By David Futrelle
From the Unpopular Opinions subreddit, a rather ingenious explanation as to why it’s much, much worse for men (well, cis men) to cheat on (cis) women than it is for women to cheat on men:
This was an unpopular opinion even for Reddit, with everyone in the comments arguing against this unique insight from OpinionManVIP, who not only seems to have never had sex but also to have never watched any porn. Seriously, dude, if you believe this you are Very Bad at Sex.
H/T — r/TheBluePill
Oh my gosh not everyone has the day off work, you know. Calm it down there tusky.
Now let’s peel some nonsense apart to see if there’s anything actually in there!
http://oi45.tinypic.com/250ia9t.jpg
Before getting into the nitty-gritty, I gotta point out here – you don’t actually believe in or care about any of the evidence you’re pointing out here. You’re saying it because it supports you, but as soon as it’s shot down (which it has been already) you’ll just shrug and continue on obliviously. Because – as you said earlier – this is all instinct. Intuition. Gut-feel. Duckspeak. You’re not interested in truth, you’re interested in feeling right.
That said, I won’t spend too long knocking over these targets; the work’s been done by others and it’s obvious that it won’t sway you.
First, some things you’ve said:
There are plenty of studies that show that men and women do react differently to all sorts of situations. Virtually all of them say that those differences are societal, not inherent.
I mean, you do realize that what you’ve said here is sort of counter to your argument, right? You’re saying that the differences between us are instilled by society and aren’t inherent to our biology. Almost everywhere else you’re claiming the opposite.
You argue against yourself. Not a good sign for the strength of your position, my duck.
Patriarchal honour systems punish women much more heavily for infidelity. Three points are supported. 1) Infidelity, or the perception of infidelity in women damages the honour of men related to her, 2) this damage can be partially corrected by domestic violence, and 3) women in this situation are expected to stay loyal despite this violence.
No such system punishes men, just women.
What you are experiencing is the perception that women are disloyal moreso than men, and punished less for it. This is because of your subjective bias. You think your subjective position is an objective position. It is not.
Vandello, Joseph A., and Dov Cohen. “Male honor and female fidelity: implicit cultural scripts that perpetuate domestic violence.” Journal of personality and social psychology 84.5 (2003): 997.
False. I’ll take that down in one of the papers you’ve cited. But it’s wrong.
And yet, among younger couples – those under 35 – the divorce rate is stable or declining. You know, those feminist, liberalized youths. The divorce rate itself is greatly leveling, and one of the biggest suspected reasons for this is because women are being more selective in their partners, making later divorce less likely.
Women, making choices that are good for them, resulting in happier relationships for all involved. You know, feminism.
Kennedy, Sheela, and Steven Ruggles. “Breaking up is hard to count: The rise of divorce in the United States, 1980–2010.” Demography 51.2 (2014): 587-598.
Second, to the references
As a note, just dropping a link and going “aha! Here’s my source! Read it and weep!”is a pretty big tell that you’re just bullshitting here, not looking for truth.
Because you’ve been here before, you’re just turning a crank that makes you giggle, and we’ve done this before. How are you doing?
Again, won’t spend long on these, ’cause you don’t give a damn about the truth anyways.
In the Brain, Love is Basically an Addiction
Written by a science journalist, not a scientist. Not that that specifically matters, but in this case it does. Because the journalist doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Romantic love activates the “dopamine reward pathway”, it claims, and that’s a true claim! The activity in the nucleus accumbens is the primary culprit of the addictivity, we believe. We see activity there in the use of almost all addictive drugs, and many non-addictive but nice ones.
We also see activity there when a person is exposed to anything they find nice or rewarding.
If you want to have the position that love is addictive, you have to also hold the position that everything nice is addictive.
That’s dumb. Don’t do that.
Two minds
The cognitive differences between men and women
WWTH did a great job of pulling this apart. I’ll only add one thing. Almost all of the structural stuff we know about gender differences in neuroanatomy are from fMRI or PET scan studies of adults or animals. And brain regions get larger with use. If women are told they have to handle all of the emotional work in a relationship, and spend decades doing just that, they’re going to have larger cognition centres responsible for those functions. If they’ve got to manage more people, they’ll have larger brain regions responsible for facial recognition.
