and-then-there-were-n0ne

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« Today’s AI technology allows people of different cultures to communicate instantly and effortlessly with one another. Wow! Isn’t that a centuries-long dream come true, weaving the world ever more tightly together? Isn’t it a wonderful miracle? Isn’t the soon-to-arrive world where everyone can effortlessly speak every language just glorious?

Some readers will certainly say “yes,” but I would say “no.” In fact, I see this looming scenario as a great tragedy. I see it as the beginning of the end of the age-old tradition of learning foreign languages [...]. The problem is that people of all cultures instinctively follow the path of least resistance.

Today’s young people [...] who grow up with translation software, will not be lured in the same way that I, as a teenager, was lured by the fantastic, surrealistic goal of internalizing another language. They won’t feel the slightest temptation to devote a major fraction of their lives to slowly and arduously acquiring the sounds, vocabulary, grammar, and cultural richness of another language. To them, someone with my self-punishing attitude would seem hopelessly wedded to the past. Why on earth cling to riding a horse or a bicycle for transportation, when you can drive a car (not to mention flying in an airplane)? [...]

[I]t strikes me as possible—in fact, quite likely—that humans are collectively going to knuckle under and throw in the towel as far as foreign languages are concerned. [...] As my friend David Moser put it, what may soon go down the drain forever, thanks to these new AI technologies, is the precious gift that one can gain only by immersing oneself deeply in another culture and thereby acquiring an entirely new set of ways of looking at the world. It’s a gift that can’t help but turn any human being into a far richer and broader one. But David fears that it may soon become as rare as hen’s teeth.

[...I]t’s incredibly depressing to contemplate the profound impoverishment of people’s mental and emotional lives that is looming just around every corner of the globe, thanks to the slick seductiveness of AI translation apps, insidiously creeping their way into ordinary people’s lives and sapping their desire to make other tongues their own.

When children first hear the sounds of another language, they can’t help but wonder: What in the world would it feel like to speak that language? Such eager childlike curiosity might seem universal and irrepressible. But what if that human curiosity is suddenly snuffed out forever by the onrushing tsunami of AI? When we collectively abandon the age-old challenge of learning the languages of other lands, when we relinquish that challenge to ultrarapid machines that have no inner life of their own but are able to give us fluent but fake facades in other languages, then we will have lost a major part of what it is to be human and alive. »

— Douglas Hofstadter, "Learn a Foreign Language Before It’s Too Late"

#language

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Changes in UK children’s daily time use, based on Mullan (2019). From After Babel.

#miscellaneous #after babel #jon haidt

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For more than 70 years, a slender volume written by a dockworker who died in 1983 has been handed around by presidents, would-be presidents, journalists, students, and more as a guide—decade after decade—to epochal and baffling events. 

Published in 1951 in the shadow of World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements became one of President Dwight Eisenhower’s favorite books. As the former Supreme Allied Commander of European forces during World War II, Eisenhower saw firsthand the rise of mass movements and how they turn destructive. During one of the nation’s first televised presidential press conferences, he cited the book, turning it into a bestseller. 

Hoffer, often called “the longshoreman philosopher,” was admired across the political aisle. In 1967 he was an overnight guest of President Lyndon Johnson at the White House. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Years after Hoffer’s death, his book was rushed back into print and sold briskly when, in the new millennium, people turned to The True Believer to explain the attacks of 9/11. Decades before the terrorists commandeered the planes, Hoffer wrote: 

All the true believers of our time declaimed volubly. . . on the decadence of the Western democracies. The burden of their talk is that in the democracies people are too soft, too pleasure-loving, and too selfish to die for a nation, a God, or a holy cause. This lack of a readiness to die, we are told, is indicative of an inner rot—a moral and biological decay.

Since then, journalists have cited the book as a source to explain both the creation of the Tea Party on the right and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left. 

In 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, to better understand her opponent Donald Trump and his followers, read what she later wrote was Hoffer’s “exploration of the psychology behind fanaticism and mass movements, and I shared it with my senior staff.”

For readers today, Hoffer’s descriptions of the nature of these movements and the people who join them are timelier and more trenchant than ever. The book—the paperback edition is fewer than 170 pages—is divided into 125 “chapters” ranging from a few sentences to several pages. These are mostly epigrammatic observations that build into a portrait of the personalities and forces that create mass movements.

As The Wall Street Journal wrote: “If you want concise insights into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement at their most primal level, may I suggest an evening with Eric Hoffer.”

I first learned of The True Believer in the summer of 2020. I was out of the U.S. getting my PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge. I had already begun publishing my own social observations, which led to an interview with a Dutch media outlet on cancel culture. The interview was posted and got a lot of views, which prompted the head of the outlet to take it down because he felt I was too sympathetic to the canceled.

I wrote a piece in Quillette on the irony of being canceled for expressing my thoughts on the canceled, and noted, “The U.S. used to export Coca-Cola, television shows, and music. Today, we export outrage, deplatforming, and social mobbing.”

A fellow student in my program saw the piece and told me I had to read The True Believer. I did, and like Eisenhower, it quickly became one of my favorite books. There were passages—published in 1951!—that seemed to describe how the rise of intellectual and social orthodoxy on campus, and across a growing number of institutions, stifles debate and free expression. More than that, Hoffer captured how in the age of smartphones and social media, people fear the consequences of uttering a single wrong word. He wrote:

[I]n a mass movement, the air is heavy-laden with suspicion. There is prying and spying, tense watching, and a tense awareness of being watched. The surprising thing is that this pathological mistrust within the ranks leads not to dissension but to strict conformity. Knowing themselves continually watched, the faithful strive to escape suspicion by adhering zealously to prescribed behavior and opinion. Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith. 

[...] Hoffer also described how language gets enlisted as a marker of who really is a true believer:

Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting, and scholastic tortuousness.

I wonder what Hoffer would make of a world in which some words are so pregnant with meaning that the phrase “pregnant women” has become verboten. […]

One of the key and enduring insights of The True Believer is that frustration is the fuel of mass movements. Frustration, though, doesn’t arise solely from bleak material conditions. Hoffer argued, “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some.”

