
Why yes. And if human cultures had remained static for the past four centuries, we would also expect that the average Framingham woman of 1609 was 2 cm taller than her 21st-century counterpart, 1 kg lighter,…
I looked at the actual paper (which as of this writing is not yet behind a paywall) to see if this was dumb science or just dumb science journalism, and as far as I can tell, the fault is in the science. For instance, the authors, in their conclusions, speculate that “we might have found larger effects of evolution on the levels of sex hormones and related traits had they been measured”… as if human beings have done nothing since 1948 to affect the levels of their own sex hormones.
The process of natural selection pushes a species toward a local maximum of fitness relative to its environment. (When you speak of an organism’s “fitness” in an evolutionary sense, you always have to speak of its fitness relative to some environment, just as if you talk about the dollar “declining” in value, that decline is always relative to some other commodity.) If the environment is changing more rapidly then the evolutionary effects that adapt an organism to it, then the evolutionary effect might as well be noise.
Do these guys have an insight too subtle for me to appreciate, or are they just thick?
via Hacker News
Pornonomics
The authors of Freakonomics, pimping their next book, regale Sunday Times [UK] readers with the heart-warming tale of Allie, a prostitute with a heart of gold and a Visa card to match. The authors mention the precautions she takes to keep herself safe from her clients, her frustration with keeping her occupation secret from her family and friends, and her realization that she had to move into a completely different career before she lost her looks. In the midst of all that, the authors declare:
[T]he real puzzle isn’t why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don’t choose this career.
Jonathan Kulick gives this the snark it richly deserves:
I look forward to reading the entire chapter, so I can find out why more men don’t choose to become high-end gay escorts. It has to be much easier than waiting tables or accounting or laying pipe.
I, personally, am puzzled as to why the Freakonomists are so puzzled by the choices of non-prostitute women, but treat the johns’ motivation as self-evident. The vast majority of men who hire $500-an-hour prostitutes can also afford enough therapy and what-not to become attractive to the women who seek, ahem, noncommercial romantic relationships. If they’re not getting those relationships, well, that says something about their capabilities and priorities, doesn’t it?
Personally, if I had to choose between waiting tables for $10 an hour and pretending to love creepy men for $500, I’d go for the tables.
Democrats grow spines, gonads, teeth
Many progressives, myself included, have been concerned that (a) Democratic politicians are so used to losing that they will continue to act like losers on the floor of Congress, even when they are in the majority; (b) with war, the economy, and health care at the front of most people’s minds, Obama and the Congressional Democrats will push LGBT issues to the back burner until, umm, half-past never.
So let me give credit where credit is due: the House passed a bill to extend Federal hate-crimes protection to gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people, and the Democrats played hardball to get it passed—they attached the hate-crimes extension to a defense-appropriations bill and dared the Republicans to vote against the whole bill.
The article quotes Senator McCain, of all people, saying that “elections have consequences”. Elections damn well should have consequences and this particular consequence is most welcome.
Michel Foucault to the pink courtesy phone
News coverage of the controversy regarding whether or not track star Caster Semenya is “really” a woman is giving everyone a crash course in postmodern gender theory. Can one’s chromosomes determine once and for all whether a person is “really” a man or a woman? Nope. Shape of genitalia? Nope. Hormones? Nope. Now that we’ve reviewed the general issue of how subjective sex attribution can be, I’d like to focus on who, in this case, gets to be the subject.
In tough cases any rule for determining sex is going to be arbitrary, but whose arbitrary rules are governing Ms. Semenya? Nobody (of course!) cares about her own opinion regarding which sex she belongs to. The judgement of the family and community in which she was raised also counts for nothing. The laws of the country where she is a citizen do not apply.
Instead, this 18-year-old is going to be examined by “a geneticist, an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, a psychologist and so forth” (Ms. Semenya, if the psychologist asks you if you played with dolls as a child, say yes), who will put her through “chromosome testing, gynecological investigation, all manner of things, organs, X-rays, scans”. These worthies will report their judgements to the International Association of Athletics Federations, which will decide whether or not Ms. Semenya qualifies as a female athlete. Does she get five points for a vagina, lose a point for facial hair, gain another ten if she menstruates, with 100 points needed to qualify? Or is this like figure skating, where the American, Russian, French, and British judges will each score her based on some combination of technical merit and aesthetic judgement, and then her average score will determine her fate? Nobody is saying.
No objective procedure—no medical exam or legal certificate or other kind of attestation—could have settled the question before Ms. Semenya competed and thus prevented her from suffering this indignity. The only thing she could have done was avoid falling under suspicion in the first place. So, girls, pay attention: If you want to become an international track star, it’s not enough to be the fastest woman on two legs. You have to be the fastest lady.