The author of this paper, a science journalist, doesn’t link any of the studies, so I can’t critique them directly, but I’m familiar with some- some are quite famous. The rhesus monkey one, for example, that WWTH cites, isn’t “gathering dust” as the author claims. It’s in undergraduate textbooks. And is heavily critiqued for flawed methodologies.
There are likely neurological differences between men and women, but there are no justifications for the behaviours you’re suggesting.
Married Women Who Cheat Have More Secret Lovers and Stray A Year Earlier Than Men
Nice article. Based on the UK Adultery Survey of 2012. It has some interesting things to say that challenge the perspective of women being generally disinterested in sex, for one. It has some serious flaws, though. For example, the survey points out that women are more likely to keep their adultery secret. Take a look up at the source I linked that points out that men are conditioned to believe that domestic violence is a valid response to infidelity and then read your article again.
This survey agrees with the feminist position that traditional marriage is often oppressive. The declining divorce rates amongst younger people is a good sign that marriages are becoming more about partnership than before. That’s a good thing!
It’s a shame this isn’t an actual survey.
Oh, did you not get that part? See, this was written by a science journalist (notice a trend here?), and they again provide no links. So I did some digging. This “Adultery Survey” is a bit of promotional newsmaking from an adultery dating website. It hasn’t been peer reviewed, their methodologies are opaque and likely garbage, and there is zero reason to take what it says at face value. Because it wasn’t done by scientists, it was done by advertisers who want your money.
That’s all I have time for for now – your other links are news articles from literal newspapers, more interested in making people buy their writing than they are in truth. Not exactly the bastion of unbiased thinking these days. You’ve also got some obviously biased sources and – lol – a literal TV Tropes page. You know a Trope isn’t true, it’s a stereotype that makes good fiction.
Why does it always come back to fiction?
You may get more later, I dunno. Work time. Toodles!
Addenda!
Age-old wisdom includes the thought that the world is flat.
Age-old wisdom includes the thought that the sun orbits the earth.
Age-old wisdom includes the thought that swans come from acorns.
Age-old wisdom is bollocks.
More specific to your argument, “women give sex to get love” isn’t true just because it’s been said for a long time. They said that bad winds cause diseases for a long time, too, until the germ theory came about.
Surrender to the truth. It isn’t so bad once you’re in it.
Hmmm, food for thought and I will consider it, on behalf of Fluttershy hehehe no, seriously, for me, she’s the best!
http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/309403-waifu
I knew there was a point I was intending to make and forgetting! Thanks!
Yes, troll, the notion that brains have no plasticity and stay the same throughout our lives is extremely outdated. Environment changes our brains. Brain imaging studies show correlation, not causation.
I always thought it would be interesting if a study could be done where children were raised gender neutrally in complete isolation on an island with no TV, internet or books from the outside world. It’s about the only way you could hope to measure inherent sex difference. It’d be prohibitively expensive, unfortunately.
Eww. I think that Fluttershy is my waifu link might be getting into banning territory. I’ll let others decide on that one though.
@WWTH
Already emailed the cat overlords when he implied he was jerking off to VP.
WWTH:
Riiiiight. Good luck getting that past the IRB!
@WWTH,
We can get close to that with cross-cultural studies!
Barry, H. III, Bacon, M. K., & Child, I. L. (1957). A cross-cultural survey of some sex differences in socialization. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55(3), 327-332.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0041178
This troll has always liked pushing boundaries for lols. Ugh. Thank you for emailing, kupo!
The fluttershy link just leads to a google autocomplete picture for me, was it something else?
@JDSM
Do you realize that you said you would read something because of a cartoon character and not because it was kindly offered as relevant to something you posted?
That’s really shitty. And to change the subject to your feelings about the cartoon character instead of your earlier assertions is not only rude but part if the underlying social problems people tend to care about around here.
Just in case you aren’t banned I would suggest thinking carefully about why you might be ignoring what other people are responding to you with.
“Why is Fluttershy a tree”? What’s up with that search term?
Hi all, long time lurker, not a big commenter. But I do enjoy these science threads.
Writing in to second Cordelia Fine’s book. There is a section where she completely trounces the monkey/gender preference study. There is a particularly entertaining passage about why female monkeys would prefer playing with pots, given they haven’t invented cooking yet.
