Archive for the ‘gender’ Category
some interesting beasties: cheetahs
Sadly I don’t have so much time for writing these days, especially anything too strenuous or research-based, so I think I’ll do a series on organisms that have interested me over the years – or that I’ve just recently been fascinated by, for that matter.
Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, there’s an article to whet the appetite as well as to apply a corrective to our thinking about everyone’s favourite wild cat, the cheetah (the name derives from Sanskrit, and cheetahs are found in Iran as well as Africa, and were probably more widespread in Asia in earlier times). Cheetahs are a vulnerable species, with about 10,000 of them currently existing in the wild. They’re described as a ‘charismatic species’, meaning that they’re utilised a lot as ‘ambassadors’ to draw attention to environmental and habitat issues for wildlife in general – along with elephants, humpback whales, giant pandas, California condors, grey wolves and such.
Cheetahs are, of course, built for speed in every way, though agility, with an incredible acceleration and deceleration rate, is also a key to their success. They can accelerate from zero to 40mph in just three strides – faster than the most sophisticated racing cars. Claims that their lightning runs leave them half-dead with heat exhaustion much of the time are, however, wildly exaggerated, as are the claims that they lose as much as half of their kills to lions and hyenas. In fact, cheetahs use up far more of their energy seeking out or tracking down potential kills than they do actually chasing them. A cheetah sprint takes up only 45 seconds a day on average – that’s less time than I spend on my high intensity interval training.
The key to maintaining cheetahs in the wild, then, is not to add to their greatest and most energy-sapping problem: finding food. Adding obstacles to their habitat, such as fences and enclosures, and depleting that habitat of their favourite food – gazelle, deer and impala, and the odd young zebra or springbok – would make life that bit more painful for them.
Speed, of course, is the cheetah’s big specialisation, what it’s adapted for. In fact over-specialisation is arguably its main problem, as it doesn’t have the bulk or strength to fight off other predatory mammals, all of which annoyingly compete for the same food. It’s light, with a weight that averages around 50 kgs, and its aerodynamically evolved head and body trade speed for strength, meaning that its jaws and teeth don’t have the size or force of other wild cats. It has a flattened ribcage but larger than usual heart and lungs for large intakes of air and fast pumping of blood. It also has a longer and larger tail than most cats, which it uses as a rudder for balance as it sets off on one of its twisting and turning runs. Its claws are only semi-retractable, unlike those of most cats (its genus name, Acinonyx, is Greek for ‘no-move claw’). This gives it extra grip while running. Males and females are the same size and hard to tell apart from distance.
Cheetahs don’t roar but they make up for it with a range of other noises, including purring like a – well, a cat, when experiencing domestic plenitude. They also hiss, spit, growl and even yowl when faced with danger. Cubs make a bird-like chirping sound, and the mother makes a similar sound when trying to locate her young. A sound called churring – no idea what that sounds like – is used on social and sexual occasions between adults. Male cheetahs form lifelong partnerships, often but not always with brothers, while females are solitary, bringing the kids up by themselves. They tend to mate with a variety of males – which hardly makes it mating, really. Interestingly, though the females are regular hunters, they’re not territorial, unlike the males, who practice group territoriality, each member of the gang contributing his scent.
Female cheetahs put their kids – or those that survive, as there’s a heavy infant mortality rate – through a tough survival training schedule before abandoning them at around 18 months. At around 2 years of age the females go their lonesome ways and the males hang together, sometimes combining with other blokes. It seems to work for them. In fact I think I read somewhere that males live longer on average than females, which wouldn’t surprise me. Fending for yourself all the time’s a deadly business, even when it’s all laid on in the big smoke, never mind having to chase your meals every day into old age. So spare a thought for the cheetahs, especially the girls, under-appreciated as always.
he for she
I have to say, from a very young age, I considered myself a feminist. And then I read (sometime in the seventies, long before Emma Watson was born, bless her cotton socks) that you couldn’t be a feminist as a male, because it was some kind of uniquely female thing, whereas I, like Emma, thought it was a simple matter of believing that females were equal to men in every respect, and that it didn’t matter who did the believing – male, female, androgyne or alien.
Emma Watson’s Hermione is an iconic figure. Perhaps I should say J K Rowling’s Hermione, though millions identify Emma as Hermione. Yet, interestingly, Emma described herself in her speech, self-depracatingly, as ‘that Harry Potter girl’, inadvertently reminding us of her role as support to the main protagonist.
I don’t in any way want to disparage the Harry Potter novels, which I’m sure would have been just as successful with Harriet Potter as the heroine – at least I hope so. I personally have observed how much Hermione has inspired young girls, as an intelligent, level-headed problem-solver. So it was with great delight that I, along with many others, have been able to see that Emma was not just playing a part as Hermione; that she genuinely wants to use her prominence to push for the recognition of women globally.
I would go further – and I suspect she would agree, though she didn’t go that far in her speech – and say that the world would be better for having more women in prominent positions – that it would be safer, more collaborative, and more congenial. But maybe I’m being a little idealistic…
In any case, the ‘he for she’ initiative is one that I endorse whole-heartedly, because it allows men to have their say without experiencing any of the weird responses from both sides. It’s simply about equality, and respect.
What do we currently know about the differences between male and female brains in humans?
