Guys. First. Should we use Branch the next time we do this? Because this is not the first time.

Whoa, this is like over 5 times better than Twitter :)

Is this public? Who can see this?

I don't think it reflects on twitter, correct?

It doesn't, but I'm pretty sure it's URL-public. (So: basically as public as the Twitter conversation was.)

And anyone can join the branch? If not I'm going to scoop up some key branch names :)

Ok, sweet. Does my argument about how biological differences explain the prevalence of patriarchal societies historically make sense?

I mean, yes, but then it seems strange to think that biological differences don't matter.

Also, it seems you doubt the existence or prevalence of biology-influenced cognitive/psychological/behavioral differences.

That would be point 1: "caveman" or even further advanced societies would naturally place men in militaristic roles to ensure safety, especially during child bearing when women were especially vulnerable

People need to be invited by someone. Also, I (at least) can "conclude" a branch.

Gilbert, I don't think I follow, but I would be pretty surprised if I didn't agree. Would you reiterate?

I'm under the impression that Ian thinks the gendered-ness of violence follows more-or-less straightforwardly from biological differences, and you think it follows from patriarchy in a vacuum. Yes, I just cartoon'd you two. Knives out (bad taste intended).

I'm saying that by Occam's razor we have no need of those hypotheses to explain historical prevalence of patriarchies

Right now I'm not trying to argue that patriarchy causes violence

In which case you'd have to claim something like either:

1) Different male/female behaviors in such a society would not lead to reproductive success compared with a blank-slatish system.

2) Different male/female behaviors would lead to more reproductive success, but this is somehow unable to be influenced by genetic factors.

point number 2 would be that because we now live in less primitive societies, with characteristically different threats to our security, the physical advantages that men had as protectors are less relevant to irrelevant

@Sam your caricature of me is pretty accurate :)

@Gilbert but the genetic baggage that resulted from our ancestors living in patriarchal societies for thousands of years is still there

youre saying that in response to claim 1 Ian?

This is less confusing than Twitter but still confusing :)

What I'm saying is that while it makes sense to talk about inherited gender roles from our ancestors, there's no need to assume that the method of inheritance is genetic

The "genetic baggage" is in response to claim 2

But you do accept that the actions we should take depend to some extent on how much of these effects are genetic?

to add in genetics as an explanation for patriarchal organization of society is non-sequitur and unnecessary

But you also used that explanation when I asked why almost all societies are patriarchal!

If there are genetic causes, then the responsible thing to do would be to identify phenomena which cannot be explained by an obvious alternative that we already know must play some role

My first claim is the answer to why societies are patriarchal. My second claim is that patriarchal societies persist because of cultural inertia.

But why do you think that thousands of years of ancestry in a patriarchal society would not lead to genes that influence male/female behavior differently?

Because "I have no need of that hypothesis"

Longer, more slowly-written posts tend to be less confusing. More email; less IRC.

I think you two are going in circles. Very tiny circles.

So, we agree that patriarchy likely existed because men were stronger and didn't have nine months downtime during war. They specialized for violence both culturally and biologically.

Ian thinks that there are things about our biology that even today act as male-specific forcings on violent outbursts. He thinks this is the main cause. Gilbert thinks that patriarchy is a massive structural relic of our more-violent past that largely explains male violence. The core of the disagreement is pretty standard nature and nurture, and the responsible discussion is where, when and how… isn't it?

I don't follow how we "don't need" genetic causes to explain violence, or why it's more responsible to throw them out if we don't need them. Gilbert is invoking Occam's razor ("I have no need") in a way that puts the burden of proof on genetics, which doesn't make sense to me if we're after truth. If we're after action, maybe it does, since we can more easily affect culture, and perhaps even use culture to compensate for whatever "baggage" exists.

I mean, I think that logic is not quite valid. Gilbert, surely you're not saying that ~100% of differences in violence (or some other behavior) are explained by culture, and thus we have no need to look for other factors?

A further claim would be that chalking it up to genetic causes without pointing to a phenotype manifestation of that genetic trait is irresponsible. You could make a claim that male dominant behavior or violent behavior is inherited, which is a weaker claim and could be tested by examining incidences of criminal violence throughout the population—I believe the statistics do not support a very strong inheritance claim, if even significant at all (reference: rape book I read).

