I take weekly individual tango dance lessons from a guy named Oscar at his apartment in downtown Buenos Aires. One day he comes down to let me in, says hi to the doorman (doorwoman? “portera” in Spanish) and as we start walking up the stairs he says “speak in English”. So we talk for a little bit and then I say, in English, “why are we speaking in English?”
“It’s the doorwoman. She asks me about what I do, why I keep bringing people up to my apartment, I try to keep it vague, make things interesting. I thought speaking English would add to the mystery a little bit.”
This then led to a conversation about the nature of how your neighbors knowing what you do can lead to them complaining about you in a different way “oh it’s noisy, must be that musician” if they know you’re a musician, etc. This wasn’t the thing that threw me about our conversation though.
We switched back to Spanish soon after reaching his apartment. What struck me though was how odd it felt at first to speak English to him. I’ve known Oscar for several months now, and I consider him a good friend; in addition to tango we’ve had lots of interesting conversations about everything from politics to physiology to philosophy (and of course women). But I’ve never really spoken to him in English for any length of time and only had a dim recollection that he spoke English (I sent him a link to something about blues dancing and remembered that I wouldn’t have to translate it because he spoke some English).
My study abroad program The Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA) tries to encourage its students to speak Spanish all the time amongst ourselves, but I’ve stopped respecting this rule. I was trying to figure out why. It isn’t just because I’m lazy or tired of speaking Spanish all the time—I don’t spend much time with other Americans and don’t actively seek out their company. Part of it may be that I just realize that it isn’t ideal for communicating and I figure I keep up my Spanish just fine speaking with other Argentines. This semester there have been weeks I've gone without speaking any English at all, apart from talking to my family on skype (I certainly read, write and listen to plenty though). You just get used to operating in one language in certain contexts and another language in others.
I always spoke English with my father even though it wasn’t his native tongue. He (and I) received a lot of flack about this later. Why didn’t you teach him Spanish? The closest to an answer my dad ever gave was, “well he didn’t want to”. I think he just didn’t really know why.
I’ve been in Buenos Aires for just a month shy of nine months. I don’t tend to think of him as a foreign student, but my dad was in the U.S. a lot longer than that. Like the entire time he knew my mother (several years, most of which they weren’t officially dating). The jolt I felt with Oscar must have been similar to what he felt speaking Spanish around Mom.
Dad and I have another thing in common of our experiences studying abroad; we both changed our names. Here I’ve told people that my name is Mariano, instead of Stephen, something I decided on doing before I got here. It's not a complete fabrication--Mariano is my middle name, after my great-grandfather on my dad's side. The superficial reason is that Mariano is easier to pronounce in Spanish than “Esteefen”. But it’s also a way of creating a different sort of person for a different world. My dad quit Opus Dei in Guatemala as “Geno” (short for Eugenio, his middle name—Marco was his dad’s name too) to pursue higher education abroad as his given name “Marco”. If someone called our house on the phone and asked for my dad, you instantly knew they were friends or family pre-1980 if they asked for Geno instead of Marco (or, you know, "Dad", another new name).
Rechristening yourself is one of the perks of travel.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Minors, Delinquents and my grandmother
"Menores y Delinquentes" (juvenile delinquents)
This was the name of an episode of "Policias en Accion" (ever watched Cops? It's like that) which my host mother is a big fan of. Sometimes I'll watch it with her, at which there is an odd sort of moment of bonding between us, and at which she reaffirms her belief that the country is going to hell ("va a la mierda") and that South American immigrants and "American cultural habits" like drinking and smoking dope (don't ask) aren't helping. Obviously I have some strong feelings about those views (being the American son of a Latin American immigrant) but let's set that aside for now.
Every episode they have a different theme and this one was juvenile delinquents. But unlike most episdoes, this one included, in addition to the customary Cops style video shoots, they had commentary from some media figures and ordinary people about the political issue of potentially lowering the age where you can go to jail for a crime. My feelings about the issue are in some way a yardstick of how I've shed a lot of my liberal sensibilities since coming here.