Having had an interesting conversation-cum-dispute recently over the question of male-female differences, and having then listened to a podcast, from Stuff You Should Know, on the neurological differences between the human male and the human female, which contained some claims which astonished me (and for that matter they astonished the show’s presenters), I’ve decided to try and satisfy my own curiosity about this pretty central question. Should be fun.
The above link is to How Stuff Works, which I think is the written version of the Stuff You Should Know podcast, that’s to say with more content and less humour (and less ads), but I do recommend the podcast, because the guys have lots of fun with it while still delivering plenty of useful and thought-provoking info. Anyway, the conversation I was talking about was one of those kitchen table, wine-soaked bullshit sessions in which one of the participants, a woman, was adamant that nurture was pretty well entirely the basis for male-female differences. I naturally felt sympathetic to this view, having spent much of my life trying to blur the distinctions between masculinity and femininity, having generally been turned off by ultra-masculine and ultra-feminine traits and wanting to push for blended behaviour, which obviously suggests we can control these things through nurturing such a blending. However, I had just enough knowledge of what research has revealed about the matter to say, ‘well no, there are distinct neurological differences between males and females’, but I didn’t have enough knowledge to give more than a vague idea of what these differences were. The podcast further whetted my appetite, but writing about it here should pin things down in my mind a bit more, here’s hoping.
I’ve chosen the title of this post reasonably carefully, with apologies for its clunkiness. For the fact is, we still know little enough about our brains. I’ve mentioned humans, but I expect there are gender differences in the brains of all mammals, so I’m particularly interested in that part of the brain that distinguishes us, though not completely, from other mammals, namely the prefrontal cortex.
Here’s an interesting summary, from a blurb on a New Scientist article by Hannah Hoag from 2008;
Research is revealing that male and female brains are built from markedly different genetic blueprints, which create numerous anatomical differences. There are also differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages between neurons. All this is pointing towards the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two. …
Men have bigger brains on average than women, even accounting for sexual dimorphism, but the two sexes are bigger in different areas. A 2001 Harvard study found that some frontal lobe regions involved in problem-solving and decision-making were larger in women, as well as regions of the limbic cortex, responsible for regulating emotions. On the other hand, areas of the parietal cortex and the amygdala were larger in men. These areas regulate social and sexual behaviour.
The really incredible piece of data, though, is that men have about 6.5 times more grey matter (neurons) than women, while women have about ten times more white matter (axons and dendrites, that’s to say connections) than men. These are white because they’re sheathed in myelin, which allows current to flow much faster. On the face of it, I find this really hard, if not impossible, to believe. I mean, that’s one effing huge difference. It comes from a study led by Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine and colleagues from the University of New Mexico, but this extraordinary fact appears to be of little consequence for male performance in intellectual tasks as compared to female. What appears to have happened is that two different ‘brain types ‘ have evolved alongside and in conjunction with each other to perform much the same tasks. Other research appears to confirm this amazing fact, finding that males and females access different parts of the brain for performing the same tasks. In an experiment where men and women were asked to sound out different words, Gina Kolata reported on this back in early 1995 in the New York Times:
The investigators, who were seeking the basis of reading disorders, asked what areas of the brain were used by normal readers in the first step in the process of sounding out words. To their astonishment, they discovered that men use a minute area in the left side of the brain while women use areas in both sides of the brain.
After lesions to the left hemisphere, men more often develop aphasia (problems with understanding and formulating speech) than women.
While I’m a bit sceptical about the extent of the differences between grey and white matter in terms of gender, it’s clear that these and many other differences exist, but they’re difficult to summarise. We can refer to different regions, such as the amygdala, but there are also differences in hormone activity throughout the brain, and so many other factors, such as ‘the number of dopaminergic cells in the mesencephalon’, to quote one abstract (it apparently means the number of cells containing the neurotransmitter dopamine in the midbrain). But let me dwell a bit on the amygdala, which appears to be central to neurophysiological sex differences.
Actually, there are 2 amygdalae, located within the left and right temporal lobes. They play a vital role in the formation of emotional memories, and their storage in the adjacent hippocampus, and in fear conditioning. They’re seen as part of the limbic system, but their connections with and influences on other regions of the brain are too complex for me to dare to elaborate here. The amygdalae are larger in human males, and this sex difference appears also in children from age 7. But get this:
In addition to size, other differences between men and women exist with regards to the amygdala. Subjects’ amygdala activation was observed when watching a horror film. The results of the study showed a different lateralization of the amygdala in men and women. Enhanced memory for the film was related to enhanced activity of the left, but not the right, amygdala in women, whereas it was related to enhanced activity of the right, but not the left, amygdala in men.
This right-left difference is significant because the right amygdala connects differently with other brain regions than the left. For example, the left amygdala has more connections with the hypothalamus, which directs stress and other emotional responses, whereas the right amygdala connects more with motor and visual neural regions, which interact more with the external world. Researchers are of course reluctant to speculate beyond the evidence, but as a non-scientist, but as a pure dilettante I don’t give a flock about that – just don’t pay attention to my ravings. It seems to me that most female mammals, who have to tend offspring, would be more connected to the flight than the fight response to danger than the unencumbered males would be??? OMG, is that evolutionary psychology?
