I don’t buy women’s magazines very often. But I recently bought the two latest issues of Elle, to find out what the magazine is all about. My initial impression was one of shock. All these women in the photographs appear to be ready to orgasm! Half-closed eyes, swollen half-open lips. Indeed, almost every one of the models pictured was portrayed in a sexually appealing manner. This is interesting, given that the presumed readers of the magazine are mostly women. I wonder if women in our society learn to have a certain kind of self-eroticism? Is what turns us on, whether gay or straight, the pictures of our own sexuality?

Probably not, but it’s fun to think about the reason for this style. The orgasmic women are also very thin, of course, some so thin that no way would they have anything sexual on their minds. When one gets adequately anorexic sexual feelings are an extravagance that the body sheds in order to stay alive.

What the magazine sells is clothes and cosmetics. The clothes are very expensive; T-shirts for nine hundred dollars and itsy-bitsy evening bags (made out of crocheted wool) for a thousand or two. The jewelry is by Cartier and so on. Given that the average woman doesn’t earn very much it’s likely that most of Elle’s readers don’t in fact buy what is shown in its pages. So why would such readers buy the magazine in the first place?

For the advice, I guess. The advice which tells us how to be a desirable woman in this world, which tells us how to repair our bodies and faces so that they comply with the unwritten rules. Also for the opportunity to visit this imaginary world where women might worry about which nine hundred dollar T-shirt to buy, or whether to go for gold or silver in bracelets this year. And for relaxation, you might say. Yes, but why does what Elle contains make us relax? That is the really interesting question.

I was pleasantly surprised by the articles, though. They are quite interestingly written and often informative. Some of them were even what I would call feminist in tone, though the word itself is not mentioned in the Elle world. The most recent issue, for example, contains an interesting take on the American myths of motherhood. On the other side, the issue preceding that one had a story about a woman making her peace with her husband’s internet porn addiction.

I come across very snooty and condescending here; as if I was somehow above those poor benighted women who read Elle or other similar magazines. Hmmm. How to rewrite it all so that my points remain but the arrogance is removed? Can’t be done within the time frame available. In any case, I want to get back to my Elle.

The 1970’s porn movie Deep Throat is coming to movie theaters near you:

Deep Throat,” the infamous 1972 adult film that led to a government crackdown on pornography, is being re-released in theaters as a new generation of lawmakers wages a renewed assault on smut, trade paper Daily Variety reported in its Tuesday edition.

The release of the Linda Lovelace opus, which was banned at the time in 23 states, coincides with the premiere of the documentary “Inside Deep Throat,” which hits theaters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston on Friday.

The original film, which was made in six days for $25,000 and has grossed over $600 million, will not be ready until at least Feb. 18, the paper said. Las Vegas-based Arrow Prods., which owns the rights to the mob-funded “Deep Throat,” started striking 10 prints on Monday, it added. Five of the prints will be edited to garner an “R” rating, which allows admission to children aged under 17 if accompanied by an adult.

The media reports I have read seem to present the relaunch as yet another battle between the freedom of expression gang and those who want to ban pornography, and every one of them so far has taken the side of the freedom of expression. This is not that surprising. Porn is everywhere today and things which were seen as shocking in the early 1970’s are no longer so. That porn, and especially violent and misogynistic porn, might directly or indirectly hurt some women is not a hot topic in the mainstream media, and neither is the possibility that plentiful supply of porn geared towards the sexual desires of mostly men might lead to a distorted view of women’s sexual needs and the expected sexual behavior of women. Instead, when something sexual provokes wider outrage this tends to be about the consequences of porn to its unintended viewers, such as children. The Janet Jackson breast episode is a good example of what the media might address.

