Facebook Protestant Award

Last week, as I was recovering from surgery, I remarked a particularly happy milestone with this status update on Facebook:

"[Gruntled] says no painkillers + coffee = clearer head, better work ethic"

To which a very Catholic friend replied:

"if that fb update were to enter a contest for the most protestant update ever, it would win."

Men's and Women's Different Sexual Peaks Not a Tragedy, But a Complement

In class I mentioned the well-known stereotype that men reach their sexual peak in their early 20s, whereas women reach their sexual peak in their mid-30s. Afterwards I realized that I did not really know the research behind this claim, nor what, exactly, "sexual peak" means.

Alicia Barr, Angela Bryan, and Douglas Kenrick did research at Arizona State on whether people think men peak in their early 20s and women in their mid-30s. They do. And what most people seem to have in mind for "peak" is a little different for men and women. For men, sexual peak means their peak of desire; for women, their peak of satisfaction. When they asked when men and women peaked in sexual desire, satisfaction, and frequency (of intercourse), men were still thought to peak earlier than women on each dimension, though they were pretty close together, of necessity, on frequency.

Alfred Kinsey's plaint that this difference was a tragedy. Some have even suggested that it would be good to change our mating system to bring older women together with younger men, matching peak to peak. This is what might called the "cougar strategy."

Barr and colleagues, though, speculated on why this difference might have evolved. Men prefer young women who are at their most fertile. Women favor older men when they have the most resources. Different sexual peaks would counteract these opposing desires with a balancing sexual motivation.

If young men with few resources most desire young women, they will compete harder for them, wooing them with ambition and commitment. The young women, prudently, are not so swayed by sexual desire that they do not choose wisely among their suitors. If women in their mid-30s, by contrast, are heading to the end of their childbearing years just as their male counterparts -- their husbands, for most women -- are becoming most successful, they will compete better to hold their mate's attraction with more satisfying sex. For both men and women, the shifting balance of passion and prudence across the childbearing years strengthens marriage.

Contrasting sexual peaks is an instance of the marvelous complementarity of marriage.

Making Marriage Ordinary is the Best Role Model of All

Merlene Davis writes a column for the Lexington, KY Herald-Leader. She writes homey, sensible pieces about her husband and children, jobs and schools, their local neighborhood, and sometimes about larger issues. Most papers have a middle-aged mom writing a similar column. I like her column and read it regularly. Davis is black, so often takes an explicitly African-American take on these universal themes.

In today's column Davis has a nice piece about the quiet 25th anniversary celebration she had with her husband recently. She notes that there are many public benefits to marriage. Communities in which marriages are the norm are safer, richer, happier, and more giving. Married people are richer and healthier, too. But the main reason she is married is because she loves her husband, and likes him, too. The feeling, she says, is mutual. The public benefits are gravy.

These micro and macro benefits of marriage are universally true. She says the Davises don't deserve any particular notice for making it to 25 years. Their parents and couples in that generation routinely enjoyed mariages twice that long and then some.

What struck me most in Merlene Davis' column was her modest assessment of how she contributed to the public good:

Through it all, I've never considered us to be examples for younger couples. We are rather run-of-the-mill. Most of our friends, black and white, are ancient, and most have been married much longer than we have.

Davis notes, though, that black America passed a tipping point in the past generation. Marriage is not the norm for most black Americans. This is not true of any other ethnic group. She praises the upcoming annual Black Marriage Day. She and her husband should be role models, encouraging young African-Americans, including their own children, to aim for marriage. And the best role modeling is to make a community where marriage is a normal, "run-of-the-mill" institution that regular people join in. For themselves and for the public good.

The Gender Gap Only Matters If it Hurts Society as a Whole, Over Generations

There is a well-known gender gap in the average pay of men and women. Likewise, there is a gap in the proportion of men and women at the top of most occupations.

People whose main conviction is for equality look at the gender gap and see something bad because men and women aren't the same.

