Noli Irritare Leones

Yesterday we had the funeral for Joel’s Aunt Faire. She died at just a week past a hundred. Unfortunately, her final stroke came days before her hundredth birthday, so she didn’t reach that milestone in a very aware state, but it was a long and productive life; this aunt poured her life into volunteer efforts, most notably the restoration of the John Muir house, but also the DAR, the PEO sisterhood, and a local historical society.

Aunt Faire, her pastor said, had planned out her own funeral service in detail - the hymns, the scripture readings. I don’t know that she planned the flowers, one set red-white-and-blue to fit a day before Independence Day funeral, but she probably would have enjoyed them. I couldn’t help, as I sat there, comparing and contrasting her faith with my own.

Aunt Faire’s small independent Baptist church was important in her life, as my meeting is in mine. She attended regularly until she was around 98, and only in the last declining years of her life had to pass on that regular Sunday service. But she had a different approach to faith than mine; to me she seems all simplicity and trust (even in the televangelists she loved to watch, and whom I would see with a more jaundiced eye), with a touch of sentimentality, while my faith is more one of doubt and complexity and even occasional cynicism. Even our Bible study is different - I look for scholars and learn about J and E and P sources, while she put together a course for her church about foods of the Bible, tying each food to a verse and showing how it could be nutritious and good for you.

Still, I like to hope there’s a gift in both styles of faith. “In my father’s house are many mansions,” read the scripture Aunt Faire chose for her funeral. Surely there’s one for both a doubting Thomas and one with few doubts. If Aunt Faire’s doubts were fewer than mine, she held her faith with a gentle and generous spirit.

Stories about Aunt Faire:

One of her memories that I had typed up, earlier:

The only thing I remember was the beautiful cup I won in the big baby show in Denver. There were over 1000 babies in the show. Mother had made me a lovely bonnet to wear, and all the judges lifted up each baby and then voted. My mother applauded with delight when I received 4th place, so she let me carry the cup as we started home. I was about 2 ½ yrs. Old and could barely walk behind her. After walking several blocks she looked several times at me. Then she looked back at me and the cup was gone. She turned and asked me where the cup was. I said, “Me tried.” She took me by the hand and looked from side to side as we went back. Then she saw the cup in the weeds before an old building. She kept the cup all her life, and I now treasure it today.

One that Joel told in his eulogy at the graveside: Aunt Faire went back to her college reunion, and, as she was making the rounds, met a woman who peered at her and said, “I don’t recognize you.” Aunt Faire said, “Well, I had a kind of embarrassing name.” The woman said, “Faire Virgin!” It didn’t help, said Joel, that when she married she became Faire Sax.

The one told by her cousin Topsy: Aunt Faire was a pioneer, and when she was a child her family came to live in a small mining town in a still unsettled area. There were mostly men, with few families, but many bars and bawdy places. And Aunt Faire’s mother set about the task of starting up a church, encouraging families, and making the town a less wild and saloon-centered sort of place, and took her daughter with her as she did, so that Faire’s childhood education was of this sort of town improvement.

Today, I read, there’s another death, of a figure of whom I have less fond memories, Jesse Helms. Several of the bloggers I regularly read ask, why do we say to speak only good of the dead? And of course, none of us do, really. Not of Ted Bundy or the 9/11 hijackers or Idi Amin, and not even of much less malicious figures whom we see as having done real harm. I think, though, that the one way that admonition makes sense is not to take is as “Bury all your disagreements with the dead,” or “Quit reading all those fun British obituaries that describe the dead with some actual color,” or “Pretend you considered Jesse Helms a thoroughgoing saint and perfect patriot.” Tell the full truth about public figures who are dead, whether it includes Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door, or Nixon and Watergate, or Helms blocking the integration of the Fourth Circuit Court or whistling Dixie beside Senator Carol Moseley-Braun. And, even for our own personal friends and family members who die (and me, when it comes my turn), it’s OK to remember us with all our imperfections. No, I think what’s of value in that saying is more, “Don’t be gratuitously nasty about the dead. Don’t dance on their graves. Don’t show up with ‘God hates fags’ placards at their funerals. Show some care for those who grieve them, and remember, at least for a moment, the humanity we share.” Tell the full truth, good and bad, but tell it with compassion. (In the case of Helms, see Pam’s House Blend for a sharply negative take on his record, including quotes, with a few good words about his attention to constituent services.)

For the past couple of weeks, for my Bible reading, I’ve been reading over and over, in my Greek New Testament, the Sermon on the Plain, Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. One of the differences: where Matthew has, “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” Luke has, “Be merciful, as your Father in heaven is merciful.” Perhaps they’re two sides of the same coin.

Johnny Cash and June Carter singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”:

I tailed off without much resolution on yesterday’s post about the work of Professor Anne Campbell of Durham University, because I had to leave for work. What struck me about the description of her work was that she sounded as if she was both an evangelist for sex differences and someone who in some sense identified herself as feminist (or at least wanted to frame those differences often posited by evolutionary psychology in a more feminist friendly way, one that emphasizes women’s activity and choice).

And, as luck would have it, I just ran across a series at Slate that reviews the work of two women scientists who are both self-proclaimed feminists and evangelists for sex differences (non-worksafe figleaf has his own commentary on the series here). Amanda Schaffer points out that in fact,

The bottom line from the science should really be this: Some differences between the minds of men and women exist. But in most areas, they are small and dwarfed by the variability within each gender. To be fair, Brizendine and Pinker intermittently acknowledge this point, and they translate complex material for a wide audience, which necessarily involves simplification. They get credit for trying.

I think this is an important point. Feminists often take issue with popular accounts of sex differences for downplaying the influence of culture. And it’s a valid criticism. We’re hardly short on cultural messages reinforcing different behavior for men and women. But to me, the more basic point is that we’re so similar, on the whole, that individual differences so often dwarf the average differences between the sexes. That’s why one of the quotes that speaks to me most on this matter is this, spoken 70 years ago, by Dorothy Sayers.

When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: “Why should women want to know about Aristotle?” The answer is NOT that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle - still less, as Lord Tennyson seemed to think, that they would be more companionable wives for their husbands if they did know about Aristotle - but simply: “What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him - but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.”

Dorothy Sayers, Are Women Human?

If I, eccentric individual that I am, want to work in the computer field, have the mental ability and skill set to do it, and nothing in my shape or bodily functions that prevents me, then I should get my equal shot, and my equal pay for it, regardless of whether there’s any innate cause for the relatively small average differences between the sexes in things like verbal facility and mathematical ability.

Even studies that report quite large differences between the sexes can show more overlap than difference. Let’s return to that study of Professor Anne Campbell’s about casual sex. Remember how it was presented? Women don’t much like casual sex because they’re not evolved for it? Here’s an alternate presentation of the same results:

Men and women are more alike than different in their attitudes toward casual sex. An Internet survey by Professor Anne Campbell showed that most women, like most men, reported positive experiences with one night stands. Moreover, few women reported that they were seeking longer term relationships in their flings.

Technically, this is an accurate description of the results. 54% (the percentage of women reporting positive experiences) is a majority (if a narrow one). 54% also overlaps more with 80% than it differs. And the press release did say, of the women who were dissatisfied with the experience, that

Women found the experience less sexually satisfying and, contrary to popular belief, they did not seem to view taking part in casual sex as a prelude to long-term relationships.

