On artificially intelligent gaydar

A paper by Yilun Wang and Michal Kosinski reports being able to identify gay and lesbian people from photographs using “deep neural networks,” which means computer software.

I’m not going to describe it in detail here, but the gist of it is they picked a large sample of people from a dating website who said they were looking for same-sex partners, and an equal number that were looking for different-sex partners, and trained their computers to learn the facial features that could distinguish the two groups (including facial structure measurements as well as grooming things like hairline and facial hair). For a deep dive on the context of this kind of research and its implications, and more on the researchers and the controversy, please read this post by Greggor Mattson first. These notes will be most useful after you’ve read that.

I also reviewed a gaydar paper five years ago, and some of the same critiques apply.

This figure from the paper gives you an idea:

These notes are how I would start my peer review, if I was peer reviewing this paper (which is already accepted and forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — so much for peer review [just kidding it’s just a very flawed system]).

The gay samples here are “very” gay, in the sense of being out and looking for same-sex partners. This does not mean that they are “very” gay in any biological, or born-this-way sense. If you could quantitatively score people on the amount of their gayness (say on some kind of scale…), outness and same-sex attraction might be correlated, but they are different things. The correlation here is assumed, and assumed to be strong, but this is not demonstrated. (It’s funny that they think they address the problem of the sample by comparing the results with a sample from Facebook of people who like pages such as “I love being gay” and “Manhunt.”)

Another way of saying this is that the dependent variable is poor defined, and then conclusions from studying it are generalized beyond the bounds of the research. So I don’t agree that the results:

provide strong support provide strong support for the PHT [prenatal hormone theory], which argues that same-gender sexual orientation stems from the underexposure of male fetuses and overexposure of female fetuses to prenatal androgens responsible for the sexual differentiation of faces, preferences, and behavior.

If it were my study I might say the results are “consistent” with PHT theory, but it would be better to say, “not inconsistent” with the theory. (There is no data about hormones in the paper, obviously.)

The authors give too much weight to things their results can’t say anything about. For example, gay men in the sample are less likely to have beards. They write:

nature and nurture are likely to be as intertwined as in many other contexts. For example, it is unclear whether gay men were less likely to wear a beard because of nature (sparser facial hair) or nurture (fashion). If it is, in fact, fashion (nurture), to what extent is such a norm driven by the tendency of gay men to have sparser facial hair (nature)? Alternatively, could sparser facial hair (nature) stem from potential differences in diet, lifestyle, or environment (nurture)?

The statement is based on the faulty premise that they are “nature and nurture are likely to be as intertwined.” They have no evidence of this intertwining. They could just as well have said “it’s possible nature and nurture are intertwined,” or, with as much evidence, “in the unlikely event nature and nurture are intertwined.” So they loaded the discussion with the presumption of balance between nature and nurture, and then go on to speculate about sparse facial hair, for which they also have no evidence. (This happens to be the same way Charles Murray talks about race and IQ: there must be some intertwining between genetics and social forces, but we can’t say how much; now let’s talk about genetics because it’s definitely in there.)

Aside from the flaws in the study, the accuracy rate reported is easily misunderstood, or misrepresented. To choose one example, the Independent wrote:

According to its authors, who say they were “really disturbed” by their findings, the accuracy of an AI system can reach 91 per cent for homosexual men and 83 per cent for homosexual women.

The authors say this, which is important but of course overlooked in much of the news reporting:

The AUC = .91 does not imply that 91% of gay men in a given population can be identified, or that the classification results are correct 91% of the time. The performance of the classifier depends on the desired trade-off between precision (e.g., the fraction of gay people among those classified as gay) and recall (e.g., the fraction of gay people in the population correctly identified as gay). Aiming for high precision reduces recall, and vice versa.

They go on to give a technical, and I believe misleading example. People should understand that the computer was always picking between two people, one of whom was identified as gay and the other not. It had a high percentage chance of getting that choice right. That’s not saying, “this person is gay”; it’s saying, “if I had to choose which one of these two people is gay, knowing that one is, I’d choose this one.” What they don’t answer is this: Given 100 random people, 7 of whom are gay, how many would the model correctly identify yes or no? That is the real life question most people probably think the study is answering.

As technology writer Hal Hodson pointed out on Twitter, if someone wanted to scan a crowd and identify a small number individuals who were likely to be gay (and ignoring many other people in the crowd who are also gay), this might work (with some false positives, of course).

Probably someone who wanted to do that would be up to no good, like an oppressive government or Amazon, and they would have better ways of finding gay people (like at pride parades, or looking on Facebook, or dating sites, or Amazon shopping history directly — which they already do of course). Such a bad actor could also train people to identify gay people based on many more social cues; the researchers here compare their computer algorithm to the accuracy of untrained people, and find their method better, but again that’s not a useful real-world comparison.

Aside: They make the weird but rarely-necessary-to-justify decision to limit the sample to White participants (and also offer no justification for using the pseudoscientific term “Caucasian,” which you should never ever use because it doesn’t mean anything). Why couldn’t respondents (or software) look at a Black person and a White person and ask, “Which one is gay?” Any artificial increase in the homogeneity of the sample will increase the likelihood of finding patterns associated with sexual orientation, and misleadingly increase the reported accuracy of the method used. And of course statements like this should not be permitted: “We believe, however, that our results will likely generalize beyond the population studied here.”

Some readers may be disappointed to learn I don’t think the following is an unethical research question: Given a sample of people on a dating site, some of whom are looking for same-sex partners and some of whom are looking for different-sex partners, can we use computers to predict which is which? To the extent they did that, I think it’s OK. That’s not what they said they were doing, though, and that’s a problem.

I don’t know the individuals involved, their motivations, or their business ties. But if I were a company or government in the business of doing unethical things with data and tools like this, I would probably like to hire these researchers, and this paper would be good advertising for their services. It would be nice if they pledged not to contribute personally to such work, especially any efforts to identify people’s sexual orientation without their consent.

Couple fact patterns about sexuality and attitudes

Working on the second edition of my book, The Family, involves updating facts as well as rethinking their presentation, and the choice of what to include. The only way I can do that is by making figures to look at myself. Here are some things I’ve worked up recently; they might not end up in the book, but I think they’re useful anyway.

