The problem with sex is not getting enough….no, actually that’s an old joke and I should be ashamed to use it. So, I’m ashamed.

However, two litte snippets from the newspapers which give us the real answer to the problem with sex.

First, from Ghana.

According to Dr Owusu, it is a well known fact, that, men have the tendency to achieve orgasm much quicker than women.

Yes, that has been mentioned by any number of disappointed women over the years (and I’m not referring solely to those I have known, it’s a more general problem than that).

Then from England. Essentially, evolution got it wrong and tucked those parts that lead to the female orgasm a little too far away from the parts that get stimulated during intercourse.

And there we have it. Amazing what we’ve learned over the years, isn’t it?

The gender gap is, in at least one way, actually widening in modern societies.

No, we’re not talking about the gender pay gap, which is shrinking everywhere. Nor are we talking about the gender gap in legal rights, or opportunities, or in what it is that men and women are either allowed or encouraged to do.

No, all of those gender gaps are shrinking, some slower than others, to be sure, but they are shrinking.

But the gender gap in personality traits is widening. We might call it that Mars versus Venus sort of thing, or refer to our own EQSQ personality tests. Things about competetiveness, nurturing behaviours, cooperation: those things which we see as being typically male or female are becoming more obvious as markers of whether someone is indeed male or female.

Which is exceedingly odd when you think about it. If we’re all getting ever more freedom (which we are, most especially freedom from want) then wouldn’t we be growing more alike? Freed from the very rigid gender role allocations of only one or two generations ago, why should we be becoming less alike?

To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

It is a puzzle but here’s my take on it (there are other ideas in the linked article too).

At root the argument is between those who say that gender attributes are simply part of being human. Have ovaries and (on average, of course) and you’ll be cautious, nurturung and so on. Have testes and you’ll be adventurous and competitive. The other side are saying that these are all social constructs.

Now there is a way to combine these two views and to also explain the above evidence, that we are becoming less alike as we become freer.

That these attributes are indeed inherent, but they can be socially modified. And it’s the 8,000 years of an agricultural society which was the unnatural modification of those innate attributes.

Thus, as we in a wealthy society regain many of the freedoms that our hunter gatherer forefathers had, those innate attributes aren’t modified quite so much as they were by the societal structure we had in the interim.

It’s well know, for example, that hunter gatherer societies has higher calorie intakes than our farming ancestors. That they had a great deal more leisure time. That they were more egalitarian. These are all things which are happening in our own societies now (sure, egalitarian income distributions we don’t have, but we’re a lot more egalitarian in opportunity). So why shouldn’t, freed from the restrictions of an agrarian lifestyle, the innate differences between the sexes flourish?

Title IX is the system by which sportsmoney at colleges across the country has to be allocated equally between the genders. Fair enough you might say, although it does indeed lead to problems. For example, you might not be all that surprised to find that it is usual for there to be more men interested in playing sports than there are women. But if the money has to be equally allocated then either there will be less per man playing, or the number of men must be artificially restricted.

That latter is what usually happens.

However, that’s not really a vitally important thing, the funding of college sport. However, the funding of sciences at colleges is of vital importance. And there are those who would extend Title IX to that arena: the funding of male and female students in the hard sciences should be equal.

Christina Hoff Summers has an excellent article here on what such and extension of Title IX is really all about and the possible effects.

I’ll not repeat her whole complex argument, just extract one part of it. The original claim is that the low number of women in the hard sciences, compared to men, is a result of bias, almost of oppression, of women. That claim rather failes for this very simple reason:

So, why are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences? In a recent survey of faculty attitudes on social issues, sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University asked 1,417 professors what accounts for the relative scarcity of female professors in math, science, and engineering. Just one percent of respondents attributed the scarcity to women’s lack of ability, 24% to sexist discrimination, and 74% to differences in what characteristically interests men and women. Many experts who study male-female differences provide strong support for that 74% majority. Readers can go to books like David Geary’s Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (1998); Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modem Denial of Human Nature (2002), and Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain (2003) for arguments suggesting that biology plays a distinctive- but not exclusive-role in career choices.