He points out in the years leading up to both the French and Russian Revolutions, life had in fact been gradually improving for the masses. He concludes, “The intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired.” […]

In a passage in The True Believer that is reminiscent of today’s idea of the “horseshoe theory”—that is, political extremes have more in common with one another than with moderates—Hoffer wrote, “When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any movement. . . . In pre–Hitlerian Germany, it was often a toss-up whether a restless youth would join the Communists or the Nazis.” One of his most famous aphorisms is this:

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. . . . Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.”

#rob henderson

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https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02717-0

In an online survey of 1124 heterosexual British men using a modified CDC National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 71% of men experienced some form of sexual victimization by a woman at least once during their lifetime.

Hello!

So, I'm guessing this question is reference to the discussion from a few days ago?

In short, the linked study did not collect data in a way that can be generalized to a larger population. Therefore, the lifetime prevalence that "71% of men experienced some form of sexual victimization by a woman" cannot be viewed as accurate and is likely a significant over-estimate. I'll go into more detail about this below:

Question: What sort of data collection methods allow for generalization?

Answer:

In short, data from a sample can only be generalized to a population if the sample is representative of that population. In "pure" statistics, this would mean a random sample (also referred to as "probability sampling").

In reality, we often cannot take a truly random sample (due to constraints involving time, money, ethics, etc.). So, we attempt to create a "representative" sample instead.

In some cases we can justify generalizing results from a convenience (e.g., volunteer) sample when we don't expect volunteers to differ from non-volunteers. In most cases however, there is reason to believe that those who would volunteer for a study are different than those who would not. (Think of something like Yelp! reviews: people who had a very bad or very good experience are much more likely to post on Yelp! than someone with an average experience. Therefore, it's not likely that the sample of experiences represented on Yelp! are representative of all customer experiences).

In many cases we can use statistical techniques (such as post-stratification weighting) to make a non-representative sample more representative. (This is a common strategy for reputable polling firms.)

In addition, online surveys are particularly unreliable.

Question: How is this relevant to the linked study?

Answer:

The study's methods indicate: "A total of 1190 adults from the United Kingdom participated in the online study in exchange for payment of £1 through Prolific Academic. ... The description forewarned that questions would be asked about non-consensual sexual experiences. ... Age, gender, and sexuality were the only demographic information collected."

If you aren't familiar with Prolific it may not be obvious to you, but the end result is that this recruitment method introduces several problems. (1) Only individuals who are likely to participate in online surveys -- a demographic that likely does not match the whole population -- could possibly be recruited. (2) Of this already limited recruitment sample, individuals self-selected into the survey. If you recall from above, people are much more likely to self-select into a survey when they "have something to say" (i.e., had a very bad experience at a restaurant, have been sexually assaulted). (3) No post-stratification weighting or other statistical techniques for reducing the impact of response bias could be used, because they did not collect any other demographic factors.

The end result here is that this estimate of lifetime victimization is completely unreliable and likely much higher than the true prevalence rate (see part (2) on the above bullet point).

Question: Okay, so why do you trust the rates given in other reports (e.g., reports by the CDC, UN, etc.)?

Answer:

The key lies in the methodology of the study. The bigger (CDC, UN, etc.) reports I've linked to in the past have made efforts to gather representative samples. They usually also use post-stratification methods. Perhaps most importantly, they clearly outline what results may be unreliable based on their data collection and how.

In contrast, the report you've linked fails to acknowledge the deficit in their data collection and instead seems to be suggesting that this new (much higher) rate for male victimization is the accurate one. (They also suggest this high rate is backed by past research by using a single statistic from a review of studies, ignoring the dozens of other much lower statistics from the same review. This is ... misleading at best, actively disingenuous at worst.)

To add on to the above, generally when you're doing research and find an unexpected result, the proper response is to investigate reasons why this might have happened and include this in your discussion. Sometimes, this means you are explaining an improvement on past methodology and why it should generate a more accurate result (and arguing for future replication). Oftentimes, you are instead explaining a deficit in your methodology and why it resulted in such a severe deviance from past results.

Question: Does this mean the linked study is useless?

Answer:

Nope! Even though the population prevalence estimate is arbitrary, it still gives us some interesting and important information. I'll list some below!

(1) Of the men who have been sexually victimized by a woman, more than half of them have been victimized more than once.

(2) Physical force was used less than 5% of the time, suggesting that the methods for victimization employed by female offenders is different than those employed by male offenders.

(3) Sexual victimization among men is statistically associated with anxiety, depression, and PTSD.

(4) Conformity to masculine norms did not alter the psychological impact of sexual victimization.

Clearly the study gives some interesting information about male victims of female sexual offenders, even if it can't give an accurate population prevalence estimate.

Question: So ... what is an accurate prevalence rate for male victimization by women?

Answer:

First, data on this is shockingly difficult to pin down! There are good reasons for this (which I won't get into right now), but here's some better estimates.

The CDC reports lifetime estimates for sexual victimization for the USA (bonus check out the methodology and data assessment reports!). Their most recent lifetime estimate for any "contact sexual violence" (completed or attempted rape, made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact) are: 54% for women and 31% for men.

However, these prevalence rates do not take the perpetrator sex into consideration. This is important if we're looking for a prevalence rate for male victimization by women, since not all of the 31% prevalence rate for men was by male perpetrators.

For women, depending on the offense subcategory, victims reported only male perpetrators 90-95% of the time.

For men, depending on the offense subcategory victims reported only female perpetrators 10-72% of the time (notably this means that 28-98% of male victims were victimized by other men compared to the approximate 5-10% of women who were victimized by other women).

One study attempted to reconcile prevalence differences between various studies for the UK, and ended up with the following prevalence ranges: 16-18.5% "less serious" sexual violence for women and 2.5-3.5% "less serious" sexual violence for men; 5-6% attempted/completed rape for women and ~0.5% attempted/completed rape for men.

