It’s difficult to overcome the prejudice that having more choices is always better.   In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz made a convincing case that too much choice can overload and paralyze us.   I couldn’t help but think of the paradox of choice while grocery shopping yesterday.  

One of the major chains of grocery stores in the midwest is Schnucks (that’s right, 7 consonants and only one vowel).   Schnucks has done business in St. Louis since well before I was born.  I’m assuming that Schnucks is a typical grocery store and, therefore, that it stocks as many as 30,000 different products in each of its stores–a formidable number.

As I shopped yesterday, I took a few photos to illustrate the point made by Barry Schwartz.   Here, for instance, is the mustard aisle, offering you about 30 kinds of mustard:

And that’s just the beginning.  Here’s the pickle department.  I will occasionally eat a pickle, but if you told me that I could never again have a pickle, it wouldn’t upset me in the least.  Many people value pickles more highly than I do, apparently.  Here they are, dozens of types of pickles, ready for you to choose.

I was on a roll (and I was having some fun), so I moved over to the pasta aisle:

There were a lot more types of pasta than one could fit in a single photo.  

Was there any major product, I wondered, where you could simply choose between two or three types?  The answer is “no” regarding most of the things most of us purchase most of the time.  There were hundreds of types of liquor, tea, cheese, snacks, cookies, cake mixes, cereals and pizzas, all of this choice making it so incredibly difficult to whisk in and out of the store.   You can imagine a comment echoing across America every day:  “No, not that type!  I wanted you to buy the mini, mint flavored, instant, Brazilian, fiber-enhanced, artificially sweetened low-fat version with individual servings!”

Ready for another photo?  How many types of peanut butter can there possibly be?  After all, it’s only smashed up peanuts with a bit of sweetener, right?

Actually, there are many types of smashed up peanuts with a bit of sweetener (some types coming with no sweetener).  

I decided to end my little tour at the non-dairy creamer section, assuming that there would be only few types of this product (I’m not a coffeee or tea drinker, and I’ve never actually paid attention).

There they were.  Enough brands to start a fight in any well-behaved household in the country. 

I can’t find the statistics to support me at the moment, but it seems to me that grocery stores doing business when I was young (in the 1960’s) probably carried only 20% as many products as modern grocers.  It’s also funny to consider what “works” for modern buying clubs.  Costco seems to do very well with only a couple types of each food product.   If you want pretzels, you pick either this one or that one.   If you want a jar of Vitamin D tablets, here’s your only choice (unlike the mega vitamin selection you’ll find in a Walgreen’s–if you really want to have your head spun around by choices of vitamins or supplements, shop on the Internet.  For instance, the Vitamin Shoppe brags that it carries 20,000 distinct products. 

Choosing a tombstone can also be exhausting, according to Rock of Ages.  You’ve simply got to pick the right one, or else the dead person might get hurt feelings: 

Selecting the granite for a memorial can be confusing-much like selecting a fine gemstone. If you’ve ever purchased a diamond, you know that even stones that appear similar can vary greatly in quality and value. It takes special tools and expertise to tell a perfect stone from an imperfect one-whether diamond or granite.

And what about choosing a pet dog?  For our family, it was relatively easy.  We went to the local Humane Society and took home one of the bouncy mutts (I admit that we focused on type of dogs known to be friendlier with children).   If you want to do it right, though, you might want to spend a few hours looking over all of this material at Wonder Puppy.  Before having a wine and cheese party, you simply must spend a few days learning to become a competent beginner wine-buyer here. 

It just doesn’t stop, here in the U.S.    Good enough is simply not good enough.  It’s often said that we are so choosy because we need to make the “right” choice, but that rationale doesn’t convince me.   I think that there we are often shopping for sex, whether we realize it or not.  The cure for this madness?  I don’t know that there is one, though the “Church of Stop Shopping” is trying to lend a hand to neurotic shoppers everywhere.

If choice makes us neuotic (Schwartz has convinced me that it has), we are “lucky” that we don’t have excess choices in all aspects of life.  For instance, we are in the process of wiping out many types of fish, by some estimates, 90% of the large predatory fish of the oceans, such as swordfish, marklin and the biggest types of tuna.   Soon, we’ll be surprised that there is any fish at all in the restaurant.  We’ll happily take whatever they have.

And our voting neuroses will be kept to a minimum this election (as almost every election), because we only have two choices for president (at least for those of us who vote for someone who might actually serve as President).    

This article, by Ann J. Simonton of Common Dreams recommends that we slow down in order to better appreciate, absorb and enjoy all aspects of life.

It isn’t just fast food that reminds us fast is not always better. The frantic pace of everyday life seems to impede our ability to make changes that are increasingly necessary for a sustainable future. Many have begun to realize that a primary step toward positive social change is to slow down. Cutting edge groups like Canada’s Adbusters have been promoting Slow Week to encourage SLOW as means to enjoy and prioritize all aspects of life.

She recommends that part of slowing down should include having slower sex:

The media landscape is clearly bloated with highly processed sex. High in fat content, in terms of the lies it tells. High in calories, in terms of the burden it places on the possibility of real intimacy. It does not celebrate the beauty of imperfection, the vulnerability of tenderness and shared experience. It hasn’t time for, or interest in empathic communication about respective desires and boundaries. At best it sets people up for misunderstanding and disappointment-at worst for rape and abuse.

Slow sex is not a condemnatory movement, but a movement toward informed pleasure. It isn’t about forcing change but about providing a fair and reasoned platform to address difficult questions about how the culture promotes sexual intimacy, with the caveat to do no harm.

