UPDATE (Feb 1): There’s reason to doubt this story is true. Check out this post for details.

Original post is below the fold.
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• WISELI has a useful list of links (mostly newspaper articles) about the controversy. Not all the links are persistant, alas, but the Boston Globe and Harvard Crimson links all seem to be good.

• A good Slate article argues that Summers deserved to be criticized. It also reviews (very briefly) some of the clear evidence that yes, Virginia, discrimination does exist.

• PZ Myers, who actually has a science background, comments. Plus he wins my heart by reproducing a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.

• A good post and discussion at Dispatches From the Culture Wars (which I also linked to in my previous post). I disagree with 75% of what was said here. Both Summer’s critics and his defenders need to keep in mind that we don’t really know what Summers said (there is a tape recording, but Summers has refused to release it).

(This is from a comment I posted on Dispatches from the Culture Wars).

I’m a cartoonist, so naturally I pay attention to comics. So I know from long experience, it’s hard to have a discussion of why the overwhelming majority of comic book readers are boys without someone suggesting that boys are biologically more visually-oriented. Since girls are language-oriented, it’s only natural that girls prefer reading prose, and boys like comic books more. It’s often suggested that folks who think that social factors are why so few girls read comic books are ignoring science in the name of feminist ideology.

Stop here. Before you continue, ask yourself if the biological explanation for why (on average) boys and not girls read comics rings true to you.

Because the truth is, I should have put the paragraph about comics in the past tense. Today, the majority of young comic book readers are girls - by far the best-selling comic books in the USA are manga (translated Japanese comics), which are read mostly by girls.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that whatever biological factors (if any) may make boys more natural comic book readers, they are utterly dwarfed by social factors. (In this case, what made the difference was a new publishing model for translated manga).

There was a time when many highly intelligent people of science thought that women were biologically unsuitable for higher education; that women were biologically less likely to make good lawyers (all that logical, rational thinking!); that women were inherently unsuitable for medicine (all that science!); etc.. Heck, there was a time when the idea of female schoolteachers was extremely controversial.

What would we have thought if we were alive back then? Most of us would have agreed with the consensus (most people do, after all) that apart from a few outliers, most women were biologically unsuited for (fill in the blank).

I recognize, of course, that there are biological differences between the sexes. Nonetheless, I don’t think it makes me a Luddite to suggest that, in physics departments as in comic books, lawyers and schoolteachers, it’s possible that the social factors dwarf the biological.

This is a summary of “The Partisan Paradox: Religious Commitment and the Gender Gap in Party Identification’? by Karen M. Kaufmann, in Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter 2004), which I’m simply swiping from The Wilson Quarterly.

If religious voters are more conservative than others, and if women tend to be more religious than men, why is there a “gender gap” in national elections that leaves the women’s vote tilted toward the Democratic Party?

It could be that religious commitment influences the partisan leanings of only the most devout voters. But that’s not the case, according to Kaufmann, a University of Maryland political scientist who analyzed public opinion surveys from the four presidential elections between 1988 and 2000. Among the highly devout (as measured by such factors as weekly church attendance), the gender gap persists: 59 percent of men, but only 49 percent of women, identified with the Republican Party.

Perhaps religious commitment has a stronger effect on men than on women, making the men more conservative? No, says Kaufmann. On a range of issues…from defense policy to gay rights and other cultural issues…religious belief pulls men and women to the right in equal measures.

But that rightward shift still leaves a big gender gap on one question: attitudes toward the size and nature of the welfare state. Women, Kaufman says, “are simply more liberal than men on questions of social welfare.” And for many religious women, social welfare policies are a more important determinant of voting behavior than the hot-button cultural issues that are said to animate so many religious voters.

Page 26 is done. This one was a lot of fun to draw, for some reason. I love this sort of layout, which I realize is pretty common in manga in general but I always associate it with Rumiko Takahashi in particular.

Update: I’ve changed the title to reflect the direction the discussion has taken.

“Alas” is currently being spam-flooded by some roulette site. So, for the time being, I’ve set the software to automatically delete any comment with the word “roulette-” in it.

