#SeemsLegit

"I don't have to see it... I lived it."

And/or the title of my sex tape.

Oh cognitive dissonance, where would we be without you?

True Story.

Point.

The real origin of Wonder Woman.

"Professor M and the Wonder Women."

The Man Behind Wonder Woman Was Inspired By Both Suffragists And Centerfolds : NPR: "The man behind the most popular female comic book hero of all time, Wonder Woman, had a secret past: Creator William Moulton Marston had a wife — and a mistress. He fathered children with both of them, and they all secretly lived together in Rye, N.Y. And the best part? Marston was also the creator of the lie detector. "

Wonder Woman’s Kinky Feminist Roots - The Atlantic: "Marston was equal parts genius, charlatan, and kinkster. As an undergraduate at Harvard just before World War I, he was thrilled by militant suffragists like the ones who chained themselves to the fence outside 10 Downing Street. Maybe that’s where his fusion of feminism and bondage started—imagery of slavery and shackles abounded in the movement’s demonstrations and propaganda. His experiences in the psychology department left their mark, too. Marston was a lab assistant to the prominent Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, a rigid German who opposed votes for women and thought educating them was a waste of time. Münsterberg would surface in the comics as Wonder Woman’s archenemy, Dr. Psycho. (“Women shall suffer while I laugh—Ha! Ho! Ha!”) Busy strapping Radcliffe students to blood-pressure machines in Münsterberg’s lab, Marston invented the lie detector—a forerunner of Wonder Woman’s golden lasso, which compels those it binds to speak the truth. Devising the lie detector was the high point of Marston’s rather erratic pre-comics career. He seems to have lost every job he held. His venture into business ended in an indictment for fraud; his brief stint as a lawyer saw the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reject lie-detector tests as evidence. In 1929 Universal Studios hired him to give its films psychological realism and let him go a year later. His academic career, pursued alongside these and other ventures, went swiftly downhill; he plummeted from chairman of the psychology department at American University to roving adjunct. His brash egotism—and his affair with Olive Byrne, his student at Tufts and Columbia—may have been part of the reason for his academic failure, but so was the fact that the only psychological theories that interested him were his own. And the only people who took his mishmash of matriarchy and masochism seriously were Holloway and Byrne. His 1928 tome, Emotions of Normal People, defended “abnormal” sexuality—homosexuality, fetishism, sadomasochism, and so on—as not only normal but fixed in the nervous system. (He may have been a bit of a charlatan, but he was also way ahead of his time.) The book received little notice, except for a rave by Byrne, writing under a pseudonym. As with his other academic work, Byrne and Holloway were mostly uncredited collaborators. marston had a sweet thing going: two remarkably smart, adoring women to cater to his every need, each apparently believing she’d landed in feminist heaven. "

William Moulton Marston - Wikipedia: "William Moulton Marston's philosophy of diametric opposites has bled into his design of his Wonder Woman mythology. This theme of diametrics took the form of his emphasis on certain masculine and feminine configurations, as well as dominance and submission. Marston's "Wonder Woman" is an early example of bondage themes that were entering popular culture in the 1930s.[1] Physical and mental submission appears again and again throughout Marston's comics work, with Wonder Woman and her criminal opponents frequently being tied up or otherwise restrained, and her Amazonian sisters engaging in frequent wrestling and bondage play. These elements were softened by later writers of the series, who dropped such characters as the Nazi-like blond female slaver Eviless completely, despite her having formed the original Villainy Inc. of WW's enemies (in Wonder Woman #28, the last by Marston). Though Marston had described female nature as being more capable of submission emotion, in his other writings and interviews[citation needed] he referred to submission as a noble practice and did not shy away from the sexual implications, saying: "The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound... Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society... Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element."[17] One of the purposes of these bondage depictions was to induce eroticism in readers as a part of what he called "sex love training". Through his Wonder Woman comics, he aimed to condition readers to becoming more readily accepting of loving submission to loving authorities rather than being so assertive with their own destructive egos. About male readers, he later wrote: "Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves!"[18] Marston combined these themes with others, including restorative and transformative justice, rehabilitation, regret and its role in civilization. These appeared often in his depiction of the near-ideal Amazon civilization of Paradise Island, and especially its Reform Island penal colony, which played a central role in many stories, and was the "loving" alternative to retributive justice of the world run by men. These themes are particularly evident in his last story, in which prisoners freed by Eviless, who have responded to Amazon rehabilitation and now have good dominance/submission, stop her and restore the Amazons to power."

