I don’t think I have anything to say about the election that hasn’t already been said, but I wanted to put it out here in my own words, with my own perspective. On this morning after the election I’m feeling more hopeful about my country than I have in several months. The biggest things that I’ve been turning over happily in my mind are these…

You still can’t get away with trivializing rape or forced pregnancy
This picture sums it up pretty nicely (click to see the whole thing). What appalled me about these quotes wasn’t that there are people who actually think these things — I knew that was true. What appalled me was that these professional politicians judged those statements as safe to make. They thought enough Americans would agree with them, and enough of those who disagreed wouldn’t care, that coming out in favor of requiring a rape survivor to bear her rapist’s child wouldn’t lose them the election. I am unbelievably heartened to see that they were wrong. America has a lot of problems, but we aren’t that far gone.

You also can’t get away with pandering only to white people
From Nate Silver’s coverage:

Forty-five percent of those who voted for Mr. Obama were racial minorities, a record number, and he made gains among Hispanic and Asian-American voters.

Even Bill O’Reilly agrees! Aside from the hyperbole of calling the white establishment a minority (which is a common mistake people make when they go from having ALL the power to just MOST of the power), I thought he was basically correct in his remarks. In fact it’s kind of eerie to read them over and think, “Yeah, man, you’re right! Wait, you probably think this is awful.” People do want “stuff.” Stuff like jobs, and affordable healthcare, and security for their families. I know I want that stuff. I voted for the person I thought was most likely to provide that stuff, and I’m not sure how saying I did that is supposed to be a condemnation. But back to minorities. Seeing “the white establishment” become weaker and weaker against the diverse needs of the diverse population of our country… that’s pretty excellent.

More states have taken steps toward marriage equality… and they voted it in
It’s been said that permitting same-sex marriage is something that can only be legislated or ruled on by a judicial bench, never voted on by the people. Not anymore. The majority of voters in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington are in favor of the rights of gays and lesbians to marry the people they love. A friend of mine posted a facebook status that gave me the warm fuzzies:

A lot of people take it for granted so they won’t know how great this feels: we woke up married in three more states than when we went to bed.

I’m so glad more and more people are willing to expand their idea of what love can be.

Score one for observation and analysis over intuition and obfuscation
I came across Nate Silver’s election stats a couple of months ago, and it’s done wonders for my blood pressure. While numerous pundits were calling the election a toss-up (apparently tightness is a salient attribute of razors?), Silver’s analysis showed a solid Obama lead for most of the race. In response, the pundits scoffed. A whole lot of people were watching the election results with two filters: Who will win the election, and who will win the election predictions game?

This is important to me because a lot of people still want to believe that intuition can beat out careful analysis. A lot of people feel that “we just can’t know!” is a more satisfying position than “actually, we have pretty good data and analytical tools to get us within a reasonable confidence level.” What’s interesting to me is that these two positions aren’t, strictly speaking, contradictory. Nate Silver never claimed to know who would win the election, just like scientists never claim to know the absolute truth about the universe. “We just can’t know!” is fundamentally true, and likely always will be. What’s important is what you do once you’ve acknowledged that. Do you throw up your hands and let that be the final word? Or do you then say, “But let’s see how close to accurate knowledge we can get?”

Throwing up your hands has certain advantages. It lets you continue to believe something unlikely to be true without cognitive dissonance. It lets you keep doing your job, if your job is to keep viewers glued to your story for several months. It gives you the occasional heady rush of being right without requiring any work, or specialized knowledge or skills. The whole cycle of gathering data, interpreting it, and re-calibrating both your data-gathering and interpretation methods based on the quality of your results makes for a long hard slog, and the only reward you get is tending to be right more often, which is not always rewarded in society.

Obama’s win doesn’t prove Nate Silver was right. (The close conformity of state-by-state results to his predictions provides stronger evidence that his model is good.) What it does is give the public a dramatic example of the power of numbers and correct analysis. We humans need big victories and dramatic stories to get really interested in something (in that, the pundits are quite right.) So what we have here is a big victory and dramatic story about the power of rational analysis. My hope is that it will inspire many to follow that road further.