Is my hypothetical “gee, women like casual sex, too” account the best description of reality? Not necessarily. For one thing, as Phila pointed out, self-reporting of a non-random sample in an Internet survey has its limitations as a methodology. We don’t really know that 54% of women in general like casual sex and the rest don’t. For another thing, if I assume we do live in the world where 54% of all women enjoy casual sex and the rest feel used, those could be odds that really suck if the negative experiences are more strongly negative than the positive ones are positive, especially if you can’t reliably predict, going in, which experience you’ll get. So, my point is not, casual sex is a fun thing that we can all enjoy if we shuck off our social conditioning, but rather, even studies that report sharp sex differences show lots of overlap, too.

Still more overlap shows up in those often reported intellectual differences between the sexes. Amanda Schaffer at Slate describes how the more strong claims of differences between the sexes turn out to be unreproducible. Here, for example, is what happened to Louann Brizendine’s claim that women use 20,000 words a day while men use 7,000.

Thanks in part to Liberman’s provocation, last year University of Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl conducted a new analysis of daily word budgets. He and his colleagues sampled speech from male and female college students, who wore recording devices that turned on every 12½ minutes throughout the day. The findings, published in Science, show that on average women use about 16,000 words per day. And so do men.

In fact, differences in verbal fluency between the sexes are quite small.

But while adolescent girls may perform better on some tests of verbal ability, the gender gap is not large, according to meta-analyses assessed here. In the past couple of years, scores on the critical reading section of the SAT essentially show a dead heat for boys and girls: In 2007, they averaged 504 and 502, respectively. The new writing test on the SAT shows an advantage for girls, but it’s small: In 2007, those male and female averages were 489 and 500. Sex differences on reading comprehension and vocabulary tests also appear to be small or close to zero, when all ages are taken into account. To some degree, differences in verbal ability in children or adolescents may reflect different paces of development that even out later on.

I think part of why “Mars/Venus” stories about profound differences between men and women are so popular is that men and women in groups are different to a much greater degree than men and women taken one by one. Talk to your friends about who wants or doesn’t want children, and you may well find that close to even proportions of your male and female friends claim to want to be parents (at least, that’s been my experience). But walk into a company baby shower, and you’ll likely find, if you sit at a table of all women, near constant baby discussion, while, if you shun the women’s table for the one that’s made up mostly of men, the conversation will turn, after a bit of perfunctory baby discussion, to something else entirely. Many differences are quite sharp between groups of men or women in a social setting, even if there’s tons of overlap, on the very same matter, between individual men and women.

We sometimes frame discussions of nature, nurture, and sex differences as if it were simple to slice nature and nurture apart. Either our hormones are clamouring for us to be different - men wired by testosterone to be more aggressive and lustful, women ever so much more sensitive to the bonding effects of oxytocin (and we’ll set aside, for the moment, the effects of testosterone on women or oxytocin on men). Or else we’re responding directly to social messages - men should do this, women should do that. And, of course, both those things are important. But there are also a lot of ways nature and nurture interact, that can’t so easily be sliced apart. What does it mean to know that you can get pregnant, for maybe thirty years of your life? To know that you’re smaller and weaker - or know that you’re bigger and stronger - than most of your available sex partners? To know for sure that the baby’s yours, vs. knowing that the baby might not be yours? To know that you stand a non-trivial chance of being raped at some point in your life? All these things involve differences in our basic biology that can have a profound effect on our behavior, and certainly on our assessment of risks, but they’re also not disconnected from culture. Only look at how sexual behavior changes as birth control becomes more reliable and readily available - birth control is far more effective (for better or worse) at encouraging freer engagement in uncommitted sex than philosophies of free love, absent reliable birth control, ever could be. Similarly, the influence of rape on our behavior is hardly disconnected from cultural factors such as how likely rape is to be punished, how likely we are to be blamed for it, and what messages we get about the best ways to avoid it.

I said, in the monogamy/polyamory thread, that I think there are some natural constraints on what we can make of marriage, or at least what’s most likely to work on a large scale. Those constraints aren’t especially narrow. Some cultures have demanded monogamy, others allowed for polygyny, some (if a smaller number) for polyandry. Some have relatively easy divorce, and some divorce that’s nearly impossible. Some encourage families to live near the husband’s relatives, and others the wife’s. Some arrange marriages and some don’t. There have been (no, we’re not the first) some that allowed for varieties of same-sex marriage. The Egyptians allowed siblings to marry. The Nayar provide a standard anthropology class “does every culture really have marriage” example, with a system in which women, after a coming of age ritual with a man they may have little occasion to see again, have relationships with various men - to whom, if anyone, are they married? And our own culture, within the past century, has made radical legal changes to marriage - from divorce law, to laws about marital rape, to whether married women can get and use their own credit.

But, beyond that, marriage is a particular kind of institution. One that tries to accomodate a large number of people who want relatively lasting relationships that involve mutual support, sharing of property, and, for most married couples, bearing and raising children together. By no means does that mean that you’re less married if you can’t (or even just won’t) bear and raise children together, or if you choose to manage that mutual support and sharing of property in a different way from other couples, etc. If you publically make the commitment required of married couples, you’re married, and fit whatever requirements your state imposes, you’re married. But it does mean that if I say (and do believe) that there are limits to how far marriage is likely to evolve in an open to free casual sex on the side direction (given the realities of human jealousy, how people react to the risk of pregnancy involving someone outside the relationship, what most married people are likely to accept as comfortable and fair), I’m talking about how human nature interacts with a particular kind of institution (and what the bulk of people choosing that particular kind of institution are likely to shift their expectations to accept), not what anyone at all can ever enjoy doing. Something that only a few people will choose in the context of marriage may be something that quite a lot of people will choose, at least some of the time, in the context of dating. And something that only a few people choose in any context may feel just as “natural” to the people who choose it as the majority’s choice feels “natural” to them.

So, how far marriage will or won’t develop in a particular way has something to do with what people are like on a large scale (how we react to pregnancy and childrearing, what sexual arrangements are likely to be broadly popular and what ones may require more of an incentive to accept), something to do with cultural specifics (such as what the economic incentives may be, in particular cultures, of particular arrangments), and something to do with the nature of what kind of thing marriage is and what sorts of relationships end up there.

Phila at Echidne of the Snakes takes exception to The Latest Research reported by the Telegraph. The Telegraph had reported on research by Professor Anne Campbell of Durham University, showing that women reported less happiness with one-night stands than men did; the article attributes the difference to women being less “adapted” for casual sex. Phila thinks otherwise:

Could this have anything to do with what has come to constitute “appropriate” behavior for men and women in this situation…exacerbated, perhaps, by certain small but important differences in physiology?

Actually, what surprises me about the report isn’t the fact that the men are self-reporting more happiness with casual sex and more willingness to boast to their friends about it; it’s the degree of happiness with casual sex across the board. 80% of the men, and even 54% of the women, in this particular survey, reported being happier with one-night stands than not. I’d actually have expected more negative experiences than that. On the other hand, I can’t read too much into these numbers, given that it’s an Internet survey, and, who knows, maybe people who like casual sex are more likely to take Internet surveys asking about experiences with casual sex.