Principles don't matter if you're from the wrong tribe.

#Legit

Wait. What?

...

There it is.

Dude went complete savage.

Don't judge me, man.

Rick gets it.

Religion is all about the hair...

And the funny hats...

"I do not say lonely... but essentially, and finally, alone.

125%

...

But he was so cool though.

Facts need not apply where ideology is concerned.

It only takes a generation...

"Mansplaining" has nothing to do with the fact you're a woman and I'm a man...

...and everything to do with the fact I disagree with you about something and think I know better.  I am an equal opportunity asshole, if nothing else. 

Joe Gets It.

Protest Advantage: Venezuela.

If only it were that easy.

#SeemsLegit

"Extremely Problematic."

I have no idea what is happening here.

But she seems like a keeper.

Life is Change.

Like, it doesn't matter at all. Sadly.

I laughed. Because I am an asshole.

"People tell you who they are but we ignore it..."

"It’s not just that the edges of microaggression are poorly defined: ambiguity is baked into the entire concept."

The scientific evidence for microaggressions is weak and we should drop the term, argues review author – Research Digest: "...a new review in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University argues that core empirical and conceptual questions about microaggressions remain unaddressed...

So what exactly is a microaggression? First coined in the 1970s but rejuvenated in 2007 in a paper in the American Psychologist by Derald Wing Sue and colleagues, it originally referred only to racism but has expanded to a range of commonplace slights or hostility towards an oppressed group. The definition includes microinvalidations, such as being told that a negative interaction couldn’t have been due to racist motives, and microinsults, such as a teacher avoiding calling on you in class due to your gender, as well as a third class of microassaults...

 It’s not just that the edges of microaggression are poorly defined: ambiguity is baked into the entire concept. Advocates see this as a key feature, and claim that more ambiguous acts of prejudice are the most damaging, because they are the hardest to deal with...

(Sue again: “The invisibility of racial microaggressions may be more harmful to people of color than hate crimes or the covert and deliberate acts of White supremacists such as the Klan and Skinheads.”)

Ambiguity can have its uses but the risk is that the concept becomes overly subjective. For example, it could be that the experience of microaggressions is at least partially explained by a propensity to see fault or attack in statements. It could also be that the apparent impact of microaggressions on health or wellbeing is because people prone to negative emotionality (they score high on the trait of neuroticism) are more likely both to perceive microaggressions and to experience poorer health...

Personality having a hand in microaggression experience would also explain why some people from minority groups report no microaggressions when canvassed. The (limited) evidence that more ambiguous slights lead to more negative outcomes could also reflect the established psychological fact that in “weak” situations with no clear guidelines for action, people’s personality – in this case, their negative emotionality – tends to assert itself to fill in the interpretive gaps. 

Lilienfeld raises a lot of other issues we simply don’t have space for here: political assumptions, no measurement of base rates of everyday slights, inclusion criteria that limits participants to those who already buy into the concept to begin with, and the need to address whether people who commit microaggressions show other signs of a prejudicial mindset (something that research into the Implicit Affect test has also struggled to demonstrate). 

But he stresses that while he is not here to praise research into microaggression, nor is he here to bury it. He emphasises that many of these issues could be addressed by joining the microaggression field more closely with other more established areas of psychological research, and he offers a number of steps researchers could take to strengthen their research base. Lilienfeld also suggests we all consider putting aside the word microaggression in favour of “perceived racial slight” – because we don’t yet understand the role of interpretation due to personality, and because it simply isn’t clear that those using microaggressions are showing aggression as we usually understand the word. Putting aside the charged term, together with the “victim and perpetrator” parlance used by advocates and researchers, would allow us to affirm that these ambiguous events have a reality of their own, while recognising that the nature of that reality needs further investigation to be understood."

"Reductionism is misleading and lends itself easily to fear-mongers and fanatics on either side of the political spectrum."