All this explains the treatment of Catherine McKinnon’s comments about the movie. She participated in a panel discussion at the New York premiere of Inside the Deep Throat, a documentary about the movie, and she appears to have been the one on the panel who was most vigorously arguing the unpopular points about porn’s possible effects. This is how she was written up later on:

Mitchell looked on helplessly as McKinnon did her thing, claiming that the film we had just watched was promoting the acceptance of rape. At one point, however, her righteous zeal became unhinged when she claimed that it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis. “What’s so funny?” she snapped as the audience rippled with mirth. Todd Graff’s hand shot up - “I can do it,” he said, and the room echoed with a chorus of gay men going “me too!” (Gigi Grazer - wife of Brian - later told Graff to stop bragging and that she could do it better than him and had the rocks on her fingers to prove it. Touché). But La McKinnon was not to be discouraged; she claimed that emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act.

And:

Former New York Times movie critic Elvis Mitchell moderated, and the group consisted of HarperCollins publisher and controversy lightning rod Judith Regan, journalist Peter Boyer, famed criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz and feminist professor Catherine McKinnon.

The latter, who turned out be quite mad, I thought, immediately coined the phrase “throat rape” about what happened on screen to the movie’s late star, Linda Lovelace.

That declaration produced hissing, and a few laughs, from the audience.

McKinnon, infamously known in intellectual circles as the “feminist censor,” does not often appear before mainstream audiences. Her “partner in crime” is the militant feminist Andrea Dworkin, who was not among us.

“Inside Deep Throat” producer Brian Grazer’s hair was already standing straight up. More of McKinnon’s theories might have made it curl.

And so on. In other words, Catherine McKinnon is viewed as an extremist, someone quite removed from mainstream ideas, someone who is a safe object for general ridicule. Yet I could list many current commentators whose views are more extremist in some other directions and who still get accorded both respect and a place in public debate. Consider Ann Coulter’s proposal to nuke Islamic countries and to convert them to Christianity or Michelle Malkin’s views on detention camps as a good way to prevent terrorism. To name the men whose ideas are even more outrageous would take me the rest of this post. Clearly, some extreme views are more acceptable than others.

But what does McKinnon really say? The anti-feminist websites tend to have a field day picking out isolated comments from her writings, all of which are intended to show how unreasonable McKinnon is, and sometimes her name is used in debates to tar all feminists with the same brush of freakiness. This is partly McKinnon’s own fault. She likes to use strong statements as a rhetorical device, and they do work to draw attention to what she is saying. But they tend to do this only in a superficial sense and seldom lead to an extended discussion of what her actual arguments are. Or this is what I believe. Though using careful phrazing is not as exciting to begin with, it tends to turn fewer listeners off and ultimately results in a more fruitful discussion.

Consider the often heard argument that McKinnon compares all heterosexual sex to rape. I read the book in which this idea is discussed before I was aware of McKinnon’s mythological proportions among the anti-feminists, and this let me interpret her arguments quite differently. Not necessarily agree with them, but to see what her point might be, and to me it was that if sexuality is defined by purely patriarchal standards women living in patriarchy are unaware of their true sexual desires and needs and therefore cannot in a fundamental sense make free choices to engage in sex. This may not be the reading that McKinnon intends, but it’s quite a different reading from the one which equates voluntary sex with rape. Even more generally, McKinnon writes theory and to understand her arguments one must understand the way she defines the concepts. Not that this excuses her use of the terms in public debates without proper definitions.

All this is background for my argument that when McKinnon called the events in the Deep Throat “throat rape” what she said was quite different from what the audience heard. Linda Lovelace, the actress performing in the movie, stated in her autobiography that swallowing a penis so deeply did not come naturally to her but needed a lot of practice. She also revealed that her then-partner and manager had used physical violence to control her during the making of the movie:

Unlike two earlier autobiographies, Ordeal was not a titillating affair, and the liberation Lovelace talked about was not sexual but deeply personal. Chuck Traynor was not her ‘creator’ as she had previously announced, but her abuser. She claimed that she had made Deep Throat under threat of physical harm, and explained that Traynor would use guns and knives to get his way. There was also a confession that some found ironic: on the set of the movie, Lovelace felt less threatened than she had before; the movie people were a creative family, and she drew strength from her new relationships. Traynor observed this, and would double his beatings.

