http://www.jhsph.edu/faculty/directory/profile/1437/Hindin/Michelle

Dr. Hindin’s background is in demography and sociology.  No guessing needed.

It’s kind of troubling to me (but not surprising) that the kneejerk “journalistic” reaction to a study which is explicitly woman-centric, is to flip it around and make it All About Men (even Jezebel presents that interpretation before debunking it). Not to mention taking a study about women in Africa and making it All About Our First World Lady Problems (which Jezebel doesn’t even mention). I shall dub this, “But What About White People???” syndrome.

It’s not just that men supposedly aren’t attracted to dominant women—a lot of the comments on the story repeat the idea that women just want less sex than men do, so a dominant woman will exercise her dominance by reducing the frequency of sex.  Two evo-psych cliches in one!

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.

Couldn’t it be more complex than that?

It’s hardly any surprise that, in situations where women lack power, they have little to no ability to turn down unwanted sexual contact.  And, if they do say no, and are raped, no one gives a shit.

Societies that are progressing beyond the point where women are completely powerless are embracing the principle that women have the right to say “no”, but not necessarily that women have the right to pursue sex when they want it.

Meanwhile, other societies (largely in the West) have progressed even further, to the point of decrying slut shaming and creating a culture where women can initiate sex if they so choose.

It seems like that’s as plausible an explanation as the fear of HIV.

I find it really interesting that evo psychos never seem to consider the possibility that sometimes it’s evolutionarily better to actually have fewer offspring and to put more resources into them, considering that that has basically been the strategy of primates compared to fish, insects, and mammals that have litters.

If they’re gonna pull some ridiculous assertions out of their asses, then they not spin this as assertive women being “natural” because it means they have less sex and therefore fewer offspring to spread their thin resources among?  It’s so easy to make this data mean anything want if you’re allowed to just make up anything without needing any actual evidence.  And in this way it’s treated pretty similarly to how thousands of denominations can interpret a religious text differently.  Evo psych is for people who are too cool to still be religious but still want to make stuff up for their own benefit.

It’s kind of troubling to me (but not surprising) that the kneejerk “journalistic” reaction to a study which is explicitly woman-centric, is to flip it around and make it All About Men

Good point. Journalists seem to do this in every scenario. Even if you have a rape case where the crime and its perpetrator aren’t in question (which is depressingly rare in itself), you’re likely to see newspaper articles take the approach of “what will this poor man do with his life in the aftermath of his rape conviction?” If a woman is raped, the media starts flailing about, certain that somewhere, some man is the actual victim in this situation.

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.

I think this has been true for close to a century now, honestly. We didn’t need Wilson or Hamilton or Dawkins to start saying replacing “God’s will” with “the natural order” with “evolution.” I think the one-two punch of Darwin and Freud hitting the pop consciousness was sufficient to get that ball rolling.

In practice, I find that the hardest thing about talking about evolution with people who believe it but don’t really get it is explaining that it’s not a magical life force yearning for progress, but the net result of a bunch of unrelated stuff happening. I suspect it’s harder than we’d hoped to dial the first cause/implicit agency problem out of popular thinking.

I think I’m smelling “Africa = anachronistic space = studies about current societies in Africa are actually studying how things were before we, mighty civilized white people, evolved” as the reason why this is being taken as EvoPsy.

kesh, there’s a lot of variation in these 6 countries in cultural and political response to sexual coercion, so I’m hesitant to make generalizations on those grounds.

It’s funny how journalists writing about this type of study alternate between believing women never want sex and therefore our participation is just an exchange for something we want from men, and believing women want sex all the time and if some women have more sex than others, it’s because the latter are trying to get sex but failing.

And most of the audience, whichever of these mutually exclusive assumptions they’re being fed, goes “yup, that all makes perfect sense because cavemen!”

What an odd, though sadly not surprising, reaction these journalists had to the study. My first (flippant) thought was something along the lines of there being a lot of dudes out there who need to work on their skills. For those who may not have heard of it, in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa there is a prevalent view that ‘dry sex’ is the ideal, to attain which dirt, household cleansers, SAND etc. are placed in the vagina (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_sex). That right there seems like reason enough to say no thank you, however in addition the practice has been linked to the spread of AIDS. I don’t know how common this is in the countries involved in this study, but there’s probably a good chance it was a factor. Even in the oh so progressive US there was a recent study that found that something like a third of random women reported that the last time they had sex it was painful (http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/12/09/sex_chronic_pain). Oh well, that’s patriarchy for you.