Finally, this study highlights the variability in prevalence estimates from research articles. The range was very broad and depended on: methods of data collection/sampling, data collection instruments, specific population (i.e., age, country) sampled, specific time range inquired about (i.e., lifetime, since 18, etc.), specific assault types (rape, forced kissing, etc.). (I don't have time to go into each of the articles they analyzed, but this is evident from the overviews they presented!)

I hope this helps you understand this paper (and its limitations!). Hopefully, you can apply this same sort of analysis to other studies.

#stats #evidence based activism

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from the most recent edition of reviving ophelia

#social acceleration

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“Reading good books, always studying, regardless of the work she intends to do, should be a part of every girl’s plan for her life. The only way not to let what we’ve gained be taken away from us is to be smart and capable, to learn to design the world better than men have so far done.”

— We Tell a Story and Try to Do Our Best | Elena Ferrante

#miscellaneous #elena ferrante

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Scholars have long known that youthful marriage is a strong predictor of divorce. For instance, someone who marries at 25 is over 50 percent less likely to get divorced than is someone who weds at age 20. Most youthful couples simply do not have the maturity, coping skills, and social support it takes to make marriage work. In the face of routine marital problems, teens and young twenty-somethings lack the wherewithal necessary for happy resolutions.

What about age at marriage past the twenties? Delaying marriage from the teens until the early twenties produces the largest declines in divorce risk, for totally understandable reasons: we’re all changing a lot more from year to year as teenagers than when we’re in our twenties or thirties. [...] Still, earlier scholarship found that the risk of divorce continued to decline past that point, albeit at a milder rate (as the figure using 1995 data shows below). And why wouldn’t it? Couples in their thirties are more mature and usually have a sounder economic foundation. Conversely, youthful marriage is correlated with lower educational attainment, which compounds divorce risk no matter how old you are.

But what was true for decades no longer seems to be the case. I analyzed data collected between 2006 and 2010 from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). The trick is to use statistical methods that permit nonlinear relationships to emerge (click here for more information on these methods). My data analysis shows that prior to age 32 or so, each additional year of age at marriage reduces the odds of divorce by 11 percent. However, after that the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent per year. The change in slopes is statistically significant. The graph below shows what the relationship between age at marriage and divorce looks like now.

This is a big change. To the best of my knowledge, it’s only recently that thirty-something marriage started to incur a higher divorce risk. It appears to be a trend that’s gradually developed over the past twenty years: a study based on 2002 data observed that the divorce risk for people who married in their thirties was flattening out, rather than continuing to decline through that decade of life as it previously had.

How can this change be explained? The first step to answering this question is to see if the pattern persists after adjusting for a variety of social and demographic differences between survey respondents. Indeed it does: thirty-something marriage continues to yield a higher divorce rate even after controlling for respondents’ sex, race, family structure of origin, age at the time of the survey, education, religious tradition, religious attendance, and sexual history, as well as the size of the metropolitan area that they live in. Note that the NSFG is a cross-sectional survey, which means that all respondent information was collected at a single point in time. Consequently the effects of education, religious attendance, and other impermanent demographic attributes on marital stability may not be causal. Results involving these variables should therefore be treated as provisional.

None of these variables seem to have much of an effect on the relationship between age at marriage and divorce risk. Additional tests revealed that the relation seems to function more or less the same for everyone: male or female, less or more educated, religious or irreligious, intact or nonintact family of origin, and limited versus extensive sexual history prior to marriage. For almost everyone, the late twenties seems to be the best time to tie the knot. [...]

My money is on a selection effect: the kinds of people who wait till their thirties to get married may be the kinds of people who aren’t predisposed toward doing well in their marriages. [...] More generally, perhaps people who marry later face a pool of potential spouses that has been winnowed down to exclude the individuals most predisposed to succeed at matrimony.

There are obvious strengths and weaknesses to this sort of explanation. [...] But we do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that people who marry in their thirties are now at greater risk of divorce than are people who wed in their late twenties. This is a new development. This finding changes the demographic landscape of divorce, and lends credence to scholars and pundits making the case for earlier marriage.

Note: Unadjusted estimates of divorce in NSFG in 1995 and 2006-2010.

#marriage #miscellaneous

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Below is a piece on mating psychology I wrote for Onn Health. It is aimed primarily at (heterosexual) men, yet the insights offered here are broadly applicable to everyone.

The two most powerful predictors of happiness and life satisfaction are working in the right profession and finding the right spouse.

You can commit a lot of blunders in your life, but if you manage to get two things right, you will maximize your chance of long-term wellbeing.

Our choice of job and our choice of spouse are central to our happiness because they are where we spend most of our lives—at work and with our families. Therefore, we should devote a good deal of time concentrating on how to make the best possible decision for these two sources of potential happiness. Indeed, making the wrong choice can lead to potential misery.

Interestingly, much of modern advice prioritizes education and career, often relegating relationships to a secondary concern or valuing them primarily for their potential to enhance career ambitions.

Relationships, though, are critical for our health and wellbeing. Studies have found that the effect of poor relationship quality on mortality is as strong as the effects of better-known risk factors, such as smoking and alcohol use, and even stronger than other important factors, such as sedentariness and obesity.

For those who are focused on their careers, choosing the right partner can fuel occupational success. For instance, people with conscientious romantic partners tend to report higher job satisfaction and income, and are more likely to be promoted. This pattern held even after controlling for the study participants’ own conscientiousness. A disciplined and hard-working romantic partner can help us succeed in our own careers.

Indeed, there are examples of well-known men and the women who have helped them in their journeys:

Mr Beast:

“I have someone who I think is very beautiful, very intelligent, makes me better, is constantly pushing me, is okay with me working hard, makes me smarter. And just all these different things. For me, love just makes me a better person.”

Connor McGregor:

“My girlfriend worked very hard throughout the years and stuck by me when I had essentially absolutely nothing. I only had a dream that I was telling her.”

Chris Bumstead:

“She just built this confidence in me… It was a really important moment for my personal growth, champion growth, relationship growth.”

