Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

I love me some Echidne of the Snakes, who has the chops to thoroughly and repeatedly discredit the two or three standard tropes of evolutionary psychology that are all we ever hear of it.

But when it came to dismantling the serially disgraceful Satoshi Kanazawa could have stopped right here

Ten thousand years ago, when humans were hunter-gatherers, we mated, tended to our kin and fled when danger was in the air – activities that did not require much intelligence.

Read the quote in context here.

10,000 years is as little as 1% of the estimated age of homo sapiens. And at most a quarter of the age of what at least used to be called our subspecies, homo sapiens s.

For most of that time our sizes, shapes, and colors may have varied but our brains? Probably not so much.

Which means we might not have needed much intelligence 10,000 years ago. (coughbullshitcough!) But we had the intelligence anyway!

It’s not even an insult to Kanazawa that a child born 40,000, or 500,000, or possible even a million years ago but educated today would stand the same chance as Kanazawa of landing a professorship in economics and political science at the London School of Economics. (The insult would be to say anyone, from any era, with more intelligence than he would have chosen a less disreputable line of work.)

At any rate, the fact that, need it or not, we have the same size brains today that we had 10,000 years ago and beyond… but didn’t need them until recently undercuts rather then reinforces Kanazawa’s fantasies about the evolution of human behavior. That a professor at a fucking school of economics would overlook, oh, say, theories of rational, enlightened self-interest in favor of biologically determined behavioral “central planning” says pretty much all you need to know about the professor and… the institution that chooses to retain him.

I gotta say I’m less enamored of this whole gender business, as distinct from more tangible qualities like biology, body, identity, and orientation. But people like Bond of Dear Diaspora or Sinclair of Sugarbutch argue passionately and often very well that no, there is such a thing, and what’s wrong with that?

It still gives me hackles. Especially when it sure looks like (as turned up in conversation with a friend today who’s struggling with her relationship with male partner) the gendered female trope of “disappointment” and the gendered male one of “resignation” sure… look awfully similar. Except for the names, of course. And the genders they’re ascribed to.

In fact I think one big clue came today when I was talking with my friend and she asked me how it can be that the person you can be almost sick to death of being different than could have been so rivetingly appealing when you first met. And it occurred to me that that’s one more domain where over time all the stuff you have in common — maybe 99% or more — just cancels out from familiarity, overuse, complacency, and especially confidence and comfort… and therefore take up only a very small percent of effort and energy. Compared to that nagging 1% difference that, because everything else fades figuratively into your literal background that… the difference takes up nearly all your effort and energy. With the result that you’re saying “irreconcilable differences” when externally friends and loved ones can’t imagine what the problem is.

Well. I think it’s the same with gender. A lot. Human beings aren’t 100% alike. (That’s a common but moronic straw-person argument often held up by gender essentialists.) But we are 99% alike. Even when we’re biologically different we’re very often still functionally alike. (Consider for instance that in many parts of the world both sexes squat to pee even though with practice nearly all men and most women can pee perfectly well standing up.)

So like I say, there are very clearly differences between heterosexual cis-gendered biological sexes. But just the fact that I have to add all those qualifications is a reminder of just how small those differences can actually be.

Small differences, however, aren’t the same as no differences. And while I’m not persuaded that the difference is big enough to bring in a whole ‘nother social institution called “gender” to help explain those differences, stereotype those differences, or police those differences when people go “astray” from them I’m willing to accept that they’re there and they might even be unavoidable.

Especially if other people seem to believe they’re there it doesn’t even help if you don’t. Consider that if men look you in the chest instead of the eyes you’re being gendered, like it or not. Consider that if women cross the street rather than walk past you after midnight you’re gendered it doesn’t really matter how long you’ve spent deconstructing gender in yourself.

So…

So I got a big epiphany the other day that it’s not actually gender itself that bugs me. Like Sinclair I feel comfortable wearing pants, for instance, nor am I inclined to skirts. On the other hand a number of bio-women and at least one bio-man who just strongly prefer conventional skirts or dresses.

In fact Sinclair and I are really quite a lot alike. In gender terms we have quite a lot in common! In fact, even though she’s thoroughly and even cheerfully not a man in a lot of ways she’s better at being “masculine” than I am. Or at least more consistently so.

Which gets me to that sticking point again. Because the way gender is constructed it’s “good” when I do some of the gendered things I do because I’m biologically male. But when she does it it’s “bad” because she’s not. Except that, as I just mentioned, she’s really good at it.

So my epiphany was that I’m actually not so much down on gender as I’m really down on the 50/50-split, yin/yang, I’m hairy so you must be hairless, you’re nurturing so I must be aloof, Mars/Venus, everything-about-us-must-be-opposite two-sphere model of gender. I’m seriously impatient with the exclusivity that goes with gender essentialism.

In other words I’m fine with gender… as long as it’s completely independent of sexual biology, or anatomy, or identity, or orientation.