1. Attitudes on sexuality and related family matters continue to grow more accepting or tolerant, but acceptance of homosexuality is growing faster than the others – at least those measured in the repeated Gallup surveys:

2. Not surprisingly, there is wide divergence in the acceptance of homosexuality across religious groups. This uses the Pew Religious Landscape Study, which includes breakouts for atheists, agnostics, and two kinds of “nones,” or unaffiliated people — those for whom religion is important and those for whom it’s not:

3. Updated same-sex behavior and attraction figures from the National Survey of Family Growth. For some reason the NSFG reports don’t include the rates of same-sex partner behavior in the previous 12 months for women anymore, so I analyzed the data myself, and found a much lower rate of last-year behavior among women than they reported before (which, when I think about it, was unreasonably high – almost as high as the ever-had-same-sex-partner rates for women). Anyway, here it is:

FYI, people who follow me on Twitter get some of this stuff quicker; people who follow on Instagram get it later or not at all.

When is the target a community?

“LGBT Community Meeting” / Flickr Creative Commons: https://flic.kr/p/iUDb4t

I credit Hillary Clinton for sticking up for the LGBT community. But I always get stuck on the way she puts it. The other day she said:

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” Mrs. Clinton asked the audience of black, white and Hispanic union members, “would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?”

(It’s funny that the audience in that sentence has race, ethnicity, and union status, but not gender or sexuality. But anyway.) At the debate last week she said:

I think that a lot of what we have to overcome to break down the barriers that are holding people back, whether it’s poison in the water of the children of Flint, or whether it’s the poor miners who are being left out and left behind in coal country, or whether it is any other American today who feels somehow put down and oppressed by racism, by sexism, by discrimination against the LGBT community, against the kind of efforts that need to be made to root out all of these barriers, that is what I want to take on.

Two issues. First, she’s got no ism-word to use for this, because I guess she doesn’t want to use heterosexism, which I understand. But I don’t really like using “community” this way. Because I think discrimination against people for their sexual identity, gender identity, or sexual orientation is a problem even if they’re not part of that community, or any community, actually. Second, racism and sexism are more than discrimination on the basis of race or sex. So the problem is also that discrimination is too narrow. (The ACLU also has “a long history of defending the LGBT community,” but the discrimination is often against individuals.)

Of course, a marginalized group has a different sense of community than a dominant group. For example, in Google page hits, “LGBT people” outnumbers “LGBT community” about 5-to-1, and it’s the same for “Black people” versus “Black community.” But the ratio of “White people” to “White community” is almost 50-to-1. Maybe dominant-group members are safe enough on their own. Anyway, community is good.

If you’re being very narrow or legal, you could (not to make this a campaign issue) do like the FeelTheBern page on LGBTQ rights, which refers to “the abolishment of all discriminatory laws pertaining to sexuality.” Bernie also likes to say “people have a right to love who they want, regardless of their gender,” but that’s just narrow in a different way.

It’s not simple, and the statement is important anyway, but I’m not voting for Hillary’s usage here.

Note: If this kind of thing interests you, I’m still happy to talk about homogamy.

Things are getting better/worse, and we’re not going to take it anymore

There is a whole social science to the optimal balance of victory and defeat in social movements and social change. Trying to sort that out recently reminds me of the time in 1980 when the Williams pinball machine company introduced Black Knight, which featured four flippers, 2- and 3-ball multiball™ play, and magna-save (don’t ask). And it talked. It was hard to get to sleep that week, with the ringing in my ears, the flashing lights burned into my eyes, and the endless strategic possibilities bouncing around in my head (though, looking at it now, I find this all hard to believe).

So, too, in the last week. Consider two political cartoons by Mike Luckovich. This from June 21:

And this one from June 25:

Did he really just demand the removal of the Confederate flag and then mock people who would celebrate its removal? Is that how much things change in a week? But in periods of social change, moving the goal posts is what it’s all about. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

The Charleston massacre was a horrific reminder of how it seems some things never change. But they do change. Dylann Roof was caught and may be put to death, legally. And it turned out that, not only had the Confederate flag only been flying at the South Carolina capitol for a few decades, but it actually could be taken down in response to public outrage. And yet, that’s not the end of racism. (Four flippers, three balls, magna-save.)

Anthea Butler, a religion and Africana studies professor at Penn, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, was on the On Point radio show last week. She was talking to host Tom Ashbrook, when she got this:

Tom Ashbrook: If you ask me, I understand that feeling and that vivid response. At the same time, I, and maybe you, Anthea Butler, Dr. Butler, don’t want to lose, or not recognize, or lose the progress that has been made. And this is nowhere near paradise…

Anthea Butler: But what kind of progress? What kind of progress? This is what we keep talking about. And I don’t understand, when you say, “We’ve made progress.” How have we made progress when the president of the United States has been constantly questioned because he is partially a Black man? And so you talk progress — and this is the kind of talk we’re going to hear all week long after this.

TA: But he’s president, madam.

AB: He is president.

TA: Well, that’s a pretty big deal…

AB: That is a big deal, but to some people in this country, like Dylann Roof, that is the end of this country. That’s why you had the kind of phrase that he said, that all your politicians, the right Republican politicians have been saying, “Take our country back.” And so, I want to talk about the rhetoric that’s happened…

Ashbrook has a point about progress, of course, but it’s just the wrong time to say that, days after a racist massacre that seems as timeless as a Black-church burning. At that moment there could be no progress.

For whatever reason, Ashbrook turned to progress on the interpersonal level:

TA: We did see White people in South Carolina, in Charleston, pour into the churches alongside African Americans over this weekend.

AB: Yes we did. But you need to understand the distinction here. I don’t doubt that there are well-meaning, good White people, good White Christians, who are appalled at this. I understand that. But when you have a structural system that continues to do this kind of racial profiling, the kinds of things that are going on with the police in this country, the kinds of issues that we’ve had. The problem becomes this: you can talk about progress all you want, but reality is another thing altogether.