I realized this very recently, when several factors forced gender into awareness. In a psychology course a few quarters back, the professor asked the class to list the groups to which we each thought we belonged. My list looked something like this: “Student; Intellectual; Atheist; Independent; Skeptic; Young Adult”. As students read off their answers, I noticed a big glaring gap in my own response: gender. Most women had mentioned that they saw themselves as “women”. In fact, “women” was usually the group at the top of the list. I wrote this off as an example of how much I value my intellectual life over my more superficial life-on-paper. Or something.

Then one day, I became ensnared in one of my Hillary-Clinton-supporting roommate’s little tirades about women and power. He considers himself a big feminist, and he loves powerful women and the gender questions it creates. At one point he said something like, “When people look at you as a a woman-” and I quickly, instinctively replied, “But I don’t really think of myself as a woman.” He seemed to understand what I meant instantly- I see myself as a person.
(more…)

The Telegraph is reporting on a new book that argues that teenaged girls are being corrupted by distorted images of what it means to be a woman. 

In a society that celebrates people such as Paris Hilton, girls are being brainwashed into believing that promiscuity is synonymous with success, says Carol Platt Liebau.
 
In Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Liebau claims there is “scant recognition or respect” for a woman’s achievement that is not associated with sex appeal.

Liebau says the sexy images of performers such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera catapulted them to fame.

She claims that teenage girls are growing up in a culture in which being called “a slut” is preferable to being labelled “a prude”.

“The overwhelming lessons teenagers are now learning from the world around them is that being sexy is the ultimate accolade, trumping intelligence, character and all other accomplishments at every stage of a woman’s life,” says the author, managing editor of Harvard Law Review.

These sorts of accusations have been made before.  For instance, see here.

Last night I saw The Da Vinci Code for the first time.  I had read the first chapter of the book some time ago and frankly it so did not capture my imagination that I haven’t picked it up since.  Years before, I’d read Holy Blood Holy Grail, the book upon which most of Brown’s novel seems based, although the ideas in both have been around for a long, long time.

What did I think of the movie?  It was entertaining.  It moved well.  One might say it is almost (almost, not quite) a Thinking Person’s Indiana Jones.  The photography is gorgeous, the settings cool, and I am never disappointed by Ron Howard’s direction.  Tom Hanks character seems a bit too restrained at times, but this is a minor quibble.

I am frankly impressed that they had the nerve to follow the argument all the way through.  The whole notion of Jesus’ sex life drives many people into spasms of irrational anxiety and vehement denunciation.  It is not just that the early church—from the time of Constantine on—exhibited a profound and evolving misogyny, but that the very idea of sexual intercourse itself elicits a kind of systemic, reflexive revulsion I find baffling to say the least.  I mean, if it were only the subjugation of women at issue, then the notion that Jesus might have used them like kleenexes (much as most charismatic cult leaders have done and continue to do) should raise no passions.

No, it is beyond that.  It is a rejection of sex as a valid exercise between men and women.  Jesus and the Apostles become not just the ultimate He-Man Woman Haters Club, but a paradigm for an asceticism echoed down through time as some sort of ideal state for the true christian.

It falls apart, though, in the subsequent perversion of the Ideal in the very subjugation and profound misogyny that Jesus himself seems to have had no time or patience for.  Later generations of church leaders found that in order to reject sex, they had to demonize the very thing that kept pulling them away from that Ideal—the desirability of women.

(I’m speaking here in terms of heterosexuality, but the same applies to all forms of sexual intimacy.  If it was sinful for a man to lust after a woman, at least such lust was discussable, while homosexual lust brooked no dialogue whatsoever, just condemnation.)

The difficulty of this part of the standard operating procedure of christianity appears unique among the other ideals sought—honesty, humility, generosity, forgiveness.  Frankly, none of them are as difficult to achieve and live by as chastity.

The fact that sexual love can be so magnificent, so transcendent, so Other Worldly makes me wonder—has always made me wonder—if this were even an issue for Jesus.  I seriously doubt it was.  I seriously doubt it was part of his ethic.  He seems to have regularly chastised his disciples for being “boys” when it came to letting the women in as equals.  Doubtless there was a lot of competition among the Twelve for Jesus’s attention and approbation, and doubtless—because of the persistence of the aesthetic within Roman, Greek, and Hebrew cultures—there was more than a little resistance to letting women in on anything the boys did, so it would be natural, while the male competition was going on, to resent even more the intrusion of—ugh—females!

Like all oppression, misogyny on the systemic level is a control device.  The church learned early that it could control its followers best by instilling a constant state of anxiety over sin, by making them all feel guilty and requiring expiation through the intervention of priests.  If they could make you feel guilty during your most private and intimate moments, boy they had you.

Did they do this consciously?  Some probably knew very well what they were doing.  Most just followed orders.  They revered hermits and ascetics, set them up as standards—like St. Jerome, who castrated himself rather than be distracted by lust.  After a time, it becomes entrenched, and the cult of chastity becomes self-perpetuating.  It is always a mistake to think that psychological tyranny is a new thing, invented by the Bolsheviks, or that Back Then people weren’t good at it.  Nonsense.  Modern dictators study Caesar for more than mere military advice.

But was it based on Jesus’s teachings?  Likely not.  He was very much about freedom, about getting out from under the shadow of sin, about finding truth, and about people being equal.  The idea that he would somehow have found women lesser beings is not borne out in the texts, either canonical or apocryphal.