Warren Buffett:

“Susie really put me together. She believed in me. She got me to believe in myself, and that changed my life.” “And I would not only have not turned out to be the person I turned out to be, but I actually wouldn’t have been as successful in business without that. She made me more of a whole person.”

These examples show only one side of the story. In healthy relationships, both partners are expected to receive net benefits and grow.

Research in evolutionary and social psychology has illuminated key findings that help us to understand how people choose mates, as well as the factors that predict relationship success.

George Vaillant, former director of the multigenerational Harvard Study of Adult Development, has noted that “warm, intimate relationships are the most important prologue to a good life.”

Warm relationships supply benefits to both happiness and health.

How do people go about choosing mates? In popular culture, we often hear two different adages when it comes to relationship formation: Opposites attract, and birds of a feather flock together.

The former might make for a good romantic comedy. But in the real world, people tend to mate assortatively. We generally favor romantic partners who are similar to ourselves.

This is especially true for education and intelligence. In the U.S., for example, if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, your probability of marrying a college graduate is only nine percent. In contrast, if you hold a college degree, your probability of marrying a fellow college graduate is sixty-five percent. Interestingly, though, couples’ similarity in intelligence does not seem to predict relationship satisfaction.

Beyond education, we also tend to choose romantic partners who are similar to ourselves in terms of age, political orientation, religious affiliation, and socioeconomic status.

Does similarity predict stronger relationship satisfaction? The answer seems to be no. A meta-analysis concluded that “similarity had very little effect on satisfaction.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that similarity is meaningless for romantic satisfaction. More likely, similarity is necessary but not sufficient for romantic satisfaction. That is, while similarity does not guarantee relationship satisfaction, strong dissimilarities might be “deal-breakers” that would contribute to discontent. Your romantic partner holding the same political beliefs as you doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be 100% satisfied with each other; but if they take the opposite stance on every view you hold, there’s a strong chance that relationship wouldn’t last very long.

So what does predict relationship satisfaction?

One factor seems to be authenticity. A team of psychologists found that the link between authenticity in relationships and relationship satisfaction is very strong. For instance, people who strongly agreed with statements such as “I share my deepest thoughts with my partner even if there’s a chance he/she won’t understand them” reported being particularly happy in their relationships. Interestingly, the study found that authentic people tended to mate with other authentic people, whereas deceptive individuals tend to attract deceptive partners. This seems to be another example of assortative mating, whereby people find themselves in relationships with partners similar to themselves.

What else besides authenticity predicts relationship satisfaction? A 2016 paper in Evolution and Human Behavior, authored by Daniel Conroy-Beam, Cari D. Goetz, and David Buss explored what makes people happy in their relationships. They discovered that people were less satisfied in relationships when their partners were less desirable compared to other potential choices. However, this was specifically the case for individuals who were more attractive than their partners. That is, people were satisfied with mates who were either more attractive than themselves, or more attractive than alternative choices. In short, when people were with partners who were attractive and hard to replace, then they were more likely to be satisfied. It seems that people aren’t asking themselves, “Does my partner fulfill my relationship needs?” Rather, they ask “Is my partner better than the realistic alternatives?” We aren’t gauging on some objective rubric. Rather, we grade our partners on a curve, comparing them to others we could reasonably hope to pair with.

This gets to the question of how we should approach searching for a compatible mate. An important idea from decision theory that can assist with this is known as the 37% rule, or “the secretary problem.” Suppose you’re looking for the best candidate for a secretary position (or any other job). The rule says that you should estimate how many total applicants are likely to seek the position, interview the first 37 percent of them, and remember the best out of that initial sample. Then, continue interviewing until you find a candidate who is even better than that. Once you find that better candidate, hire him or her. That is how you select the optimal candidate.

The problem with this rule is that it takes a lot of time and energy, especially if you are faced with a large number of possible candidates. You can’t realistically date 37% of all women you might possibly be interested in, and then keep going until you find someone more compatible than the best in that batch. However, researchers have found that a similar rule called “Try a Dozen” can work just as well as the 37% rule. According to this simpler approach, you would date a dozen possible romantic partners, remember the best of them, and then pick the very next prospect who is even more appealing to you. Of course, this is just a theoretical model that sheds light on the challenges of trying to optimize a difficult decision. It has many shortcomings and is not necessarily applicable to all individuals in all circumstances.

Many men try to get the hottest possible partner they can find. But this can present its own problems. As David Buss has said, “Mates, once gained, must be retained.” An average guy might manage to get a few dates with a supermodel. But the supermodel’s array of potential alternative options can introduce potential instability into the relationship. This can lead to jealousy, increased mate guarding, warding off potential romantic rivals, increased stress, heated arguments, and so on.

Of course, the reverse is not ideal. Entering a relationship with someone who is noticeably less attractive than you can give rise to dissatisfaction, conflict, and a wandering eye as you consider possible alternatives. The ideal situation, as Buss says, is “when both people feel lucky to be with the other person.” Of course, if your current pool of mates you could reasonably hope to attain is less attractive than you’d like, there is a simple option: Become more attractive yourself. For appearance, keep up on personal grooming and hygiene; improve your health and fitness; buy clothes that are stylish and fit well; get a good haircut. As a man, you can also level up your attractiveness by earning a promotion at work, switching to a higher paying position, or seeking a cool side job (bartenders, musicians, and volunteer firefighters don’t get paid like surgeons but still appeal to many women).

Many people have noticed that young people are unrealistically expected to know what career they will pursue at the age of 18 or 22. Seldom does anyone point out that the same logic applies to long-term romantic commitment. Interestingly, while there is a lot of guidance for how to choose a good career, far less support is available for choosing the right spouse.

Choosing a mate is not just choosing a mate. It’s also casting a vote for who you will be and who your children will be. [...]

Mate choice also profoundly influences children. If you have kids, your partner’s genetics will significantly influence their intelligence (at least 60% heritable), personality traits (more than 40% heritable), and mental health (more than 30% heritable). And as I cover extensively in my book, healthy, stable relationships benefit children. Having a partner who contributes to such a relationship will be instrumental in your child’s development and wellbeing. 