I’m feeling all fired-up after reading several articles on the dumbass “legitimate rape” quote, and then I read this ridiculousness: somebody wants atheists to pray, every day for 40 days (of course it’s 40 days) for God to reveal himself (their pronoun), recording their experiences and submitting them for inclusion in an academic paper.

First let me get through my rage that this is being considered an “experiment” and might be made the basis of an “academic paper.” P.Z. pretty much spelled it out: there’s no methodology here. The participant pool is entirely self-selecting with no (stated) filtering criteria; there is no discussion of what is being measured; guidelines for participants are so vague as to be meaningless; and no discussion is made of the researcher’s personal bias and how that might affect results (a particularly important piece to include in qualitative research, which this would be if it were research at all. Which it’s not.) It’s appalling from a purely academic standpoint.

Then there’s the personal hit. And excuse me, because this gets personal. Motherfucker, do you not think that people have tried this? Let me tell you about my three months (your 40 days plus another 50 or so) of asking God — begging God — to reveal his existence to me. It started shortly before Christmas, and I realized that the faith-bearing part of my brain, the part that believed in God whether it made sense to me or not, was gone. And I was devastated. I felt like I’d been left by the one person I had always counted on to be there for me. Because that was what happened. If God existed, he had withdrawn, for his own mysterious reasons, my previously unshaken belief that he was there, was real, would one day meet me face to face. For a long time that’s what I thought had happened, and I earnestly tried to submit to his will; to play the role which he had evidently asked me to play, as a non-believer who desperately wanted to believe. But I also prayed, often with tears, that if it was all a mistake, that if something had gone wrong and I had gone astray somehow, that he would lead me back. That he would give me back my faith. I prayed for three months; I let go of all reservations and expectations about what this God-being might be like or how he might manifest. After three months I felt I couldn’t keep up the pretense of being a Christian any more, so I told my friends and family what I was going through, but at the same time I kept searching. Kept praying. Kept hoping, because if there was one thing I didn’t want, it was to live in a world with no divine force in it.

And eventually my longing was enough to enable me to create a new imagined reality. I never got back the strong, tangible sense of God’s presence that had been with me for the first 25 years of my life. But I started interpreting everything I could as evidence that God was speaking to me, and I came up with complicated rationalizations for how the fact that I knew it was myself, and my own interpretations, was yet another way God spoke to me. I couldn’t recreate those mental contortions if I tried. If you want to believe something badly enough, you will find yourself a way to let yourself believe it. And always, always, I was praying — for revelation, for insight, for guidance.

So don’t fucking say that what atheists need to do is earnestly pray for God’s revelation. Not to me. It’s ignorant and insulting.

And don’t set people up for the kind of self-delusion that I engaged in: don’t tell them to look out for a sign, no matter what it is, and it could be anything, that God is responding. You know what will happen if you do that? The people who want to believe will find a sign. Because that is one of the number-one things human brains are best at: reading signal in noise. It’s a trait I love about us — sometime I’ll write about my experiences with tarot cards and why I find them valuable even though I don’t believe in any supernatural influence — but you can never let go of the awareness that the signal comes from ourselves, not from outside. Otherwise, you can so easily be exploited and manipulated, which is especially traumatizing when you’re the one doing the exploiting and manipulating.

The whole thing makes me sick and angry. I’m going to take a shower.

There’s a guest post at Friendly Atheist by Todd Stiefel, criticizing the wording of some proposed harassment policies. It’s clear that Stiefel isn’t seeking to minimize the problem of harassment, or argue against the adoption of harassment policies, but only to make specific criticisms of points where he feels they need tweaking.

Overall I agree with his points: he mentions one thing in particular that I had noted, which is that some policies prohibit “unwanted sexual attention,” without specifying what that means: is asking someone for a date if they’re not interested unwanted sexual attention? Technically, I’d say it is, and yet I think asking someone for a date shouldn’t necessarily be prohibited. The addendum he suggests makes the boundary much clearer.