Again, it’s progress, but focusing on it at that moment is basically #AllLivesMatter. President Obama also tried to keep his eyes on the prize, in his appearance on the WTF podcast:

Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say “nigger” in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.

Outrage ensued about his use of “nigger,” but White House Press Secretary Josh “earnest non-racist white guy” Earnest doubled down:

The President’s use of the word and the reason that he used the word could not be more apparent from the context of his discussion on the podcast.  The President made clear that it’s not possible to judge the nation’s progress on race issues based solely on an evaluation of our country’s manners.  The fact is that we’ve made undeniable progress in this country over the last several decades, and as the President himself has often said, anyone who lived in this country through the ‘50s and the ‘60s and the ‘70s and the ‘80s notes the tremendous progress that we’ve made.  That progress is undeniable. But what’s also undeniable is that there is more work that needs to be done, and there’s more that we can do.  And the fact is everyone in this country should take some inspiration from the progress that was made in the previous generation and use that as a motivation and an inspiration to try to make further progress toward a more perfect union.

Now is no time to talk about progress, some say. With Black church members being gunned down and churches burning, and one appalling, outrageous video after another showing the abuse of Black citizens by police, having a Black president is not a victory. So much so that maybe he’s not really Black at all. Frank Roberts writes of Obama’s “Amazing Grace” moment:

With Obama … blackness has been reduced to a theatrical prop; a shuck-and-jive entertainment device that keeps (black) audiences believing that the President “feels their pain” — at precisely the same time that he fails to provide a substantive policy response to black unemployment, over-incarceration, and/or racialized state violence.

The social scientist in me objects, because the rate of progress is not determined by the victory or tragedy of the moment, or by the blackness of a man. And Obama probably has done more than any other president (at least recently) to address Black unemployment, incarceration, and racialized state violence. That’s not a moral or political statement — and it doesn’t imply “enough” — it’s an empirical one.

Movements use good news for legitimacy, and bad news for urgency.  When something goes well, they need to claim credit and also make sure their supporters know there is more work to be done. When something awful happens they place the troubles in the context of a narrative of struggle, but they don’t want to appear powerless because that saps support as well, and undermines morale.

Case in point, marriage equality

In that old psychology study of lottery winners and paraplegic accident victims, the researchers concluded that we put too much weight on the fleeting reactions of others to good or bad events, falsely assuming that these events will define them permanently. Since gay marriage will not actually make their lives worse, I have to assume that the doom-and-gloom gang on pathetic display in a mordantly morose, delightfully depressive, symposium on the Supreme Court decision at the religious conservative First Things site will soon again return to being their sunny selves.*

And these San Francisco Pride marchers will go back to being miserable soon enough. (Photo by James Buck)

In the meantime, the family right will use SCOTUS to stoke their movement — after an oh-so-dramatic display of what Jeffrey Toobin called a “religiously themed retreat into victimology.”

But the anti-equality right has to be careful, or their nattering negativity will undermine their appeal, especially among young people who haven’t yet given up all hope of being the change they want to see. For Ted Cruz to call this — that is, people getting married — “some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history,” to declare a “day of mourning,” or to see a vision of Jesus weeping, all may be a little much for the youth vote. (Not that kids these days know how to spell anymore, but I think they’ll get the difference between “morning” and “mourning” in America.) It’s one thing for religious conservatives to entice others to join them on the holier-than-them side of the fence with a little martyrdom (after all, whole religions have been built on it). But who wants to join a movement — much less have Thanksgiving dinner — with a guy who wallows in his own defeat like this?

While many have pointed to the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade as an obvious historical analogue for the Obergefell decision, to my mind, the insistence that all must conform to the new, official definition of marriage that no civilization has ever endorsed until yesterday seems to be more aptly compared to life under Communism. … The “monopoly of violence” possessed by the State is now a main weapon in perpetuating this lie, and will be used mercilessly and without cessation against those who persist on pointing out that it seeks to perpetuate a lie. But violence will serve as a last resort, merely backstopping the education system, the economic players, and even family members who will work to correct wayward thinkers.

That poor persecuted soul, by the way, is a tenured professor.

Four flippers, three balls, magna-save.

* The First Things symposium was linked without explicit endorsement by Ross Douthat, who on marriage equality day did not pause to congratulate a gay couple (whose wedding he would rather not attend anyway) before mean-spiritedly besmirching the movement by speculating on the coming legalization of polygamy.

The persistence of gender differences, Catholic furor edition

The Pope’s convention of male moral pontificators is convening to discuss family matters. One of the most important questions, as Ross Douthat has described at great length, is how to strike the right balance between laxity and rigorism on the question of divorce, to maximize Church membership by keeping divorced people (and their children) on the rolls while sending the minimum of those members to hell for adultery after they remarry.

(This is a great project for a sociologist interested in simulations.)

Divorce is a leading issue, but homosexuality looms. In yesterday’s New York Times, Frank Bruni writes about the American Catholic Church leadership’s obsession with homosexuality:

…Catholic officials here have elected to focus on this one issue and on a given group of people: gays and lesbians. Their moralizing is selective, bigoted and very sad. It’s also self-defeating, because it’s souring many American Catholics, a majority of whom approve of same-sex marriage, and because the workers who’ve been exiled were often exemplars of charity, mercy and other virtues as central to Catholicism as any guidelines for sex. But their hearts didn’t matter. It was all about their loins. Will the church ever get away from that?

As Bruni reports, employees at Catholic institutions are still being fired for acknowledging their homosexuality (the starting point, incidentally, of the new movie Love Is Strange, for the couple played by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina).

Bruni may speak for the majority of American Catholics when he condemns the Church’s witch-hunt. But as the synod approached, a group speaking for the academic right wing of the anti-gay movement within American Christianity beseeched the Holy Father to use the occasion to “express timeless truths about marriage,” which are that cohabitation, divorce, homosexuality, and pornography are wrong.

(Aside: Academics will appreciate the funny requests for money for themselves and their movement in the letter. They want money for “cross-discipline, longitudinal research on the role of pornography and ‘no fault’ divorce in the marriage crisis,” and they want “mandatory courses [for seminarians] covering social science evidence on the benefits of marriage, threats to marriage, and the consequences of divorce and cohabitation to children and society.”)

