The XX Factor: What women really think.

More Kids Equals More Happiness?

A post from DoubleX writer Bonnie Rochman:

Well, fire up your engines, ladies, because now there’s a new bit of research supporting a third conclusion: that being married with children is the key to happiness. In contrast to previous research that indicates an inverse relationship between satisfaction and number of children, this particular study, which tracked 10,000 British households over 15 years, found that the more kids you have, the happier you are. I think that would come as news to those parents who’ve decided to raise a singleton because they also want to have a life of their own ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

The Pill Could Do You Wrong In Many Ways

If the blood clots and stroke risks don’t scare you off the pill, maybe this will: Women taking oral contraceptives are less attractive to the opposite sex and less likely to pick a good mate, according to a roundup of studies on the pill, published in this month's Trends in Ecology and Evolution, that Sarah Kliff at Newsweek reported on today.

When a woman is ovulating, her hormonal fluctuations affect her “facial appearance, her vocal pitch, even body odor,” Kliff writes. “And during ovulation, those changes increase a woman's attractiveness because they indicate fertility.” Hardly as dramatic as the potential side effect that terrified many of my friends when we started going on the pill: rapid weight gain. But apparently men—who, so the legend goes, don’t even notice a new outfit or restyled hair (or is that just my dad?)—pick up on these shifts, as shown in a study in the roundup that found that lap dancers make higher tips when they’re ovulating ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Fun Factoids on Animal Sex

Last night was the annual Planned Parenthood-sponsored “Summer Sex & Spirits” night at the Museum of Sex in New York, which I somehow have failed to visit until now. There was plenty of the expected—some porno flicks, some stylish anal plugs, even a hands-on display of rubber sex dolls with rubbery vaginal openings. But the real gem is the exhibit on the sex lives of animals. Here are a few highlights to share at your weekend BBQs. And Miriam, please chime in with any other fun animal sex factoids for this summer Friday ... (Read the rest of this post, and Miriam Goldstein's response, in Double X.)

How to Make Girls Succeed in Math and Science

Over on Slate, there's a really interesting piece by Ray Fisman about the importance of female mentorship. Apparently, a recent working paper from the NBER found a way to measure the effects of female vs. male teachers on students at the Air Force Academy. It can be hard to distinguish among various complicating factors when... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Geeks in Heat

io9, the Gawker empire's science/sci-fi blog, is wrapping up its weeklong "Spring Mating Season" series, and it's pretty awesome. If you find that you need a break this weekend from those repeat Susan Boyle viewings, I highly suggest checking it out. The io9 editors highlight sex-related science news—such as a potential end to menopause and the discovery of the world's first all-female ant species*—and they've also put together some awesome top-ten lists, like this not-entirely-safe-for-work one about the all-time most embarrassing alien mating moments. (I vividly, unhappily, remember that Klingon one from when I was 11.) I especially recommend Takashi Murakami's creepy-sweet Inochi videos, about a prepubescent love-sick robot who looks like Eric Stoltz from Mask, and has similar girl problems. Happy Pon Farr, everyone!

*Correction, April 21, 2009: the original post said "all-female species," but the Mycocepurus smithii is actually the world's first all female ant species. Other all-female, non-ant species exist.

What's So Scientific About 17?

Breasts! Prostates! ... and the Limits of Scientific Research

Hanna, your great post on the science of prostate cancer treatment reminded me of this interesting op-ed that ran in the Post a week back but that—amid the beginning simmerings of the AIG furor—didn't get much attention. The writer, an endocrinologist named David Shaywitz, suggested that we tend to treat scientific research with far too much reverence:

A lot of science, it turns out, can't withstand serious scrutiny. Thoughtful analysis by John Ioannidis suggests that more than half of published scientific research findings can't be replicated by other researchers. Part of the problem is that we've been conditioned to trust university research. It is based, after all, on the presumably lofty motives of its practitioners. What's not to like about science carried out by academics who have nobly dedicated their lives to understanding the unknown, furthering knowledge and serving humanity? ...

[But] the university is not a peaceable kingdom, and life is far more Hobbesian. ... University researchers are in a constant battle for recognition and the rewards associated with success: research space, speaking engagements, funding and autonomy. Consequently, while academic research is often described as "curiosity-driven," the reality is messier, as (curiously) many researchers tend to pursue the trendiest technologies and explore topics that happen to be associated with the most generous levels of research support.

It's a twist on the expert problem—most of us aren't scientists or doctors, and our ignorance weighs heavily on us. We feel we've just got to trust scientific or medical analysis, because we wouldn't have a clue where to begin questioning it. But we also operate from the assumption that scientific or medical researchers are an especially holy kind of expert, the intellectual ascetics sweating their lives away over petri dishes in pursuit of Truth. But maybe we should be just a little more open to treating scientific studies like we treat the bid of the mechanic who wants to fix our car.