His criticisms seemed so reasonable to me that I was surprised that the first several comment responses I read were negative. The objections were all along the lines of, “Well obviously no one’s going to go running to the conference organizers if someone just asks them on a date or pats them innocently on a shoulder… and to say otherwise implies that women are irrational.” They seemed to be in agreement that the purpose of a harassment policy was to serve as a safety net, so that if something does happen that makes someone uncomfortable, they have someone to turn.

I disagree, and I said so in a comment, but wanted to make a wider response. Harassment policies are there as a safety net, yes, but I don’t think that is, or should be, their only purpose. The other purpose should be to set clear norms and boundaries for what is considered appropriate behavior. I think this is important for three reasons.

– First, as JT Eberhard illustrated a while back, some people have a hard time grasping social rules that aren’t explicitly laid out. I have a mild version of this impairment myself, and a lot of sympathy for those with the more difficult versions. Some people really do work better, and with much less anxiety, when it’s spelled out: This is what you can do, this is what you can’t do.

– Second, some people claim to have this impairment as an excuse to not give a shit how their behavior affects other people. Having accurate guidelines, that we actually expect people to follow, takes away the excuse from these people, while it helps the sincere and well-meaning folks above.

– Third, I really really hate rules that everybody knows aren’t meant to be followed literally most of the time. Please tell me I’m not alone on this. They can function as a nasty kind of trap, wherein somebody who’s behaving perfectly according to the accepted norms can get tagged for breaking a rule — one of those rules that nobody follows. Maybe that’s because they’ve, wittingly or unwittingly, crossed an unspoken boundary. Or maybe it’s because somebody in the group doesn’t like them and sees an opportunity to get them on a technicality. It’s just not to anybody’s benefit to create an elaborate list of rules, then expect everybody to function by a different, more relaxed set of rules under most circumstances. As Wes (who’s sitting right behind me) says, “When you make rules that you don’t expect people to follow, you breed contempt for the system.”

In class this weekend we watched The Making of Me, a documentary by John Barrowman in which he goes on a quest to find the reasons why people in general, and himself in particular, might grow up to be gay. It’s not a bad film — Barrowman himself is charming, no surprise, and it’s fun to get to see some of the researchers and methods that are employed in elucidating this question. The scientific logic is horribly sloppy in some places, as is pretty common with mass-market presentations of scientific research, but it does give a good layperson’s overview of the biological causes researchers are looking at right now, and how they’re tested and examined.

Barrowman says at the outset that he wants to find an innate, biological gause for gayness rather than something that traces to social influences. His investigation is pretty heavily colored by this bias throughout, as he shows much more persistence in looking for a “nature” cause rather than a “nurture” one. The bias toward a biological cause is something I’ll discuss further at the end of this post.

Casting aside Barrowman’s cursory investigation of “nurture” causes, one thing I appreciate about the documentary is that it makes clear that there are likely multiple biological pathways to becoming gay, some genetic, some due to the in utero hormonal environment. From what we know so far, it seems that no single biological factor is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for gayness. (This is a good point to mention that the documentary doesn’t talk about lesbians at all. Since it’s very focused on Barrowman personally, it’s excusable here; the overall research gap between the study of gay men and the study of lesbians is less so.)

One thing that’s notable throughout the film is the conflation of male femininity with gayness. This is tricky and probably has a lot of sociopolitical folks up in arms. A lot of people see gay and transgender identities as existing on a continuum, with trans people just being “gayer than gay.” The documentary doesn’t do anything to forestall this misconception, so let me do it here: being a man who is attracted to men is very different from being a male-bodied person with a female gender identity. Even if the two have similar biological roots, the way they manifest in the conscious brain are quite different. Gay men, in general, have no desire to become women, and a female gender identity isn’t fulfilled by a gay male lifestyle.