I'm not sure if I thought about this issue very much in the United States, but here I was surprised by how firm my opinion was. It seemed like the majority of the commentators (interlaced with scenes of hoodlums being pressed up against police van hoods) were basically saying that the change would be a bad thing, that it's missing the point of the real problem. It's a view I'm sympathetic with. The delinquency is just the symptom of bigger societal issues which will never really be solved until we get to the root of the issue.
It reminds me of a parable my grandmother used to tell me about the drowning babies. The story goes that a man walks down to a river and finds a young child floundering about in a river struggling to avoid drowning. Concerned the man bends down and fishes the baby out and lays it by the bank of the river. Another baby appears, and then another, all of which he carefully fishes out and lays by the side of the river. At this point a stranger walks by sees the babies, stares for a while and then starts running away from the scene.
"Where are you going!" The first man yells to him, "you've got to help me save all these children from drowning!"
"I'm going upriver" the second man yells back, "I wanna figure out who's putting all these babies in the river!"
This notion exists in the background of much of my thinking, about issues as diverse as poverty to Amerca's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (you guys didn't forget we were in Iraq did you?) Being that second man, is what my grandmother once told me that she had dreamed of being when she retired for social work, that she wanted to join the peace corps to be a part of just such a solution, and I've shared similar dreams. It's what attracted me to the Peace Corps and is what attracts to me economic development research.
But there's another side to the story. I was robbed by a pair of kids who couldn't have been older than my little brother. Their not going to jail is not doing anythin to keep them from stealing cell phones. True, because of the crime's proximity to Retiro they were probably from Villa 31 one of Buenos Aires urban ghettos (similar to Brazil's Favelas which you'll recognize if you've seen City of God or City of Men), made up of squatters who build ramshackel homes on public land. Because of the cap that said Paraguay that one of them left behind in our scuffle, I would guess that they are the children of immigrants who left their homes behind in an effort to build a better life for themselves in Argentina's biggest city. They probably lived in crushing poverty and didn't have much of a future.
But such liberal empathy becomes harder to sustain when said disadvantaged youth is busy kicking you in the face and while he tries to make off with your valuables. The resulting sensation leaves one more desirous of committing homicide than seeing some kind of elaborate social justice meted out.
Of course these kinds of feelings ought not to be the basis of public policy. But consider the logic; Steven Levitt, a Chicago economist who teaches there on the economics of crime and the author of NY times bestseller Freakonomics, found in his analysis of crime statistics that one of the main causes of the increased crime rate of the 1990's (one less controversial than Roe vs. Wade, which he found to be the principal explanation) was lighter and less frequent prison sentences, during the liberalization of the 1960's and 70's.
The question is of course on some level an empirical one, but it makes theoretical sense if you believe (as economists do) that people respond to incentives, that the demand curve for crime is downward sloping--when the price goes up the demand goes down. This seems to work pretty effectively for things like shoes, hamburgers and automobiles and there's a pretty good case for why it would work for crime. You can increase this "price" of crime in a variety of ways, whether be increasing the penalties for it, increasing the chance people get caught, or (somehow) increasing the moral burden people incur by comitting crime.
Of course making crime more expensive has its limits for all kinds of reasons--we certainly wouldn't wish the death penalty on teenagers caught drinking (actually Levitt also found that application of the death penalty did not serve to decrease crime because of how infrequently--even in states with heroic execution rates like Texas--you can atually expect to get electrocuted for comitting a crime). And it's still true what the commentators say that the root causes of delinquence go a lot deeper than the immediate reasons for the crimes. But as one commentator rightly (in my opinion) pointed out, "you have to stop the bleeding before you can heal the wound". All these nice words about fighting poverty are nice but in the short term (and unaccompanied by action by the way) they seem to wind up doing nothing more than supply these kids with lines like those of the hooligans (God I love that word) from West Side Story singing about why they're stuck in gangs instead of going to school and staying out of trouble. The kids on Policias sing the same song though less politely than Sondheim's delinquents ("Gee Officer Krupke, Krup you!") and are well aware of the rules of the system that lets them off the hook just because they're young.
