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.
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That’s me asking the question at 9:46! *jazz hands*
Loved your talk. You, Rebecca, and Joe Nickell were the definitive highlights for me.
I was surprised by the lack of disingenuous misogynist libertarian douches at this event. Normally Missouri is lousy with them.
You know it was a good talk because it made me arrive late at work.
Still have to watch the question period. Was hopeing for witty disingenuous misogynist libertarian douches takedowns, but @2 seems to indicate there’ll be little of that. Good for your sanity, Amanda, bad for my entertainment. 
I particularly liked the point you raised about criticizing religious nonsense in other cultures vs. that in our own.
great talk, and looks like you got good response there.
this will help me because I keep running across people who saw something on the Discovery Channel they think is science.
Very well done. You hardly sounded stuffed up at all. 
It hangs together nicely and the questions you got were thoughtful. The last guy was incorrect though. Mirena can stop periods, but it’s not a sure thing. Is there a date set for next year’s yet? I would have gone to this one except I had already made other plans when I found out about it.
Very engaging and entertaining, and of course, you made a very careful argument. May I ask if you’re planning on writing a book on the topic, or do you feel that books like The Mismeasure of Women and the other one that you mentioned that escapes my mind at the moment cover the topic adequately?
I have some ideas, Mighty, but I need to flesh them out. Find where I can add something new/different. The advantage those women have is they have more of a background in science than I do.
Still downloading.
Did anyone else notice the guy editing out ‘nigger’ and ‘injun’ from Huck Finn is a white guy? So far, all the people I’ve seen defending this change are white. White teachers, white parents, white children. All his examples on NPR were white people bothered by these words.
This bothers me because it’s supposed to be there, and they’re supposed to recognize it as being harsh and crass - because it was. It also bothers me a little bit because they’re talking about it being 10th grade reading material… And I read it while in third grade, and my experience with children says that if they didn’t get exposed to it by sixth grade, they won’t be mature enough to read it at tenth grade.
Grr.
Amanda, it’s a good point you raise about rationalization. That we look for evidence to support our pre-formed biased worldview, rather than the obviously correct way, which is forming our worldview according to the available evidence.
However, you didn’t seem to realize the exact same charge applies to yourself. You clearly have pre-formed beliefs and seem to reject evidence which does not conform to it. Suppose there was compelling evidence that shows inherent differences between men and women; you would be actively attempting to discredit it, downplay it, and look for any possible criticism. If there was evidence showing otherwise, you would nod and accept it without question.
As an example, I remember in your book (It’s A Jungle Out There) you briefly mentioned domestic violence in regards to men. You dismissed it by implying that the extent of the problem was that men were bruising their knuckles by punching women.
I do not mention this to derail the thread, but to point out an example of rationalization. Because you have a pre-existing belief that women are significantly less violent than men, you dismissed the ample evidence and studies shown that women commit equal amounts of domestic violence.
Also, your criticism of evolutionary psychology was poorly done. You didn’t even mention its biggest flaw, namely that the field is based almost entirely on extrapolations from the actions and motivations of prehistoric human society. Now, how can we know precisely the actions and the thoughts of humans who existed before written records? Clearly We can’t.
As well, the Buss study you cited was indeed flawed and almost meaningless. You were correct in your criticism of it. But it’s not enough just to pick someone’s weak argument, dismantle it, then declare yourself the winner. That’s enough to win an argument. To arrive at the truth, you need to pick your opponent’s strongest argument, even improve it any way you can, and THEN show why it’s wrong.
In other words, you shouldn’t have picked a weak and easily dismissed evo psych study, you should have picked one of its strongest and then defeated it. (Unless of course there is no stronger or more compelling evo psych study than the one you showed, in which case the entire field should probably be eliminated)
@10
the whole field of evo psych should be considered BS. The reason being that it is a rationalization of the same old ideas that we already know are BS but now we are going to call it science and make confused people buy into what they already want to buy into.
We can make logical deductions about what was going on with prehistoric man by looking at actual evidence, there are whole fields of actual study by real scientists, if only evo psych was doing that but that is not what they are doing.
Women are less violent than men, that is my experience, its bore out every day by the evidence, lol, I mean, look around you. Its completely ridiculous what you said. I’m sure you could come up with some stat from somewhere about domestic violence incidents but that would be you trying to rationalize away the actual reality that men are usually stronger and inflict more actual damage within that number. Thats not some game when you try to score on a point system and call things a wash. Its serious stuff.
“women create equal amounts of domestic violence” = BS
I do not mention this to derail the thread
Riiiiiiiiiiiight.
Speaking of evo-psych and other spurious/silly claims about sex:
A Woman’s Tears- the Anti-Viagra?
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/01/a-womans-tears-the-anti-viagra.html
Great speech. Although I would say that there is zero scientific justification for sexism even if a handful of scientists tried to use science for justification. Because then it falls into the realm of pseudoscience, which is closer to religion.
@ 11
I do not want to derail the thread, but neither do I want to make claims and not prove them. If you would like to email me, I can show you studies that show domestic violence is relatively equal between genders.