You could make a biological argument without appealing to genetics. Instead simply claim testosterone leads to increased aggression/violence. That seems like the easier biological argument. My recollection from a Wikipedia search is that the testosterone/aggression ...

...link is disputed, so that's not even 100% solid ground

Sure Ian, the inheritance data I saw suggested a weak positive correlation, but that means that it's not very predictive. You could also look for mother's father/father's father asymmetries as a way to try to implicate the Y chromosome

But even that weak inheritance data doesn't implicate any degree of genetics alone. And the fact that it's weak means that trying to offer a dominantly genetic explanation is suspect

I'm a bit confused here. I mean, males and females have different brain structure [many studies]. Brains affect behavior. Why is this not case closed? (Not that culture has no effect, but that biology clearly has one. And not that violence is necessarily part of this difference.)

You are putting an abnormally high burden of proof on genetics, and not doing the same for culture, where you have no physical mechanism with even the limited strength of testosterone.

The genetic claim would distinguish between males who are positive for some trait, and males who are negative. If the point is that males are categorically more prone to violence than women b/c of a biological cause that is present in all men then there's no need to invoke genetics as anything distinct from biological differences, which may or may not have any kind of adaptive advantage.

As an example of that, I suggested testosterone levels b/c it is much easier to experimentally check its effect than different brain structure, which we understand very poorly.

maybe the different brain structures actually make men less violent? That's possible too. What's the evidence for a positive correlation of any sort between male structured brains and violence? Where's even a plausible argument which can't trivially be inverted to support a negative correlation?

To be more positive here on biological differences, if testosterone was clearly a factor (plausible) then it makes sense to warn both men and women about the dangers of testosterone supplements or medication. That's definitely very important. We might also try to treat violent people who have elevated levels of testosterone through chemical therapy, although we would have to be careful about that.

What you are asking from biology/genetics is unreasonable. It sounds like you want an explanation at the level of chemical reactions, or even _physics_, that shows how genes might influence behavior.

But you have nothing even close to that for culture! The physical pathway is going to be much more convoluted there. What low-level mechanism explains how culture influences behavior?

I'm not saying I want mechanisms. I'm just saying there are different kinds of biological claims, and there are common expectations for establishing one of them.

For instance there is evidence for hereditary transmission of a propensity to violence, but the effect size of that correlation is established to be weak. That proves that genetic or other hereditary (biological or not) causes do not account for the difference

shitdifferences hit. Gotta take Skype call

I need to go to sleep, but here's some evidence that convinces me that males and females have different behavioral tendencies not caused by culture:

1. Different brain structure, even in fetuses.
2. Different behavior in infants, even on day one: math.kth.se

It sounds like you're saying that since those differences observed were not exactly that male babies went on killing sprees and female babies did not, we can't conclude that biology has anything to do with violent tendencies.

Fine. But please conclude that males and females have some different behavioral tendencies not caused by culture. You really have to go out of your way to not conclude this.

Sure, of course men and women have differing behavioral tendencies because of their biology. I agree with that 100%. Please don't mistake me as being intractable (and dumb) on that.

What I'm arguing is how much of an influence biology plays in the specific phenomenon that men are statistically more violent than women. So we can consider a wide range (and different categories) of contributing factors, including genes, hormones, brain structure, gender identity, etc. And we can argue for against those factors being correlated different ways using a variety of arguments, though the appropriate kind of evidence should vary with the claim

Can't resist adding this. Whenever I start looking into "feminist theory" to see if it is actually something, I hit incomprehensible bullshit so fast, and this time was no exception: en.wikipedia.org

Did you know that "geography itself represents and reproduces the heterosexual male gaze"? This is not nearly clever enough to be completely fucking insane.

When feminist theory and some other branch of "thought" have competing hypotheses, you can see why I might tend to favor the other one. I want to see a feminist theory vs. astrology showdown.