"If you want to change behavior, you can't give them excuses or let them just get away with stuff"
The words are mine, but they're paraphrased from my grandmother, in explaining her skepticism about Freudian psychology and the psychoanlytic method, which she sees as excusing more behavior in young people than it fixes. She would hear a kid say "but my father drinks and abuses my mom, that's why I robbed the store/broke curfew/do drugs",
"but did you know what the consequences would be?"
"Yeah"
"Alright then"
Maybe these ideas aren't so new to me after all.
Happy Birthday Grandma (she turns 80 today)!
P.S. My grandmother should enjoy this: check out the social worker's dissenting diagnosis of the boys problems in the West Side Story video.
This was the name of an episode of "Policias en Accion" (ever watched Cops? It's like that) which my host mother is a big fan of. Sometimes I'll watch it with her, at which there is an odd sort of moment of bonding between us, and at which she reaffirms her belief that the country is going to hell ("va a la mierda") and that South American immigrants and "American cultural habits" like drinking and smoking dope (don't ask) aren't helping. Obviously I have some strong feelings about those views (being the American son of a Latin American immigrant) but let's set that aside for now.
Every episode they have a different theme and this one was juvenile delinquents. But unlike most episdoes, this one included, in addition to the customary Cops style video shoots, they had commentary from some media figures and ordinary people about the political issue of potentially lowering the age where you can go to jail for a crime. My feelings about the issue are in some way a yardstick of how I've shed a lot of my liberal sensibilities since coming here.
I'm not sure if I thought about this issue very much in the United States, but here I was surprised by how firm my opinion was. It seemed like the majority of the commentators (interlaced with scenes of hoodlums being pressed up against police van hoods) were basically saying that the change would be a bad thing, that it's missing the point of the real problem. It's a view I'm sympathetic with. The delinquency is just the symptom of bigger societal issues which will never really be solved until we get to the root of the issue.
It reminds me of a parable my grandmother used to tell me about the drowning babies. The story goes that a man walks down to a river and finds a young child floundering about in a river struggling to avoid drowning. Concerned the man bends down and fishes the baby out and lays it by the bank of the river. Another baby appears, and then another, all of which he carefully fishes out and lays by the side of the river. At this point a stranger walks by sees the babies, stares for a while and then starts running away from the scene.
"Where are you going!" The first man yells to him, "you've got to help me save all these children from drowning!"
"I'm going upriver" the second man yells back, "I wanna figure out who's putting all these babies in the river!"
This notion exists in the background of much of my thinking, about issues as diverse as poverty to Amerca's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (you guys didn't forget we were in Iraq did you?) Being that second man, is what my grandmother once told me that she had dreamed of being when she retired for social work, that she wanted to join the peace corps to be a part of just such a solution, and I've shared similar dreams. It's what attracted me to the Peace Corps and is what attracts to me economic development research.
But there's another side to the story. I was robbed by a pair of kids who couldn't have been older than my little brother. Their not going to jail is not doing anythin to keep them from stealing cell phones. True, because of the crime's proximity to Retiro they were probably from Villa 31 one of Buenos Aires urban ghettos (similar to Brazil's Favelas which you'll recognize if you've seen City of God or City of Men), made up of squatters who build ramshackel homes on public land. Because of the cap that said Paraguay that one of them left behind in our scuffle, I would guess that they are the children of immigrants who left their homes behind in an effort to build a better life for themselves in Argentina's biggest city. They probably lived in crushing poverty and didn't have much of a future.
But such liberal empathy becomes harder to sustain when said disadvantaged youth is busy kicking you in the face and while he tries to make off with your valuables. The resulting sensation leaves one more desirous of committing homicide than seeing some kind of elaborate social justice meted out.
Of course these kinds of feelings ought not to be the basis of public policy. But consider the logic; Steven Levitt, a Chicago economist who teaches there on the economics of crime and the author of NY times bestseller Freakonomics, found in his analysis of crime statistics that one of the main causes of the increased crime rate of the 1990's (one less controversial than Roe vs. Wade, which he found to be the principal explanation) was lighter and less frequent prison sentences, during the liberalization of the 1960's and 70's.
