NEWS: Keep Your Hands To Yourself

Yes.

Agreed! I'm reading 1984 right now and this just makes me think of how statistics can be completely useless and misleading.

This MAYBE sounded plausible until it went into the bit about siblings...that sounds like they're trying really hard to make the pieces fit when really, they're just wrong.

Go pseudo science! I await the spam (preferably in moon-English) offering pills to grow or shrink one's ring finger and thus one's lesbian inclination and math skills!
Fingomax™ or Fingatrim™!
'Well, it gave me the boost I needed to pass that calculus test...but now I lick vaginas'

why are they studying this and not the claim that people with longer second toes than big toes are dynamite in the sack?

Until you factor in......

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

Blue steals for the win!

orangeinfinity said:

Well, the sibling connection only sounds implausible without the context of why they looked at that effect: there is evidence that mothers carrying male babies have immunological and/or hormonal responses to testosterone that cause subsequent male babies (younger brothers) to have less exposure to testosterone. This isn't really trying to force the pieces to fit, considering the whole point of looking at finger length is that it is a marker of in utero testosterone exposure.

But I see your point. I'm not sure why the fingers of gay younger brothers would be much shorter. I'd have to read the paper again.

"Correlation does not equal causation." Man, I can't believe I forgot that statement after 4 years of college! Someone slap my hand! I'ts a hell of a statement! I've got my own statement that keeps me in check in life: Interpretation is in your imagination. think about it,.....

There's a golden XKCD comic in there somewhere

OMG, precisely what I was thinking! Well, that and "Where is that damn pizza delivery guy?"

I tried reading through the comments on this fairly lousy article, but I've been left with bruises as a result of all the knee-jerk reactions. Way too many flying feet.

Hey! I know! Correlation does not equal causation! Hey! I bet I could teach those university know-alls a thing or two! Oh wait, my pinky is longer than my thumb! Does that mean I fuck goats? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Jesus fucking Christ.

If you think, as Jody Kolodzey does, that 720 respondents counts as a "surprisingly small" sample (keeping in mind that the adequacy of a sample size depends largely on how many variables you're trying to control for), then feel free to go out, collect a larger dataset, one that controls for all the variables you think have been overlooked (sibling effects, alcohol or meth consumption by the pregnant mother, goat-fucking tendencies, etc etc), and do the work necessary to falsify Brosnan and Breedlove's findings.

And read this book, just for shits and giggles.

I never cease to be amazed about how people who obsess over the word "gender" will happily masturbate to overrated blowhards like Foucault and Judith Butler, but react to empirical science like a vampire reacts to a crucifix.

With the help of modern medicine, we've probably actually kept people alive who would have died under the hunter/gatherer system and don't necessarily conform to those basic rules of which you speak.

If you read Anne Fausto-Sterling (Brown University), she points out that males and females both have testosterone and progesterone/estrogen to varying degrees.

Well, if you're saying that over a century or so, we've been tinkering gently with the effects of millions of years of evolution, then, well, yeah, I guess...

Yes, it isn't either/or. What's potentially of significance is differences in testosterone exposure in utero.

A better point might have been that it's just as possible - if not indeed a good deal more probable - to account for gender-based role differentiation by social training mechanisms rather by biological causation. My impression has always been that complex organisms - particularly social ones - don't tend to rely overmuch on evolutionary hardwiring.

Why posit one or other causal agent as mutually exclusive?

Do "social training mechnisms" get handed down by God? By "the patriarchy"? Or did they emerge in response to something, for better or worse?

I don't get this it's-one-thing-or-it's-the-other obsession when it comes to understanding the full range of complex human behaviours.

Really, I don't. Makes me shake my head in confusion. A lot.

I'm pretty sure sure I didn't posit mutual exclusivity. Or am I misunderstanding your lament?

I took you to mean that you took these to operate more or less independently of one another.

If I was mistaken, I'm pleased to be disabused.

I banged on about this stuff for, like, years in the Feminist group on here until I just ran out of steam. People just like Blaming Society, it seems, and they're happy to stop there.

It's the rather more abstract and disembodied version of people liking conspiracy theories.

Oh, I'll disabuse you. But with the reservation that it's really tempting to just poke you with a stick, instead. You're kind of jumpy on these topics.

Moreover, I will confess to a notion that social mechanisms are probably the more salient of the two gender-based influences on individual character, even while I'm neither inclined to deny the influence of biology out of hand without evidence.