[This is a post written by Mary Schweitzer, for a email-list I lurk on. I'm posting this here with Mary's kind permission. - Amp]

Anecdote: During World War II, when employers had to hire women for “men’s” jobs, it was pointed out that a lot of farm women do a lot of hard, physical work all the time.

I recall (it’s somewhere in my master’s thesis, could be in the JEH paper from 1980) a report in the Women’s Bureau (a wonderful source) about how men assumed that a BIG woman (read: fat) would be strong, and a skinny woman would be weak. That is, they projected unto women’s bodies what a “strong man” looks like and what a “weak man” looks like.

However, the report noted, to everyone’s surprise it was the scrawny farm women who were the strongest.

Now, today we know that when women do weightlifting (like the Nautilus circuit, not like power lifting) they don’t get BIG. They get … kinda scrawny, if you want to look at it that way (in today’s society, they get the type of figure that is “in” for the moment) (well, “in” if it also has tits and ass tacked on to either side — but your basic Hooters girl or USC “song girl” — they don’t call them cheerleaders at USC - will do the Nautilus circuit to get small and tight, then add on the tits and sometimes even a fake butt. The fake butt is all toward the back — for waggling — big hips, which supposedly represent childbearing capabilities, are also on the undesirable list. One could hypothesize that the current male affinity for a woman who is simultaneously tightly muscular (again, not weightlifting muscular), has big jugs, an butt that “looks good” in shorts or tight pants but is not wide enough to signify childbearing — shows they are looking for a playmate who can also be Mom.

In other words — women’s muscles do not build OUT like men’s do — they get more tight.

But men didn’t “see” that (although it was all around them) because they assumed that a woman who shared a particular characteristic (such as physical strength) with men must LOOK like a man.

That digression aside, the point remains that (1) an awful lot of farmwomen used to do very hard physical labor, but nobody seems to remember that; and (2) men assumed that the visual characteristics of strength in a man would be identical in a woman.

It was not that women could not be strong — they ended up doing a lot more tasks during World War II than the men had ever thought them capable of — but that men had not been sufficiently observant to notice the women around them who WERE physically strong.

I remember when women’s basketball was played half-court. That wasn’t that long ago.

Just about any “evidence” these guys have that women “can’t do” something men can do has historically been socially constructed.

And the PET scan studies that supposedly show that men use a different part of their brain for problem-solving than women is a tautology — if you are TAUGHT to approach problems in a certain way, then the part of your brain that corresponds to what you were TAUGHT to use is going to light up in a PET scan — it does not prove anything genetic; does perhaps demonstrate something very interesting sociological.

Finally, as I was trying to get across with the (personal) story of the embarrassed 13-year-old who was considered a freak of nature because she tested higher than ANY 13-year-old boy in a study of spatial reasoning ability — as long as there are SOME women who don’t fit the stereotype — they may claim these women are the tail on the “bell curve,” but they have no way to prove it — AND, what they CANNOT say, is that NO woman can do XYZ.

As long as they cannot say NO woman can do it, and as long as significant differences remain in the way boys and girls are raised (particularly when you look at TV — jeez!), and in the expectations society has for men and women, they have no way to tell HOW MANY OTHER women could do it, were the social assumptions and constraints differently.

Yes, women have babies and men don’t. Women can breast feed. That’s about it.

My son spends more time raising his daughter than his wife does (there’s a day are center where he works, plus she is a social worker in Florida and is grossly overworked). But he is in a career path and no one has denied him promotion or chances for self-improvement because he happens to be the one who spends more time with his daughter. Were he to get an opportunity to move up, nobody would ask in the interview “What are you going to do about the kid?”

Nobody would ask him “Are you planning to have more children?” They’re not supposed to be able to ask us that, but they do, don’t they?

The degree to which social constructions of gender differences impacts expectations and behavior is so very very great, that whatever biological differences there may be are swallowed up by it. (For that matter, nobody discusses the biological differences AMONG men and AMONG women.)