The question is of course on some level an empirical one, but it makes theoretical sense if you believe (as economists do) that people respond to incentives, that the demand curve for crime is downward sloping--when the price goes up the demand goes down. This seems to work pretty effectively for things like shoes, hamburgers and automobiles and there's a pretty good case for why it would work for crime. You can increase this "price" of crime in a variety of ways, whether be increasing the penalties for it, increasing the chance people get caught, or (somehow) increasing the moral burden people incur by comitting crime.
Of course making crime more expensive has its limits for all kinds of reasons--we certainly wouldn't wish the death penalty on teenagers caught drinking (actually Levitt also found that application of the death penalty did not serve to decrease crime because of how infrequently--even in states with heroic execution rates like Texas--you can atually expect to get electrocuted for comitting a crime). And it's still true what the commentators say that the root causes of delinquence go a lot deeper than the immediate reasons for the crimes. But as one commentator rightly (in my opinion) pointed out, "you have to stop the bleeding before you can heal the wound". All these nice words about fighting poverty are nice but in the short term (and unaccompanied by action by the way) they seem to wind up doing nothing more than supply these kids with lines like those of the hooligans (God I love that word) from West Side Story singing about why they're stuck in gangs instead of going to school and staying out of trouble. The kids on Policias sing the same song though less politely than Sondheim's delinquents ("Gee Officer Krupke, Krup you!") and are well aware of the rules of the system that lets them off the hook just because they're young.
"If you want to change behavior, you can't give them excuses or let them just get away with stuff"
The words are mine, but they're paraphrased from my grandmother, in explaining her skepticism about Freudian psychology and the psychoanlytic method, which she sees as excusing more behavior in young people than it fixes. She would hear a kid say "but my father drinks and abuses my mom, that's why I robbed the store/broke curfew/do drugs",
"but did you know what the consequences would be?"
"Yeah"
"Alright then"
Maybe these ideas aren't so new to me after all.
Happy Birthday Grandma (she turns 80 today)!
P.S. My grandmother should enjoy this: check out the social worker's dissenting diagnosis of the boys problems in the West Side Story video.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Music is totally a drug...
and I've been doing mostly depressants lately.
You've probably heard people say things like this about music, but I'm gonna try to substantiate this for a minute. Also keep in mind that by depressants I do not mean that I'm horribly sad all the time because of my music choices. Setting aside songs that are actually "sad" and make me tear up from their lyrics, depressants mostly don't make you sad but chill you out. Alcohol is a fine example of this (NB: this apparently does not hold for soldiers/cadets).
Specifically my drugs of choice have been tangos (of various styles) and acid jazz.
There's a reason why people at a tango (music not dance) show get really animated when the musicians start playing an uptempo milonga or folklore number in place the tangos that make up most of their repertoire. Tango just isn't happy music. Since it's beginnings its lyrics were preoccupied with content similar to that of blues: jealous lovers, separation, poverty, crime etc. But unlike blues, tango, with a brief spell of happier (at least musically) tunes during the golden age of orchestras, tango seems to have gotten more serious and somber as time went on. Piazzolla's "nuevo tango" which incorporated elements of classical and jazz (the cat spent his youth in NYC he couldn't help himself) got more sophisticated and at times faster tempo musically, but certainly not something you'd go jogging to (or even dance to really). And while the "electrotango" that's become popular in more recent years uses elements of electronic music, those elements come more often from dub, downtempo and chillout than from party genres like techno or house. And its heavy use of samples of old tango singers and orchestras only furthers the nostalgia that's heavy in the music (and the city too but that's another story).
This is generally just fine, I've increasingly become a fan of more relaxed music, and my evenings out have been filled with a lot more sitting at restaurants/bars sipping a glass of wine than dancing/moshing at a rock club. But one serious disadvantage of this trend has been my physical health: I'm not going to the gym nearly as often.
I know what you're thinking, listening to tango is a pretty lame excuse for not going to the gym. And indeed there are definitely some deeper more important reasons for my being lax on physical activity. But any of you have ever been walking down the street listening to your ipod on shuffle and a more upbeat song came up, giving you the idea that maybe you should run to the bus stop rather than walk, well...you get the idea.