The idea that he was married is hardly the Big Deal the church makes of it.  All it would mean is that he lived life fully as a human being, eating, sleeping, working, talking…loving, in all the ways humans have of loving.  To claim, as the church does, that he was made human in order to live as us so that when he died he could die as one of us is undermined if you take away one of the most basic and powerful and intimate of human experiences.  All the rest of that list is barely more than survival.

I’ll leave the examination of why the decision was taken to subjugate women in the church to others.  It’s a lengthy topic.  Suffice it to say that they did and we’re paying the price of ridding ourselves of that condition, and have been for some time.

What interested me in the ideas behind The Da Vinci Code and it source material is the notion that the revelation of such a fact would overturn the church.  People are gullible, but stubborn.  It would do no such thing.  People would fight and cling to their faith and reject the new fact, just as they reject anything else, true or otherwise, that threatens them where they pin their hopes.  I see atheists all the time hoping for the day religion disappears (hoping, of which most faiths draw sustenance, hence an ironic condition for one who wishes faith to disappear) and thinking that this or that piece of science might dispel as if by magic the blindness of those who see the world otherwise.  Never happens.  Never will.

At best, people adapt and modify the new facts to fit with the old framework, and over time the whole thing gradually morphs into something new, even while appearing to be the same old schtick.

Therefore, I see the idea of the Priory of Scion not as a secret organization designed to guard a Great Secret until the time is right to reveal it, but as another church that has a different kind of icon at its center—a human one, but nevertheless just as potent a symbol as any other.  The bitterness of Ian McKellen’s character that when the first millennium rolled around and the Priory failed to reveal the heir misses the point.  They didn’t reveal the heir (fictionally, mind you) because it would have gotten them all killed, including the heir.  But more importantly, they would have lost their icon.  Their center.  They changed, became like the thing they sought to replace, and simply continued on, worshiping in their own idiosyncratic way.

I quite enjoyed the whole scene with The Last Supper.  Absurd in many ways, though.  While I liked the notion that the person on Jesus’s right is, in fact, Mary, it is a problematic conjecture.  The original was painted on a wall in a mess hall—the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan.  It did not fare well.  Even in 1556, one commentator described it as ‘a muddle of blots.’  It has been restored more often than any other painting by Da Vinci.  The church itself was hit by a bomb in 1943 and rubble covered the painting.  The current version is the nth restoration and no doubt a lot of it is guesswork.  It is not the only Last Supper with a beardless youth at Jesus’s side, but many have pointedly identified this person as John, his brother (another point of contention among those who find the idea that his mother had sex with Joseph offensive).  If Da Vinci had been so bold as to paint a woman, I think there would have been public controversy at the time.  But who can say?  It’s as concrete as any other aspect of this particular issue.

I think we are best left to the long and slow process of just growing up when it comes to this issue.  The supernatural elements of the church have less and less hold on more and more people.  The essential points of Jesus’s teachings do not require his deification or the intercession of divinity—except, perhaps, the divinity we ourselves possess simply as conscious beings capable of greatness.  Capable of wholeness.  Capable, finally, of love.

Here’s how Christina Page addresses this question:

• 98 percent of American women have done it.
• 37 million Americans are currently doing it.
• Most of the GOP candidates oppose it.
  What is it?

“It” is using birth control.   The GOP candidates have made it clear that they oppose the right of women to choose abortions.

The GOP candidates have not yet been forced to explain their generally ridiculous positions on this incredibly important issue of whether birth control should be freely available to consenting adults.  It’s time for this free ride to end.  They should be forced to take a position.  Why?  Honesty on this issue will reveal their ambitions to destroy additional personal liberties in order to hang onto the votes of fundamentalist zealots (I know that this is redundant).  Here’s how Page explains her position:

These guys [GOP candidates] may try to outdo each other on anti-abortion rhetoric and explain, unflinchingly, how doctors will be thrown in jail when Roe fails (an inevitability in their minds). But it’s the contraception question that really scares them. Because once the presidential debate focuses on how the candidates plan to alter the average American’s sex life (made possible thanks to family planning) it is lifted from the pink ghetto of “woman’s issues” and becomes a concern of male voters too.

For more evidence regarding the prevalent GOP position that birth control should not be freely available to American adults, see these previous DI posts:

Beware Claims of Pregnancy Resource Centers

The Bush administration relishes unplanned pregnancies - new evidence.

Focus of religious organization: Ban all birth control

Bush’s new head of family-planning programs opposes birth control

Protecting pharmacists who refuse to fill valid prescriptions for legal drugs

Those abstinence-only programs are really bringing down the teen pregnancy rate . . . or are they?

Conservatives: Stop having sex for the pleasure of it! 

Special proms for prepubescent fundamentalist girls 

I bristled yesterday as I read yet another faux-controversy concocting article in my misguided home town paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  You see, Body Worlds is coming to my town and the morality “experts” are getting restless.  The “concern” is that maybe we shouldn’t be staring at dead bodies.  The morality experts quoted by the article are suggesting that the Body Worlds exhibit, sponsored by the St. Louis Science Center, “exploits the dead for entertainment and commerce.”

What is Body Worlds?  Check out the short video at the bottom of this page.  Here’s a written description from the official Body Worlds site:

The BODY WORLDS exhibitions are first-of-their-kind exhibitions through which visitors learn about anatomy, physiology, and health by viewing real human bodies, using an extraordinary process called Plastination a groundbreaking method for specimen preservation invented by Dr. von Hagens in 1977. Each exhibition features more than 200 real human specimens, including whole-body plastinates, individual organs, organ configurations and transparent body slices. The specimens on display stem from the body donation program that Gunther von Hagens established in 1983. The exhibitions also allow visitors to see and better understand the long-term impact of diseases, the effects of tobacco consumption and the mechanics of artificial supports such as knees and hips. To date, nearly 25 million people around the world have viewed the BODY WORLDS exhibits.

