I may get tired of using Pete Campbell pulling faces to illustrate my posts, but not yet. Not yet.

I remember how, just a couple of years ago, there was a lot of hand-wringing in skeptic circles over whether or not to apply rationalist thinking to religious claims, mainly because some skeptics---who were all atheists themselves, by the way---were concerned that it was impolitic not to create a giant Shall Not Touch bubble around magical claims that were deemed "religious". Well, the Reason Rally this past weekend shows that the pro-atheists basically won that debate, and the increasing racial and gender diversity of the community demonstrates that it was a good idea. No, now it turns out that there's a cow more sacred than religion, with a number of self-identified skeptics and atheists freaking out at the increasing willingness of writers and thinkers in the community to apply critical thinking skills to political claims. Apparently, you can criticize religion all you want, but to dare insist on the facts when it comes to global warming or especially the offensive claim that women are full human beings? That's where some folks are drawing the line. 

Rebecca Watson has a post up about the problem of pseudoscience proliferating on the right, and the unwillingness of the supposed warriors against pseudoscience to do anything about it. She uses her spot on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe to, on occasion, talk about things like states forcing doctors to read scripts full of medical misinformation to women seeking abortion, and every time she does, she gets a rush of letters from dudes scolding her to keep her focus on the important issues to skeptics, such as Bigfoot and UFOs.

Now, don't get me wrong. My eyes roll like a motherfucker whenever I see an advertisement for a Bigfoot or UFO show on TV. Still, there's a top limit of how much damage some of the more apolitical pseudoscience out there can do. Skeptics like to draw attention to when homeopathy contributes to illness or people waste money on fantastical claims, and these are important issues, but they are absolutely dwarfed by the amount of pain and suffering that misinformation about reproductive health causes. I rail against anti-vaccination idiots all the time, but even in the worst case scenarios---measles outbreaks, etc.---the cost in money and human suffering from the misinformation is really limited next to the cost in money and suffering from political pressures to force women to bear children they don't want. And that's just in the U.S. In other countries, where misinformation about abortion and contraception have even more influence on the law, maternal mortality rates are sky-high because of unwanted child-bearing and illegal abortion. I don't even want to talk about how much of the AIDS crisis stems from political concerns that these idiot so-called skeptics want to believe are hands-off. Without taboos around sex, homophobia, misogyny, and religious groups spreading misinformation about the effectiveness of condoms, we'd be looking at a much lower transmission rate worldwide than we're seeing now. 

Interestingly, one political issue tends to get widespread support in the skeptic community across partisan lines, and that's regarding evolutionary theory. Everyone is for it, and everyone thinks that religious claptrap denying it should be taken out of schools. I will bet you a lot of money that Rebecca doesn't get nasty emails about not getting political when the topic comes up on Skeptic's Guide. This, even though the opposition to evolutionary theory and the opposition to abortion rights are the same group of people, nearly exactly. I support this political activism against creationism, obviously. But let's not pretend it's not political. It stems from the same theocratic impulse as does the opposition to abortion rights, and frankly I see them as very similar issues.

But while I support activism around the evolution vs. creationism debate, I have to point out that the global warming issue is far larger and more immediate of a problem. If we can't get to a point where science trumps political bullshit on global warming, THE EARTH IS DOOMED. Okay, perhaps not completely doomed, but seriously fucked. We're already irreversibly fucked in many ways on this, but if we continue to treat it like a weird side issue, we're going to be fucked in all sorts of amazingly novel ways. I suspect a lot of global warming denialists don't really believe their own bullshit; they just figure they'll be dead before it's time to pay the piper. They may be right, though there's reason to believe the effects are coming faster than scientists previously thought, so their gamble may not be paying off. Either way, the utter lack of compassion for the rest of humanity is galling. Skeptics who refuse to discuss this issue because it's "political"---even though they happily dive into other political issues like creationism---are being cowards and babies. 

Andrew Sullivan is back at it again, kindly reminding us that despite his support of Obama, who he really is never lurks far from the surface. Yep, he's defending The Bell Curve again, relying on the same tricks---mainly leaning on the assumption that the audience doesn't have time to do the background research, which is true enough and a reason why journalists really shouldn't promote pseudo-science---and Ta-Nehisis Coates is pushing back, albeit in a way that far more generous than I could ever feel towards Sullivan's intentions. It's really upsetting to see these redonkulous theories of race and IQ continue to be trotted out 30 years after biologist Stephen Jay Gould published The Mismeasure of Man, neatly outlining the history of these kinds of studies, the arguments for what kind of scientific proof would actually be required (hint: much higher than need-to-believe sorts like Sullivan accept), and the real-life results of putting a faux scientific veneer on old-fashioned racist and classist arguments about how oppressed people aren't oppressed but simply inferior. (Forced sterilization is a direct example, but basically all continued institutional racist oppression is rationalized by the "it's not the oppression, it's that they're not good enough" argument). There was even a 1996 reprint that kindly put to bed The Bell Curve's attempts to update the hoary old IQ studies of old. Ta-Nehisi addresses the ahistorical aspects of Sullivan's.....I hate to call the "arguments", so I'm going to say evidence-free whinings about the P.C. police preventing scientists from demonstrating what he clearly thinks they could, which is that black people are inferior as a group. 

With that said, Andrew's ahistorical approach to race and intelligence has always amazed. The contention, for instance, that "research is not about helping people; it's about finding out stuff," may well be true in some limited sense. But it's never been true, in any sense, of race and intelligence. In the 19th century helping out white people (however that is defined) was very much the point of intelligence research. Into the early 20th century, the rise of eugenics was equally linked the field to the advancement of "people." Even the intelligence theorists whom Andrew, himself, has advanced over the years are motivated by a desire to presumably help people, if only in the form of deciding how a society should expend its limited resources.

Advocates of the "p.c. egalitarianism" theory, such as Andrew, evidently believe that the notion that black people are dumber than whites is a cutting edge theory, as opposed to a long-held tenet of slave-holders and white supremacists. They present themselves as bold-truth tellers who will not bow to "liberal creationists." In fact they are espousing firmly established views that date back to the very founding of this country. These views did not emerge after decades of failure of social policy. Indeed they picked up right where their old advocates left off; within five years of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Arthur Jensen was convinced that black people were intellectually addled.

I'll add a couple other points. Sullivan also neglects to remember---despite his claims to have done his research, he doesn't seem to have read Gould's masterpiece on this topic---that in addition to trying to find IQ differences between established racial categories, IQ studies of old targeted ethnic groups such as Italians. I'm sure Sullivan wouldn't find it so scintillating and provocative if I argued that science demonstrating that his Irish heritage puts him in a group that is morally and intellectually inferior to the groups the compose my heritage (French, German, Welsh), but the kind of studies he's so enamored of would have, in the past, done exactly such a thing. That the supposedly agenda-free researchers have stopped bothering to measure white ethnic groups against each other tells you everything you need to know about Sullivan's silly claims that this is about pure science and not about manipulating research to prove a pre-determined conclusion about people the researchers feel racism towards. 

Or to put it more simply, since the Irish and Italians became white, interest in finding "scientific" evidence that they're inferior people has completely dried up. 

I'm not a scientist, so please take my thoughts on this with that knowledge in mind. But I do love science, and have spent my time making fun of the endless stream of research that purports to find that women are inferior---though often by different measures than IQ, though that's a new development that has arisen no doubt as women have gained educational opportunities and can easily equal or even beat men as a group on IQ tests---so I think I can offer a little advice to people reading claims that black people are stupider as a group and are skeptical that research really could prove such a thing. Here's some questions to keep in mind as you read these debates. 

*What are the researchers measuring? The claim here is that "intelligence" is being measured. But what's the definition of "intelligence"? The assumptions employed by Sullivan and the researchers he champions are that intelligence is a single, fixed entity that in innate at birth. Is there evidence to support this contention? There's other ways to think about intelligence that have more evidence for them in the real world. For instance, I tend to do very well on the kind of IQ tests that we're talking about. I'm also quick with a joke, perceptive when it comes to the psychology of complex human systems, and adept at manipulating my first and only language, English. I'm decent at basic math skills. But I'm bad at learning new languages, and dealing with complex but abstract systems such as anything running a computer beyond the most obvious level. So am I "intelligent"? Most people would say yes, but if thrown into a situation I don't understand, the answer is absolutely not. Nor are any of my intelligences fixed in time---I could be having a bad day and be unable to crack a joke. Or I could suddenly have a burst of inspiration/a lot of coffee and dedicate myself to understanding something that's usually beyond me. Nor are any of these intelligences innate. It's probably true that if I had been taught a second language from the cradle, I could be bilingual, for instance. If I'd been socialized as male, I may have had more confidence with computers, as well.

