Vive la Difference

And now for something different: the feminisation of men in islamic countries. Or perhaps more accurately, the attempts to stop the feminisation of men in one islamic country. The basic religious view is this:

“Among those who are cursed by Allah and His Angels, both in this world and in the Hereafter, the Prophet, peace and blessings be on him, has mentioned the man whom Allah has created as male but who becomes effeminate by imitating women, and a woman whom Allah has created as female but who becomes masculinised by imitating men. For this reason the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) forbade men from wearing clothes or things pertaining to women.”

Now, if we were to restrict ourselves to such things as homosexuality or lesbianism then there’s plenty of other religions, some of them much closer to home, that would take a similar sort of attitude. But in Kuwait, they really mean these things. A man caught wearing an earring can (and some are) be arrested by the police and held.

Quoting a Saudi scholar, Sheikh Muhammad Salih al-Munajjid, it continues: “Wearing adornments on the wrist and neck, and on the ears is an imitation of women, as this is something that is only for women. So it is not permissible for men to wear bracelets, earrings, anklets, or chains.”

The Kuwaiti parliament has now taken this religious advice to heart: on December 10, it amended the penal code so that anyone “imitating the appearance of a member of the opposite sex” could be jailed for up to a year or fined up to 1,000 dinars (£1,790).

Since then, at least 14 people have been arrested in Kuwait City and thrown into prison for the new offence, according to Human Rights Watch. Several were picked up at police checkpoints, one in a coffee shop and two more in a taxi.

Again, it really isn’t all that long ago that men who wore their hair long in our own society were regard as, at minimum, a little odd, and we still have a certain incredulity (although no longer legal discrimination) about men who dress as women.

But if I’m honest, the thing that first came to mind on reading this story was, well, if this was imposed here, what would that mean to all those metrosexuals? Carefully coiffed hair, immaculately moisturised skin and so on?

Would there be a rebellion at the clamp down, as millions of young men had to stop using those products which were until recently thought of as exclusively feminine, like said moisturisers?

Or would there be a great sigh of relief as we all abandoned the competition to appear perfectly groomed and went back the the idea of takinig a simple shower once a week, whether we needed it or not?

Economists refer to this primping and preening as a hedonic rat race, competition for a positional good. And at times it’s regarded as a bad thing, for by the very nature of the competition being about position, only a small minority can be top dog. So perhaps the slobs of the world (like myself) should actually be agitating for such laws to be brought in?

There are parts of this education theory that seem very strange:

Dr Sax, founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education in the United States, believes the answer lies in subtle, but important differences in the brains of boys and girls.

“Until ten years ago, people said that boys are spatial and girls are verbal. That’s nonsense. There is not much difference in how girls and boys think, but there are differences in how they see and hear,” he told The Times at the start of a lecture tour of boys’ schools in Britain.

That boys tend to have better spatial skills while girls tend to have better verbal is not something we consider nonsense around here, rather, it’s something we consider self-evident. But there are other parts of his theories that seem entirely reasonable, sensible even:

Boys and girls should be educated in separate classes because their brains are hard-wired to learn in different ways, a controversial book says.

Too many schools are creating an environment that is “toxic” to boys, turning them off learning and leaving them quite unprepared for adult life, according to Leonard Sax, a family doctor and research psychologist from Washington DC.

For the past decade parents and teachers have become worried increasingly about boys, who are now routinely outperformed by girls at every level and who show growing levels of disaffection and lack of motivation.

In his book Boys Adrift, Dr Sax argues that this yawning gender gap is the result of innately differently learning styles of boys and girls, and that most classrooms play to the strengths of girls.

Now again, we around here (for our EQSQ personality tests are based upon the premise) think that boys and girls tend to be hard wired differently. But not that they are. We’re taking the whole thing a step further, in that we say that there is such a thing as the female brain, something that is the male, it’s just that not all boys and or girls have the one described as being the same as their actual gender. There’s a spectrum, and while boys tend to have male brains and girls female, there’s a significant minority that cross over these distinctions.

Which means that, if you become categorical about how either girls or boys should be taught, you’ll be doing a disservice to a significant minority. Then again, if you, as the present education system seems to, insist that they be taught exactly the same, then you’ll be doing a disservice to a (different) significant minority.

But as long as we remember that these differences are not exactly distributed along with the XX and XY distinctions, then yes, his descriptions of the ways that boys and girls learn differently would be backed up by just about any experienced teacher I would think.

But while they’re good ideas this isn’t, I think, quite as good as it sounds:

When such these methods were used in single-sex classes in Florida, pass rates for primary school fourth-grade boys (Year Three in Britain) rose from 55 per cent to 85 per cent.