Islam vs. Islamism: Why the Distinction Still Matters – Areo Magazine: "Pew Research Center surveys of Muslims from 39 different countries show that beliefs are largely determined geographically. This means that in countries like Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, people overwhelmingly support sharia law — 84, 91, and 99% respectively– whereas in the secular, ex-USSR countries of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, only 8 and 10%, respectively, favor its implementation. Even so, Muslim communities in Britain hold convictions that contrast deeply with the rest of the population. When asked, for example, whether homosexuality should be legal in Britain, 52% of Muslims said they disagreed, compared with 5% of the general public. Almost one third of those interviewed thought it acceptable for a Muslim man to practice polygamy, compared to 8%, and nearly 40% agreed wives should be submissive to their husbands, compared to only 5% of the rest of the population. In this case, religion, rather than geography, decided belief...

Trevor Philips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, noticed a correlation between a lack of willingness to assimilate, and sympathy with terrorists: “One in six Muslims say they would like to live more separately, a quarter would like to live under sharia law. It means that as a society we have a group of people who basically do not want to participate in the way that other people [do].” Citing this worrying find, he stressed the urgency of integration and the danger in sacrificing disagreement for the sake of being non-confrontational: “We are more nervous about Muslims because we feel people will be offended. But my view is that looking at the results of this survey…we have gone beyond the situation where we can say: ‘OK, don’t worry; they will come round in time.’ ”

It is precisely the concern that radical beliefs may not be the exclusive domain of radicals, however, that makes the distinction between Islam and Islamism so pertinent. While Daniel Pipes declares that Islamists are a minority, he acknowledges that they are a “very active minority” whose reach is “greater than its numbers. Islamists are also present here, in the United States, and, to a stunning extent, dominate the discourse of American Islam...

When looking at the book from which both the faithful and the militant draw their inspiration, it would be easy to obfuscate Islam and Islamism. But how much does the Quran matter when discussing the problem with radicalization? One could argue that to say all religions are equal is dishonest. Bill Maher, television host, writer, and unabashed critic of religious fundamentalism, often ridicules the hesitation to label Islamic terrorist as such. It’s safe to say they aren’t Amish, goes the joke. There’s the sentiment that honest debate regarding the Quran is being silenced in favor of political correctness: all religions are the same, Islam is as benign or malevolent as any other belief system, and terrorists are politically driven. As is most often the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, between the equally ridiculous arguments that attribute extremist inclinations to the poor, disenfranchised, and disillusioned — absolving religion of any responsibility — and those that make Islam out to be the root of all evil. Reductionism is misleading and lends itself easily to fear-mongers and fanatics on either side of the political spectrum...

The same responses that are fallacious in one context are legitimate in another, in so far as they are irrefutable facts. Organized Christianity did engage in forced conversions on indigenous peoples. It did carry out the Inquisition. It was responsible for the systematic persecution of heretics, — often Christians themselves who deviated only slightly from accepted dogma — and the brutal torture and execution of homosexuals, Jews, and women. Shall we separate these from the doctrines of Christianity? If the answer is yes, then we can plausibly do the same for other religions. But the answer is unequivocally no. The Bible certainly allows for these interpretations. And it’s a tired old trope saying communism wasn’t real communism, those weren’t real Christians, and terrorists can’t call themselves true Muslims. No one is buying the forced distancing of atrocities committed in the name of one ideology or another from their idealistic or cherry-picked versions. Westboro Baptists have all they need in the Bible to justify their hate. And we never shied away from identifying the problem when abortion doctors were being murdered...

Those who wish to identify as Muslims, especially for reasons of heritage and family tradition, must be offered the choice to interpret the Quran as a philosophical text, much like secular Christians who do not necessarily believe in the divine infallibility of the Bible but choose to follow Christ’s compassionate example. This would lead to a clear demarcation between church and state, private and public. The relationship with the divine would shift from public to private. The onus is on figures of authority, like imams, to instigate and encourage this interpretation. There is no place for the violent, primitive practices of the Bible and Quran in modern society, if there ever was a place for it in history. We all share a responsibility in decriminalizing criticism and skepticism. This is exactly why it is so crucial to distinguish between an ideology and individuals. If they are one and the same, we cannot criticize the former without appearing bigoted towards the latter. Though the lines may seem to blur, as in the tragic cases outlined in the previous paragraph, we must criticize the ideology that motivates individuals to abandon their humanity."

"If you want to be believe you can always be fooled."

It’s Aliveness – Still | Matt Thornton': "Always remember that fighting, and by extension, fighting methods/training epistemologies, are empirically testable things. Any competent blue belt who wasn’t a cooperating stooge, but instead acting as the one thing every functional system needs as a correcting mechanism – a resisting opponent – would prove, repeatedly, that what you’re witnessing in the video above was little more than delusion made physical. And repeated experiments of many different sorts could verify these conclusions. 