Two of the things I was surprised to learn when I took a job reading textbooks all day were: 1. Even “serious” “academic” ev psych is basically defined within the social AND hard sciences as the “the approach to studying the intersection between evolution and human behavior that doesn’t involve doing science”. When it involves doing science, they call it biological anthropology, paleoarchaeology, or behavioral ecology, or some such; and 2. Half of the “serious academic” ev psych still says basically the exact opposite of pop ev psych as used by self-righteous blowhards anyway (for example, its emphasis on the idea that we evolved so that we ARE supposed to have social skills and be able to interact with one another, whereas a lot of pop ev psychers I have run into like to insist that evolution says that I am supposed to like them specifically because they are jackasses who can’t hold a normal conversation).

The textbooks are all too polite to come right out and use terms like “evo psycho” so they just say things like “Criticisms of evolutionary psychology include that the assumptions it works from have not been proven, and criticism of its reliance on surveys of WEIRD university freshman” and then they go on long chapters about the history of scientific racism, social Darwinism, and “pop Mendelianism”, which is a term I think I need to start using more often.

In practice, I find that the hardest thing about talking about evolution with people who believe it but don’t really get it is explaining that it’s not a magical life force yearning for progress, but the net result of a bunch of unrelated stuff happening. I suspect it’s harder than we’d hoped to dial the first cause/implicit agency problem out of popular thinking.

In the U.S., our science education is especially dismal, and especially so with evolution because of all our creationists.  I think most people who “believe in” evolution really have no idea how it works.  I’m not even talking about technical stuff like cell signaling and how flagella work at a molecular level.  So many people haven’t gotten past the “more offspring = always better mindset”.  It’s also kind of sad how many people don’t realize that faster, stronger, and bigger aren’t always “fittest” when it comes to evolution.  I agree that for a lot of people, “nature” has taken the place of god as some magical guiding force.

@13 So essentially, when right-wing blowhards talk of the “religion of evolutionism,” they’re partially right.

I fucking hate it when that happens.

Oh, evo psych. I love how the conclusion, no matter what, is that equality is bad for women. If studies show that more equality leads to more sex, it’s because women with egalitarian attitudes are hoors who “have sex like men.” If it shows the opposite, it’s because men aren’t attracted to assertive women. Pick one.

My favorite evo-psych book—back when I basically made a career out of anti-feminism—is “The Female Brain” by LouAnn Brizendine, which basically asserted that women are emotional, hormone-driven Chatty Kathys who all want to be mothers and only have sex to secure “financial stability.” Most of her major claims were completely false. She had a statistic that women use something like 20,000 words a day and men use 5,000. Wrong. She made false assertions about the female orgasm, such as that it creates “sperm suction.” (It doesn’t, and as far as actual researchers can find, it really has no reproductive benefits.) She also claimed women rarely think about sex (she said once every few days) and frequently Do It just to get something out of their male partners. And, of course, she claimed that men are basically cavemen who think about sex once a minute (seriously) and have no clue what their partner is ever feeling and can’t read any emotional clues. I remember reading it and thinking “this doesn’t seem true for me at all,” but hey, it’s evo psych.

predeacesed, I wouldn’t necessarily put that much emphasis on “dry sex”. It’s probably something more mundane—-condoms aren’t always readily available, and women might be more willing to ration them out.

And, of course, she claimed that men are basically cavemen who think about sex once a minute (seriously)

The specifics of this bit of conventional wisdom vary, but the extreme is every seven seconds. This was a commonly held belief amongst my peers back in high school; I’m sure there are adults who still believe it, but my methods of selecting friends tend to rule such people out, so I have no direct proof.

Seriously, how would such a determination even be made? A phone survey where people are asked, “Are you thinking about sex now? ... Okay, how about now? ... What about now?” Never mind that asking people if they’re thinking about sex is just going to make them think about sex.

women are hurt by feminism because it forces them to put out more—-which he asserts, evidence-free, women don’t like to do.

So let me get this straight…the Huffpo reporter thinks that because women have more sex when there’s more equality that it means that they’re being “forced” to put out more?

