for a while. There’s another Pie diary and I got sucked into it. Below the fold is a bit of the diary and one of my responses, which I would like to discuss without the rancor and idiocy.
The diary is by MilitaryTracy and quotes this definition of sexual harassment:
What is it?
Sexual harassment is any kind of unwelcome sexual advance. It can be a pinch, a leer, a suggestive remark, or an overt request for sexual favors.
Forms of sexual harassment:
Verbal:
Suggestive comments
Sexual innuendo & insults
Humor & jokes about sex
Threats
Comments & jokes based upon gender or sexual identity
Non-Verbal:
Whistling, leering & ogling
Suggestive or insulting sounds
Display of obscene or suggestive material
Obscene gestures
Physical:
Touching or patting
Pinching
Brushing against the body
Coerced sexual conduct
Assault
Don’t Blame Yourself!
Sexual Harassment is about POWER not Sex.
One of my comments (before I just got fed up) was:
For example, why is it called a “conquest”? A conquest is when power is exerted by someone over someone else and something is taken that is wanted by the taker. As Stephen Pinker wrote: armed robbery is not about power, it’s about getting the money. If I get mugged (I have been a few times) I don’t think it is my fault for having something that the robber wants.
Of course if I walk around the tenderloin district late at night wearing a suit and I get mugged then I would think that I might have avoided it had I not gone there. But for women a huge fraction of the world is the equivalent of the tenderloin. That’s the horrifying truth and that’s what has to be changed.
But the punch line is: Yes, it is about sex and yes, it is Not your fault. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I think kos should have removed the ad. I think that sexual harassment is in the eye of the harassee (women). But I think that (at least some) men would have less of a problem with such discussions if comments like “it’s not about sex” were relegated to the dustbin.
The problem with such comments is that they were invented by women to explain actions by men that they (women) don’t understand. The problem is men do understand. It is about sex. It is about power as well but not just about power. In many instances it is about the conflation of power and sex, as I tried to explain in my “pie diary” comment quoted above.
I’m just sayin’.
Hopefully it will be a bit quieter around here, with more thoughtful and less judgmental commentary.
Please let me know what you think.
Welcome to BT. Some of us have been here awhile, not as long as others, but some of us joined in the last day or two. We’ve been having lots of discussions about gender, and power, and sex. there’s one going on right now being hosted by MaJeff just down from you a bit. Drop in if you’re interested.
I think your perspective is interesting. I do see gender as about power relations, but I think some of what I see as gender you may be coding as “sex,” and that gives us a place to start a discussion from. No fighting. I’m tired of fights. But I think a discussion of gender/power/sex is where a lot of us are right now.
The concepts do get conflated, perhaps because all men think about is sex (when they think about gender, that is). I’ll hop over to the diary you mentioned and check it out.
How better to demonstrate power than through sex?
Sex is the most vulnerable act, and is one of the most basic acts – procreation, orgasm, complete removal of all armor and protection.
So, again, my question, if one is all about showing and imposing power over another, how better than through the use of sex?
Consider anal rape in prisons…no women involved, and sex is used as the ultimate form of power.
Agreed. I think mark’s objections are based around semantics rather than content. The statement he objects to seems to be accurate, from a psychological/philosophical point of view. But from a societal point of view, it may be inaccurate, because “male sex” is “about power” anyway. Yes?
I think that the “not about sex” statement is intended to relieve women from any guilt they might feel that they are in some way responsible for the harassment they get. Sex is supposed to be a good thing and so if it is about sex then how can it be bad? Making it solely about power allows harassment to be demonized (as well it should be) without making the demonizer seem to be a puritan.
I really disagree with the statement because I believe that it is not true, and therefore it hinders useful action.
You may want to back that car up and restate your comment, because it almost sounds like you’re saying that women share some of the guilt when they are sexually harassed or raped. I don’t think they should have any guilt in these situations, and I think that saying “it’s about power” is an accurate psychological evaluation of the situation. After all, both harassment and rape are about forcing unwanted attention on a recipient (no matter what their gender/sex), and situations where force and coercion are involved are almost always – without any exception that I can think of – all about power.
By definition, it can’t be about sex, as sex is consensual. (There’s that language issue) It may be about intercourse, but I think forced intercourse comes down to, again, being about power.
Society (in the past at least, and to some extent today) has blamed women being harassed. “Why was she wearing those slutty clothes?” – shit like that. My point is that the “not about sex” statement is a way for women to distance themselves from the (completely unwarranted) blame that society heaps on them. I can understand why this might make one feel better, but I don’t think that the statement is true.
As I said above:
But the punch line is: Yes, it is about sex and yes, it is Not your fault. The two are not mutually exclusive.
To be more explicit: it’s about both sex and power, and in many men’s psyches the two concepts are conflated.
Oh, I see now. That is definitely a concept worth further investigation/discussion, I think. However, I would further qualify your statement – it’s about forced sexual intercourse and power. That makes what you’re referring to more specific, as sex can have many other meanings attached. (Biological equipment, societal gender, emotional attachment) Or possibly forced assignment of gender roles. I’m not really up on the theory, and lorraine or Jef could explain it a thousand times better than I could.
But I think the key here is to emphasize that it’s about the forced act and power. I think another point of “it’s about power” is to emphasize the forced nature of it.
and I agree. As a man I have gotten the impression that men are put off by some of the statements of the “theory” crowd that seem counterintuitive (i.e. bullshit). Statements that mislead are, at best, unuseful and, at worst, dangerous.
I have no problem with “theory” per se. I am a physicist and like talking about the finer points of quantum theory as much as I like talking about politics. But I personally am sensitized due to some of the more extreme statements of the theory set, such as “western science is gendered in the male direction (emphasizing objects over wholistic views)” and therefore bad. It’s an interesting point but, trouble is, western science is correct and is the only kind there is now. Reductionism actually works and we have it to thank for the staggering speed (historically speaking) at which nature’s secrets are being discovered.
I could go on for hours on this subject but I’ll save that for a future diary (I have one at dKos anyway). My point is: theory must be in service to the truth (objective reality), not the reverse.
Thanks for your comments! This is the kind of discussion I wanted at dKos.
Mark,
Your point in that kos diary is an excellent one, and one that I have made and had to defend mightily for many, many years.
And I was at Duke when Sokal pulled his stunt on Dr. Fish, and man, o man, I was soooooooooo amused.
The point is that in SOME fields, and in SOME endeavors, there really, REALLY is observable, documentablee, hard fact.
In others, there may not be – at least not that we know.
The POINT is DON’T MIX THE TWO…
I even got Armando to agree, if you can believe that.
The Sokal thing was a hoot, but it was looong after my University days. I was in a class with Sokal (on Quantum Field Theory) so you can see how long.
And probably one you are not interested in now.
point but, trouble is, western science is correct and is the only kind there is now.
Your statement is true on one level, the level that most scientists work at most of the time.
But there is another level, which is not a part of science per se, but of the philosophy of science. At that level, your statement is not true.
That level is: What questions should scientists investigate or should not investigate? What paradigms are a priori acceptable or unacceptable for trying to explain phenomena?
There is no way to answer these two questions scientifically–by collecting data, forming hypotheses, testing the hypotheses, &c. Partly they are guided by a practical test: What questions are we capable of investigating?
This practical test is important and guides much. For example, when the Big Bang Theory of the universe was gaining acceptance because of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, it contained a great big gaping hole that was assiduously ignored: What was the source of the Big Bang? This was totally devastating, because there was no reason for the Big Bang to occur “when” it did. Nevertheless, the microwave background fit too well to just discard the whole hypothesis, and there were other problems that had to be dealt with first, such as the fact that entire universe seemed to have been, for the first few seconds of its history, in thermal equilibrium. This was even more impossible than the choice of the beginning, and had to be dealt with first. It seems to have been solved using the techniques that are now called “inflation.”
Now that cosmologists are prepared to believe in inflation as the solution to the problem of thermal equilibrium, they have taken up the question of origins, including the possibility that universes spring up from time to time inside a larger whatever-it-is that contains them. This last is speculation, but the point is that now cosmologists are at the point of tackling the quesion.
But close inspection reveals that while the constraint of what is doable limits the choice of questions investigated, it does not actually decide what they shall be.
It is at this level that the masculinistness of modern science reveals itself. The choice of questions is social or political. Male scientists study questions that men find interesting. They do not study questions that women find interesting. When women become scientists, we sometimes see very interesting off-the-masculine-path choices of investigation.
An example that does not exactly lie on the masculine/feminine axis, but which is revealing, is the reaction of biologists to Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. It started with NASA asking him to design experiments for one of the Mars landers to test whether there is life on Mars.