The letter calls for opening a new front in the war on modern marriage law, using the language of religious freedom to prevent divorce (as they have urged with regard to marriage equality):

Many do not know that religious freedom is routinely violated by divorce judges who ignore or demean the views of a spouse who seeks to save a marriage, keep the children in a religious school, or prevent an abandoning spouse from exposing the children to an unmarried sexual partner.

In other words, they want to argue — in court — that divorced spouses who have new partners are violating the religious freedom of their ex-spouses. (By this logic, I guess, I could argue that them even making this argument violates my religious freedom not to live in a society where someone makes this argument.)

They would like the Pope to:

Support efforts to preserve what is right and just in existing marriage laws, to resist any changes to those laws that would further weaken the institution, and to restore legal provisions that protect marriage as a conjugal union of one man and one woman, entered into with an openness to the gift of children, and lived faithfully and permanently as the foundation of the natural family.

Regnerus himself (follow the Regnerus tag for background) is taking the long view in his new role as movement intellectual. And the logic he uses helps explain Bruni’s puzzle over the Church’s homosexuality obsession. In an interview on a Christian radio station last month, Regnerus said there are a lot of objectionable marriage laws outside the same-sex marriage debate. He went on:

It’s important for us to not sort of just get caught up in the big kahuna around same-sex marriage, and to remember, as we’ve seen with the abortion debate, incremental change, legally, can occur even after all hope seems lost. But there’s also sort of – nobody’s holding us back from creating a marriage culture in, say, the Catholic Church or broader evangelicalism. We hold ourselves back, right? I tend to think the way things are rolling at the moment, it’s not just as if same-sex marriage fell out of the sky, and was on our plate. I mean, it was paved, right? The road to there was paved in part by all sorts of poor laws around opposite-sex marriage, right? And the giving away of what we might call the sort of functional definition of marriage, visions of complementarity, you know? We have bought, hook, line, and sinker, the idea that essentially men and women are interchangeable in our marriages. And it’s hard to get away from that, but I think we’re going to have to. So in some ways we want to fashion a counter-cultural movement regardless of what the states signal.

The way I see the way he sees it, the mission is to protect and restore gender differentiation itself. That agenda, not just old-fashioned patriarchal views, underlies the anti-homosexual obsession, the opposition to marriage equality and single motherhood, and the effort to protect the male religious hierarchy.

Different genders

I object to this agenda personally on moral grounds, naturally. But my scientific opinion is that the concern is misplaced. In some broad ways, of course, gender differences have eroded — for example, as women have gained political rights and access to gainful employment. And on the rare occasions when they choose to, men can even be nurses, teachers, and stay-at-home parents. You might call all that a convergence of gender roles. But gender differentiation is alive and well.

In some respects the gender binary is resurgent after a brief surge of androgyny in popular culture around 1970 (which Jo Paoletti traces in the fascinating forthcoming book, Sex and Unisex). A visit to the Sociological Images Pinterest board on pointlessly gendered products helps reinforce this point — there are even gendered kids’ Bibles:

Or consider the relative frequency of the phrases “toys for boys” and “toys for girls” in American English as a fraction of references to “toys for children,” from Google ngrams:

In fact, it seems to me that gender difference is proliferating. But it’s not just the binary difference.

One of the benefits of the high visibility of the marriage rights movement has been its exposure of gender variance. Far from a convergence around a single gender, as the traditionalist Christians fear — or the elimination of gender — instead I think we have a growing diversity of gender perspectives and identities. The very narrow interpretation of this is that “men and women are interchangeable.” The reality is that no one is.

Is the price of sex too damn low?

I’m sorry this is so long. If you’re in a hurry, some of the funny parts are toward the end.

In an animated video rant against sexual liberation, Mark Regnerus gives the 10-minute version of an essay he published in the journal Society in 2012 (with a Slate companion piece) — using professional drawing hands and narrators. Since it has received more than 80,000 views, and some fawning in the conservative press, I wanted to comment a little.

The video asserts that in the market for sex, women sell and men buy.

On average, men initiate sex more than women, they’re more sexually permissive than women, and they connect sex to romance less often than women. No one’s saying this is the way it ought to be. It’s just the way it is! Women, on the other hand, are likely to have sex for reasons beyond just simple pleasure. Her motivations for sex often include expressing and receiving love, strengthening commitment, affirming desirability, and relationship security. So in an exchange relationship where men want sex more often than women do, who decides when it will happen? She does, of course. Sex is her resource.

Let me just stop here for a minute. If I grant you that, on average, contemporary American men want sex with women more than the reverse, does the size of this difference matter at all? In a response to Regnerus, Elaine Hatfield and colleagues remind us that difference within the genders are greater than the differences between them (which, in turn, are shrinking over time). If the difference between men’s and women’s attitudes toward sex were observable but tiny, would it still be true that the system is one in which women sell and men buy? Of course not. The difference has to be big enough to drive the whole system. No one can say how big it is, or needs to be, because the crackpots running this theory don’t care. They are just spinning out the why-pay-for-milk-when-the-cow-is-free analogy without regard to the specifics of the model.

Anyway, what is the “price” women charge for sex? It’s “a few drinks and compliments,” or “a month of dates and respectful attention,” or “a lifetime promise to share all of his affections, wealth and earnings with her exclusively.” So, which will it be? To explain why we have too much casual sex and not enough marriage nowadays, Regnerus turns to an inadvertently comical lesson on supply and demand, starting with this figure.

“When supplies are high, prices drop,” the narrator says, “since people won’t pay more for something that’s easy to find. But if it’s hard to find, people will pay a premium.” Cow, milk, etc. The reason this figure is funny (and how it differs from real supply/demand curves) is that it also shows that rising prices lead to lower supply. But whatever – the point is, feminism is bad.