One more example and I will quit: In 17th century New England, men were the guardians of religion. The male head of the household was legally charged with educating his household (including servants) to a minimal level of literacy, but also by reading the bible to them and literally making sermons TO them. WOMEN were not considered to be biologically (or theologically) capable of understanding scripture (the Society of Friends — Quakers — believed th opposite — women were human beings, all human beings were the same in the eyes of the Lord, so women could be both ministers and even missionaries, which is how Quaker women ended up getting hung in New England …)

Two centuries later, in the 19th century, it was accepted as an OBVIOUS fact that WOMEN were the guardians of religion, morality, all things “home,” and they had a duty to protect men from internalizing the harshness of the commercial world. (The favorite fictional account of a male/female relationship would have the woman “saving” the man from his self-centeredness, the product of participating in that cold, harsh outside world.) Conversely, women were supposed to stay OUT of that cold, harsh, outside world because not only was it not in their “character” to be able to participate in competitive endeavors of that sort, BUT IT WOULD DESTROY THE VERY FABRIC OF SOCIETY IF THEY TRIED.

Spend an evening with 1950s-60s sitcoms on TVLand or some similar channel — it is hard not to be beat over the head with the obsession that women are creature from another planet. That was all part of an enormous societal push to try to squeeze women back to pre-World War II conceptualizations of what they could, and could not, do — by the pretense that women were “better” at household work than men (when men tried to run the house they always screwed it up) the converse message was being subtly — and sometimes not so subtly — being sent — women would screw things up in the outside world. This defying the statistics that showed a steady progression of even married women (and women with older children) in the market place.

With the lens of a historian, this is all very much the short run. We are not so far removed from this deliberate effort at amnesia (forgetting what women did in World War II, forgetting what we know farmwomen always did) that any hypothesis about what women are “suited” for, as opposed to what men are “suited” for, that one can be in any way certain that even a study designed to show the “real” gender differences does not have socially constructed biases built into it.

One more thing — I was interrupted in writing this email by a friend who was meeting with one of the women behind the book, “Out Bodies Our Selves.” That was a very radicalizing book at the time, because I don’t think any of us (I was about 19 or 20 when it came out) REALIZED how little we knew about our bodies, or ourselves. They are putting out a new edition, and will also have a website. Send your students there, because they are back in that world of ignorance where we once were.

I called in to “His Side with Glenn Sacks” this past Sunday. The guest on the show was Hugo Schwyzer, who has posted about the show a few times since Sunday.

Anyhow, I’m too lazy to transcribe the entire show, but I’ll transcribe the tiny part I appeared in. (You can listen to a recording of the whole show here.)

I marked in the transcript where Glenn cut me off, because I thought otherwise people might wonder why I was suddenly uncharacteristically silent. However, no criticism of Glenn is implied: There are too many callers for him to spend a lot of time with just one caller, so he has to cut people off once they’ve made a point.

The transcript probably isn’t 100% accurate, but it’s pretty close. It begins after Glenn has said the next caller is Barry from Portland, Oregon.

GLENN: How you doing Barry?

AMP: Hi, Glenn.

GLENN: Barry agrees with Hugo. So what’s up, Barry?

AMP: (laughs)

GLENN: Hi, Barry.

AMP: Hi, Nice to finally talk to you in person after all those emails. And hello to Hugo as well - you know me as Ampersand.

GLENN: Oh, Ampersand! Alright, okay.

HUGO: I sure do.

GLENN: Alright, what’s up? Feminist blogger - Male feminist blogger Ampersand.

AMP: Okay. Well I just wanted to say that there is an extent to which I do agree with the men’s rights movement. I do think that sexism harms men a lot. When you look at schoolyard bullying, when you look at the disproportionate male deaths in the workplace, when you look at the alienation from families for men who are working fifty or sixty hour weeks, the pressure to always be masculine and sexism in courtrooms that works against men sometimes. All of those are places where I think the men’s rights movement is really on to something.

GLENN: However…

AMP: However… The mistake made by the men’s rights movement is that you folks tend to think it’s a zero-sum game. You tend to think that, because men do have genuine complaints, that means you need to spend your time talking about how women don’t have genuine complaints. Which is why men’s righters like you do spend time writing column after column talking about how rape isn’t as serious a problem for women as feminists say it is, or that-

GLENN: I don’t say it’s not as serious for the women who’s been raped, I say it’s not as common as feminists say.

