Monday, November 12, 2007 - Posts
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It's taken a long time, but at last—thank you for contributing, Meghan!—evolutionary psychology is being revealed as the psuedoscience it usually is, at least by the time it reaches the newspaper columns and the conversations around the water cooler. My main objection has always been the way its lay adherents solemnly discuss research that confirms the existence of some utterly banal aspect of human behavior, usually sexual, and then go on to explain why our ape ancestors found it so useful. Usually, this involves self-satisfied explanations of the primal male "need" for multiple sexual partners—men "need" to spread their DNA around, you see—as opposed to the primal female "need" for a man to protect her children. But why, then, did the human race evolve the concept of monogamy? And who are these women with whom the naturally adulterous men are supposed to sleep? I know that evolutionary psychology has come up with various explanations for these phenomena, but really, one could argue the whole thing the other way around, too. It's like Marxism or Freudianism: a set of all-encompassing principles that can explain anything. And it, too, will pass.
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The trouble with evolutionary psychology is that there are no (or few) ways of testing its theorems. With enough ingenuity on the part of the researcher, nearly any finding about gender can be twisted to suit the evolutionary lens. Prime example, from Crooked Timber last week: the Times in London reported on a study in which men rated the "sexiness" of women's walks. The study found that men rated the women in the less fertile part of their cycle as sexier than the women in a more fertile part of their cycle, because the fertile women walked with "smaller hip movements." You might think that this finding would give evolutionary psychologists pause—might lead them to consider, for a moment, whether some other factor might be at work, such as culture (or tampons!). But no; instead, the Times goes on to say:
That makes evolutionary sense, because it would benefit a woman to advertise her fertility only to those men she believes would make a suitable mate. In contrast, men can pick up on the attractiveness of a woman’s walk from long distance, and it can therefore act as an unwitting signal to less appealing males whom she might not want to choose.
Dr Provost said: “If women are trying to protect themselves from sexual assault at times of peak fertility, it would make sense for them to advertise attractiveness on a broad scale when they are not fertile.”
But you can bet if the study had found that fertile women were seen to have the "sexiest" walks Dr. Provost would have thought that made evolutionary sense, too. There's just no control group here.
via Crooked Timber.
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More frivolously occupied than Dahlia or Emily have been, I spent a bit of my weekend flipping through The Daring Book for Girls. I picked it up after my daughter had written about it for her high-school newspaper—and after The New York Times had mocked it as yet more helicopter parenting for our technology-dependent indoor kids, not a manifesto in favor of daredeviltry at all. My daughter's take was different. She pointed out that the book, billed as "the no-boys-allowed guide to adventure," is actually boy-based and imitative at its core (tips for building scooters, etc), with girl frills around the edges. And it's not very new, she noted: Tomboyishness has always been derivative, taking cues from the guys.
I buy both views of the book, which looks old-fashioned but taps right into the current micromanagement of youth culture. Once upon a time—or so I recall—the tomboy impulse was also defiant, a girl's way of flouting peer and parental expectations. But when adults get into the act, packaging boy stuff specially for girls, the result all too often gets cloyingly tame, to nobody's obvious benefit-except the manufacturer's (or publisher's). An article in today's Times reports on another example. Trading cards, a boy craze for decades, are suddenly being marketed to heretofore generally uninterested girls. The new girl-targeted card game, called Bella Sara, sounds tedious as well as sexist. Featuring pastel-colored ponies, unicorns, and "caring" messages ("use your love to bring peace to the world"), Bella Sara evidently skirts the competition and trading that define boy card games like Magic; it's about cleaning and feeding horses (on a special website, using secret codes on the cards). And it's about buying ever more cards (because the codes can only be used once). Here's where The Daring Book perhaps has advice the whole family could find liberating: "Forget asking your parents for a horse; ask for a ping-pong table instead."
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Rachael, here's a partial answer to your good question: Breast-feeding rates vary in this country by income and race and maternal education. According to this from the Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog, which cites CDC stats, in 2005 "women living below the federal poverty line breastfed at the rate of 63%, and women living at 350% of the poverty level breastfed at the rate of 82%." Also: "Rates of breastfeeding were 81% for Asian Americans, 79% for Hispanics/Latinas, 75% for Whites, 67% for Native Americans, and 59% for African Americans." And 85 percent of college-educated women breast-fed, compared with 63 percent of women with less than a high school diploma.
What's going on here? The answer must involve culture--whether you know about the health benefits, whether a nurse at the hospital where you had your baby has the time to help get you started, whether your mother and sisters and other women you know breast-fed, themselves, and can help you over the rough patches, whether it's regarded as expected or weird in the community you live in. This article from the CDC blames low rates on "lack of social support" and lazy hospitals and lack of follow up. This article in Pediatrics found that immigrant women are more likely to breast-feed than native-born women in their ethnic groups, which suggets that the cultural push against breast-feeding happens here. Amanda's point about the relative ease with which white-collar, as opposed to other, jobs accommodate nursing is well taken.
But I suspect there's more than job-related obstacles at play. And in fact, the rate of breast-feeding has risen dramatically among some of these groups--26 percent among African-American women in the last 10 years.
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Anyone else following the lawsuit filed by two women at Yale law school against AutoAdmit -- the law school discussion board that makes the men's room wall at your local bus station read like the collected works of John Donne? Via the Wall Street Journal's law blog here's a link to the amended complaint, filed late last week in federal court in Connecticut. These women are alleging that anonymous posts to the Web site created emotional distress and may have precluded employers from offering them jobs.
It's going to be rough sledding for these women to actually track down the offenders, named, for instance, "Horse walks into a bar" and "Spanky" in the complaint. And who knows whether they'll be able to prove that they were harmed. Still, just reading the complaint is cause for emotional distress: The plaintiffs are threatened with rape and sodomy and violence; links to the site were sent to employers; private information about them was posted on the site. Part of this is just the unbelievable sewage that gets chummed up wherever anonymous posts about women roam free. I've written a bit on this, but have no real solution to offer. Read the complaint. Is this the kind of thing we should simply ignore? Are lawsuits the answer?
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