...areas of claimed proficiency can be tested, and those tests can be repeated, safely, humanely, and without anyone getting seriously hurt (beyond perhaps, their pride). So if we settle on the fact that we are looking at the Martial Arts equivalent of Scientology, then it must just be about the money, right? 

...people who buy into this sort of Martial Arts superstition, like people who spend tens of thousands on Scientology, must be a bit dim. But that proposition, that superstition requires stupidity, is little more than faulty logic. I don’t think Mitt Romney is stupid. In fact, I think he’s an extremely intelligent man. However, as a Mormon (and we have every reason to believe he’s sincere in his faith), Mitt Romney also believes in a creator God who lives on a planet (or near a star) named Kolob. Uri Geller was very obviously, a shitty con man and magician. Yet he had physicists, research institutes, and heads of state believing he had “psychic powers”. That is, until he was exposed by the people qualified to expose him, other magicians (the Amazing Randi), on the Johnny Carson show...

Is it so hard to think that someone could have years of experience with functional Martial Arts, and still be taken in by some well-spoken huckster who uses the Martial Arts equivalent of carnival tricks? One of the reasons I continue to talk about Aliveness is because you don’t have to be dumb to fall for Martial Arts delusion; you just have to have one or more of the two following afflictions – a lack of understanding as to what Aliveness actually is, and or, a desire to believe. The first I can help fix. The second I cannot. Some people really want a magic bullet...

There are some profound lessons there. Lessons all of us need to remember. If you want to be believe you can always be fooled. If you want a magic bullet there will always be someone who will sell you one. And if you’re arrogant enough to believe that your failure of imagination is an insight into necessity – then you too may end up falling for the absurd. Hubris and nescience frequently come as a team...

Life is short. Time is precious. And truth always matters. So why do I care? I care because at their worst, fantasy based Martial Arts like Systema are dangerous. And at their best fantasy based Martial Arts like Systema are impoverishing. Dangerous because they pretend to teach people how to deal with things like guns, knives, and violent attackers. And impoverishing because they waste peoples time giving them make believe answers where proven solutions exist. Who are they most dangerous and most impoverishing for? Those who need help the most – the weak. I’m not worried that the Jocko Willinks of the world will be taken in by Martin Wheeler’s Systema secrets. But that chubby guy who keeps falling over himself as he haplessly pretends to get a grip on Wheeler, he will be. And that’s why the message is Aliveness – still."

"You're allowed to say a place and 'kids'..."

How to react when you're called a racist.

"Tell me something. What do you know about Wakanda?"

This. Looks. Awesome.

"The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries."

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness: "By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men."

Why Women Are Unhappy | Human Events: "The National Bureau of Economic Research released a study to be published soon in the American Economic Journal that shows women’s happiness has measurably declined since 1970. It’s no surprise that this has stimulated much comment. This study covers the same time period as the rise of the so-called women’s liberation or feminist movement. The correlation demands an explanation. 

One theory advanced by the authors, University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, is that the women’s liberation movement "raised women’s expectations" (sold them a bill of goods), making them feel inadequate when they fail to have it all. A second theory is that the demands on women who are both mothers and jobholders in the labor force are overwhelming.   

I’m neither an economist nor a psychologist, but I’ll join the conversation with my own armchair analysis. Another theory could be that the feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach.   

Feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women held consciousness-raising sessions where they exchanged tales of how badly some man had treated them. Grievances are like flowers — if you water them, they will grow, and self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.   

Another theory could be the increase in easy divorce and illegitimacy (now 40 percent of American births are to single moms), which means that millions of women are raising kids without a husband and therefore expect Big Brother government to substitute as provider. The 2008 election returns showed that 70 percent of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama, perhaps hoping to be beneficiaries of his "spread the wealth" policies.   

In the pre-1970 era, when surveys showed women with higher levels of happiness, most men held jobs that enabled their wives to be fulltime homemakers. The private enterprise system constantly produces goods that make household work and kiddie care easier (such as dryers, dishwashers and paper diapers).   