Baron-Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on autism, a disorder that affects far more males than females. Autistic persons tend to be socially disconnected and unaware of the emotional states of others, but they often exhibit obsessive fixation on objects and machines. Baron-Cohen suggests that autism may be the far end of the male norm-the “extreme male brain,” all systematizing and no empathizing. He believes that men are, “on average,” wired to be better systematizers and women to be better empathizers. It is a daring claim-but he has data to back it up, presenting a wide range of correlations between the level of fetal testosterone and behaviors in girls and boys from infancy into grade school. Despite two major waves of feminism, women still predominate-sometimes overwhelmingly-in empathy-centered fields such as early-childhood education, social work, veterinary medicine, and psychology, while men are overrepresented in the “systematizing” vocations such as car repair, oil drilling, and electrical engineering.

The research emphasizing the importance of biological differences in determining women’s and men’s career choices is not decisive, but it is serious and credible.

We around here are pretty much sold on Baron Cohen’s ideas, given that he wrote the basis of our EQSQ personality tests. But it isn’t just that of course. The idea that men and women are equally interested in hte same things simply cannot hold water for anyone who has actually bothered to go and talk to a few representative examples of their species. How ivory tower, how far out of touch with human society, do you actually have to be to think that everyone’s the same?

Not all that important, just though it was a nice phrase. The groups of the elderly, out for their evening stroll (passagiata) are known in Italy as the “cane brigades“.

The whole article is talking about the very low birthrates in parts of Europe. That part is true, unfortunately they get the cause very wrong.

The causes behind declining fertility rates are manifold, but the most obvious cause was the introduction of mass contraception in the mid-20th century.

It might be an obvious cause but it’s not actually an important one. Most academic studies say that the availability of contraception has, at most, a 10% share in the changes in fertility. Something which should be obvious with the use of a little bit of logic. For there are plenty of non-mechanical ways (perhaps not 100% effective but still pretty good) of preventing conception for a start. But more than that, before people use contraception there has to be the desire to use it.

That is, desired fertility (which those academic studies say is responsible for 90% of the changes in actual fertility) must change before contraception can have an effect. Now there are indeed arguments about what changes desired fertility but from my economist type viewpoint it is wealth. Wealth as properly measured, not simply cash in ones hand of course. Longer lifespans, more education, lower rates of child mortality, urbanisation, they all have an effect.

But it’s still very much true that the availability or not of contraception is very much a bit player in this. It the change in the desired number of children which makes the difference.

Now here’s something I hadn’t known:

Scientists have found that both men and women who had lower levels of the hormone vasopressin find it difficult to stay in a long-term or monogamous relationships.

So that man or woman known for spreading it around rather more than might be quite seemly (say, Samantha from Sex and the City) can claim that it’s nothing to do with their morals at all. It’sthat they are in fact disabled, vasopressin deficient…or in the more modern manner of constructing such tags, differently vasopressed?

I’ll have to see whether, if the opportunity to do the straying presents itself of course, whether my wife will buy that particular argument.

The other suprise was this.

Alcohol depletes testosterone in men, and therefore can inhibit their performance. But it speeds up testosterone production in women. Testosterone controls sex drive in both men and women.

The debilitating effect beer can have on male performance I am of course all too aware of. Any and every male who drinks of course is. But what I hadn’t known was that alcohol has the opposite effect on testosterone production in women. Finally, now I know the answer to one of the great mysteries of life.

Why is that men always try to buy women drinks?

Not, as I had previously thought, so as to get them drunk enough that they’ll succumb, not just to get those beer goggles working, but to increase their testosterone levels and thus their very desire for sex.

Amazing what you can learn on the internets, isn’t it?

No, not that male crisis at college, where women are now the majority of most incoming classes. Rather, something I’d never thought about.

When Aman Kidwai arrived at the University of Connecticut, he was scared, nervous and anxious like most young men. And, like most young men, he didn’t talk about it.

He had played football and run track in high school, and while he might have played sports at a Division 3 school, he wasn’t going to play at UConn. He was used to the highly structured life of high school, with every moment spoken for, ever-vigilant parents and teachers and a team full of friends.

The university felt cold and impersonal and he had a hard time connecting with people, much less discussing his uncomfortable feelings.

“Those are tough feelings to emote,” said Kidwai, now a senior, “tough feelings to tell anyone about.” He found himself skipping classes just because he could.

While most kids — young men and young women — have a mix of anxiety and excitement when they head off for college, experts on men and masculinity say that young men handle those feelings differently from young women and therefore often experience different problems and sometimes greater difficulties in the transition.

The article then goes on to discuss the ways in which colleges might help those who find this transition difficult. For example, we’re used to the idea that there should be a women’s center on campus. Should we now have a mens’ center as well? Or those student counsellors that already exist: can we make sure that they’re not entirely female focused and are willing and able to deal with the different ways that men deal with and express their emotions?