This happened when I added ska-punk to the shuffle of podcasts, Us3 and Billie Holiday (god, talk about some sad music! If Billie Holiday doesn't make you tear up sometime you have no soul) that have been residents for a while. But I could use a little variety.
So anyone out there who is a big fan of some energetic music, whether it be hardcore punk, death metal, or drum & bass wanna send me some tunes or artists to look up (so I don't have to), I'd appreciate it. I really need to hit the gym sometime.
You've probably heard people say things like this about music, but I'm gonna try to substantiate this for a minute. Also keep in mind that by depressants I do not mean that I'm horribly sad all the time because of my music choices. Setting aside songs that are actually "sad" and make me tear up from their lyrics, depressants mostly don't make you sad but chill you out. Alcohol is a fine example of this (NB: this apparently does not hold for soldiers/cadets).
Specifically my drugs of choice have been tangos (of various styles) and acid jazz.
There's a reason why people at a tango (music not dance) show get really animated when the musicians start playing an uptempo milonga or folklore number in place the tangos that make up most of their repertoire. Tango just isn't happy music. Since it's beginnings its lyrics were preoccupied with content similar to that of blues: jealous lovers, separation, poverty, crime etc. But unlike blues, tango, with a brief spell of happier (at least musically) tunes during the golden age of orchestras, tango seems to have gotten more serious and somber as time went on. Piazzolla's "nuevo tango" which incorporated elements of classical and jazz (the cat spent his youth in NYC he couldn't help himself) got more sophisticated and at times faster tempo musically, but certainly not something you'd go jogging to (or even dance to really). And while the "electrotango" that's become popular in more recent years uses elements of electronic music, those elements come more often from dub, downtempo and chillout than from party genres like techno or house. And its heavy use of samples of old tango singers and orchestras only furthers the nostalgia that's heavy in the music (and the city too but that's another story).
This is generally just fine, I've increasingly become a fan of more relaxed music, and my evenings out have been filled with a lot more sitting at restaurants/bars sipping a glass of wine than dancing/moshing at a rock club. But one serious disadvantage of this trend has been my physical health: I'm not going to the gym nearly as often.
I know what you're thinking, listening to tango is a pretty lame excuse for not going to the gym. And indeed there are definitely some deeper more important reasons for my being lax on physical activity. But any of you have ever been walking down the street listening to your ipod on shuffle and a more upbeat song came up, giving you the idea that maybe you should run to the bus stop rather than walk, well...you get the idea.
This happened when I added ska-punk to the shuffle of podcasts, Us3 and Billie Holiday (god, talk about some sad music! If Billie Holiday doesn't make you tear up sometime you have no soul) that have been residents for a while. But I could use a little variety.
So anyone out there who is a big fan of some energetic music, whether it be hardcore punk, death metal, or drum & bass wanna send me some tunes or artists to look up (so I don't have to), I'd appreciate it. I really need to hit the gym sometime.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Because Solitude Gives You Time to Think: A Modest Proposal About Sex
By "solitude" I mean hour-long bus rides (although reading this gal's blog probably contributes to the content of those thoughts) and by "Modest Proposal" I mean an idea that ought to be just that, and not that my last name is "Swift" nor that I’m being ironic. And this isn't about eating Irish babies...
Instead this is about gender relations and this is about sex, something which ought to interest anyone who has a gender and likes sex, and maybe other people too. My specific question is "who ought to initiate sex, men or women?" I've decided to treat the question, as is increasingly my habit, like an economics problem. I'm starting from a premise that's common in that discipline, namely that our goals should include maximizing happiness (what economist call "utility"). Oddly this doesn't seem a common metric for evaluating cultural norms of any stripe (try to think of the last time you heard an argument about gay marriage or abortion and someone said--"but people will be happier this way!"), but I can’t honestly think of a better one.
For starters let’s suppose that every man and woman has a certain percentage chance that, upon being propositioned for sex by someone of the opposite sex, he or she will say yes (I’m leaving out being propositioned by members of the same sex because, things seem to work out a little differently on the other side of the fence). We can comfortably assume that for every person there’s going to be some given value between 0 and 100 that will vary based on all sorts of factors we’re not going to get into, but which could include their mood, how their day went, the physical attractiveness of the other person, how they feel about said person, what relationship they have with that person etc. The list goes on.