The history of educational theory is littered with ideas that worked well when tested and then failed to make much difference when rolled out on a larger scale. Quite simply, when experiments are made, people are paying more attention, more effort is made in general. When exactly the same practices are rolled out to the general school population, they get the usual level of attention and thus do just about as well (or badly) as any other methods. Of course, we can hope, but those results are not, for this reason, conclusive proof.

A fascinating little study here that speaks to two of the concerns we’ve long had on this blog. It throws some light on both the autism controversy and also the whole idea of male and female brain types. For one of the things we’d really like to know about both of those things is whether they are truly genetic (being caused by the original mixing of the chromosomes at the moment of conception), or caused by environmental factors either inside the womb or outside it post partum.

For example, some think that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine (although we know that specific idea is wrong) and there is still controversy over whether male and female behavior is imposed by society or innate in the child.

With autism I tend to think that it’s genetic, with behavior, a mixture of the pre-existing male and female brain types and the impositions and expectations of society. But what we’re seeing in this study of twins, one of whom had leukaemia, one not, is that there’s a whole raft of things which rely on more than just one of these mechanisms:

Doctors said pre-leukaemia cells developed in one of the twins some time after the first month of pregnancy and spread to the other while in the womb.

Shortly after birth a chance infection, perhaps from a common cold virus, was enough to trigger the second, dangerous mutation in Olivia. “What we’ve never been able to see before is where this disease begins. The surprising thing is that it’s a very small population, only 1% of leukaemia cells, that turn out to be the ring leaders,” said Prof Enver.

That, to me, is the crucial part. There was both a genetic element and an environmental one. One provided the predisposition to the disease, the other actually caused it.

I have a feeling that as we continue to investigate, as we continue to use the insights provided by genomic research, we’re going to find that an awful lot of things work this way: perhaps, even, that there are very few things which are strictly genetic and very few which are strictly environmental in causation.

There’s good news and bad news in this recent decision by the UK government about advice on careers to school pupils.

The way apprenticeships split on traditional gender lines is apparent from official figures which show only 3% of apprentices on childcare courses and 8% on hairdressing courses are men. In engineering 3% of apprentices are women, and in construction only 1% are women.

The aim is that this gender imbalance be corrected by making sure that the advice given to the pupils is sex (or if you prefer, gender) blind.

Schools will be ordered to offer impartial careers guidance to pupils amid concerns that teachers’ “sexist” attitudes are promoting hairdressing courses to girls and construction apprenticeships to boys.

And that second is the bad bit. For as we know from our EQSQ personality tests and the results that Simon Baron Cohen has got from his research, the aptitude for the different jobs and careers is not distributed equally across genders (or sexes, if you prefer). The numbers of men taking the traditionally female training (and vice versa) are certainly lower than the numbers we would expect have the aptitude for the different jobs, but the insistence on gender blind counselling makes me think that they want to move to something more like an equal split of the sexes on each course.

And as we know, that’s not right either. We find that some 17% of women have the systemising type brain (and would therefore be suited to an engineering type job) and similarly some 17% of men have the empathising and thus might be suited to the child-care ones.

I suppose that my real complaint is that they seem not to have heard of Baron Cohen’s research at all: instead of being gender blind, the counselling should first attempt to work out the brain type of each individual and then direct the advice appropriately. But then that’s trying to insist that government be sensible and up to date: always a losing proposition, that one.

I find this little story fascinating.

Female singers striving for vocal perfection have been advised to take the contraceptive pill because the hormones can help stabilise their voices.

Opera singers sometimes have problems hitting high notes at key points in their menstrual cycle because of changes to their vocal chords.

Some have been forced to skip sections of music or even avoid performing altogether.

As we know, the pill was originally invented to free women and their sex lives (and thus, indirectly, the men in their lives) from the tyranny of boundless fertility. It’s interesting (to me, at least) that the method chosen to perform this chemical treat, the mimicking of pregnancy itself, also means that the huge hormonal swings of the menstrual cycle have also been swept away.

Yes, I realise that this one specific example, of classical singers being less affected by such hormones is relatively trivial, but when we combine it with those earlier findings about the earnings of lap-dancers on (or not on) the pill it serves (again, to me) as an interesting reminder of quite how little we actually know.

No, really, the way to a happy love life is sniffing the t-shirt of your intended date.

The thing is that we are programmed to find attractive those who have an immune system complimentary to our own. And the evidence of such is contained in the pheromones that we throw out in our sweat, meaning that sniffing a t-shirt which has been worn for three days can give us some guidance (ie, whether we like the smell or not) as to whether we would find the person attractive. This is also a reason why those pheromone scents in a bottle don’t in fact work: the opposite sex is looking for subtle scents compatible with their own, rather than a generalised blast of general human hormones.