The question that always comes to my mind when I see such articles is whether the conclusions drawn in the article are those of the researcher, or those of the reporter; sometimes, especially when it comes to research on sex differences, papers like the Telegraph have their own spin, which turns out to be different from what you find out the researcher is saying. In this case, though, the Telegraph article is actually pretty close to the press release from Durham University describing the research. Professor Anne Campbell is an evolutionary psychologist who specializes in studying sex differences “with special emphasis upon female aggression, both as an end in itself and because it may illuminate the more physically dangerous nature of male aggression.” She has written a book called A mind of her own: The evolutionary psychology of women. It looks as if her work is in one sense a challenge to feminism, and in another sense a challenge to those versions of evolutionary psychology that see women in a passive role. From a page describing her book:

‘In her readable and thought-provoking account, Campbell argues that there are profound differences between women, and that this is both a cause and a consequence of directional selection on female psychology… Campbell provides an excellent taxonomy of nine classes of feminism This book will stimulate an important debate and ensure that evolution cannot be ignored.’ - Anne Magurran, Times Literary Supplement

…

Theories of human evolution portray ancestral men as active individuals who shaped future generations by testosterone-driven competition, creating a critical gulf between reproductive winners and losers. But what role is left for women within such evolutionary thinking? Their role has been constricted to mere consumers of the fruits of male competition accepting the winning male genes to pass to their children. Allegedly devoid of the need and capacity for competition amongst themselves, women could be neither winners nor losers in the reproductive stakes and so could contribute nothing to the genetic variability that drives selection. Is it any wonder that feminists are dismissive of such evolutionary approaches? That many have sought to ignore the contribution that evolutionary theory can make to our understanding of women? But have women really just been bit part actors in the whole story of evolution? Have they not played their own role in ensuring their reproductive success?…

Irvine has a really cool dog park, where we’ve been taking Drake - separate areas for small and large dogs, a chance for him to meet other dogs and us to meet other owners, mostly all good. But, into every such situation must come one jerk. This Sunday, it was Guy With Hamburger.

Guy With Hamburger ignored the huge sign announcing that no food or snacks are allowed in the park. He was accompanied by a girl friend, so it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to go in first while he finished his hamburger outside; I’ve done that myself. But no, not this guy. We saw him surrounded by about four dogs; probably most of the other dogs weren’t there because, in the dog park Chuck-E-Cheese atmosphere of many distractions, they hadn’t yet noticed the hamburger.

As Drake was one of the dogs in the knot around the hamburger, Joel suggested I go over there and retrieve him. I approached; the dogs not mine scattered as they saw me, perhaps realizing that I was out to break up the fun. Drake waited for me to pick him up and carry him off. I put him down a couple of yards away; he returned to the hamburger and looked up with pleading eyes. I picked him up again and carried him to the other end of the park.

At this point, Joel went over, and, in a level voice, pointed out the “no food” sign. In an anything but level voice, Guy With Hamburger began his rant. “What is your fucking problem? No one else has a problem.” Etc., etc. He worked his way up to how it was all our fault because our dog has bad manners and begs. It upset me, afterwards, to hear Joel telling me about how our dog’s begging had nothing to do with our own training, since he’s a rescue we’ve only had about eight weeks. While true, it’s beside the point. Dogs beg for food. It’s their nature. With a great deal of consistency in training, you can reduce that begging tendency, but, to expect that you should be able to walk into a park full of dozens of free running dogs, many of them across the yard from their owners, and have them all ignore your hamburger, because it’s so much easier for dogs to ignore hamburger than for humans to read a sign and follow posted rules, well, that, as I told the guy when I had finally had it with him cursing out my husband and slagging off my dog for his own misbehavior, is bullshit.

Turns out, there’s a city number you can call if people bring food into the park; the sign’s up because the city actually considers bringing food into the middle of a pack of dogs a safety issue. (That part hadn’t occurred to me, since the dogs in our half of the park are small, but I can see the point - dozens of free running dogs, a small amount of food not available to all - there’s always the chance you’ll run into something worse than begging eyes.)

The government of South Sudan has ordered the Ugandan army, currently pursuing the Lord’s Resistance Army in South Sudan, to leave, says the Vice President of South Sudan, but a Ugandan army spokesman says his government has received no formal communication and the troops will remain.

The ministers in charge of security in Cameroon, Chad and Central African Republic have asked the international community to contribute to trans-border security.

The Washington Times: Gunbattle Erupts in Chad.

Business Day reports from Johannesburg that

PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki appears to be on the verge of a breakthrough in mediating Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis, after his envoys secured promises of talks on a power-sharing deal between President Robert Mugabe and his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai….

Sokwanele posts a statement by Tendai Biti, MDC Secretary-General saying that

There are recent widespread reports that Zanu PF and MDC are talking and are about to conclude an agreement to form a Government of National Unity (GNU).

Nothing can be as malicious and as further from the truth….

La Cholla points out an interesting video on the anti-immigration movement - surprisingly, a lot of the groups turn out to be based out of Michigan and founded by one man.

The UN Security Council last week welcomed a peace accord between the government of the Central African Republic and two rebel groups.

In a statement to the press, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad of the United States, which holds the rotating Council presidency this month, said last Saturday’s accord must now be fully implemented as part of efforts to bring peace to the CAR….

Mr. Khalilzad warned that the political, economic and humanitarian situation inside the CAR remains fragile, despite the peace agreement, and he welcomed the placing of the CAR on the agenda of the UN Peacebuilding Commission, which strives to help post-conflict countries avoid sliding back into war or chaos.

He also called on other rebel groups in the CAR to reach peace deals with the Government.

The Lord’s Resistance Army (whose leader, Kony, failed to sign peace accords with Uganda earlier this year) is no longer recruiting children in Uganda, because it had to flee Uganda and so is no longer around to recruit children there, but a UN report says that there are still women and children in its ranks, and that there have been reports that the group was recruiting children from Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR).

Blogger/journalist David Axe writes from Chad that

Three weeks after Chadian rebels mounted their third major challenge this year to President Idriss Déby’s troubled regime, the fighting has dwindled to a few isolated gunfights on the barren eastern border with Sudan.

Instead of the regime-toppling attack that the Sudan-based rebels promised in their press releases — something akin to their February offensive that reached downtown N’Djamena on the country’s western border — the spring attacks apparently never reached more than 50 miles inside Chad. In mid-June, rebels briefly occupied a number of towns, only to depart hours later regardless of whether the Chadian army offered up any resistance….

Water and wood shortages, a major cause of the interlocking conflicts in Darfur, Chad, and the Central African Republic, have worsened for refugees of the conflict. The Kenyan paper The Nation asks Are Sudanese and Somalis Killing Each Other Because of Climatic Change?

Marc A. Levy of CIESIN, Earth Institute at Columbia University, and his colleagues investigated the relationship between water availability and internal war outbreak in their 2005 publication Freshwater Availability Anomalies and Outbreak of Internal War: Results from a Global Spatial Time Series Analysis.

They concluded that, at the global scale, there is a highly significant relationship between rainfall deviations and the likelihood of outbreak of a high-intensity internal wars. These experts say that when rainfall is significantly below normal, the likelihood that low-level conflict will escalate to high-level conflict approximately doubles.

Therefore the effects of climate change can, and do increase the general risk of conflict, but this does not mean that one can make the leap to saying that any particular conflict was caused by climate change….