Betty Friedan started the feminist movement in the late 1960s with her book "The Feminine Mystique," which created the myth that suburban housewives were suffering from "a sense of dissatisfaction" with their alleged-to-be-boring lives. To liberate women from the home that Friedan labeled "a comfortable concentration camp," the feminist movement worked tirelessly to make the role of fulltime homemaker socially disdained.   

Economic need played no role in the feminist argument that marriage is archaic and oppressive to women. A job in the labor force was upheld as so much more fulfilling than tending babies and preparing dinner for a hard-working husband.   Women’s studies courses require students to accept as an article of faith the silly notion that gender differences are not natural or biological but are social constructs created by the patriarchy and ancient stereotypes. This leads feminists to seek legislative corrections for problems that don’t exist.   

A former editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal wrote in her book "Spin Sisters" that the anorexic blondes on television are every day selling the falsehood that women’s lives are full of misery and threats from men. Bernard Goldberg calls the mainstream media "one of America’s most pro-feminist institutions."   According to feminist ideology, the only gender-specific characteristic is that men are naturally batterers who make all women victims...

The feminists reject choice in gender roles. The Big Mama of feminist studies, Simone de Beauvoir, said: "We don’t believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children … precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." The feminists have carried on a long-running campaign to make husbands and fathers unnecessary and irrelevant. Most divorces are initiated by women, and more women than men request same-sex marriage licenses in Massachusetts so that, with two affirmative-action jobs plus in vitro fertilization, they can create a "family" without husbands or fathers. Despite the false messages of the colleges and the media, most American women are smart enough to reject the label feminist, and only 20 percent of mothers say they want full-time work in the labor force. I suggest that women suffering from unhappiness should look into how women are treated in the rest of the world, and then maybe American women would realize they are the most fortunate people on earth."

Only 18 percent of Americans consider themselves feminists - Vox: "Plenty of people say they believe in equal rights for women, but when you ask those same people if they're feminists, most of them will say no. That's what we found in a new Vox poll, which explores the public's view on feminism, abortion, and the Affordable Care Act. The poll, conducted by research and communications firm PerryUndem, shows that a strong majority of Americans agree on gender equality. Eighty-five percent, for example, say they believe in "equality for women." But many fewer want to put the feminist label on their beliefs. Eighteen percent of poll respondents said they consider themselves feminist. Fifty-two percent said they were not feminist, 26 percent were not sure, and 4 percent refused to answer the question."

Column: Why millennial women don't want to call themselves feminists | PBS NewsHour: "2. The term “feminism” has been hijacked by a minority of vocal extremists who have redefined it as “gender feminism,” claiming that gender is a patriarchal social construct created in order to oppress women. Gender feminism is based on the discredited belief that humans are born as blank slates and all sex differences are artifacts of socialization. They believe the only way to achieve true political and economic equality is to erase all differences between men and women by rigidly socializing boys and girls to be the same. 

Gender feminism is very much alive and well in American colleges and universities, housed within many Women and Gender studies programs...  Barnard College student Toni Airaksinen recently blogged about her experiences in such a program: In one year, I took three Women’s Studies classes. My professors taught me that, because I was a woman, I was victimized and oppressed. Prior to enrolling, I did not see myself that way…Mentioning anything that didn’t support the notion that females were unilaterally oppressed would be akin to blasphemy...

3. “Feminist” has come to mean “careerist” — competing with men in the workplace on men’s terms. This implies that stay-at-home mothers cannot be feminists and that women must put career ahead of family in order to compete. This phenomenon can be traced to a shameful chapter in second-wave feminism. Shulamith Firestone declared “Pregnancy is barbaric.” Ellen Willis admitted that “I saw having children as the great trap that completely took away your freedom.” Gloria Steinem described her mother as spiritually broken by giving up her career as a journalist to raise her children.

Within the confines of the traditional workplace, where men were the breadwinners and women’s place was in the home, careers are meant to be unbroken, rising trajectories. We are expected to claim our turf and prove ourselves in our 20s and 30s and move into positions of greater prestige, power and authority in our 40s and beyond. This, of course, leaves no room for forming and caring for young families."

"This is the point where any argument to justify a belief in non-binary genders explodes if you base it on sex chromosomes."

Bill Nye: The Lie-By-Omission Guy

"There's no such thing as one unit of healthcare."