People whose main conviction is for liberty look at the gender gap and see something potentially good because men and women get to choose what they want.

Most of these gaps come from the differences between married fathers and married mothers. Married men respond to parenthood by working more and seeking more money, status, and power. Married women respond to parenthood by working less and trading money, status, and power for greater time to raise their children.

From the perspective of the good of society as a whole, both equality and liberty are means to a greater end. Neither equality nor liberty are ends in themselves. In order for there to be society at all, there have to be children. Having some educated women choose to have children and invest themselves in them is a good thing for society.

On Mental Fogginess

I have felt too mentally foggy since surgery last week to write the blog. Last night I stop taking painkillers. This morning I had caffeine for the first time in almost a week. I feel much clearer right now.

On the other hand, I thought several emails that I wrote over the past few days, including some written from the hospital, were competent -- until the recipients had to ask for clarification of some words that were clearly not the right ones. So I decided I better not try to grade until I could get external validation that my brain was truly up to speed.

When I told my father-in-law the above, he told me of a time he had twisted his back and was on serious pain medication for a week. He did his job through the week - but found afterwards he had no memory of anything he had done.

His conclusion was the punchline of my thought on this subject: "To think that some people take drugs on purpose." Amen.

I don't understand why people would want to have an altered consciousness. I am not talking about medicine that helps give you a normal, focused mind. I am talking about wanting to be high or drunk. I just don't get it.

In many ways I am a regular guy. (More ways than my family will assent to, I maintain). But I know from the long history of alcohol and high-inducing plants found in every culture I have ever heard of, that most people do like an escape (I guess) from this reality. And the well-off seem as likely to seek this escape as the miserable, at least in moderation. I don't condemn this. Jesus made wine - it can't be all bad. But in this particular I am an outlier, in the tail of the distribution.

I don't like to be mentally foggy. I like this reality, seen clearly.

Out of Action for a Bit

I am going in for non-scary surgery this morning. [OK, Mrs. will only allow that it is not very scary.] This will knock me out for a few days.

I am working on a nifty post about the science of the idea that men and women have different "sexual peaks." Stay tuned.

Scratch Beginnings is Not About Race (Surprisingly)

Adam Shepard is white - I know this from his picture on the cover of Scratch Beginnings. Some of the people he lives with in the shelter and works with at the moving company in Charleston, SC, are black. I think. There are clues in the biographies and dialogues he gives us that suggest as much. So does the sheer demography of Charleston. If there is a hero in the book, it is Derrick, the best mover in the company who becomes Shepard's partner and landlord. Several context clues suggest strongly that Derrick is black.

Yet it is a remarkable fact about this book and the world it illuminates that race never intrudes in the story. The men in the shelter and on the several jobs Shepard has seem to be of many hues and ethnicities, but that is not central to their story. And it is not possible that a college-educated Southern white boy did not notice race or did not think about whether it matters. My guess is that Shepard was determined not to make race one of his standards for measuring people. When he was writing his story, his race did not seem to be central to how others were measuring him. I believe he must have made a conscious decision not to tell readers the race of the people he met because it was not really important to the story he was telling.

I take this as a measure of progress. Adam Shepard is of a new generation. Survey research suggests that Millennials think that ethnic variety is a good thing, and race just doesn't tell you much about what another person is like. If this means the rising generation is less obsessed with race than the retiring generation has been, then we are indeed making progress.

Scratch Beginnings Shows the Continuing Power of Privilege

Yesterday I wrote about Adam Shepard's experiment in Scratch Beginnings to work his way up from nothing to something by hard work and careful thrift. He succeeded, which is the main point of his book and a valuable lesson to keep testing.

Shepard also had several advantages that many of the other guys in the homeless shelter did not. He was young, healthy, and educated. He did not come into the shelter with addictions, a criminal record, or children to care for. He was a native English speaker. These are all privileges. Shepard did not ignore the advantages he had. Rather, he was making a case that attitude, work, and prudence can still produce success. He also believes, though of course could not prove with this one-case experiment, that attitude, work, and prudence could overcome the disadvantages that many of the other guys had.