Now defenders of IQ tests would say that it's measuring potential, and would say that because I'm "intelligent", I could pick up say, computer programming, faster than someone who isn't. This I find hard to swallow, because I've met people who were, say, swift at picking up how to play musical instruments (which I can't do) who don't perform nearly as well as I do on standardized tests like the IQ test. Additionally, I've never really seen any evidence to suggest that the IQ test captures potential instead of one's current ability to take IQ tests, which is why my scores graduallly improved every time I took tests like it. What changed was the context and how much I'd learned. This has been demonstrated in labs, as well---the brain is not a fixed entity by any means, but is constantly moving stuff around depending on context.

Before we even begin to measure, innate, fixed intelligence, we need to prove that there is such a thing. Which would require being able to sort out the innate, fixed-ness of it from factors such as education, stimulation, and nutrition. We'd also have to account for the fact that some people are really good at some things and not so much at others, and explain what the scientific reasons are to say X is more "intelligent" than Y. If you assume it takes more intelligence to write for The Daily Beast than fix a car, are you absolutely sure that it's not simply classism that's driving your assumptions? Where's your evidence?

*What tools are they using to measure it? We assume IQ tests measure intelligence, because that's what they've always purported to do. Which is why I really recommend reading Gould's book, because he does a great job of showing how, no matter how test writers tried to rearrange the test, it never really got past measuring acquired skills and knowledge to measure some sort of deep-down intelligence that's unaffected by acquired skills and knowledge. This is important, because if the IQ test is measuring acquired skills and knowledge does absolutely nothing to support the racist contention that differing outcomes for social groups is about innate intelligence and not limited opportunities. 

In addition to demonstrating that an IQ test measures some deep-down innate intelligence---which they've never been able to do, since the very existence of innate intelligence hasn't been demonstrated---they would have to prove that what they're measuring has more impact on eventual life outcomes than socialization, opportunity and education. Since dumbasses like George W. Bush can become President by coasting on privilege, I think that's probably going to be beyond even the most strained rationalizations of the most devoted racists. 

I realize that the authors of The Bell Curve did try to hedge on this by suggesting socialization is part of intelligence, but they still grounded their argument in the belief that innate intelligence is a natural limitation, and that it is the primary factor in how well racial groups do against each other in the economic and educational marketplaces. That's something of a red herring. Even if you think "intelligence" is only say, 50% fixed, you're still arguing that there's a fixed, innate intelligence. You still have to prove that contention. 

To be fair, since I'm a fan of the idea that there's no single definition of intelligence, I'm going to guess that Bush is a pretty good golfer. 

*What categories are they comparing in their research? When IQ studies first came into vogue, assumptions about who and who wasn't in the category we now consider "white" were much different, with Italians and Jews being considered tremendously different than Anglos. Which is to say, race and ethnicity are social and legal categories, but they can't really be understood realistically as biological categories. (According to Wikipedia, the authors of The Bell Curve tried to skip over this problem by claiming that previous studies finding Jews and white ethnics were less intelligent were nothing but folklore, but in fact, there's a strong historical record to prove otherwise.) All the problems inherent to treating men and women as discrete categories who can be meaningfully compared on factors like "emotionalism" and "horniness", as if we didn't have more in common biologically than not? That goes quadruple for treating race categories that way. Because we put a lot of social worth into things like skin color doesn't mean that nature agrees. If we chose as a species to highlight foot length instead of skin color, we're probably be seeing IQ claims correlated with shoe size instead of race. 

I'm not pulling one of those irritating white liberal "race is just a color" things out of my pocket. I accept race as a category and am a firm believer that social categories matter as much, if not more, than biological categories. I'm just arguing that it's important to know the difference. If you're struggling to understand the difference, consider people who have parents of differing racial categories, such as Obama. If you assume race is a biologial category, he's uncategorizable. If you assume it's a social category---as I do, and as most of us do, if you really think about it---he's black. He identifies as black and is identified by others as black. Most of us have a more diverse ancestry than you'd initially realize, making the notion of biological race categories even shakier. In addition, applying the racial categories that have developed in the United States to the world at large, which has a wide variety of ideas about how to categorize people, reveals the limits of conflating social categories with biological ones. In the U.S., for instance, we identify as large and diverse group of people from a large part of the largest continent in the world as "Asian", but I don't imagine they see themselves as a racially homogenous group.

*Is their hypothesis falsifiable? This is getting into the most science-y part of the scientific questions for laymen, and in most cases it might be more than the average reader can take on. But I do think there's one thing to consider for ordinary people looking at this debate: Do the people making the claims of intellectual inferiority back down when their claims are disproved? Or do they hedge, trying to throw up a lot of distracting complications to make their work impenetrable for ordinary people, and otherwise do anything but let go of their theory? I particularly think it's important to watch and see if someone with a racial inferiority theory tries to get you into the weeds by chasing down red herrings instead of dealing with the central arguments and the evidence for them. They're not interested in finding truth so much as defending their hypothesis. (Sullivan does this by saying, "No one is arguing that "that black people are dumber than white," just that the distribution of IQ is slightly different among different racial populations, and these differences also hold true for all broad racial groups..." Which is a way of saying, "If I say black people are dumber than white using bigger words, that will create a larger and more headache-inducing debate that will drive most of you off in frustration." That's not allowing your hypothesis could be falsified by any stretch.) 

In other words, if they're striving to make their claims as complex-sounding and headache-inducing as possible, instead of putting effort towards making their claims and their evidence clear and understandable, that's a giant red flag. They're not trying to invite criticism like proper scientists should, but trying to put a wall up around their ideas to protect them from it. 

Look out, too, for them putting you on the defensive. That's not how scientific theorizing works. It's like court: the burden of proof is on the prosecution. They are going to try to claim that the burden of proof is on those who think it's not obvious that black people are inherently inferior, but since we're not the ones making previously un-evidenced claims (that intelligence is fixed and innate, that IQ tests meaningfully measure it, that racial groups are distinct biological categories), it's not. If they try to shift the burden of proof or make their ideas harder and not easier to understand, that's about protecting the theory and not subjecting it to rigorous criticism. 

**************

Now, by bringing up these questions, I'm not trying to come up with a definitive answer, though I think it's utterly clear what my opinion is. I'm not interested in playing a game of concealing my point of view on these things, because that only contributes to an atmosphere of bad faith that has infected this debate from the beginning. For which I blame the pro-racism side, because they strike a bad faith pose of being merely interested in scientific discourse, even though there's no real reason to think that disinterested scientific research would move in a direction of using inadequate tools to measure ill-defined traits amongst groups that are genuinely hard to categorize using biological measures. But I think that their bad faith pose can cause people of good faith to engage on that level with them, and I hope keeping these four questions in mind will keep you grounded when dealing with an issue that has a whole lot of ill-intentioned hand-waving going on. 

Before I get into this, I want to say that I'm the first to say, from a reality-based perspective, that Americans are, in a sense, "over-medicalized". I'm no shill for doctors, and in my ideal world, we would all spend less time at the damn doctor. But the reason that we are in doctor's offices more than we should be is a complex one---if fact, it's multiple reasons. And most of them are things the medical establishment is trying to fix. A lot of the reason doctors order too many tests and prescribe too many drugs is that if they didn't do so, their patients would flip the fuck out on them---because Americans have never once really gotten behind the idea that less can sometimes be more---and since it's in a doctor's best financial interests often to do more, they aren't going to fight you as hard as they probably should. Another reason that is completely unrelated that we spend more on doctors than we ideally should is that we, as a nation, don't invest nearly enough in prevention. We let young people go uninsured, making it years and even decades that people go without just basic check-ups, so that when they do finally start seeing a doctor, illnesses that could have been caught early have festered. We eat too much and exercise too little, and then we end up spending way more on diabetes management and cholesterol drugs than we should. We underfund contraception spending and shame women for being slutty if they use contraception, resulting in high unintended pregnancy rates that lead to even more preventable health problems. 