Um…he doesn’t really understand what “equality” means, does he?

I would think that women having more sex in more equal circumstances would mean that they’re getting hornier because they’re less pissed off at men. Because in more equal societies, men probably do fewer things to piss women off and screw them over.

I’ve gotten a huge amount of mileage by recommending to my married male friends that if they want to have more sex, they should step up on the housework, so their wives are both less tired and less grumpy.

This has gotten me a reputation among my less knowledgeable friends and family as The Woman Whisperer.  (“I like to think I help women with man problems.”)

So, thank you very much to Pandagon, and Women’s Studies in general, for illustrating a basic truth: women, men, like to have sex when they’re not tired and when they like the person they’re maybe having sex with.

Anyways, the Corporate Media is by and for folks with the worldview of 14 year old boys.

Seriously, how would such a determination even be made? A phone survey where people are asked, “Are you thinking about sex now? ... Okay, how about now? ... What about now?” Never mind that asking people if they’re thinking about sex is just going to make them think about sex.

^That’s what I thought! How would they know? Self-reports? There’s no MRI scan to prove you’re thinking about sex.

As a former science-journalism type, I think quite a lot may have to do with some of the people who end up assigning and writing breaking-science stories. But a lot of it is also just nature abhorring a vacuum. Especially given the shite that they see in the papers it’s little surprise that real anthropologists don’t want to spend a lot of time talking to clueless reporters. And the ev-psycho people are just thrilled to talk. So combine that with the “contrarian” thing—i.e. whatever reinforces the status quo by trying to represent feminism or sane science as totalitarian orthodoxy—and a desire to get commetns and page views and whee!

Seriously, how would such a determination even be made?

This is actually really relevant for all kinds of things.  One of the great things about college is that instead of just being told the facts, we were shown how researchers arrived at these facts.  That happened occasionally in high school science, but not nearly often enough.  It changed my perspective when hearing bold claims and my first thought is often “How could they know that?”  And that’s not just me being doubtful; I am genuinely interested in how things are determined.  This is yet another area where our science education is sorely lacking.  My 5th grade teacher once listed the scientific method, but it never went any farther because I doubt even she understood it that well.  So now when Snapple puts little “facts” on their bottlecaps and say that the average person swallows 8 spiders in their sleep each year, most people just think “Ewww!!!” instead of “Wait, how could they have studied that?  Did they put video cameras in some bedrooms or what?”

I work with an Indian woman who once said “Ooooh, I hate the sex!”  and looked surprised when everyone didn’t jump in and agree with her.  I realized that the experience was probably a lot different for someone in an arranged marriage who met her husband the day before the wedding and was expected to start having sex immediately, than for an American who got to date people she found attractive and start having sex when she wanted to.  And those two women would probably have very different ideas of the ideal frquency of sex.

They interviewed Michelle Hindin, the lead author of the study, this evening on the CBC Radio One show “As It Happens”. You can hear the podcast here: http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/episode/2011/09/26/monday-september-26-2011/

I find it really interesting that evo psychos never seem to consider the possibility that sometimes it’s evolutionarily better to actually have fewer offspring and to put more resources into them, considering that that has basically been the strategy of primates compared to fish, insects, and mammals that have litters.
Comment #5: bananacat on 09/26 at 05:44 PM

Actually they do.  They argue that Black people use the “max offspring litter” strategy like lower animals and that White people use the “treasured fewer offspring” strategy like the better higher class animals.

This is why it’s okay to have sex with a lot of trashy women so they can have their litters, some of which might include smart boys like their fathers who can be leaders in the trashy neighborhoods (improving the genetics thereof, you are doing the ghetto a favor), and also have their sweetheart wives who will have a reasonable number that get intensive schooling and care.

Amanda, dry sex is pretty common in some African nations (especially Southern Africa) and it’s not fun at all for most women.  When they get a chance to say “no” without the threat of loss of support or partnership, they say “no.”  Because bad sex is bad.

Search Google Scholar for references, examples:
http://sti.bmj.com/content/82/5/392.short
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13548500802270364
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/tchs/2009/00000011/00000003/art00005
http://www.sabinet.co.za/abstracts/sajsci/sajsci_v105_n1_2_a25.html

My first (flippant) thought was something along the lines of there being a lot of dudes out there who need to work on their skills.