Of course, he knew that there were not little green men on Mars, and he was not going to worry about testing for that. But would he test for plant life? For animal life? But even on Earth we have things that are neither animals nor plants. For bacteria? But might their be non-bacterial life? What about DNA and proteins? Maybe, but how do we know that DNA or proteins are necessary for life? Maybe there are other ways for life to occur. What is life anyway? Fortunately, even as he got more and more abstractly philosophical, he bottomed out with a practical idea: Life finds ways to tap energy and move the environment out of chemical equilibrium. That became his test.
Unfortunately for his relationship with NASA, the question of whether Mars was out of chemical equilibrium had already been answered by measurements made from Earth or nearby space–in the negative. There was no life on Mars, and no reason to send the lander!
(The question has been reopened, but only slightly, with the discovery of the microspheres–which may be the remains of ancient life–and the possibility of subsurface water and organic methane outgassing–that might be due to there being a little bit of life left. But there cannot be much. Of course even the chance of remnant life on Mars is intensely interesting.)
Turning his thoughts back to Earth, he created with Lynnn Margolis the idea that maybe life on Earth works–that is, co-operates–to maintain favorable conditions. This suggested a line of inquiry: To look for transportation and informational feed-back systems in the biosphere.
Finally I get to my point: It turned out that this line of inquiry, though feasible, broke a Biological taboo. Biologists were not allowed to conduct an investigation of this sort. It broke their rules, and they told him so with great vehemence. Not the rules of science, but the rules about which questions a biologist is allowed to ask. Biologists are allowed to ask how organisms are comprised of cells, how cells are comprised of small structures, how small structures are composed of molecules, how organism compete, but they are not allowed to ask whether members of different species co-operate or if they are organized into larger functional units.
The facts are determined by what is rather than what is not. But the choice of facts is determined by what we want.
Yes, this is post-modernism–as created by post-modernists. Practical low-grade postmodernism, as debased by its exploiters, collapses the distinction between facts and their choice: Rather than choosing facts we want–which is hard work–let’s just lie about what the facts are and pretend they are what we want.
This latter, of course, you recognize as Lysenkoism, Creationism, or any total pseudoscience.
Which is a totally different matter from the political choices of science.
Have you read Kropotkin’s biological work?
I ask because I think your characterization of “masculine” science is not particularly fair or accurate.
Indeed, recent emphasis on the power of symbiosis and cooperative evolution have opened new worlds and enhanced our understanding of the ecosphere.
A lot of that work is being done by men educated in the “masculine” Western tradition of scientific exploration…
The reality is that if a person is HONEST to their data, observations, and hypotheses, they will be, eventually FORCED to ask the “unaskable” question.
They will, of course, meet lots of resistance from the entrenched, and perhaps their research will go unnoticed or scoffed at…until it comes to the point where there simply is no other way to go forward.
Wegener, Kropotkin, Lovelock and many others stand as examples of this.
see my comment just below. It’s too bad that they are forced to fight for what will eventually become the conventional wisdom.
It was ever thus, and will continue that way.
Society is gendered and patriarchal and hierarchical…and the funding and treatment of scientists and the behavior of individual scientists will reflect that…
But…still it moves, eh?
The reality is that if a person is HONEST to their data, observations, and hypotheses, they will be, eventually FORCED to ask the “unaskable” question.
Honesty is key, and I agree it can lead to some strange places.
I know that in retrospect choices often seem forced, yet it is hard to be sure. I guess I believe that there is more freedom–or arbitrariness–than we tend to think. Science in practice is not infinite: No one, no group of people, can investigate everything. One is always studying less than one would like to be studying. And thus human choice is built in.
That is in honest science. When we get funding sources who want the results to turn out a certain way, that is corrupt science, and another matter.
I believe that there is choice built into honest science. This does not bother me, but I think if we would recognize it, it would help us think about science more subtly. I don’t think it diminishes science at all.
PS. Apologize to say I am not up to date on Kropotkin. I am glad to hear things might be getting better.
Heh. Out in Kansas, this discussion makes no sense. They are arguing whether proven lies should be taught as truth! 😀
more. And this is where “theory” has a lot to offer to science. Because it is people who do science. It doesn’t just happen in a vacuum.
When I was learning quantum mechanics in the early 70’s it was not considered useful to ask questions about why qm was the way it was. A good friend of mine, a physics postdoc at Berkeley, wanted to ask those questions and managed to do pathbreaking research in spite of the physics establishment (I was going to say seminal but…). He proved experimentally that the entire class of “hidden variables” alternatives to quantum mechanics was wrong – not the answer he wanted but the answer he got.
His reward? He had to leave the field that he had created because he couldn’t get support. Now his original papers are referenced widely and many other experiments followed that sharpened, but did not change, his results. In the mean time qm has undergone a revolution and there is a complete understanding of the weirdnesses like schrodinger’s cat.
This may not seem like a gendered issue but in a way it is. It was felt (I really can’t say thought) that such questions were not useful. Steven Weinberg told me during that period that he just didn’t see any use in such questions (he doesn’t feel that anymore since the new understanding of qm is central to the completely quantum view of the universe that is required by quantum cosmology). The questions seemed to get into the whole matter of consciousness and that was far too squishy for physicists, even too squishy for psychologists who were still in the throes of their attempt to ape physics and treat humans as cause-effect automatons. Psychology has surrendered here too, and you can get a PhD in the subject from name-brand universities.
To make a long story short: yeah, you’re right. When used by people who don’t have an aversion to science, questions about the human process of science are very helpful. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
This is nice 🙂 I finish replying to RedDan and find your post is right there.
Hmm.
When used by people who don’t have an aversion to science, questions about the human process of science are very helpful
This is my chocolate cookie, and cold water in the face, all at once: Do I begin to get it? Because yes, I know a lot of (otherwise) intelligent people who are . . . um . . . adverse to science. A lot of . . . tension . . . becomes possible. Too much discourse gets closed off that needs to be happening . . .
Thank you. Tonight’s conversation has been a delight!
A good friend of mine, a physics postdoc at Berkeley
I kiss your feet!
including how to pick locks and beat the roulette wheel. I saw his name in Newsweek several years ago so I guess he’s finally getting some popular recognition.
So what kind of science do you do?
Fascinating discussion. I have too little knowledge on this topic to fully digest, but I do have a true story to share.
A physicist, 2 electrical engineers and a design engineer leave their office to go to lunch. The car they’re taking won’t start. They collectively decide to:
a) take another car
b) jump start the battery
c) call AAA
d) none of the above
If you chose d), you would be correct. The physicist, 2 electrical engineers and the design engineer decide to push start the car. 15 minutes into their hour lunch, the dirty, sweaty, and exhausted group were on their way. The moral of my story is never underestimate the power of group dynamics. The competition between reason and group think is fierce.
And I’ll bet they got lost on the way because they couldn’t ask directions 🙂
My training was in mathematics. I reached the level where non-technical criteria began to dominate in advancement. And then–as I found out later–the government defunded the entire field: That’s right, zero. So that ended.
Before mathematics, I thought I would do mathematical physics, but soon discovered physics did not suit me at all. I nearly failed special relativity, and was so upset by this that afterward I sat myself down to somehow learn the subject. When I realized that the theory was based on linear transformations between vector spaces–concepts never mentioned in my course–the whole thing popped into focus. I decided I was a genius until I discovered that in 1906, one year after Einstein had published his famous paper, Minkowski had detailed everything I had discovered, and more besides. Well, reproducing Minkowski’s work is not the worst fate that could befall a person. Sometime after that, Taylor and Wheeler published Spacetime Physics elaborating Minkowski’s paper as a textbook. So after 75 years Physics had caught up to him.
But the whole environment of physics drove me nuts, and I could not understand why. I gave it up, while trying to study it peripherally, so to speak. Feynman’s Lecture notes are very good, and his description of Quantum Mechanics was clear enough to me for faking polite discussion.
Just a few years ago, I came across Nick Herbert’s (already old) book Quantum Reality. It is partly a history of the development of Quantum Mechanics, and in it he asserts an interesting thing: That physicists have given up on understanding reality and concern themselves only with describing and modeling phenomena. This was shocking–incredible. It had never occurred to me that physics could not be about reality–and yet I decided he was right: It seemed to explain why physics had been making me crazy.
The bulk of Herbert’s book is about Bell’s Theorem–and whether it is a physical fact, as well as a theoretical one. Could there be a more important question in mid-20th century physics?
Whence my comment about your friend.
These days my activities tend more toward music and astronomy–two long interests of mine. Music maybe I will explain later. In astronomy I have gotten interested in a sort of Theoretical Paleo-Astronomy: What-did-the-ancients-know and what-did-they-need-to-know-it. It is a funny subject, with more speculation than real results, but I can give an example to give the flavor it:
The ancient Mayans of Central America had several calendars that they used simultaneously, and perhaps the most important was the Sacred Year or Tzolkin–a 260-day cycle built out of concurrent cycles of 20 and 13 days. This is common, even popular, knowledge. The tzolkin is still in use to this day, although the Mayans are long gone, which is interesting though irrelevant to my subject. The point is, what was the purpose of the 260-day cycle?