Obamacare? Trumpcare? Get Rid of it All | Mises Wire: "From a fundamental economics point of view, what is healthcare exactly? One of the things that's particularly frustrating for me as an economist is this notion that "healthcare" is some kind of a unique good or service, that everybody needs, everybody wants, but cannot be provided by the market the way the market provides shoes, or tomatoes, or automobiles, or any other good. But what is healthcare? Nobody consumes "healthcare". No one has a right to "healthcare," because healthcare is not a homogeneous thing. There's no such thing as one unit of healthcare.

Rather what we mean by healthcare is a discreet set of specific commodities, goods and services, that you can buy in combinations, or different quality levels. So open heart surgery is a service you can purchase on the market that contributes to your health. But so is taking an aspirin. In other words, there's no such thing as "healthcare." There's a heterogenous bundle of goods and services that different individuals will want to consume at different levels. Now when we think about it this way, it becomes far from obvious that these particular kinds of goods and services cannot be supplied on the market just like other goods and services. If we would just allow the free market to work, if we could eliminate the third party payer system, the government subsidies on the expenditure side that drive prices up, there's no reason why a truly free market in healthcare goods and services couldn't be just as effective in the U.S. as the market for computers, software, automobiles, or the market for anything else."

"Operation Mindfuck."

Operation Mindfuck - Wikipedia: "Operation Mindfuck or OM is an important practice in the Discordian religion... It is most often manifested as a decentralized campaign of civil disobedience, activism, art movements, especially performance art and guerrilla art, culture jamming, graffiti and other vandalism, practical jokes, hoaxes, reality hacking, chaos magic, words of power, and anything else that is believed to bring about social change through disrupting paradigms and thus forcing the victim to question the parameters of his or her reality tunnel."

"Progressives used to say 'I may disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.'"

"Not anymore...  The Battle of Ideas has been replaced by The Battle of Feelings and outrage has replaced honesty..."

Cultural Appropriation: The Skate Punks of Myanmar.

Awesome.

"...some of us ignore biological data when it’s inimical to our political preferences."

The ideological opposition to biological truth « Why Evolution Is True: "One distressing characteristic of the Left, at least as far as science is concerned, is to let our ideology trump scientific data; that is, some of us ignore biological data when it’s inimical to our political preferences. This plays out in several ways: the insistence that race doesn’t exist (and before you accuse me of saying that races do exist, read about what I’ve written here before: the issue is complex), that there are no evolutionarily-based innate (e.g., genetically based) behavioral or psychological differences between ethnic groups, and that there are no such differences, either, between males and females within humans. These claims are based not on biological data, but on ideological fears of the Left: if we admit of such differences, it could foster racism and sexism.  

Thus any group differences we do observe, whether they reside in psychology, physiology, or morphology, are to be explained on first principle as resulting from culture rather than genes. (I do of course recognize that culture can interact with genes to produce behaviors.) This ideological blinkering leads to the conclusion that when we see a difference in performance between groups and genders, the obvious explanation is culture and oppression, and the remedy is equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. Yet in areas like most sports, where everyone agrees that males are on average larger and stronger than females, it’s clear that the behavioral differences (i.e., performance) result from biological differences that are surely based on evolution. In sports like track and field or judo, nobody would think of making males compete with females. But that’s not a good way to act. The Left has historically been characterized by respect for the facts, and the refusal to even consider that such differences could be based in part on genes is an unwelcome and unhealthy departure from our traditional embrace of rationality. Yes, phony biological data has been used to support racism and sexism, but remember that that is the fault of human prejudice, cooked data, and an inability to do proper experiments that have all resulted in terrible data being used to support human prejudices...

To claim that there are no evolutionary differences in behavior and psychology between men and women is fatuous.  The data show otherwise, though of course for most traits we don’t know if it’s genetic. But the default hypothesis, based on observation of other species (especially primates) is that at least some psychological and behavioral differences will be based on genes that evolved via selection in our ancestors. Why is the brain immune to evolved, sex-specific differences but the body is not? Thus, to claim, as does P.Z. Myers in a new post, that higher testosterone levels in males have minimal influence on their aggressiveness compared to the effects of culture, is a claim based not on data—which show that he’s wrong—but on ideology. And so he and his commenters try to refute the testosterone-effect notion using anecdotes: some males aren’t aggressive, Myers himself is not aggressive (!), aggression is due “mostly” to cultural difference (the “patriarchy”) rather than to biological differences, and so on. To read the comment thread is to see a bunch of progressives desperately squirming to avoid the obvious. Well, I’m not an expert on testosterone, but what I do know is that levels of that hormone are not only correlated with aggression within and among the sexes, but that injecting it into both men and women also makes their behavior and psychology more aggressive. Thus the correlation at least partly reflects causation.