So yes, we are over-medicalized in a sense, but it's a complex problem and Americans are simple-minded idiots. Thus, people have this vague sense that we are all at the doctor too much, and they react not by learning the ins and outs of this complex problem, but instead by embracing a knee-jerk assumption that medical science is BAD and "natural"---whatever the fuck that means---is GOOD, and that doctors are out to get you and that everything produced by Big Pharma is BAD and "chemical" and therefore toxic. And they convince themselves the problem isn't a combination of hard-to-extract social forces plus bad managment of our collective medical dollar, but instead that medical science is some Frankenstein-y evil scientist shit and that the cure for our problems lies in shopping at Whole Foods. This attitude gives birth to anti-vaccination idiots and homeopathic nonsense and GOOD magazine tricking themselves into believing that something is bad if you call it "salycic acid", but A-OK if you call it "extract of willow". (Seriously, it's time to revive the dihydrogen monoxide hoax.) And no one is more guilty than Huffington Post of promoting knee-jerk hostility to medical science in lieu of promoting actual knowledge. 

Case in point: they've run an article by a quack named Dr. Robert Kornfeld, who is.....wait for it....a "holistic" podiatrist. Who has this art on his office's homepage:

 Run away while your feet are still healthy!

In all seriousness, the Huffington Post should issue a formal apology for running this article titled "6 Medical Myths Even Your Doctor May Still Believe", since it's a sea of strawmen, shilling for just-as-corporate "alternative" medicine, and straight dangerous misinformation. Let's take it one at a time. 

Myth #1- Technology has improved healthcare

But....but....statistics!

But Dr. Kornfeld poops your stupid, irrefutable numbers. 

Statistically, since the age of technology, there has been an onslaught of increasing pathology. The amount of illness and morbidity in our society is dramatically rising. There are now more cases of cancer, heart disease, arthritis, auto-immune illnesses, endocrine disorders, developmental disorders, allergies, respiratory problems, infectious diseases, neurological problems, musculo-skeletal pathology, gastro-intestinal disorders, psychological illness, etc., than ever before.

Plus, there's so many more old people around, and they need to go to the doctor so much. Clearly, letting people get older hasn't done shit for our national health. 

In all honesty, what's particularly perverse about this is one reason U.S. life expectancy has gone up so much in the past century or so is that we've developed so many technologies that keep small children alive that would have otherwise died, with vaccines being a big one, as well as some of the simple technologies that keep troubled infants alive that would have died before we had things like, oh, respirators. 

But the biggest problem with his argument is that it's a red herring. Yes, it's true that certain illnesses are on the rise in our culture (but other fatal illnesses, such as polio, have been wiped out), but that literally has nothing to do with technology. His argument is like saying, "Cars were promised to get us places faster, but I still can't run better than an 8 minute mile." The two things are unrelated! Unless you think there's a sea of doctors out there telling patients to stuff their maw with tons of crap while never getting their heart rate above resting because, fuck it, they can get Lipitor, then this argument makes no sense at all. 

Myth #2 - Inflammation is bad

One thing about quacks is that all have one completely bizarro obsession, and this guy's argument that you should let swollen things be swollen and painful is his. I've argued before that I see connections between thinking of anti-choicers and the "natural" fetishists, even though they often fall on opposite sides of the political divide (though not only---look up the concept of a "crunchy conservative"), and this belief that suffering is inherently good for you---well, not you, but other people you would foist it on---is one of those links. I feel bad for this guy's patients, because I'm guessing if you have foot problems, the occasional use of an anti-inflammatory, even just aspirin, is probably just what you need.

Myth #3 - Genetically coded diseases are unavoidable...

Let's take a closer look at this issue. If having a gene for any illness condemns you to having that disease, then why are you not born with the disease you are coded to have? Why isn't every person who carries a gene for disease suffering at all times from that disease? The answer is that all genes do not express themselves at all times and many never do. There must be a reason why the body would call upon a gene to express itself. Otherwise, none of us would be able to survive the onslaught of genetic expression. So what is it that causes a gene to express itself? If you consider for a moment that diseases are just a complex of symptoms being incorporated by the body in an attempt to protect itself from tissue destruction and/or imminent death, you may begin to get a clearer understanding of what I am trying to say. Once we begin to pay attention to the reasons that a gene might express itself, we may be able to prevent that gene from releasing its code for illness.

He then goes into a lot of blather about "free radicals" and basically implies that eating right is all you need to do to prevent genetic illnesses from developing. This section may have bothered me the most, because it takes a grain of truth---that genes interact with the environment and can express themselves in different ways---and runs off into la-la land with it. Unfortunately, it's a la-la land where he's discouraging people from working with their doctor to learn about genetic diseases in their families and what can be done to prevent or minimize them in the real world. It's a complete and utter lie that doctors think that having a gene for something condemns you to the worst possible version of that disease, and that they won't do anything to help you prevent that from happening. For instance, I have a friend whose family has a genetic tendency towards high cholesterol, and her doctor---gasp!---put her on a diet and exercise program in order to lower her cholesterol and avoid having to control it with drugs that can sometimes be not so good for your body. He certainly didn't drag her into his office and say, "Well, let's talk about how you're inevitably going to have a heart attack before you're 35." This is a despicable misreading of how doctors use genetic information to deal with patients. Plus, Kornfeld basically claims that any genetic illness that you develop is your fault because you didn't mind your free radicals, which is an outrageous guilt-tripping of people who do get sick no matter what they do. He's basically pandering to the weird notion that we will never die and that we're in complete control at all times of our bodies, and that's simply not true.  You can do things to improve your health, sure, but you know, the clock is ticking for all of us.

Myth #4 - Medications improve health

We are, in this country, the most heavily medicated society on the planet. People are taking medications to control the symptoms of countless diseases. These medications are either prescribed by their physicians or purchased over the counter by the patient. I have seen, in my practice, thousands of elderly patients taking upward of 10 prescription medications as well as a few over-the-counter ones. If you ask the average senior how they are feeling, most will say that they feel awful in spite of their medications. How could this be? If the medications are supposedly "keeping them healthy," how come they feel so bad? There are a number of reasons for this.

Seriously, I'm beginning to wonder if this sort of thing is opening HuffPo up for a lawsuit. Look, this is about the stupidest thing I've ever read. For instance, say someone has a minor stomach upset from the birth control pill on occasion. Are they feeling less than perfect? Sure. Are they feeling better than they would be if facing an unintended pregnancy? Absolutely. (Talk about stomach distress.) He's basically trying to imply that doctors don't believe in side effects, when the contrary is true. In fact, the point of a doctor is that they're supposed to balance your competing needs to determine what treatments to give you. So yes, some drugs make you feel not so great, but the point is that if you didn't take them, you'd feel even worse. Or you wouldn't be feeling at all, due to the "dead" thing. Take Lipitor, which is a drug I return to because it's one of those that I think provokes this kind of anxiety. The medical establishment is trying to prevent people from going on Lipitor. That's why they test your blood even if you're healthy, weigh you, and otherwise promote diet and exercise. They know Lipitor has bad side effects, but the problem is that high cholesterol has worse side effects. 

Myth #5 - Childhood immunizations protect us from serious disease

I don't even know what to say. He minimizes childhood illnesses from the past, suggesting that it's no big deal to get, say, whooping cough or diptheria (which currently kills about 10% of people who get it), but then makes the usual unfounded claims that vaccines are bad for kids. I don't even want to go over this, except to refer you to this actual science-based myth-debunking about vaccines. The one thing I'll add is to ask you to look at that life expectancy chart and remember that one reason life expectancy went up so dramatically is that we were able, through medical technology, to dramatically reduce the number of infant and small children deaths, and that one of the most important technologies was vaccines. If you still don't believe this, go visit a 19th century graveyard and consider how many graves are there for children.

Myth # 6 - The double blind - placebo controlled study guarantees safety and efficacy in drug therapy

It's no surprise that quacks all over dislike double blind studies, because double blind studies tend to show that "alternative" therapies don't work at all. Which isn't to say that there aren't legitimate criticisms of the FDA standards for testing efficacy and safety. But most of those criticisms aren't coming from people who think you should stop going to real doctors and give your money to quacks instead. For a more measured, pro-science approach to this question, I recommend watching Ben Goldacre's TED Talk.

I'll repeat; on a certain level, I get it. Our health care system is in crisis. Some people are over-medicated, and some people can't get care at all. Doctors are often over-worked and not up on the latest science. We spend too much treating illnesses that could have been prevented. A lot of drugs given to people aren't the best treatment  possible, and Big Pharma actually takes pains to conceal that fact because it hurts their bottom line. All these things are true. But the solution isn't to embrace some black-and-white anti-medical science point of view, and lash out at medical science for having the nerve to exist. Medical science isn't evil, it's just in crisis. It doesn't need to be abandoned so much as improved. And if you stop wasting so much time engaging with quacks and Big Alternative Medicine (much of which is owned by Big Pharma) and pay attention to the real debates going on about how to improve medicine, you'll find it's all very fascinating and perhaps not as hard to understand as you feared. 