However one of the primary determinants to the answer to this question is going to be the gender of the person in question. I don’t think I need to gender stereotype too much to say that generally that number will be higher for men than for women. Some men reading this will undoubtedly say “hell yeah 100%, I never turn down sex!” and some of you will say, “that’s not true at all, I’m very discerning”. But I think it’s fair to say that on average (a crucial caveat) that number will be higher (and less than 100) for men than women. Women are, on the whole, just a bit pickier than we are.
I think we can also reasonably suppose that being turned down diminishes people's happiness pretty dramatically. It really stinks to get turned down (for anything really) and people do their best to avoid rejection where possible.
If you accept these premises, which I find fairly modest, then let’s look at the ramifications. Remember we said earlier that our goal was to make people happy. Suppose that only one gender can be the one to do the propositioning whether in the case of casual sex or sex in the context of a relationship or marriage. Which gender would we want this to be?
It should be pretty clear that if we want to maximize people’s happiness we would want this to be women or, if you don’t hold with my first assumption, whichever gender it is that is most likely to turn down sex. Let’s play this out and make some numbers up to illustrate this better. Let’s say that women have an average 25% chance of accepting a proposition of sex to any given man, and that men on the other hand have a 75% acceptance rate. This means that on an average proposition the man will be turned down 75% of the time, making him (and probably her as well) unhappy and making everybody pretty awkward and arguably worse off than if he hadn’t brought it up to begin with. If on the other hand these 25% acceptance rate women are doing the asking they will only be turned down 25% of the time and thus there’s less awkwardness and more happiness for everybody.
Something similar happens in many partner dance scenes. The old default of men asking women to dance has changed to a more pragmatic approach where the gender who is in the majority (in terms of numbers) does the asking. This makes sense if you think about it—if you’re a man and in the minority (as is often the case) the notion that you should go up to a group of women and pick one of them, making everyone else feel crappy because they have to sit out isn’t really worth it. You may not even have particularly cared which one you danced with but you had to pick somebody. If on the other hand the group in the majority does the asking then it becomes a matter of which of them can find an available partner fastest or who feels like dancing to this song (if you’re tired you can just sit out and leave the available men for someone who’s up for dancing this song).
Reality is of course not nearly this simple, people don't literally just ask people to have sex with them, and things like desire and consent can be slippery things. But actually when we complicate the situation it only makes the case stronger. For instance, let’s see what happens when we introduce rape into the equation. Suppose the cost for being turned down, in terms of happiness, self-esteem, etc. is quite large due to social pressures on men for having sex, the male ego and similar forces. Now suppose you can avoid this penalty by persistence and not taking “no” for an answer effectively increasing the costs of refusal for everybody. Suppose further that within our previously assumed 25% acceptance rate there is a “true” acceptance rate of only 10% that is to say that we can divide that acquiescence in the face of a proposition into some percent of the time she wants the sex on its own merits and some other percent fo the time when she strictly prefers saying “yes” over saying “no” as a result of taking into account those costs (which are shared, but now imposed more disproportionately by the other's attempt to avoid rejection) of refusal that we mentioned earlier.
As I said, this actually makes for an even stronger case for female initiation of sex, for if you accept the inevitability of the above assumptions (which I contend are not strong but actually fairly modest) you then have to accept that there will be a certain amount of rape occurring in the traditional arrangement, in addition to a whole lot mediocre sex (if she wouldn’t have picked it without coercion than it’s unlikely to be good sex). Even if you suppose that men suffer none of the consequences of women being raped by men (I have a sister and am thus unconvinced of this) the mere enormity of the costs, physical, social and psychological, of a rape should balance the scales firmly against this arrangement for even any marginal amount of rape produced by this arrangement.
You could argue that if the tables were turned and women were consistently the ones initiating sex we would see a reversal of that outcome and see more men being raped by women. But even if we would see a marginal increase in women raping men, it’s important to keep in mind that I’m not writing about what will happen every time (surely men initiating sex has resulted in plenty of good, consensual sex). I’m talking about that if we want things better, on average, we should encourage cultural norms that support that superior average outcome, or else what the hell good is culture?
