On HU
Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on Neil Gaiman and the death of dream.
A storify about telling people they’re privileged.
Chris Gavaler presents a superhero performance.
I reviewed the film Bethelehem about the Israeli spies and how they suck.
I reviewed the doc Next Year In Jerusalem about elderly American touring Israel.
Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from the end of ’52.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Playboy I interviewed David Barash about how humans are naturally polygamous and harem forming.
At the Kernel I wrote about my failed Patreon campaign.
For my first piece at The Week I wrote that this isn’t the year of the political outsider.
At the Establishment I wrote about the fascist fantasies of “London Has Fallen” and Trump.
At Splice Today I wrote
—about some great future past electronica: Chema64, Gqom, and Kraftwerk reprised.
—that Sanders should quit when it’s clear he’s going to lose.
A couple of Shmoop guides I worked on were posted.
—One on Karel Capek’s
—One on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Other Links
Jeff Spross on how we should give welfare to everyone.
C.T. May on shitty prose on the Internet.
Suzy Khimm on the movement after Sanders.
On your Sanders piece: I tend to believe Sanders’ goal all along was to achieve a Perot Effect -make a splash and get his issues out there and influence the winner, as Perot, in fact did- in which case stopping now wouldn’t make any sense.
Of course, Perot syphoned off a non-trivial portion of the vote on the right, but I anticipate Sanders, at worst, going home after the Democratic convention, having gotten a few planks on the platform and prodded HRC left. More likely, I see him endorsing and campaigning for her, considering the alternative…
The thing is, I think there’s a point where you become less influential as it becomes clear you can’t win, or as you keep losing. I think he’s probably pushed Clinton and the party as much as he’s likely to be able to, and is moving towards the point of diminishing returns.
I have two sorta tangential comments on your Playboy, Polygamy, Polygyny piece.
1. I see no reason why a traditional polygyny set-up couldn’t be used to matriarchal ends. I mean, if you’re really a democrat it necessarily would be. So politics can change the meaning, I think, which is simply really interesting to me. Also, it sounds ideal for child rearing. Testosterone’s not great for impulse control.
2. I wish there was more work on asexuality and aromantic tendencies. From an evolutionary standpoint, non-breeders who yet reproduce culturally, especially if they are one of the primary caregivers to (a) child/ren. Genetic reproduction happens with cultural reproduction. This has been shown in many species. Also, asexuality as a result of environment. Lots of animals don’t breed in captivity. Makes perfect sense. It seems really perverse for any creature to reproduce in a hostile environment. (of course, I don’t believe there is one reason for anything, so I’m not making any argument at all.) I do really wish asexuality wasn’t sooooo fucking invisible. I know it’s more common and it really isn’t repped; the media makes it seems like we’re all in desperate search of a mate. I’m not. The idea of a mate *horrifies* me.
… That last bit is more aromantic than asexual, maybe. But with sex/marriage a la horse/carriage, so many humans are like desperate meerkats and were trained to be. The desire to get married can’t possibly be “natural”… pending you can parse a difference between nature and culture. Hahahoho… Fuck your carriage.
Finally, somewhere along the line it seems like humans decided the most important bond was a sexual bond. In my experience of relationships, sexual bonds are by far the least stable. Why would anyone make the least stable primary? I don’t get it.
PS, the non-breeders makes it sound like I’m being heteronormative/supremacist. Generally speaking, I am of the opinion that sexuality is fluid and canalized. I’m thinking more libido. (You can only end up making out with so many gay male friends and straight girls before it’s more about direction and force of energy, as well as relationship structures and their reproduction, than a strict “sexuality”… which, in general, when most people talk of it, confuses me.)
My base theory is that the more interested you are in having sex with others (not masturbating) the more likely you are to reproduce, just playing the odds.
OK. Bye.
“I do really wish asexuality wasn’t sooooo fucking invisible”
Apparently Chip Zdarsky just outed Jughead (as in “Archie’s Pal”) as asexual.
@BU I was just a kid at the time, but I remember it well. When Clinton finally vetoed NAFTA, we all knew that behind it was the quixotic billionaire from Texas with the funny ears. Oh, wait…
@Noah You can’t become less influential when your influence is already 0.
“Finally, somewhere along the line it seems like humans decided the most important bond was a sexual bond. In my experience of relationships, sexual bonds are by far the least stable. Why would anyone make the least stable primary? I don’t get it.”
I suspect the answer, if there is one, is complicated. But I have to assume it has to do with the cultural shift to romantic love as the basis for marriage. To the extent sexual attraction is part of romantic love, and because it is, as you note unstable (even ephemeral), it makes intuitive sense that people with skin in the game would want to build it up. That’s maybe the optimistic view?