Yup. Even without the specific cultural Thing that is “dry sex”. One of my initial reactions was that the frequency of sex is being studied in a world where heterosex is often not about getting the woman off and DUH, that’s gonna skew the frequency with which women want sex, because women don’t want sex in which there’s nothing for us.

If you took a group selected for a history of good, mutually-satisfying sexual experiences and THEN ran the same study on THAT group, I’d bet cold hard cash you’d see a lot more frequent sex whether or not women were calling the non-sexual shots.

So really, it’s: NEWS! Women not interested in sex that’s not pleasurable for them. DETAILS AT ELEVEN.

I heard this story on NPR, and kept waiting to hear either MRAs or evo pysch fans start having panic attacks: “Men who spend more time on child care show reduced testosterone levels.”

Actually they do.  They argue that Black people use the “max offspring litter” strategy like lower animals and that White people use the “treasured fewer offspring” strategy like the better higher class animals.

The Duggars are black?  Who knew?

Seriously, large families seem to be a problem of poverty, not a problem of race.  Most of the software and hardware engineers I know have only two kids max, myself included.  Why?  We don’t want to tumble down the economic ladder.  There is no way I could maintain the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed and have a third child.  So I have a significant economic incentive to keep my family small (not to mention the physical and mental incentives).

If you are already standing on the bottom rung, and you feel that society doesn’t give a damn about you, why not have a bunch of kids?

I heard this story on NPR, and kept waiting to hear either MRAs or evo pysch fans start having panic attacks: “Men who spend more time on child care show reduced testosterone levels.”
Comment #28: JCfromNC on 09/27 at 02:56 AM

Suddenly they’re all nuanced and shit over that, when they even bother to discuss it.

Can we try not to throw out all evo psych as illegitimate? It’s really only when evolutionary theory is used to explain sex or gender differences that we get into bullshit misogynistic non-science. There are still perfectly valid, scientifically sound reasons why many human behaviors and emotions have a biological/neural basis that is the result of evolution.

Can we try not to throw out all evo psych as illegitimate? It’s really only when evolutionary theory is used to explain sex or gender differences that we get into bullshit misogynistic non-science. There are still perfectly valid, scientifically sound reasons why many human behaviors and emotions have a biological/neural basis that is the result of evolution.

OFFS, there’s one of these quotes every fucking time evopsych comes up.  Yet, conveniently, there’s never a single shred of proof that it isn’t all bollocks.

Prove it.  Show us any “perfectly valid” evo psych.

I have no doubt that many human behaviors have biological bases shaped by evolutionary pressures.  I just doubt that there is anything remotely scientific about evo psych.  At best, it’s oversimplified post hoc speculation, at worst, it’s cover for racism, sexism, and conservative cultural norms.  If you’re really interested in the biological bases for behaviors, you do science.  Evo psych is not science.

I have no doubt that many human behaviors have biological bases shaped by evolutionary pressures.

But most of what we know is boring, like the fear of falling is instinctive, as can be seen here, or smiling is instinctive)blind babies smile at the same stage of development as sighted babies do, this summary separates the shit from the Shinola:

So what instincts and pre-programmed behaviours do humans have?
I think they are:
1. A few reflexes such as baby sucking nipple, hand that pulls away from fire, eye that blinks to flying objects etc. These are better thought of as reflexes rather than instincts. They are virtually ‘blind’ to environmental influence.

2. A multitude of learnt pliable instincts = mindrules.

3. One inherited instinct, which is to make mindrules in the cortex according to the principles of the interaction desire or parsimony.

http://drbeetle.homestead.com/mindrules.html

OTOH:

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that humans are also hard-wired to notice trouble. The study’s subjects watched images of various outdoor scenes, two at a time. The second image was slightly different from the first. The changes involved a variety of things, from living animals and humans to inanimate objects like cars and wheelbarrows. The results showed that we identify changes much faster and more accurately if they’re living things. Nearly 90 percent of the living changes were spotted, compared with 66 percent for inanimate objects. In other words, we’re naturally wired to look out for living things. Just as our ancestors scanned the landscape for the charging wildebeest, we’re still on alert for anything that could potentially be a threat.

http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/survival/wilderness/wired-for-survival2.htm

I think the best characterization is that we have a lot of tendencies, more so than hard-wired ‘instincts’, which is what a lot of evo-psych blather seems to be about instead of tendencies.