Given the importance of marriage in a man’s life, it is crucial to choose a compatible spouse. Knowing which qualities to avoid and which to seek out can save you from future emotional and perhaps financial ruin.

People often focus on attributes they would like in a partner, but it is perhaps even more important to know which characteristics to avoid. “Red flags,” in common parlance. [...]

Smith offers a quote in another of his books, The Tactical Guide to Women, “Look for the red flags early in the relationship. If anything pops up early on, don’t let that slide. Most people are on their best behavior in the beginning. They hide it well until around the six-month mark. For example, if she gets drunk and is screaming at you for no reason within the first month, run as fast as you can. Don’t let something like that slide. There are underlying issues there.” This doesn’t mean that they are a bad person or unworthy of love or anything like that. But drinking and yelling is a sign that such a person might not be ideal for a long-term relationship commitment.

What about beneficial traits, or so-called “green flags?”

Smith suggests seeking clarity, maturity, and stability in a potential mate.

Anybody can communicate well when they and the relationship are at their best. Clarity, though, encompasses reliable communication and the ability to communicate during stormy periods. [...] Good relationships require that both partners express themselves constructively, especially during times of stress.

Relatedly, inquisitiveness is an important skill. It cuts through ambiguities and insecurities. Within a relationship, if one person behaves in an insensitive manner, a sign of inquisitiveness would be if his or her partner, rather than expressing anger, calmly asks why and listens. This can open the path to communication and understanding, rather than mutually escalating hostilities. [..]

Emotional maturity is another green flag. Some signs of this skill: She can calm herself when she’s sad or angry, she accepts reality, she keeps commitments, she takes care of relationships and doesn’t burn bridges, she bases important decisions on values rather than impulse, and she possesses the emotional resources to function well among coworkers, family, and friends.

Stability, another positive quality, indicates that a woman handles her personal challenges and cares for herself so that her life (and yours) isn’t a series of crises. As Smith puts it, a woman “who is unwilling to strive for her best state of mental health is unlikely to succeed in relationships.” [...]

This perspective on relationships underscores the importance of mutual support and shared growth. The notion of the “special woman” and “special man” transcends the conventional understanding of romantic partnerships, emphasizing a deeper, more harmonious connection. This link is not solely about love or attraction or sex; it is about finding a partner who understands, encourages, and participates in your life journey. Such a relationship becomes a crucible for personal and professional development, where both individuals are not just companions but co-architects of a shared future.

#rob henderson #love #marriage #relationship #relationship advice #red flags #toxic relationship

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On 14 September 2023, the European Parliament voted to support a resolution that defines prostitution as a form of violence and both a cause and a consequence of the persisting inequality between women and men. The resolution encourages member states to adopt the so-called “Swedish model” to combat prostitution — which punishes the client and not the person, usually a woman, who solicits.

The vote was tighter than usual — 234 in favor, 175 against and 122 abstentions — and was divided between political formations: social democrats and populists voting almost en bloc in favor, while liberals, greens and many of the conservatives and the far-right were positioned against or abstained.

The European Parliament had already adopted similar resolutions in 2014 and 2016. The documents are long but worth reading in full.

#prostitution #feminism #intersectional feminism #radical feminism #sex work

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Yesterday CNN published an article by senior writer Tara John about the UK National Health Service’s newly skeptical stance toward youth gender medicine. The main takeaway, which is big news to observers of this debate, is that the NHS will no longer provide puberty blockers to young people, other than in research contexts. (As for cross-sex hormones, a relatively strict-seeming regime is set to be implemented, and they will be offered to youth only “from around their 16th birthday.”)

As myself and a number of others pointed out, the article contains a sentence that is, in context, rather wild: John writes that “Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender — the one the person was designated at birth — to their affirmed gender — the gender by which one wants to be known.” But of course, whether youth gender medicine is medically necessary and evidence-based is exactly the thing being debated, and anyone who has been following this debate closely knows that every national health system that has examined this question closely, including the NHS, has come to the same conclusion: the evidence is paltry. That’s why so many countries, including Sweden, Finland, the UK, and Norway have significantly scaled back access to these treatments for youth. So it’s very strange to see this sentence, which reads as though it comes from an activist press release, published in a news article in CNN, an outlet that generally adheres to the old-school divide between news and opinion.

There’s a strong case to be made that CNN’s sentence, as written, is false. Gender medicine is at best unproven, when it comes to the standards society (and regulatory bodies) expects medical researchers to adhere to. The situation with youth gender medicine is particularly dicey, given that this is a newer area of medicine suffering from an even severer paucity of quality studies.

It would be bad enough for this sentence to have appeared in one article on one of the most important news websites in the world. But here’s the thing: this wasn’t the first time. Rather, this exact sentence, and close variants of it, has been copied and pasted into dozens of CNN.com stories over the last few years, as a Google search quickly reveals. 

This sentence, and its close variants, appear over and over and over. I asked my researcher to create a list of all the instances he could find. Here’s what he sent back, in reverse chronological order [...]

I haven’t triple-checked every single one of these, but it’s undeniable that effectively the same words have appeared in about three dozen CNN articles since May of 2022, which was already years after the present wave of European nations rethinking these treatments had begun. 

When I asked CNN about this, I heard back from someone there who explained on background that it’s standard for outlets to provide reporters with guidance about accurate and appropriate language. While that’s true, it doesn’t really answer my question. Sure, it’s not unusual for an outlet to have a house style, sometimes enshrined in a stylebook, that provides rules about how to refer to, for example, individuals in the United States who lack legal status. They used to be called “illegal immigrants,” and now they’re often called “undocumented immigrants,” or language to that effect. This is a fairly normal process by which language changes and, sometimes as a result of a push-pull between outlets and advocacy groups, outlets decide which changes to make and when. So you may or may not agree with the fact that many outlets have switched from “biological sex” to “sex assigned at birth” when discussing trans issues, but the underlying process of switching from one phrase to another is standard and occurs in many areas. 