Not being an optimist, I’m inclined to think that the privileging of the mutual sex bond just maintains the patriarchy. In the U.S. it was, and to an extent still is, more-or-less expected that men will step out (boys will be boys), but that women must keep it in the marriage. The double standard suggests a mechanism of control more than a mutual agreement.
Of course, accepting that romantic love is a cultural construct doesn’t necessarily make the expectation of monogamy “feel” any less important or true. Affect and emotion theory has gone a long way toward showing that cultural constructions rest on (and persist through) a convoluted chain of sublimation.
At this point, I’m driving way past my headlights…
Nix, there is a growing asexuality movement. I should read more about it, but there are at least a few books from my cursory search on Amazon. (You probably know this already though.)
Politicized sexual identities (like homosexuality) are more the result of oppression/resistance than descriptions of biological truths about who you will/won’t ever have sex with, I think. Barash does agree with you though that different relationships can be inflected differently. Human evolutionary history is uniquely malleable because of human brains and culture. Along those lines, I’m not sure that the sexual bond *is* primary in marriage, exactly. Marriage means lots of things culturally and personally; sex doesn’t have to be at the center.
I took Nix’s remark about the sexual bond being primary as a statement about normative expectations (as opposed to the realities of marriage). It’s also worth mentioning that this expectation is heteronormative. Again, I’m outside my realm of expertise on the specifics, but there’s a lot of work on this stuff. Lauren Berlant and Nancy Frasier have both written on it. I’ll have to revisit it soon, as it’s coming up a lot in discussions surrounding cultural citizenship and marriage equality.
“It’s also worth mentioning that this expectation is heteronormative. ”
But it isn’t now! Or less so, since marriage equality has become much more visible and accepted. That’s an example of culture changing meanings, I think.
@Nate A. Monogamy as traditionally practiced in Anglo-Saxon countries – that is, in combination with norms by which married adults live separately from their parents, and brothers have no mutual obligations (as in most of Latin Europe, Russia, India, and China, where there’s a tradition of brothers equally dividing their inheritance) – is maybe the family form most corrosive of male authority, as a result of its making the wife the only adult member of the household besides the husband. (Maybe the strongest competitor is the form that existed until the second half of the 20th century in Kerala, where the monogamous husband and wife each continues to live with his or her respective parents after marriage, the husband visiting the wife in her family’s home.)
Polygyny, like Buddhism and communism, is one thing when bored western liberals dabble in it, and another thing (or things) in countries that actually take it seriously. As commonly practiced in Subsaharan Africa today, the result is that, as opposed to the husband delegating some of his power to his wife, men simply ignore women. For an example of the practical result, see the male versus female literacy rate: men are far ahead of women in the middle third of the continent, where polygyny is most common, and barely ahead of even slightly behind on the southern periphery from Namibia to Mozambique, where polygyny is rarer.
Forgot to mention: Contra what I assume Noah’s interviewee is saying, judging by the family form that appears most frequently in the various parts of the world peripheral to major population centers – e.g. England, Ethiopia, Java, pre-colonial North America – humans probably “naturally” form monogamous relationships and live near (but not in the same house as) the father’s parents.
” Contra what I assume Noah’s interviewee is saying”
Hah; you might want to read it; his arguments are somewhat more complicated than that.
He argues that monogamy is a more egalitarian arrangement in general. Also argues that there are things about humans which make them suited for monogamy, though there’s evolutionary evidence that (at least historically) harems were probably how societies were set up. (The biggest evidence is human dimorphism, which is associated with harem formation in most species.)
I’m not advocating polygamy, and I think morality is relevant to more of this discussion than Mr. Barash does, but that was an informative and fascinating interview. Graham, I don’t disagree with any of your points about power structures or Western liberals, but I recommend reading it. For what it’s worth, I’m not sure Barash would disagree with you, either. He seems to be listing advantages and disadvantages of the various family arrangements and discussing the role of biology more than advocating anything, although the book may be different. I especially enjoyed his point about humans’ unique capability to rise above those biological influences.
Noah, I’d submit that Sanders does HRC more good than harm -even when he ramped up the aggression in the latest debate-simply by being there and having better than a snowball’s chance; it’s the horse-races sell papers thing, and gives the media something faintly interesting to cover on that side. -And as long as he’s winning delegates for leverage at the convention, my original point stands.