Fine also talks a lot about reverse inferences in neuroscience (what Scild said re: behavior causing brain differences versus brain differences causing behavior). The analogy used is that it is nearly impossible to predict the location/type of objects based on the shape of their cast shadow (opposed to predicting what shadow will be cast given the shape of an object, which can be done easily).
Here’s really the best take-away from the book:
“As the result of my research, I have come up with four basic pieces of advice for anyone considering incorporating neuroscientific findings into a popular book or article about gender:
(1) unless you have a time machine and have visited a future in which neuroscientists can make reverse inferences without the nagging anxieties that keep the more thoughtful of them awake at night, do not suggest that parents or teachers treat boys and girls differently because of differences observed in their brains;
(2) if you don’t know what a reverse inference us, read the previous chapter of this book;
(3) exercise extreme caution when making the perilous leap from brain structure to psychological function; and
(4) don’t make stuff up”
– Cordelia Fine
I’d like to be a tree
(It’s a joke in the show)
Thus spake ZaraImaginary Petal:
What, seriously? The guy is comedy gold. I’ve never seen a more hilarious example of the ridiculous intellectual bankruptcy of MRAs. JDSM is so buffoonish, so smugly impressed with himself while being comically wrong about everything, he’s like a Saturday Night Live sketch about “red pillers.” Or Lucy Van Pelt’s withering condescension at Charlie Brown not knowing that snow actually comes up, not down.
If Reddit weren’t full of dudes spouting exactly the same talking points, I’d suspect JDSM of being a sock puppet from somebody determined to make MRAs look bad.
JDSM is just one of the regular trolls we get who’s here primarily to annoy people and be ridiculous. He really does believe the things he says, of course, but he’s got zero interest in an actual discussion. I’m pretty sure he’s eaten seagull pie once or twice, and may or may not be a 329 year old vampire.
He’s out-and-out admitted to being here just to annoy people, and apparently thinks that he’s “making us” reply to his stupid points, and that that’s really funny. For me, I reply to him ’cause I like pulling apart the arguments to see if there’s anything true in there at all – once in a rare while there’s a kernel of it amidst the wreckage.
His mind isn’t ever going to be changed, he’s convinced of his own intellectual superiority. Others reading, though, deserve to see his arguments carved at the joints!
Rip in peace, JDSM. See you under your next nym.
@(formerly) DepressedCNS ! I remember your comments. I’m glad you’re no longer depressed, good for you! And a great commentary there. I will have to read that!
Yeah, Fine is a seriously bad-ass lady neuroscientist.
Thanks Scild. It does feel good to be doing alright. I always enjoy your comments; it’s nice to see someone trying to make the internet a better place and I always learn something.
I know there has been a lot of mental-health chat around the comments lately and I just want to say to anyone feeling particularly down; solidarity. It may feel like you’re going to feel bad for forever but that’s an insidious symptom of depression-brain. Keep reaching out to people and trying different things until you find something that works, because you are worthy of getting your mental health to a manageable place and living without that shadow.
Or at least a flight data recorder whose contents can inspire interesting insights about the failure modes of human cognition, eh?
@(formerly) DepressedCNS
Just wanted to say that is one of the best nym changes ever. 🙂
I have recently come across a useful but annoying paper. Useful because it puts some structure on the idea of a social decision making network in the brain. The network has two limbs:
The social behavior network consists of,
The “disorder” stuff needs reevaluating big time. Still tourettes syndrome is a useful thing to compare to such systems and their human expression.
Tourette syndrome: a disorder of the social decision-making network.
I’m still feeling creeped out by the word waifu being in that link.
Can we, please not have crushes on cartoon ponies please?
I enjoyed arguing with JDSM, but I would still ban him just for the constant tsk tsk tsking. Then he will have to come back as a different sock and come up with a new affectation.
JDSM’s use of waifu was sexist as hell and worthy of consequence, the reality is more complicated and I don’t want to diminish their behavior so they can rot in moderation or be banned and it makes no difference to me.
As a phenomena it involves a bond akin to fan-crush with added elements in my limited perspective (many of us at ponychan had them). Choice in bonding is not so simple, acting sexist with a cartoon character while pretending they will read what Scildfreja wrote is easily condemnable.
As another silent lurker.. I also really enjoy all the things I learn when the trolls arguments get ripped apart. So please do keep up the good work. ❤️
Welcome, @Katzentier! That’s for speaking up, i’m glad you like the fireworks!