20 Things I Love About ... People

In response to claims that the site is too hard on men or sees male goodness as something to be achieved rather than something men simply have, Good Men Project contributor Neely Steinberg posts a list of "20 Things I Love About Men."

As an exercise in validating the inherent goodness of masculinity, the list falls flat to me. Nearly everything on the list is something that I would say I love about women -- women donate to charity, and look deeply into their children's eyes, for example. A few I would be hesitant about simply because they're things that women are unjustly pressured by our culture to do. So I would love a woman who "go[es] off to work every day and then come[s] home after long work hours to share in the housework and child-rearing," but I would also love a woman who stands up to the cultural expectation that she must do that simply because she's a woman, especially when she's partnered with a man who won't do likewise.

A few make little sense to me either in their original form or turned around to apply to women. Take "I love when a man makes us feel like women." I'm not sure how exactly I would make a woman feel like a woman (at least in a positive way -- I'm sure I could do a bunch of sexist stuff to her to remind her of her female status in a bad way). I could do things to make her feel like she's occupying a traditionally feminine role, like buying her dresses and paying for her dinner -- but then I think of one of my ex-girlfriends, who would have slapped me for doing any of that stuff but was no less a woman for it. And really, "respecting people's preferred gender expression" is something everyone should be doing for everyone else.

I think the difficulty of constructing this sort of list goes to the heart of the angst a lot of men feel about the dissolution of traditional gender roles. They're hardly dissolved at the moment, but our culture is clearly moving away from having two quite separate and therefore mutually dependent gender roles. Numerous times I've heard men say "If women can now do everything men can do, then why do we need men anymore?" But I think we need to get away from attaching importance to the category "men" (as opposed to individual men). After all, brown eyed people can do everything that blue eyed people can (thanks to contact lenses and CGI, they can even play blue-eyed characters in movies). But that doesn't mean we blue eyed people should worry about becoming obsolete. I don't want my value to come from being a representative of a particular category, I want it to come from who I personally am (which may include how I inhabit various categories).

Time Magazine Is Not Making Americans Ignorant

A recent "outrageous image of the day" reposted by all my liberal friends on Facebook compares the US and non-US covers of Time magazine's December 5, 2011 issue:



The implication is that Time doesn't think people in the US want serious, important news. The Sociological Images blog picked up this image and ran with that interpretation, placing it alongside several other similar juxtapositions from past issues of Time and Newsweek. These images are described as evidence of American "ignorance of global issues and international news" and "that our news outlets feed us fluff and focus us only on the U.S."

But consider this alternative image:



Suddenly, it looks like the international audience that's being fed fluff, and US audiences who are getting serious news.

Luckily, Time has an easy archive of past covers. I went through and counted up the characteristics of the last year's issues. In this analysis, I'm abiding by the terms of the original outrageous image -- non-US politics constitutes good, serious news while other stories are fluff, and we're judging only based on the cover, not the overall content of the magazine or quality of the story (you can write a really bad, fluffy story about Afghanistan, after all).

The first thing to note is that 34 out of 52 issues had essentially identical covers. Many of these were about serious non-US politics stories such as the death of Muammar Gadhaffi or the social unrest in Europe. A few were equally fluffy, like the royal wedding. I counted 13 of the same-everywhere covers as being about non-US politics, using a very narrow definition that excluded serious issues like clean energy. This also excluded stories on US events that could affect the world (is the US economic crisis less serious or internationally relevant than the Eurozone crisis?). The Oct. 31 issue was the only one in which the US edition showcased non-US politics while the non-US editions did not, while the reverse was true 10 times (and 6 issues had different US and non-US covers but neither was about non-US politics). That would seem to validate the original intent of the image. Nevertheless, many of the US covers in those pairings were still about serious topics like the US job market and cancer treatment. Overall, US readers of Time seem to be getting exposed to plenty of non-US politics in their cover stories.

What I would find interesting -- but unfortunately do not have time to do right now -- would be a sociological analysis of how the original outrageous image was selected and promoted. How did it move through social networks? And what sort of rhetorical work is it doing in reinforcing the idea of the "stupid American"?