...let’s look at some data showing prima facie that there are biological differences in behavior between males and females, and that those differences reflect the working of natural selection—in the form of sexual selection—in our ancestors. To do this, we’ll use body size as an index of behavior. I’ll try to be brief. It’s well known that in virtually all species of primates (there are a few exceptions in lemurs), and in other groups such as pinnipeds, males are larger than females. That is not cultural, but genetic; if you rear gorillas in any habitat, the males are going to grow up larger than females. You can see the data among species yourself in a 2006 paper by Adam D. Gordon (reference and free link below), showing an almost universal trend for the male/female body mass to be larger than 1 in primate species (in every species there are of course some small males and large females, but we’re talking about averages). Why is this? It reflects evolved male behavior: the tendency of males to compete for females, and the advantage of large body size in that competition. Whether the advantage be in direct competition, so that the larger you are the more you can fight off other males (gorillas, elephant seals), or in female choice, so that females choosing large males can gain protection for her young from marauding males (also gorillas), the difference in size reflects something almost universal among animals: males, who have cheap gametes, must compete for females who have expensive gametes and invest more in reproduction.  

And that is why, in study after study in humans, male sexual behavior shows promiscuous mating, while females are more selective. That’s not necessarily all biological, but some of it surely is given that our closest relatives show the same behaviors and that there is no such thing as The Gorilla and Chimpanzee Patriarchy. Here’s further evidence that the larger size and strength of males is reflected in their behavior—and was almost certainly promoted by sexual selection: In human societies studied by Richard Alexander, those societies that are more polygynous (in which males compete more intensively for females) show greater sexual size dimorphism than societies that are more monogamous. This was a prediction made before the data were acquired—a prediction derived from sexual selection theory. And it was fulfilled. 

Among species of primates, there’s a good correlation between the polygyny of a species and sexual dimorphism: those species in which males have a higher variance in offspring number, and in which males thus compete more intensely for females, also show a greater ratio of male/female body size, even when corrected for phylogeny. (Too, in primate species in which males fight each other over females, the relative size of the canine teeth, used in battle, is larger than in species showing less direct male-male competition.) In humans, as in many other species in which males compete for females, the sex ratio at birth favors males. They then die off at a higher rate due to higher risk-taking and exploratory behavior, until at reproductive age (about 25), the sex ratio is equal. Then, as males continue to die off, the sex ratio reverses, becoming female-biased at greater ages. This is exactly what evolutionary theory predicts: if there are biological differences in mortality rates, then evolution will adjust the sex ratio so it’s equal at the time of reproduction. In line with the above, in humans and other primates, males show from the outset great exploratory and risk-taking behaviors, and as adults show many other behaviors that differ from those of females, such as greater dispersal. Is this due to the Primate Patriarchy? Probably not, given that these differences in behavior are shown in many species besides ours and make evolutionary sense.

And if all this be true, then it would be foolish to deny prima facie that there are other evolved differences in psychology between men and women, some reflected in morphology (why are men hairier than women?).  The conventional wisdom should never be that men and women are biologically identical in their psychology and behavior, amiable as that may be to Leftist ideology. The primacy rests not with ideology, but with data; and while we can act against what the evolutionary data tell us (as we do when we use contraception), we should not deny that the data exist, or exercise confirmation bias so we try to dismiss data that contravene our ideology while welcoming data that support it. What we need to do is accept the data, but then adjust our society so that we realize the outcomes we want from our (partly evolved) morality. And that doesn’t mean structuring our society so that morality parallels biology. And you can bet your tuchas that the ideologues will do their best to undercut (or ignore) the data adduced above. And for similar arguments but a lot more data, see Steve Pinker’s book The Blank Slate, which has a new Afterword with a detailed update on gender."

Crystal Clear.

Related - Posts: "Males are oppressors. Women are victims. But gender is a social construct. While also being a spectrum. Yet I was born in the wrong body. So I'm going to have a sex change. And I'm bisexual. But I hate men. Yet I love gender diversity. So I celebrate our differences. Because we're all the same. But you used the wrong gender pronouns. So you're a sexist bigot. I hope I made myself clear."