It’s also, slightly oddly, why women who have similar natural such body smells tend to choose the same perfume. It is to maximise, to exaggerate, the pre-existing odours, rather than to cover them.

In his original study Dr Wedekind recruited female volunteers to sniff men’s three-day-old T-shirts and rate them for attractiveness. He then analysed the men’s and women’s DNA, looking in particular at the genes that build a part of the immune system known as the major histocompatability complex (MHC). Dr Wedekind knew, from studies on mice, that besides fending off infection, the MHC has a role in sexual attractiveness. It changes odours in ways the mice can detect (with mice, the odours are in the urine), and that detection is translated into preferences for particular mates. What is true for mice is often true for men, so he had a punt on the idea that the MHC might affect the smell of human sweat, as well.

It did. Women preferred T-shirts from men whose MHC was most different from their own. What was more, women with similar MHCs favoured the use of similar commercial perfumes. This suggests that the role of such perfumes may be to flag up the underlying body scent rather than mask it, as a more traditional view of the aesthetics of body odour might suggest.

That makes evolutionary sense. The children of couples with a wide range of MHC genes, and thus of immune responses, will be better protected from disease. As the previous article suggests, that could be particularly important in a collaborative, group-living species such as humanity. Moreover, comparing MHCs could be a proxy for comparing kinship, and thus help to prevent inbreeding.

OK, so much for the science. (It should be noted that this doesn’t work for women on the pill. Pregnant women prefer the smell of people with very similar MHC, like family members. Hmm, I think we might actually have explained the modern rise in divorce here, for a large number of women when out dating and looking for a mate will indeed be on the pill and will only come off it some years later, take a whiff and call the lawyers. You think?) But what next?

Well, clearly, the next thing to do is figure out how to make money out of it. Which has been done by a dating agency. They test (similar to a regular DNA test) your MHC and then set you up with those who have a very different set. Sadly, it costs $1,995 a time which really isn’t the sort of fee we really want to have to pay in order to get a date.

Sadly, the simpler, cheaper option also seems unlikely to work. I’m not really sure what the reaction on Facebook would be if before agreeing to meet in meatspace one demanded (or offered to send) a three day worn t-shirt. Not a good one I’d think. So perhaps this is a scientific finding to file in the “interesting but not immediately useful” bin?

This is really a rather counter-intuitive result to me. In fact I find it really rather strange. Here’s the whole synopsis of the paper:

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development–including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth–were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men’s personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.

What’s confusing me is that this is entirely running the other way from what happens with cultural and working differences between rich and poor societies. In a truly poor society (as most of the world still lives in) then sexual roles are strictly, even fiercely defined. There’s very little freedom for a woman to enter the world of paid work outside the home, for example, and there’s almost none for a man who might want to stay home and raise the children.

In our vastly richer society these options are indeed open. Even if they really only have opened up in the last generation or two and to the chagrin of some, not many men make the decision to do as they now can.

Now I would expect that in a world of greater freedom such as we have, that personality differences as defined by sex would reduce. For while I do believe that certain parts of the human psyche are innate, I’m perfectly willing to agree that some (much?) is influenced by the society in which one grows up. A more egalitarian one, as between the sexes, would to my mind lead to a narrowing of those differences.

But the authors of this paper have come to the opposite conclusion. That personality differences between the sexes increase when the society is both richer and more sexually egalitarian. Very much a head scratcher and one I’m going to have to think about a little more.

One point we might make though. If the empirical evidence is that the richer a society the greater female neuroticism, have we actually found the smoking gun about women’s body image, anorexia and the rest? That capitalism really is to blame, as it is capitalism that produces the riches?

This is an interesting little discovery:

A specific structural variation on chromosome 16 dramatically boosts the risk of autism, according to a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

That would seem to be supporting Simon Baron Cohen’s ideas that autism is indeed genetic and that the rise in incidence is being driven by assortative mating. However, that might not be quite the way to read it.

The findings build on previous reports that autism is linked to genetic deletions or duplications that arise spontaneously, rather than being passed down through generations. In almost all cases, parents of the affected people did not carry the chromosome 16 variation.

Ah, there, you see? What they think they’ve found is that it is a spontaneous (another way of thinking about it is first generation) mutation. So it isn’t in fact something that is handed down from parents to children, it’s something which happens at the very earliest stages of the development of the fetus (or blastocyst perhaps). So this would seem to indicate that we’ve got something which refutes the Baron Cohen thesis. For, as we know, that entails that the condition of autism be inheritable.