@Graham I was an adult at the time and actually remember what Perot’s big issue was. Opposition to free trade wasn’t even his second position after, of the -maybe- 20-30% of the time he talked about anything else.
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On monogamy/biology, even casual observation makes it clear that humans have considerably less sexual dimorphism than the other primates and more than -for example- species of birds that mate for life. Throw in that in practice, some cultures go in for polygamy, others monogamy, and the latter is frequently scandalized by rampant unfaithfulness, and I don’t think a conclusion that we fall somewhere in the middle of the ‘gamy’ spectrum is unwarranted.
Humans have less sexual dimorphism than some species…but more than those which are monogamous, according to Barash.
Another indication that we’re a polygamous, harem-forming species is the fact that boys mature more slowly than girls. Best explanation for that is that boys need to stay sexually immature as long as possible so they aren’t seen as being in competition for mates until they’re big enough/smart enough to defend themselves.
But again, the thing about humans is that we’ve got these big brains, which we can use to act in all sorts of “unnatural” ways. The most human thing about us is that we don’t do what our genes tell us (or have a lot of leeway in interpreting what our genes tell us, however you want to look at it.)
@John He has a book called “Buddhist Biology.” I think I’ll spare myself.
@BU Come on, the one thing people who don’t follow politics remember about him is the giant sucking sound. Anyway, what are you alluding to? The balanced budget? He couldn’t “get” that “out there” – even if people who lose elections ever did do that, which they don’t – because both of the other candidates already wanted it anyway.
@Noah As the Leadro character from the commedia dell’arte tradition – and his belated culmination as Beaumarchais’ and Mozart’s Cherubino – attests, boys are seen as sexual competition from the moment when they’re capable of getting a woman pregnant.
Ugh – Leandro.
Noah, I agree with your first paragraph -I thought I said that- and like your insight in the third. In between, I find your logic to scan, but still look around in our nominally monogamous culture and find us in between. I’m also not sure the same strategy wouldn’t hold as true in a monogamous species, where there’s less competition/fighting mostly because the fights actually settle it for good.
Graham: points for adequate civility that time, but I agree with none of your assertions of fact aside from guessing balanced budget on the second try. No use in us going on with this.
“points for adequate civility” is of course one of the least civil things anyone can ever say. Fortunately, I of course don’t want them.
“boys are seen as sexual competition from the moment when they’re capable of getting a woman pregnant.”
Right; this is why they’ve evolved so that the moment when they can do that is unusually late.
Yeah, look at all those 12 year olds holding their own against fully grown adult men in sports.
I’m…confused. Looking at the kids in my son’s class, I can assure you that 12 year old boys haven’t generally hit puberty. Some girls have; this is the developmental dimorphism we’re talking about.
Boys hit puberty late, and when they do, they grow very fast, as opposed to girls, who start out ahead. This is consistent with Barash’s discussion. Of course, humans are tricky, so it’s difficult to 100% know anything about us…but I think it’s pretty strong evidence for his position. I found it convincing. (Especially since I’d always wondered what the deal was with girls maturing so quickly.)
again though…even if Barash is correct about harem formation, that doesn’t mean we should reorganize our societies around harems or anything. In fact, Barash argues (correctly, in my view) that we should not.
https://www.google.com/search?q=boys+average+age+puberty
Yep, as that link says, boys mature later!
Are you arguing that the maturing later doesn’t matter because it would only offer a slight advantage? that seems to be the gist of your earlier comments…which would be a real misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. (as you surely know…)
12 seems pretty early. I know quite a bit of 12 year olds at the moment; number who have hit puberty is 0. Some at 13, though still not very many.
Noah, what’s with all this discussion of ev. psych. without the usual eye-rolling, contempt, etc? You’ve changed, man…
Hah. Well, I like Barash’s spin on it. Can’t be consistent all the time…
Woo, look at that goal post move.
5:28 – “Looking at the kids in my son’s class, I can assure you that 12 year old boys haven’t generally hit puberty.”
10:31 – “Yep, as that link says, boys mature later!”
Graham, I’m not getting your investment here. The argument is that boys mature later. This suggests that they’re putting off maturation so that they are bigger/more able to defend themselves when they become sexual competition.
That seems a pretty straightforward argument. Your response seems to be, “well they’re still not fully able to defend themselves.” But for evolution to have selected for this, there only needs to be a slight advantage. That’s how evolution works.