AMP: Right-

GLENN: Let’s be clear, I don’t say that, for those women who actually are raped, I don’t say it’s not serious-

AMP: Indeed. I wasn’t-

GLENN: I was saying it’s not as common as feminists make it seem. Alright-

AMP: If I may continue?

GLENN: Well, I wanted to talk about your point here, Barry.

AMP: Okay, well, the final point I’m making.

GLENN: Alright, Barry, go ahead.

AMP: That’s why I think the pro-feminist men’s movement has a better understanding of the situation. Because they understand that it’s not a zero-sum game. Or, I should say, “we.” We don’t say, “well, nothing bad ever happens to men, and no men suffer.” And we don’t have to spend our time talking about how - saying that deaths in the workplace is not a serious problem for men. Instead, we can understand that sexism is actually harming both women and men.

GLENN: Okay. Barry, I can go with you there. [Hangs up on Amp.] The thing is this: feminists have portrayed - and thank you for the call. Feminists have portrayed gender relations in the United States as a thing where all the advantages work in men’s favor, all the disadvantages work in women’s favor. They’ve exaggerated the advantages men have, they’ve exaggerated greatly the disadvantages women have. So that is why a lot of people like myself, in my writing and on my radio show, I do feel compelled to point out that women don’t have it anywhere near as bad as feminists say they do. And I do point out that men don’t have it anywhere near as good as feminists say, simply because that’s what I feel we have to do in order to have a real debate on these issues. We can’t have a real debate on these issues if we’re going to pretend that men have everything and women have nothing. Hugo, what do you think?

HUGO: Well, I don’t think that any of us in the pro-feminist movement are saying that men have everything and women have nothing.

GLENN: You come pretty close. (laughs)

HUGO: No, I think - What Ampersand is absolutely right about is that we in the pro-feminist movement totally understand that male pain is real, that men are hurting. But men like yourself have misdiagnosed the cause of that hurt and you have misprescribed the cure for that pain.

In the comments to an earlier thread, Mousehounde wrote:

As to the topic: I do not understand the fixation on trying to discredit Koss’ study. What difference does it make if the rate is not 1 in 4? So what if the numbers are different? Is there some magical cut off point in the numbers when it becomes something that doesn’t need fixing or attention? If the incidence of rape is 1 in 4, then there is a problem. But if the numbers are lower, 1 in 8, 1 in 20, then rape really isn’t a problem and women just need to stop whining about it I guess.

There’s a bit of a history there. The attack on Koss’ work was made popular among anti-feminists by Katie Roiphe and Christina Hoff Sommers. (Roiphe, in particular, was very convincing - I remember reading her 1993 New York Times Sunday Magazine attack on Koss and feeling livid at those lying feminists.)

Roiphe and Sommers, in turn, both cribbed their arguments from Neil Gilbert (not in a dishonest way; they both credit Gilbert in their books. By the way, Roiphe’s endnotes don’t cite a single piece of writing by Koss; her sources were all secondhand.) But Gilbert wasn’t arguing about the difference between “1 in 8″ and “1 in 20″ or whatever it is anti-feminists argue nowadays. From the conclusion to Gilbert’s seminal Koss-attacking essay (published in the magazine Public Interest in 1991):

The difference between a sexual-assault rate of 25 or 50 percent and one of 0.1 percent is more than a matter of degree. It is the difference between the view that male-female relations are normally enjoyable for most people and the view that they are inherently antagonistic and dangerous. To argue for the higher rate is to try to shift our understanding of the battle between the sexes; the model suggested by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn is to be replaced by one in which Conan the Barbarian violently thrashes his cavemate.

There’s a lot to unpack there (Conan wasn’t a caveman!), but note the statistical point: He thought he was arguing between 1 in 2 (a number he got, I suspect, from Diana Russell’s studies), 1 in 4 (Koss’ number, if you include attempted rapes) and 1 in 1000. That’s a real difference. That’s a difference that matters. Arguing about that difference makes sense.