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Carnival of Feminists No 59 is at Natalie Bennett’s blog, Philobiblon.

Post that I like in this carnival: Cara at the Curvature on Faulty Feminist Introspection. You see, there was an article in Science Daily - not the object of Cara’s criticism, but worth discussing in itself - on Why College Men May Hear ‘Yes’ When Women Mean ‘No’. Thirty college women and sixty college men got asked about various rejections that women might deliver to men, ranging from direct (”Let’s stop this”) to indirect (”I’m seeing someone else” or “let’s be friends” - both of which, you know, actually sound like a pretty clear brush off to me, unless you do something like explicitly add “so I hope you’re OK timesharing” to “I’m seeing someone else”).

Anyway, the college men agreed that “let’s stop” meant “stop,” and about half of them got the point with “let’s be friends” as well, but another half were perennially hopeful. And, when asked what they would mean if they said the words (half the men were asked what they thought a woman would mean, and half what they themselves would mean), very few of them said they’d mean “no” or “stop” with the more indirect messages. (I sort of wonder if some of this is that some of the college men, not getting so many direct approaches as the women, have more trouble imagining themselves saying no, period.) Though the Science Daily article suggested both that “Men need to be aware of the many ways that women may say “stop” without using the word “stop.”" and “When in doubt, ask.” and also that women consider using more direct messages, evidently a blogger at Salon Broadsheet decided the article didn’t blame women enough for the miscommunication. And Cara lights into said blogger.

… What this analysis of women being partially to blame excludes is the concept of affirmative consent. Yet again, people — the person who doesn’t want to go forward with a sexual act does not have a responsibility to fight the other person off; it’s the job of both partners to make sure that affirmative consent is reached.

And really, why is that so hard to understand? Why is it that with most other situations in life, if you don’t understand what a person means, you say “what do you mean?” but when it comes to sex, it’s perfectly okay to make assumptions?

…

There is a cultural narrative that communicating with a sexual partner somehow ruins the experience. I’ve never understood this, not for a second. Knowing what your partner wants is hot. Hearing your partner say that he or she is turned on is hot. If you have reason to believe that your partner will give a shit, telling him or her what you want is hot. Making assumptions and being pushed away because you’ve done something that your partner doesn’t want? Definitely not hot.

And one of Cara’s commenters points to where the Guardian has excerpts from Deborah Cameron’s book criticizing the Mars/Venus stuff, and the excerpt addresses just this issue.

… All the strategies the women reported using in this situation are also used, by both sexes, in every other situation where it is necessary to verbalise a refusal. Research on conversational patterns shows that in everyday contexts, refusing is never done by “just saying no”. Most refusals do not even contain the word “No”. Yet, in non-sexual situations, no one seems to have trouble understanding them.

If this sounds counter-intuitive, let us consider a concrete example. Suppose a colleague says to me casually as I pass her in the corridor: “A few of us are going to the pub after work, do you want to come?” This is an invitation, which calls for me to respond with either an acceptance or a refusal. If I am going to accept, I can simply say “Yes, I’d love to” or “Sure, see you there.” If I am going to refuse, by contrast, I am unlikely to communicate that by just saying “No, I can’t” (let alone “No, I don’t want to”).

Why the difference? Because refusing an invitation - even one that is much less sensitive than a sexual proposal - is a more delicate matter than accepting one….

I think she’s right. Realistically, most people try to soften the blow by making their refusals of, well, any invitation indirect, or accompanied by some plausible excuse. And normally most people recognize that fact, and expect a refusal as soon as they hear the hedge. I do think it’s a good idea to escalate to a plain, direct no if a guy isn’t getting your face saving version, rather than repeating more indirect refusals. (Although, a couple of times when the guy acted sufficiently dangerous, I’ve been known to skip the direct “no” altogether in favor of making any excuse at all to get out of the guy’s vicinity for long enough to make my escape.) But it’s not especially realistic to think that most people would start there. And, Cameron’s right, “softening the blow” is something both men and women often do when rejecting ordinary invitations, not some specially feminine form of unassertiveness about sex.

I’m less in agreement with The Female Sex Agent’s submission to the carnival, an exercise in which women can supposedly empower themselves by turning the tables on men and being sexual subjects rather than sexual objects.

Instead of putting on make-up, styling your hair, wearing ‘feminine’ shoes or clothes that emphasise your figure, leave the house with none of the paraphernalia of objectification. Instead, don’t put in contact lenses if you wear them, go for glasses instead, wear a loose coat that is not tailored to the waist, wear no make up or distracting jewelery, wear straight-cut trousers, tie your hair up or put it under a hat, and don’t clutch a dainty handbag - put your keys, phone and money in your pockets. If you have manicured and polished long nails, wear gloves. This may be very difficult to do, because you are constantly told by the media that being sexually desireable is the most important thing about you, and that your sexual desireability depends on this paraphernalia, which is not true. You may doubt this because you probably do get certain privilages as a result of being complicit in your own objectification. Yet you are about to experience a completely different power and it will be worth it. Even if it is just for a few hours.

The purpose of this exercise, is for you to be able to experience the world as a ’sex-agent’. You will travel about almost incognito, without drawing attention to yourself, in order for you to experience the world voyeuristically….

Um, no, not buying. Look, I’m your basic non-make-up wearing hairy-legged sensible-shoe-wearing feminist, nerdy and not much good at being dainty and “feminine.” I get annoyed when I hear about how Everywoman is supposed to naturally enjoy adornment of any kind, when “pampering” and “treating yourself” is supposed to mean spending time and money making yourself look pretty. Because, bright clothes and something that’s comfortable but still flatters my figure? Sure, I can enjoy it. But anything that’s time and money and trouble, and certainly anything I find actively uncomfortable (as I do most feminine shoes), count me out. So, I can get “ditch all the appearance stuff that you find a pain in the neck anyway” as empowering. But, gloves? Not empowering. Covering my hair so I can be “incognito” and hide my sex appeal? Not empowering. Trying to find an outfit that will conceal my figure, even though it’s summer right now and rather warm here in SoCal? Not empowering. I’m unfeminine because I’m lazy, and switching going to a bunch of trouble to look pretty for going to a bunch of trouble to be absolutely sure no one can see the contour of my breasts kind of misses the point. I can’t imagine that I’d suddenly be better able to

Stand tall, stretch out and take up space.

by donning gloves and a loose coat and stuffing my hair under a hat.

Moving on from the feminist carnival, a couple more links:

Unaccredited Pensacola Christian does not sound like my kind of college. Unbelievably stringent student body rules. Like getting disciplined for looking into the eyes of someone of the opposite sex, or being part of a group of women who crossed the path of a group of men off campus.

From Crooked Timber, a ukulele orchestra does a decidedly weird version of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”

Another Science Daily article, Sexual Preference In Women Linked To Difference In The Inner Ear.

Compassion for Enemies.

A local realtor has put out flags all around our condo complex. As I walk Drake past each flag, I shorten his leash and urge him to a quicker step. He has, you see, that male dog’s urge to mark any tall object, and I’d just as soon he not do it to the flag.

“This is Lynn, and she’s a bipolar Christian.” Reese, the rector of St. Paul’s, introduced me to the others at the small Thursday noon Eucharist service.

What, had he read my blog?

“No, actually, it’s my husband that’s bipolar,” I said, but Reese was continuing, “She has both Quaker and Episcopalian roots.”

