Pornification of girlhood

I was interested in this Quadrant article by Melinda Reist on trends in modern commercial culture towards the sexualisation of girls. Girls are increasingly taught that their bodies are their major asset and the main source of their self-worth. The important thing is to be 'hot'.

Despite the internalisation of many of the ideas in the 'women's movement' many young women seem to me to lack a sense of autonomy. Modern dress styles mirror this. Freedom and fulfillment are endangered by a promoted need to be desired.

Reist's arguments are a bit exaggerated - and a bit worn - but, overall, they are a good read. They came at the same time as this Senate report on the sexualisation of children in the media - policy recommendations are here.

Public policy responses to the sexualisation of children are often inappropriate - they should be directed at restricting offensive advertising. Beyond this promoting realistic sense of self-worth is a matter of education and developing sufficiently discriminatory tastes.

What does Dick Cheney see in fly-fishing?

Hat tip Daniel Finkelstein

Update: Apparently it is his hand on his fly rod . I can guess the humour with that explanation.

Maternity economics

In advance of the Productivity Commission report being released Melbourne’s Pravda has come out strongly in support of paid maternity leave for all ‘working’ women with a front-page editorial (it could never be mistaken for a news-story) written by two concerned sensitive femmes and, luckily for them, a supportive article by Pru Goward who is miffed previous governments did not endorse her scheme, a backup story on two struggling mums and a mainstream editorial further on. Pravda takes its role of educating the ignorant masses of Victoria seriously although perhaps here with a certain amount of overkill.

The concerned femmes reject waiting for the PC report on the grounds that: ‘Disappointed women's equity activists [they don’t specify who these are] see this as a delaying tactic’.

This is trash journalism at its worst. Indeed the story itself points out the complexity of the PC inquiry:

‘The terms of reference include exploring what employers now pay; it will also identify pay models and their interaction with social welfare systems; assess the cost and benefits to business; examine women's workforce participation, employment and earnings; investigate post-birth health of the mother and development of children from newborns to two years; and analyse financial pressures on families’.

Pravda seems (I am unsure) to want extended leave provision funded from the public purse at some fixed percentage of salary and they don’t like the baby bonus (BB). It is a bit non-specific since when it comes to details they are, well, vague.

If this is Pravda’s advocated policy it is not a self-evidently good thing at all. I think we should wait before the PC inquiry reports before making up our minds. First, it seems to me that, as a matter of course, parents should save to provide a decent environment for their newly-born while one parent takes unpaid leave. The government has already taken over our task of saving for our old age by compulsory superannuation and now is being urged to take away from us any need to save for large consumption and income-depleting events such as having a child. It is the nanny-state gone bananas.

The chorus from the fruitcake left will in unison say – ‘what about the poor and ‘working families’’(to use a treasured Ruddism). Well economic theory is clear on this. Give them income if they need income but don’t meet their income needs through paid maternity leave.

Second, while the current baby bonus is regressive the scheme proposed by Pravda is even more so. With a fixed proportional payout per worker a lawyer earning $200,000 per year who gives birth would get 5 times the benefits a factory worker taking home $40,000 who does the same. Do the rich sheila’s kids provide more social externalities than the battler? I don’t see it.

Third, one can ask, why the payment? The editorial thunders:

‘First, it is not about who pays — clearly, it should not be a direct cost to employers, but accepted as a national responsibility. Taxpayers who paid for maternity leave would ultimately benefit because they would retain vital members of the workforce and allow them to produce the next generation of Australians at a time when fertility rates are low. It makes sense to subsidise women to have families, rather than to penalise them for what comes naturally. If a generation of working women sacrifice motherhood to preserve jobs and careers, it will cost us all’.

This suggests that, giving birth provides an external benefit to the community. But if that is the case then why restrict the payment to working women? Why not give a baby bonus type payment to all women including stay-at-home mums. An enhanced baby bonus, perhaps means tested and perhaps coupled with the right to unpaid leave for working mothers, seems a better suggestion than Pravda’s suggested policy. (By the way I disbelieve the proposition that enhancing the bonus would lead to significant costs of mothers delaying delivery as Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh apparently do).

