it is actually only partly because of our culture. genetics found out many years ago that male and female brains are sort of preprogrammed trough evolution. man are stronger therefore they were more likely to survive risky endevors like hunting and in general experimenting. females in return had to cover the more manual, monotone and mostly repeating tasks without taking risks (collecting berries).
through this evolutional behavior men just have no fear “breaking” things and women are rather scared of breaking things and try to handle situations on the emotional level instead of putting in risk. a good example is that women are prefered in factories doind repeating work. our brains are just wired like that.

Just as inevitably, someone will reply to that guy like so:

Wow. And the fact that this sort of gender-essentialist, ev-psych nonsense is the VERY FIRST RESPONSE to an extremely thoughtful post? Oh, yeah, the constant messages that women should go back to their “natural” work (read: taking care of men and children) definitely have nothing to do with women’s challenges in technology. Nuh-uh, it’s all about our genetic adaptations to pick up berries. Go check the research, because you’re quoting a bunch of debunked bullshit.

This fight just won’t go away, and the reason it persistently avoids resolution is because the two sides of the argument represented above — I couldn’t have found a better archetype of it if I’d made it from whole cloth — are just talking past each other. Or maybe, to the members of their respective choirs. I’ll paraphrase these two sides, reducing them to absurdity.

Guy: There exists evidence that men and women are different when it comes to logical reasoning and mathematics. I have misplaced my references on this evidence. Women are inferior and nothing will ever change that.
Girl: Your evidence must be “bad science” because its conclusions contradict my very pleasant, egalitarian beliefs. You are obviously a sexist. [To be fair, the dude often is a sexist]

What really bothers me about this repeating argument isn’t so much the often blatant sexism expressed, but that it’s always immediately derailed by emotional rhetoric into a conversation that’s no longer about evidence. After all: it’s a scientific question. Without evidence, it’s just a particularly nasty sort of philosophy. I said as much when I wrote about the Larry Summers debacle back in 2005:

What is really at stake here is academic freedom. The job of a scientist is to discover and present facts, not to dictate which facts should and should not be presented. When the president of a prestigious university suggests a venue of research and is silenced and forced into retreat by ideologues, there is cause for concern.

I was taking poetic liberties in that opinion piece — Summers didn’t so much “suggest a venue of research” so much as talk off the cuff about his own personal beliefs, which include the probability that innate differences between the sexes plays some role in gender imbalances in various occupations. As evidence, he cited the much wider distribution of SAT math scores among men relative to women, despite a similar mean. In other words, many more men than women score very high or very low on the math SAT, although the average scores for each gender are relatively close. For scores above 700, it’s a ratio of 2:1.

What happened to Summers was a case study for everything people hate about the Political Correctness movement — the privileging and presupposition of certain thoughts over others. A torrent of media voices, his peers, and fellow academics called for his censure or resignation. A blog kind enough to link to my opinion piece paraphrases their outbursts:

The speech of Lawrence Summers was outrageous – everyone who has heard it should either black out or throw up. He has no right to speak in this way. Women are discriminated. You can see that they have a smaller representation in various professions – and most people (both men and women) believe that men are more likely to be successful in these professions. This proves that discrimination is everywhere around us because everyone with the right opinions about the world knows that the women are identical to the men, perhaps except for one organ. Note that this is not a circular argument because it is not a circular argument.

Several commentators at the time pointed out the irony of feminists shutting down a debate about the rational abilities of women with an emotional outburst, such as this lady.

I can think of few things more discouraging to any woman who lives by her intellect than the sight of some of the nation’s most highly credentialed female scholars attempting to use their emotions to cut off argument, rather than focusing on winning the debate. Political correctness is the opposite of thought. It proceeds by moral condemnation and emotional outrage: Anyone who can imagine such a thought must be a bad person, or a crazy one.

Because here’s the thing: when you disagree with someone about a potentially falsifiable thing they said, you’re supposed to disprove them with contradictory evidence, not angry rhetoric. That people agree to do so is the only reason the scientific community can function.

It saddens me to see people scorning evolutionary psychology because some of its findings reinforce gender stereotypes from the fifties. Evolution is the guiding light of biology, which is the root of psychology and behavior. Just as I didn’t really understand the unifying principles of life on earth until I understood evolution, I didn’t really get the unifying principles of the people around me until I understood evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. It probably says a lot about my own propensity for engineer-thought that I needed a formal, math-based framework to understand other people’s motivations, but there it is.

Of course, that’s not to say that out culture isn’t responsible for some part of the gender imbalance in science and engineering (but not all of it). The driving force behind these social pressures is illustrated nicely by the aforementioned bland essay, and is something I’ll call Male Privilege.

Most of my classmates were not that extreme, and from my experience, most mean well but are just socially awkward. They can say something so simple as “Oh don’t you know that command?” but in an inadvertently condescending voice that makes you feel like you’re the only person who doesn’t know it. As someone just testing out the CS waters, that type of experience in every class can be very daunting. I think women are more susceptible to these feelings of inadequacy, and it can deter some potential CS concentrators from the department. From my limited experience, the ones that stayed with it were pretty strong-willed and generally kept to themselves.