If you have a counter-explanation for why boys mature earlier, I’d be interested to hear it. and/or if you have an actual objection, I’d be happy to listen to that too. I think Barash’s explanation is elegant and convincing, but if you’ve got something equally elegant and convincing, maybe I can be convinced! Snarky, transparently ideological flailing that is based on you pretending you don’t understand how evolution works just seems pointless though.
argh; maybe that’s overly snarky. I’m trying to find other explanations for the discrepancy, but am not seeing anything through google at the moment. Would be interested if anyone else finds one though.
Curious about other explanations for sexual dimorphism too…again a quick google search isn’t turning up anything…
Can you be more specific about what your question is, re: other explanations?
Oh…well, Barash argues that dimorphism is an evolutionary result of harem formation; in speceis where harem formation is common, men tend to get bigger/stronger to compete with each other for mates. So, the question is, from an evolutionary perspective, if dimorphism is not the result of humans being a harem forming species, what is its evolutionary explanation?
Well, I’m 15+ years out of touch with the state of the art in evolutionary theory, but based on first principles I’d have thought the standard explanation of dimorphism was sexual selection. But I have no idea how the evidence compares for that vs. other explanations
Okay, I obviously did a poor job of explaining in my earliest remarks on this.
Polygamy/monogamy isn’t a binary – there’s a spectrum, much like gay-het, and we’re ‘bi-gamys’ somewhere in the middle. I don’t think there’s any question that dimorphism isn’t to do with sexual selection/competition – but intelligence is also part of our evolution, and like the chimpanzee Jane Goodall observed rising to alpha status by finding the novel display strategy of rolling empty cans down hills, our big brains make it a much more complex and difficult to decipher thing than bighorn sheep butting heads.
Note too, that dimorphism expresses in ways other than bigger and stronger that sometimes are useful in competition displays (as well as the obvious Mrs. Orangutan thinks your fat male face is handsome). Evolution often favors competitive strategies that resolve conflict less violently, resting on dances and elaborate displays hard to fathom without that species’ sensory equipment. Baboons flash their colorful butts not only at the opposite gender but as part of their threat displays between rivals.
-And ants aren’t even selecting for faster males with more stamina in their mating flights, being a hive species that selects on the whole hive level of completion centered around the queen, the mating flight part being rather vestigial to all that.
-It’s complicated, is what I’m saying, with nature having found a very wide range of strategies and modes across many species.
“Polygamy/monogamy isn’t a binary – there’s a spectrum, much like gay-het, and we’re ‘bi-gamys’ somewhere in the middle. I don’t think there’s any question that dimorphism isn’t to do with sexual selection/competition – but intelligence is also part of our evolution, and like the chimpanzee Jane Goodall observed rising to alpha status by finding the novel display strategy of rolling empty cans down hills, our big brains make it a much more complex and difficult to decipher thing than bighorn sheep butting heads.”
Sure; Barash agrees with you.
Yeah; I finally broke down and read the article after posting my last. My main takeaway was that it’s certainly a very Playboy thing to cover. Does Barash have any science credentials? What field?
It seemed appropriate for Playboy, in part because I think it challenges some of their assumptions (since it’s basically arguing for the virtues of monogamy.)
Barash is an psychologist at the University of Washington. The book is published by Oxford UP.
Ah. I got a sense, reading it, that he was probably a soft science guy who’d done a lot of research on the evolutionary biology part.
I take it this interview was initiated by you, then, not assigned somehow? Good job on selling to Playboy while it’s still there.
Hah; I don’t think Playboy is going anywhere.
Yep, I pitched it. That’s how these things usually happen (every so often an editor will ask me to do something, but mostly freelancers are expected to pitch ideas.)
I would be surprised if they survived the repackaging – I’ve seen that sort of thing in comics alone always end up meaning “We’re not yet willing to admit we’re through.” -Still, for your sake alone, I hope I’m wrong, given how sweet I’ve heard breaking into Playboy is for rates and how they treat contributors.
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There’s a thing that hasn’t come up yet about the correlation between herding/flocking/troop/pack modes of living and stronger levels of polygamy, but humans, with so many varied modes according to culture and circumstance, make it a hopeless hash with how we’ll gather in cities of millions but prefer to sleep in rooms alone or in pairs…
And this might be good for at least a larf:
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=articles;sa=view;article=10
If you ignore the science fiction part related to a game (trying to discern what two aliens are probably like from headshots) I was going for a tone somewhere between academic and popular science, talk a lot about what’s known of Earth species as the basis for the reasoning, and it’s a reasonably good overview on sexual dimorphism and the evolutionary implications, with much on how mode of diet (herbivore, omnivore, predator) plays into it. I couldn’t swear I got every detail exactly right -my degree’s in communications- but the science is overall solid, as I understand it…