I visited the Body Worlds exhibit twice while it was in Chicago two years ago.  The exhibition was breath-taking and educational.  I plan to see Body Worlds III while it is in St. Louis.  I plan to bring my kids (aged 7 and 9), because this is a terrific chance to learn about one of the most incredible phenomena on Earth—the human body.  Viewing the body from the numerous perspectives offered by the exibitors, the question is not why it sometimes breaks down or dies.  The real question is how it ever actually works, given its surreal complexity.  There is no reason that human specimens should be viewable by anatomy students, but off-limits to the rest of us.  Why has the viewing of dead humans become off-limits to most of us?  There is probably no single reason, but it’s not because we aren’t interested in viewing dead bodies.  I’ve long suspected that it’s due to a widespread reluctance to consider the undeniable fact that humans are animals. See here and here and here and here and here and here.

While at Body Worlds, I plan to be inspired (as I was in Chicago) by Gunther von Hagens’ professionalism and creativity.  He puts boundless time and energy into preparing his specimens. Perhaps the problem for some people is that von Hagens has a little fun with his specimens.  Instead laying the bodies out on slabs, he arranges them in real-world postures.  They “do” things like play chess and ride bicycles.  Oh, but how dare they arrange dead human bodies so that they are doing the same things that living humans do! Such disrespect!

Yes, there are now accusations that Body Worlds is “exploiting the dead for entertainment and commerce,” as though the dead can be exploited.  And as though dead bodies aren’t exploited whenever they are dressed up for wakes, to allow us to pretend that those dead people are merely sleeping.

Consider yet another way of displaying images of dead human bodies:  Two days ago, my family attended a St. Louis animal preserve run by Anheuser-Busch.  This beautiful facility is called “Grant’s Farm” because part of the land was once owned by Ulysses S. Grant.  Given that Halloween is coming up, the grounds were decorated with ghoulish specimens that undoubtedly exploit the dead for entertainment and commerce.  Check out these photos, then nod your head in agreement that we have a stark double-standard at play:

                      (more…)

There’s really little more that I can add to this clip, other than refer you to this post. 

Here’s the video.

You bet it did!  Actually, the Earth moves whether or not you are having sex.

The only real question is figuring out how far the Earth moved. Luckily Quirkology has provided you a calculator that allows you to customize input to figure out, in miles, how far the Earth actually and truly moved.

This post is from Press Esc:  

The Pope’s calls to save the environment [were] met with dismay by critics who have repeatedly pointed out that the Vatican’s ban on contraception will effectively negate all attempts at protecting the environment and tacking climate change.

“Care of water resources and attention to climate change are matters of grave importance for the entire human family,” Benedict XVI said today, on th eve of an international symposium on the defense of the Arctic. “Encouraged by the growing recognition of the need to preserve the environment, I invite all of you to join me in praying and working for greater respect for the wonders of God’s creation.”

But William Lawrence argues in New Scientist that Catholic church is responsible for denying women access to condoms that could halt the population explosion, which is the main cause of Planet Earth’s environmental ills.

Senator Larry Craig’s defiant claim that he is “not gay” is an interesting one.  He didn’t say “I don’t hang around in public restrooms where men commonly have sex with men.”  He said he was not “gay.” 

Is it possible for a man to have sex with other men but not be “gay”?  I suspect that most people would claim that a man who has sex with other men is, by that very fact, “gay.” But is it that simple?

Scientist Alfred Kinsey argued that “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals” were both located on the same continuum running from “Exclusively heterosexual” to “Exclusively homosexual.”  This continuum is represented in Kinsey’s scale of sexual orientation.  He argued that society’s efforts to pigeonhole people into one type or the other was a political move.  It was possible, according to Kinsey, that a man (or a woman) might be predominantly heterosexual, but only incidentally homosexual.  Perhaps, this is what Senator Craig meant when he claimed that he was not “gay.”  Perhaps he was honestly (and desperately) claiming that he liked sex with women as a rule, though he did the public restroom gig with other men on the side.

Senator Craig obviously feels the pain of the “gay” label a lot more than he feels the pain of being caught in a restroom where men commonly have sex with other men.  Thus, his continued protests denying his alleged homosexuality.   But maybe he’s protesting the “gay” label for yet another reason.   Maybe he is honestly (and desperately) trying to communicate that he only has physical sex with men, but no emotional relationships.  Preposterous?  Not really.

Consider the numerous men who, though married to women and though living public lives as straight men, have repeated episodes of uncommitted sex with other men.   Salon.com did an extensive piece on this phenomenon in African American communities.  There, it’s called “on the down low,” or the D.L., where men lead seemingly straight lives but have sex with other men.  There’s even a long tradition of how a man should solicit sex from another man in adjoining bathroom stalls–the flashing of a wedding ring in the process even makes it all the more alluring to some participants.

This phenomenon of the “down low” is not limited to African American communities.   Consider this statistics reported by Medicinenet.com:

Nearly one in 10 men who say they’re straight have sex only with other men, a New York City survey finds.
And 70% of those straight-identified men having sex with men are married.
In fact, 10% of all married men in this survey report same-sex behavior during the past year.
This means safe-sex messages aimed at straight and gay men are likely missing this important subgroup . . .