Nowhere in the popular literature have I heard a breath about this, which is now starting to seem odd. (I have seen many obviously bogus explanations of the tzolkin. I mean ones that just don’t work.) Is it a commonplace among professionals and therefore never mentioned? Or of no interest? Because actually, there is an answer.
To come at it obliquely, the first thing to say is that 260 days corresponds to absolutely nothing in the sky. I know that is an absolute statement, but it is the first thing to strike you when you look into the matter. Secondly, and still obliquely, the Plains Indians–there’s an article in Sky and Telescope, but bibliography is just about my worst skill–had a central set of myths connected with the planets Venus and Mars and their relationship in the sky explicitly. (No they are not Mayans, I’m just alluding to the Mars/Venus concept.) And finally, one of my friends, who digs around in mythology of cultures from all over the world, came across a Mayan myth about the Nine Lords of Night and a scholarly explanation that strikes me as unlikely in the extreme but also with a speculation that there was a connection to the calendar.
What pops out? The sidereal period of Mars is 780 days or three tzolkins. This is incredibly precise: The error is just six hundredths of a day, which makes it a very good cycle to use if you wanted to make a calendar. But why use 260 instead of the full 780? Because after nine tzolkins, Mars and Venus complete a harmony, returning to the same positions (relative to the Sun) in the sky. If the Nine Lords of Night are part of the calendar–which I am not sure of yet–they combine with the tzolkin to create, that is, follow, this larger astronomical cycle. When constucting a calendar out of concurrent cycles, as the Mayans did, the cycles have to be relatively prime, or it won’t work. A 780-day cycle running against a 3-day cycle just gives back a cycle of 780 days. So it makes sense to go with 260 days instead, and let the Nine Lords of Night take care of both Mars and the longer harmony with Venus.
I am still waiting for someone to notice the tzolkin is based on Mars.
I hope that gives an idea.
You should know better than to claim that science is correct. Science and scientific theories are not correct – the best they can say is that they do not appear, at the moment, to be incorrect.
Also, the thing to remember is that, just like physics, there’s the “theory set” and then there’s the “metatheory set”. The theory set – or at least, those parts of it that I’ve met – avoid making value judgements like “bad”. When they say that something is “male gendered”, they’re simply making a statement about that thing within the context of their theories. This doesn’t necessarily imply that science is bad, or any other such value judgements. What it does imply that taking alternate gendered approaches within the framework of scientific inquiry may be productive and enlightening. Or may not.
I’m sure you’ve dealt with the physics “metatheory set” before. Well, psychology and philosophy have exactly the same problem. I fully admit that I know next to nothing about these fields, and am a mere student of them. But I do know that they’re amazingly complex… Which seems to make the “metatheory set” both more pervasive (easier to bamboozle people) and more insane.
You should also know better than to say “counterintuitive (i.e. bullshit)”. How many predictions of quantum physics, or even physics in general, are counterintuitive to the layperson? I still run into people who aren’t aware that heavier objects don’t “fall faster” than light ones! Counterintuitive predictions just mean that your intuition is wrong. And your intuition isn’t any more accurate when talking about yourself than it is when discussing the external world – monitoring one’s own thinking/reasoning processes is virtually impossible. (This was a major problem for psychology… Oh, 75-100 years back or so. One of the major techniques that was popular then was having people describe how they were thinking. Didn’t work so hot.)
when you said:
Absolutely! And this is the stance that I advocate. But I do have a few differences.
I agree that science is not “correct” in the metaphysical sense of a complete description of the ultimate essence of reality. However it is correct in the sense of a quantitative and predictive description of reality, at least for the more settled issues. The vast technologies that are the fruits of western reductionist science are clear examples of this.
An example is in order. Do you really believe that DNA is not the repository of genetic information? When the human genome was sequenced everyone was shocked at how few genes were found. This was followed by the discovery of alternate transcriptions – the ability of the genome to transcribe a single gene into different versions. So the gene theory was found to be wanting, but only at the detail level (albeit an absolutely fascinating detail it was). Even before the discovery of alternate transcriptions the theory was still hugely accurate, it just wasn’t perfect. The experimental discovery of the inaccuracy in the prediction of the number of genes in the human genome led rather quickly to the reason why and to a richer, more accurate, theory. This is western reductionist science at its best.
As for counterintuitive notions, I have a lot of background in the more counterintuitive aspects of quantum theory. And, yes, these results can be confusing to the layman. But the reason we believe them is that they have been worked to death over the past 100 years (I believe it was 100 years ago this month that Einstein published his paper in Annalen der Physic on the photoelectric effect – cool!) and have been honed to a fine edge. Indeed the relativistic version of qm, quantum electrodynamics, is freakishly accurate in its quantitative predictions.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and qm has such evidence in abundance. But gender theory, not so much. The problem is that people know how they feel. They can’t describe the neural mechanisms through introspection, of course, since they don’t directly perceive them. But they do directly experience their emotions. The claim that, for example, rape is not about sex but instead about power is counterintuitive becuase it does not match experience or reason. The counterclaim that I make, that rape is about both power and sex (and also about sociopathy), is both more in line with experience and also has support in the world of psychological research. It’s also broader and therefore more difficult to falsify – heh!
Anyway, thanks for your very thoughtful comments. I’m liking it better and better here:-)
Ouch – look, what has my arm ever done to you? 😉
On a side note, mind if I ask what your tastes are on the smörgåsbord of QM interpretations?
As a philosopher type who spend long and hard days in the metaphysics lab, I’m agnostic but lean towards Many Worlds (Everett/Relative State). Once, someone charged that “you can’t talk common sense with someone who believes in parallel universes!” To which I sheepishly replied: “Only some of me do.”
Cheers – and welcome in the Tribe.
I believe that battle is over, at least as far as the copenhagen interpretation and schrodinger’s cat are concerned.
In a nutshell: the world is not classical. It is quantum mechanical all the way down and all the way up. It looks classical (i.e. we do not perceive superpositions) due entirely to decoherence. For details see Understanding Quantum Mechanics by Omnes and Consistent Quantum Theory by Griffiths.
As far as Everett, he got close to this. The “many histories” interpretation of Gell Mann, Omnes, Griffiths, et al is similar to the “many worlds” idea but is not so metaphysically extravagent. While there may indeed be parallel universes, decoherence shows why they do not generally communicate. One would have to find a method of getting around this in order to expand the theory to include parallel universes in a physical, as opposed to metaphysical, sense.
I was going to say that the universes “do not communicate” instead of “do not generally communicate” but I changed that due to an experience I had in the 70’s (no, it wasn’t LSD – that was the in the 60’s). Coleman and Mandula proved a nice theorem that showed that you can’t combine internal and spacetime symmetries into a single group, e.g. you can’t combine the quark-gluon “color SU(3)” symmetry with the spacetime Lorentz (relativistic) symmetry. This was depressing since everything had been heading nicely toward bigger and bigger symmetry groups as a method of unifying the various forces (the Weinberg-Glashow-Salam SU(2)xU(1) unified the weak and electromagnetic forces beautifully and accurately).
But the Coleman-Mandula theorem only considered groups generated by a Lie algebra, i.e. one defined by commutation relations. This is the “ordinary” type of symmetry group and all previous symmetries had been of this type. If you extend the question to groups defined by both commutation and anticommutation relations (the graded Lie algebras) then you find that such a unification is possible after all, and in fact there is actually only one class of such symmetry groups that is consistent with relativistic quantum field theory: the Supersymmetry groups. When you hear about supersymmetry this is what they are talking about.
The moral of the story is that there might be a way of getting around the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of decoherence and actually detecting the parallel universes, or at least showing that they exist in more than a metaphorical or metaphysical sense. But presently I can’t see how we can perceive them directly and I would guess that any experimental evidence would be indirect.
I’ve been researching a book that I (hopefully) will be writing on qm. My working title is Schrodinger’s Cat is Dead.
Thanks for this highly informative treatment. Yes, the Decoherence / Consistent History version of MW is indeed what I lean toward. I haven’t read the popularizations you mention, but did suffer through Gell-Mann’s The Quark and the Jaguar, which explains the ideas in painfully unlovely prose. (About the guy himself I have mixed feelings also – a Reneissance man and multi-genius, but also probably the most arrogant hominid alive with the possible exception of James Watson. I plan to get hold of George Johnson’s biography though. By the way, the latter’s Fire in the Mind is really an awesome piece of popular science writing. Is he still at the NYT? He was one of the few intellectual alibis of that rag. Hell, this must be the most rambling paranthesis in history.)
Schrödinger’s Cat is Dead – LOL. Inherently a great title; but may it not turn off the feline lovers? You might want to run it by Catnip first. 😉
really did suck badly. I read somewhere that publication timing pressure caused Gell-Mann to hurry it up.