Matthew Yglesias points to a couple of places in the world where there really are fewer men than women — American inner city neighborhoods where prison and murder take their toll, and Iceland where much of the male population is often literally at sea — and then jumps on the much-buzzed-about notion that the higher number of women enrolled in college compared to the lower number of men is a social/dating/marriage/settling catastrophe. (Yglesias, for instance, points to an article in the New York Times, um fashion section that addresses this very serious social issue!)

He also points to a post by big-L Libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution Never one to shy away from evolutionary economist psychology explanations involving hypothetical supermarkets giving away hypothetical $100 bonuses that, Tabarrok claims, perfectly explains “the predictable consequences on dating.”

Yglesias, like many other intelligent people, smells red herring.

...most of the hand-wringing about this seems silly. It would be bizarre to start admitting fewer women to college in order to make it easier for the remaining women to find steady boyfriends. Things like improved labor market opportunities for blue collar women and improved college preparation for low-income men would help resolve the imbalance, but those things would be goals with pursuing even absent the gender balance on campus issue. What’s more, there’s a large-scale shift toward people getting married later that’s rendering a lot of these ideas about meeting your future husband in school obsolete anyway.

He said it here.

There’s a bit of difference between 60-40% women and men in college and 60-40% men period. For instance, yes, if you’re dead set on marrying someone in your econ 101 course then with that sort of on-campus ratio a woman’s going to be at a disadvantage relative to men in the same class.

Probably not so much at an off-campus coffee shop. Or bar. Or church. Or local alt-weekly or on-line personals.

When I was an evidently charming but distinctly non-college-bound young vagabond back in the 1970s I found no more but also no fewer opportunities relationships in women’s-college college towns as general-admission college towns. Nor did other charming but non-college bound young vagabonds in my circle of friends consider their prospects to be better in those places. I know, I know, plural of anecdote is not data and all that but still, 60-40 mixes aren’t anything compared to the three, four, and five to one (straight) women to (straight) men ratios on and near college campuses that had traditionally been women-only back in the day.

Pluralist of Feministing Community has a really cool post up about the near side of non-consensual “gray area” sex.

What makes it a great illustration is that the sexes were reversed! (Emphasis hers.)

Since November my best friend has been having relationship problems. She is cis and het as is her boyfriend and they’ve been a committed and monogamous relationship for about 4 years now. The whole story is too long to recount, but as of a week ago they began a “break they need in order to stay together”.

Suffice it to say the first two days were hellish as I talked to one of the loves my life breaking down over the phone. But during one of the more lucid moments, she told me that – among a lot of alleged grievances – she had (unknowingly) forced her boyfriend into sex.

Apparently he had said things along the lines of “I’m too tired right now, let’s just go to sleep” and she had continued to proposition him thinking “welll, this will help you sleep better!” My immediate reaction was that there was no way she had coerced or pressured him into sex. After all, he should’ve just said “No really, I don’t want to do this right now” if she kept at it. It was his fault for not stopping the encounter.

And then I realized that had this been a woman in his place – not to mention my best friend – I would never have given this consideration. I was victim-blaming, basing my assumptions in tropes of male hypersexuality and female passivity. She didn’t handcuff him to a heater and force-feed him viagra . She’s a nice girl, she couldn’t have done that!

Read the quote in context here.

I talk a lot more about the paradigmatic social assumptions that women belong to the “no-sex” class — sugar, spice, everything nice, sure, but also possessing no autonomous sexual agency. Unless they’re somehow “broken,” or “damaged goods.” I don’t talk so much about the other side, the equally strong assumption that men are the sex class — obligate, reflexive, indiscriminating, and single-mindedly ready for sex. Unless, again, there’s something wrong with them. But it’s just as big a deal.

Inside the dominant paradigm it’s as unheard of for a man to say “no” as for a woman to say “yes.” Inside the paradigm, with it’s bogus Two Rules of Desire, the ratchet of initiative alway clicks in one direction.

This too has its consequences. It doesn’t just assume women never mind not having sex, it also assumes men never mind having it. One consequence would be Pluralist’s friend assuming her partner was having a momentary brain fart or something therefore his “no” couldn’t possibly really mean no. So she kept trying.

As I said up at the top this is way over on the near side of the “gray area.” A little persistence, especially in a long-term relationship where one partner’s behavior is perhaps uncharacteristic, is an unfortunate failure to recognize that no means no, but not an appalling one.

That said, whereas it’s way over this way verging into “no harm then no foul” territory, as Pluralist hinted and one commenter stated very clearly, however mild-sounding the incident

Obviously, something went wrong in this particular case if the guy is bringing it up as a grievance.

Therefore not “no harm then no foul.”

So if her failure to acknowledge or respect his decision wasn’t appalling it wasn’t benign either.

So there’s definitely still something to talk about.