To Regnerus, the falling marriage rate (the only fact offered as evidence for this) means the supply of sex has increased and its price has fallen. The narrator asks, “So how did we get here? How did the market value of sex decline so drastically?” Answer: the Pill, which “profoundly lower[ed] the cost of sex.” From there the video goes on to blame women for abandoning their centuries-old cartel, which restricted the supply of sex, thus propping up the price.  The video says:

In the past, it really wasn’t the patriarchy that policed women’s relational interests [because isn’t that what you thought patriarchy was all about?], it was women. But … this unspoken pact to set a high market value of sex has all but vanished. But in a brave new world where sex no longer means babies, and marriage has become optional, the solidarity women once felt toward each other in the mating market has dissolved. Women no longer have each other’s backs. On the contrary, they’re now each other’s competition. And when women compete for men, they tend to do so by appealing to what men want.

So, women have sold each other out. As a result, they’ve lost their leverage and men have an advantage they don’t deserve, given their randy minds. To conclude, the narrator declares:

Today the economics of contemporary sexual relationships clearly favor men and what they want. Even while what they are offering in the exchange has diminished. And it’s all thanks to supply, demand, and the long reach of a remarkable little pill.

In the article version, Regnerus writes:

I assert that if women were more in charge of how their romantic relationships transpired—more in charge of the ‘pricing’ negotiations around sex—we’d be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts by men, fewer hook-ups, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on (and perhaps even at a slightly earlier age, too). In other words, the ‘price’ of sex would be higher: it would cost men more to access it.

Yes, that does contradict the point earlier about how women always decide when they will have sex, because it’s inherently their resource. But who cares, feminism is bad.

Tangent

This is all tricky to reconcile with the common lyrical formulation, in which both men and women “give it” to each other (though not in the same song). So Tom Petty fits the theory, trying to lower the price to zero:

It’s alright if you love me / it’s alright if you don’t / I’m not afraid of you running away / honey I’ve got a feeling you won’t

There is no sense in pretending / your eyes give you away / something inside you is feeling like I do / and we’ve said all there is to say

Baby, breakdown, go ahead and give it to me…

But I think it’s more common for men to “give it” to women, too, as in Tanto Metro and Devonte or 50 Cent among many others.

Economics

Anyway, a few thoughts on this big ball of wrong.

First, what about actual economics? If women sell sex and men buy it, and women set the price by how slutty they act, there is still the issue of the value of what men have to offer — to women. Like Hana Rosin, who bemoans the cardboardness of today’s man — unable to respond to changing times — Regnerus assumes unchanging men. When it comes to sex, that’s presumably because it comes from God, evolution, or (in Regnerus’s Catholic view) God acting through evolution. But even if all they care about is sex, the value of what they have to offer for it — relative to what women have and need — has surely changed a lot. So, as the relative value of the men’s lifetime promise of wealth and earnings falls toward the value of a couple drinks and compliments, it’s only natural that women will be less and less able to distinguish the two.

As Paula England notes in her (disappointingly mild) critique of Regnerus, his theory has a problem explaining why marriage has declined so much more for the less-than-college-educated population. Among those men and women, the male/female ratio has grown markedly as women flee for higher ground. So, with the relative shortage of women, they should be in command — so they could demand marriage.

But if women insist on marrying a man with a job, as I just showed recently, they actually face a shortage of men. In the video’s terms, they’re back in this situation:

But that’s only because women insist on a man with a job. In other words, the value of what men have to offer (relative to what women need) matters. (England argues against this “it’s the economy, stupid” perspective, for reasons I don’t find convincing.) So why doesn’t Regnerus talk about actual economics?

In the Society version of this video Regnerus says he gets this sexual economics theory from Baumeister and Vohs (and the video resource guide links to several of Baumeister’s papers), including the basic story that sex is something women sell and men buy, and the thing about how feminism dissolved female solidarity.

Interestingly, however, Baumeister and his several co-authors are much more keyed in to the economics questions that Regnerus all but ignores. While Regnerus focuses on the Pill, they write in the 2004 paper he relies on that one of the “preconditions of market exchange” in sex is that, “In general, men have resources women want.” It’s not just the Pill that has changed things, in other words, it’s also the end of men: “Once women had been granted wide opportunities for education and wealth, they no longer had to hold sex hostage.”

Regnerus really does the theory a disservice by leaving all this out. In another recent article, Baumeister and Mendoza reiterate:

According to sexual economics theory, when women lack direct or easy access to resources such as political influence, health care, money, education, and jobs, then sex becomes a crucial means by which women can gain access to a good life, and so it is vital to female self-interest to keep the price of sex high.

The real problem now, according to the intellectual godfather of Regnerus’s version of this theory, is gender equality, but Regnerus doesn’t want to say that. Baumesiter and Mendoza write: “when women have direct economic clout, they do not need to use sex to bargain for other resources, and so they can make sex more freely available.” Thus, they show that casual sex is positively associated with a measure of gender equality across 37 countries. I’ve made a figure from their findings. This is the percentage of people in an international online sex survey who say they ever had sex with someone just once (on the y-axis), by the level of gender equality according to the World Economic Forum (on the x-axis):

The logic here is approaching random. Get this: When women were poor, they needed to withhold sex to get money. Now that they have more money — and are less dependent on men — they don’t need to withhold it, so they give it away. Wait, what? If they don’t need to sell it anymore, and we already know they don’t want to “have” it (that is, do it), then why don’t those Scandinavian women just keep it, for f#cks’ sake? (Amanda Marcotte made a similar argument about Baumeister)

It seems likely the differences between Regnerus and Baumeister are of emphasis rather than principle. Believe it or not, Regnerus’s explanation, focusing only on sex and the Pill, would be stronger if he latched on to this crazy economics argument. But I reckon he stays away from that because taking a stand against women’s equality is a political and cultural nonstarter, and Regnerus’s ambition is social influence.

You asked for it

If you’ve read this far, you deserve some insanely sexist quotes. Because Baumeister has no such qualms about offending women. Besides representing what I think Regnerus really thinks, Baumeister and Vohs are also much more entertaining than Regnerus (in this piece, anyway). In their response to Regnerus, they blame women’s sexual permissiveness for just about everything. That’s because, “Giving young men easy access to abundant sexual satisfaction deprives society of one of its ways to motivate them to contribute valuable achievements to the culture.”