This is quite different. You do not generally see the same complex sentence pasted over and over and over into news stories written by different authors and published in different sections. I asked CNN if it could provide me any other examples of CNN.com publishing the same sentence in multiple stories by different authors, and posed the same question in an email to Virginia Moseley, the CNN executive editor who, according to the website, “oversee[s] international and domestic news operations across platforms.” I didn’t hear back about this.

This copy-paste job is journalistically problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing, it suggests that CNN has decided, at the editorial level, that its institutional stance is that youth gender medicine is “medically necessary” and “evidence-based.” While they’re being used somewhat colloquially in these articles, these terms have fairly specific definitions in certain medical and legal contexts, and treatments only qualify for such designations if they have exceeded a certain evidentiary benchmark based on solid published research. That is not the case here — far from it, actually. As written, this is a deeply misleading sentence.

The language also puts CNN writers in an awkward position. Does each and every bylined author of these stories believe that youth gender medicine is “medically necessary” and “evidence-based”? Maybe they do (which would be disturbing), but the fact is that they didn’t write these sentences — they, or one of their editors, grabbed that language from somewhere else and pasted it in. They are effectively outsourcing their own judgment on a hotly contested controversy to their employer. This is not what journalists are supposed to do, and, at the risk of repeating myself, it’s significantly different from a reporter rolling their eyes when using language like “undocumented immigrant” or “sex assigned at birth,” rather than their own preferred verbiage. Those are rather small-stakes linguistic quibbles, different not only in degree but in kind from the question of whether or not youth gender medicine is medically necessary and evidence-based. And it goes without saying that a CNN reporter who does develop doubts about youth gender medicine is likely to be deterred from investigating further by the fact that their bosses have already decided that this is the way they’re going to cover this subject — say the line, Bart. Why bother?

It’s a pattern, unfortunately. Many outlets dug themselves into a deep hole on this issue by simply acting as stenographers and megaphones for activist groups rather than doing their jobs. And now that there is ever-mounting evidence undercutting the loudest activist claims, climbing out of this hole is going to be awkward. But there’s no other option, really. Because right now there’s absolutely no reason to take CNN.com seriously on this issue — the site has proven, demonstrably, that it doesn’t take itself seriously on this issue. 

#transgender #ccn #jesse singal #feminism #radical feminism #intersectional feminism

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

"On average, children raised by a single parent are 3 times more likely to be abused compared to children raised by married birth parents. Children raised by a single parent with a live-in partner are, on average, 10 times more likely to be abused compared with children raised by married birth parents."

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[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The study has been published in Nature Food. From the BBC.

#environment #vegan

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The medical transitioning of children has become one of the most controversial and polarising issues of our time. For some, it is a medical scandal. For others, life-saving treatment.

So, when hundreds of messages were leaked from an internal forum of doctors and mental health workers from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, it was bound to spark interest. WPATH describes itself as an “interdisciplinary professional and educational organisation devoted to transgender health”. Most significantly, it produces standards of care (SOC) which, it claims, articulate “professional consensus” about how best to help people with gender dysphoria.

Despite its grand title, WPATH is neither solely a professional body – a significant proportion of its membership are activists – nor does it represent the “world” view on how to care for this group of people. There is no global agreement on best practice. The leaked messages (and the odd recording) – dubbed the WPATH files – are disturbing. In one video, doctors acknowledge that patients are sometimes too young to fully understand the consequences of puberty blockers and hormones for their fertility. “It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall,” one Canadian endocrinologist says.

WPATH’s president, Dr Marci Bowers, comments on the impact of early blocking of puberty on sexual function in adulthood. “To date,” she writes, “I’m unaware of an individual claiming ability to orgasm when they were blocked at Tanner 2.” Tanner stage 2 is the beginning of puberty. It can be as young as nine in girls.

Elsewhere, there are extraordinary discussions on how to manage “trans clients” with dissociative identity disorder (what used to be called multiple personality disorder) when “not all the alters have the same gender identity”. Surgeons talk about procedures that result in bodies that don’t exist in nature: those with both sets of genitals – the “phallus-preserving vaginoplasty”; double mastectomies that don’t have nipples; “nullification” surgery, where there are no genitals at all, just smooth skin. And doctors discuss the possibility that 16-year-old patients have liver cancer as the result of taking hormones. The problem is not necessarily the discussions themselves, but that the organisation is not so open when speaking publicly.

The views of WPATH matter to the UK. For years, the organisation and its SOC have been cited as a source of “best practice” for trans healthcare by numerous medical bodies, including the British Medical Association and the General Medical Council – and still is. The Royal College of Psychiatrists refers to WPATH in its own recommendations for care.

Most relevant is that WPATH is cited as “good practice” in the current service specifications underpinning youth and adult gender clinics in England and Scotland, albeit in both cases it is WPATH’s previous SOC that is mentioned. The most recent version does away with all age limits from the beginning of puberty for hormones and surgical interventions, other than female to male genital surgery, and contains a chapter on eunuchs.

Several staff at England’s NHS adult gender clinics are not just members of WPATH (one is the former president), but authors of that current SOC. So too was Susie Green, the former boss of the young people’s charity Mermaids; a lack of medical expertise does not exclude either membership of WPATH or the power to influence policy.

England’s only NHS children’s gender clinic – the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) at London’s Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust – will close its doors at the end of March, having been earmarked for closure since July 2022. But the 2016 service specification still underpinning Gids states that “the service will be delivered in line with” WPATH 7. While Gids was generally more cautious than other WPATH practitioners, clinicians I spoke to for my book, Time to Think, also relayed how young people claiming to have multiple personalities, or who identified with another race, could be referred for puberty blockers.

Gids staff have also presented at WPATH conferences for the past decade, including the most recent, held in 2022. This doesn’t imply agreement with WPATH’s principles, but association with the group becomes harder to justify as its views become more extreme.

It is difficult to see how the Department of Health’s assertion that NHS England “moved away from WPATH guidelines more than five years ago” holds.