Instead this is about gender relations and this is about sex, something which ought to interest anyone who has a gender and likes sex, and maybe other people too. My specific question is "who ought to initiate sex, men or women?" I've decided to treat the question, as is increasingly my habit, like an economics problem. I'm starting from a premise that's common in that discipline, namely that our goals should include maximizing happiness (what economist call "utility"). Oddly this doesn't seem a common metric for evaluating cultural norms of any stripe (try to think of the last time you heard an argument about gay marriage or abortion and someone said--"but people will be happier this way!"), but I can’t honestly think of a better one.
For starters let’s suppose that every man and woman has a certain percentage chance that, upon being propositioned for sex by someone of the opposite sex, he or she will say yes (I’m leaving out being propositioned by members of the same sex because, things seem to work out a little differently on the other side of the fence). We can comfortably assume that for every person there’s going to be some given value between 0 and 100 that will vary based on all sorts of factors we’re not going to get into, but which could include their mood, how their day went, the physical attractiveness of the other person, how they feel about said person, what relationship they have with that person etc. The list goes on.
However one of the primary determinants to the answer to this question is going to be the gender of the person in question. I don’t think I need to gender stereotype too much to say that generally that number will be higher for men than for women. Some men reading this will undoubtedly say “hell yeah 100%, I never turn down sex!” and some of you will say, “that’s not true at all, I’m very discerning”. But I think it’s fair to say that on average (a crucial caveat) that number will be higher (and less than 100) for men than women. Women are, on the whole, just a bit pickier than we are.
I think we can also reasonably suppose that being turned down diminishes people's happiness pretty dramatically. It really stinks to get turned down (for anything really) and people do their best to avoid rejection where possible.
If you accept these premises, which I find fairly modest, then let’s look at the ramifications. Remember we said earlier that our goal was to make people happy. Suppose that only one gender can be the one to do the propositioning whether in the case of casual sex or sex in the context of a relationship or marriage. Which gender would we want this to be?
It should be pretty clear that if we want to maximize people’s happiness we would want this to be women or, if you don’t hold with my first assumption, whichever gender it is that is most likely to turn down sex. Let’s play this out and make some numbers up to illustrate this better. Let’s say that women have an average 25% chance of accepting a proposition of sex to any given man, and that men on the other hand have a 75% acceptance rate. This means that on an average proposition the man will be turned down 75% of the time, making him (and probably her as well) unhappy and making everybody pretty awkward and arguably worse off than if he hadn’t brought it up to begin with. If on the other hand these 25% acceptance rate women are doing the asking they will only be turned down 25% of the time and thus there’s less awkwardness and more happiness for everybody.
Something similar happens in many partner dance scenes. The old default of men asking women to dance has changed to a more pragmatic approach where the gender who is in the majority (in terms of numbers) does the asking. This makes sense if you think about it—if you’re a man and in the minority (as is often the case) the notion that you should go up to a group of women and pick one of them, making everyone else feel crappy because they have to sit out isn’t really worth it. You may not even have particularly cared which one you danced with but you had to pick somebody. If on the other hand the group in the majority does the asking then it becomes a matter of which of them can find an available partner fastest or who feels like dancing to this song (if you’re tired you can just sit out and leave the available men for someone who’s up for dancing this song).
Reality is of course not nearly this simple, people don't literally just ask people to have sex with them, and things like desire and consent can be slippery things. But actually when we complicate the situation it only makes the case stronger. For instance, let’s see what happens when we introduce rape into the equation. Suppose the cost for being turned down, in terms of happiness, self-esteem, etc. is quite large due to social pressures on men for having sex, the male ego and similar forces. Now suppose you can avoid this penalty by persistence and not taking “no” for an answer effectively increasing the costs of refusal for everybody. Suppose further that within our previously assumed 25% acceptance rate there is a “true” acceptance rate of only 10% that is to say that we can divide that acquiescence in the face of a proposition into some percent of the time she wants the sex on its own merits and some other percent fo the time when she strictly prefers saying “yes” over saying “no” as a result of taking into account those costs (which are shared, but now imposed more disproportionately by the other's attempt to avoid rejection) of refusal that we mentioned earlier.