Where did Gilbert get 1 in 1000 from? From the Bureau of Justice Statistic’s (aka BJS) estimate of how many rapes occur annually. It’s appropriate, considering how much the anti-feminist movement has mangled statistics to attack Koss over the years, that the trend was begun by a scholar so careless with statistics that he’d directly compare a lifetime statistic to an annual statistic and think he was saying something meaningful. (Of course, he’s not the only anti-feminist to make that particular error.)

What’s happened since? Well, a lot of studies - including three major nationwide studies - have replicated three of Koss’ major findings (that something in the range of 10% to 15% of American women are raped at some point in their lifetime; that the typical rapist is not a stranger to the victim; and that the vast majority of rapes are never reported to the police). All three of the studies were influenced by Koss’ earlier work, in my opinion. The BJS admitted that the survey instrument they used to measure rape back in 1991 was badly designed, and have revised their methods somewhat, although some problems remain. Koss’ work continues to be frequently cited in the peer-reviewed literature.

In short, Koss’ findings are widely accepted within the mainstream research community. Yet you’d never guess that from reading right-wing and anti-feminist literature; most anti-feminists who follow the issue believe that Koss has been entirely discredited. Why haven’t they given up already?

Furthermore, it’s now been nearly two decades since Koss’ study was published. As groundbreaking as Koss’ study was, other, more recent research is probably more significant at this point. So why is Koss still the target, rather than (say) the Centers for Disease Control, which ran a major, recent study replicating many of Koss’ findings?

Well, because for most anti-feminists the critique of Koss’ work was never really about how common rape is. Instead, Koss’ work was exhibit A in the prosecutor’s case against feminism for Malicious Anti Male Lying. Criticizing the CDC, which is not a feminist organization, doesn’t suit that purpose. The target must be a feminist, like Koss. And to admit they were wrong about Koss would imply that they might be wrong about their caricature of feminists as a bunch of vicious man-hating evil Feminazis - and to most anti-feminists, that’s simply unthinkable.

And that, as well, is the reason I keep on posting about Koss. Not because I think there’s an important difference between 1 in 8 and 1 in 15 or whatever - there isn’t. Nor is it only because I think Mary Koss is, if anything, a hero, and the constant attacks on her character deserve rebuttal.

Rather, I continue arguing with the anti-feminists because their implied view that “all feminists are liars” needs to be opposed. The more they succeed in getting policy-makers or the general public to accept their view of feminists are manhating liars, the harder it will be for feminists to succeed in their policy goals. Trying to disprove the anti-feminists regarding their chosen Exhibit A is, I think, worthwhile.

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

* * *

While I’m at it, check out this wonderful anagram: Richard Wallace, author of Jack the Ripper, Light Hearted Friend (Gemini Press, 1996), suggested that Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky is actually an anagram of Carroll’s confession to being Jack the Ripper.

In a 1996 letter column of Harpers, Guy Jacobson and Francis Heaney wrote: “The first paragraph of [Wallace's] article contains a grisly confession.” Wallace’s first sentence was:

This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain’s worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children’s stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland.

Which turned out to say, with the letters rearranged:

The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv’s strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare’s sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon’s works too.

Maggie Gallagher, a newspaper columnist who has written frequently about the marriage movement (and also against same-sex marriage), accepted $20,000 from the Federal Government in 2002 to write materials promoting the Bush administration’s Marriage Initiative. Meanwhile, she failed to disclose that interesting fact to her readers even while she preached the benefits of the Bush Initiative to them.

Now she claims that it never even occurred to her that there was a conflict of interest there. Frankly, I think Maggie’s too smart for that, but I guess even the smartest among us can overlook the obvious.

Maggie is a leading writer (perhaps the leading writer) against same-sex marriage, so I’d be delighted to see her discredited. No one has less interest in her defense than me. Nonetheless, this is not a big deal. Why? Because, given Maggie’s work before 2002, there is no question in my mind that she would have supported Bush’s marriage initiative - and supported it in column after column after column - even if they never paid her a cent.