What is true is that there is no mention of WPATH in updated guidance that will underpin the new youth gender services opening on 1 April. What’s more, NHS England has made it clear that WPATH’s views are irrelevant to its core recommendation that puberty blockers will no longer be available as part of routine clinical practice.

There is a battle raging over how best to care for children and young people struggling with their gender identity, with ever increasing numbers of European countries choosing to take a more cautious, less medical, approach after finding the evidence base underpinning those treatments to be wanting. NHS England insists that new services will operate in accordance with recommendations of the independent Cass review, and that it is well placed to develop policies “in line with clinical evidence and expertise”. But it won’t be easy. There is already discussion among professionals working in gender services planning a pushback against Cass’s as yet unpublished final recommendations.

It was difficult for Gids to stand up to external pressures, allowing the care it offered to suffer. At the same time, NHS England failed in its duty to provide proper oversight. Both they and those in charge of the new services must do better if they are to avoid the mistakes of the past. Without proper, evidence-based guidance on what good practice looks like, organisations like WPATH will continue to have influence.

#transgender #radical feminism #wpath #feminism #trans kids

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

#transgender #trans kids #dutch protocol #feminism #radical feminism

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Something I’m increasingly sceptical of in modern mental health culture is this constant insistence to open up. Share your story! says every celebrity. Speak out! says every company. [...]

My main concern with this is that Gen Z are very lonely and screen-addicted and so often take this advice and start opening up online. [...] On TikTok #mentalhealth has over 127 billion views; #trauma alone has almost 30 billion.

And no wonder! Not only is there this cultural push to open up, but campaigns and influencers explicitly encourage us to share our problems on social media. Like Kendall Jenner’s #howareyoureally hashtag, encouraging fans to share a video of their mental health story on Instagram. Or #postyourpill, the campaign started by Love Island influencer Dr Alex George urging people to post a photo of their mental health medication every month. “Join me,” he insists, “and take a stand against medication stigma”!

I have many concerns about this. Not because I think Dr Alex has bad intentions; I’m sure he genuinely wants to help. But firstly because his fans are likely very young. We’re talking teens and pre-teens. And he’s sharing this on TikTok, where a third of US users are thought to be 14 or under, and Instagram, where more than a million users are underage. Should we really be pressuring them to “please please please” post their pill and share their mental health problems with strangers?

Then there’s this framing of it as activism. Actually, more than activism—now it’s almost a duty. You need to open up because it helps other people! Maybe, but does it help you? You, a 15 year-old girl, are not responsible for removing the stigma around autism or ADHD. The progressive narrative now also seems to be that if you aren’t opening up about your mental health problems it has to be because of stigma or discrimination. Have we forgotten the word privacy? You don’t have to be ashamed, but you don’t have to share either.

I say this because there are risks to sharing your personal struggles, especially online. Something our current mental health culture seems unable to admit is that being open about your problems comes with problems. Rarely do we talk about the regret of opening up to the wrong people, or too soon before you’ve tried to recover or really understand what’s wrong, or of misrepresenting yourself. 

One major problem with opening up online, for example, is that whatever you share inevitably becomes part of your brand. This, I think, can explain a lot of Gen Z’s current obsession with and confusion around identity. We market ourselves from very young ages and then struggle to rebrand, to integrate our evolving selves into our online image. Once you share something on social media—your anxiety, OCD, gender dysphoria—it’s documented. You’re categorised. Consciously or not, you are more compelled to stick with it. But identities evolve! You are supposed to change! I find it so suffocating how modern culture makes us feel like it’s inauthentic or some sort of moral failure to change who you are or what you believe. Nobody can live up to that! And actually the opposite is true: something is very wrong if you aren’t changing. 

As I see it this is why older generations often chafe at all this oversharing. Not because they can’t relate to adolescent angst or have no compassion for mental illness, but from an understanding that things, people, change. Maybe you are in real emotional pain. But don’t go blasting your gender identity journey all over the internet because someone told you it’s brave. You might not feel that way in six months, a year, six years. Even if you do, you might not want it out there. You might not even remember that you thought you had Tourette’s in your pre-teens. Also: trends change. There may not be the same cultural cachet for sharing your symptoms in the future. People might not be as rewarding or forgiving, so don’t start relying on their validation now.

This is a caution, then. A plea, actually, to the young girls recording their anxiety attacks, documenting their depressed day in the life, introducing their multiple personalities, posing with their mental health pills, to honestly think about this: what if things change for you? What if when you’re 30 you don’t want that video of you crying on your bedroom floor online? Or cleaning your messy depression room? What if you don’t even relate to that person anymore?

And please, ask yourself: is this going to be good for your recovery? Because despite what the mental health industry would have you believe, your anxiety isn’t fixed or inevitable. You could get over your OCD. But you’ll make that much less likely and harder for yourself by posting it all over the internet and publicly building your identity around it first. Maybe you’re socially anxious at 14 but not at 20, but you made it your brand and showed the internet that you struggle to make a phone call and can’t order food. Maybe you desperately want to be seen as confident but you’ve already marketed yourself as anxious and that’s how people treat you. All I’m saying is you might regret reducing yourself to a collection of symptoms. This world can be cruel and unforgiving, and you might one day regret telling it you can’t cope.

Of course I understand sharing helps people feel less alone. I also recognise that social media is a nauseating highlight reel, that everyone is pretending to be perfect and that’s so much pressure—but I don’t think the answer to that is to post all of our personal and vulnerable moments. My answer would be to post less about everything.

Because another thing I want girls to think about is who really benefits here. A good rule of thumb for when something is being pushed this much in modern culture—when you’re hearing the same mantra over and over again like open up—is to think, okay, someone is majorly profiting here, who is it? Sometimes I wonder if this message to open up is so heavily pushed by social media companies like TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram because they benefit when we plaster our problems all over their platforms. [...]

“Check out how you can take care of your mental health on Snapchat and encourage your friends to do the same!” Right, well, firstly you’re never going to take care of your mental health on Snapchat. And Instagram—the place some teens have traced back the desire to kill themselves—is absolutely not #HereForYou. Open up and find “mental health resources on Instagram”! Key words: on Instagram. All this is an attempt to keep you on their platforms. Platforms very often responsible for mental health problems. Please don’t buy it.