I have learned that I have to divorce my feelings about a person’s character from my feelings about that person’s work product. I have had personal interaction with many well-known scientists and there is apparently no correlation between not being an asshole and being a good scientist. Would that there were.
The books I mentioned are technical, by the way. Griffiths’ book is actually a textbook. Omnes’ has lots of math but has whole lots of words so you can skip over the math to a large extent.
If I do write the book I plan to have a disclaimer in it explaining that “no cats (or other living things) have been harmed in the production of this book” 🙂
I think the most accurate statement I could give would be the following.
Yes, I do believe that DNA is the repository of genetic information, and that my belief is correct. However, from a purely scientific standpoint, the most I can say is that there is no evidence I’m aware of that contradicts my belief, and a good deal that supports it. Still, I cannot claim that science has proven it to be correct as science, by its very nature, does not rule out the possibility of some error, missing information, or other new data that would invalidate prior knowledge. The fact that much has been built on that prior knowledge, especially practical applications, makes this somewhat unlikely, but it still cannot be ruled out.
As for counterintuitive notions, gender theory has been developing for (to the best of my knowledge) 50 years or more. Yes, much of the early work on it was of dubious quality – just like much of the early work on quantum mechanics. Einstein’s attempts to disprove QM, for example. (The whole “God does not play dice” thing, and his problems with mysterious action at a distance) The modern work has quite a lot of evidence behind it, as far as I know.
Emotions are also subject to the same things I describe when analysing thoughts. You directly experience them, yes. But you also experience your thoughts. This doesn’t mean you are qualified to or capable of picking them apart and analysing their causes and effects. Why do you fall in love, for example? A hard question to answer! What drives you to make friends with someone, or hate someone who was once your friend? The answer is usually more complicated than you think.
In the case of rape, it may be about sex in the moment. But what lead the individual to make the choice? What was their motivation? Often, when you get down to it, as is the case with most uses of force, it winds up being all about the exercise and demonstration of power.
The reason I used the DNA example is that you can actually see the little buggers with the proper equipment. This goes way beyond the question of “well, it just hasn’t been falsified so it’s probably true to some extent”. The stuff is there and you can see it. You will never in any possible universe be able to unsee it – it is really there and it really does what it does.
There is a concept that is discussed in statiscics that says that if the probability of an event is non-zero but so small that the likelihood of it happening in the lifetime of the universe is even small then it is more useful to speak of the probability as zero, that is that the possibility is only there in a metaphysical sense. For example, statistical mechanics shows that is is possible that heat can flow from a cold ice cube into your (warmer) hand, but that the probability (which is calculable) is so close to zero that it will never happen. This is analogous to the situation in the previous paragraph. The likelihood that DNA really isn’t responsible for genetics, at least according to the general outlines of the model, is so close to zero that it becomes a metaphysical discussion.
Quantum mechanics was entirely experimentally based from the very beginning. Observations had been made that were inexplicable by classical theory and people were forced to look for alternatives. Successive theories were advanced until the synthesis in the middle 20’s by Schrodinger, Heisenberg, et al that are the same theories that you learn in upper-division qm class today. They are not considered settled because people have been thinking about them for so long. The are condsidered settled because they have withstood the tests of massive amounts of detailed quantitative measurements and, in addition, have the predictive power to explain, for example, all of chemistry, solid state physics, and much more. Einstein stood alone in resisting qm, and it’s a damned shame since I believe that he could have advanced physics much further if he had contributed. Sometimes it’s only when the old guys die that advances are fully accepted. Ironically, that’s the way it was with relativity.
In this way the counterintuitive and extraordinary claims of qm are backed up by extraordinary evidence, not simply plausibility arguments. Indeed the damned stuff isn’t plausible at all in the absence of the evidence.
The qualitative theorizing that goes into gender theory results in conceptual frameworks that can be very helpful in dealing with the world, but can’t yet be considered settled in the same way that qm and the molecular basis of genetics are. Hopefully that will someday no longer be the case.
The psychology of things like gender isn’t just theory, though. There have been (to the best of my knowledge) experiments run to attempt to falsify these theories, and they’ve generally stood up. And the standards used for social science experiments these days are quite strict – there’s been a lot of work done in pinning down what makes a good experiment, and what different kinds of experiment tell you, since the bad old days of Freud. The same experimental design methodologies get used in Human/Computer Interaction research, and the results of well-conducted HCI experiments are very useful and informative.
Also, I seem to remember that there are exceptions to the “DNA is responsible for genetics” research. I’m not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do recall reading some fascinating stuff in Nature a while back about genes “skipping” generations – disappearing in one generation, and then mysteriously reappearing in that generation’s children. The conclusion, I believe, was that there was a second mechanism that species was using to correct “damage” to its genome.
And?
The problem is that you are allowing a vocal (in in my suspicious mind, deliberate) minority to get in the way of an important discussion in an important place with important people.
If the only response you can think of is to leave, then who wins?
You? No.
Kos? No.
Wreckers, some of whom may be trolls and operatives deliberately trying to stir up trouble? Hmmmmm…
Think about this little factoid: One of the prime stumbling blocks that destroyed the powerful coalitions built in the late ’50’s that grew even more effective through the 60’s and then self-destructed in the 70’s was this SAME issue, played out in almost exactly the SAME way.
Now, was some of that due to internalized sexism (it happened with race too) on the part of many “progressive” men (or whites) who got really nasty and defensive when approached on the topic? Yes indeed.
However, how many cointel, FBI and other “operatives” were there in those groups? A lot, it turns out. A lot of the paranoiacs of that day were RIGHT, it turns out. One of the things that those “ops” did was suggest radical or violent action. Another was sow strife. And this is one of the ways they did it.
Am I paranoid about this? Yes.
Do I have a good reason to be suspicious? Yes.
I’m curious about this, Dan. Because as you know, I’ve commented on the connections between the new left splitting and the founding of the modern-day women’s movement. Do you think that that strife was stirred up by moles of some kind? I’d be curious to see where I could read up on this.
Wouldn’t surprise me if freepers were fanning the flames. They’ve got a long history of “counterprotest” activities. Things like sneaking agitators into rallies, putting on fake demonstrations, that kind of thing. But I think all the initial diarists were people I recognized, so I’d be inclined to guess that they jumped in on the “Smurfette Side”.
That said, I left because of kos’ reaction. Nothing else. I’m not giving up or surrendering anything, I’m merely not giving him my pageviews anymore.
I thought the ad was in questionable taste — and yes, I did notice it before all of this got ugly — but it was Kos’ reaction for me, too, that sealed it. Even then, if it had been an isolated event, I might have ignored it as the sort of poor judgment that everyone has on a bad day. But it wasn’t an isolated incident. Kos and his close associates have been markedly dismissive of and openly hostile to women, minorities, gays, midwesterners, southerners, environmentalists, pro-choicers, and anyone else they perceive as a liability to their goal of partisan supremacy at any cost. I can understand his point of view there, even though I disagree with it for a variety of reasons, but what I couldn’t accept was the nastiness and hostility and contempt.
I’m not going to throw stones, though. Seeing the dKos orthodoxy treat their friends the same way they treat their enemies has made me wonder about my own approach, which has been pretty harsh and combative at times. I’m beginning to think the intense antipathy I feel towards the political right is more toxic to me than it is to my opponents. James Dobson doesn’t know I exist and doesn’t care. It’s me sitting up late at night because I’m furious at the misdeeds of the neocons and religious nuts and fat cat swindlers. I’m thinking it’s high time I reexamined how I’m approaching the whole struggle, and I suppose I ought to be grateful for the recent nastiness for prompting that introspection.
Funny who our enemies can sometimes teach us more than our friends, unintentionally of course. A friend taught me that if I feel intense hate then something is probably wrong and, also, that my enemy is probably winning.
The object of intense hate is internal, not external. Like homophobia or racism, it’s all fear. Listen to FDR on this one and the next time you’re supremely pissed, ask yourself what it is that you fear and why you fear it.
Wouldn’t surprise me if freepers were fanning the flames. They’ve got a long history of “counterprotest” activities.
Perhaps. I’ve seen more than a few responses which directly echoed Rush Limbaugh. But the folks on the right who are agitating are the anti-feminists, the men’s movement, the defenders of patriarchy. Which is to say that they organize and advocate from a decidedly focused POV.
They’re difficult to work with because, for them, any gains for women politically are always viewed as losses for men. And the other reason they’re difficult to work with is because they’ve not been addressed or identified on DKos and often present themselves as victims.
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm
ICK!
You could have warned me about the photograph, Boo! Now I’m going to have nightmares.
OK, that was really creepy.
Try this
and so on.
There’s a host of material on this topic out there.