These articles and policy recommendations are, as I say, trash journalism from what is becoming Australia’s worst daily newspaper. Pravda has no hesitation in pushing any daft fashionable leftwing political causes its nitwit journalists believe in but is short on analysis of the consequences of its endorsements.

Gender inequality in education

Gary Becker examines the new gender inequality in US education – females do better that men at school and because they get married later and have fewer kids have become the majority gender (57%) in US college education. Men get lower grades and drop out more. The obvious question is why women do better at school? This isn’t clear – perhaps they are ‘more diligent students, less rebellious and more docile’.

The outcomes here are interesting since, as Richard Posner notes, men still dominate the workforce and wage inequalities favour men. Posner accepts that women are more ‘docile’ than men who are likewise more ‘aggressive’ and hence less open to new educational experiences but again asks why this is so.

One speculative explanation suggested by Posner rests in the decline in the disciplined ‘patriarchal’ family (due to increased illegitimacy and a higher incidence of divorce) which might be ‘harder’ on boys than girls. If dad isn’t around maybe boys become more unruly than girls and do worse at school.

Maybe too because boys can more easily get into a wide range of well-paid jobs than girls that they have less incentive to invest in their human capital.

A quick flip around the web didn’t yield much more than a general confirmation that these patterns also exist in Australia although my casual observation suggests they do.

Fuller-figured women are just fatter

Why are women developing larger breasts? Hormones that stem, in part, from taking the pill play some role but the major fact is just that women carry more fat generally and a significant fraction of the breast is fat.

Brassiere manufacturers are responding to the increase with larger average cup sizes.

Hat tip to: A Random Walk.

Hot strippers earn big bucks

I found this fascinating. Geoffrey Miller’s theory is that women have lost their oestrus – any outward sign of fertility – to keep men faithful. Otherwise a man might go hunting for another mate when he knew his mate was infertile. But this should create an evolutionary arms race among men as men evolve ever-heightened sensitivity to signs of female fertility.

Miller tested his theory in lap-dancing clubs by examining the number of dollars female performers received for their dancing. During menstruation – when women were infertile – women earned about $185 per shift – about what they earned if they were on the pill. Women who were ovulating earned $335.

This suggests a woman is sexier when she is fertile and that lap dancers should stay off the pill if their main objective is to maximise their income. Earlier studies have shown that a woman’s face, smell and even clothing become more attractive during oestrus. Clothing looks more attractive to men when women are fertile.

But I still don’t know if women advertise their sexuality better when they are fertile or men have enhanced powers to pick up their fertility status.

Do women work harder?

At the recent ACE meetings I attended, a prominent economist (Christopher Pissarides) asserted in one session that he had found that in developed countries (other than Denmark) women work harder in total (in the paid workforce and in the home) than men. It was a claim that interested me so I have been checking it out. At least one prominent NBER study refutes it overall. There are in fact quite a few countries where men work harder – notably the US – where everyone tends to work quite hard. Women do more work in the home but men make up for it in the paid workforce.

Women might feel they have less free time but when they are not working they tend to sleep whereas men watch TV or do other things. This may change the perception that women have less free time.

An interesting observation is that the richer the country the smaller the gap between hours worked by men and women.

Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative cites the Australian evidence – except for women with children aged less than 5 years men work harder. The attached comments to Mark's post contains data sources.

Polygamy & the unwanted males

I got a fair bit of adverse comment for a post I made on how gender-balanced Muslim societies could deal with the sexual frustration that must affect those males that miss out on a partner where polygamy is practiced.

I suggested this frustration might spill over into aberrant social attitudes, a preference for religious stupidity and even a leakage of young men into the ranks of the terrorists. They might even then delude themselves by believing they can eventually ‘get it off’ with the 72 virgins in heaven if they do their duty on earth by massacring some innocent civilians and non-believers.