White Privilege means never having to worry that your apparent race is the cause of your inadequacy in the eyes of others. Male privilege is never having to worry your gender is the cause. Anxiety caused by such worries is a measurable demotivator and performance killer in academic contexts, so we know objectively (at least in the case of race) that it’s a real problem that we should try to correct. Note that I have absolutely no idea how to do so short of quotas in CS schools and corporate jobs, and good luck getting that one past the Fourteenth Amendment. Still, plenty of people want to fix the problem by doing exactly that, applying Title IX to the sciences. Yes, they are serious.

I think a large part of putting this fistfight to bed, or at least making it marginally more civil, is for the proponents of innate gender differences to stop referring to “ability” and start referring to “preference,” turning the argument from one about superiority into one about empowerment and choice. It’s not a misrepresentation — the data are entirely sensible in this light — and it reframes the debate to not sound so confrontational. Susan Pinker does so very eloquently in the same Times article about Title IX:

Ms. Pinker, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Globe and Mail in Canada (and sister of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist), argues that the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming they don’t know what they want. She interviewed women who abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in fields like architecture, law and education — and not because they had faced discrimination in science.

“Creating equal opportunities for women does not mean that they’ll choose what men choose in equal numbers,” Ms. Pinker says. “The freedom to act on one’s preferences can create a more exaggerated gender split in some fields.”

I don’t think the argument will get anywhere close to settled anytime soon, and sadly I see it getting worse in the face of more empirical evidence, but I do wish people would quit saying it was all my fault.

Sometimes it seems like I remember Ocarina of Time better than most of high school.

For most of a decade I’ve been carrying around a phone that was pretty cool in 2001 and hopelessly outdated by 2003, the Nokia 8390. Just look at this bad mother. It has these sweet white LEDs in its faceplate that light up when you push a button or get a call. Back when nobody had color screens yet, the 8390 was about as sexy as phones got. That changed pretty quickly.

Fast-forward to 2010 to find me carrying the same model. Not the same phone — I’ve gone through three identical ones in all, including one that spent 15 minutes at the bottom of Lake Sutherland and recovered. My coworkers universally have iPhones or Blackberries, and my friends, even the luddites, have color screens and cameras on their phones. I’ll admit to the occasional pang of jealousy at those luminous devices, but mostly I was immune to phone envy.

Ironically, what spurred my decision to move into the 21st century of mobile communication is that AT&T became so overwhelmed with the volume of data traffic generated by iPhone customers that they couldn’t even bother to reliably make my simple non-smart phone ring when I got a call. So I caved and, for better or worse, joined the ranks of people who can dick around on the internet in public whenever they want. I chose this sexy beast to the right here over the iPhone, mostly because I want to write applications for it without having to buy a $2000 laptop. Overall it’s probably not as polished as the iPhone, but it has more functionality (at least until the 4G) and will let me put my own software on it without jumping through a bunch of quasi-criminal hoops.

I’m still just scratching the surface of its functionality beyond making phone calls and web browsing, but I’ve already started using it as a camera and a GPS. This weekend I used it to trace Roark, Adam and me as we wended our way up a ridge line outside Leavenworth. I might even buy an armband and take it running, just like those people I used to mock mercilessly once they had jogged out of earshot.

I hate to say this, but Twitter is probably next. Sorry, everybody.

It’s relatively safe to say that some impressionable pubescent male is getting turned on by this stuff, and that, later in life, he’s going to have trouble getting off unless he hears the sound of a team of Japanese men screaming at him to try harder. Imagine how crippling that’s going to be for him in his relationships.

This problem, writ large, is really about the extent to which the ubiquity and strangeness of internet pornography is producing a generation of deviants. It really is too early to tell — the medium only really flowered with broadband, so we’re talking this decade. The first batch of young men to be shaped by it only recently reached the age of majority. The sexual dysfunctions and anxieties they’re going to have as a result of exposure to the above kind of stuff from an early age (as well as dozens of flavors of much nastier, abusive porn) really is hard to predict, but I’m going to go on the record right now and say that in another five or ten years it’s something we’re going to have to confront as a society, probably at the institutional level. Sex therapy for men, to re-wire their brains to be turned on by something as humdrum as a naked lady, is going to be common. We’ve got advance warning of this problem coming from the ultimate spiritual source of bizarre porn, Japan. In 2005, Durex conducted a global poll of sexual satisfaction which found that Japan is the least sexually satisfied country in the world, with just 25% of those polled saying they enjoy sex.

To be clear, I’m a fierce opponent of censorship of any kind on the internet — it always, always starts with someone asking you to think of the children, and ends with your news being filtered. Literally every country with internet censorship has followed this pattern. But I do think that parents today need to consider being much more open with their kids about the topic of sex and porn, especially little boys. It’s no longer enough to keep them away from those dirty magazines; limiting exposure with today’s technology is like trying to beat back the ocean. Rather, today’s parents probably need to actively talk about “good porn” versus “bad porn.”