My email: celdazero at yahoo dot ca
and why exactly won’t you post those studies where all of us can see them? because they are bullshit? I thought so.
and why exactly won’t you post those studies where all of us can see them? because they are bullshit? I thought so.
Since you asked so politely, allow me to interject. Here’s a summary of one from Harvard medical:
http://www.patientedu.org/aspx/HealthELibrary/HealthETopic.aspx?cid=M0907d
Here’s 274 more:
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
To be fair, Michael Kimmel, among others has criticized many of the studies used above because they tend to focus on under-30, single (ie, not in a family setting) and rely on a methodology of self-reporting where women tend to over-estimate the number of times they were violent, and men underestimate the times they were. The other criticism is that many of the studies do not ask who hit first (hitting back in self-defence is obviosuly different han just going after someone).
If you look at criminal charges, men are charged vastly more than women for domestic violence, which supports the data that men do it more. However that fact gets confused because data also shows that in cases of a mutual situation men are more likely to be considered culpable by the authorities and women more likely to get away with it.
The general summary is that if you are talking about an abuser (that is, someone who is pretty much pathologically going to abuse another all the time in a systematic manner), the majority are male. If you’re talking about serious violence, including murder and what any rational person would consider torture, no question it’s men.
If you are talking about someone who can get violent toward the other person in the relationship, which is not the same thing, then it tends to be more equal, at least among younger people. In such cases the violence is often mutual, but there are studies showing that violence is at a minimum initiated by the female partner at least half the time, with some studies showing it being significantly higher. One factor that comes up in several studies is that the female partner is more likely to suffer a more serious injury, which is trivially explained in many cases by the fact that the male partner is typically bigger and stronger, and thus more likely to cause such an injury than the reverse.
The difference between the two situation is important to note: in abuse, counselling is pointless and you need to get the victim out of the house and to safety. There’s no question who is at fault in that situation. In other cases of domestic violence, because it is often a mutual thing, then counselling can help, or treatment of the underlying cause of the violence (alcohol is often a factor in those cases, with one or both of the people involved being, basically, a mean drunk).
Like all things in life, there’s of course a large fuzzy area between the two situations, and there can be significant overlap. I know of one couple where the husband is a jackass and I’ve seen what could be described as borderline mental abuse (he’s a sexist jerk, to begin with) when they’re sober, but when they go drinking he’s usually a happy drunk who quietly passes out while she’s a mean one who will take a whack at him with a pot or anything else that happens to be laying around while he’s dozing.
When I’ve been at scenes because of an emergency call, the worst cases where the victims have clearly had the shit beat out of them have been women. However, I’ve also been to enough scenes to take a guy in for stitches or other minor treatment while a (usually drunk) woman is screaming that the bastard deserved it and sometimes attempts to go after him while we’re trying to get him out, or where we have to physically seperate both parties to stop them from going at each other, or where I have to duck as very projectiles are flying from one or both parties, that I cannot take seriously anyone who lives in La-la Land and thinks that women are innocent of domestic violence or that it is so vanishingly rare as to be ignorable.
Note that if the physical assault changes to sexual assault, that changes everything.
It comes down to what you believe, basically: if you believe interpersonal, intimate violence is largely cultural, then culture has to change and given the still patriarchal nature of our culture, there’s an argument to be made there. If you believe that interpersonal, intimate violence is more driven by the people involved than the culture, then that demands a different way of dealing with it.
Keith, thanks for posting that. Since it’s already derailed, and no one was discussing Skepticon anyway, might as well continue.
Not surprisingly, there are some issues I have with your assessment.
I believe that the rate of severity and injury is much closer to equal than you claim. The statistics are skewed, here’s an example. A woman doused her boyfriend in nail polish remover, set him ON FIRE, then went after him a knife. He suffered second-degree burns.
According to the police, that is not domestic violence, and therefore does not get included in DV stats. She was charged with “assault with the intent to do great bodily harm.”
Second, domestic violence by women against men is significantly underreported. Sound familiar?
The reasons of course being that if men do report it, they are laughed at. In one case, a man whose wife slashed him in the neck with a knife got handcuffed and was about to be arrested. She had no injuries. When the daughter said that mommy was crazy, the police left and said the woman should get therapy. (no jail)
There are no shelters / services for men, etc.
As for murder, the reason the stats are skewed is because men typically kill their wives themselves = spousal murder. The wives usually have help (they and another man kill the husband together) which is not a spousal murder, it counts as a “multiple offender” killing. And, women are more likely to hire someone to kill their husband, which of course does not count as a spousal murder.
Basically, it comes down to this.
Do you believe men are more evil than women? Unfortunately, lots of feminists do (wrongly).
If you do, then it’s reasonable to believe that men are more likely to commit DV, more likely to kill their spouses, more likely to be a batterer.
If you believe men and women are equally moral (or equally evil), as I do, then it’s not reasonable to believe that. And the evidence shows in favour of that.
Murder by women is such a rare thing in our society that there are several cable shows that deal with nothing but murder/attempted murder by women.