It’s interesting but hardly surprising to note that studies have shown this right-left amygdala difference is also correlated to sexual orientation. Presumably – speculating again – it would also relate to those individuals who sense from early on that they’re born into ‘the wrong gender’.
Neuroimaging studies have found that the amygdala develops structurally at different rates in males and females, and this seems to be due to the concentration of sex hormone receptors in the different genders. Where there’s a size difference there appears to be a big difference in number of sex hormones circulating in the area. Again this is difficult to interpret, and it’s early days for this research. One brain structure, the stria terminalis, a bundle of fibres that constitute the major output pathway for the amygdala, has become a focus of controversy in the determination of our sense of gender and sexual orientation. As a dilettante I’m reluctant to comment much on this, but the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis is on average twice as large in men as in women, and contains twice the number of somatostatin neurons in males. Somatostatin is a peptide hormone which helps regulate the endocrine system, which maintains homeostasis.
What all this means for the detail of sex differences is obviously very far from being worked out, but it seems that the more we examine the brain, the more we find structural and process differences between the male and female brain in humans. And it’s likely that we’ll find similar differences in other mammals.
It’s important to note, though, that these differences, as in other mammals, exist in the same species, in which the genders have evolved to be codependent and to work in tandem towards their survival and success. Just as it would seem silly to say that female kangaroos are smarter/dumber than males, the same should be said of humans. The terms smart/dumb are not very useful here. The two genders, in all mammals, perform complementary roles, but they’re also also both able to survive independently of one another. The amazing thing is that such different brain designs can be so similar in output and achievement. It’s more impressive evidence of the enormous diversity of evolutionary development.
reflections on the video ‘Why I am no longer a Christian’ – part 1
funny but not entirely relevant
Why I am no longer a Christian
I ‘m on the mailing list for an atheist meet-up group which, sadly, I rarely attend, but recently an email was sent around recommending a video called ‘Why I am no longer a Christian’. The author has been adding snippets to the video over the years and it’s now over 3 hours long, but you can watch it in chunks. I’ve found it thoroughly compelling viewing so far. The author narrates the story of his deconversion in great detail, in soft-spoken, measured style, conveying the atmosphere and the feel of US pentecostal religiosity from the inside. To me, this was important because it’s easy, coming from a very different background, to be dismissive and contemptuous of that world – as Dawkins is often accused of being (I note that he’s been keen to promote his loving, caring side lately).
Even so, and even though I was certainly not put off by the measured treatment of his faith days, his faith community, and the sacred music that accompanies these early sections (much sacred music is, of course, very beautiful and soothing), my interest really grew with his encounter with the ex-Christian academic, and his increasingly skeptical/curious readings of the Bible.
There are many outrageous passages in the Bible, so many in fact that the more subtle infelicities may easily go unheeded. And most of them aren’t so subtle when we decide to pause and examine them. For example, the author discusses Abraham, in Egypt, telling Sarah to lie to Pharaoh about his relationship with her (Genesis 12:10-20). The reason for the lie was that, finding Sarah very attractive, they might take her from him and kill him, if they thought she was his wife. If, on the other hand, they thought she was his sister, they would still take her, but would treat Abraham well, as the bearer of a gift of such a beauty into Egypt.
The author is struck by the passage because he believes (or believed at the time of reading it) that lying is never right, and he believed that this was a fundamental moral principle of the Bible, one of the Commandments. Interestingly, as a lifelong non-believer, I might’ve been struck by this lie (and I do recall being struck by it on first reading it) because it so contradicted the Commandment, but I doubt if I’d have been struck by its immorality. Abraham wanted to survive, first and foremost, and he considered that Sarah was doomed to be ‘looted’ from him anyway. Better to benefit from it than to die because of it. On the other hand, of course, he may have been wrong in his consideration that the Pharaoh and the Egyptians wouldn’t respect his ‘right of possession’ of Sarah. So we have a genuine moral dilemma here. In any case his decision to ask Sarah to lie doesn’t seem outrageous to me, given the patriarchal brutality of the era.
But it is the consequence of all this that the author is even more struck by, and rightly so. For Yahweh strikes Pharaoh down with illness because he takes the apparently single Sarah, rather than punishing the couple whose lies placed Sarah in such a compromising position. It doesn’t make sense to modern western morality, yet it makes perfect sense to those family honour-based societies that still exist today. The married Sarah’s honour has been besmirched, and Pharoah did it. Lying is as nothing beside having your way with a woman who is some other man’s possession, even if you didn’t know she was. It’s primitive and brutish, but that’s the Bible.
The author points out other questionable passages, including two contradictory ones about Judas that I hadn’t noticed before. In Acts 1:18-19, the unrepentant Judas is depicted as having his guts suddenly burst open in a field (bought by the proceeds of his betrayal), an Act of a wrathful Yahweh, but in Matthew 27: 3-8 , Judas, clearly guilt-ridden, tosses away his blood money and hangs himself from a tree. Completely incompatible stories, shocking to a discriminating, questing sensibility trying to understand this god’s book.
Later the author goes into aspects of the Bible’s production which I didn’t know about or the details of which I’ve read but forgotten, as an atheist who, knowing the books of the Bible are full of propaganda, fabrication and rescension, isn’t interested in the precise details the way many apologists are. Still they’re worth setting down here, to solidify them in my mind.