Part of that comes out of reasoning from anecdotal experience, but a lot of that preference, too, derives from a justifiable aversion to anything smacking of a theory of biological destiny. Obviously, there are gross physical differences between genders (and races, for that matter). The interior significance of any of those differences is arguable - and if I am not mistaken, not fully established by science as it exists today.

Science as it existed a few decades ago, of course, was only too happy to ascribe interior differences between persons on the basis of gross external physical characteristics. With significantly uglier results than the myth of a generalized approximate equivalence (if indeed it is a myth) has yet produced.

Furthermore, seeing society as the more salient influence makes it potentially more malleable to alteration, as a biological interpretation would not. Again, science itself has not issued a final judgment on this point, to my knowledge, and so in the meantime I see little harm done and more potential for good in taking the most progressive and generous view which the known facts can support.

So you didn't misinterpret me entirely, but you did oversimplify me.

Well let me make this somewhat concrete, if that'll help clarify my occasional "jumpiness".

Why is Suicidegirls.com Suicidegirls? Why is it female eroticised imagery that sells this site to the world (at least in the first instance), while the Suicideboys are kind of hived off in their quiet little corner with a devoted, but comparatively small, fanbase?

(Note that some of the most outspoken critics of the recent proposal to make the Suicideboys corner a little more prominent were female. DO NOT WANT!)

So:

Predominantly evolutionary explanation: Human females evolved to "be prettier" than human males. That is, there is/was an evolutionary advantage for females to be visually attractive to males of the species. We can look at other species to find examples of females using visual signals to indicate sexual arousal.

Without going into tedious detail for which I don't have time, the issue here is then it's not surprising that we tend to find females more pleasing to look at. It's not deterministic or binary -- men can be aesthetically pleasing too. It's just biased in women's favour. Judging by comments I've seen on this site a thousand or more times since I've been a member, even straight women like looking at women more than at men.

(We could do a whole section here on why women's faces tend to feature on women's magazine covers if we really wanted to get into it.)

Predominantly cultural explanation: Women have, at some point, for some reason, been positioned as the "visually" attractive members of the species. Somehow, for some reason, pretty much all of us have brought into this. According to this view, women have "paid a price" and "been oppressed" by a socially-constructed beauty myth, created by a kind of deus-ex-machina that has male supremacy at its core. Taking this to what are actually fairly logical ramifications, we get statements like:

This is from the woman who regards make-up and pretty clothes as "a form of submission to patriarchal sadism". (Seriously, you should see what she has to say about tattoos and piercings!)

Hence, Suicidegirls.com is part of the reinforcement of the sexist and oppressive women-are-prettier-than-men double standard. (And by prettifying them and nakedifying them, we disempower them and remove them from participating on full and equal terms in the male-created-and-dominated world.)

But wait, someone shouts, TFOK, stop it, you're being too harsh! Just because someone thinks that "female beauty" is a social construct, doesn't mean they think it's a bad thing. Women can be empowered by posing naked. It doesn't mean it's definitionally oppressive!

And so we come to the completely fucking insane pissing contest that is sometimes laughingly referred to as "different schools of feminism".

- I think posing nude can be empowering.
- It's oppressive! That's simple Feminism 101!
- No it's not! I'm a pro-sex feminist! I can like porn!
- Pfft. You're not a feminist, you're a deluded lackey of the patriarchy.
- I'm empowering myself!
- You're letting yourself be objectified!

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Final comments.

1. I cling to nothing resembling a theory of biological destiny. I've said it so often here that I'll probably smack the next person who makes me say it: (Quoting Katharine Hepburn) "Nature is what we're put here to rise above." I'm simply interested in what makes us tick.

2. Acknowledging biology doesn't make change impossible. It does make it difficult, a process to be delicately managed, and it's about time we acknowledged that instead of wringing our hands about what went wrong since the 1960s, maaaaan! (Backlash! Backlaaaaash!!!!!) I don't think we're very different as people from the citizens of classical Athens, we just have fancier machines. We change slowly. Deal with it.

3. Basing social explanations on anecdotal evidence invites confusion between proximate cause and ultimate cause, which has been my lament all along.

4. Saying women have evolved to be "prettier" does not in any way imply that all the effort to prettify oneself is costless or easy. It has an element of competition about it, whether one chooses an evolutionary or social perspective. Claiming that it springs from evolution is not the same as saying it's benign.

Yeah, I get it... I was only kidding... I have a tendancy to be a smartass. I think it might have something to do with my baby toe being rougly 1/3 of the size of my pinkie finger, or something like that.

Dude, new study says doing that is gay.

My secret is out!!