There are many other examples of men who have sex with other men who don’t consider themselves “homosexual” or “gay.”  These “situational homosexual” acts are reputed to be common on long tours of duty on ships and in prisons.   (more…)

World-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal is tired of reading the nonsense written by conservatives who are working hard to do the same thing to bonobos that they have been doing to climate change: change the facts to fit the politics.

Why are conservatives embarrassed by the bonobo?  Is it, perhaps, because the bonobo is ”known for its ‘gay’ relations, female supremacy, and pacific life-style”?   That’s the topic of de Waal’s NYT article. 

Are you sure you want to be “free”?  Freedom is such a strange concept. I’ve never understood it in the context of personal decision-making. 

Americans claim to love “freedom,” but how much freedom can you stand?  Freedom implies occurrences that are unhinged from naturalistic laws.  Freedom implies a mechanism that is not hooked into the laws of physics, chemistry or biology. Freedom implies a capricious mechanism that guides one’s most important decisions.  To have a truly free mind, then, is to have a lawless mind, a random mind.  How would you possibly make any sort of rational decision if your mind operated in a lawless fashion?  Is that really what anyone wants? 

Many thinkers have spent their careers trying to figure out how to justify freedom in the happy sense (I freely chose to marry my spouse) without having freedom in the three-of-natural-law-sense.  There are lots of ingenious approaches to this attempted maneuver, many of them invoking spiritual beings or quantum physics. None of them persuade me in the least. I am convinced by the evidence.  I prefer to let the chips fall.

Also, I am happy being a law-abiding animal with law-abiding cognition.  It doesn’t concern me that my mind is really shorthand for the effects of a law-abiding brain.  It is my guess that someday (perhaps not in my lifetime) we will be able to fully account for all that we perceive to be beautiful or boring or logically compelling.  In my mind, a mind/brain that “obeys” the laws of physics can generate the full gamut of human emotions.  I am in the minority on this point, though.  Most people fear the thought that their minds could be subject to natural laws.  They flee from this thought with such energy that they run straight into the arms of random (and therefore unpredictable) cognition, a worldview that is allegedly controlled by ghosts and particle-waves.

I thought of the quirky concept of “freedom” while reading an article called “Mating Intelligence in Personal Ads,” by Charlotte De Backer, Johan Braeckman and Lili Farinpour.  This article is found in a brand-new book: Mating Intelligence: Sex, Relationships, and the Minds of Reproductive System (2008) edited by Glenn Geher and Geoffrey Miller. 

This personal ads article is a comprehensive review of research that’s been done on the types of mates people seek in their personal ads.  According to this article, there are numerous predictions one can make based upon the authors’ survey of a survey of ads placed by heterosexual people seeking opposite sex companions in newspaper ads.

A predictable and long litany of sex differences shows up, regardless of time or culture.  Most women want longer-lasting sexual relationships than men.  Men seek much more short-term mating.  Men seek multiple sex partners.  Men seek younger females and females seek older men.  Men seek physical traits associated with youth and fertility, while women seek out men who display queues of wealth and status, such as nice houses, cars and luxuries.  Women also seek men who are willing to share that wealth with others, such as these women themselves and their future children. Women want tall men; no women seek short men.  Women rarely specify weight restrictions in their ads.  Men often seek out slim partners. 

Very few of these conclusions are new, though it is striking to see them all in one place.  Actually, I’m currently seeing these conclusions in at least two places, because almost all of these conclusions are even more thoroughly documented in another brand-new book, this one by David Buss, entitled Evolutionary Psychology: the New Science of the Mind (Third Edition) (2008).

Based upon their survey of the personal ads, De Backer, Braeckman and Farinpour drafted an ideal ad for a man:

I am a wealthy, reliable, mature man, with an intelligent mind in a pretty good body.

They also drafted an ideal ad for a female:

I am a young, attractive, slim woman, who is reliable and financially secure.

What do these personal ads have to do with freedom?  Human beings have an almost unstoppable desire to believe that they are “free.”  It is such an intense desire that, if asked, the people running these ads would confidently claim that they “chose” each of the characteristics that appeared in their ads.  Yet it is highly unlikely that such an enormous number of males and females, respectively, would independently write such a similar ads “freely.” It makes much more sense to assume that human cognition is subject to stable natural laws.   And one need not limit oneself to the laws of physics.  Evolution predicts that these choices in the way people write personal ads result from such things as the need for paternity certainty and the predictable differences relating to the parental investment theory of George Trivers.

Despite this onslaught of predictability in the way males and females draft their personal ads, very few writers of these ads would even want to consider that they wrote those ads in accordance with predictable scientific laws. I say this because I’ve discussed this issue of freedom with quite a few people over the years, and it’s a rare bird that dares to question the focus of physics version of the term “freedom.”  In fact, it is not unusual to find people disgusted by the idea that cognition is subject to natural laws.  Several people have gone so far as to question my sanity and I raise this topic.  They think that I’m trying to argue that people are “robots.”

In my mind, evolutionary theory gives much greater explanatory bang for the buck than the oxymoronic term “freedom.” Most people are willing to timidly blame their decisions on emotions.  They are unwilling to go that additional important step, the step described by Robert Wright (in The Moral Animal) when he wrote that emotions are “evolution’s executioners.”

Nietzsche was one of those thinkers who dared to carefully consider the term “freedom.”  He pessimistically wrote about it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst.”  

As I mention above, though, I don’t consider a naturalistic version of cognition to be a sad thing or a happy thing.  It is simply the way it is. 

If you are intrigued by the Incredible Sameness of Human Beings, also consider reading this article.  Be careful, or you might have a bad dream that we are largely interchangeable, a direct challenge to the treasured platitude that each individual is unique. 