So, should we simply throw out the whole idea (either of them, as they seem to be mutually incompatible)? No, not quite, for there’s a third part to their findings.

They found that deletion or duplication of approximately 500 of the same DNA letters on chromosome 16 was strongly linked to autism, accounting for about one percent of cases. “While that doesn’t sound like a huge number, the fact that these people carry the identical spontaneous deletion or duplication would be incredibly unlikely to happen by chance,”

We’re able to explain some one percent of autism cases this way. The other 99% are so far open to other explanations. And this leads us back to another contention of Baron Cohen’s, one that is generally not all that well known.

That there really isn’t a “disease” called autism. A disease implies one causative factor: what we really should be saying about autism is that it’s a condition. And the thing about conditions is that they can have multiple causes. Similarly, diseases can cause multiple conditions, not all of which show in each and every case (measles normally just produces a rash and a temperature but it can also cause brain damage). Congestive heart failure, for example, is a condition: it can have many causes (ie, many diseases or factors can cause it), pleurisy, cholestorol, viral infections and so on. And so with autism. We can see the diagnostic criteria in someone, but we don’t actually know what has caused them. Here we have a possible explanation for 1% of cases. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that the same diagnostic signs can be caused by more than one thing. Just as with heart disease.

As they say, more research is required here.

Or rather, gay men can’t navigate. That’s the outcome of a piece of research that was done in London recently:

Gay men navigate in a similar fashion to women, according to research that offers fresh evidence for a heavy biological influence over sexual orientation.

Now this is all rather intimately tied into the background research that gives us our EQSQ personality tests so it’s worth explaining some background again. Essentially, the current belief is that there is a spectrum of brain types, which we call from female (or empathising) to male (or systemising). Autism is an expression of an extreme form of the male brain. There are certain attributes which are associated with the male brain, one of which is spatial reasoning. This is what gives the male brain that better talent at map reading, as an example. Now we also have to point out that not all men have the male brain, nor all women the female: here on this blog we once asked an economist (which uses much the same spatial skills as map reading) whether she was good at reading maps and her answer was that she was, better than most men in fact.

And the mechanism which produces this male or female brain type is thought to be exposure to fetal testosterone in the womb (other recent research is showing that this is better than plausible, if not yet proven).

I’ve been terribly hesitant to even think that sexual orientation is influenced in the same manner: that it’s heavily (if not completely) biologically influenced I have no doubt, it’s the mechanism I’m thinking about.

Yet, if we are finding that gay men (on average remember, always on average) share some of the attributes of the female brain, then we are at least going to have to think about whether they do so for the same biological reason.

Is it all caused by the same thing, the level of exposure to fetal testosterone? If it is (and it’s nowhere near proved yet) then that enables us to answer another question, which to why homosexuality persists, for it is plainly not an evolutionary mechanism to maximise the number of one’s own descendants. Thus it’s unlikely that it is passed down in the genes: but if the mechanism is environmental, in the womb, that neatly sidesteps that problem.

Well, I mean, who wouldn’t want to be an alcohol researcher? (There’s a novel in which one of the characters does get the perfect job: travelling to bars to taste the beer on behalf of the brewery, to make sure it’s being served right. “Decline and Fall” by Evelyn Waugh, I think). Actually, this research does throw up an interesting result:

Women drink more than men at fancy dress parties, scientists say.

This goes against pretty much everything else we know about men, women and alcohol. In almost every social situation, men drink more than women (and not just in relation to body size: they get drunker). But what we’ve got here is something different, a time when women get drunker than men. The researcher doesn’t say what he thinks causes it but I think we can take a guess ourselves:

However researchers who attended 66 American student parties found this to be true, except when they involved guests wearing fancy dress - especially with a sexual theme.

I think it’s our old friend, women and their body image, at play here. Attending a party in fancy dress, one with a sexually explicit theme, will play on those old insecurities just fine. And when people are nervous in social situations they do indeed tend to drink more, to allay those fears. So I think we’ve found our cause here.

However, there is one more thing that needs to be pointed out:

“Given that some theme parties can be highly sexualized, future investigation of the mechanisms that may explain this effect is warranted.”

That’s the researcher speaking there and what he’s actually saying is, in the special code that academics use, that further research grants should be given to him so that he can carry on his investigations. He might even be right, but cynical old me wants to point out what he’s really saying.

I want you to give me more money so that I can go to more fancy dress parties, ones with “a sexual theme”, ones where young female students are wearing skimpy costumes in a “highly sexualised” atmosphere, parties where women are drinking more than they normally do to cover up their insecurities.

Yes, I would like a job like that. Where do I sign up?