Some of this comes from Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, which I’ve actually read, but rather somnolently, probably because, like the video’s author, I was bored by the multifarious inventions of gods, or the qualities of gods, which she presents in the book, none of them based on anything but subjective speculation, albeit ingenious at times. It all started, from a historical perspective (rather than a pre-historic one) with the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian epic poem which presents, in a deliberately mythic way, a creation event, not out of nothing, but out of an eternal ‘raw material’. Armstrong claims that the creation of something out of nothing ‘was an idea that was alien to the ancient world’, including the writers of the Bible’s creation myths. An examination of the very first words of Genesis, however – at least in English – uncovers, at the very least, a vagueness about the issue. I quote from the KJV:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
What we seem to have here is a beginning in which only the single supernatural agent exists. This agent (whose maleness isn’t revealed until verse 5, though it’s likely that in highly gendered Hebrew it was clear from the start) apparently created two things, at least initially, out of what we don’t know (magic happens!), and one of them was formless and void, whatever that may mean. In fact there’s enough ambiguity in these opening lines to keep theologians going for centuries. Ah, such is the inscrutability of brevity.
Anyway, moving along. The Enuma Elish is dated to around 1750 BCE, and is, importantly, a tale of polytheism. It was doubtless a highly selective representation of the polytheistic myths circulating around Mesopotamia at the time and previously. It speaks of a power struggle between gods and then a creation out of a primordial world that’s also formless and void, with a sequence including light, the firmament, land, the sun, the moon, and finally humanity. It’s believed that the first verses of Genesis, written most likely at the time of the Babylonian exile, more than a thousand years after the Enuma Elish was set down, were inspired by and derived from this ancient epic.
In my next post I’ll look at the emergence of Judaeo-Christian monotheism out of polytheism, with reference to this video.
a more realistic pope? don’t hold your breath
‘Catholic’ kids in Haiti, and plenty more where they come from
Herr Ratzinger has resigned, citing ill-health and old age, and a consequently increasing inability to get his head around all the issues and complexities involved in pretending to be the moral and spiritual leader of all humanity, whether humanity likes it or knows about it or not.
It might be argued that the fact that the 85-year-old’s decision caused ‘shockwaves’ through his community is an indication of how ‘away with the fairies’ that community is, but with some 600 years’ history of the big papa holding onto power till his last gasp, they can perhaps be forgiven their complacent fantasies.
So there’ll be a new pope soon, and the rest of us – that’s to say, those who take little personal notice of the pronouncements of the pontiff and the organisation he heads, but who also realize that a worrying proportion of the human population does take him seriously – engage in the more or less slim hope that a new leader will have a more realistic and less hubristic outlook, in terms of attitudes to women, to homosexuals, to contraception, to knowledge and ideas, and so forth.
But of course we outsiders won’t have a say in the election of the next male spokesman for a decidedly male one-and-only god. Nor will most catholics.
So who elects the next pope? A college of cardinals (as opposed to a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows or a conspiracy of ravens), that’s who. And, amusingly, if you’re a cardinal and over 80, you’re not considered compos mentis enough to vote for the next incumbent. That at least seems more in line with realism, but I don’t hear any noises about mandatory retirement of pontiffs – or cardinals, for that matter.
In Australia, judges of the High Court, the highest court in the land, are mandated to retire at age 70. That ruling came in in 1977, and before that the appointment was for life. No doubt similar rulings have been made internationally. And these days, because of the onerous workload, judges often retire before the mandatory date.
The next pope will be elected by about 118 cardinals (depending on when the election takes place, with cardies hurrying over the 80-year cliff as fast as their ruby-red dresses permit). More than half of these blokes were appointed by Ratzinger, and the remainder by his equally ultra-conservative predecessor, Karol Wojtyla, so it’s unlikely that many of them would be overly infected with realism. And of course the problem is that realism, a fairly mundane and anodyne notion for most of us, has been seen as forbidden fruit to the hierarchy of this organisation for centuries. So a dose of realism always carries the risk of Vaticanonical anaphylaxis (quite proud of that one).
Consider the last ‘realistic’ pope (it’s a relative term), Angelo Roncalli, who called the second Vatican Council in the sixties. Certainly his papacy made a case for ecumenicism that has been pursued, at least, in name, ever since, but Vatican 2’s promise has been almost entirely unfulfilled, and Roncalli’s famous ‘open the windows’ pronouncement has fallen on clogged ears inside the Vatican. What’s more, the possibilities Vatican 2 just might have opened up have proved so scarey to the hierarchy that a veil of silence appears to have been cast over its very existence. I suspect their attitude to reform has something in common with the notions of that old fuddy-duddy Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, with his apparent loathing of softies, considered the Anglicans, with their female priests and their modern services and their acceptance of poofs and the like, to be far worse than the Catholics, who at least stood for something. The question is, is it better to stand for misogyny, homophobia, celibacy, anti-intellectualism and ignorant authoritarianism, than to stand for nothing at all? Well, actually, if bums on seats are the measure, the answer appears to be yes. Not that I’m convinced that the Anglicans stand for nothing, but whatever they do stand for, it doesn’t appear to be very popular. Anglican numbers are crashing in this country, whereas the Catholics are creeping rather more slowly towards extinction. Of course this has a little to do with the influx of Catholics as against Anglicans, compared to earlier days, but I’d bet too that it has much to do with the age-old appeal of militant conservatism, from Genghis Khan to little Adolf. And the Vatican has managed, over the years, to clothe its iron fist with the fetching velvet gloves of a humanism that almost seems modern. Kindness to children, to the poor, to the dispossessed and disadvantaged, that sort of thing.