Shepard bolsters his case with some valuable lessons he learned from the people he met in the shelter and on the job. Chapter 7 is entitled "Job Hunting 101 with Professor Phil Coleman." Coleman was one of the "resident nutcases at the shelter that no one paid much attention to." But he did give Shepard a valuable lesson in how to get hired:

You gotta go down to these managers and be like, 'Look here, homeboy. You need me. I'm the best worker you're gonna find, so hire me or not.'

Shepard accepted this as a solid point. He did go on to get a real job by persistently selling himself as a good worker. Shepard also knew the even more important follow-up point:

And after I had a job, it was just a matter of disciplining myself enough to keep that job and save the money that I needed to achieve my financial goals.

This second point was one that, sadly, Professor Coleman never managed to take in, which was why he had had 50 jobs but was still a regular at the homeless shelter.

Scratch Beginnings Shows the Continuing Power of Hard Work

Adam Shepard read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed in college. As an experiment, she tried to live on minimum wage, and found it nearly impossible to feed, clothe, and, especially, house herself on minimum wage. Shepard wondered if it would really be so hard to work up from nothing, if you were disciplined and not self-destructive. Putting his money where his mouth was, he took the clothes on his back and $25 to Charleston (chosen at random). He tells his story in Scratch Beginnings.

He found a homeless shelter the first night. He took every job he could find. He managed his money very carefully. He didn't smoke, drink, or buy lottery tickets - the specific ways his sheltermates wasted their little extra money.

Most importantly, he learned that he was never going to get a regular job by filling out want ads when he lived at a homeless shelter. Instead, he took himself to an employer who caught his eye - a moving company, but it could have been any of dozens of blue collar jobs - and made a determined pitch that he was a hard worker who could be relied on. They took a chance on him. He wasn't a great mover, but he learned. He worked civilly with the other movers, especially the good ones. And he just kept showing up reliably, taking harder jobs as they were offered.

Shepard gave himself one year to have himself housed with next month's rent ready (Ehrenreich's standard) plus have a working vehicle and $2,500 in the bank. Through hard work and diligence, he met those goals within 8 months. He also made friends, and learned to respect the guys at the bottom who kept working honestly.

Adam Shepard gives a good answer to Barbara Ehrenreich's main claim that the bottom rung jobs are not enough to sustain a worker.

Can Gen-X Bring Outcomes Assessment to the Church?

My fellow Presbyterian-poker Michael Kruse has a good post, "Budgets Are Not Moral Documents." He takes issues with evangelical Left leader Jim Wallis, who has famously argued that budgets are, indeed, moral documents. Wallis' contention is that you tell what an organization values by what it spends on. I think this is partly true. But Kruse makes the important point that what really matters to the world is not what you spent money on, but what effect your spending, and your work, has.

The church, and the non-profit world in general, are just pervaded with the idea that what matters is what we put in to achieving our goals, not what we get out of our money and work. Kruse is a church reformer trying to get the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to pay more attention to the effects of its spending than their good intentions (or worse, to their job protection intentions). Mrs. G. is an education reformer trying to redirect the attention of public schools in a parallel way. Higher education, where I labor, is beset by ranking systems that measure inputs, like endowments size and spending per pupil, and not outcomes - what students learn and what kind of people they become as a result.

I have written about the broad difference in mindset between Baby Boomers and Generation X. I don't know where Kruse fits in this narrative. I do know that Wallis is a classic Boomer. I am on the cusp between the two generations, so I daily notice the difference. Boomers are often content to be judged by the morality of their rhetoric. Xers are more likely to eschew rhetoric and Just Do It.

One of the great achievements of Gen X as they now come to power could be to shift the practice of institutions from talking a good game to doing what it takes to actually improve achievement.