The generous reading of McKinnon’s comments would take all this into account. But feminists seldom receive generous readings these days and radical feminists practically never, even when the point they are making is one that deserves wider discussion.

He has deigned to give a few carefully formed comments on the hullabaloo that ensued from the careless statements of Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, at a conference about how to get more women into the hard sciences. I blogged about this earlier if you are interested in the details. For now I want to talk to Professor Pinker, because he is an interesting man to talk to.

He’s a warrior on President Summer’s term, a warrior who wields his keyboard deftly and smartly. Listen to this:

Summers did not, of course, say that women are “natively inferior,” that “they just can’t cut it,” that they suffer “an inherent cognitive deficit in the sciences,” or that men have “a monopoly on basic math ability,” as many academics and journalists assumed. Only a madman could believe such things.

I remember hearing a radio interview with Pinker when his book The Blank Slate came out, and he used the same madman-argument to clear the deck of any accusation that he might be an essentialist. As few researchers would call themselves madmen, this clever trick means that we can now dispense with any exploration of Professor Pinker’s own possible biases, and can go on to study the biases of his opponents. Like this:

Conservative columnists have had a field day pointing to the Harvard hullabaloo as a sign of runaway political correctness at elite universities. Indeed, the quality of discussion among the nation’s leading scholars and pundits is not a pretty sight. Summers’s critics have repeatedly mangled his suggestion that innate differences might be one cause of gender disparities (a suggestion that he drew partly from a literature review in my book, The Blank Slate) into the claim that they must be the only cause. And they have converted his suggestion that the statistical distributions of men’s and women’s abilities are not identical to the claim that all men are talented and all women are not–as if someone heard that women typically live longer than men and concluded that every woman lives longer than every man. Just as depressing is an apparent unfamiliarity with the rationale behind political equality, as when Hopkins sarcastically remarked that, if Summers were right, Harvard should amend its admissions policy, presumably to accept fewer women. This is a classic confusion between the factual claim that men and women are not indistinguishable and the moral claim that we ought to judge people by their individual merits rather than the statistics of their group.

Conservative columnists always have a field day. If there is no reason for one, they invent it. But Pinker’s summary of the issues is partial: he fails to address all the reasoned responses from feminists and progressives, and he fails to mention the truly outrageous statements on many of the anti-feminist and conservative websites and blogs. This makes the unreasonableness appear solely something that takes place among the liberals and feminists, not something that might even infect careful researchers such as Professor Pinker.

In any case, our careful researcher then goes on to summarize various studies which demonstrate gender differences on the average. He doesn’t summarize the studies which don’t support these findings or the studies which address the whole question of what we are actually trying to measure with the various tests. All this reads “biased” in my book.

Pinker’s supporting examples of evidence are interesting. Take this one, for instance:

Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, “Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.”) To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.

Here we are to replace scientific evidence with anecdotes about what people talk about in parties or with one person’s confessions. I know of a six-year old girl who took the family iron apart to find out how it works, and then couldn’t put it back together. Who knows how many other things she had examined before she was caught in the act? But this is anecdotal evidence, and not to be admitted if it comes from my side of the aisle, the unreasonable one, the one which believes (despite all evidence to the contrary) that women and men are exactly identical at birth.

This is all rubbish, of course. There are no feminists who believe that women and men are biologically exactly the same, though there seem to be a very large number of anti-feminists who never see the most obvious difference between the two sexes which is the fact that women give birth. Anti-feminists want to have more science to find out what really distinguishes the sexes, all the while letting their eyes glide over the pregnant bellies of their coworkers or the countless young women pushing prams outside.