Polarization Of Views On Climate Change Is Healthy

Dan Kahan presents two graphs illustrating what he calls "healthy" and "unhealthy" distributions of risk perception for two different risks:



The upper graph is the "healthy" situation -- a nice bell curve distribution of perceived risk for both of the cultural orientations (hierarchical-individualist and egalitarian-communitarian) into which he divided his survey respondents. The lower "unhealthy" situation shows a polarization of views about climate change -- hierarchical-individualist respondents were skewed toward thinking climate change poses little risk, while egalitarian-communitarians think it is a major risk.

The cultural groups that Kahan uses as his key explanatory variable are drawn from Grid-Group Cultural Theory. But his use of them has a decidedly Rawlsian or Habermasian flavor. That is, he prioritizes the reaching of consensus and deplores polarization or conflict between irreconcilable views. Thus, the perceptions of nanotechnology are healthy because culture is not driving people to see the risk differently, and thus the possibility to negotiate a broadly acceptable policy on the topic is open. Climate change, on the other hand, is not amenable to such consensus-driven policymaking because culture has trumped reason or science and driven people into opposing camps.

I usually have little patience for insisting on fidelity to the views of the founder of a theory (whether said founder be William Stephenson or Karl Marx, to use two examples that frequently rub me the wrong way). Nevertheless, in this case I think my disagreements with Kahan are centered on topics where he seems to me to depart from GGCT inventor Mary Douglas. Douglas would argue (I think) that risk perceptions that are not culturally engaged are not functional. After all, Kahan's second graph shows that the lack of polarization of views on nanotechnology is due to a lack of knowledge about the risk -- once exposed to information, views polarized on cultural lines. People have middling views of nanotechnology's risk because they don't see it as affecting their lives, and so they can't make sense of its pros and cons. People can only evaluate risks by understanding their implications for their favored way of life.

Climate change, on the other hand, has clear implications for people's way of life. It poses a severe threat to hierarchical-individualist culture because it exposes the failures of that way of life's techno-optimism and pursuit of economic growth, and serious action to deal with climate change could severely hamper the enactment of hierarchical-individualist values. Egalitarian-communitarians, on the other hand, are quite open to believing the danger of climate change because it validates what they were calling for all along.

Douglas would argue that this polarization is a good thing. It shows that people are engaging with the risk and its implications. There is no objective, culturally neutral viewpoint (of the sort that Kahan seems to aspire to) from which vantage point we can make unbiased judgments of risks. Rather, we have different cultural groups that are highly attuned to different sorts of threats. The polarization between the two groups Kahan is evaluating illustrate a society teasing out the implications of dealing with the threat. (What will climate change do to us? What will action on climate change do to us?) A good policy must be open to and address all cultures' concerns, rather than trying to de-culture consideration of the risk.

Cain and Abel

In preparation for NaNoWriMo, I've been doing a bit of casual research into traditions surrounding Cain and Abel, and particularly the identity of Cain's wife. Some of the information I've found is not collected neatly anywhere else on the internet that I can find, so I figured I'd write it up here.

Genesis, 500s BCE: The book of Genesis tells the Cain and Abel story in Chapter 4. Cain's murder of Abel is attributed to jealousy over God accepting Abel's sacrifice but not Cain's. The reason for this difference is not spelled out, but the text does imply that only Abel was giving God the first and best of his produce as a sacrifice. There is also an implication, in God's statement that "if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it," that rejection of Cain's sacrifice is an attempt to test him to see if he can resist committing a sin out of a desire for revenge (a test he obviously ends up failing, just as his parents failed the test of not eating the forbidden fruit). Cain's wife is not explicitly named, nor is it specified where she came from. There is widespread consensus among apologists today that Cain's wife should be understood to be one of Adam and Eve's "other sons and daughters" mentioned in Chapter 5 (after all, Seth -- the first of the other children of Adam and Eve mentioned in the Bible -- is not named until after Cain's great-great-great-great grandchildren are listed, so not everything in Genesis is given in chronological order). Cain goes on to build a city, which apologists argue was initially populated by other siblings. More vexing is the question of how the city was possible if Cain was cursed to be a wanderer and to fail at agriculture.