So I’m not expecting anything particularly positive to come out of this change in leadership. The noises coming out of Africa, the fastest-growing Catholic region, are all about holding the line on the homosexual scourge, upholding the traditional family and the dignity of manhood, etc. If anything I see the Catholic Church moving backwards into the foreseeable future, retreating into conservative, anti-intellectual fantasy, much like the Pentecostals, only different. We shall tediously see.
atheism plus comes to town, perhaps
The other day I attended my first local atheist meetup here in Adelaide for quite some time. Not that I was particularly avoiding them, they’ve just been clashing with other commitments, but it turned out to be an interesting time to return, because it was posted that we might like to have a semi-formal discussion on the ‘atheism plus’ push which is causing a bit of a stir on Free Thought Blogs and elsewhere, and if and how we want to incorporate it.
Controversy! Flying Sparks! Noses out of joint! Death threats! Trolls! Witches! Indifference!
In other words I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. What I did find pleasantly surprising was that the topic got a reasonably good airing and the group came to a more or less loose consensus about behaviour at meet-ups, in order to maintain the sorts of standards that might be expected at club meetings, gabfests and the like. That’s to say, no blatant sexism, racism, intimidation or offensive behaviour, with the convenor, presumably after consultation with the respective parties, or having witnessed the abuse, making an executive decision about behaviour having crossed the line sufficiently far as to require intervention, such as politely but firmly asking the offender to desist, or to leave, or even imposing a ban. Doubtless none of this is particularly binding or enforceable, but it’s only a pub meet-up group after all, Amazing tho’ our Meetings might be.
All of this is certainly Good Progressive Stuff, and it might open up an avenue of complaint for some who have avoided meetings because of one or two blowhards who’ve behaved offensively in the past, but does it put as all in the Atheism+ camp? In other words, is Atheism+ anything more than a movement to encourage or impose civility?
This issue was discussed at the meeting, as were the origins of this movement, or proto-movement; the experiences of Jen McCreight, the elevator affair [not so much a storm in an elevator as a storm outside one], the Dawkins response, and harrassment in general, with a variety of views expressed and criticised. Also discussed was the general issue of the way men treat women, and vice versa. I detected plenty of underlying tensions between some males and some females [for the record, though I can’t recall all the conversation, I can say with some certainty that seven males and two females spoke up on this issue, which is almost more revealing than what was said], with the ‘males don’t have an easy time of it either’ line featuring heavily.
We’d just about reached a positive conclusion on the matter, despite the slightly grumbling note of one or two men, when a late male arrival was asked his opinion of the whole A+ thing. He announced to us all that he considered feminism ‘a travesty’, a remark obviously intended to create a splash. A moment later, he added ‘I mean academic feminism’. Needless to say, academic feminism, and whatever reaction one might have to it, was not at issue at the meeting. What was at issue was civility, particularly between men and women, and the creation of an atmosphere that would make everyone, but particularly women, comfortable and enthusiastic and willing to go on attending and contributing – especially given that the group, like most atheist meet-up groups – was dominated by males. To arrive late to a meetup in which he knew that Atheism+ was to be discussed [the same individual had earlier posted a response to the convenor’s announcement about the topic, which clearly mocked the whole thing], thus indicating his lack of interest, and then to state, as his first contribution to the meetup, that feminism is a travesty, was clearly a deliberate provocation, and it had the obviously desired effect of upsetting at least one of the female minority attending, who was passionately concerned to raise the issues around A+, civility and inclusiveness, precisely because she’d been avoiding meetups in which these kinds of arrogant and bombastic statements were being aired.
There are a few lessons to be drawn from this. First, that it only takes one or two insensitive males, or one or two insensitive comments, to spoil a whole evening, or even a whole movement, for those who feel targeted by them. We should all be aware of this, as we all remember the nasty comments directed at us more clearly than a thousand compliments. Second, it’s very important not to let those comments go unchallenged, as silence will feel like assent to those who feel offended by them.
And to describe feminism as a travesty is offensive. I felt personally affronted, and I’m only a male, but a male who grew up in the seventies, at the height of second-wave feminism, with its vital historical perspective on patriarchy’s distortion of female value. It profoundly influenced my intellectual development, and still does. Of course I didn’t agree with all feminist discourse, just as I disagreed with some of the discourse on black power that was prevalent at that time, but I fully agreed with the prime thrust of both these movements, equality. Equality of opportunity, equality of treatment, equality of power. How could anyone object to that?