That American parents are in no way ready to have that talk with their kids tells me that we’re going to be in for some really interesting and depressing cases of sexual dissatisfaction that affects an entire generation of men.

It’s difficult to express how this wealth of archaeological data makes me feel. On the one hand, it’s a meticulous and reasonably honest record of my life, such as this account of my host family in Vienna. On the other, it’s a look back to a trivial and somehow gratuitous form of self-expression that’s frankly embarrassing to read. It’s a view onto a younger, less settled incarnation of myself, one I’m not entirely sure I still want around.

My dad sometimes comments dolefully on how my blog got all serious and full of, you know, content all of a sudden. He has a point. I don’t fully understand why, but I got pretty deeply disenchanted with the idea of online journaling, to the extent where updating the website felt like a chore. Maybe I’m just not self-absorbed enough anymore, or maybe there are only so many “interesting” things one can write about oneself before getting burned out. In any case, you’ll notice that I filed all those old posts under the “Musings” category to highlight their essentially substance-less nature. I think it says a lot that the earliest incarnation of this blog was titled “Zach’s Musings.” I’m not so interested in musing about nothing anymore, for better or worse.

Now, at least, the evidence of all those former musings are part of the public record.

GARBAGE ONLY IN THIS RECEPTACLE!

It gave me pause! Doesn’t any conceivable item become garbage upon introduction to the receptacle? Are they alleging that only a priori rubbish can be placed there? Or are they expressing the same tautology I thought about — that placing any item into the bin transforms it to garbage? (Obviously they’re trying to distinguish “garbage” from “recycling,” but this is how I think.)

It reminded me of trying to buy some plastic utensils and noticing that most brands were proudly advertised as “shatter-resistant.” Well, obviously, since the forks aren’t lying in microscopic shards on the bottom of the box they possess some degree of shatter resistance; but then, I challenge you to name one substance (short of Einsteinium) which doesn’t.

Listen, you little shit, what really cheeses me off is that this was probably your one chance in your tiny miserable life to be in the spotlight, and you blew it. You won’t get another one, but for all you other six-year-olds with poorly-tethered experimental aircraft in their backyards: grow a pair and climb in next time.

… the arrest raised a strong possibility that Mr. Polanski would be returned to the United States to face sentencing under his conviction for having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

Seems simple enough. He’s not the first man to like young girls, right, so why all the fuss? And anyway, as Whoopi Goldberg is now under fire for saying, it wasn’t rape-rape. Except that, actually, it was rape-rape of a pretty reprehensible nature. In the victim’s own words,

It was not consensual sex by any means. I said no, repeatedly, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was alone and I didn’t know what to do. It was scary and, looking back, very creepy.

What’s going on here? Why do people like Whoopi, myself, and apparently a plurality of internet denizens think that this was the other kind of rape (not rape-rape), the kind where consent was freely given but the law took it back? The kind where a senior gets blown by a sophomore and goes to jail for ten years?

The tacit belief that there two kinds of rape — “real” rape, and statutory rape — is apparently widespread. It’s also fairly insidious, in that when we hear that 1) Roman Polanski raped a girl and 2) that she was underage, the latter fact completely wipes out the former in our consciousness. Simply because the victim was a minor, we automatically lump this case in with the dozens of other “victimless” statutory rape cases we’ve heard about, including the handful of incredibly sensationalized stories of female teachers seducing younger male students.

Given the common application of our statutory rape laws — punishing consensual sex acts involving minors along arbitrary age lines — I think you could make a strong case that we should call it something else. Including the word rape just conflates a violent, invasive assault with an act widely accepted as benign. As a matter of fact, according to Slate, most states don’t call it statutory rape at all:

Polanski pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a minor. What’s the difference between that and statutory rape?
They’re synonymous. Only a few states—Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina—actually use the term “statutory rape” in their penal codes. Other legal euphemisms for having sex with someone who’s underage include “Rape in the Third Degree” (New York), “Felonious Sexual Assault” (New Hampshire), and “Carnal Knowledge of a Child” (Virginia).

You might ask, what’s the difference? It was illegal for him to have sex with a 13-year-old, so he’s breaking the law either way, consensual or not, right? Not really. What’s the difference between someone who utters a falsehood, but believes it, and a liar? Simply intent — also the difference between murder and manslaughter. More importantly, it matters a lot to the victim of the crime, specifically whether they personally feel that something bad has happened to them.

If we’re going to continue to prosecute seniors who have sex with sophomores (or college freshmen who have sex with sophomores, depending on the state), then we really need to stop including the word “rape” in that offense (for the states that still include it) and strip it from the popular lexicon, a process that will take time. Any room for confusion between “rape” and “rape-rape” is an insult to victims of sexual violence.