Jewish legends, Genesis Rabbah: Jewish legends and Midrash follow the Genesis account, but add some other ideas. Cain is sometimes said to be the son of the serpent (Satan), who had sex with Eve after they were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, thus explaining his evil nature. The idea that Cain gave God leftovers rather than the first and best of his produce is reinforced, as is Cain's insolence toward God and resistance toward what he sees as God's arbitrariness and tyranny. These legends also introduce the idea that Cain and Abel each had a twin sister who they were intended to marry. Cain, however, preferred Abel's twin (or wanted a second twin sister of Abel, who Abel also claimed) -- not named in the compilation of legends I linked to -- and this jealousy became an additional motivation for murdering his brother. (There is an added wrinkle here that Abel could have won the fight, but he stupidly tried to be nice to Cain.) God also is said to explicitly have pity on Cain and rescind the curse of nomadism. There is an interesting debate in the linked material about free will, with Cain accusing God of setting him up to sin by giving him an evil nature, while God insists that Cain is responsible both for the murder of Abel and for his continued sinfulness in later life. While Cain's descendants are discussed in some detail, his wife is never mentioned, and Adam and Eve do not begin to have additional children until after Cain is killed by his great-great-grandson Lamech.

Antiquities of Philo 100 CE: This text describes Cain and Abel as having had a sister, Noaba, born between them, as well as other named brothers and sisters born after Abel's death. The actual story of the murder is not told, but Cain is said to have married a woman named Themech, who is not listed as one of Adam and Eve's daughters. He then builds seven cities (Enoch, Mauli, Leeth, Teze, Iesca, Celeth, and Iebbath). Given the small number of family members accounted for, this book seems to imply the existence of other people not descended from Adam (pre-Adamites).

Book of Jubilees, 160-150 BCE: The pseudepigraphical Book of Jubliees (considered canonical by Ethiopian Christians) holds that Cain and Abel had a younger sister, Awan. After Cain murders Abel (motivated by God's rejection of his sacrifice, for which no reason is given), he marries Awan.

Conflict of Adam and Eve With Satan, 400s-500s CE: This book names Cain's twin sister Luluwa, and Abel's Aklia. Cain is portrayed as refusing to offer regular sacrifices the way obedient Abel does. Cain prefers to marry the beautiful Luluwa rather than the "ill-favored" Aklia, and so Satan convinces him to kill Abel. After Abel's funeral, Cain marries Luluwa in defiance of his parents (Luluwa's wishes are obscure, since she is stated to be distraught at Abel's death). Seth later marries Aklia, and Adam and Eve have no more children. Cain, on the other hand, has a huge family and fills up the valley below Paradise.

Book of the Cave of Treasures, 500s CE: This apocryphal book, named for the cave where Adam and Eve worhipped after being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, states that Cain had a twin sister named Lebhudha, while Abel had a twin sister named Kelimath. Adam intended each of his children to marry their opposite-sex non-twin (Cain-Kelimath and Lebhudha-Abel), but Cain preferred Lebhudha because she was beautiful. This sexual jealousy was the primary reason for killing Abel, and after Cain's expulsion from the family he did end up marrying Lebhudha. There is a great emphasis on the enmity between the virtuous Sethites living on the mountain of Paradise and the wicked Cainites living in the valley below until the two began to mix in the days of Yared (Jared). The story of Cain being killed by blind Lamech at the direction of Tubal-Cain (who mistook him for a game animal) is also told here.

Qur'an, 600s CE: The story of Cain and Abel (Qabil and Habil) is given in Surah 5 verses 27-32, though the brothers are not named. It is presented as a condemnation of murder, with Abel refusing to act in self-defense so as not to commit a sin, allowing Cain to take the sin on himself. The text moves on to discuss proper punishments for crimes, saying nothing about Cain's subsequent life.

Book of the Bee, 1200s CE: Here Kelimath is Cain's twin and Lebhudha is Abel's, but the intended marriages still involve swapping twins. Cain's desire to marry his own twin is presented as the reason for holding the sacrifices, during which Cain gives God blighted corn or just straw. The identity of Cain's eventual wife is not stated.