Pain considered harmful
I would have thought that the pain of unmedicated childbirth has very little in common with the pain of getting woken every three hours by a crying infant, not to mention the pain of one’s plans interrupted by a pre-schooler’s fourteenth tantrum of the day, not to mention… you get the idea. And therefore, I would have thought that suffering one of these pains does not really prepare you for the others, except perhaps through the psychology of misaccounting for sunk costs.
But hey, what do I know? I’m not a university professor who is also one of the most influential midwives in Britain.
“A large number of women want to avoid pain. Some just don’t fancy the pain [of childbirth]. More women should be prepared to withstand pain,” he told the Observer. “Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.”
…
“Over recent decades there has been a loss of ‘rites of passage’ meaning to childbirth, so that pain and stress are viewed negatively,” said Walsh. Patients should be told that labour pain is a timeless component of the “rites of passage” transition to motherhood, he added.
Snark aside, one can certainly make a case that in general, anaesthetics are overused in labor and that patients should weigh the risks against the benefits. But replacing a foolish orthodoxy (“the more medical interventions, the better”) with a foolish counter-orthodoxy (“if you take the epidural, you’re a bad mommy”) is not progress.
via eyelid
Femme-inism
Narratives of transsexuality aimed at a general audience, both in print and online, are a genre unto themselves, and one of the conventions of the genre is the tone, directed at cissexual (i.e. non-trans) readers, of “please understand me, because if you understand me, then you couldn’t possibly condemn me”. The refreshing thing about Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl is that it breaks that frame, and tells us “please understand yourselves, because if you understand the prejudices that our culture has taught you, then you can learn to respect me”.
For example, consider the issue of “passing”, which consumes a lot of the literature devoted to transsexuality. (I have to include something I myself blogged five years ago in this indictment.) Serano points out that the language of “passing” puts the focus on the trans person, who either succeeds or fails at “passing” as his or her self-identified gender. But it ignores the role of other people who pass judgement (ahem) on the people they encounter, and who stigmatize anyone whose gender presentation they consider deviant. (Gender-noncomformant cissexuals sometimes run afoul of this stigma1, but we don’t usually describe their experience as a failure to “pass”.) Taking for granted that everyone else will acknowledge your self-identified gender—assuming that if someone does misidentify your gender, then your peers will agree that the problem is with them, not you—is one aspect of what Serano calls “cissexual privilege”.
With insights like this, Serano attacks the received wisdom of many communities: not just mainstream “straight” society and media, but also the medical establishment, the “queer studies” world (Foucault and his intellectual descendants), lesbian and queer communities, and the feminist world.
With regard to feminism, she has critiques of the “feminism is all about the specialness of women, by which of course we mean women who have been raised as girls” faction of the movement (no surprise there), the “let’s measure feminist progress by how many women are becoming doctors and lawyers” faction, and the “let’s deconstruct the gender binary and live androgynously ever after” faction. But she comes not to undermine feminism, but to improve it.
Serano’s model of sexism, I humbly suggest, is worth adding to the Feminism 101 curriculum. She distinguishes between traditional sexism, the belief that masculinity is superior to femininity, and oppositional sexism, the belief that men should be masculine and women should be feminine. A woman (i.e., someone universally regarded as female—let’s bracket the trans issues for a minute) who takes on a stereotypically female role benefits from oppositional sexism, but is harmed by traditional sexism. A woman who goes into stereotypically male endeavors benefits from traditional sexism (e.g., higher pay and prestige) but is harmed by oppositional sexism. A “manly man” benefits from both, and an effeminate man is harmed by both. This tension explains why trans women encounter extreme reactions and trans men are barely noticed by mainstream society, but it also explains a lot of other things about the way sexism operates in society, even among cis heterosexual men and women. (For instance, Serano observes that the modern feminist movement has done a lot to fight oppositional sexism but not so much to fight traditional sexism, and suggests that this is why many straight, cissexual, femme women will say “I’m not a feminist” even as they enjoy many of the rights that feminists have won for them.)
Which is why this is a book that everyone should read, regardless of their gender, how masculine or feminine they are, their attitude towards transsexuality, or their attitude towards feminism itself.
1 If I recall correctly, one of the very first Dykes To Watch Out For strips was about how a butch dyke should respond to a woman who rebukes her for being in “the ladies’ room”.
“Do as I say, not as I do”
A former youth adviser at a Bridgeport church was arrested Monday after police said he sexually assaulted a 16-year-old Trumbull girl he was counseling about sexual abstinence…
In an interview with police detectives, [the defendant] allegedly said he had been counseling teenage girls, including the victim, on how to say “no” to sexual advances from adults.