Flash of Grandstanding

Hanna, I'm glad Obama's grand claim to separate politics and ideology from science bothered you, too. It disturbs me when politicians and pundits talk about science as if it's a separate force all its own, somehow divorced from rational decision-making in which moral forces always come to play. There was a line in last year's movie Flash of Genius in which Greg Kinnear's character points out this political deception to his students. He reminds them that it was engineers who did incredible good when they invented the replacement heart valve and also engineers who were responsible for so much evil when they invented the Auschwitz gas chambers. The examples are extreme, but the point is a good one: Just because science gives us the capability to do something—it doesn't make it the best thing to do. Science allows us to destroy human embryos, but it can't answer whether that's right or not. 

So, if anything, Obama's choice to lift the ban and begin to fund morally questionable research when science is giving us such promising, noncontroversial alternatives seems like more like a "Flash of Grandstanding" than anything else, but one that has some seriously scary consequences.

Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream

Reading "Bikinis Make Men See Women as Objects, Scans Confirm," I had to laugh. Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske used an MRI to scan the brains of men as they were shown a variety of images: clothed and unclothed women and men. Upon eyeballing the images featuring scantily clad women, the portion of the male brain dedicated to "tool use" lit up like a Christmas tree. Meanwhile, the portion of the brain devoted to recognizing the subject as human didn't react at all in some subjects. Fiske notes: "The only other time we have seen this is when people look at pictures of the homeless or of drug addicts. ... "

Men objectify women! Color me shocked. Apparently, Fiske was "shocked" at the results. It sounds like she didn't enter into the study entirely objectively either. When the idea for the study was suggested to Fiske by Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, who predicted the "tool use" effect: “I said, ‘Oh, Jennifer, that’s disgusting. I can’t believe you’re predicting that.' ” I am fascinated to know what bubble it is these people live in. Or maybe they just never leave the lab.

Of course, feminist bloggers are having a field day with the results, although they can't quite seem to decide if it's male biology that's the culprit here or that infernal patriarchal society they're always talking about overthrowing. Feministing: "I think this argument proves that despite some pre-historic desire for men to get horny over scantily clad women and for women to want rich husbands that provide security and ability to nest (this is what evolutionary psychologists would argue), most of this desire comes from cultural conditioning." Thank you for clearing that up for me. (See Tracy Clark-Flory for a more rational response.)

What's being overlooked here is twofold. One: Fiske et al. studied a whopping 21 men. Who were all college students. To leap to grand generalizations based on such a limited pool seems foolish, at best. Two: Why do the results of this limited study have to lead to the conclusion that men are somehow "bad"? Can't they just be, well, men?

And everyone seems to be happy to overlook the fact that when asked if women view scantily clad men the same way, Fiske responded that women tend to privilege the bank balance and age of a man over his looks. How's that for objectification?

What America Is Getting Wrong about Cancer

Who Knows What Women Want?

Like many others here, I read Daniel Bergner's "What Do Women Want?" with interest. While I tend to shy away from reports from the frontlines written by those who do their research talking to the scientists and not the monkeys, I was intrigued by the essay's truthtelling: "All was different with the women." (Is not one among us going to confess to being turned on by bonobo porn?) The piece reminded me of a parallel story I've seen played out on the adult movie sets that I've visited, where you can never believe your eyes, especially when it comes to women. 

Over the years, porn has taken a beating at the hands of those who deem it misogynist garbage. In fact, I'd argue, pornography is obsessed primarily with female desire. That the product its industry produces is less socially acceptable than the polysyllabic studies of Bergner's "postfeminist" desire hunters in lab coats doesn't make it any less revealing of how complicated it gets for all of us when it comes to sex, and how little any of us know about our own desires. 

Porn stars toil daily in the shadowy world of desire. In Porn Valley, the sex acts are real, but is the desire manufactured? As Susan Faludi so vividly illuminated in her 1996 New Yorker essay, "The Money Shot," there is no greater pressure on a porn set than the burden placed upon the male performer and his erection, or "wood," in the parlance of the business. The woodsman must prove his desire to convince the audience that this is the "real" deal, that this scene of sexual desire is no masquerade. Hence, the "money" shot. Without it, all is lost.

For porn starlets, the act is trickier. On the one hand, the female performers have it easier. Sometimes they're turned on. Sometimes they're not. They don't have to physically "deliver" on desire in the same way their male counterparts do. Yet, for the vast majority of the male viewing audience, porn "fails" without at least the pantomime of female sexual pleasure. Without it, no scopophilia. If porn is to be believed, most men are as preoccupied with female desire as we are unaware of what it is we really want.

I wonder why the term "postfeminist" is used in the context of Bergner's essay? Understanding female desire seems more like a universal quest. Either way, I suspect it may be an impossible one. 