Last Friday, Governor Blunt signed a bill that mandates that sex ed teachers provide political affiliations and charitable contribution disclosures to the state in order to prevent any teachers possibly affiliated with any reproductive rights centers or groups from teaching about reproduction. It also prohibits schools from obtaining materials from organizations that normally provide family planning materials.

The White House approved Abstinence Only policy is now the official Missouri directive. This program is well discredited. Yes, it does cause the average age of first sex to increase, by about 3 months. But the incidence of pregnancy and disease from graduates of Abstinence Only is significantly higher within the same age group as survivors of real sex education.

This sex anti-education clause was attached to a bill that requires any office that provides abortions to comply with regulations pertaining to full Emergency Room facilities.

Blunt ceremoniously signed the bill on a cross-shaped podium in a church lobby in front of an audience of church leaders. Talk about keeping church and state separate!

Here’s the Google News round-up on this issue

If you Google “Paris Hilton Jail” you’ll get 15 million hits. If you Google “Downing Street Memo” you’ll get only 800,000 hits. A terrifying real-world topic, “Greenland ice sheet,” will only return 900,000 hits. I suppose it’s because there are no videos of memos or glaciers having sex.

What brought me to the topic of Paris Hilton (other than my world salad mood) might be my fascination with how folks use Google. It astounds me whenever I notice the sexually graphic search strings that bring some people to this site. I don’t know who you are (the feds know who you are, but I don’t). Website traffic software, however, allows me to view your search queries if you click on a Google result that brings you to this site. Lots of kinky stuff. I hope those of you who stumble onto this site in that manner won’t be disappointed, even though you really won’t find the kinds of things for which you are apparently looking. I’m not trying to be preachy, but maybe you can afford to take a break from all that stuff, at least once in a while, and come to this website on purpose.

I really don’t know anything about Paris Hilton, other than that she is famous because of a sex video and that she is otherwise famous because she is famous. Those millions of Google hits (the jail episode involves merely one small slice of her life) really speak to the power of vapid celebrity. But this is a word salad post, so I am at liberty to move on to discuss the next thing that comes to my mind.

After work, I commute home past a stadium where the St. Louis Cardinal Baseball team plays. I often do wonder whether baseball fans are more out of shape than football fans or basketball fans. Here’s a thought experiment I’ve never run because I don’t want a broken jaw: Try greeting every single fan who comes through the baseball stadium turnstiles by saying, “You need to lose 25 pounds. You would be correct 60%of the time. If anyone want to run this experiment, I’ll be happy to watch.

People often excel at what they do most often. If people sit, eat and watch athletes that mostly stand and spit, that has real-life consequences. Fans who engage in this activity much of the time really get good at sitting, eating and watching. Ironically, in my experience, most fans don’t actually pay attention to the baseball game even after paying lots of money for a ticket to get into the stadium. It must be all of those distracting advertising posters and videos, I assume.

Now don’t get all bent out of shape. Professional baseball athletes are capable of doing many things I will never be able to do. They are exquisitely skilled. But here’s the irony: most professional baseball players don’t exercise much during the competition. Only when it’s “time out” do they get busy taking practice swings, taking ground balls, stretching, running sprints and coming in and out of the dugout. When it’s time in, however, there really aren’t many calories burned on the field. Just stare at the outfields and all of those guys sitting in the dugout and you’ll see that I’m correct.

There can’t be much debate on this lack of exercise issue. But now, answer this: Playing what sport will burn the fewest calories? Baseball loses hands down. No question. Therefore, we sign up our kids to play soccer and basketball over tee-ball, right? Not in this town. We can’t wait to take our kids out to a baseball diamond to get very little exercise, well before their little muscles can even function well enough to make a match meaningful. That doesn’t matter to the parents, who come to cheer the kids on. Human beings are great creators of meaning.

Uh-oh. Another transition. Damn that National Geographic! The June 2007 issue features “The Big Thaw.” There are too many dramatic photos of water flushing down and out of Greenland at an incredible rate. The message is clear: If we don’t do something drastic, “the ice will likely disappear.” The only polar bears will live in zoos, just like it already is for tigers and many other endangered animals. The photos and statistics are numbing (see pp. 56 – 71). Go look, if you dare. As I was reading this depressing news about global warming, at least for a few seconds, I felt like a Republican. I was irritated that all of those uppity scientists and writers were telling me devastating things that won’t stop unless all of us dramatically change our lifestyles. That must be what Republicans feel when they decide that it’s easier to deny than to do something meaningful about a problem. All of this environmental damage is going on under the watch the most powerful man in the world, yet he doesn’t give a crap. Well, actually, he does care enough to allow his minions to falsify scientific reports to assure us that everything is OK. Lots of people voted for him, because they like that approach.

Voting? That topic reminds me of a haunting letter to the New York Times Magazine (June 10, 2007): “Today’s manipulation of the uninformed and illogical voting public by puerile ‘sound bites’ and bumper stickers has gotten us into lots of trouble.” What do we do about our big problems? We elect people who make us feel good about not doing anything at all. Nonetheless, many people still claim that that our voting system is a system that has proven its worth. It’s better than any other voting system in the world. There’s no need to actually make a factual comparison. We just know it.

But let me bring this full circle, in a word salad sort of way. Yes, all of us do like to watch videos. We especially love underdogs. Would you like to watch the opposite of Paris Hilton? If you’ve seen this video of Paul Potts before, you’ll thank me. If you’ve never before seen this video, you’ll really thank me. May this be a complete antidote to my frustration and cynicism . . .