From an intellectual, political perspective, I really loathe anti-vaccination nuttiness. Just like with anti-choicers, I will never completely understand what compels people to support choices and policies that will objectively create health problems where none need exist. I hate the shunning of evidence for woo, and I especially hate the way parents are encouraged to substitute their own dislike for getting their children vaccinated (kids hate shots!)  for intellectual assessment of the necessity of vaccination.

But now I have one more reason to loathe anti-vaccination nuts. They made me feel kind of hot---and not in a fun, sexy way---all damn afternoon. Though I imagine it will fade in a couple of hours, I am running a slight fever, and Jenny McCarthy and the sea of yuppie no-vaccination parents are to blame. 

You see, I agreed this morning to get a Tdap, which is a combination tetanus, diptheria, and pertussis vaccine. It used to be that adults getting a booster for tetanus (every ten years, people---keep up with your shots!) or tetanus/diptheria alone, but now they toss the pertussis in with it. Pertussis is better known by the name "whooping cough". Just last year, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices  recommended that adults, especially those with regular exposure to small children, start getting pertussis boosters along with their tetanus shots, in response to a surge in whooping cough cases, which have resulted in at least 10 infant deaths in California alone. The reason for the surge in whooping cough cases? Anti-vaccination activists. Yep, because of paranoia about vaccinations, vaccination levels for whooping cough have fallen below herd immunity levels, causing the disease to come back. And it's an ugly one even if you don't die, I'll tell you. From this handy-dandy cheat sheet debunking the nine most prominent anti-vaccination arguments comes this description of the hell that is whooping cough:

Whooping cough is much more than “just a bad cough”. Kids often turn blue from lack of oxygen during coughing fits, they may vomit after severe attacks, and even fracture ribs. There is no cure for whooping cough – antibiotics are given to help stop the transmission to others – you just have to hope your immune system can fight it. Severe complications such as pneumonia and brain damage occur almost exclusively in unvaccinated people and in babies under 6 months of age the symptoms can be severe or life threatening. Whooping cough is also known as the 100-day cough making it a chronic and potentially fatal disease.

Frontline showed a video of a baby with whooping cough who was coughing so hard he was unable to take a breath and nearly died. It took me days to shake that horrible image from my head. Terrible stuff. So when my doctor suggested I get a Tdap, I was like, "Where do I sign up?" I'm not someone who spends a lot of time directly around children, but it still seemed to my doctor and myself like I really should get vaccinated. I live right smack dab in one of the major areas where there are both a lot of young children and a lot of yuppie parents who buy into anti-vaccination nonsense, meaning that I'm simply in an area that probably has fallen below herd immunity levels. I'm somewhat surprised that Brooklyn hasn't had an outbreak to rival the ones in yuppie-thick areas of California, in fact. So getting a shot that helps raise that herd immunity, even by a little bit, seemed like the right thing to do. But I am kind of paying for it a little right now. So I'm blaming Jenny McCarthy and putting the word out there to the adults reading this blog to get your booster shots. If you're feeling like whooping cough isn't that big a deal, please watch that episode of Frontline. And then go get vaccinated. 

Of course, I may have just run a slight fever from a tetanus shot alone, to be completely fair. And that particular vaccine? That one is just for me, because dying of lockjaw seems scarier to me than being burned alive. 

I know I shouldn't give the NY Post the time of day, because it's a right wing, misogynist rag that has very little interest in boring old journalistic ideas like "facts", but I'm going to go ahead and address this article decrying modern women for being "cheap", and not holding out for sex until men provide a higher "price". The reason is I've seen a variation of this article in practically every newspaper under the sun. There are a lot of dudes out there not getting laid as much as they think they deserve, and this theory of sexual markets is so appealing to them that they're willing to shove aside all critical thinking to believe that "science" has explained their problems. See, the eternal complaint of the Nice Guy® is that a) women give it away to guys who don't deserve it but b) women's affections aren't loose enough to be applied to them.  (Not all Nice Guys® are obsessed with "sluts" even as they work hard the idea that if a woman would guy X, she's required to date guy Y, and if she finds Y unattractive, she's "shallow". As long as they're not raving about sluts, I think there's potential for redemption for Nice Guys®.) The problem with the theory of Nice Guys® is that it's internally contradictory: they both believe women's standards to sleep with a guy are too low (which is why she sleeps with him) and too high (she's shallow for not sleeping with me). There's mental tricks they play to ease the cognitive dissonance---for instance, by suggesting that if a guy's hotness impresses you that makes your standards too low, but if you don't like someone who spends 40 hours a week playing table games, you're shallow---but evo psych has come up with a theory that satisfies many of their desires.  It's the "market theory" of sex. NY Post, as is their habit, reduces a misogynist theory that's painted in more subtle terms elsewhere in the blunt terms that make it oh-so-accessible.

Men want sex more than women do. It’s a fact that sounds sexist and outdated. But it is a fact all the same -- one that women used for centuries to keep the price of sex high (if you liked it back in the day, you really had to put a ring on it). With gender equality, the Pill and the advent of Internet porn, women’s control of the meet market has been butchered. 

Ha ha! Women's rights have taken from them the only thing women really want: some man to pretend to love them in order to get laid. Ladies, admit it. You may think that living with a guy who seethes with resentment towards women but occasionally and reluctantly buys you flowers in order to achieve occasional penetration may not sound so great, but really the culmination of all your heart's desires. 

But what's so great about this theory for Nice Guys® is that it explains all their problems. It characterizes women as both sexually reluctant (meaning the reason she doesn't want to have sex with you is she just doesn't like sex) but also paints them as dirty sluts (who only sleep with other guys because, shallow whores that they are, they're all brainlessly competing for a guy that is more "alpha" than the Nice Guy®).  On top of it all, the theory punishes women for daring to believe they deserve something like rights---especially the right to choose their partner, meaning they can not choose the Nice Guy®!---by suggesting that their dumb female ambition to be treated like full human beings is what will destroy them. I suspect that it's Nice Guys® driving the market for these stories, because every time I write about them, I get exactlly the same clusterfuck of comments and emails from angry dudes I get when I make fun of Nice Guys®.  (Please, Nice Guys® of the world, I beg of you: If you must innundate me with emails and comments where you insist that I drop everything I'm doing--hey, it's not like women need to work to earn money---could you just dial down the condescending, pompous language that insinuates that you are uniquely burdened to explain to the child-woman how stupid she is being and how, if she just applied herself to swallowing your horseshit wholesale, she could even pretend she's real people?  No?  Okay, I thought I would ask.) 

My reporters willing to promote this evidence-free sexual market theories try to conceal some of the  obvious flaws in the theories, but NY Post doesn't give a shit.  Their blunt language makes it all the much easier to see some of the glaring flaws in this theory. 

Flaw #1: Men like sex, but women don't.  None of these theories work for a second without believing this.  Evo psych goobers have dialed it back a little, by suggesting just that men like sex "more"---which is a softened way of saying men like sex, and women don't, so men have to buy it from women.  The reason that "more" can't be in play is that the argument always rests on the assumption that every act of sex is a woman trying to extract resources, not orgasms.  For instance, if they did accept that women like sex for itself---even less than men---at least some sex, even casual sex, needs no explanation.  Women do it because they like it. I don't love lattes as much as some people who live in the coffee shop. But somehow, when I'm in the mood for a latte and buy one, there's no need to create a market explanation for what I'm getting out of latte that the person who simply likes latte isn't getting.  When evo psychologists say men like sex "more", they mean men like sex and women like money and/or male attention. Believing taht women don't really like sex with men tells you more about the person holding the belief than men and women.

Flaw #2: Men like sex more than women. As noted, this is just weasel language to try to fit evo psych theories into undeniable evidence that women seek out sex because they like it. (Also, it's really hard to explain away lesbians if you assume women live for male resources and attention.)  It does make some sense that if men liked sex more, women could be pickier, even though it would drain a lot of this market theory of its oomph. But they'll take it---anything to preserve the theory, which means that it falls outside of the realm of science, where theories that don't hold up well are abandoned in favor of better ones. The problem with this theory that men like sex more is no one has really ever been able to prove it. There was one study that was bandied around as proof positive, but it turned out that it was a study where random people were asked by a stranger of the opposite sex to have sex right then and there, and men were more likely to say "yes" than women (who basically all said no).  Of course, what that study measured was not actually sexual desire, but women's fear of being raped, a fear that makes perfect sense in a world where rape rates are so incredibly high. Pretty much all research I've seen indicating men like sex "more" only indicates that men have more freedom and opportunities for sexual stimulation.  It's probably impossible to measure some kind of pure biological set level of desire in men and women.  Desire is heavily influenced by environmental factors and varies tremendously from individual to individual. It's also worth noting that even if you could find some average, that doesn't say much about individuals. Many women out there could easily tell you about having far more sexual desire than male partners, for instance.  The theory that men like it more is torture for these women, by the way. It makes them feel like unattractive monsters---after all, if men like it more, why do they have to beg for it, if not that it's they're extremely undesireable? (If we accepted that men can actually have lower sex drives, these women would be in a better place to realize that it's unlikely their partners would be with them if they didn't like to fuck them.)