The standard argument by Robert Frank is that polygamy advances the interests of women by increasing their scarcity value. I don't buy this in Muslim societies where a female is initially the property of her father which is, on marriage, transferred to her husband. Indeed one might argue that these oppressive institutional arrangements that treat women badly are endogenously determined by the demand for polygamy which would otherwise give them enhanced scarcity value.

Oppression is then a mechanism for reducing what would otherwise be increased bargaining power. Women just lose out big and are treated badly as Ayaan Hirsi Ali (and others) point out.

No-one could possibly say that women in Muslim societies enjoy enhanced status as a consequence of polygamy. That is not so anywhere.

The Mormons in the United States have an interesting way of dealing with induced gender imbalances in their polygamous societies. The old guys just kick all the young men out and keep all the nubile young women for themselves. At my age it sounds like a conjugally ideal type of arrangement although I doubt I would have enjoyed it as a rootless young man. And my own daughters doubtless would dislike this way of organising their future marriages. I wonder if these ugly Mormons have any respect for their own daughters!

According to the New York Times:

Over the last six years, hundreds of teenage boys have been expelled or felt compelled to leave the polygamous settlement that straddles Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.

Disobedience is usually the reason given for expulsion, but former sect members and state legal officials say the exodus of males — the expulsion of girls is rarer — also remedies a huge imbalance in the marriage market. Members of the sect believe that to reach eternal salvation, men are supposed to have at least three wives.

It is amazing how grown men can delude themselves and, indeed, how whole societies can come to fool themselves with non-functional religious beliefs.

Sexual frustration under Islam

I have asked Muslims I know what happens to all the men who miss out on getting a partner in an Islamic society when polygamy is practised? Assuming levels of homosexuality are constant across cultures and that the gender ratio is approximatetely 1:1, won't there be a lot of sexually frustrated men?

This article from Psychology Today suggests that frustration is inevitable and explains the concentration of terrorism and suicide bombers among Muslim polygamist societies as a consequence. The claim is that nearly all suicide bombers are single.

This is a corollary of the idea due to Robert Frank - discussed earlier on this blog - that polygamy favours females at the expense of males.

'The history of western civilization aside, humans are naturally polygamous. Polyandry (a marriage of one woman to many men) is very rare, but polygyny (the marriage of one man to many women) is widely practiced in human societies, even though Judeo-Christian traditions hold that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage. We know that humans have been polygynous throughout most of history because men are taller than women.

Among primate and nonprimate species, the degree of polygyny highly correlates with the degree to which males of a species are larger than females. The more polygynous the species, the greater the size disparity between the sexes. Typically, human males are 10% taller and 20% heavier than females. This suggests that, throughout history, humans have been mildly polygynous. Relative to monogamy, polygyny creates greater fitness variance (the distance between the "winners" and the "losers" in the reproductive game) among males than among females because it allows a few males to monopolize all the females in the group.

The greater fitness variance among males creates greater pressure for men to compete with each other for mates. Only big and tall males can win mating opportunities. Among pair-bonding species like humans, in which males and females stay together to raise their children, females also prefer to mate with big and tall males because they can provide better physical protection against predators and other males. In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, "The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one."

Despite the fact that humans are naturally polygynous, most industrial societies are monogamous because men tend to be more or less equal in their resources compared with their ancestors in medieval times. (Inequality tends to increase as society advances in complexity from hunter-gatherer to advanced agrarian societies. Industrialization tends to decrease the level of inequality.)

Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy When there is resource inequality among men—the case in every human society—most women benefit from polygyny: women can share a wealthy man.

Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man. The only exceptions are extremely desirable women. Under monogamy, they can monopolize the wealthiest men; under polygyny, they must share the men with other, less desirable women. However, the situation is exactly opposite for men. Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife.

True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that's much better than not marrying anyone at all.

Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don't realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.