In this 1971 article, Judith Jarvis Thomson suggests that we’ve spent way too much time and emphasis on the issue of whether a developing fetus is fully human.   She doesn’t concede this point (she argues that acorns are not oak trees).  Yet she prefers to bring the conversation to what to do assuming that the fetus is fully human.

I found Thompson’s discussion unusual in that most abortion arguments (pro and con) focus on the status of the fetus.  Thompson assumes that the fetus is human, yet she argues for an approach that

allows for and supports our sense that, for example, a sick and desperately frightened fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, pregnant due to rape, may of course choose abortion, and that any law which rules this out is an insane law. And it also allows for and supports our sense that in other cases resort to abortion is even positively indecent. It would be indecent in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her seventh month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of postponing a trip abroad.

What is Thompson’s approach?  It is a detailed approach filled with vivid examples that creatively and powerfully illustrate her points.  Hers is also an approach entirely lacking in vitriol.  

One of her examples especially caught my eye, in that it quite similar to a pro-choice argument presented at this site by Grumpypilgrim.

Here is one of the illustrations from Judith Thompson’s fetus is fully human pro-choice argument:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.”

If you found this example intriguing, there is a lot more for you here. 

Why would God be justified destroying an entire city right now?  Because we’re bad.  How do you know we’re bad?  Because of lesbian sex.

How do we learn all of this?  Because when minister John MacArthur says so, James Dobson nods in approval.  For more, see Crooks and Liars.  Here are Mac Arthur’s words:

We haven’t had a massive calamity such as the destruction of an entire city. We certainly don’t want that to happen — pray that does not happen — but it could happen. And God would be just in any calamity that he brought upon us.

See also Bob Cesca’s spin on this intriguing theological position.

ps.  Someone should tell MacArthur about New Orleans.

The Washington Post reports on a “controversial” meaure that would:

increase funding for family planning clinics, expand Medicaid and private health insurance coverage of contraceptives, require hospitals to make emergency contraception available to rape victims, and allocate money for comprehensive sex education programs that teach youths about birth control as well as abstinence.

Here’s the money quote.   You might have to read it several times to believe what you’ve read:

“There’s a utopian view that women ought to be able to have sex any time they want to without consequences _ that’s the bottom line of all these bills,” said Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group which opposes the measures.

Now let’s see . . . whose body is it?  

There are many people in power who believe that the government has a right to keep citizens from seeking private consensual pleasure in a way that they choose.   Conservatives often attack Roe v. Wade on the alleged basis that Roe has no basis in the Constitution.  

On this issue of access to birth control I would respond: where in the constitution does it say that consenting adults don’t have a right to seek pleasure, where many of them are adults in their 20’s, 30’s 40’s and up, and especially where many of them are married to each other? 

For more on conservatives and their arrogant attitudes toward controlling the harmless sexual impulses of others, see here and here and here and here. 

For some of the real-life health benefits of having sex often, see this list, based on an article from Forbes Magazine.

Parting thought:  Wouldn’t we be better off as a society if people had babies only when they intentionally had babies?   I can’t believe that we’ve gotten to the point where such a position has become “controversial.” 

My wife and I attended the wedding of a good friend today.  A thoughtful and sometimes light-hearted rabbi presided over the ceremony. 

This ceremony was quite a change of pace from most of the religious weddings I’ve attended.  There was no somber talk about the heavy guilt we bear for being human or how small and pathetically helpless we are, or how we are at the mercy of a God who could crush us for no reason if He wanted.  Instead, the ceremony focused on the interrelationships of the people attending the ceremony.  We were all there to celebrate and support the new marriage as a newly bonded community.  I was really getting into the ceremony, which is unusual for me (I generally prefer empty churches).

Toward the end of the ceremony, the rabbi invited each of us to take a moment to appreciate the sacrifices of our ancestors, to consider all those things our ancestors had done to enable each of us to be standing there today.  Like most people, I started considering the sacrifices made by my parents and grandparents, but that got me thinking about the overwhelming odds that I shouldn’t actually exist at all. 

I shouldn’t exist?  Why would I think that?  Because if my mother had not met my father at the right point in time, and if they had not been amorous at the right time of the right day, the sperm and the egg that became “me” would never have met each other in my mother’s fallopian tube.  Just the tiniest perturbation of circumstances and some other sperm would have won the race.  If that happened, I would be named Mary or Joe or Carol. Had I been somebody else, I might well have taken an incredibly different convoluted path through life and I might’ve ended up selling insurance policies or working as an engineer or staying at home to raise six children.  Or I might have been wiped out in a traffic accident at the age of three. 

There are a lot of other possibilities too.  For instance, maybe my parents wouldn’t have had sex at all on the month I was conceived.  Or maybe my father would have failed to say some clever thing on their first date and my mother wouldn’t have found him interesting enough to date, much less marry. If you consider just the task of getting the right gametes of my proper parents’ together, it is much more likely that I would not exist than that I should be sitting here writing this post.

Over the years, I have often considered the many permutations that preceded my birth, so I didn’t need to articulate this idea in my head, sentence by sentence, at my friend’s wedding ceremony.  Further, this same basic idea was captured in a delightful way in the 1985 movie, “Back to the Future.”  