Angry Camels

This is the funniest thing I saw all week:

Guest Couple

Today Mrs. G. and I were the guest couple in my family life class. This is an annual exercise, and is always fun. This time I suggested a few topics that we should be sure to hit on, and divided up which of us would talk about which. I wrote the topics out on an index card, going back and forth between us. This worked very well. Our discussion flowed, and we stopped ourselves in time to let students ask questions for half the class time.

One of the questions was whether we argued, or whether we had been married so long that we had already worked out those problems. Of course we do argue, and said so. I noted, as I have argued in class before, that marriage does not really change your basic nature, but you can develop work-arounds for the points at which husband and wife clash. Mrs. G. then pointed out that the index card itself was one such work-around. For the last couple of years she has had so many interesting stories to tell that we ran out of Q & A time. Having the topics listed on the card was a way in which we (I) worked out how we (she) would talk to make our (mostly my, but also her) class work better.

I had not really thought about the index card as a work around, but she is entirely correct. And because we have spent years metacommunicating about how to work around communication glitches and conflicts, this technique worked without creating strife.

Lap Dancers Show That Estrus is Not So Hidden

Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan of the University of New Mexico have done a wonderful study to see whether human beings can tell when a woman is ovulating. Unlike most animals, people have "hidden estrus." One good consequence is that men pay attention to their mates all the time, whereas in other primates females only get attention when they are "in heat." However, human beings may be able to tell when a woman is ovulating in more subtle, even subconscious, ways.

Miller and colleagues asked eighteen lap dancers to keep track of their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days - more than 5300 lap dances. The researchers noted differences between women who were on the pill and those who were not.

The result:
Average tips during ovulation = $335 per shift
Halfway through (luteal phase) = $260
During menstruation = $185

Women on the pill, by contrast, showed no ovulation peak for tips.

[Thanks to reader Brittany for the study]

Women's Circular Business Plan

Last night Rebecca Kousky spoke at Centre College about her non-profit business, NEST. NEST makes microloans to women in poor countries to make traditional crafts. They pay back the loans with products, which NEST sells online and through craft stores. Kousky started this project at 24, fresh out of social work school - in other words, with no formal preparation for what she was getting in to.

What was most interesting to me was her description of her "business plan." She said that all of her male advisors insisted she write up a business plan, write up a financial model, then go to investors. She found herself unable to do that. Instead, she took all kinds of people to her favorite coffee house and told them her whole plan, including the whole process of how the idea grew out of her life. From these conversations she got ideas, business contacts, investors, and lots of relationships that form the real foundation of NEST today. It was only when she was applying for a grant months after she had gotten the business under way that she was able to write down what her plan was - in retrospect.

Kousky is conscious of being young and a woman. She has noticed how this makes a difference in how she can connect with the women they give loans to, to the in-country intermediaries that they work through, and with the many women on her staff and board. She sees her naturally developing "circular flow" business model as a more female alternative to the linear business model that she was counseled to use.

NEST is a case study, not a proof. It is still young, only in its third year, and is only one case. Still, Kousky's account of building a business based on relationships that flow into opportunities does match what I have read elsewhere about how women tend to think of their "careers" in general.

The Sexual Non-Paradox: Women Don't Have to Choose Like Men

Throughout The Sexual Paradox Susan Pinker addressed the economists' "gender paradox": as women's economic choices and achievements increase, they diverge more from men. Progressive opinion expected that we would come closer to a 50/50 division of all money and power positions by now. They thought women would, on average, make the same as men. But reality is not heading that way. Some aging liberationists think that sex discrimination must be the main cause.

Susan Pinker, and many others, are documenting that women do not make the same economic choices as men -- and that is fine. Moreover, she concludes, “Devaluing women’s preferences is an unintended aspect of expecting the sexes to be exactly the same.” The gender paradox is a paradox only if you deny sex differences. If we see that men and women, as a group, are different from one another and make different choices, then there is no paradox.