“Ah, you mean metaphorically bipolar. I’m metaphorically bipolar; he’s clinically bipolar.”

“I’m not psychic,” said Reese.

There are some ways St. Paul’s and Orange County Friends parallel each other, despite the gap between the liturgy of Episcopalianism and the bare bones silence of Quakerism. There was, for example, the moment during the homily (focused, for the day, on John the Baptist), when Reese made reference to his spiritual director - a Reform Jew. I think of the clerk of our Ministry and Oversight Committee this year, who also attends Reform Jewish services (her daughter recently having had her bar mitzvah). We all draw inspiration from people of different faiths.

I did get one other small thing done Thursday; Reese gave me a diocesan phone number I could call about my great-grandfather’s sermons. I have a box of them, you see, and, as he was the suffragan bishop of Los Angeles, am thinking the diocese may be better able to store them and make them accessible.

The run off election in Zimbabwe took place as planned yesterday, despite the withdrawal of Mugabe’s opponent, Tsvangirai. This withdrawal, in response to pre-election violence, was supported by a number of Zimbabwe civil society organizations. Leaders of other African countries have spoken out on the situation, with Nigeria and Kenya calling for a postponement of the election, and Uganda and Botswana also cautioning Mugabe. Around 200 activists from Tsvangirai’s party, MDC, camped outside the South African embassy on Wednesday seeking refuge. The five Heads of State of the East African Community, meeting the day before the run off election, expressed “serious concern” over the situation in Zimbabwe. Mugabe rejected calls to postpone the election.

Mugabe’s defiance flew in the face of Heads of State of the Southern Africa Development Community (Sadc), including AU Chairman and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete, who on Wednesday urged for postponement of the election because of raging violence and withdrawal of the opposition from the voting.

The Zimbabwean leader also remained firm against world wide condemnation that attracted the voices of people like former South African President and Africa’s moral icon Nelson Mandela and the US presidential election hopeful Barrack Obama.

SW Radio Africa related reports that some voters were forced to the polls.

Reports received from most areas indicate that ZANU-PF operatives have been conducting what they called ‘Operation Handigone Kuvhota,’ or ‘Operation I can’t vote.’

People were being force marched in ‘cells’ to the polling stations where they were to say that they are either blind or could not write and would require assistance to vote. They were then made to openly state to a polling agent who their candidate of choice was.

Meanwhile, voter turn out was low in the Harare suburbs. Election observers reported that many ballots were defaced. Sokwanele reports further on the success of the election boycott.

South Africa blocked a move in the UN to delegitimize the election.

The United States and its allies in Europe had pushed for a resolution that would have delegitimized the election and questioned its credibilty.

The move was blocked by South Africa arguing that the Security Council was not mandated to certify elections.

The council instead issued an oral statement expressing “deep regret” that the election went ahead after widespread calls for it to be shelved.

The younger brother of the president of South Africa called on Mugabe to vacate office, but President Mbeki continues to refrain from pressuring Mugabe. Here’s an article that discusses why.

BREAKING: Transsexual Israeli Tops Lebanese Song Chart! Song here.

The movies of the week were Dark Star, a science fiction spoof, and a DVD of readings from slave narratives. The slave narrative DVD had Vanessa Williams among the actors doing the narratives, but, more importantly, it’s from a cool WPA project, back in the thirties, where they got the last people alive who had once been slaves to tell their stories. I have another documentary coming, Africans in America, in two parts, so I think I’ll wait till I’ve seen that to write more, so I can compare the two.

Other than that, we’ve been without hot water all week, as various repair people come in. Also, Joel’s aunt just turned a hundred - but had a stroke a few days before, so she was less alert for her hundredth than Grandmother was. She’s not expected to live long. What with all the personal stuff, I had to miss Ministry and Oversight meeting for the second time in a row (the first I had to miss because we were helping Joel’s mother move), and so now I feel like a delinquent M&O member.

Here’s Holly Near singing part of “Harriet Tubman,” one of my random iTunes for this week.

1. Coelestis Aulae Nuntius, from Gregorian Chant Greatest Hits
2. The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze
3. With You On My Arm, from Cage Aux Folles
4. Pacem Relinquo Vobis - more Gregorian chant
5. Steppin’ To the Bad Side, from Dreamgirls
6. Lili Marlen, by Dad
7. Harriet Tubman, by Holly Near
8. I Amygdalia, by Dad
9. One Night Only, from Dreamgirls
10. For Unto Us a Child Is Born, by John McCutcheon

Discouraged when you see the news each morning? Here’s your replacement news page. Via Elliot.

Still, good news also exists in the real world, and, though the Darfur crisis has sadly not been solved as reported on that page, I can supply an African ingenuity blogwatch of mostly good news stories from Africa.

TheHub and a “World of Witnesses”: “the world’s first participatory media site for human rights.”

A similar recent tool has been Ushaidi, which allowed for participatory documenting of the post-election incidents in Kenya. Timbuktu Chronicles reports that Displaced African has an interview with David Kobia of Mashada, who is also the co-founder of Ushaidi.

Deep Roots Scholarship Fund: “The DeepRoots scholarship recipients, two-thirds of whom are girls, excel academically at their local schools, but unfortunately lack the financial resources to continue their education. A Deep Roots Scholarship makes it possible for them to go to school.”

Africa still needs Microfinance. And for those enterprises too big for microfinance, but still too small for traditional finance, there’s Investors Without Borders.

Hardware Hacking: Handmade Tools in Africa.

East Africa: Why Kenya is an Attractive Investment Spot for Somalis.

East Africa: Region Has Great Investment Potential - Heads of State.

Senegal: Festival Celebrates Global Hip Hop.

Jamati.com is an African entertainment portal; White African talks with the founder.

Picture messaging from Safaricom.

Barcamp Nairobi ‘08 - Final Recap.

For once Maureen Dowd gets it right in her election commentary, as she takes to pieces Karl Rove’s silly depiction of Obama as a snide (what? the guy with the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” style eager optimistic reformer persona?) country club denizen (because country clubs have always been so much more eager to invite in folks like Obama than folks like McCain). A Talking Points Memo reader, though, suggests that the real venom in the Rove remark is the “beautiful date” that Rove placed on Obama’s arm.

The key to the statement is that in the image he is with “a beautiful date.” Not Michelle Obama or, in the abstract, his wife, i.e. a wife like Michelle Obama. When you think of a “beautiful date” specifically at a country club, do you picture an African-American woman? Would Rove’s target audience? Or do you picture him there, a black man, smoking a cigarette indoors at a country club, with a white woman on his arm?

When I thought of this, I got a chill. When you think of Obama’s vulnerability, I think the primaries showed that race remains a real and very serious obstacle, particularly with white Americans over 50. When you think of where we are with racism in this country, I think its a pretty safe bet that the final freak-out factor to overcome may be black men dating white women, in particular, one’s daughter. If I were a completely amoral Republican operative, I’d try to find some white women that Obama dated before Michelle and get them into the public’s stream of consciousness anyway I could. Its a tactic so vile I don’t even like speculating about it, but if you want to be ready for the worst, I think Rove just tipped his hand at where they plan to go.