I certainly knew some of this, but I guess I hadn’t thought of the women’s movement as having been spurred by this type of thing. I always think of those memoirs I remember reading years ago by women who talked about the men getting to make revolution while the women made coffee and made themselves available for sex.
But given what I do know about the tricks in the African-American movements, this is not all that surprising.
Thanks for the stuff.
The women’s movement was not spurred by the instigators, but the natural and logical tensions within the New Left, the most obvious of which were the race and gender driven discussions and arguments, were exploited by COINTELPRO to sow division.
I remember laughing about the FBI’s delemma re infiltrating the women’s movement. They didn’t really want to recruit women, but they had to; they hired the best and brightest, the agents joined consciousness raising groups, the <click>s came fast and furious, and they ended up with radicalized employees who started asking some very embarassing questions.
In my Yippie/Zippie days, we knew who “our” undercovers were, and decided to keep them around.
My pal Mike Roselle (later to cofound Earth First!) elaborates on this theme in this fragment of a column from the generally excellent http://Lowbagger.org.
(He says the marshmallow quote’s from me, I can’t remember.)
More reasons to keep them around:
You could use them to feed obfuscation back to headquarters.
With skill, by watching how they played in our interactions with other organizations, you could spot the agents in the other group.
A few did eventually defect to us.
if you could, you wouldn’t have been there (in the 60’s, that is)!
1972. I’ve actually got a lot of clear memories from that Summer. Abbie later claimed he couldn’t remeber anything from that year. He blamed Quaaludes.
I was an undergrad there 72-74. This boy from Orange County was sure disillusioned during a demonstration by conversation I had while occupying Wheeler. Seems he thought that the issues were unimportant, just the struggle was. Also that what Vietnam really needed was “good communist government”. Welcome to the big show, I guess.
No. Grew up in NJ, then kicked out of U of Wisconsin end of freshman year. Headed to Miami for that summer, The parent story’s from the leadin to the Republican National Convention. Only one to make the Nixon Enemies List before turning 18.
Did you know John Kniffin?
I once interviewed one of his co-defendants, Scot Camil. Long ago.
See below, “I didn’t know him well” comment.
Actually, the first COINTELPRO-type operation by the FBI was, ironically, carried out against the KKK. The tactics, which were originally used by the Bureau’s counter-intelligence division, were put to use against the Klan, and then later turned on the black nationalist movement. I’m not sure if the KKK operations were actually under COINTELPRO, or if it was a fore-runner to that program, but the tactics were identical, and for all intents and purposes, it was the beginning of COINTELPRO era.
…I’ve chosen to leave DKos and it wasn’t because of any agent provocateurs, it was because I objected to the attitude of Kos and Armando towards people who had a legitimate grievance. Kos treated people like shit and encouraged others to do the same–why would I want to hang about a place like that?
I’m far to the left of Kos’ politics–he’s made it quite plain that his is NOT a “progressive politics” website but rather a pro-Democratic Party website.
I think you give DailyKos far too much importance when you think it is worthy of a concerted effort to “splinter”. I’ve been an active ACLU member for years, although of course since I decamped to Europe I don’t participate as much as I once did (it’s just letters and financial contributions now)–and nobody’s trying to tear the ACLU apart through “counterprotest” or any other “mole” activities. I find my participation in, and financial support of, the ACLU to be far more meaningful than my participation in any website. It’s interesting to have political discussions and share ideas, and SusanHu in particular is good at creating diaries that ask people to take political action, rather than just discussing politics, but at the end of the day it is organisations which are geared towards positive action that matter the most.
I’m seeing a lot of paranoia on DKos right now–Armando has posted a diary in which he’s declared “war” (his word) on the “anti-DailyKossians” (again, his term). This is Armando’s declaration of war:
I am declaring war.
The views expressed in the quoted text are of someone declaring war on dailykos and markos.
I shoot back.
Civility has nothing to do with this diary.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/8/112713/0280
The person whose post has drawn Armando’s wrath, and led him to theorise (without much evidence, I’d say) a grander conspiracy to destroy DKos from within, is NYCO–who is one of the primary contributors to Liberal Street Fighter and is NOT a right-wing troll. NYCO is a “lefty liberal” type.
Now, think about that–Armando’s arch-enemy is NOT a right-wing neocon, nor a Freeper, but rather a primary contributor of a blog with politics to the left of DKos.
And I, for one, didn’t need anybody to make up my mind to leave DKos and I am NOT a right-wing troll; I resent the merest fact that I have to write words disavowing association with Freepers, etc, and I think it’s poor form indeed to accuse anyone who criticises Kos of having bad motives. On the contrary, I saw many people (I was not one of them) who were distressed that their “community” seemed to be giving them a great big middle finger and saw it as a flaw in the web community that they wanted fixed. Their motives were and are good, not bad. I, on the other hand, have no emotional attachment to DKos but rather see it as a place merely to discuss politics–it’s not a “community” for me, although I understand that others see it that way.
That was not my point.
My point was, as should be clear from what I wrote, that there are legitimate grievances that should be the basis for serious and long-reaching discussion.
Further, the response to those grievances from some folks has been poor, at best.
Finally, my point was that those legitimate grievances and the resultant disunity can be stirred up and taken advantage of.
Oh, and shadow…
I just read the post you linked, and I tend to agree with Armando on that one.
NYCO was way, way out of line, and was so in a pretty blatantly, self-serving, driving traffic his own way sort of manner.
Like I said before, have your differences with Kos? Fine. Think he’s a sexist? Fine (I tend to agree in part)…
But don’t get used.
Now it’s more than just a “bit” insulted–I feel greatly insulted.
I’m not a stupid person by any means; I’m not some unwitting pawn of someone else’s game. You seem to think I am.
Of course I’m aware that some people wanted to direct traffic to their blogs; but the great majority of people I saw were genuinely distressed over the way Kos was treating them and their views. There are always a few bad apples; and the issue is NOT Nyco. But I do find it most interesting that Armando has directed his wrath, once again, not at external opponents but at internal dissidents.
I’ve chosen where to go and where to write my opinions. It’s not on DKos; I’m not providing free content for someone else’s website when the proprietor insults people in the way Kos has (and does). And I long ago stopped posting on any diary originated by Armando, because he seems unable to comport himself with civility for any length of time.
Some on DKos are accusing Booman Tribuners (if that’s what folk here are indeed called) of directing disgruntled people HERE–and calling this site “Boo Hoo Man Tribune”. The charge is absurd, false, hysterical, and more than a bit self-important and paranoid. I didn’t see anyone representing this site attempting to direct disgruntled DKos folk here; but when some realised that DKos was not for them, they began looking at other places to post their ideas.
I actually looked at half a dozen other sites and settled on this one because SusanHu is an important influence here, and I admire her writing from her DKos diaries.
Did you read what NYCO wrote?
Do you agree with it?
I found what NYCO wrote to be patently ridiculous, offensive, and paranoid in the extreme.
I think that there are some here, some on Kos, and some in other new and old sites that are, indeed taking advantage of very real and very important arguments to push their own agenda.
I completely respect your decision to come and go, write and contribute, participate where you please for whatever reason.
I am not calling you stupid.
I am asking you to pay attention to some things that are happening that are not happening on the level.
I think that NYCO’s attack is a perfect example of that.
Did you read what NYCO wrote?
Do you agree with it?
Two days ago Armando, and now you, are coming here interrogating people on their positions vis-a-vis what someone wrote somewhere else on another planet.
WTF? Why should people here be held accountable for what most obviously hadn’t the faintest idea about before you came here throwing it in their faces?
I found what NYCO wrote to be patently ridiculous, offensive, and paranoid in the extreme.
Good. Go tell NYCO. After all, it’s his writing isn’t it?
I think that there are some here, some on Kos, and some in other new and old sites that are, indeed taking advantage of very real and very important arguments to push their own agenda.
And why should people here have to answer to you for that? Again, Armando and you are the ones who brought the issue here.
I completely respect your decision to come and go, write and contribute, participate where you please for whatever reason.
Yet you’re following people around?
I am not calling you stupid.
Sigh.
I am asking you to pay attention to some things that are happening that are not happening on the level.
You could be more non-confrontational about it.
I think that NYCO’s attack is a perfect example of that.
You seem to think people who left did so because they read NYCO and kneejerkedly abandoned Kos because of it?
Give us a little more credit than that.
That’s not what I meant to imply, and I am not following people around “interrogating them.”
This kind of split has been endemic to the “left” for many decades.
I am a committed progressive, and I want our cause to WIN for once…because if we don’t get our shit together, things are going to get worse.
To that end, I am trying to figure out the many variables, drivers, and motivations that are interacting.
If that comes off as “interrogatory” then I apologize and will try to figure out how to make it not so…
Again, Armando and you are the ones who brought the issue here.
That is not true. The number of folks talking about “over there” and “migrants” and so on was, and remains, very large.