Flaw #3: Women's rights somehow automatically mean more sluttiness.  I've never figured this one out.  They explain it over and over again, but it keeps sounding like a just-so story.  If women had a cabal over the pussy before the pill, why don't we have a cabal over it now?  If we don't like sex, it would be the easiest thing in the world to say no still.  People who forward this complex theory can't get around this problem.  The easiest explanation for why women fuck more with contraception is that the price of sex was lowered for everyone, not just men.

To put it this way: I don't like the taste of mayo. I make every sandwich place hold it. But I know that I can tolerate it if I have to. So if you paid me, I'd probably eat some mayo if the price is high enough. But if you were like, "This mayo is free!", I'm still not going to eat it.  In this model, mayo is sex for women. Even if you assume that I occasionally have a mayo craving because of hormone swings, that doesn't mean I'm going to eat more mayo when I'm not in the mood for mayo. What evo psychologists can't get around is that women like sex so much that they had it even when it often meant having babies they didn't want or even the possibility of death. Unless you believe that most to all sex was basically bought or extracted with rape throughout history and women only developed a teeny little flicker of desire in the 20th century, I really don't think this theory holds up in the slightest. 

Worse, it justifies rape. When you're running around saying that science says men are uncontrollable horny beasts and women who have sex have lowered their value, then you've just written a blank check to rapists to rape as many "sluts" as they want, assured that science says they can't help themselves and that women who have had sex before have no value anyway. 

Every time I write pieces like this, by the way, I'm accused of having an agenda. I think it's high time we start asking if people who forward theories of sexual markets that have little to no real evidence behind them might themselves have an agenda.  I know, for instance, that Mark Regenerus, who is quoted in this article, is a conservative Christian who believes that the ideal would be for women to be locked down as someone's wife by no later than 23. What's funny is I have less of a dog in the fight than a bunch of dudes that feel left out of the "sexual marketplace".  Defending women who have casual sex is more of an intellectual than a personal exercise for me at this point in my life. But for men who, whether it's because they're married or they aren't high performers with the ladies, don't get to be in the game and seriously resent it, these theories might have a lot of emotional power that is clogging up their ability to be rational. 

Today at XX Factor, I counter a lot of the reporting on a Johns Hopkins-based study of 6 sub-Saharan African nations and the factors that influence sexual frequency.  Researchers found that the more decision-making that a woman did in her household, the less frequently she reported having sexual intercourse. For those of us who spend a lot of time reading about public health research, this study read like many, many others that are like it, which are looking at the intra-personal politics in areas where there's a lot of negative health consequences related to sex (high maternal mortality and HIV transmission are the biggies), with an eye towards developing interventions that will reduce the incidences of these kinds of problems.  For instance, what someone might take away from this study is that women who have a lot of power in non-sexual negotiations at home probably has more power when it comes to sexual negotiations, which can in turn make it easier for a woman to prevent HIV transmission and time her pregnancies.  

What this wasn't was an evolutionary psychology study, as far as I can tell. But, as I report at XX Factor, that's exactly how it was read by many journalists.  Reporter after reporter decided to spin this as if it were researchers suggesting that not only do "bossy" women get laid less, but that the researchers were suggesting that this is due to an evolved, genetic response in men to abhor assertive women. The Huffington Post even went so far as to compare this research to some bullshit nonsense being asserted without evidence by a evo psych devotee at Florida State. (He found evidence that greater gender equality leads to women having more sex in various countries, but he did not actually establish evidence for his convulted theory that this shows women are hurt by feminism because it forces them to put out more---which he asserts, evidence-free, women don't like to do.)  There's nothing in the comments from the researchers I've read that suggest that they were saying such a thing, or that they were interested in extrapolating genetic theories from their research at all. The head of the Johns Hopkins study is Michelle Hindin from the department of population and family health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health---I'm guessing a public health researcher who has no relationship whatsoever to evolutionary psychology, because she's probably too busy doing real research.

As I note at XX Factor, what this study probably shows even more is that sexual choice-making is highly influenced by culture and circumstance, because these women, living in areas where HIV prevalence is way higher than here and where it's primarily transmitted through straight sex, have a different environment than empowered women in countries where women have lower risks. I suspect strongly this influences their idea of how much and what kind of sex is good for them. 

So why was this study touted as some kind of evo psych bullshit "proving" that men lose their hard-ons when women start making decisions, and that this is inborn and not something anyone can change by changing society?  Well, I think it's because there's such a constant stream of such bullshit evo psych research being sent to newspapers in chipper press releases that this has become the dominant model of reporting on science looking at sex and gender. Evo psych ideologues don't even need to spell out their claims that most to all sex-and-gender choices are programmed genetically and unchangeable.  They've trained (oh irony!) journalists to fill in that assumption themselves.  So much so that when a study that has no relationship to evolutionary psychology comes across reporters desks, they apply the "men are like this, women are like that" evo psych model of assuming that misogynist stereotypes are biological facts, and they run with it. 

It's really disturbing to see the 21st century version of phrenology  get so much play in the mainstream media. But now it's gobbling up real science coverage.  That's fucked up.

With all that in mind, I'd like to invite anyone that's going to be in Brooklyn tomorrow night to come to Union Hall for the next installment of the Story Collider series. Story Collider is a story-telling series that focuses on stories about the personal impact that science has had on the lives of the story tellers.  I'm honored to say I've been invited to tell a story, and I'm going to write about how being a critic of evolutionary psychology made me more interested, as a writer, in science overall.  The headliner is Carl Zimmer, and he'll be joined by Anna North, Mark Katz, Bora Zivkovic, Tricia Rose Burt and myself. Buy your tickets in advance, if you can, because it often sells out. 

Disclaimer: I'm not interested in turning this into a tedious thread about how Dan Savage is the worst person who ever lived because he occasionally says something you disagree with.  I'm genuinely surprised he gets shit on so much, since his occasional error is inevitable when you're producing a voluminous amount of work on the often-tricky and complex questions of sexual and relationship ethics and choices.  Most of the time, people who get shit on as much as he does, it's because the shit-ers believe the shit-ee is sensitive and responsive, and they enjoy shitting on them because they know it gets to them.  But Savage strikes me as thick-skinned, so I don't know why the Internet Denunciation Committee even bothers.  I don't really think he gives a flying fuck what you think.

This isn't really part of the news cycle and probably isn't the most important thing to be tackling on a Monday morning, but I have to unload my irritation.  Last episode of the Savage Love podcast, Dan had on Heike Rodriguez, who claims to be a sex educator who teaches women how to do female ejaculation, should they feel that they aren't spending enough time doing laundry.  I'm all for women learning the technique that could get you there, if that's something you're in to, and applaud all sorts of erotic experimentation done for the holy reason called "for the hell of it".  I'm guessing that kind of goal was why Rodriguez was invited on the show.  Unfortunately, she wasn't interested in educating people on techniques that might work for them so much as pushing her ridiculous and frankly sexist agenda on unwitting women like myself who tune in to the show for purely innocent reasons.  (Read: we like to listen to other people's sex problems while running errands or working out.)  See, Rodriguez is a first class pusher of woo, but more than that, she's a big fucking bully. And Dan should have cut the interview and told her to suck it.

Basically, what happened was that Dan was trying to get her to talk about the basics of female ejaculation, to dispel a couple of myths (that it's pee being the big one), and go on her merry way.  She, on the other hand, wanted to talk about how the G-spot is the emotional center of a woman's being and the if you're not ejaculating on a regular basis, the sole and only reason had to be that you are suffering from emotional blockage. Thus, when asked for techniques on how to do it, she was focused like a laser beam on characterizing those who don't ejaculate as emotionally broken women who need to go into therapy or just generally work on their brokenness until they start ejaculating, at what point they can feel like they're whole human beings without all those terrible neuroses non-ejaculators have.