Nonetheless, I found myself considering what had to happen in order for me to be standing there at that ceremony.  The odds get even slimmer when one considers one’s grandparents.  They had to meet each other at the right time and have sex at the right moment in order that my parents (their children) would exist.  And there were so many things that could’ve gone wrong to keep my grandparents from meeting each other or having sex with each other.  Maybe their parents would have moved to a different town than the one in which they actually settled.  Maybe one of them wouldn’t have taken that walk to the park on that day when they met. There are millions of ways to go “wrong” and only one way to go “right” (by “right,” I’m admitting my vested interest in a particular outcome—my existence).

But we’re not done.  (more…)

Today’s topic is high heeled shoes.  Why do women wear the damned things, I sometimes wonder.  Those women wobble around, they take longer to get from here to there, they often trip on small sidewalk imperfections, and they regularly fall and get hurt. 

I will confess: my gut reaction is that a woman’s IQ relates inversely to whether that woman tends to wear accident-inducing high heeled shoes.  I think of women who flock to such shoes as women who aspire to become Barbies or Princesses.  Before you write a comment to protest, I realize that my gut feeling is a gross over-simplification.  I also have an analogous gut feeling with regard to men who aspire to higher forms of masculinity by rushing to engage in dangerous activities such as motocross or hang-gliding . . .

I never understood high heels.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, I don’t think that women who wear high heels are “hotter” than those who don’t.  To the contrary, I’m annoyed by high heels.  Most woman who wear them look uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that they become objects of my pity, not lust.  But many other men (and women) disagree with me.  For proof, take a look at almost any advertising (and see here and here and here (for 8” heels!)).

Because I appear to be obtuse regarding this particular slice of human sexual responsiveness (and a tad bit concerned about my lack of responsiveness!), I have chosen this subject of high heels as yet another port of entry into the compelling field of evolutionary psychology (I’ve written about evolutionary psychology and consumer issues before).

I’ll start things off with the downside to dangerous and uncomfortable high heel shoes.  It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that wearing high heel shoes contribute to numerous serious injuries.  Here’s a list of high heel shoe-related injuries published by the Mayo Clinic:   

• Corns and calluses. Thick, hardened layers of skin develop in areas of friction between your shoe and your foot.  . . .
• Toenail problems. Constant pressure on your toes and nail beds from being forced against the front of your shoe by a high heel can lead to nail fungus and ingrown toenails. 
• Hammertoe. When your toes are forced against the front of your shoe, an unnatural bending of your toes results. This can lead to hammertoe . . .
• Bunions. Tight fitting shoes may worsen bunions — bony bumps that form on the joint at the base of your big toe.  . . .
• Tight heel cords. If you wear high heels all the time, you risk tightening and shortening your Achilles tendon. . . 
• Pump bump. Also known as Haglund’s deformity, this bony enlargement on the back of your heel can become aggravated by the rigid backs or straps of high heels. . . 
• Neuromas. A growth of nerve tissue. . .A neuroma causes sharp, burning pain in the ball of your foot accompanied by stinging or numbness in your toes. 
• Joint pain in the ball of the foot . . . This causes increased pressure, strain and pain in your forefoot. Shoes with tightfitting toe boxes can lead to similar discomfort. 
• Stress fractures. Tiny cracks in one of the bones of your foot.

High heels have also been linked to overworked or injured leg muscles, osteoarthritis of the knee and low back pain. You also risk ankle injuries if you lose your balance and fall off your high heels.  See here. High heels can even be dangerous, resulting in trips to the emergency room.

Rupert Evans, an accident and emergency doctor at University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff said injuries could lead to long-term problems. Women should stick to shoes with heels less than 4cm (1.5in) if they wanted to avoid a trip to hospital, he advised. Dr Evans said he has seen an increase in the number of women being admitted to hospital with injuries caused by the fashionable footwear. Injuries ranged from sprained ankles to broken bones and dislocations - and in some cases caused permanent damage.

What kind of permanent damage?  How about chronic knee pain, sprained ankles and back problems.

My interest in high heeled shoes was re-ignited when I started reading a brand new book by Gad Saad, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption (2007).

I’m only about 75 pages into Saad’s book, but I am impressed with his scholarship and clear writing.  He has spent much of these first 75 pages making the case for the need to use the relatively new paradigm of evolutionary psychology when analyzing consumer spending issues.  The status quo among most consumer and marketing researchers is to ignore evolutionary psychology, but this quite often leads to an incomplete and erroneous explanation for consumer spending issues. 

I’ll get to what Saad says about high heels in a second.  It is important to note that high heels are merely one of thousands of illustrations of consumer purchases that can be better understood using evolutionary psychology. Why are so many marketing researchers and psychologists ignoring evolutionary psychology?  Mainly because it’s a relatively new field, and most established researchers prefer to stay within the paradigms with which they are more familiar.  To ignore evolutionary psychology, though, is to have an unanchored and incomplete picture.

In many ways Saad’s book parallels arguments suggested by Geoffrey Miller (see “Shopping for Sex: wasteful consumerism and Darwin’s theory of sexual selection”).  

Saad cites studies showing that 80% of shoe purchases are for sexual attraction.  It has been suggested that wearing high heels creates “the visual illusion of lordosis (arching of the back when a female is in a sexually receptive position) and furthermore accentuates the body curves that are particularly appealing to men.” (Page 75). Saad cites further research showing that a 2-inch heel results in a 20 degree “lift of the buttocks:

High heels may well be the most potent aphrodisiac ever concocted.  When worn by women, the high heels sensuously alters the whole anatomy-foot, leg, thigh, hips, pelvis, buttocks, breasts, etc…. men are perfectly frank in admitting that high heels stimulate their sexual appetite.  They seldom fail to express their predilection for them, and women, consequently, assign to stilted shoes all the magic of a love potion. (more…)