It’s important to figure this shit out, and I think that being direct is the best way.
was you asking people here on the issue if we agreed with what someone else wrote somewhere else. Armando’s diary (now pulled) doing the same in a taunting tone riled me up and I guess it’s not out of my system yet.
The greater issue – about how to acommodate a friendly and respectful environment – is a matter of great importance and is rightfully discussed here and – I hope – “over there”.
In my defense, and by way of trying to let you know why I was doing so, let it be noted that the title of this diary is one that invites such discussion…
and let it be noted that the comment and discussion to which I was referring we linked to by another commenter as a part of the larger discussion.
So, can you start to see why I would be asking such questions?
I tend to be an introvert, which is another way of saying that I tend to sit back and watch the commentary, and then after thinking about it give my take sometimes.
The first couple of days of the ‘exodus’ involved alot of raw emotion on all sides. Many of these people felt more comfortable venting here without the snarky comments that were permeating at DailyKos. I’ve read alot of the need for respect and civility. I don’t think that involves “having an agenda”. I am not comfortable with the DKos vs. BooMan mentality and I suspect I am not alone.
I don’t think it’s helpful to discuss the comments of someone who isn’t here to defend themselves. Period.
I agree with you that there could be some that have an agenda; but that is not the point of these gender-related diaries from many new members. I feel like these are constructive discussions about the state of our country and world that need to be happening not just within the Left Blogosphere, but also between the various political ideologies.
Finally, because it is way past my bedtime. I’ll take you at your word that you are not calling people names. You will get the benefit of the doubt on that one. Have a good night and I’ll see you all tomorrow.
I think approximately ONE person — that I’ve seen anyway — called this “Boo Hoo Man Tribune,” and I chastised him. Sorry to jump into your discussion, but I think it’s important to note that “Daily Kos culture” or “orthodoxy” isn’t fixed, nor some abstract notion. It’s made up by the people that post there and that are loud…
And one notable feature of DKos I’ve not seen anywhere else in the Blog Universe is the seemingly perpetual vigilance of people who police diaries…even wandering over to non-DKos sites to make sure that all thoughts are orthodox and double-plus-good.
Know what I mean?
with a gilas girl over at dkos. The one thing i must say and I questioned it in my dialogue with her was people are forgetting that kos did chose her as a Front pager..knowing that he is not as qualified as she in certain issues…he kind of passed the baton to her and that was a bit of a risk for him (not to mention the risk factor in Armando)…she is out spoken and very opinionated (for the good) and for whatever reason it didn’t work out..she didn’t take advantage of Front page status and run with it (i think she said something about not liking being called names and being confronted..(my words, not hers..it’s an interesting dialogue..go check it out)..I think she’s awesome and the front page desperately needs her voice). At one point I even thought she stepped down, and I thought that was why another female was promoted to Front page statue. Anyway..I do think Kos was well aware that his limited views/experience with women’s views could have been helped with a gilas girls voice…he made a good call…it just didn’t work out for the best. Some time it is best to defer to people that know more about certain issues than you..Now that is leadership.
“…why another female was promoted to Front page statue.”
did I write Statue….my..my…ok…I meant demigod.
A statue will stay on a pedestal. Demigodesses like to levitate.
slip…you caught me…i like statue.
As NYCO was wrong in assigning kos motivation, you are wrong assigning her motivation.
Remember too much metal makes you stick to magnets.
Of course he’s just a hot-blooded latin and can’t help himself 🙂
I think one of the things that soured me on dKos was a comment I made on Kos’ post on the pie thing. People were wondering how Kos could be so insensitive and I opined: “Dude, Kos is hispanic. And we know how hispanics treat their women”. Wow did I get flamed.
It was intentionally snarky, serious, and intended to cause people to think about stereotypes. The serious part was that yes, on average hispanic societies tend to be rather sexist. I got more zeros than I had ever gotten before (and 4’s and 1’s and 2’s, the standard deviation of the ratings on that comment may have set a dKos record).
Actually, I took Armando’s comments to mean he thought the threat is coming from the left, so I’m not sure how relevent the fact person X is a “lefty liberal” type really is.
Uh…
…This site is not affiliated with the Democratic Party. However, the Democratic Party is the only institution in this country that is capable of combatting the Bush administration’s agenda, or of offering a realistic alternative to the GOP’s control of both houses of Congress.
Therefore, this site is committed to building the Democratic Party, raising money for the Democratic Party and its candidates, finding and promoting promising candidates for state and local offices, helping to shape the Democratic Party’s agenda, and holding Democratic office holders to account for their votes and their ethics.
The site is also committed to doing some of the investigative work that is so desperately needed with the GOP in control of the oversight committees….
that you think that Boomantribune is a counterproductive splinter group.
I have a selfish reason for migrating here “for a while”. There’s less to read here and I have to work on occasion to pay the bills! Also I hope the signal/noise ratio will be higher here.
Besides I won’t have to read Plutonium Page talking about science when she’s just a girl 🙂
I think that BooTrib COULD BE such, but I do not think it will be.
Especially if we take care to make sure it is not.
I will be active in both places…that’s a good thing anyway, to spread the virus wider and wider..as it were.
We’re all little vectors now! But the tone at dKos was making me feel more like a tensor </math joke>.
As long as we can all agree that we need to remove the scalars from our eyes…
Uh, person!
A derivative statement, Mark, but integral to the conversation! 😉
RedDan, hope you aren’t saying that the FBI is behind the pie ad! 😀
Actually, if I were an enterprising and nasty media consultant trying to figure out a way to poison a community and advertise at the same time…why not design an ad and market it exactly for that purpose.
The coporate media hates the blogs and wants the viewership but not the competition and criticism…why not plant a poison pill?
they use this division against us, because it’s a real problem we have.
Solve the problem, they can’t us it.
So while it may be wise to be paranoid, the first order of the decade is to heal this problem.
Yes.
Yes.
A thousand times YES!
we want to figure out what is best for all, and they just want to get more money and power. Their problem is simpler.
they use this division against us, because it’s a real problem we have.
Thank you. I love it when someone distills central truths.
doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
Now–how about being a bit more explicit about what’s bugging you.
“She who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.”
Before I decide to move all of my activities back into the meat-grinder, I want to know just why I should set myself up as a target.
In the end, I may willingly do this–but I really need to know why it matters–and why my being a target is necessary to solving the problem–first.
…in terms of the credibility of the notion of sexual harrassment, but yes, it’s pretty obvious from this side of the Y chromosome that it is about sex and power. It’s also about anger and insecurity.
Sex and power aren’t by any means exclusive. Take the best-case scenario: consensual bondage. Some folks get off on domination, and some get off on being dominated, and some get off on both. In the worst case scenario — rape — there are some rapists who can’t maintain an erection, but there are also plenty who can and do. Sexual arousal can be triggered by pretty much anything, but most especially past sexual experiences, which is part of the reason so many sexual predators started as victims of abuse themselves.
It’s not about sex only in the sense that sex is often not the primary motivation for harrassment or worse. Men who feel slighted or rejected or misused by a woman or several women will often project the resulting anger and resentment on all women. You can often see this in the over-the-top excoriation that some men dish out on women they perceive as promiscuous, even (and sometimes especially) ones who are promiscuous with them. In the extreme case, you can see it in serial killer-rapists who often had dysfunctional relationships with a female relative.
I would like to point out that this is not an inborn failing of men, but rather a byproduct of the society in which we live. Part of that is the public objectification and vilification of women that is the legitimate target of so much feminist rhetoric. But an even bigger part of it is the dysfunctional traditional family, with the dominant and unemotional father, the submissive emotional mother, and children who never quite mature emotionally as adults because they never had anyone model emotional health for them.
And that, really, is why men should care about the mistreatment of women. It’s also why whites should care about racial minorities. We’re all damaged, individually and collectively, by the hatred and fear and distrust that the status quo creates.
but I think that we should not err in the direction of “everything is socially constructed”, although your point about the traditional family is very powerful.
Men and women do appear to have differences that are biological in origin and that affect behavior. I believe it is safe to say that, on average, men are more agressive than women and are more sexually driven than women (“testosterone poisoning”). This has caused societal forms to emerge that, in turn, perpetuate and strengthen gender role differences.
The soviets failed to create “socialist man”, mostly due to innate human drives (OTOH they may have had more luck trying it on women). In order to create “feminist man” we should not ignore biological realities or we also shall fail.
Point taken. Especially the part about the feedback loop between innate tendencies and socialization.
I’m not sure the failure of the Soviet Union is as simple an example as that, though. The Bolshevik leadership was corrupt and bloody-minded from the outset. Things might have turned out quite differently if the Mensheviks had been able to consolidate their position. Some communist states were better than others, Czechoslovakia being a good example. But like in Czechoslovakia, all efforts at a more humane and democratic version of communism were ruthlessly crushed by the Soviets.