Men Are More ADHD, But Are Less Handicapped By It

Susan Pinker reports that more boys than girls are diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. This I knew. I did not know, though, that about twice as many boys get this diagnosis in North America as in Europe - 10% vs. 5%. Pinker says the Europeans regarded the idea of a disorder called "hyperactivity" as an American fad, though they are changing their minds and catching up to us.

One of the things I like best about The Sexual Paradox is that Pinker follows up on the boys she treated years ago to find out what they did as men with their various disorders. She found that many hyperactive boys found ways to turn their vice into a virtue by making their work more efficient. She tells the story of the man who invented e-tickets because he was so ADHD that he kept losing his paper tickets.

Men are more likely to find ways to work around handicaps and deficits if they see them as a competitive challenge. ADHD is more of a problem in school than in the world of work. Girls do better in school in part because they are less likely to be hyperactive, as well as being more socially compliant. In the work world, though, Pinker suggests, hyperactive boys are more likely than hyperactive girls to compete to succeed.

Most Men Don't Believe in a Personal God; Most Women Do

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has been parsing its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. They found that more than 2/3rds of Americans absolutely believe in God or a universal spirit. Women believe more than men, 77% to 65%. 2/3rds of this group of believers, or about 1/2 of all Americans, absolutely believe in a personal God. The female/male breakdown here crosses the 50% threshold. Of all American women, 58% report an absolutely certain belief in a personal God. Of American men, only 45% agree.

Pew report that women have stronger religious faith and practice across the board, not just on this item. In general, though, women prefer personal relationships to abstract concepts. This, I think, is the heart of the dispute between Carol Gilligan and Lawrence Kohlberg about whether loyalty to people or loyalty to abstract concepts represents the highest level of morality.

I do not read the Pew data as showing that most men are not really religious. I read it as showing that men and women differ somewhat in how they conceive of God and therefore of what they have religious faith in.

The Bigger the Backpack, the Brighter the Babe

Faithful reader Mark came up with three aphorisms about the clues that women's appearance can give men about the potential relationship they might have, such as "the thicker the makeup, the thicker the drama."

Faithful reader Rebecca came up with three excellent replies:

The baggier the sweat pants, the bigger the hugs.
The bigger the backpack, the brighter the babe.
The flatter the footwear, the funner [sic] the date.

Men Like Competing More

One of the reasons men make more is that they like competing more than women do. In particular, men like tournament competition, with clear winners and losers, much more than women do. In adult life, the clearest way to mark winning is with higher pay. Men are more willing to negotiate for pay; women not only don't like to negotiate, they don't like to be negotiated with. One of the reasons for this is that women are more likely to think that they are imposters - see yesterday's post. Women compete for intimate relationships, but they do not like anyone to lose completely - that is, to be utterly excluded.

My favorite piece of evidence that Susan Pinker cites is a study of what happens when boys and girls run alone, compared to when they run with others. Alone, boys and girls run at the same speed. When boys are running with someone else, especially another boy, they run faster. When girls run with someone else, especially another girl, they will slow down to keep pace with the other.

Women Think They Are Imposters

Women are more likely to think that their success is a fluke. Even if they have sustained success, they are more likely to think it is a fluke. When they fail at something, women are more likely to think it is due to their own failings. Women are more than twice as likely to get depressed over their failures - indeed, Susan Pinker calls the connection between women feeling like an imposter and getting depressed "the other problem with no name."

Men are more prone to overestimate their own skills. They are more likely to bluff, and take on responsibilities they are not really ready for. When they fail, they are likely to blame other people or outside conditions.

Reality is still reality, and offers a real bottom line of whether we succeed or not. However, men and women still draw different conclusions from the verdict that reality renders.

Men are more likely to see failures as investments from which they can learn, and to regard challenges ahead as something they can probably overcome. Because of the way women regard their own talents, even their own achievements, they are likely to aim lower than men. This has a cumulative effect. Imposter syndrome, as Pinker calls it, is one of the factors that means there are fewer women at the top of our power hierarchies than there are men.