Book of Jasher, 1613 CE: The book of Jasher mostly follows the Genesis account, with the added story that the murder of Abel was directly precipitated by Abel's flocks wandering into Cain's fields, and Abel's retort that if Cain wished to keep the flocks out he could refuse to partake of the meat and clothing he had been obtaining from the sheep. (Contrast the Genesis account in which Cain led Abel out to the fields in order to kill him.)

Pearl of Great Price, 1800s CE: The Mormon Pearl of Great Price tells the Cain and Abel story in the book of Moses, chapter 5. Before naming Cain and Abel, the text emphasizes that Adam and Eve's large family was divided over following God's commandment to worship him through the Son and to sacrifice the first and best of their produce to him. Cain is said to have failed at this, and to have loved Satan more than God and made a pact with him to kill Abel. As to motives, in addition to his anger at his sacrifice being rejected, Cain is described as trying to take Abel's flocks. Cain's wife is not named, but is described as one of Abel's daughters, who Cain married before killing Abel. The story also implies that the inhabitants of Cain's city were siblings, nieces and nephews who left the family along with Cain after the murder.

Atheist Ethics

I think this summary of Penn Jilette's atheist version of the Ten Commandments is a good list, which can easily be adjusted to incorporate other sentient beings (despite the fact that Jillette has prominently criticized the animal rights movement*). In fact, many of Jillette's commandments are much better than those of the Bible even apart from losing their reference to God. For example, he expands the Biblical prohibition on adultery to a general prohibition on breaking promises and violating commitments you have made, with monogamy just one important promise that many people have entered into. Moreover, the list is one that theistic people should also be able to concur with, since it does not actively deny the existence of god. Theist belief simply puts a different metaphysical foundation behind things. As a pragmatist, I'm inclined to hold to a way of thinking somewhat like Deep Ecology's "Apron Diagram" on this point: a worldview, whether theistic or atheistic, that leads you to adhere to a platform of basic decency similar to Jillette's ten commandments is a valuable one.

After linking to this article on Facebook, I was challenged to explain how an atheist could justify the respect for life that Jillette calls for, if life is just "meaningless, animated matter." This gets at the heart of the perennial question of how atheists can justify their ethical code.

I can't speak for Jillette, not knowing much more of his particular worldview than what was in the article linked above. Certainly there are people whose atheism leads them to see life as "meaningless, animated matter" -- and those people can very well end up either cynical nihilists or in deep denial. (Then again, there are plenty of theistic cynical nihilists -- after all, what is more cynical or nihilistic than Pascal's Wager?) I, however, do not take such a dim view of life. I think that life creates its own meaning -- indeed, the capacity to do so is one of the criteria for sentience. And the ability to create one's own meaning is pretty awesome, amazing, and respect-worthy thing. My own life, for example, is meaningful to me because I have worked out for myself what purpose(s) I want it to serve, and taken responsibility for that. A view that makes meaning entirely dependent on God is one in which we respect life because an outside party is telling us "do this or else," or "don't break my stuff." We might go through the motions of respect, but that respect is not really premised on the intrinsic value of the things we're respecting.

That being said, I think "respect" is a pretty fuzzy concept. What exactly does it mean to "respect" something? The best definition I can come up with right now is that respect involves fully recognizing -- not just giving intellectual assent, but really grokking -- the facts about the thing being respected. We respect the dangerousness of a fire, for example, when our actions show that we really understand how fires burn and what kind of pain we'd be in if we touched it. (This is not to say you can't touch it, any more than respecting nature would mean walling it off as a pristine wilderness -- you just have to make that decision with full awareness of the consequences.)

One of the facts about life is that living things (or at least sentient ones, which are what I'd apply Jillette's "respect for life" principles to) care about what happens to them and their world. If you truly respect someone, then you have to fully take into account that fact. To count someone else's desires as mattering less than yours simply shows that you don't really recognize the existence of their desires. It would be like if I said Ginger Hill (1440 feet above sea level) is taller than Mt. Everest (29,000 feet above sea level) because Ginger Hill's feet count more -- you'd say I didn't understand the whole concept of feet as a measuring unit. We have, then, a perfectly good (broadly utilitarian) foundation for ethics without needing to invoke God (albeit also without needing to deny her existence, either).