It seems to me that a job of empowerment, in gender terms, still needs to be done within the atheist community, if we’re to call ourselves a community. That might need more than just civility, but it’s a damn good place to start.
jensen’s submissionary position
I suppose I come across in these posts as a fairly reasonable, analytical sort of bloke, but I actually have to suppress quite an upwelling of emotion, especially angry emotion, from time to time. For example when I witness bullying behaviour, even if only in a movie, I become agitated, unable to keep still. If I’m alone I’ll start pacing up and down, I’ll change the channel, but too late, I’ll remonstrate with the bully, I’ll expose him, humiliate him, perhaps even murder him, or her. And then I’ll tell myself to calm down, why do I over-react like this, where does all this anger come from, almost with the flick of a switch, is there something really wrong with me, etc etc. I’ve gone through this little cycle – the flaring up of anger, followed by the calming-down, the wondering at my semi-unhingedness, the concern about my sanity – literally a thousand times. It can be brought on by stories told to me by third or fourth or fifth persons, or by something I’ve witnessed or been subjected to, or unreliable memories, or my reading of ancient history. But no matter how much I admonish myself, like Beckett’s Krapp telling himself to stop eating bananas, I’m unlikely to change.
Certain benighted characters, from Josef Stalin to Gordon Ramsay, can trigger this cycle in me through the mere mention of their names, and some of them, like the current Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, don’t even seem to fit the general profile of a bully. It’s a puzzlement. But while I can’t expect to cure myself, I can perhaps reduce the symptoms by a little tried-and-true analysis.
So, to Jensen.
My most recent sighting of him was on ABC-TV [I think] the other day, in relation to a quirky little piece on a recent marriage ceremony in which the female party chose to submit to her husband. This ceremonial wording, apparently deliberately chosen by the devout couple, has caused a bit of a stir, apparently. Switch to Jensen’s smiling dial as he ‘explains’ that men and women are different and need to have different roles within a marriage, because a man, you see, is a man, and a woman is a woman, and therefore, well, the conclusion is obvious, surely, and it’s so good that we’re having this debate at last.
Jensen is, of course, a staunch conservative, who’s totally opposed to the ordination of female clergy in the Anglican church, as well as gay marriage and homosexuality generally. The CNNNN team did a great job of questioning the Biblical basis of his views here, and though you could argue that the man was ambushed, he did a notably poor job of defending himself. For this reason I’m a bit uncertain of the value of this post. The fellow seems so feeble-minded, and his views so laughable, that I’m really not sure he’s worth expending energy on, or that his views should be given even the tiny piece of promotion my blog can offer.
However, for my own equanimity’s sake, I will continue. Jensen expands on his views in this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, and that’s what I’ll focus on.
Marriage really matters. Thank God we are talking about it. As Professor Patrick Parkinson said in these pages last week, marriage is ”by far the most stable, safe and nurturing relationship in which to raise children”. However, fewer people are choosing marriage as a way of relating to someone of the opposite sex and fewer people are nurturing children in a family with marriage at its heart.
I can understand that. Individualism leaves us with little reason to join our life to that of someone else. Apart from that, for many marriage has become an arena of suffering, exploitation and disappointment. We choose to bypass it. Yet I would say that we need to go back to biblical principles and understand, improve and support marriage rather than abandon it.
I freely admit that for me, the earthly title and vocation I cherish most is ”husband”. It all began with promises, and each day I try to live out the commitment I made. Marriage is not always easy and I know that for some it proves painfully impossible. But, mostly, making our promises before witnesses and trying to keep them is what works best.
Public promises make a marriage. Marriages are founded on promises of lifelong, exclusive bonding. Provided that the promises commit both man and woman in good times and in bad ”till death do us part”, and that both intend to relate only to each other, the promises are effective in creating the marriage. Husband and wife can certainly make identical promises.
But promises can reflect something even more profound. Since they unite not simply two people but a man and a woman – two different bodies for whom marriage holds different consequences, needs, expectations and emotions – the promises can express these differences, and traditionally have done so.
Many of our young people want to be ”wives and husbands” rather than simply ”partners” and in their weddings they come as ”bride and groom” rather than simply two individuals. They believe that expressing these differences, including different responsibilities, makes for a better marriage.
Both kinds of promise are provided for in the Sydney Anglican diocese’s proposed Prayer Book, which has been the subject of commentary this week.
There is nothing new in this – it is the same as the Australian Prayer Book which has been used for decades.
Where different promises are made, the man undertakes great responsibility and this is also the wording of the book, as it has always been. The biblical teaching is that the promise made voluntarily by the bride to submit to her husband is matched by the even more onerous obligation which the husband must undertake to act towards his wife as Christ has loved the church. The Bible says that this obligation is ultimately measured by the self-sacrifice of Christ in dying on the cross.
This is not an invitation to bossiness, let alone abuse. A husband who uses the wife’s promise in this way stands condemned for betraying his own sworn obligations. The husband is to take responsibility for his wife and family in a Christ-like way. Her ”submission” is her voluntary acceptance of this pattern of living together, her glad recognition that this is what he intends to bring to the marriage and that it is for her good, his good and the good of children born to them. She is going to accept him as a man who has chosen the self-discipline and commitment of marriage for her sake and for their children. At a time when women rightly complain that they cannot get men to commit, here is a pattern which demands real commitment all the way.
Secular views of marriage are driven by a destructive individualism and libertarianism. This philosophy is inconsistent with the reality of long-term relationships such as marriage and family life.
another podcast
this sounds like my kind of podcast
Here’s another podcast, at last, this one on the census.
more on religion and atheism from a gender perspective, and damn statistics
whatever
While reflecting and doing some googly research on women, woo and religious belief, I came upon an article, ‘Religion and Atheism from a Gender Perspective‘, by Tiina Mahlamäki, a lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of Turku, Finland. The article got my back up after only a couple of paragraphs, so I’ve decided to explore my irritation here.