The aggressiveness and competitiveness in our society — in which men traditionally take a leading role — stems from or is at least reinforced by 19th century notions of social Darwinism. A more modern understanding of evolution paints a picture of ecosystems in which cooperation and interdependence are the norm, and competition, while quite real and important, is a secondary force. I have to wonder how much of the cutthroat competition in our society is actively fostered by the misguided notion that it is natural, healthy, and necessary. Our societal notions of how men and women should relate may likewise swamp the much weaker effects of our innate biological differences.
The question is an open one in large part because historical examples of gender equity are slim to nonexistent. We don’t really know how it would work because, until very recently, it had never been tried.
The Bolshevik leaders were bloody minded…yes.
But I would argue that the revolution would not have succeeded without that.
The Mensheviks had a better grasp of what should happen AFTER the Revolution…while the Bolsheviks had a better grasp of what would be required to WIN the revolution…If only they could have put their egos and petty bullshit aside and shared the burdens appropriately!
we should not ignore biological realities or we also shall fail
True. But what are those realities? It is very difficult to tease them out. When it comes to gender studies, biologists have become so sloppy that I have to say they are corrupt. I won’t say they are as bad as Lysenko–in his opposite way–but they are getting there. The few studies that don’t look totally cooked seem to show that gender differences arise out of interactions of biological, social and environmental factors so complex as to seem almost arbitrary.
If in the mean time, we could quit making stereotypical presumptions, that would be nice.
I’m a big fan of Steven Pinker, although he goes overboard in the advocacy of nature over nurture. He does this since he is bucking the tide, I believe. But he does report interesting results regarding identical twins reared apart compared to those reared together that are very revealing.
We shouldn’t take the stance that these problems can’t be understood simply because there are some bad scientists out there. It will get sorted out, although in the mean time we will have to contend with the Lawrence Summers type of crap. But hey, he’s Jewish and we all know how they treat their women, don’t we 🙂
wow. I just came from reading that same diary and with the same thought.
If I have to hear about how I would be horrified by nude ballet one more time I’m was going to let loose.
That dairy was actually painful for me to read because it was just so abusive and grotesque. Those folks are completely out of control, the place has jumped the shark.
And you’re right about power and wrong about us not understanding that aspect.. some of us understand quite well.
And I thought everyone here would agree with me. Off I go to even greener blog pastures!
Seriously, I certainly don’t think that everyone misunderstands the issue. But I’ve seen the point bandied about and many seem to.
And who’s this “us”, white man (uh, woman)?
Seriously, I certainly don’t think that everyone misunderstands the issue. But I’ve seen the point bandied about and many seem to.
I quite agree that many people don’t understand or examine the power dynamic and thought yours a worthwhile and important observation.
And who’s this “us”, white man (uh, woman)?
You said that ‘women’ don’t understand it, I think many don’t some do. That’s all I was trying to convey.
I was one of the first female car salesPerson in the Va. Beach area years ago- me with 35 other men- I was cornered, grabbed, threatened etc., at every turn. I lasted about 4 months and that was before ‘sexual harrasment’ was termed in the workplace- early 70s.
That’s just one of a dozen workplace examples I could give.
Looking back it was more a form of bullying- after all I had entered a once sacred man’s territory.
You know, I think you may have just stumbled on to a language thing.
The whole “it’s not about sex, it’s about violence” bit must have originated from one woman to another.
There’s this huge big issue for people who have been sexually abused (or religiously abused, for that matter)–they can’t separate the sex (or religion) from the abuse. So someone comes up with a sentence like the above the help the stuck person find a difference.
For a woman to feel positively about sex (in any case I know of), sex MUST be defined thusly:
Sex
+many things
-coercion
-violence
-power
+voluntary
A lot of men insist that women have to be wrong. And that is a loss for all of us.
Don’t get me wrong–I suspect there’s a strong biological component for the differential definitions.
(And if you hadn’t used the money analogy, I wouldn’t have figured it out, either!)
CategoryGenderSpeak is for threads about Verbal Gaps and Verbal Bridges between men and women.
I must say I’m dismayed to learn that you’ll be hanging out around here. It will do nothing for my onsetting Carpal Tunnel Syndrome when I have to dish out 4’s to most of your comments.
My poor arm is hurting already. You uncaring scientist, you!
Seriously, the issue you raise is becoming a pet peeve to me too, simply owing to the reaction it typically draws to question whether sexual aggression is in fact motivated purely by lust for power. Though I have no professional credentials here, my impression is that the emotional investment in this idea far exceeds the evidence in its favor. Instead it has become an article of faith for many folks, who lash out at any attempt to challenge it. Which raises a red flag in my mind, because this is a characteristic of myths. (Not to say it necessarily is such. I just don’t know; but that is my point.)
I made my case in this recent brief exchange on dKos. Maybe I tackled my interlocutor a little harder than necessary, but I do think my points were sound.
– the notion that it is lust for power that drives ‘the rapist’ (!) has become a kind of feminist dogma. Raising objections or requesting evidence will win you no friends. I have no idea why.
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by Sirocco on Wed Jun 1st, 2005 at 22:06:05 PST
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stunned (none / 1)
I’m stunned to read this.
As far as I know, the idea that rape is a crime of power is no more a tenet of “feminist dogma” than global warming is a belief held only by members of Earth First!. Global warming is accepted by general scientific consensus.
So too, there is a general consensus, relatively independent of gender politics, that the common central impulse in acts of sexual aggression is a desire for power. Sex is the means, not the end. Of course, power-lust and sex-lust are pretty difficult to separate, so some confusion on this point is understandable. But someone who sexually assaults a two-year old is, safe to say, doing so less out of a desire to fuck than out of a desire to hurt something, anything.
Does that help clarify the issue?
Some sexual aggressors (a term which I prefer to rapist) select their victims with an eye to convenience only; others may have more particular tastes, motivated by God only knows what. But I know of a man who, whenever he and his wife fought, would go out–maybe not that night, but soon after–and wait for someone vulnerable to come along. Terrorizing, beating, and forcing his victims to have sex with him had very little to do with lust.
The woman who molests a child, the prison guard who sexually assaults a prisoner, the priest who manipulates a boy into fellating him by playing on his fears and insecurities and desire for love… Soldiers who use rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing… lust is purely incidental to these acts. I would hope so, anyway.
I like to think of sexual desire as a life-giving (certainly life-engendering) force. Blaming lust for all acts of sexual aggression does it a disservice and may say more about the person doing the blaming than anything else.
by Isabella702 on Thu Jun 2nd, 2005 at 01:53:35 PST
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Just what I’m talking about. (none / 0)
A declaration of disbelief (“Stunned, stunned”) followed by an exercise in self-righteousness, as if skepticism about one particular theory about the motivation of rapists (or ‘sexual aggressors’) is a moral flaw. Thanks for bearing out my point.
First of all, since global warming is a measurable fact disputed by virtually noone, I guess man-made global warming is what you have in mind. While the models underpinning the climatological consensus that global warming is at least partly man-made are based upon a lot of assumptions, these are at least quantifiable and empirically informed. I’d be pleasantly surprised if the ‘lust for power’ theory of sexual aggression is that well-founded. If so, why the endless theoretical disputes, not to mention the constant invitations on guilt trips for anyone who questions the evidentiary basis?
‘General consensus’ among whom? Psychiatrists? Criminologists? I assume this consensus is based upon a wealth of empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals – perhaps you could supply some references to this massive body of research?
At least we agree on that then.
Since when are two-year olds typical rape victims? And even if they were, how could you rule out a pedophilic disposition as the dominating factor? So no, that doesn’t especially clarify the issue.
Indeed; that is my point.
Anecdotal evidence doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid.
Who doesn’t – and so what, exactly?
Personal attacks like this may say more about the person doing the attacking than anything else.
But for the record, I am hardly ‘blaming lust for all acts of sexual aggression.’ On the contrary, I doubt, until proven otherwise, that there is any mono-causality involved. After all, there is apparently no single factor behind other kinds of deviant violent behavior. Homicide, for instance, is caused by a wide range of background- and triggering factors including psychological trauma, psychosis, various personality disorders, substance abuse, dysfunctional relationships, and preceding anti-social acts. In the case of rape I’d expect, until proven otherwise, that a similar spectrum of interacting factors is at work. And I would expect sexual desire and lust for dominance both to be among these; to differing degrees in specific instances; perhaps together with other factors; and probably interacting in ways that may even have a cross-culturally variant dimension. (Incidentally, since you brought that up, recent simulations by a group of climatologists in Bonn indicate that there is no single cause of global warming either.) But in the absence of empirical research, even these are at best hypotheses and nothing more.
Look, for all I know, there could be a near-universal psychological mechanism involved. I would just like to see the hard evidence if I’m expected to believe this, as I evidently am.
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by Sirocco on Thu Jun 2nd, 2005 at 03:58:16 PST
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Comments welcome.