Did you get that? Women giving away sex is literally ruining the culture. If I knew my classics I’m sure I’d know the analogy here. I’m thinking of the early Christian adaptation of the Greek sirens, which sometime before A.D. 700 changed them from magical creatures to vile humans, “prostitutes who led travelers down to poverty and were said to impose shipwreck on them.” If that seems overdramatic, it’s just because you haven’t read the whole essay.

In the feminist era Baumeister and Vohs describe, rather than just marriage in exchange for sex, women have upped their demands: “Women, meanwhile, want not only marriage but also access to careers and preferential treatment in the workplace.” (I’m not sure how this fits with the idea that women have lowered the “price of sex,” but logic isn’t the point here, hating feminism is.)

Here are some key snippets:

The giant trade thus essentially involved men giving women not only easy access but even preferential treatment in the huge institutions that make up society, which men created. Today most schools, universities, corporations, scientific organizations, governments, and many other institutions have explicit policies to protect and promote women. It is standard practice to hire or promote a woman ahead of an equally qualified man. Most large organizations have policies and watchdogs that safeguard women’s interests and ensure that women gain preferential treatment over men. … Nobody looks out for men, and so the structural changes favoring women and disadvantaging men have accelerated.

All of this is a bit ironic, in historical context. The large institutions have almost all been created by men. … Even today, the women’s movement has been a story of women demanding places and preferential treatment in the organizational and institutional structures that men create, rather than women creating organizations and institutions themselves. … All over the world and throughout history (and prehistory), the contribution of large groups of women to cultural progress has been vanishingly small. …

Indeed, the world of work is a daunting place for a young man today. Feminists quickly point to the continued dominance of men at the top of most organizations, but this is misleading if not outright disingenuous. Men create most organizations and work hard to succeed in them. Indeed, an open-minded scholar can search through history mostly in vain to find large organizations created and run by women that have contributed anything beyond complaining about men and demanding a bigger share of the male pie.

Warning, the excerpts grow more and more offensive from here on…

Why have men acquiesced so much in giving women the upper hand in society’s institutions? It falls to men to create society (because women almost never create large organizations or cultural systems). It seems foolish and self-defeating for men then to meekly surrender advantageous treatment in all these institutions to women. … Because of women’s lesser motivation and ambition, they will likely never equal men in achievement, and their lesser attainment is politically taken as evidence of the need to continue and possibly increase preferential treatment for them.

But this pattern of male behavior makes more sense if we keep in mind that getting sex is a high priority for men, especially young men. Being at a permanent disadvantage in employment and promotion prospects, as a result of affirmative action policies favoring women, is certainly a cost to young men, but perhaps not a highly salient one. What is salient is that sex is quite readily available. As Regnerus reports, even a man with dismal career prospects (e.g., having dropped out of high school) can find a nice assortment of young women to share his bed.

The male who beds multiple women is enjoying life quite a bit, and so he may not notice or mind the fact that his educational and occupational advancement is vaguely hampered by all the laws and policies that push women ahead of him. After all, one key reason he wanted that advancement was to get sex, and he already has that. Climbing the corporate ladder for its own sake may still hold some appeal, but undoubtedly it was more compelling when it was vital for obtaining sex. Success isn’t as important as it once was, when it was a prerequisite for sex.

(Did I mention I’m not making this up? I’m sorry to just keep excerpting, but this stuff just writes itself.)

Unfortunately for society, women taking over the economy has a real downside:

Still, replacing male with female workers may bring some changes, insofar as the two genders approach work differently. Compared to men, women have higher rates of absenteeism, seek social rewards more than financial ones, are less ambitious, work fewer hours overall, are more prone to take extended career interruptions, and identify less with the organizations they work for. They are more risk averse, resulting in fewer entrepreneurs and inventions. … Women are less interested in science and technology fields. They create less wealth.

And finally, “the implications of the recent social changes for marriage could fill a book.” (Really, a whole book?) In that book (which we’re really quite happy to wait for), casual sex is also ruining marriage because it’s increasing the crushing depression that naturally follows from female-dominated marriage:

The female contribution of sex to the marriage is evanescent: As women age, they lose their sexual appeal much faster than men lose their status and resources, and some alarming evidence even indicates that wives rather quickly lose their desire for sex. To sustain a marriage across multiple decades, many husbands must accommodate to the reality of having to contribute work and other resources to a wife whose contribution of sex dwindles sharply in both quantity and quality—and who also may disapprove sharply of him seeking satisfaction in alternative outlets such as prostitution, pornography, and extramarital dalliance.

Yes, in their zeal to describe the sexual disaster of modern marriage, they forgot to even nod to the ideal wife’s housework and child rearing contributions.

We speculate that today’s young men may be exceptionally ill prepared for a lifetime of sexual starvation that is the lot of many modern husbands. The traditional view that a wife should sexually satisfy her husband regardless of her own lack of desire has been eroded if not demolished by feminist ideology that has encouraged wives to expect husbands to wait patiently until the wife actually desires sex, with the result that marriage is a prolonged episode of sexual starvation for the husband. … Today’s young men spend their young adulthood having abundant sex with multiple partners, and that seems to us to be an exceptionally poor preparation for a lifetime of sexual starvation.

Yes, that was a third “sexual starvation” reference in one paragraph. (I am completely above making a joke about this, but The Onion isn’t.)

Regnerus cites this guy Baumeister up and down. If all Muslims have to personally disavow Bin Laden, I think it’s only fair that we expect Regnerus to comment on this.

What about lesbians?

Oh, that. When Regnerus wrote his post in Slate, Belle Waring wrote a nice piece about it, which included this:

Please note also that under the economic model, lesbians can’t exist, since they have nothing of value to exchange for sex, except for…um…sex? And since women only use sex as a means to an end, and exchange it with men; and since further, sex has been explicitly devalued to something cheap, well, hm. I submit that if you propose a model of human sexual behavior, and it positively forbids the existence of a whole class of people who nonetheless actually exist, then maybe there’s a problem with the theory? Just a thought.