*Bad philosophy collapses in on its own internal contradictions. Good philosophy allows you to see beyond its author's own assumptions and prejudices.

Bad Arguments Against Libertarianism

I'm not a libertarian. I think there are good reasons not to agree with the libertarian claim that if you oppose government regulation with respect to "personal" issues like sexuality then you ought to also oppose government regulation of the market. But this argument by John Quiggin is not one of those reasons. Quiggin claims that he can show that personal freedom requires economic regulation:

Suppose A rents a house from B, who requires, as a condition that no-one in class C (wrong race, religion, or gender) should share the bedroom with A. Suppose that A signs the lease, but decides that this contractual condition is an unreasonable violation of personal freedom, and decides to ignore it. B discovers this, and seeks the assistance (or at least the acquiesence) of the state in evicting A. On a [libertarian] view, B is in the right, and is entitle to call in the state into the bedroom in question.

I think Quiggin's confusion here results from treating libertarianism as a species of utilitarianism. Quiggin's argument is an effective one for utilitarians (of which I am one, and IIRC he is as well). Utilitarianism is all about balancing the levels of utility (happiness or satisfaction) to be gained from different policies and social arrangements. On one side of the ledger, you have the utility gained by preserving the freedom to invite others of one's choice into one's bedroom, and the danger that allowing such restrictive lease contracts will lead to no non-restrictive leases being available for people who want them. On the other side, you have the loss of utility suffered by those who would like to be able to enter into an enforceable bedroom-activity-restricting contract. On any reasonable interpretation, I think the former utility is greater and thus utilitarianism inclines us to accept some economic regulation in defense of personal freedom. A "utilitarianism of liberty" view, in which we're maximizing liberty itself (rather than maximizing happiness or satisfaction which are often derived from liberty) would come to the similar conclusion.

But Quiggin's argument is not meant to be against "utilitarians of liberty," it's meant to be against propertarian or contractualist libertarianism. This is a deontological view, concerned with not violating someone's rights. The basic right that concerns these libertarians is the right not to be coerced by someone else, and in particular not to have society as a whole gang up to coerce you through the state. To a contractualist libertarian, there's nothing contradictory about the landlord calling in the state to enforce a contract that the tenant freely entered into. In this case, the state is not imposing a definition of proper bedroom behavior on the tenant, the state is merely enforcing an agreement that the tenant consented to. There is no more contradiction here than there would be for a libertarian to expect the state to enforce a contract between an auto manufacturer and its parts supplier, or between a polluter and people who have agreed to allow only a certain amount of waste to be dumped in their stream.

Genuine, Authentic Desire

Holly Pervocracy and Clarisse Thorn have fired the latest salvo in the war between radical feminists and sex-positive feminists, provoking interesting responses by Mandolin and saurus, and leading me ultimately back to the locus classicus of this debate's blogospheric manifestation, Twisty Faster's infamous "funk-filled bratwurst" post. Below is my attempt to sort through some of the issues involved. I'm focusing on the question of fellatio since that was Twisty's example, but I think the principles at work apply mutatis mutandis to dressing in a conventionally sexy way, changing one's last name, and various other issues that get debated in a choice-vs-structure framework. I'll refer to the pro-fellatio arguments and their supporters as "sex-pos," and the anti-fellatio arguments and their supporters as "radfem," while recognizing that the views in both camps are actually more diverse than that.

The basic question posed by Twisty is whether any women every really like giving fellatio to a man*. I think we can separate this into two questions: is a woman's desire to give fellatio to a man ever genuine, and if it's genuine is it ever authentic. A genuine desire, as I'm using the term here, means one that is experienced as subjectively real by the desirer -- it really runs through the desire circuits of her brain. On the one hand, un-genuine desire to give fellatio to a man is common -- many women report being pressured, by individual lovers or by societal norms, to give fellatio that they don't really enjoy. On the other hand, though a few people who have embraced a very crude form of radical feminism and irresponsibly universalized their own experience may deny it, widespread genuine desire to fellate men does in fact exist. It's impossible to explain away the large amount of testimonial evidence from women who do experience real, direct pleasure from the act.