By the way, here is the link. And here’s the parent post of my first remark:
And thanks for making my point so well. I have realized that the argument I raised in the diary is really better applied to rape as opposed to sexual harassment. My intention was that the term “harassment” would include both, but that wasn’t very clear.
You might check out the comment just above yours (by chriscol). His (or her, I’m new here) realization the the “not about sex” belief might be emotionally necessary to women who have been victims of abuse hit me like a ton of bricks! Here we are arguing the fine points of gender theory and not thinking about people who have been hurt and desperately need to find a way to heal. I seriously need to take some time to come to terms with this.
Wow, never thought of that either… That’s a brilliant suggestion.
And it’s perfectly compatible with what I said below: That objectively speaking, the ‘lust for power’ angle is more pessimistic than ‘lust for sex.’ It just mightn’t seem so from the viewpoint of victims of sexual abuse.
From The Nation
Holy cow.
No, I don’t know how it fits into the picture. But I do know this: The purity of this man’s evil is almost beautiful. It is true perfection.
That David Hager of all people was the Bush admin’s pick for national advisor on women’s health is just perfect also. It makes the head swim and is the kind of thing you just can’t make up.
Holy cow.
Sirocco says there is a question as to:
“whether sexual aggression is in fact motivated purely by lust for power”
There are very few things that are “pure” in any area of life. I don’t think you can cast every single rape as a desire for power, but certainly a significant amount of rape is committed in the name of power. Rape is used as a weapon in war (see Darfur). Women are often raped by their husbands and boyfriends as a way of “putting them in their places.” Most rape in the US is done by acquaintances. She says no; he says yes and then proceeds to impose his will–how is that NOT about power?
My question is, if it’s not about power, are men so subject to lustful desires that they cannot control them and therefore must rape someone? I prefer to think that men are better than that.
Absolutely. However, (i) this is not necessarily, indeed almost surely not, the most widespread form of rape; (ii) even when systematic rape is used as a terror strategy by some government or warring faction, the individual rapist may still be motivated by other desires than the will to dominate women, though this presumably plays a part. In principle it could be that, in order to demoralize the ‘enemy population,’ warlords invite their brutal, war-hardened fighters to indulge their sex drives by raping civilians. The leaders’ motive (ultimate cause) need not be the same as the rapists’ (proximate cause).
Well, maybe. But how often? Do you have any statistics, and if so, on what kind of methodology are they based?
Undeniably the interaction involves a power asymmetry, but doesn’t imply that the exercise of power is an end in itself for the rapist. It might as well be a means to sexual gratification.
Consider this trade-off scale:
|———————————————————————–|
<-End: Sex; Means: Power End: Power; Means: Sex->
At one end of the spectrum, the sole purpose of rape is sexual gratification and the abuse of physical power is purely instrumental. At the other extremity these roles are reversed. It is plausible to me that most instances of rape fall somewhere between the two poles and furthermore, that the exact position will vary greatly depending on the psychological, social, and cultural specifics of each case. I also suspect that even this is simplistic as sex and domination may be inextricably intertwined for some abusers. In any case, it is hard to establish their motives without interviewing them, which is by no means guaranteed to bring enlightenment, since they may either lie or deceive themselves or any blend thereof. It’s no accident that human motivations are among the hardest things to figure out in the universe. Quantum Mechanics is comparatively easy.
Sorry, but that makes no sense to me at all. First, it is only a small minority of men that rape, so we are not talking about men in general. Second, I absolutely fail to see how raping out of ‘lust for power’ – a desire to tortuously subjugate for its own sake – is ‘better’ than doing so for sexual gratification. The former latter is merely callous; the former outright sadistic. If you want to think well of men, you ought to go with the latter.
But then, of course, this whole consideration takes the form ‘X would be preferable, hence X’ – which is known as wishful thinking. What you ‘prefer to think’ should play no role in forming your beliefs if truth, as opposed to comfort, is what you are after. Note that the dKos poster I argued with made a similar reference to what she ‘liked’ to think. Two instances may not be a representative sample, but I have seen this argument before in this kind of debate, and it gives me pause.
Thanks for your reply.
I also suspect that even this is simplistic as sex and domination may be inextricably intertwined for some abusers.
Yes. Exactly. It’s as if sex is neutral and becomes hardwired to some strange things. Thus pedophilia, rape (and gang rape which is, I think, slightly different and a sort of bonding, self affirming ritual)
Domination=masculinity fellows are impossible to reason with (for me anyway) because in order to have a dialogue one must cease seeking domination.
Women trying to change things either personally or politically are often reduced to looking for the occasional opening and the more threatened and insecure about their masculinity men are the fewer openings are provided. And let me tell you, DKos as been a difficult arena. Which is hard because we’re trying to discuss grassroots politics.
expecially child sexual abuse, can be responsible for these “hard-wirings”.
This can be true for the victim as well. People seek out mates whom they feel comfortable with, and comfort comes from familiarity. Problem is, to the victim of child abuse familiarity is the last thing they need.
Then there is the sex act itself, where the rewiring can express itself as a need for pain, restraint, or humiliation. Many times such people find dominant partners who respect their boundaries, but many times not.
I used to think of these things as hard wired but have come to the conclusion that most are the programming of emotional response that comes from child abuse.
That some men are driven by a combination of motivations, including sexual desire, to commit rape is surely something that many women would rather not believe. Hell, I would rather not believe it and I am a man (thought I would clarify that since I met a woman last year named Mark).
But some men are also driven by a combination of motives to commit robbery. I’m sure there is a power motive somewhere in there but I just don’t think it is primary, and it certainly is not to the exclusion of monetary desire.
Yeah, well, as I said above I consider the gratification hypothesis to be the best-case scenario: Ugly though it is, the sheer desire to oppress, humiliate etc. is even worse. But that isn’t why I am skeptical of the latter.
For my money, the only good prima facie argument against sex drive as a primary motive is that rape would seem to be physically unpleasant even for the rapist. But perhaps they tend to learn this the hard way, in which case it only applies to serial offenders.
This stuff beats me. Introspection sheds zero light on the matter, as I honestly lack the slightest inclination to such behavior. Which I contend is the case with most men.
May I interject ?
I have always viewed rape as a crime of power, not sex.
My perspective is that of the rapee, not the rapist.
I’m relating to how it feels on the receiving end.
I’ve read your comments with great interest.
Perhaps gendered understanding of “sex” is the root of the problem. From my point of view, men conflate power with sex in a way that makes it unrecognisable to women AS sex.
In listening to men speak, I hear sex regarded as something men get from women or do to women. Language is larded with this view: consider: “consent”
This is VERY different from women’s view of positive sex: we feel good sex like a duet sung by two people, or a dance with a simpatico partner. It is not surprising that negative sex, that is sex without mutuality, will appear to women as an exercise in pure power.
Without the mutuality of the dance, we will not recognise what you’re doing as sex.
and thanks for your enlightening comment. As you can see in this comment upthread, chriscol has also helped my understanding of the woman’s perspective. But you have expanded that understanding greatly.
I guess my problem has been that I view “truth claims” such as we have been discussing from the perspective of wanting to fix the problem, and therefore an understanding of male motivation was what I believed to be important. Of course it didn’t hurt that I am male and would naturally gravitate to that perspective anyway.
While I still think it is important to understand the motivation of the criminal I can now better understand the other side of the coin. I was made speechless when I read chriscol’s comment and I just had to sit quietly for a few minutes and try to deal with the sadness that I felt. No, it isn’t sex to the victim and furthermore it isn’t sex to a large majority of men.
Thanks again.
You’re welcome.
I appreciate your desire to tackle the problem.
It is a HUGE one. Sex is so fraught with power issues and semantic differences that when men and women discuss it we might as well be speaking different languages.
I don’t know, for instance, if men often worry about being physically hurt during sex. Is that fear lurking in the back of your minds ? It is in ours, because sex can hurt, has hurt before, and can hurt again at any moment.
It’s also linked to the great difference between putting part of yourself into someone else and having something put inside you. I have no way of understanding how that feels psychologically to men. For women, safety and trust are significant factors in being comfortable, let alone enthusiastic about having somebody inside us.
We could discuss this for years, markinsanfran, and if enough of us did it, and told the truth, we could love each other better.
discussing, that is 🙂
In answer to your question, I have never had any fear of being physically hurt during sex but I can see how that could be a big distraction, to put it mildly.
Except for that woman with the whip, of course. Now there’s a power and trust issue 🙂
but he and several of the Gainesville 8 defendants used to hang around the house I was living in before the trial. (A roommate was active in VVAW.)
That’s the reason why I had the experience of finding FBI agents on my front porch (and immediately thereafter, in my house) several times. A formative experience, as they say.
John is the one I remember best – I really liked him. He seemed quiet and truly kind.
This was supposed to be a reply to Ben upthread.