I’m not saying don’t tell anyone. Just don’t tell the internet. I mean that sincerely: I wouldn’t even recommend opening up to online therapists. The therapy service BetterHelp has been fined millions for selling users’ mental health data—“rest assured this information will stay private!”—to platforms like Facebook (Meta) and Snapchat. And the more these sites know you are struggling, the more advertisers can categorise you. You’ll get ads for therapy apps and ADHD meds and mental health chatbots and get stuck in a cycle. This is more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s software engineering behind it. [...]

So: open up to people you know and trust. Talk to family and friends. If you aren’t fortunate enough to have those, turn to local communities, support groups, professionals when necessary. But stop opening up on the internet. Stop opening up about everything. Give yourself the chance to change organically; give yourself the option of moving on. Bottom line is I don’t think it’s worth exchanging your deepest emotional struggles for that hit of dopamine. Because Instagram being #HereForYou? Hahaha, please. Open yourself up to friends and family. Close yourself off from these companies.

#freya india #mental health #feminism #ed recovery #mental illness #depression #intersectional feminism

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Hunger makes me

To desire effort from a man, we are taught, is to transgress in several ways. (This is true even if you’ve never had or wanted a romantic relationship with a man.) First, it means acknowledging that there are things you want beyond what he’s already provided — a blow to his self-concept. This is called “expecting him to read your mind,” and we’re often scolded for it; better, we learn, to pretend that whatever he’s willing to give us is what we were after anyway.

Second, and greater, it means acknowledging that there are things you want. For a woman who has learned to make herself physically and emotionally small, to live literally and figuratively on scraps, admitting that you have an appetite is a source of cavernous fear. Women are often on a diet of the body, but we are always on a diet of the heart.

The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.

The secret to satiation, to satisfaction, was not to meet or even acknowledge your needs, but to curtail them. We learn the same lesson about our emotional hunger: Want less, and you will always have enough.

A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite is always voracious: her hunger always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist. If she wants food, she is a glutton. If she wants sex, she is a slut. If she wants emotional care-taking, she is a high-maintenance bitch or, worse, an “attention whore”: an amalgam of sex-hunger and care-hunger, greedy not only to be fucked and paid but, most unforgivably of all, to be noticed. […]

The attention whore is every low-maintenance woman’s dark mirror: the void of hunger we fear is hiding beneath our calculated restraint. It doesn’t take much to be considered an attention whore; any manifestation of that deeply natural need to be noticed and attended to is enough. You don’t have to be secretly needy to worry. You just have to be secretly human. […]

When I said “I don’t like romance,” it was the equivalent of a dieter insisting she just doesn’t want dessert. I did want it—I just thought I wasn’t allowed.

People frequently claim that eating disorders, like anything common to adolescent girls, are just “a cry for attention.” As someone who was once an adolescent girl, I suspect they are at least partially the opposite: a cry against hunger and need, an attempt to kick away that profoundly human desire to be paid mind. To shut the door on the void.

Fearing hunger, fearing the loss of control that tips hunger into voraciousness, means fearing asking for anything: nourishment, attention, kindness, consideration, respect. Love, of course, and the manifestations of love. It means being so unwilling to seem “high-maintenance” that we pretend we do not need to be maintained. And eventually, it means losing the ability to recognize what it takes to maintain a self, a heart, a life. […]

Women talk ourselves into needing less, because we’re not supposed to want more—or because we know we won’t get more, and we don’t want to feel unsatisfied. We reduce our needs for food, for space, for respect, for help, for love and affection, for being noticed, according to what we think we’re allowed to have. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we can live without it, even that we don’t want it. But it’s not that we don’t want more. It’s that we don’t want to be seen asking for it. And when it comes to romance, women always, always need to ask.

There’s a YouTube video I’m fond of that shows a baby named Madison being given cake for the first time. The maniacal shine in her eyes when she first tastes chocolate icing is transcendent, a combination of “where has this been all my life” and “how dare you keep this from me?” Jaw still dropped in shock, she slowly tips the cake up towards her face and plunges in mouth-first. Periodically, as she comes up for air, she shoots the camera a look that is almost anguished. Can you believe this exists? her face says. Why can’t I get it all in my mouth at once?

This video makes me laugh uproariously, but it’s that throat-full-of-needles laugh that, on a more hormonal day, might be a sob. The raw, unashamed carnality of this baby going to town on a cake is like a glimpse into a better, hungrier world. This may be one of the last times Madison is allowed to express that kind of appetite, that kind of greed. She’s still young enough for it to be cute.

This is Madison’s first birthday. By the time she’s 10, there’s an 80 percent chance she’ll have been on a diet. By high school, she’s likely to have shied away from expressing public opinions; she’ll speak up less in class, bite back objections and frustrations, shrug more, stay silent, look at the ground. She’ll worry about seeming “good”—which means not too pushy, not too demanding, not too loud. (Only bitches want better. Only sluts want more.) Boys will treat her shoddily, and she will find ways to shrink herself into the cracks they leave for her. She will learn to assert less, to demand less, to desire less. She won’t grab for anything with both hands; she won’t tip anything towards her face and plunge in. And that transcendent anguish, that stark gluttony … well, at least we’ll have it caught on video.

What would it take to feel safe being voracious? What would it take to realize that your desires are not monstrous, but human?

Imagine being Madison, grown up but undimmed. Imagine being the woman who is unabashed about needing food to survive and pleasure to be fulfilled and care to be happy. Imagine prying open the Pandora’s box where you hide your voraciousness, and letting it consume indiscriminately, and realizing that the world is not destroyed. Imagine saddling up the seven-headed beast of your hunger and riding it to Babylon.

#hunger makes me #jess zimmerman #appetite #feminism #ed recovery

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Marriage rates for Americans aged 25 to 34 by income quintile: Top fifth: 60% Middle three-fifths: 52% Bottom fifth: 26%

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