I promise I’ll stop now, but Regnerus actually has talked about lesbians recently — though not to explain how they have sex without a buyer. This from a speech just last month at Franciscan University of Steubenville, at which he implied homosexuality emerged partly because of the Pill, too, based on his reading of Anthony Giddens’ Transformation of Intimacy. He said: “Giddens draws an arrow from contraception to sexual malleability to the expansion of homosexuality.”

So, if he thinks lesbians are an unnatural creation of modern sexual plasticity, then I guess it’s not surprising that he also believes (at about 9:10) that lesbians produce asexual children:

Despite comprising a mere 1.3 percent of the population, respondents in the NFSS [New Family Structures Survey] who said that their mothers have had a same-sex sexual relationship made up 15 [50?] percent of all the asexual identifiers in the NFSS. So, 15 [50?] percent of them come from 1.3 percent of the population.*

The hatefulness of this is what’s most important (you have to see the smirk when he jokes to the Franciscans that asexuality might be “convenient” for people pursuing celebacy). But for what it’s worth, I also interpret this as further evidence that his data is garbagey. When a substantial number of respondents answer questions at random or incorrectly — as was the case in the Regnerus/Wilcox NFSS data (see p. 333 here) — then highly skewed items will be unreasonably correlated (e.g., if 3 percent fill it out the question at random, and the actual asexual population is 1 percent, then most of the people counted as asexual will be random; and if the same happens for mothers’ sexual history, then the two variables will have a surprisingly large overlap.)

Conclusion

It would be tempting (and more enjoyable) to simply ignore Mark Regnerus forever. His record of scientific manipulation and dishonesty in the service of the movement to deny equal rights to gays and lesbians is well documented, and social scientists of good will won’t trust him again unless he comes clean. I wish that he and the people of good will could just agree never to interact again. But he’s young and ambitious, and it’s likely that he’ll be back. So we should keep an eye on him.

* On listening to this again, it’s hard to tell, but I think he says 15%, not 50%, as I first transcribed it.

What’s been queered?

How much has the term, and concept, of queer penetrated the discourse of sexuality, politics and identity?

In the overall use of the terms queer sexuality, queer politics, and queer identity, according to the Google ngrams database of American English usage, queer politics occurs most often, and queer sexuality is last.

Source: Google ngrams.

On the other hand, as a fraction of references to politics, identity, and sexuality respectively — what you could call the relative penetration of queer — the order is different: queer sexuality has most successfully entered the discourse on sexuality, with queer politics and queer identity quite behind in their relative niches:

Source: Google ngrams.

(In all of these I used both capitalized and un-capitalized versions. Follow the links to modify the codes yourself.)

Why do anti-gay people (maybe, possibly) beat their children?

The other day, Mark Regnerus (of Regnerus study fame) speculated in a blog post that pornography, with its “veritable fire-hose dousing of sex-act diversity,” might be increasing support for gay marriage:

In the end, contrary to what we might wish to think, young adult men’s support for redefining marriage may not be entirely the product of ideals about expansive freedoms, rights, liberties, and a noble commitment to fairness. It may be, at least in part, a byproduct of regular exposure to diverse and graphic sex acts.

As I was working on a chapter on family violence and abuse, I was trying to decide how to divide the discussion of corporal punishment between the abuse chapter and the parenting chapter. I checked the General Social Survey for attitudes toward spanking and found a solid (but declining) two-thirds who agree that sometimes kids need “a good, hard spanking.” (Would the number be lower if they didn’t include “good” in the question?).

So on a whim I asked: What could cause this virulent anti-child attitude, which seems to prevalent in our society? May it be, at least in part, a byproduct of hostility toward some other group, such as gays and lesbians? Sure enough!

I’m not saying anti-homosexual views are the only cause of child abuse, but it’s something to look into.

Is sameness the kiss of marital demise?

Does marriage thrive on the mystery? To hear religious marriage experts tell it (at least on the covers of their books), marriage is a mystery, the solving of which might just mean its demise. So just keep asking yourself, “What am I doing in this marriage?” Historically, the reason so many marriages survived arguably was because divorce wasn’t an option. So the survival of marriage was due to its external environment not its internal dynamics. Now that the padlock has been blown off the door, people need reasons to stay together, if they want to. Is it the mystery that holds them together? In the debate over marriage rights and homogamous (“same-sex”) marriage, one odd issue has been the relative stability of different forms of marriage. I say “odd” because there is no logical connection between relationship stability and civil rights, but it’s all wrapped up in the sideshow over what kind of marriage is “good” for children. It turns out there is a whole right-wing Christian theory about gay and lesbian relationship stability, which I had naively never heard of. This came to my attention recently when Carlos Maza, a marriage rights activist, went undercover at an “It Takes A Family To Raise A Village” conference put on by the National Organization for Marriage. One of his audio recordings reportedly featured Jenet Erickson, a conservative Christian teaching at Brigham Young University. She offered the students at her session this theory (transcribed by me), which she said she got second hand from Brad Wilcox:

I remember talking about this with Brad Wilcox and he said, he was talking about gay marriage being accepted. And I’ll just make this side comment — we do not have enough research to say it is any kind of law, but I want to be thinking about it, keep it in your mind, because there’s something about same-gender relationships also being unstable — they seem to be less stable just inherently. And he would say … when we look at the Scandinavian countries that accepted gay marriage some years ago … after people could get married as same gender couples after that period of time, when they measured how long a lesbian relationship — and you should know those are most likely to marry, are women, right? — how long those relationships last and the average was 18 months [someone whistles]. And so he just commented that there seems to be something — this is the way he would say it — that women don’t want to hang out, they’re not interesting enough, “They’re too much like me!” He would say, women bonding with women — it’s like there’s something about the difference between genders that allows for stability inherently, because there’s enough difference: “I’m going to stay in this to figure you out. It may take an entire lifetime to get into your brain,” right? He had an interesting thought that I thought was a fascinating idea, that there seems to be something inherently unstable about same gender relationships. We’ve known that about gay relationships with men, but it’s also true of lesbian relationships. And why, why is it this heterosexual dynamic, inherently seems to potentially lead to greater stability. He would say, you’ve got to figure this person out.