I was surprised she didn't start to claim that female ejaculation is the process by which your body purges thetans and renders you clean so you can move on to the next level, at least after writing a check to her for thousands of dollars. 

To be clear, it was obvious from the interview that Dan was not happy about the way things had turned, and was trying to politely steer his guest in a less judgmental, less wackadoodle direction.  As far as I know, he's never been big on the hippy-dippy crap that links sexual health, acts, or performance to some kind of cosmic wholeness or the amount of patchouli in the room.  If anything, he's often pointed out that people's neuroses can be the root of some of their hottest fantasies, and I think he generally has a wide tolerance for neuroses, on the grounds that most people have them and it's not a big thing as long as it doesn't interfere with your overall wellbeing.  The interview was shorter than usual, and he did eventually get her to the point before shuffling her off.  I wouldn't be surprised if he talks about it for the next podcast and clarifies his point of view.  Which I suspect is very different from hers, especially since he did try a couple of times to correct her gently.  Overall, the interview sounded like a conversation you might have when you get caught in a conversation with someone who has weird, false beliefs but is very insistent about them.  Most of us try to politely disagree, give up, and then try as politely as possible to get out of it.  That's what he sounds like he was doing. 

That said, there was more that had to be done.  He should not have run the interview.  This is something that people in media have to deal with all the fucking time, and it's a tough one and I get that.  I have a podcast (listen to the latest here!), and I've definitely struggled with what to do when I interview someone and they wander off the farm into La La Land.  I've cut interviews before because someone just started riding a hobby horse that I thought was counter-factual. Not often---maybe once or twice---but still.  A couple more times, I've cut the part of the interview where the guest said factually incorrect things or promoted woo.  It's really a matter of how the interview is framed.  If I bring someone on to offer an opinion and I disagree, I run it.  I'm not endorsing the views of anyone I interview so much as letting them have a chance to express themselves and let the listener decide what they think.

But when an interview is explicitly about educating the audience, I think the standards have to be a little tighter.  When I bring someone on because I think they have information to impart and not just because I think they have opinions that are interesting, I raise the standards of what they're allowed to say on my show. I just cannot support setting up an education framework and then injecting untruths into it.  It runs against the very purpose of education. 

I realize that the line between fact and opinion is blurry, especially when it comes to sexual techniques and whatnot, but this woman crossed it big time.  Blag Hag has more information on why Rodriguez was unquestionably in the wrong here.  It sucks and feels rude to cut someone's interview, but your responsibility to the people you claim to be educating should take priority  in these situations.

One last thought: I have no doubt that Rodriguez considers herself a feminist.  Women who push this particular brand of woo invariably do.  But I really have to question a "feminism" that centers a woman's life around her vagina and is bullying and essentialist in this way.  If you suddenly declared that the amount of ejaculate a man produced was indicative of the state of his soul, because the penis is the emotional center of the man, we'd probably have no problem seeing you as a sexist who blows the differences between men and women way out of proportion.  The reality is that men and women have way more in common than not, and that's especially true when it comes to the physiological manifestations of our emotions, which, as far as I understand, are basically the same.

(Amanda’s note: Lindsay has graciously written a retort to Jesse Bering in Slate, and I asked her if she’s post i here. Bering has a history of half-baked evo psych writings that play loose with the concept that rape is all that bad, and Lindsay was kind enough to do the heavy lifting on this article.)

By Lindsay Beyerstein

Jesse Bering has a very disturbing piece in Slate about intergenerational sex. It starts off creepy and culminates with a partial defense of raping 98-year-old woman with dementia. Forgive the unwieldy block quotes, but without them, I fear the casual reader will assume that I am trying to smear Bering by mischaracterizing his work.

Bering opens with the disclaimer that he’s “always found elderly women rather endearing”:

Just as chubby, doe-eyed infants and the smell of baby powder bring out the maternal part of my androgynous personality, the Loris-like gait of an aged spinster redolent with ancient perfume elicits in me a similar strain of docility. On more than one occasion I have been tempted to reach out and hug a lonely old widow making her way slowly down the grocery-store aisle. Yet it is safe to say that, while I am not immune to other curious sexual rumblings from time to time, I have never been titillated by an octogenarian. (Since I’m a gay man, I should add that this applies to the penis-bearing elderly, too. I never really knew my grandfathers, though, so the inbound anecdote wasn’t quite as fitting.)

There certainly are individuals for whom the elderly are equated, quite strongly, with the erotic, and it’s these fascinating, little-known souls—referred to in the clinical scientific literature as gerontophiles—to whom we shall now turn. Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his classic 1886 book on sexual deviancy, Psycopathia Sexualis, first described this particular “erotic age orientation.”

To recap: Bering loves old people, he really does. He thinks little old ladies are adorable, just like babies and lorises. (You know what they do to lorises, right?) But the 35-year-old psychologist has never, ever, ever been sexually attracted to an eighty-something, not even an octogenarian dude. There are people who find advanced age very sexy, and those people are sexual deviants. Got it?

Bering claims that he is drawing a line between people who can only become aroused by elders and those who are simply attracted to older folks, but his piece runs the two concepts together from the very first paragraphs. “People for whom the elderly are equated, quite strongly, with the erotic” covers a lot of ground.

Bering can’t resist a dig at the elderly and their admirers, “Rather, in sheer chronological terms, gerontophiles are perhaps better thought of as being closer to necrophiles than cougar-hunters.” He’s ripping off the old joke that gerontophlia is a heartbeat away from necrophilia. The “sheer chronological terms” qualifier doesn’t turn the cheap shot into a high-minded apercu.

Bering fusses over the precise definition of “gerontophilia” but he doesn’t address the central conceptual problem with the entire psychiatric framework for “diagnosing” paraphilias and fetishes. In a world where we can date whoever we like, the difference between a paraphilia and a “type” becomes meaningless. If I’m only attracted to skinny brown haired guys between the ages of 25 and 45, I just don’t date anyone else. Nobody questions this relatively rigid preference because it fits with society’s definition of normal. If I only wanted to date 80-something dudes, Bering would say I was a deviant. Actually, he’d say I was a golddigger because later in the essay asserts that female gerontophiles don’t exist.

The standard pop culture disclaimer is that it becomes a paraphilia or a fetish when you absolutely need that kind of partner/input to become sexually aroused. That stereotype is out of date. Today, psychiatrists recognize that most people with paraphilias engage in paraphilic and non-paraphilic sexual behaviors. Also, these days, the clinical category of paraphilia is largely reserved people with compulsions towards non-consensual sex, e.g., child molesters, subway flashers, peeping toms, and so on. A strong attraction to elders doesn’t fit.

But for the sake of argument, consider an exclusive heterosexual like General J.C. Christian. The General, a Manly 11 on the Scale of Absolute Gender, is absolutely dependent upon women, or thoughts of women, to become aroused. Every single time. Nothing else has ever aroused him in his life. Does that mean the General has heterophilia? No.

Bering insists he is incapable of erotic thoughts about elders. Does that mean Bering some kind of paraphilia for adults roughly his own age? No. He just has his preferences, like everyone else.

Incidentally, the DSM, the bible of mainstream American psychiatry, classified homosexuality as a paraphilia until 1973. Gerontophilia isn’t listed in the DSM—which says a lot about why it isn’t studied more. To psychiatry’s credit, a thing for grey beards is no more remarkable than a thing for redheads, as long as it’s all between consenting adults.

Bering notes that the term “gerontophilia” is also sometimes used by criminologists to describe serial sexual predators who target elderly victims. He argues, sensibly, that these criminals are not necessarily driven by a sexual fixation on the elderly, per se. They may simply be looking for the easiest targets. Feminists have been saying this all along. Rapists don’t rape because they can’t get the kind of sex they like. Rape is the kind of sex they like.

The notion that serial rapists who target the elderly are exploiting their vulnerability fits well with the predator theory of rape, the empirically-based hypothesis that most rape is committed by a relatively small number of hardcore serial acquaintance rapists with finely-tuned modus operandi and multiple victims over their extended criminal careers.

As Thomas explains in a fascinating post on the research behind predator theory, “[t]hese rapists select targets based on the likelihood that they can rape without meaningful consequence, and favor alcohol and avoid overt force as tools to defeat resistance for just this reason.” So far, the research has focused on rapists who target vulnerable younger victims, but it stands to reason that opportunistic predators might gravitate towards vulnerable older victims as well.

The low point of the essay is where Bering argues that a confessed nursing home rapist might have had a point when he excused his actions on the grounds that his victims didn’t know what was going on:

The authors describe the case of a 33-year-old nursing-home assistant who’d been quietly molesting and raping his female charges for several years. Some of this man’s victims were rounding the epochal century mark and were suffering from dementia, thus his defense was that they were “not aware of what was happening.”