Nor is this like the other recent right-wing-Journalist-taking-federal-money scandal, because Maggie was not being paid to to put certain content in her newspaper columns or to try and talk up the initiative among other journalists. She was being paid to write pamphlets and speeches for the federal government, which she did. Presumably, they would have paid her even if she had quit writing her column; Armstrong Williams cannot say the same.

Should she have disclosed? Yes. Does this make her an illegitimate and untrustworthy source, like Armstrong Williams?

Alas, no.

Hereville here.

This is a special Monday page to make up for the page I missed the week before last. Page 26 will be posted sometime on Thursday. (Not Tuesday as I originally posted!)

Dear Alas Readers,

I”m a new guest blogger here and I wish to thank Ampersand for his exquisite taste in allowing me this opportunity. I will do my best to maintain the high standards of discourse on this site.

January has been a tough month for women in the field of gender science. This field contains a mixture of subfields ranging from microbiology to various origin myths in the shadier kinds of evolutionary psychology. Though the proponents of gender science view it as a pure, objective form of science which will tell us all the definite answer to any questions we might have about sex or gender differences, I am concerned with its almost complete lack of interest in cultural or environmental explanations and also with the whole question of objectivity in a field where every researcher is both part of the subject matter and an individual with particular biases, values and personal experiences. Trying to be neutral is important in sciences but I doubt that it is completely feasible here. Just leafing through some of the literature in evolutionary psychology has me pretty convinced that this particular subspecialty attracts a large number of people with conservative and anti-feminist values. These individuals might argue that it is their science which informs their opinions, but these things tend to go in circles.

All this is background for the news in the last month. It all started with the way (presumably heterosexual) undergraduates rated the attractiveness of photographs of the other sex for purposes of both one-night stands and long-term relationships. The crux of the study was that some photographs were randomly assigned to be the rater’s superior at work, whereas others were also randomly assigned to belong to a subordinate at work.

Women tended to rate attractiveness independently of the boss-subordinate status of the pictures, and so did men in the case of considering someone for a quickie. But when it came to long-term relationships, men rated the women who were marked as bosses lower than the women who were marked as subordinates.

Popularization of these results was instantaneous. We were told that educated women will not find husbands, we were told that feminism was a great hoax (this one courtesy of Maureen Dowd in the New York Times) and other similar idiocies. We were also told that the explanation for these findings is in our deep prehistory where we somehow decided that uppity women are more likely to be unfaithful…

Very few popularizers pointed out the faults in the study which were many. For example, the superiors were described as monitoring the rater all the time and as correcting the rater’s behavior. These might be odd quirks in the behavior of a long-term partner and not exactly the kinds of things most of us look for in a potential mate. It’s actually more interesting that the female students didn’t seem to mind such descriptions. Perhaps this is why the study did not find, as it expected, that women preferred the superiors for long-term mating purposes. This is one of evolutionary psychology’s major speculations: that women find money and power sexy and therefore marry older men while men find fertility sexy and therefore marry younger women.

The reality is, of course, rather different and surely affected by the actual distributions of income and power in the society. But gender science appears to regard these sorts of explanations as unscientific.

Anyway, only a week later we are offered the whole debate over women’s scientific abilities, ignited by the comments of Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University. The burning question is, once again, whether the scarcity of women in the fields of mathematics, physics and engineering is best explained by innate biological differences between the sexes or not. Few appear to mind that we literally cannot answer this question, given our current knowledge of genetics. Instead, it is perfectly acceptable to have an opinion on this issue and to use studies which find gender differences or don’t find them in various test taking as proof of genetic differences. That all such test taking is based on the tests humans make up and administer on individuals who already have years of history as members of a culture is ignored by those who believe in the biological explanations.

And today a study argues that it is the lack of testosterone that makes women supposedly less capable parallel parkers and mapreaders. This study is another one done on a sample of undergraduates, this time in Germany, and it finds that men score better, on average, in mental rotation of three dimensional figures and similar tests. The finding is old-hat. What is new about the study is that those women who supposedly had higher testosterone levels scored better than women who had lower levels, and that you can predict a woman’s parking abilities by how long her ring fingers are. Oddly enough, the study didn’t actually try to find out how well the subjects could do in mapreading or parallel parking.