This is all very well but there’s a part of me that wants to deride all of this.

Jason Zelesky, wellness outreach coordinator at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said that “the whole formation or the social construction of masculinity sends young men these lofty and unfair messages about what it means to be a young man,” and that it’s “a narrative of violence, confrontation, fierce independence, of a sort of emotional apathy or non-communication of emotion with the exception of anger.”

“Our dashboard indicators are pretty convincing that for the most part it is men who are the predominant judicial load (at the university); men acting out in residence halls, men transported to the hospital for drinking too much,” Zelesky said. “The numbers bear that out.”

The real question is whether this is indeed part of the social construction of masculinity or whether it’s something innate about masculinity? Of course, not every man drinks too much, or has a propensity for violence, but on average men are more likely to do both than women are. Is this innate or learned behavior?

We’re not going to solve that nature/nurture argument here in a blog post but it’s difficult to think that none of it is innate…the argument is how much is nature and how much nurture, surely?

So I find myself a little conflicted about all of this. Aiding people through one of the great transitions of life, from child to adult, is of course a great and valid thing to do. But to wrap it all up in therapy speak just doesn’t work for me, sorry.

This might not be the most astonising research finding ever, you know?

Binge drinking (5+ alcoholic beverages at one time) is associated with risky sexual behaviors.

Really? Someone had to do a study to work this out?

Isn’t that why they invented happy hour?

“The link between binge drinking and risky sexual behavior is complex,” said Heidi E. Hutton, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as corresponding author for the study. “We wanted to examine one component of that relationship, whether binge drinking increased the risk of engaging in sexual behaviors and having STDs. We found gender differences in binge drinking among patients at an STD clinic, and also that binge drinking increased STD risk for women.”

Well, peoplewith a PhD are supposed to be clever but are we seriously suggesting that this result is “complex”?

People who drink too much have more sex with people they don’tknow, taking less care over contraception and the specific sexual activities than people who don’t drink too much?

This is “complex”?

“Binge drinking results in a decreased ability to make clear decisions,” noted Geetanjali Chander, assistant professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “and can enable individuals to engage in behaviors that they would not if sober.”

I’m beginning to think that this paper might be a spoof actually. Drunk people do things that sober ones would not?

But apparently not. Our tax dollars were spent to bring us this entirely unsurprising news.

It’s not exactly a world changing observation, to be sure, but it is an interesting one.

50 years ago, very few men could type. Almost all typing was done by women.

Now just about everybody types.

Inch by inch, we move toward gender equality in a host of ways. When we compare today’s workplace, for example, with the one portrayed on the TV drama “Mad Men,” depicting a New York advertising agency in the early 1960s, the contrast is striking. Men dominate the agency. They are the decision-makers and the bright creative types (only one woman has broken in so far). All of the other women at the agency (called “girls,” regardless of their age)? They type.

….

Today, boys all learn to type at an early age. In the era of computer technology, it’s unthinkable for them to dictate their words, or write them out in longhand, and expect an underling to input them into the computer. Men in every profession now want and need to use the technology that’s still mainly accessible through typing, and they spend hours sitting in front of keyboards in the workplace and in their homes. Everywhere there’s a computer hookup, there are men busily typing away.

Of course it’s a banality to point out that technology does indeed change the gender balance. When washing was still done with a mangle, when food preparation took hours each day then someone or other was going to be needed to run the house full time. Further, when most paid work required gross physical labour, it was going to be the man who went out and did that and the woman who worked the house.

We can look back on the past century or so and see that as that farm and blue collar labor became less and less important in the economy, as the household technologiesadvanced, this is what freed up the world of paid work for women.

Perhaps less of a banality is to wonder how much of the sea change in working and domestic life has in fact been caused by changes in attitudes and how much was always there, but is only now being enabled by technology. Maybe we always wanted to be (roughly) equal as we are, but just couldn’t be as we hadn’t invented the things that would enable us to be so?

There really is a marriage market you know?

Yes, certainly some are indeed lovestruck and live happily ever after. For the other 99.99% of the population it is indeed a market. We look for the best deal we can get through the sale of whatever it is that we have. Very unromantic, I know, but here’s some proof.

More than half of women would consider asking a male friend to father their child if they failed to find the right partner by a certain age, a survey suggests.