Five Puppies and a Sex Slave

Meghan, I'm curious about that T-shirt sniffing, too, and am trying to get hold of the actual paper. In the meantime, I confess, I've been riveted by another tale that features some modicum of science but also five puppies, a Mormon sex slave, and (possibly) a three-legged horse. So, turning for a moment from birth control to copious reproduction ...

Last week, a woman named Bernann McKinney received five puppies that had been cloned from her dear, departed pit bull, Booger. This was apparently the first time a canine had been cloned for commercial purposes, and McKinney was photographed frolicking on the floor, hugging and squeezing one of the pups (whom she called "mini-Boogers"), and telling them, "Yes, I know you! You know me, too!"

Unfortunately for her, someone watching the spectacle also recognized her as a fugitive whose real name was Joyce. According to the Associated Press, in 1977, Joyce McKinney "became a British tabloid sensation over a kidnapping case. She faced charges of unlawful imprisonment after she was accused of abducting a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave. She jumped bail and was never brought to justice." Another account, which likens McKinney (weirdly) to John Edwards, features velvet handcuffs and has her posing "as a deaf-mute actor to escape to Canada."

McKinney is also wanted in Tennessee, it turns out, for "criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary" in 2004. "Authorities there said she instructed a 15-year-old boy to break into a house," the AP reports. Her attorney explains she "needed the money to help her three-legged horse." She wished to buy the horse (seriously) a fake leg.

So where is McKinney now?  Is she on the lam with five puppies and a four-legged horse? Will she ever explain what insatiable drive led her to buy five clones of a beloved pet (let alone one)?

The South Korean company that did the cloning, meanwhile, is not backing down and seems, in fact, to sense opportunity. The head of the company says "criminal records will not disqualify future customers." Indeed, "cloned animals could even help them find stability and thus prevent crimes." I'll gladly stay tuned. 

Do I Have to Be an Astrophysicist?

While I can't answer Melinda's question of whether the bar for mothers-who-do-it-all was always set so high, as a young twentysomething just starting out in my career, I can see that bar vaulting upward among the women of my own generation. With few glass ceilings remaining, the limits to our professional ambitions seem next to nonexistent. But along with our heightened career expectations comes the decision to try to balance both work and family life. For all the inspirational value of Hillary Clinton's historic campaign, even she got choked up trying to explain how she did it all.

About a year and a half ago, I heard Linda Hirshman speak about her book, Get to Work ... And Get a Life, Before It's Too Late, at the women's college I attended. I remember vividly her assertion that women in college should not waste their time studying subjects such as art history. Now, I was an art history major at a liberal arts college, and among the audience were a number of art majors who had emerged from the print-making and painting studios down the hall to hear Hirshman speak. Needless to say, none of us were thrilled with her advice. We were all passionate about the subjects and challenged and fulfilled by our work. Why should we have felt guilty for pursuing our interests?

With the opportunity in recent years to disprove the stereotypes about women's aptitude (or lack thereof) in math and the hard sciences, I often felt in college that I was letting down women everywhere by taking art and literature courses instead of math and physics. Studying at a women's college, I didn't have to contend with gendered expectations about the classes I should take; test tubes and equations just didn't excite me. Still, Hirshman and others like her made me feel that there were fields into which I should venture simply because they remained unconquered by women. It's taken me some time to realize that this can't be right. Can it? Just because a woman can be an astrophysicist, doesn't mean she ought to be one, and just because female art historians are not venturing into male-only territory doesn't mean they should feel guilty about studying Picasso's cubist paintings or Bernini's sublime sculptures.

Are Boys Really Better at Math than Girls?

So over at Ars Technica there's a link to a really interesting study that came out the other week in Science. It suggests that the much-discussed "math gap" between boys and girls in American may stem more from social factors than from biology. The study looked at more than 275,000 students in 40 countries who took a particular exam. As the Ars Technica summary puts it:

Girls scored about 2 percent lower than boys on math on average, but nearly 7 percent higher on reading, consistent with previous test results.

The researchers, noted, however, that the math gap wasn't consistent between countries. For example, it was nearly twice as large as the average in Turkey, while Icelandic girls outscored males by roughly 2 percent. The general pattern of these differences suggested to the authors that the performance differences correlated with the status of women. The authors of the study built a composite score that reflected the gender equality of the countries based on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, data extracted from the World Values Surveys, measures of female political participation, and measures of the economic significance of females. countries such as Norway and Sweden score very high on gender equality measures; in these nations, the gender gap on math performance is extremely small.

So what do you make of that, Lawrence Summers? Now, to be fair, the study may not have tested for variance—I haven't read through it fully—which would mean that the gap between boys and girls in performance may still be larger at the ends of the bell curve. But the findings still are remarkable.

If you click on the study, too, you'll note an irony: It suggests that while the math gap correlates to gaps in social equality, boys' lagging reading skills don't. Of course, as the summarizer at Ars Technica puts it, that doesn't mean some other social factor isn't at work. I'm sure one is—or even many.