As for murder, the reason the stats are skewed is because men typically kill their wives themselves = spousal murder. The wives usually have help (they and another man kill the husband together) which is not a spousal murder, it counts as a “multiple offender” killing. And, women are more likely to hire someone to kill their husband, which of course does not count as a spousal murder.
Uh, no:
When women kill - and they do so at astonishingly lower rates than men who commit 85% of all homicides - the vast majority kill family members, usually men who have battered them for years. As many as 90% of the women in jail today for killing men had been battered by those men. (Allison Bass, “Women far less likely to kill than men; no one sure why,” The Boston Globe, February 24, 1992, p. 27)
http://home.cybergrrl.com/dv/stat/statbwkill.html
The national homicide rate among women murdered by men in 2008 was 1.26 per 100,000, according to a study by the Violence Policy Center. Those states that exceeded the national average were led by Nevada whose 2.96 rate was more than double the national average. Other states with a higher propensity for female murders at the hands of men included Vermont (2.54), Alabama (2.07) and North Carolina (2.05).
Nationwide, the average age of a woman murdered by a man was 39. The rate for African-American women was 2.74 per 100,000. Women are most likely to be killed by husbands, boyfriends, ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends.
The states with the lowest rates were New Hampshire (0.30), North Dakota (0.31) and Illinois (0.34).
Florida was not included in the rankings because, as in previous years, it did not submit data to the FBI Supplementary Homicide Report, which was used by the center to produce its findings.
Yep. When you get into the extreme ends of violence, severe trauma and death, men are by far the more likely perpetrators, either because of a deliberate choice or unintentionally because they tend to be bigger and thus more likely to do serious damage.
But again, domestic violence goes on a spectrum, and murder/serious physical harm is at one end, and men are by and large the majority offenders. When you get to the other end, especially among people 30 and under, it’s a lot more equal in participation. The problem comes when you allow the obviously serious part of the situation to completely dominate the discourse over the general problem, when the root causes of a given situation might be completely different.
And sexism, deliberate or otherwise plays a large role. Despite a patriarchal society, there’s a constant refrain that men should not hit women. Even in many of the most sexist societies, surveys have shown that the majority of men agree with statements such as “A man should never hit his wife” or the equivalent. And simple observation shows this is the case: everyone likely knows at least one man who has hit a woman at least once. But I’ll lay you good odds that, unless you restrict yourself artificially to only be around battered women, you probably know a great many more men who’ve never laid a finger on a woman. It doesn’t mean they’re good—emotional abuse is still abuse—but they’ve at least accepted the majority opinion that it is something You Just Don’t Do.
I’ll give an example: professional wrestling is one of the more sexist forms of entertainment out there, where if a female performer is considered even slightly above a stereotypical Barbie-esque weight she’d shown the door while men can be complete tubs of lard and still work, where the few women who don’t have model looks and still work are almost always portrayed as quasi-human monsters for the Face girls to fight (and no such requirement exists on the men’s side, Face or Heel).
That said, the best-trained and skilled women, who have a skillset easily equal to many stuntwomen, should easily handle a “fight” with a man. They can take the bumps, they can take the kicks and punches and the throws. Yet for many years it simply couldn’t be done. Fake or not, you could not show a man hitting a woman, ever. Biggest, meanest, nastiest heel in the organization would glower, threaten, might even grab an arm or something, but strike her? Not a chance. If it looked like it was about to happen, guaranteed someone would swoop in to prevent it.
When the (now) WWE brought in Joanie Laurer (“Chyna”) a decade and a half or more ago, they had her taking advantage of this mindset for months. She played a role of a “bodyguard” who was big enough to smack men around but because she was a women, they’d never hit her back. And they played this for all it was worth. They took advantage of the majority cultural view that you do not hit a woman to allow her to be a heel, run around and beat the crap out of the male performers but get away with it because they would not hit back. It took them a long time, of scripting the abuse of the cultural more, to get the audience to the point where they could accept that a Face could take down Chyna and not instantly be considered a bastard.
Yet the general cultural more persists to the point of utter ridiculousness. WWE broadcasts in Canada would simply not show a man hitting a woman for years. They’d cut away to a standard shot of the crowd. Even when it was someone like Chyna in a match. Show her tossing him around, but when it was her turn to take the bumps, off to the crowd. One of my more favourite bits of double standard was when they’d show a bunch of women ganging up on another woman and “beating” the crap out of her: hit her with chairs, throw her through tables, leave her bleeding and “unconscious”, that they would show. If a male Face came to her rescue, however, nope, can’t show him striking someone even in defense of a helpless person, even someone who had a few seconds before been a violent aggressor.
The reason I bring up this example is because even though everyone knows pro wrestling is fake, even though everyone knows there’s no real assaults and whatnot going on, even though everyone knows what they are watching is 100% complete and totally made up, the cultural rule that men do not hit women is so strong that it can’t be entirely overcome even in an arena where fake violence is the whole point.
Excellent speech that also features your wonderful sense of humor. Thanks again.