Pity, that, since, faithful married man though Obama seems to be, it’s actually a lot easier to imagine him with a “beautiful date” of any race on his arm than to imagine him hanging back by the wall making snide remarks. The guy’s good looking, confident, and was single until after he’d graduated from law school. Not that I have any reason to think ill of his dating life prior to marriage. Just that if you’re the type of guy to be envious, it’s probably easy enough to imagine him as having gotten more action than you ever did.

The case for Obama picking Hillary Clinton as VP. Like Ezra Klein, I think Beckel does the best job I’ve seen of making the case, and I think it for the same reasons Ezra does - he’s making the case for Clinton on her merits, and not as something Obama actually has to do for party unity. (Still not persuaded either that she’s clearly the best choice, or that the Vice Presidency is clearly her best option, but it’s not as if I’m deadset against his picking her - just think he may have perfectly valid reasons to choose another option.)

“Orthodox scholars say: ‘In the heathen classics you find no consciousness of sin.’ It is very true — God be thanked for it. They were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities, but they were not conscious of ‘enmity against God,’ and didn’t sit down and whine and groan against non-existent evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do them now; I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again. But I am not conscious of hating God, or man, or right, or love, and I know there is much ‘health in me’, and in my body, even now, there dwelleth many a good thing, spite of consumption and Saint Paul.”

Theodore Parker, quoted by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience

“I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of the hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is simple and rational; who is trained in the theory of such a religion, so that he never knows, for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to him for the world he placed me in. I always liked to tell him so, and was always glad to receive his suggestions to me. . . . I can remember perfectly that when I was coming to manhood, the half-philosophical novels of the time had a deal to say about the young men and maidens who were facing the ‘problem of life.’ I had no idea whatever what the problem of life was. To live with all my might seemed to me easy; to learn where there was so much to learn seemed pleasant and almost of course; to lend a hand, if one had a chance, natural; and if one did this, why, he enjoyed life because he could not help it, and without proving to himself that he ought to enjoy it. . . . A child who is early taught that he is God’s child, that he may live and move and have his being in God, and that he has, therefore, infinite strength at hand for the conquering of any difficulty, will take life more easily, and probably will make more of it, than one who is told that he is born the child of wrath and wholly incapable of good.”

Dr. Edward Everett Hale, quoted in the same source

There was a type of man whom the Puritans never tired of denouncing. He was a good citizen, a man who obeyed the laws, carried out his social obligations, never injured others. The Puritans called him a ‘civil man,’ and admitted that he was ‘outwardly just, temperate, chaste, carefull to follow his worldly businesse, will not hurt so much as his neighbor’s dog, payes every man his owne, and lives of his owne; no drunkard, adulterer, or quareller; loves to live peacably and quietly among his neighbors.’ This man, this paragon of social virtue, the Puritans said, was on his way to Hell, and their preachers continually reminded them of it.

Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family

William James, in his book, makes a distinction between the “healthy-minded” religion of the “once born,” people like Parker and Hale who have little struggle and consciousness of their own depravity, and the faith of the “sick soul” who needs to be born twice to be made whole.

My blog friend Hugo, despite his doubts about Augustine and the pears, seems to have more in common with James’ twice born than with his once born. When he tells his story, it is, like Augustine’s, a story of sin and redemption, of being rescued and transformed. Not for him Hale’s story of always finding it easy to be loved by God, but rather a “colorful past” (as he often calls it) of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual recklessness, driving his first two wives away from him, and multiple suicide attempts.

I think I’m actually somewhere in between James’ “once born” and “twice born” examples. I’ve had my spells of depression and severe self-doubt, and I’ve both doubted God and doubted my place with God far too much to give as cheery an account of my spiritual journey as does Hale. I’m not quite one of the sorts James describes “whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God, and in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.”

Reading Hugo’s many accounts of his past and his conversion, though, make me realize how much of the “once born” is in me. It’s not, exactly, that Hugo and I disagree about sin and redemption; as far as I can tell, when we lay out our theology, we use many of the same words, and would find, for example, many of the same areas of agreement and disagreement with Augustine. It’s more that we’ve experienced our journey differently, and therefore, perhaps, have different ways of coming to terms with that old story told in Newton’s song “Amazing Grace,” the one about being saved from wretchedness and blindness.

I have a “colorful past” of sorts, in the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll sense. I’ve slept with more than one person before the one I actually married. I’ve tried both magic mushrooms and cocaine. I’ve spent time in the lesbian community, which for some people could, all by itself, give me ample grounds to set myself up as a repentant sinner (except, I’m not particularly repentant about that, since the actually hurtful sexual choices I’ve made were heterosexual ones). I’ve ridden on a motorcycle in the San Francisco Gay Pride parade, and I’ve attended a clothing optional neo-pagan equinox celebration dance.

But you know, most of these things were “colorful” in the “I Never Do Anything Twice” vein than in the “I keep hitting my head with a hammer and can’t figure out how to stop” vein. I took cocaine once, and saw it ruin (or take) the lives of certain friends who took it more. I made a couple of sexual choices that were hurtful, but my total “number” is lower than Hugo’s number of wives and live-in relationships alone (if you only count “going all the way,” I don’t even beat out his number of wives), never mind his more casual affairs. And when you add in that some of my “colorful” acts were basically harmless, well, it was always pretty easy, when a preacher showed up on campus to denounce “sin” in the form of sex and drugs, to grade myself on a curve and count myself good. After all, there were a heck of a lot of people handling sex and drugs more recklessly than I was.

I remember one of those preachers vividly. She was a woman, and she spoke with great drama about how we were headed on “the wide road to destruction.” As I listened to her warn me about the dangers of frat parties (which I didn’t attend), where the men would “get you drunk, and if they don’t get you drunk, they’ll get you high,” I found myself attending, not so much to the meaning of her words, as to her style. Such cadences! Such gestures! Had she studied drama? Was she perhaps some theater student, playing a part? Where had she learned this style of preaching, for surely it must be studied, no one has these things down like that off the bat. And then my friend Matt Nicodemus came up, and whirled me around the Quad in a dance, and I quit analyzing the preacher’s speaking style.

And yet, there are experiences that sometimes make, well, not “total depravity,” but at least some sort of “original sin” make a kind of sense to me. It’s not been so much in my sexual experience that I’ve gotten this sense (though, believe me, I’m conscious of individual sins there), but elsewhere. It’s in moving between Chappaqua and Harlem, and observing the differences, that I’ve gotten the sense that maybe there can be kinds of sin that you’re born into, before you even reach the point of making your own individual choices. And it’s more stuff like racism (sometimes called the “original sin” of our country) than “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll” that helps me understand why someone could see human nature in a light rather less optimistic than James’ healthy-minded souls.

That hymn by Newton, with the lovely words about “Amazing Grace” and the line about “saved a wretch like me” which many of my friends (those who don’t particularly see themselves as wretches) want to substitute with “saved a soul like me”? Newton was a slave trader, before he converted. To my mind, that is a wretch, and when I sing the line, I think of his slave trading, and think of God as the one who can turn to repentance even slave traders (as well as the one who can liberate slaves).