Two principles I've tried to articulate are that (a) any argument must be asymmetric with respect to men and women's propensity to violence; hence saying that there are differences in men and women's brain structure is irrelevant unless a difference leads to a specific asymmetry which would explain a propensity to violence.
(b) claiming brain differences or genetics as causes should be deferred in preference to more obvious or generic hypotheses if we lack special evidence suggesting that those more precise and/or less obvious causes are at work. Thus establishing evidence that violence is hereditary is a better place to start than claiming it is genetic, and testosterone is a more obvious culprit than brain structure differences.

The cultural claim is (1) that our society, in its particular form of patriarchy, encourages men to assume violent roles and to resolve problems violently. Furthermore, that it often does this disproportionately for men compared to women. Some clear evidence for this claim is that most militaristic toys sold at toy stores are gendered male. As a counterpoint you don't see many ballerina or tea set toys that are not explicitly gendered female. Toys can be seen as one facet of how the larger culture shapes our perceptions of gender roles, as well as an expression of it by those people who make the toys. Toy makers gender guns as male b/c someone taught them to, and they now think of that as normal.

The claim here is not causal. That is, toy guns for boys do not turn boys into shooters, and banning toy guns or such is clearly not going to be an effective action to take.

Rather the claim is cultural, specifically (2) culture helps determine what we consider normal. In particular, normative gender identities shape our perceptions of ourselves. Boys are taught not to cry or talk about their emotions as much as women. The idea that a man would try not to cry in order to avoid embarrassment for not behaving "manly" is clearly a social/cultural construction.

The Feminist critique of male violence then, is that we normalize violent behavior for men in a variety of ways in our society. In a community with a gun culture and conservative values, we would expect that men must learn how to handle a gun and defend themselves while women (if allowed) are not expected to do the same. We think of games like Black Ops 2 or Call of Duty as boys games frequently, and these games usually lack female protagonists, though not always

so men are more likely to identify with guns and violent behavior than are women, not in terms of how they behave necessarily, but in terms of their cultural consumption and construction of identity. These ideas, social norms, perpetuate via a variety of mechanisms, mostly cultural in nature.

While cultural norms can't explain everything about men's violence, they help create conditions under which people perceive that violence or some of its necessary conditions as normal. So for instance, here we have the normalizing effect of Newtown's gun culture on owning the weapons necessary to carry out the shooting, as well as the normalization of gun range shooting and paramilitary thinking necessary to acquire the skills to carry out this shooting.

and I'm willing to bet that even though Women may participate in Newtown's gun culture, that it's probably still dominantly male and that going shooting is often treated as a guy's event.

One critical caveat to add is that many feminists would point out that a more underlying cause than gender is the culture of violence, which happens to be gendered male. From that perspective, it might not be good to get too hung up over the gendering of violent behavior, beyond how it helps us understand why this violence is happening—of course women can be violent too. If all we succeed at doing is making more women violent without reducing the overall incidence of violence, then that's hardly any kind of gender equality worth celebrating

Crap, I'm supposed to be asleep, but I disagree with your explanation for "gendered" (ridiculous word) guns. Toy makers make what sells. At ONE DAY boys prefer mechanical toys, girls prefer faces. This is not "patriarchy" (ridiculous word in this context).

(Side note: feminist theorists, use real words! Words are useful if you want to be understood, though perhaps you don't. There's always "feminist linguistics", I suppose.)

And it's not that I haven't heard these arguments. It's that whenever someone runs some sort of experiment against the "feminist theory" story, it loses. This is why I especially like the one day old scenario -- after that, feminist theory becomes unfalsifiable.

Now I'm really going to sleep.

The one day experiment has relatively small effect sizes, and large variation within the population: something like 10 sec difference between means with 20 sec std deviations. Feminism is not discarding biological differences, but many gender asymmetric phenomena are far too drastic (61 v. 1) to reasonably expect these kinds of studies to account for. That says there must be something else at work.

Feminist theory, like similar social science theory (a) uses technical terms, and yes it's your fault if you don't know those terms. You don't get fussy when it's mathematics, but solving a convex optimization formulation of a learning problem using stochastic gradient descent is just as much a bag of gibberish that assumes domain knowledge. (b) feminist theory is best talked about in relation to specific cases in preference to in general. Saying that a pink tricycle with glitter and streamers being marketed at girls is gendered is basically a factual statement. As is saying toy guns are gendered when they're primarily marketed at boys, bought primarily for boys and desired primarily by boys.