Two early comments immediately got me offside. First, there’s this, from the first para: ‘both (second wave) feminists and atheists consider religion from a relatively narrow point of view’. Note the moderator ‘relatively’ here. It has no real meaning, its function in the sentence is to soften the punch, an old academic device. While I can’t speak for feminists, the ‘narrow’ focus of atheists is generally upon truth, which I suspect Mahlamäki is going to tell us is boring, à la Alain de Botton. We’ll see. Next, this, from the second paragraph:
As an ideological statement and a form of irreligiousness, atheist discourse provides interesting data for the study of religions. Although atheism and secularity are not institutionalised forms of religion, they can be seen as ideologies because they are not merely describing the world; they also want to change it (Davie & Woodhead 2009: 525). For my part, I do not position myself as an atheist, nor as a member of any religious community.
The bullshit antenna is trying to yank itself out of my head here. An ideologue is someone who wants to change the world? You mean, like a researcher who wants to cure cancer, or a neurologist who wants to tease out the mechanisms of consciousness, or a physicist who wants to solve the mystery of dark matter? Or anyone who wants to make a difference in the world? For to change our understanding of the world is most certainly to change our world. These are ideologues? And here was me thinking that an ideologue was someone whose fixed notions of the world were impervious to evidence. Gee, am I dumb. As to Mahlamäki’s potent point that ‘atheism and secularity are not institutionalised forms of religion’, I’m so glad she set us all straight on that one. And then she finishes off by telling us that she isn’t so limited as to position herself anywhere, or maybe she positions herself everywhere, or whatever.
By this time I was wondering who this woman was, where she was truly coming from. Flipping to the end of the article, I noted that her interests included the nexus between religion and Finnish literature, as well as gender issues. Some of her recent writings have been on the literary influence of Emmanuel Swedenborg in Finland. Swedenborg was an eighteenth century Christian theologian, philosopher and ‘mystic’, once very influential. Oh dear. Certainly nothing remotely sciencey in Ms Mahlamäki’s background.
She goes on to point out the overwhelming maleness of the new atheist movement, a not unreasonable point, but her treatment of the ‘war between science and religion’ is wholly inadequate. Take this, for example:
Evolution is, of course, a biological fact, but for the new atheists it ‘has become a powerful quasireligious myth by which atheists such as Dawkins confer meaning on the world’. It has become ‘a powerful folk-tale about human origins’. (Beattie 2007: 12, quoting Mary Midgley.)
Of course, no explanation is given by Mahlamäki or Tina Beattie [the book quoted from is The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason & The War on Religion. Oh dear again] or the redoubtable Midgley as to how a biological fact can also be a powerful folk-tale about human origins, or how we can learn about human origins without evolution. It’s quite preposterous.
Mahlamäki goes on to treat us to a lesson in the aforementioned science-religion war. Her account starts off reasonably enough; religion and science began to separate in earnest, at least in the minds of some individuals and within certain limited circles, during the Enlightenment, and proceeded during the nineteenth century when separate scientific disciplines began to be more fully mapped out and professionalised. However, her description of the sharpening of the struggle as we move towards the modern era invokes power struggles and the tools of rhetoric, but says nothing whatever about truth, or evidence, or even such staples of the philosophy of science as coherence, explanatory power, or the way a scientific theory’s effectiveness is consolidated by the rich research programs it gives rise to. Take this little piece of complacency, for example:
Similarly, the concrete conflict between science and religion at the end of nineteenth century was not born, according to Tina Beattie, from ‘a struggle between religious and scientific ways of explanation’ but merely from a struggle of power and authority between men of science and men of God. ‘The triumph of science over theology required the total discrediting of theological knowledge.’ (Beattie 2007: 20.) This active discrediting is still being continued by the new atheists.
Again, Mahlamäki uses the polemical Beattie and seems reluctant to speak for herself. And what she quotes is rubbish. The triumph of science has consisted in its ability to generate further knowledge, much of which, in applied form, has transformed our world. Theology has discredited itself in making no headway, that’s to say in generating no further knowledge of how the world works, in almost 2000 years, in its Christian form. Few scientists have bothered to engage in discourse with theologians, positively or negatively. Why would they? Atheists, on the other hand – some of whom are also scientists, and many of whom are philosophers, like Dennett, or naturally combative types like Hitchens – are often interested in discrediting theologians and their ‘deepities’, generally by pointing out their massive hidden assumption, that the object[s] of their often interminable discourses and analyses have actual existence. Similarly, we seek to discredit belief in reincarnation and astrology because they’ve taken us nowhere in several thousand years, whereas ‘belief’ in, say, the photoelectric effect has taken us into a digital age that was unimaginable a mere century ago. Science works; it’s applicable [because testable]. I can’t imagine what an applied theology would look like.