As I said, this actually makes for an even stronger case for female initiation of sex, for if you accept the inevitability of the above assumptions (which I contend are not strong but actually fairly modest) you then have to accept that there will be a certain amount of rape occurring in the traditional arrangement, in addition to a whole lot mediocre sex (if she wouldn’t have picked it without coercion than it’s unlikely to be good sex). Even if you suppose that men suffer none of the consequences of women being raped by men (I have a sister and am thus unconvinced of this) the mere enormity of the costs, physical, social and psychological, of a rape should balance the scales firmly against this arrangement for even any marginal amount of rape produced by this arrangement.
You could argue that if the tables were turned and women were consistently the ones initiating sex we would see a reversal of that outcome and see more men being raped by women. But even if we would see a marginal increase in women raping men, it’s important to keep in mind that I’m not writing about what will happen every time (surely men initiating sex has resulted in plenty of good, consensual sex). I’m talking about that if we want things better, on average, we should encourage cultural norms that support that superior average outcome, or else what the hell good is culture?
Monday, November 2, 2009
Have I just wasted the last 9 months of my life?
Far from it.
But my host mom (the phrase seems more absurd to me every time I have to use it) said something to this effect to me today. She says that I should have done more in the past year and that I didn’t take adequate advantage of my time in Buenos Aires.
This kind of judgment is nothing new. Irma has an opinion about most aspects of my life, whether it be my social life (you need to go out more, you need to have more American friends) to my use of my time (you should spend less time on the computer) to my hygiene (just washing your hands after you use the bathroom is not often enough!) Apparently I also never study, don’t sleep, have no real friends, and am a "Bush supporter".
But while these kinds of observations aren’t new what was new was my reaction to them, if not externally at least internally. I have tended to react defensively to claims that I ought to be living my life in a way differently than I am. I will argue fiercely that I do get some sleep sometimes, or that I have friends and I’m not bothered by the fact that they’re mostly not Americans. I get kind of upset and am arrested for long periods of time thinking on the matter and whether or not she’s right. Perhaps this post is an extension of that defensiveness; I’ll let readers judge that.
Today though, when she said that I wasn’t taking advantage of my time in Argentina, I looked at her statement a different way than is my habit. I realized that Irma (and perhaps these previous students to whom I am compared) had a different idea of studying abroad than I do. Many students (as she reminds me) travel frequently throughout the country in groups of fellow study abroad students. In this sense studying abroad is a bit like an extended vacation.
I do not see myself as on vacation, but more like I’m just living in a place that isn’t Cleveland. I have friends I hang out with, I have regular activities I involve myself in and I eat at the same places most of the time. When I reflected on what Irma said, I realized that I just didn’t have the same goals as she thought I ought to.
It’s a powerful thing realizing that your desires, interests and goals aren’t necessarily in line with the desires of the people who claim to have your best interest at heart. These people are usually your parents. For me the bigger change was realizing what these desires were. For the majority of my time here I have sort of passively accepted someone else’s definition of how I ought to live my life and simply lamented the fact that I wasn’t living up to this. I am increasingly becoming more confident in asserting
It’s the same sort of thing we have to do with our parents. Many of us aren’t confronted with this very often and so may be quite used to defining our desires for ourselves. But having lived with my parents my entire life I have always defined my desires in contrast to theirs. It’s ironic then how much living with a woman who isn’t my mother has taught me of how to be free of my own not primarily what she actually says but what I still believe in the back of my mind even when she’s thousands of miles away.
If you wanted any more proof that we live with our parent’s desires in our heads, no matter how far away they are physically, just think of what is said about the dead. Within literally minutes of learning of my father’s death I was told that I should still go study abroad because “it’s what he would have wanted”. I’m still trying to make him proud of me, even though he’ll never be around to see it.
I even made him a kind of promise, after he’d forever lost the ability to hear it, that I would try to obtain from my year abroad, something he’d always wanted for me: independence and self-reliance, the ability to handle myself, to decide that I will do a thing and go out and do it. That’s a charge that I intend to keep.
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