There is something smelly about this all. Poor and sloppy research is not only given a pass but immediately popularized all over the media, but only if its results confirm age-old sex stereotypes about women’s weaknesses. I have looked hard for those studies in gender science which pursue similar stereotypes of men’s weaknesses but I have had little luck so far.

All this is political, of course. Individuals with conservative opinions tend to have prior beliefs in the genetic determination of sex differences of all kinds and they will welcome these sorts of findings uncritically. Individuals with liberal opinions have more varied prior beliefs, but on the whole we tend to assume that cultural effects at least exacerbate any existing biological differences. Something very important is at stake here: the way the society organizes itself into hierarchies by gender and the way its rewards and punishments are distributed. To argue that our interest in the findings is purely scientific is ludicrous.

(This post is a copy of an email I just sent to Glenn Sacks. Glenn Sacks is the host of “His Side,” a men’s rights radio show. Tonight’s guest was Hugo Schwyzer. I thought Hugo did a terrific job, but I won’t comment further on that here - I figure that Hugo will probably post about it on his own blog, so if I’ve got anything to say about that I can wait and post it in Hugo’s comments.)

(More “Alas” posts on the Mary Koss “controversy.”)

Glenn -

Thanks for letting me speak on your show tonight! It was fun. If I ever call again, I’ll try to be more eloquent.

After I hung up, you described Mary Koss’ study - and, specifically, her finding in the 80s that 1 in 4 women had been victims of rape or attempted rape - as “discredited.” I have to wonder - what does the word “discredited” mean to you?

Usually, when talking about an academic study, a “discredited” study is one whose findings have been disproven by later studies, and which is no longer cited in peer-reviewed journals.

In contrast, Koss’ major findings have, as I imagine you know, been supported by many recent studies, including two nationwide studies conducted by the Federal government. As for citations, this past May I looked up Koss’ two Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology reports on the “ISI Web of Science Citation Index.” At that time, 611 articles came up that cited one or both articles since 1992; the most recent citation was less than a week old. I skimmed the first few pages, and as far as I could tell the citations were respectful, not cautionary or dismissive.

Of course, Koss has published facets of her study in many places besides those two articles. My guess is that a complete search for citations of all Koss’ publications based on this study, would find well over a thousand citations.

I realize, of course, that Koss’ work has been widely criticized in non-peer-reviewed publications by anti-feminists and men’s rights advocates. However, surely that alone doesn’t make it fair to call an academic study “discredited”! Koss’ major findings have been replicated, and her work continues to be frequently cited in peer-reviewed journals. By any reasonable standard for judging academic work, that’s just the opposite of being discredited.

Barry

[Update: Edited to correct the spelling of Glenn's name. Sorry 'bout that, Glenn!]

Disclaimer: I’m more than a little critical of Christianity, both historically and as currently practiced by too many Americans. But frankly, I’m sweet on Christianity compared to many “Alas” readers. So here’s the question; if I link to stories that (among other things) speaks to the way Christians can be screwed up sexually, will people take it as a gloating sort of link? Because that’s not how I mean it.

Anyhow, the link: Feminary is collecting stories from Christian women about their sexuality, a sort of “Christian version of the Vagina Monologues.” She’s posted the first round of stories, and they’re funny and tragic and interesting. I was going to post a sample, but I think y’all should go read the stories instead (they’re really short). I wish her well with her project.

To me, what the second and third stories suggest is that it’s easy to get incredibly screwed up if you’re trying to force your sexuality and relationships to fit into a Christian mold. But I don’t think it’s different from the way people can get sexuality and relationships screwed up by trying to fit them into any other mold. What I was reminded of, reading the stories, is this stunningly great post (one of many) at Brutal Woman. Because it all boils down to the same shit, doesn’t it? Letting other people’s expectations define our lives is how we hurt ourselves.

(Hat tip: Hugo).