The abuse might have continued in silence, had not the shrewd daughter of a 98-year-old woman deduced foul play by noticing that her mom became uncharacteristically frightened whenever the elder-molesting aide came into the room. Ball also reviews forensic data revealing that, in the U.K., somewhere between 2 and 7 percent of all rape victims are over the age of 60.

Elder sexual abuse is reprehensible, of course; but from a bloodless moral philosophical perspective, it does raise intriguing questions about issues related to consent, trauma, and the impact of sex crimes on victims with different psychological and physical stakes. Is the rape of a 98-year-old Alzheimer’s patient—who, whether we like it or not, has only a limited awareness of what is happening, just as the perpetrator says—comparable to, say, the rape of a lucid, vulnerable child who would have to deal with the emotional scars of such sexual violence for the rest of his or her long life, or a teenager who might be impregnated? [Emphases added.]

Would Bering accept this same fallacious argument from a rapist who roofied other men? After all, they wouldn’t remember, and they couldn’t get pregnant. So, by that logic, our roofie rapist would be less reprehensible than your run-of-the-mill predator. I’m guessing Bering wouldn’t buy that argument, because he takes it for granted that men are people.

Even this 98-year-old woman’s suffering doesn’t count. Bering casually acknowledges that this woman was recoiling in terror whenever she saw her assailant, so, it’s not like he’s musing about the limits of consent in a person with diminished cognitive capacity.

Bering is intrigued by the possibility that a 98-year-old woman with dementia is simply less than human.

I’m as befuddled as Libby at XX about this reported study that’s flying around the internet that claims that faith makes you fat.  This is such a classic example of causation not equaling correlation that you could probably use it in a textbook, but that’s hardly the only problem with it.  Casey Schwartz at The Daily Beast also notes that this was a 20-year study, but they only asked about religiosity once, at the beginning of the study, and just assumed that young people who go to church a lot keep up the habit.  So even the correlation isn’t necessarily as strong as being touted. 

I’m all for telling people that going to church is bad for them, don’t get me wrong, but this is just silly.  Odds are that it’s just a cluster of lifestyle and demographic issues—-the study says it controlled for race and income, but not geography, for instance—-and that singling out church just doesn’t really get us there in terms of an explanation.  I’d bet, for instance, that religious people are more conformist, and that alone will have an impact on your waistline in a culture where there’s pressure at every turn to overeat.  Frankly, I bet you’d find a greater correlation between being a football fan and being fat. 

I think these researchers are playing a little fast with the facts in order to achieve two goals, one more noble than the other.  The less noble one is simply getting headlines.  Hey, it can have an impact on your funding and prestige, and it’s probably hard to resist the temptation.  And the other reason is a little more noble:

“Here’s an opportunity for religious organizations to initiate programs to help their congregations live even longer,” Feinstein said. “The organizations already have groups of people getting together and infrastructures in place that could be leveraged to initiate programs that prevent people from becoming obese and treat existing obesity.”

I think it’s hard not to look at churches at an excellent place to promote health messages and healthy habits, because churches are so good at getting people to do other things, especially if they attend church frequently.  But the way to do that isn’t “OMG FAT”.  Not only is it bad science mixed with a dose of fat-shaming, but it’s also going to backfire.  Odds are all that you’re going to convince people to do is not go to church. And there are more honest ways to do that.

Thank you, Sean on Twitter, for making my day last night by drawing my attention to the latest front in the battle of wingnuts vs. science.  Often, when we pro-science sorts are arguing about evolution with wingnuts, they’ll pull the “it’s just a theory” card, to which we often reply, “It’s also called the theory of gravity.  Are you going to argue with gravity?”

Answer: Of course they are.

I sometimes still find that people on the liberal, or at least thoughtful, side of the fence still think that global warming denialism and creationism are discrete things borne out of an emotional need not to believe either in global warming or evolution, and while that’s true, I think it’s deeper than that.  I think that science itself is under attack, and that the reason that conservatives are so eager to lash out against it has to do with an anti-modernist bent.  This is especially true when you understand that science really is a threat to religion.  A lot of people say it’s not, because science doesn’t address “spiritual”  needs, but said folks are really overrating the importance of spirituality for most people—-or assuming that this urge isn’t better scratched by loving others and enjoying life.  Religion really draws its power from explanation.  It gives order to the world.  And science is poaching that territory rapidly, which pisses off authoritarians, because they rightfully understand that if they lose the power to create facile goddidit explanations for everything from gravity to the problem of evil, they will lose their power over people. Thus, the attack not just on specific scientific theories, but on science in general, and most of academia, as well.

The latest installment is Bill O’Reilly’s war on gravity. Or, specifically, his belief that goddidit is a better explanation for the tides than the real explanation, which is that they’re created by a combination of moon and Earth gravity.  He had this exchange with David Silverman, president of the American Atheist Group on his show:

O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O’REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.

Of course, the problem with this is that 3rd graders can in fact explain that, at least well enough to basically trump the goddidit theory.  You don’t need in-depth knowledge to understand that gravity pulls on the oceans, and they basically slosh around, except with predictable regularity because the moon is predictable.  Once this was pointed out to O’Reilly, he called people who understand the theory of gravity “pinheads” and suggested they hadn’t thought this through, because they totally didn’t know where the moon came from!  Also, they can’t explain why god gave us a moon but didn’t give those uninhabited planets moons.*

I would like to point out that O’Reilly’s explanation of why you have to believe in god because that means there is “order”.  To which I must point out that this is the authoritarian, patriarchal mind at its best—-he wishes to believe that him being on top of others is the natural order, so he creates a parallel fantasy of a white guy in the sky who created everything, and his power is derived from the magical white guy in the sky, because presumably they look alike and are both assholes. Also, said white guy in the sky making all the rules means you don’t have to think any more, just obey.  People who say that religion is about “spirituality” miss this, because really, many religious people like O’Reilly like religion because it makes the universe seem small and orderly.  In reality, the universe is huge and, from the small human perspective, seemingly chaotic, making an atheist understanding of nature ironically more awe-inspiring than any petty god invented by mostly illiterate people from the ancient world.

At one point in this rant, O’Reilly, in an attempt to be satirical, suggests that the non-god explanation is something crazy, like suggesting that a meteor hit the planet and created the moon.  In fact, this is basically what happened.

Because we know how the Moon got there (a Mars-sized planet struck the Earth a glancing blow about 100 million years after it formed, splashing debris into orbit which coalesced to form the Moon).

I’d read the whole post by Phil Plait, who breaks down just how silly this all is.  Basically, we know all the stuff that O’Reilly claims we don’t know: where the Sun came from, where the moon came from, and of course, why other planets don’t have moons.  The answer to that is, they do.  Mars—-who O’Reilly says doesn’t have a moon—-has two.  If I recall from my days of star-gazing with my dad, Jupiter has like eleven billionty moons.  If you’re trying to make an argument that god loves us special best by looking at moons as evidence, then you have to believe god loves Jupiter most of all. 

The only move O’Reilly can make now is to attack the theory of gravity, which is how all these other ideas hang together.  Screw attacking Darwin!  It’s time to go after Newton!**  Maybe O’Reilly can work with the Insane Clown Posse on their next big hit single, “Miracles II: Falling Apples, How Do They Work?” 

The good news is that this expanded war on science from conservatives is going to eventually come into conflict with their support of endless spending on weapons research, some of which requires knowledge of the basics of astronomy and physics that explain how the moon got there and the tides works.

*Yes, I know.  Finish the post before leaving a comment crowing about how I didn’t note that there are other moons, because I did, in fact, do so later in the post.  I don’t want you to look foolish in your eagerness to demonstrate your swift recall that Mars has two moons.

**Seriously, we all know is more complicated than that, and that Einstein played a role in revising Newton’s theories, etc. Just let that pedantry go for a moment and enjoy the joke.

This weekend, there was a minor kerfuffle over yet another poorly sourced assertion that people evolved in just such a way as to uphold the meanest, ugliest, most essentialist gender roles the patriarchy ever produced. This time, it was over the shoddy theory that men and women evolved to constantly be in a violent struggle over the vagina, with men trying to force sex on women and women trying mostly to avoid getting pregnant by rapists (though, bafflingly, being more cool with rape when they’re not ovulating). The article reinforced tired, disproven ideas about rape, the most disturbing being that it’s an act of horniness instead of violence, when the more established research shows the opposite.  Emile Yoffe and I addressed the flaws in this article, so I’m not going to rehash the science issues here.