Perhaps this fellow, not to mention his church, should spend less time teaching girls how to say “no”, and more time teaching boys that “no means no”.
via Feministe
Mazel tov!
As a resident of Massachusetts, I am proud to welcome the state of Iowa into the Equal Protection Under The Law Club. This is a rather exclusive club right now, but I have every reason to expect that over the next decade, it will become less so. Furthermore, since Iowa, unlike California, has a sober and deliberative process for amending its state constitution, I have every reason to expect that the backlash against its supreme court’s decision can be restrained before the voters do something that their descendants will be ashamed of.
The dignity of labor
I do not have any fundamental objections to any of these newfangled reproductive technologies: IVF, surrogate parenthood, cloning, male pregnancy, whatever. Bring ’em on. And I think progressive income taxes are better for society than sumptuary laws, which is to say, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with being rich and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with rich people buying things that regular folks can’t afford.
But I was still squicked by this article on a woman whose fertilized egg was carried in another woman’s uterus, starting with the layout of the magazine cover. While Cathy Hilling, the surrogate mother, stands in flats, Alex Kuczynski, producer of the lucky egg, stands in high heels and upstage and with her hair up. It seems that the Times’s art director wanted to portray the two women bonded at the hip, but also wanted to show clearly who is in charge.
Deep in the text of the article, things get squickier:
No money ever changes hands directly between the intended parents (I.P.’s in surrogacy speak) and the surrogate. All the money goes into an escrow account set up by Brisman’s office, and a third party pays out the monthly fees. I.P.’s and surrogates are discouraged from discussing money. This is partly to remove the air of commercialism from the proceedings.
Shortly after our meeting, Brisman’s office started to send us profiles of potential surrogates. It felt strangely like getting a letter from the roommate who would be sharing your dorm room freshman year. They described themselves, their lives, their ambitions….
While no one volunteering to have our baby was poor, neither were they rich. The $25,000 we would pay would make a significant difference in their lives. Still, in our experience with the surrogacy industry, no one lingered on the topic of money. We encountered the wink-nod rule: Surrogates would never say they were motivated to carry a child for another couple just for money; they were all motivated by altruism. This gentle hypocrisy allows surrogacy to take place. Without it, both sides would have to acknowledge the deep cultural revulsion against attaching a dollar figure to the creation of a human life.
I’m sure that when Hilling’s obstetrician negotiates with an insurance company over reimbursement rates, nobody has any qualms about “attaching a dollar figure to the creation of a human life”. And the insurance company doesn’t give a damn about the obstetrician’s life or ambitions.
In a relationship between a contractor and her client, where money is discussed frankly and changes hands shamelessly, there can be mutual respect. I have something you want; you have a skill I need; let’s discuss an arrangement that benefits us both. Between two people who are related by blood or marriage, there can also be mutual respect. I want you to do me a favor because we are in a bond of mutual obligation, and I understand that some day you may ask the same of me. Hilling petitions for her assignment like a suitor, accepts Kuczynski’s money like a contractor, and then hangs out with her (playing Kuczynski’s piano, giving her a gift) like a relative. So what is their relationship? Ten years from now, if, God forbid, Hilling is abused by her husband or develops a drug habit, how far will Kuczynski et al. go to help out? Now that her skill as a gestator has been praised by the national newspaper of record, can Hilling demand $30,000 from the next aspiring mother? I fear that surrogates, like nannies, are ending up with the duties of both statuses and the privileges of neither.
Gender and shopping
The second part of the Boston Globe’s series on a Somerville doctor who got a male-to-female sex change begins thusly:
At age 52, Deborah Bershel made her first trip to the mall. It lasted nine hours. It was July 2006, and there was barely a rack of clothes in the Burlington Mall that she didn’t comb through. The next day she headed to the Natick Mall and logged another five hours shopping. She was making up for lost time. In each store, her approach was usually the same. She’d march up to a salesclerk and explain, “I’m a transsexual, so I’m new to this.” Then she’d ask her particular question, whether it be which cut of jeans would cover the top of her panties or which type of fabrics wouldn’t cling to her arms. “I have questions that no 50-year-old woman should have,” she said.
My wife inferred from this anecdote that Bershel had no female friends, because otherwise, she would be asking those friends for advice, not sales clerks. Women, she said, shop in groups as a social activity; men shop for the purpose of getting something. (The standard “all generalizations are false” disclaimer applies.)
I suggested that she put that observation in her LJ, but she asked me to put it here, since it connects with my previous comments regarding transwomen and platonic female friendship.