And here’s where I come to that quote from Morgan about the Puritan denunciations of that “civil man” who was “outwardly just, temperate, chaste,” etc. For the Puritans, a lot of this was about rejecting works righteousness, and affirming their radical dependence on the grace of God. But there’s another way of thinking about these things. In fact, “civil men,” who are, by the lights of their time, “outwardly just, temperate, and chaste,” commit all manner of wrongs. Such burned witches, such upheld slavery and Jim Crow, such now defend torture. How many wrongs might I partake of, while being “outwardly just, temperate, and chaste”? How many times have I, in fact, been convicted of my own blindness to wrongs done to others, while being outwardly “good” in the obvious ways to people immediately around me?

The puzzling thing, for me, about threads like this one is the set of men who show up in the comments to insist that of course jerks get laid more, any guy can see it; it’s just sort of self-evidently true that women really, really like jerks, can’t give the time of day to men who are nice to them, and, in fact, rather than suggesting that women might be attracted to anything other than jerkiness, we should all get about the business of explaining just why women give jerks all the sex and all the evolutionary reward.

The whole “women just like bad boys” meme actually seems to be quite common among a certain set of men, which is weird, because it bears, you know, no resemblance at all to the world I see around me. It’s not just that I don’t think I like and reward jerks - that could be self-serving - it’s that I don’t see other women particularly favoring jerks over nicer men (save a very few whose pickers are broken - just as a few men have broken pickers), that I don’t see married men (who’ve obviously landed someone) being systematically more obnoxious than unmarried men, and that among the men who’ve complained to me about women not paying them suitable attention, there have been about as many jerks as genuinely nice guys. So where do men get the idea that jerks get all the women? I’ll throw out a few guesses.

1) It’s an illusion.

a) Self-serving reassurance: Spend some time in a discussion group for infertile women (as I have), and you’re sure to hear, at some point, about how ever so much better mothers we will be, if ever we have children, than those who have them easily. If you’re going to lose out on something you really, really want, it’s some comfort to tell yourself you’re at least especially deserving of getting it. And darn it, when you do get it, you’ll appreciate what you’ve got, and do better by those kids than all those other mothers. Similar deal, maybe, with guys who are losing out in the dating game; of course you’re losing out just because you’re so gosh darn nice.

b) We’re all jerks or fools when we’re young: Well, maybe not. But we all have short term relationships when we’re young, in which we either break someone’s heart or get our hearts broken. And some people’s ideas of how the world works get set in high school. Maybe the “women like jerks” meme comes from listening to very young women and girls complain about their various heartbreaks, while you’re not getting to date them? While, from the woman’s side, the story would usually be not, I keep getting drawn to jerks, but “I made a few mistakes when I was younger and learned from them”?

2) “The race is not to the swift, or the battle to the strong”: I think part of the problem may be a certain kind of advice we all get sometimes, both men and women. You know the kind. The kind where someone’s wondering how to do better with the appropriate sex and gets advised, basically, to just be nice, be honest, be yourself, be a good and decent person, and all will be well. This is, of course, a load of crap.

Sometimes it gets spelled out in more detail, as women, for example, write advice for men on what women really want, telling a lot of things women do indeed want - to be respected and treated well in various ways - but not, you know, necessarily things that will make a woman hot for you. And any fool can see that a non-trivial set of men get laid who don’t do these things, while a non-trivial set of men never get laid who do these things. The reason is that a lot of things women find attractive (like a lot of things men find attractive) are more or less orthogonal to a man’s character. Being good looking may help you, but it doesn’t mean you’re nicer. Being rich may help you, but it also doesn’t mean you’re nicer. Neither of those things automatically makes you a bad person, but they don’t make you a saint, either. Maybe the whole “why do women fall for jerks” question springs from the fact that a person’s deeper character (for both men and women) is often irrelevant to whether they’re found attractive. Not a disadvantage, but not the advantage it’s supposed to be, if all the well-meaning folks who tell you to just be genuine and treat women well were right.

3) Maybe sometimes the “women like jerks” observation is an overgeneralization of something more specific?

a) Men who ask for casual sex only, get it after they try enough women: Take the study which inspired this particular thread (and the earlier one at Echidne’s place, and others elsewhere).

Jonason and his colleagues subjected 200 college students to personality tests designed to rank them for each of the dark triad traits. They also asked about their attitudes to sexual relationships and about their sex lives, including how many partners they’d had and whether they were seeking brief affairs.

The study found that those who scored higher on the dark triad personality traits tended to have more partners and more desire for short-term relationships, Jonason reported at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Kyoto, Japan, earlier this month….

Part of the “dark triad” was deceitfulness, which, as both Jill and Phila have pointed out, calls into question the reported number of partners - perhaps men who are deceitful lie more about how many partners they’ve had, and, being men rather than women, are more likely to boost that number up than pare it down. But let’s take the study at face value, and assume the men are reporting correctly. What it shows, apparently, is that men who express a greater desire for short term relationships have more short term relationships. (And, not too surprisingly, men who are more thrill seeking in general also want a higher number of short term relationships.) In this sense, “jerks” get laid, well, not with greater frequency (since the guy in a steady relationship may well be having more actual sex), but with more women, anyway. So, maybe “jerks get all the women” really means “guys who don’t care about a long term relationship approach more women, and therefore sleep with more” (even if most of the women they approach reject them).

b) “Alpha” men: It’s often said that women prefer “alpha” men. This isn’t, of course, anywhere near universally true - it’s not hard to hear from women who announce a preference for shy geeks, and have a series of boy friends who match that preference. (For that matter, in other species as well, “beta” males sometimes slip through and mate with the females while the would be “alphas” are battling for their favor.)

Still, to the extent that it’s true (often enough, I supposed), what does it mean? “Alpha” means successful, dominant, a leader of men, right? The guy who makes more money, the guy who gets picked to lead a group, the guy who gets deferred to.

He’s not, necessarily, the guy who’s a “jerk” in the sense of being particularly mean or nasty - there are successful guys in leadership positions who are generous and kind (as well as ones who are indeed jerks). He’s not, necessarily, the guy who’s going to be domineering in one on one situations in the household. He’ll probably speak up clearly enough about what he wants - but there are guys who are “betas” among other men who are bossy or controlling to “their” women, and there are guys who are more “alphas” who prefer to pick women who are strong enough to be their equals. If a woman prefers a man who’s successful and confident, she may wind up with a jerk, but she does have some non-jerky selections available. Still, however otherwise nice or nasty he may be, if the guy’s an “alpha,” he’s at least somewhat more dominant towards other men than the non-alpha. Which may make him more of a “jerk” in the eyes of the guy over whom he’s dominant than he is in the eyes of the woman observing.

c) Confidence: Sort of related to the “alpha male” thing. If men are expected to make the first move, the men who get laid will be those who make the first move. And can bring themselves to make the first move over, and over, and over again, because nearly any man is going to get rejected. This doesn’t necessarily require that you’re a jerk in any way - there are cheerful extroverts who can keep making the first move and also be decent people - but it probably contributes to that “race is not to the swift” thing where being nice, all by itself, may not buy you much.

d) Cheaters: Well, cheating’s a matter of both character and opportunity, right? I mean, I tend to think that, if you want to get laid and aren’t too picky, you can almost always get laid, but men keep telling me that no, I’m wrong, that’s a woman’s way of looking at things, I can always get laid, because, you know, I’m a woman, but they can’t. Well, if I grant your premise guys, then men who are attractive to women may or may not cheat, depending on their moral fiber*, but men who are unattractive to women, well, they’re sure not going to cheat much. If this is so, that may answer your question about why women keep falling for men who cheat on them. It’s not that women prefer men who are liable to be unfaithful; it’s that whoever the men are that women prefer, for whatever reason, they’ll get more opportunity, if they’re that kind, to promise fidelity and then find a bit on the side.