(I couldn’t find an email address for Erickson to run this by her. But Wilcox, via email, said it was not an accurate representation of his views.) In the recent scandal over Mark Regnerus’s study, this came up as well, due to his argument that children of any parent who ever had a same-sex relationship were worse off as young adults than those of forever-married-bio-parents. In his self-defense piece, apparently forthcoming in the journal Social Science Research, he returns to the issue of relationship stability. Regnerus writes, about a “study of Norwegian and Swedish same-sex marriages” (referring to this one in Demography) that, “The study authors estimate that in Sweden, 30% of female marriages are likely to end in divorce within 6 years of formation, compared with 20% for male marriages and 13% for heterosexual ones.” That sounds pretty high. He omits two important sentences from the same paragraph of the paper, however:

• “In Norway, 13% of partnerships of men and 21% of female partnerships are likely to end in divorce within six years from partnership registration.” (Selectively not mentioning the lower rates in Norway. I don’t know where Erickson got that 18-months figure.)
• “These levels are higher than the corresponding 13% of heterosexual marriages that end in divorce within five years in Sweden, but not high when compared with divorce levels in the United States.” (Selectively not putting the divorce rates in context.)

My not-yet-peer-reviewed lifetable estimate of divorce rates in the U.S. puts the 6-year risk at 19%, so I’d say those Swedish homogamous-divorce rates are a little higher, at least for the first six years. (Before death does them part, I reckon 49% of U.S. marriages are headed for divorce. With rates that high, you have to wonder if there is something inherently unstable about heterogamous relationships.) The authors of that Demography article note that lesbian marriages in Scandinavia feature a high degree of similarity between spouses in terms of demographics such as age, nationality, education and income. This is “usually assumed to enhance marital stability.”

However, some aspects of homogamy, especially in terms of economic characteristics, may be related to less-clear power structures in a couple. This situation may be conducive to a high level of dynamism in the relationship, but perhaps not to the kind of inertia that is related to marital stability.

It gets confusing trying to parse the speculation on the role of sameness and difference here. In this interpretation, sameness creates dynamism and undermines stability. On the other hand, differences associated with unequal power structures produce stability and inertia, which is good. For marriage. Is that good? In general, the research on marriage has indeed shown that difference is not good for the odds of not divorcing:

• When one spouse goes to church more often that the other, it bodes ill for the marriage’s survival.
• Ethnic and religious intermarriage in the Netherlands increases the odds of divorce.
• Difference between spouses in age or education increases the odds of divorce.
• Racial/ethnic intermarried couples are more likely to divorce (although there is debate about whether intermarriage has an independent effect) and recent research finds higher divorce rates among specific ethnicity/gender combinations.

But is gender difference different? Do couples inherently need to be similar on ethnicity, age, education, religion and income but different on gender — if they want the relationship to last?

Gaydar study calibration

The other day the New York Times had a Gray Matter science piece by the authors of a study in PLoS One that showed some people could identify gays and lesbians based only on quick flashes of their unadorned faces. They wrote:

We conducted experiments in which participants viewed facial photographs of men and women and then categorized each face as gay or straight. The photographs were seen very briefly, for 50 milliseconds, which was long enough for participants to know they’d seen a face, but probably not long enough to feel they knew much more. In addition, the photos were mostly devoid of cultural cues: hairstyles were digitally removed, and no faces had makeup, piercings, eyeglasses or tattoos.

Even when viewing such bare faces so briefly, participants demonstrated an ability to identify sexual orientation: overall, gaydar judgments were about 60 percent accurate.

Since chance guessing would yield 50 percent accuracy, 60 percent might not seem impressive. But the effect is statistically significant — several times above the margin of error. Furthermore, the effect has been highly replicable: we ourselves have consistently discovered such effects in more than a dozen experiments.

This may be seen as confirmation of the inborn nature of sexual orientation, if it can be detected by a quick glance at facial features.

Sample images flashed during the “gaydar” experiment.

There is a statistical issue here that I leave to others to consider: the sample of Facebook pictures the researchers used was 48% gay/lesbian (111/233 men, 87/180 women). So if, as they say, it is 64% accurate at detecting lesbians, and 57% accurate at detecting gay men, how useful is gaydar in real life (when about 3.5% of people are gay or lesbian, when people aren’t reduced to just their naked, hairless facial features, and you know a lot of people’s sexual orientations from other sources)? I don’t know, but I’m guessing not much.

Anyway, I have a serious basic reservation about studies like this — like those that look for finger-length, hair-whorl, twin patterns, and other biological signs of sexual orientation. To do it, the researchers have to decide who has what sexual orientation in the first place — and that’s half the puzzle. This is unremarked on in the gaydar study or the op-ed, and appears to cause no angst among the researchers. They got their pictures from Facebook profiles of people who self-identified as gay/lesbian or straight (I don’t know if that was from the “interested in” Facebook option, or something else on their profiles).

Sexual orientation is multidimensional and determined by many different things — some combination of (presumably many) genes, hormonal exposures, lived experiences. And, for some people at least, it changes over the course of their lives. That’s why it’s hard to measure.

Consider, for example, a scenario in which someone who felt gay at a young age married heterogamously anyway — not too uncommon. Would such a person self-identify as gay on Facebook? Probably not. But if someone in that same situation got divorced and then came out of the closet they probably would self-identify as gay then.

Consider another new study, in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, which used a large sample of people interviewed 10 years apart. They found changes in sexual orientation were not that rare. Here is my table based on their results:

Overall, 2% of people changed their response to the sexual orientation identity question. That’s not that many — but then only 2.5% reported homosexual or bisexual identities in the first place.

In short, self identification may be the best standard we have for sexual orientation identity (which isn’t the same as sexual behavior), but it’s not a good fit for studies trying to get at deep-down gay/straight-ness, like the gaydar study or the biological studies.

And we need to keep in mind that this is all complicated by social stigma around sexual orientation. So who identifies as what, and to whom, is never free from political or power issues.