A survey of attitudes towards contraception found that 56 per cent of women would think about such a course of action in the absence of the right man. The report showed that both single men and women in Britain have concerns about fertility and meeting the right partner.

More than two thirds of women not at present in a relationship worry that they will not be able to conceive naturally, while 26 per cent of men have similar concerns.

About half of single female respondents said that they thought about meeting the right partner frequently or daily, with many suggesting that they would consider settling for second-best if their search were fruitless.

The writer of the article seems to think that it says something about either contraception or fertility. Which it might do, a little, but the real story is that women will settle for second best (men will too of course, they just weren’t asked here). Or more likely third, fourth or fifty fourth best.

And if you’re willing to settle for less than being swept off your feet  by the man of your dreams, if you’re willing to compromise, willing to take the results of the bargain you can make, then you’re in a market.

You’re haggling to get the best you can with what you’ve got to pay for in that market. Looks, personality, brains, career, whatever. But just because there’s rarely cash money involved doesn’t make it any less of a market.

OK, it’s actually why some feminists hate Sarah Palin, not why all of them do. But there’s certainly more than just a smidgeon of truth in this article.

Left-wing feminists have a hard time dealing with strong, successful conservative women in politics such as Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin seems to have truly unhinged more than a few, eliciting a stream of vicious, often misogynist invective.

On Salon.com last week, Cintra Wilson branded her a “Christian Stepford Wife” and a “Republican blow-up doll.” Wendy Doniger, religion professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, added on the Washington Post blog, “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

You’d think that, whether or not they agree with her politics, feminists would at least applaud Mrs. Palin as a living example of one of their core principles: a woman’s right to have a career and a family. Yet some feminists unabashedly suggest that her decision to seek the vice presidency makes her a bad and selfish mother. Others argue that she is bad for working mothers because she’s just too good at having it all.

What on earth could be driving such feelings? Why would feminists hate Sarah Palin quite so much? Or, again, some of them do so?

The answer given rather rings true for me. It’s that there are some feminists who equate the desired (as I also desire it) legal and opportunity equity for men and women with a whole other series of political desires. For example, there are plenty of proclaimed feminists who see socialism (or it’s dull as ditchwater sister, social democracy) as the only way to gain gender equality. For they see that gender equality can only come as a matter of economic equality….and more importantly, economic equality of outcome rather than just of opportunmity.

Now I’m not saying that’s wrong, although I very much disagree with it, but views like that are obviously going to color one’s views of a conservative Christian woman and her feminism or not. Because she doesn’t embrace the economic part of that feminist argument, thus she cannot be a feminist.

There’s more to it as well I’m sure. I’ve actually read people arguing that abortion of a child with abnormalities is actually something that people should do, not just something that should be possible for them to do. Again, I’m rather steering clear of the main debate there, over abortion itself, but freedom to choose is really rather different from moral pressure to insist upon abortion in certain scenarios.

Finally there’s the point made by the author:

Not to Ms. Marsh, who insists that feminism must demand support for women from the government. In this worldview, advocating more federal subsidies for institutional day care is pro-woman; advocating tax breaks or regulatory reform that would help home-based care providers — preferred by most working parents — is not. Trying to legislate away the gender gap in earnings (which no self-respecting economist today blames primarily on discrimination) is feminist. Expanding opportunities for part-time and flexible jobs is “the Republican Party line.”

It’s part and parcel of that overarching political viewpoint I note above. That simple equality isn’t the major point. How that equality is reached is.

I must say though I wholly agree with this point:

Mrs. Palin’s marriage actually makes her a terrific role model. One of the best choices a woman can make if she wants a career and a family is to pick a partner who will be able to take on equal or primary responsibility for child-rearing. Our culture still harbors a lingering perception that such men are less than manly — and who better to smash that stereotype than “First Dude” Todd Palin?

Well quite….how well you succeed in this life in attaining your goals does in large part depend upon the choices you make in that pursuit. There’s no choice larger than the one about who you marry either. But then that really wouldn’t fit the feminist ideals of those who are so upset with Sarah Palin either, would it? That in order to have it all you need to pick the right man to have your children with? Isn’t that too close to stating that your success depends, again, upon a man?

Perhaps it is but it also sounds a lot closer to observable reality than the idea that a woman with a career, family and a balanced home life isn’t a “feminist”. That was the point of feminism in the first place, wasn’t it, that women would be able to have all those things?