e) “Bad boys”: Some women do profess an attraction to “bad boys.” Rarely does “bad boy” actually seem to mean “jerk,” here; as far as I can tell, women who say that they like bad boys mean that they like a touch of rebellion, a bit of adventure, not that they like guys to be mean to them. Some men, too, like adventurous and rebellious women, and no one suggests that this is a self-defeating desire on their part. Then, too, there are the “bad boys” that women like in fantasy only - the Heathcliffs, who make great novels but whom you likely wouldn’t want in your bed in real life. And, finally, there are a set of women - much smaller from what I can tell than the ones who either want to read about Heathcliff or want to ride with their guy on a motorcycle - who actually do have pickers that are broken, and want to play rescuer and savior to men they’d do well to avoid. Somehow, these categories get smushed together, and guys talk as if every woman who likes any sort of mischief at all in her man is out to rescue serial killers or something.

4) About that “evolutionary benefit” to being a jerk: Let’s revisit that study again. At the moment, it’s still under review by the Journal of Research in Personality; I don’t know how it will fare in the peer review process, nor do I know the reputation of that particular journal. But let’s, for the moment, take the researcher’s claims at face value. I quote from his web page.

Adaptive individual differences: Traditionally, evolutionary psychology has focused on species-typical adaptations. Personality psychology, in contrast, has focused on individual differences. When these two are combined they are called evolutionary personality psychology. This type of evolutionary approach is considered to be the most challenging. In this case, instead, of traits being by-products or neutral, personality traits are reflections of underlying social strategies. My research in this area focuses mainly on the Dark Triad (narcissism, psychopathy, & Machiavellianism). I have already established that the Dark Triad facilitates short-term mating in men. I am pursuing the nature of this personality cluster beyond mating to general life strategies like risk-taking and credit card debt as well as to topics such mate-poaching and mate-guarding. While these personality traits are often thought of as maladaptive, in the colloquial sense, they appear to also be adaptive in the evolutionary sense. Clearly they cannot be all bad. Perhaps the best example of the cluster is James Bond, a male icon, a “dark hero.”.

Now let’s jump back to that article about this man’s study.

James Bond epitomises this set of traits, Jonason says. “He’s clearly disagreeable, very extroverted and likes trying new things - killing people, new women.” Just as Bond seduces woman after woman, people with dark triad traits may be more successful with a quantity-style or shotgun approach to reproduction, even if they don’t stick around for parenting. “The strategy seems to have worked. We still have these traits,” Jonason says.

So, Jonason is saying that having the “dark triad” of traits is adaptive, by allowing you to sleep with lots of women. Nice guys always lose, right? Wrong. Wrong even in the terms of what this study is saying. “Adaptive” means that the trait is being proposed to have some evolutionary advantage. Other, very different, traits may have their own evolutionary advantages. Compare, for example, this article by William Saletan reporting on a theory as to how a gene for male homosexuality may be adaptive.

… First, male homosexuality occurs at a low but stable frequency in a wide range of societies. Second, the female relatives of gay men produce children at a higher rate than other women do. Third, among these female relatives, those related to the gay man’s mother produce children at a higher rate than do those related to his father. Fourth, among the man’s male relatives, homosexuality is more common in those related to his mother than in those related to his father.

Can genes account for these patterns? To find out, the authors posit several possible mechanisms and compute their effects over time. They conclude that only one theory fits the data. The theory is called “sexually antagonistic selection.” It holds that a gene can be reproductively harmful to one sex as long as it’s helpful to the other….

As Saletan points out, “Sexually antagonistic selection is self-limiting” and isn’t going to spread to the whole male population. The gene would, hypothetically, be adaptive, in the sense that it provides someone enough of a reproductive advantage to continue to exist - but only as long as some other genes are producing sufficient heterosexual men to keep the enterprise going.

So, “adaptive” doesn’t mean “more adaptive than anything else.” If Jonason is right, and “dark triad” traits provide some adaptive advantage, other traits may be providing other sorts of adaptive advantages. Maybe James Bond has a greater desire to sleep with lots of women, therefore does, and so eventually (in the absence of birth control) would have kids by more of them than Joe Schmoe. But Joe Schmoe, as a more devoted family man, may be giving his kids a better start in life. Under some circumstances, James Bond wins the breeding race (although the fact that so many of his lovers die violently does cut his odds some, and the others are fools if they’re not using really good birth control). Under others, Joe Schmoe wins. Even if Jonason’s study could be shown to be thoroughly convincing (and his students all honest in their self-reported number of partners), “darn it, you women are breeding all the qualities you want out of existence by sleeping only with jerks” is an interpretation more petulant than rational.

* UPDATE: Hmm, on reflection, maybe I should use a different word from “moral fiber” here, since it sounds as if I’m dividing the world into good and bad people, with cheating the sole measure of their character. And, people have lots of other ways of behaving well or ill. But my point remains; cheating is both something men can choose not to do, even in the face of opportunity (men aren’t really “dogs” who “think only with the little head”), and something people aren’t likely to do so much of if they have less opportunity to do it.

Ann Bartow points out a New York Times article on a porn lawyer who is trying to use Google search terms to establish “community standards.”

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm….

“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed,” he added….

“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” Mr. Walters said. “What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”…

I don’t know; I see a weak point in this argument. Most people don’t require the Internet to satisfy their interest in apple pie; they can buy apple pie at their local grocery stores or look up recipes in the cookbooks in their own kitchens. I do use the Internet to look for recipes, but if I’m Googling for recipes, it’s generally something a little less mainstream than apple pie. So, I’d wager that a lot more people eat apple pie than participate in orgies, and even that more people eat apple pie than watch videos of orgies, but I’m not surprised at the relative search term frequency.

Also, use of sexual search terms includes people looking for porn, people looking for sexual advice, people looking for news stories that happen to involve some racy activity, and people looking to find out how other people come to be so sexually messed up. So, it’s not clear to me that you can translate directly from a high frequency of a certain search term and high community acceptance of that particular practice. For instance, if there were a spate of searches for “Nazi” and “orgy” in the wake of the Max Moseley sex video scandal, it wouldn’t necessarily indicate an increase in approval of Nazi sexual role playing.

“Apple pie” does turn out to be a relatively weak comparison term, as the New York Times points out that

The Google service does, however, show the relative strength of many mainstream queries in Pensacola: “Nascar,” “surfing” and “Nintendo” all beat “orgy.”

Kenya: Insecurity, education hold IDPs in camps

…

The IDP spokesman at the Naivasha Stadium camp, John Mathias, told IRIN: “There is still a lot of hostility lingering in the places we came from.” IDPs were concerned about security in the areas of return.

With some camps scheduled to close down in the coming weeks, Mathias said the IDPs had not refused to leave, rather “it is the treatment the IDPs [who left] received upon their return that has made us not eager to join them”.

At least 4,411 IDPs remained in two camps in Naivasha out of 11,000 at the peak of the post-election crisis.

Resettlement programmes

“Nobody is going to be forced to resettle unless it is verified [in consultation with the local communities] that the situation is peaceful,”