Most suicide bombers are Muslim Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why?

The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50% of men have 2 wives each, then the other 50% don't get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single'.

Of course these arguments are a bit suspect when it comes to the welfare of women. If women are in scarce supply then extremely strict regtulations might be imposed by men to stop them exerting their market power. There are few societies on earth where women have a narrower range of options than Islamic societies.

Also if women must live with the consequences of terrorism - response attacks by those who don't like seeing their citizens blown to pieces by sexually frustrated bigots - then they will be disadvantaged anyway. I can't see women living with their homes being bombed and their sons and husbands being killed enjoying that much advantage irrespective of their monopoly power.

Excerpted from Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, to be published by Perigree in September 2007. Among the other issues analysed are why men prefer blondes and women with blue eyes, why couples with at least one son divorce less frequently, why beautiful people have more daughters, and why male harrassment of women is not sexist.

How to beat your wife - a user guide

Examining the way men treat women in the Middle East is almost a clichéd popular sport. Other than football I love sport. So I introduce a film clip designed mainly for my male readers – though it might help my female viewers understand – explaining how to beat up your wife if she steps out of line.

This video shows that wife-beating is a form of ‘therapy’. A beating is ‘not an assault but discipline’. Understanding this it is difficult to dispute the right of a husband to give his spouse a decent beating- after all he is merely correcting a mistake and he does have the authority:

Quote: Sura 4:34 – ‘Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other...’.

This might sometimes be difficult to explain to some recalcitrant, little women. I mean ha, ha, ha if I told my wife that she was the ‘inferior’ and subject to my discipline, ha ha ha, she might convulse with laughter or target me with a saucepan. Is there a video explaining how to beat someone rolling on the floor with laughter! Can I throw the saucepan back?

The pain, embarrassment, divorce and legal costs might end up being mainly mine!

The female interviewer in the above-mentioned video points out to the gentleman justifying the right-to-beat logic (again, on the grounds that ‘Allah says that man has the best judgement’) that ‘women sometimes have better judgement’.

I like her spunk though she obviously needs to be corrected.

The other woman interviewing this gentleman had conducted a survey around the Middle East and came up with the hypothesis of the ‘culture of the electric cable’ that was valid for many civilisation centres - Palestine, Jordon, Kuwait, Egypt and Syria. The interesting multicultural hypothesis: Even men who didn’t know each other in these different centres all mystically gravitate to the practise of beating their wives with heavy electric cables.

Would it help these folks if they thought of Israel as a female country?

The gentleman in the video points out that only ‘light beatings’ (don’t leave a mark, don’t break bones, don’t kill) are permitted so the spunky female interviewer asks – ‘what is a light beating’ with an electric cable? The gentleman evades this one but does point out ‘With some women nothing helps except beatings… Let’s face it, women were created from a crooked rib’. Plausible, I have read it somewhere else I am sure.

In a follow-up video another gentleman asserts that beating wives is part of religious law – on how to ‘manage’ a wife ‘like an electric appliance’. The natural and scientific way of looking at marital relationships! I guess the electric appliance idea justifies use of an electric cable. That’ll teach ‘em.

If correct wife-beating practises could be spread internationally a cultural innovation would improve discipline among mothers and daughters on the basis of values that counteract Western decadence. Instead of treating child and wife-bashing as a social problem we could use the mother-of-all-electric-cord-mercies to promote misogyny as a social ideal.

Taliban values – primitive but devout - would direct us to a more civilised future! Death to Israel! Death to America! Flay that butt without killing her or breaking her skin.

And death to women who make us lose our namus.

As a postscript note from Feministing:

An Internet poll conducted by a local newspaper showed that 42% of married Saudi men say they do not have sexual problems. Meanwhile, 93% of married women surveyed said they were experiencing sexual problems.

Where’s the electric cord? What’s the matter with these ungrateful femmes?

Next week: Genital mutilation and more on honour killings. The way to eliminate 50% of the world's psycho-social problems.