By this time you might be wondering what all this has to do with gender. Well, Mahlamäki does write about this, but very inconclusively. She emphasises the appeal of religion to women, and she trots out a few of the more familiar possible explanations, without wholly endorsing any of them. She supports the feminist movement in its attack on the patriarchalism and misogyny of much established religion, and wonders aloud at why so many women are supportive of this oppression, but forty years on from the heights of second-wave feminism, she has no new insights to offer on the issue, leaving me wondering about the point of the exercise.
It seems at least partly an excuse for attacking so-called ‘new atheism’, and I’m not sure if it’s an attack ‘from within’, since Mahlamäki refuses to position herself [or rather, refuses to be explicit about her position, which of course is a different thing]. She dwells on the maleness of the current atheist movement, and its problems in attracting and accommodating women. This is a valid point, but somewhat exaggerated. There are prominent female atheists, and the atheist/sceptical movement is growing among women as it is among men, but again the percentages always seem to be higher for males, and this is a conundrum that needs to be explored through the tools of science, most notably experimental psychology and its connection with neurophysiology. To describe the gender difference here as biological is too simplistic. We are biologically social creatures, with nature and nurture operating interdependently. All of this isn’t to say we shouldn’t be working always on a pragmatic level to encourage more women into the movement.
I’ll end with another bone of contention. Mahlamäki makes some statistical claims, limited to Finland, about the percentage of people who claim to be non-religious versus those who claim to be atheists. She quotes the World Values Survey, 2005, which apparently found that between 3 and 5% of Finns identify themselves as ‘convinced atheists’. I don’t know if any other category of atheists is mentioned, or how this identification was made, but Mahlamäki’s main purpose here was to look at the gender breakdown: 2% of females and 5% of males. The same survey found that 36% of the population identified themselves as non-religious. No comment is made about the extraordinary finding, to me at least , that something like 90% of these non-religious people don’t claim to be atheist, or ‘convincedly atheist’. What do they claim to be? Then she quotes another survey by the International Social Survey Programme (2008) which found that ‘Approximately 8 per cent of women and 15 per cent men have no belief in God,
Spirit, or Life Force.’ This sounds like convinced atheism to me, and the figure, cutting the gender division in two, comes in at about 11.5%, maybe three times the figure for the other survey. And these figures should be seen in the context of a nation whose figures for religiousness regularly come in well below those for Australia. They just further indicate how statistics can be heavily skewed by survey methodology and interpretation. I should also point out that the gender findings of both these surveys, with more than twice the number of men being non-religious as women, don’t fit with the findings from other countries, including Australia. The gender gap is there, but it’s generally not so wide.
I could chase up these different surveys and check out their methodologies, as far as I’m able, but I have better things to do. Suffice to say that, with these widely varying results, it’s highly unlikely that any of these studies will be definitive. In the end, what people think on these matters is personal and complex, and box-ticking questionnaires are unlikely to enlighten us about the answers. Perhaps we should just accept the crudity of these figures however skewed one way or the other, and take them all with a grain of salt.
religion, ‘woo’ and gender
something to look into
All the statistics indicate that women are more religious than men, and also more into astrology, numerology, tantric sex, reincarnation, tarot readings and other forms of fortune-telling, tantric sex, ‘alternative’ medicine, reiki, homeopathy, and I almost forgot to mention tantric sex.
Okay, I’m not sure about the tantric sex, but there’s no shortage of statistical evidence re the superior gender’s greater penchant for matters spiritual and such, and there’s also no shortage of attempts to explain this. The most common of these highlight the generally more caring and sharing and community oriented temperament of women, which of course is sheeted home to the nurturing, maternal instinct. Here’s a typical example. There may of course be something in this, despite Margaret Thatcher, Judge Judy and Xena, Warrior Princess, but though this might seem to account for the preponderance of women in community service work [religious or secular], it doesn’t really cut it for those spiritual fields which don’t obviously involve service and obedience to a [male] Lord and Master.
A slightly more interesting explanatory account comes from evolutionary psychology. According to this account, women are more risk-averse than men, and studies have shown that religious people tend to be more risk-averse than non-religious people. Religious people are religious at least partly because they like to feel protected, while atheism removes the safety net, making it much more appealing to ‘man versus wild’ types. Of course this need for protection is seen as evolutionarily associated with human females, who spend a certain period of time in the vulnerable state of motherhood.
It’s an interesting one, but some people might feel it a bit of a stretch associating, say, astrology, with the sense of being protected. Perhaps it’s a protection to feel that the world is predictable, that your star-sign will define your range of behaviours. This ‘tames’ the world in some sense. The same may go for fortune-telling, and perhaps even reincarnation – everything goes in cycles without end , the ‘world’, or the forces of ‘nature’ protect you even from death.
I wonder, though, how affluence, feminism, lower pregnancy rates and other aspects of social evolution are complexifying the picture. I have to say – to be anecdotal for a moment – that most of the women I know who are into woo [and many of them are] don’t strike me as shrinking violets in any way. They’re strong-willed, independent, and generally more career-oriented than I am [which isn’t saying much]. Of course, the most basic instincts are hardest to shift, though they’re often disguised or channelled into modes of thought and behaviour that can’t be easily traced back to primal causes. And the fact is that the social evolution of humans in terms of gender roles is quite recent and varies markedly from region to region, and between religions.
All of this is as much to say that I really don’t know why women are more into superstition than men, beyond the few clues offered here. Fortunately, there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, and our social world is never static. Always room for hope.