The reason for this bias is of course the political importance of gender differences. Anyone who believes that men and women should not be treated equally must base this belief on some form of innate differences. Feminists know this, and that is why the history of biased Victorian gender science is important to keep in mind. Pinker gives a nod to this argument, but then goes on glibly to place total trust in the newer generation of findings. Nobody, but nobody can be impartial in this field, and Pinker is not the sole exception here. He has an axe to grind, and that is to protect the views on which he has based his own research and writing. I also have an axe, of course, but you can see what it is and how sharply honed it always stays.

The differences that gender science may find are going to be put to political uses pretty fast. Even if the results are based on faulty methods and data, the harm the political applications will do is real. This is the reason why it is so important to insist on transparency and high methodical competency from all practitioners of gender science, and why it is very important not to have a value bias among this group towards one sex or the other. Currently there is such a general bias, as even a cursory reading of the studies reveals, and that is one of slight misogyny. In other words, not all science is somehow above politics or even above cheating, and all science should be approached with a very critical mind.

But Pinker is not too concerned about this. He does hint that he would love the world to be fairer and more equal if only facts would let that be the case, and he repeatedly reminds us how wrong discrimination is, before he goes on to tell us about the dangers of reverse discrimination if we ignore gender science.

Actually, I agree with Pinker on one of his arguments: that we should encourage good science on innate gender differences. The real question is how to do this. How would Pinker create a study which would tell us, for once and for all, what the real cognitive differences between men and women are? We actually don’t have the tools to do this today, and this is the main reason why I find Pinker’s elegant impartiality so insulting. He’s willing to settle for JustSo stories from evolutionary psychology in lieue of proper genetic biology:

Since most sex differences are small and many favor women, they don’t necessarily give an advantage to men in school or on the job. But Summers invoked yet another difference that may be more consequential. In many traits, men show greater variance than women, and are disproportionately found at both the low and high ends of the distribution. Boys are more likely to be learning disabled or retarded but also more likely to reach the top percentiles in assessments of mathematical ability, even though boys and girls are similar in the bulk of the bell curve. The pattern is readily explained by evolutionary biology. Since a male can have more offspring than a female–but also has a greater chance of being childless (the victims of other males who impregnate the available females)–natural selection favors a slightly more conservative and reliable baby-building process for females and a slightly more ambitious and error-prone process for males. That is because the advantage of an exceptional daughter (who still can have only as many children as a female can bear and nurse in a lifetime) would be canceled out by her unexceptional sisters, whereas an exceptional son who might sire several dozen grandchildren can more than make up for his dull childless brothers. One doesn’t have to accept the evolutionary explanation to appreciate how greater male variability could explain, in part, why more men end up with extreme levels of achievement.

I’m not an evolutionary psychologist, only a goddess, but I have trouble with this myth of our prehistory. It’s a very popular myth these days, this idea of the happy male who casts around buckets of high-quality sperm while the careful and coy females tend their one or two babies with great care. For one thing, a fertilized egg is not the same as a child brought to a point where that child can himself or herself breed further. Prehistory must not have been an easy life for pregnant women, and I find it very hard to believe that the buckets of sperm all took so easily as this myth explains. It’s at least worth considering whether the men who stuck around one or two women got a greater yield by providing food, protection, sex, childcare and friendship. They also would have kept some of the bucket brigade away.

For another thing, this myth doesn’t explain what Pinker seems to think it should. If indeed only the most technically minded men somehow managed to procreate, the men who do so poorly in mathematical tests that they are at the other end of the distribution should not exist. How come did their genes sneak in, too? No, for Pinker’s explanation to be correct we should not observe greater male variability at both tails of the distribution.

I could go on, but I hope that the gist of my complaints is visible by now. What angers me about Pinker’s approach is his “holier-than-thou” pretense combined with some very sneaky biases. At least I actually am holier than any of you thous out there and my biases are all goddess-sized.
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(This is a cross-posting from my blog. I am going to give you something more unique later this week.)

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.