Percentage of Women on Physics Faculty by Country

Remember, it’s all in the genes - culture has nothing to do with it!

Graphic comes from here, and via Sean at Preposterous Universe.

Sean also has a good post about the Summers controversy. I particularly liked the distinction Sean made between “discrimination” and “systematic bias.”

• The Hasselhoffian Recursion. Way cooler than the Matrix. And deeper, too. Via Rob, who recently wrote this post, which I would have had a lot more sympathy for before I became a landlord.
• Jennifer Wells in The Star replies to that Maureen Dowd column.
• Two excellent posts on Left 2 Right arguing against the “taxation is theft” ideology: here and here.
• I’m kinda late linking to this, but Echidne has an excellent series on women in the hard sciences, bouncing of of Larry Summers recent public bout of sexism. (Oddly enough, I’ve read a few academics suggesting that a big silver lining of Summers’ speech might be more tenured women at Harvard in the next few years, as Summers tries to mitigate the widespread impression that he’s a misogynist pig. I hope so…) Echidne’s posts: part one, part two, part three.
• Free the Slaves dot net is an earnest, well-put-together site about current-day slavery.
• WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Laws aimed at forcing teens to get their parents’ permission before getting contraception will do nothing to scare youngsters off having sex and may in fact increase rates of teen pregnancy, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.”
• New to the blogroll: Reproductive Rights Blog.
• I posted a week or two ago about the new White Wolf Game “Pimp”. Here’s an interesting livejournal post, from a freelance writer who has worked for White Wolf, about his reaction to the game.
• The second album by Insect Trust, Hoboken Saturday Night, has finally been put on CD. The Insect Trust, for those of you who never heard of them, was a late 60s/early 70s fusion-rock-blues-folk-whatever band, and although they only managed two albums before they broke up, they were fantastic. Listening to their albums reminds me of how incredibly exciting rock was in that period; there was, it seemed, no end of unexplored territory to explore. The Insect Trust, as Ed Ward points out, remains so fresh to listen to because the territory they were exploring, has gone largely unexplored ever since.
• Elves Of Valinor Warn Of “Critical Security Flaw” In Palantír Browsers
• New to the blogroll: Media Girl. And I’m bewildered that I haven’t included this one before now.
• Excellent, long Boston Review essay on society, the law and marriage. I actually haven’t finished reading it yet, but I want to link to it anyway so I won’t forget to finish it.
• SORE WINNERS. Measure 36, you’ll recall, was Oregon’s anti-gay-marriage ballot measure, which passed in the last election. Earlier this week, while my housemate Kim was driving, some guy with a “yes on 36″ bumper sticker pulled up next to her car and mimed shooting a gun at Kim (Kim’s car sports a “no on 36″ bumper sticker). This morning, we found that someone hurled a beer bottle through our car’s back windshield (again, “no on 36″ sticker). Some people just don’t handle victory gracefully.

ESPN.com entitles this article about girl’s sports team coaches who commit statutory rape “The Dark Side of Title IX.” Two comments:

First, I believe that men with jock mentalities, because they’re so much more likely to thoughtlessly buy into cultural norms of masculinity, are especially likely to be rapists. (Which isn’t to say that there aren’t a log of smart, non-macho jocks who would never rape, of course). Nonetheless, I found this statistic stunning: “In the first extensive study of its kind, sociology professor Sandra Kirby of the University of Winnipeg found that 22.8 percent of respondents in a Canadian sample had sexual intercourse with a coach or other person in position of authority within their sport.”

Second: as the Oft Yielding Optimist (who pointed this story out to me) argues, it’s ridiculous to suggest that the problem here is Title IX.

I understand that they want a grabbing title that works with their headline, but in reality, Title IX gives more options to women. The more options one has, the more potential bad experiences. By following their headline’s logic, a story about a woman getting hit by a truck on her way to the polling station could be titled: “Negative Aspects of Women’s Suffrage.”

Read his whole post.

For anyone who’s been following the story of Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ recent “maybe it’s in the genes” speech: Hee hee hee.

(To be fair, Summers has now apologized for his remarks.)