What I do want to talk about is the emotional reasoning for why something “feels” true.  Often, the evidence for the truth of a reactionary claim like, “Men are programmed to rape,” is that the very discomfort it provokes makes it true, or at least makes the objections to it false.  Jesse Bering, the writer of the original piece, plays this card:

Thornhill and Palmer, Malamuth, and the many other investigators studying rape through an evolutionary lens, take great pains to point out that “adaptive” does not mean “justifiable,” but rather only mechanistically viable. Yet dilettante followers may still be inclined to detect a misogyny in these investigations that simply is not there. As University of Michigan psychologist William McKibbin and his colleagues write in a 2008 piece for the Review of General Psychology, “No sensible person would argue that a scientist researching the causes of cancer is thereby justifying or promoting cancer. Yet some people argue that investigating rape from an evolutionary perspective justifies or legitimizes rape.”

This is a facetious analogy, because it doesn’t acknowledge the truth, which is that not everyone is as anti-rape as they are anti-cancer.  Or, should I say, as anti-rape culture.  A lot of rape apologists aren’t so much pro-rape as they are supportive of a culture that makes rape common, which is an important distinction.  (See: Wolf, Naomi.)  The fact that the topic makes some people uncomfortable isn’t proof that the objections to it are somehow more emotional or ideological than the support of it.  On the contrary, I would say that the supporters are the ones whose emotional investment in this being true is clouding their judgment. 

Think about the perceived benefits to many if rape is programmed into men, and a function of horniness and biology and not of violence and misogyny.  Just right off the bat, it means that they can throw up their hands in the air, treating rape like it’s an inevitable problem and there’s nothing they can do about it.  But more importantly, they get an excuse to support the main benefit they perceive in rape culture, which is that it puts all responsibility for rape in the hands of the victims, and therefore used to shame and control female sexuality.  After all, the argument here is that men are naturally disposed to rape and women are naturally disposed to protect themselves.  Therefore, the responsibility is shifted towards women, the only gender who has been given any control.  This, in turn, can be used as an excuse to restrict women’s movements and choices, and to, a la Naomi Wolf, say they had it coming if they engage in casual sex.  It also gives men cover to do a lot of abusive things that fall short of rape, saying they can’t help themselves, a freedom a lot of men would like to reserve for themselves.  (Such as, say, cheating while reserving the right not to be cheated on.)  Of course, a lot of men aren’t willing to be portrayed as out-of-control beasts, but clearly some figure that’s a reasonable price to pay to get these benefits.

And so I have to ask, who are the ones telling uncomfortable truths, that we must accept even if they make us uncomfortable?  I say it’s the feminists.  The fact that our truth, that rape is not inevitable, makes a lot of people uncomfortable doesn’t make it more true.  But it doesn’t make it less true, and more importantly, it doesn’t mean that we’re the only ones with an emotional investment in the outcome.  Our rape apologist opponents are invested as well, often more so.

I was lucky enough to be the first speaker at Skepticon 3.  I was unlucky enough to have a cold.  But you can barely tell!  I was really happy with this talk, so check it out.

Once in a blue moon, you get some genuinely good news in the world of cranks and scam artists pushing “alternative” medicine.  This story is a little old, but it came to my attention this morning because of Gizmodo.  The manufacturers of the obviously farcical Power Balance wristbands were forced in Australia to admit their products are crap, refund customers’ money, and publicly apologize for trying to deceive the public. 

I would also like to take this time to point out that the libertarian argument that markets correct themselves without interference from the government is neatly disproved by the very existence of Power Balance bands, and alternative medicine in general.  The notion that consumers are generally rational and that bad products will be shoved off the market without assistance from regulation is farcical to begin with, but these wristbands were selling like hotcakes.  I watched, as much as I could, a video advertising them, and the “explanation” for how they worked was basically magic.  They supposedly channeled the force fields in your body that somehow extended 1-3 inches outside of your body.  They claim to improve strength and balance by harnessing this magic through methods unknown, though I have to say that if your body has powerful magic fields of strength and balance in it, I’d think that would suffice to make you strong and balanced without a rubber bracelet. 

The problem with the notion that all consumers are rational enough to control the markets with regulatory interference is that people don’t make choices on strictly rational bases.  Or, they’re rational in one sense—-it’s rational to want to be able to spend a little money and get a lot stronger without working out extensively to get there.  Also, it’s not irrational to listen to people who should be experts endorsing a product.  For instance, Shaq has endorsed the wristbands.  If you asked a random person on the street, “Do you think Shaquille O’Neill knows a little something about working out and getting strong?”, the only rational answer is, “Yes.”  Thus, it’s not really that stupid to think that if Shaq thinks something works, then it has a good chance of working, especially if you’re not really familiar with the arguments against magic.

By the way, libertarians themselves exploit people’s irrationality, in aligning themselves with social conservatives who believe in magical deities that justify their misogyny and homophobia, and often libertarian beliefs.  Also, even secular libertarians are living proof against their assertion that average people can be expected to shape the markets with rational choices.  Libertarians believe all sorts of lies and bullshit, particularly with regards to the scientific proof for global warming, and of course their crackpot economic theories. 

Of course, the next gambit in the argument is that people who make stupid choices Have It Coming.  Of course, this presumes—-irrationally—-that there’s an objective standard of justice in the universe and that bad things only happen to people who are stupid or mean.  This doesn’t pass the reality-based test.  It also presumes—-irrationally—-that there are people who effectively avoid negative consequences by always being rational.  There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t harbor some irrational beliefs.  That doesn’t make them stupid or unworthy or deserving of being punished or ripped off.  The person who loses money on a Power Balance wristband and maybe injures himself by thinking he suddenly has a lot more strength than he did before might otherwise be an excellent worker, a good father, and a decent citizen.

Plus, the They Have It Coming argument directly contradicts the Markets Can Regulate Themselves argument. A market that’s dictated by a bunch of people getting ripped off all the time is, by definition, not self-regulating. 

It is, however, a perfect environment for scum-suckers and con artists, who are the only people who really benefit from libertarian arguments.  So, instead of pretending this is an airy, intellectual debate, I like to ask, “Who benefits?”  If you side consistently with the scumbags and con artists against decent people trying to make good choices within the limited framework of being human, then it’s really time to rethink your “philosophy”.

It’s a story that, like a lot of media coverage of science and research, is getting linked everywhere because it confirms pre-existing prejudices. Here’s the story:

Scientists have found that people with conservative views have brains with larger amygdalas, almond shaped areas in the centre of the brain often associated with anxiety and emotions.

On the otherhand, they have a smaller anterior cingulate, an area at the front of the brain associated with courage and looking on the bright side of life.

The “exciting” correlation was found by scientists at University College London who scanned the brains of two members of parliament and a number of students.

They found that the size of the two areas of the brain directly related to the political views of the volunteers.

However as they were all adults it was hard to say whether their brains had been born that way or had developed through experience.

I’m not a scientist, but I do read up on this kind of thing, and I’m inclined to think the latter—-or at best, a combination of the two factors—-is the more likely explanation.  Because there’s no real evidence that political beliefs are genetic.  Yes, they’re highly heritable, but that’s because the people who raise you instill their values in you.  From what I understand, there’s a lot of evidence to show that your environment dramatically shapes what your brain looks like on those FMRI machines, so it makes sense that people who are conservative and therefore obsess constantly about who they hate and who is out to steal their privileges would have brains that reflect that obsession more than people who think in more generous, relaxed terms.  Of course, a snapshot of the brain doesn’t tell you how it got that way, which is why some folks are critical of these FMRI studies that get a lot of press—-the problem is that there’s a tendency to think that what you see on the screen is not influenced by environment, but is “hard wired”.  And while the article itself is neutral on this subject, the headline (which, to be fair, is almost never written by the reporter) is not:

Political views ‘hard-wired’ into your brain

This kind of thing is inexcusable, both from a fact-based perspective and because the implication is that people who are conservative can’t help themselves.  While it gives us a temporary thrill to think of conservatives as just being kind of broken, the implication of this is that they can’t help themselves. And I strongly disagree.  I think the people who, for instance, are scrambling around screaming their heads off about “Obamacare” and a mosque in the financial district of Manhattan need to be held responsible for their lies and their unwillingness to engage the issues like fully grown citizens.  Writing it off as a product of “hard wiring”, especially when there’s no evidence that a brain scan shows any such thing, is giving in to the same tendency that allows conservatives to believe any fool thing someone tells them because it confirms their prejudices.