Unfortunately, a lot of sex-pos people stop with the establishment of the genuineness of desire, while radfems want to probe the authenticity of desire -- leading to a lot of talking past one another. An authentic desire is one that is "really yours," not a result of social conditioning. The usual way of describing this is to ask whether you'd still desire something if there were no patriarchy. An inauthentic desire can still be perfectly genuine -- patriarchy (or whatever social conditioning system) has the ability to make you actually like doing the things it wants you to do, not just to externally coerce you into doing them. I think there are problems with this model of people having real pre-social desires with cultural conditioning layered on top of them. But we can reformulate it in a way that preserves the essence of the radfem concern while recognizing that all desires are created in a social context. The question of authenticity is the question of the origin of a genuine desire -- is it produced by a force that we can approve of, or is it produced by a force we would like to do away with? I'll keep the somewhat unsatisfactory label "authentic" for desires resulting from approvable forces. Understanding the origins of one's desires in this way can be helpful in deciding whether and how how to reform one's own desires, or one's participation in desire-creating forces, with the ultimate goal of producing more consistently satisfiable desire packages.

So where does the desire to give fellatio to men arise from? We can see the radfems and sex-pos as each giving a plausible hypothesis. The radfem hypothesis is that the desire for fellatio is cultivated by patriarchal socio-cultural systems as a way to get women to serve men's pleasure and mark their own submission. This hypothesis has a great deal of face validity. We can document the cultural messages and direct compulsion along these lines in both women's and men's magazines, in the statements of many men to their buddies and their lovers, and in porn. This hypothesis clearly accounts for the prevalence of non-genuine desire to give fellatio, so it's hardly a stretch to imagine it cultivating genuine desires as well -- though many sex-pos people tend to conflate genuineness with authenticity, assuming that the authenticity of a desire can be validated by their own subjective feelings.

But the sex-pos side has a good hypothesis as well. There are a variety of authentic reasons one might desire to give fellatio to a man, such as the pure physical pleasure of mouth-to-genital contact or the enjoyment of having him in a vulnerable position (think of the damage teeth could do) and directing his experience. Many radfems are so fixated on the patriarchal pro-fellatio narrative that they dismiss alternative narratives as necessarily rationalizations. But in fact they are quite plausible, internally consistent, and not at odds with any objective facts about the act (after all, these reasons apply just as well in the case of cunnilingus, where there's no patriarchal pro-cunnilingus forces that we might just be rationalizing).

We must also flip things around and do a parallel analysis of the desire not to give fellatio to men. Here, radfems are quick to point to plenty of reasons why one might not be keen to give fellatio -- the taste, discomfort from performing the action, etc. (hence, of course, the term "funk-filled bratwurst"). The sex-pos side will happily recognize these reasons, and defend the right of any woman to refuse to give fellatio on this basis. Unfortunately, some radfems are quick to universalize these reasons -- fellatio is objectively disgusting to anyone, therefore authentic reasons for doing it must not exist, therefore only inauthentic reasons could explain the existence of genuine desire to give fellatio. But there are also plenty of inauthentic reasons one might not want to give fellatio to a man. For example, the strength of the "receiving fellatio as an act of domination" discourse can poison the whole act for someone.

So both the radfem and sex-pos side have hypotheses with strong face validity. Moreover, I don't think we can give the automatic burden of proof to one side or the other -- we don't have to disprove all authentic hypotheses before we can entertain an inauthentic one, or vice-versa. This leaves us the difficult task of sorting out, for any individual person or for women as a whole what the balance between the two causes is (and therefore what proportion of fellatio desire is authentic). Unfortunately, nobody in this debate seems to have a very good idea of what kind of evidence would settle this question.


* The question of giving fellatio to a trans woman or non-binary person is largely ignored in the debate, mostly because most radfems don't accept the validity of these people's existence.