I'm still not asleep.

Come on, you cannot possibly tell me that "feminist geography" page was intelligible. It's not even false statements, it's grammatical but nonsensical statements. It's postmodernist bullshit. You don't really believe that jargon is equivalent to math jargon in any sense other than "outsiders don't understand it". It's obfuscatory and polarizing rather than explanatory.

Additionally, I am opposed to excessive use of jargon in many areas, even math, sometimes.

I bet feminist theorists would have a field day with languages like German and Latin where, horrors, gender is built directly into the language! Damn the patriarchy! Seasons, days, and months are masculine because men want to CONTROL TIME!

What I'm saying is that it's going to be difficult to parse that page if you don't know what the male gaze is, or what a subaltern is, to take two very clear examples

You're right that the page could be much more intelligible. Mainly it would benefit from the use of illustrative examples, since it's almost totally theoretical/abstract as is. Again, much the same could be said about most Wikipedia math pages, except the most prominent ones. Look at the male gaze page, especially how it applies to cinema. That's a very clear understandable feminist concept.

btw can't resist, but given that the Caesars installed themselves as months on the calendar, the idea that they actually did want to control time, in at least a figurative sense, isn't that preposterous.

To go for a much easier target from antiquity, look at most of the Greek heroes and gods, especially the most powerful like Zeus and Hercules. They habitually abused power to do deplorable things including rape. Isn't there something a little sick about the idea that Hercules was the greatest hero then? What sort of cultural norms do those myths embody and (given we read them still) perpetuate?

It's likely that I think all or at least much of social science theory is pointless bullshit. I read the page on male gaze, and this kind of thinking is what mid-level high school students produce if you force them to write a certain number of pages and forbid them from running experiments or using any non-anecdotal data. This is people throwing words around for sport, backed up by nothing.

I was about to make up my own parody, but unfortunately feminist theory is basically self-parodizing. I just found a quote claiming that Principia Mathematica is a "rape manual", and that E=mc^2 is a "sexed equation".

If I admit that society sometimes enforces bad messages, will you admit that this is fucking insane?

Ian, finding idiotic shit people have said that draws on feminist theory and then throwing it all away isn't super convincing. How long do you think it would take me to find idiotic biological determinism on the 'net? Yes. People say dumb things everywhere.

Also, feminist theory using terms you don't understand is… just like everybody's relationship to all new theory ever. Disciplinary terms (like "eigenvector," "paging," or "male gaze") are useful.

That said, I'm not familiar with feminist geography, but isn't it obvious that geography *does* embody gender, race, etc.? If nothing else, when a place is full of rich folks, you don't get a lot of black churches, which reinforces that construction of place.

I think we disagree on where the idiotic shit begins, because I consider "male gaze" to be idiotic shit. Men like looking at women in a sexual way. There are obvious reasons for this. Claiming that this is any way caused by or part of "patriarchy" would require a huge amount of evidence, not empty theorizing.

Nobody's arguing that men don't like looking at women because reproduction… blah blah we know. Believe it or not, it goes both ways. (Living above the Ukrainian home in NY right now. I have evidence.)

The idea of a gaze comes from film theory, so it's clearest where there is obvious authorial intent, but has applications outside. The important bit is that a gaze is not just had literally by the supposed viewer (male or whoever), but internalized by others. People in society (especially the post-colonial) internalize the gaze of those in power. When men hold the camera or organize the harem, everybody learns and teaches what the men see and enjoy seeing.

Also. I have to include this qwantz.

You know, it'd be fun to argue that emerging metrosexuality implies emerging straight female and gay male gazes. Probably the latter paving the way for the former.

I think that's where we differ, because I think it would be a waste of time to argue that. :)

Sadly, I have to go do work and stuff. I can point you guys to books that will say pretty much what I would have said:

amazon.com
amazon.com
amazon.com

These guys are all scientists who understand the area and run experiments and stuff. They are also not fringe -- while there may be small matters of disagreement, these guys (the patriarchy!) overall represent the current state of belief in evolutionary biology.

If you have some similarly central book on feminist theory (i.e. "the one that convinced me"), I will actually read it.