I remember listening to Christopher Ryan (co-author of Sex At Dawn) on Savage Love, saying he’d been very big into evo psych explaining everything, but eventually was persuaded to discard it because he worked in San Francisco and was having feminist friends tell him all the time that their experience being ladies didn’t comport with evo psych. So, the answer if more and louder feminists for everyone.

With all the talk of incivility, just stop being civil.  Own it.  That’s what Amanda does.  Call them on their BS when they spew it and if they fluster and start claiming incivility, just smile and agree.

When I took a psychology of sex course a few years back, my professor spent very little time on the “why does X?” set of questions.  Her explanation was always, pretty much verbatim:

1. It’s cultural and/or
2. It’s psychological and/or
3. It’s shown evolutionary advantage, or
4. none of the above,
5. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY,
6. It’s dumb to speculate.  Here are the facts, accept them, don’t claim universal explanations work, stop bullshitting.  We’re scientists, not pop culture parrots.

I loved that class so much.

Eric S. Raymond just posted a rather sickening, allegedly reluctant endorsement of patriarchal sexuality based on women’s reproductive success. It amazes me how people like him never seem to factor moral and emotional factors into their political reasoning, but then again Raymond is what we might call “batshit crazy” anyway.

The Duggars are black?  Who knew?

To be fair, the Duggars had so many kids specifically to outbreed the “undesirables”.  In their case they have never specifically mentioned trying to outbreed other races, but the Quiverfull movement is about producing lots and lots of a very specific type of conservative fundie Christian, because it’s somewhat easier to just produce them than to convert others.

And you better believe that this movement is partly about outbreeding Hispanic Catholics who are their biggest rivals for religious big families.

The Duggars don’t believe in evo psych because they don’t believe in evo anything, but they sure as Hell believe all they hype about whites becoming a minority and so they are willing to “stoop to the level” of those lowly Other groups in order to beat them in some cosmic contest.

Why yes, I do have a special hatred of the Duggars and others like them.

What I want to know is why it’s even dignified with a name like “evolutionary psychology” when it’s clearly just a way for misogynistic nerds to justify their fear of women. It reminds me of transhumanism—when confronted with the fact that transhumanists don’t know what they don’t know, they tend to be stuck with nothing more than a Galileo gambit to defend themselves.

Grad Student, I already mentioned that: when they study the influence of evolution on human behavior in legitimate ways, they call it biological anthropology. Biological anthropology is pretty fascinating, if you’re a huge dork who can’t get enough of reading about stages of language development and trying to teach ASL to various species of apes.

My favorite evolution-and-behavior studies are about food. Like everyone else, I like them because they prop up my personal prejudices—I want eating lots of cheese and beef to be healthy, so I like to be able to argue that my ancestors were cattle herders and evolved to eat like that. Of course, since I am not continually teetering on the edge of starvation like my forebears were, it’s totally meaningless, but I feel like less of a bad person for *wanting* to eat bacon cheeseburgers every day.

I remember listening to Christopher Ryan (co-author of Sex At Dawn)

Is that book any good? Because I’m on the fence about reading it, based on the free sample that I read once.

The Wikipedia entry, if correct, seems to indicate this isn’t your father’s evo-psych crap:

They believe that much of evolutionary psychology has been conducted with a bias regarding human sexuality. They believe that the public and many researchers are guilty of the “Flintstonization” of hunter-gatherer society; that is to say projecting modern assumptions and beliefs onto earlier societies. Thus they believe there has been a bias to assuming that our species is primarily monogamous despite evidence to the contrary. They believe for example, that our sexual dimorphism, testicle size, female copulatory vocalization, appetite for sexual novelty, various cultural practices, and hidden female ovulation, among other factors strongly suggest a non-monogamous, non-polygynous history. Thus, the authors argue, mate selection was not the subject of much intragroup competition in pre-agricultural humans as sex was neither scarce nor commodified, rather sperm competition was a more important paternity factor than sexual selection. This behaviour survives in extant hunter-forager groups that practice communal paternity.

Regarding the whole “dry sex” thing, as a guy I really don’t see the appeal. I mean, it sounds like it would feel similar to rubbing sandpaper on my dick, and that’s not exactly on my list of things I’d like to try.