That said, there is a strong link between childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality. Of individuals who will be gay as adults (both male and female, although the effect is stronger for females), they are much more likely to be gender non-conforming as children than their peers. The gender non-conformity doesn’t necessarily persist into adulthood: Barrowman is hardly your stereotypical swishy gay, but he sure did love his Sonny and Cher dolls as a kid. My favorite hypothesis for the actual roots of sexual orientation draws on this correlation — but I’m going to leave that as a teaser for now.

Ultimately Barrowman claims that he’s found what makes him gay. What that actually means is that he’s found one biological trait in himself that’s been linked with a higher likelihood of being gay (I won’t spoil it here.) He goes home to his partner, happy because it’s been “proved” that he was born gay, that it wasn’t a choice. This would be one example of the ludicrous scientific logic I referred to, but my real objection is this: he lets the assumption go unquestioned that if being gay was a choice, people who condemn gays and lesbians would have a better case for their judgement.

There is no good case that preferring same-sex partners is an inferior trait. If underpopulation was a danger in our society, there might be an argument, but that is manfestly not the case. It is very hard to study the psychological health of gays and lesbians, and the families they create, without encountering the confounding factor of the psychological abuse and social counter-pressure that nearly all these individuals and families face through their lifetimes. But there is no evidence that a life with same-sex partners, in a socially supportive environment, is any less healthy than a life with other-sex partners.

Saying “I had no choice!” avoids addressing the argument that, if you did have a choice, it might have been a bad one. I’d have loved to see Barrowman stand next to his lovely partner and say, “I’m gay, I have a fantastic life, and even if it had been a choice, I wouldn’t have chosen any differently.”

Some of us who have left religion can rightly be considered abuse survivors. Sometimes the abuse is obvious and extreme. Sometimes it’s more subtle, but still leaves a lasting impact. The abuse largely consists of having been denied intellectual and emotional autonomy; denied the right to form our own opinions, to choose our own identities, to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. We were taught to be complicit in our own abuse, to agree and submit and accept that yes, denying ourselves was right and good. We were taught to thank the people who held the rod over our heads.

I don’t think all religion does this, or that all people who were religious in their formative years suffer the psychological damage I’m talking about. I think it’s more likely to occur for those who had a parent or spiritual leader with a personality disorder (narcissism is common, in my experience) and who had a compliant, anxious-to-please temperament.

Being one of these, let me tell you what it’s like in my head. I have no confidence in my own ability or freedom to decide what’s right or best, what “a good life” or being a good person means. From infancy, these things were handed to me, with unquestionable authority. Although I began the process of rejecting and questioning that years ago, there’s a part of my brain that is still waiting to accept beliefs and moral dictates from outside. We all have that vulnerability, I think, that sense that it would be such a relief to let someone else tell us what is good and bad, true and false. But mine was strengthened by having been allowed to dominate for the first two decades of my life. My brain was nearly fully formed by the time I shook it off, and it’s still there. Still a threat.

It’s the thing I fear most. I was thinking through my fears today, and when I voiced this one to myself — “I’m afraid of living the next two decades under someone’s thumb, the way I was for the first two” — I began shaking and crying. I’m really, really afraid of that. And I know how my brain works, so I know how real a danger it is.

One thing this means is that when someone expresses their opinion in a flat, factual way, I become hella defensive. Those who are close to me know this well. It’s true that a person can state their beliefs without implying that those beliefs are absolutely correct and you’d better believe them or else — but the part of my brain that’s looking to receive truth from outside is seduced by their confidence, their apparent certainty. I feel it leaning in, wanting to just let go, acquiesce, say “Ah yes, you’re right of course” without giving it further thought. And that feeling terrifies me, and I pull back as hard as I can, in a way that is not at all rational or measured.

We’re all threatened by having our beliefs challenged, but some of us are also threatened by the possibility that we’ll change our beliefs not because we thought them through, not because they fit with our experience of the world, but because it feels so good to surrender and let someone else do the deciding.

I don’t know how to deal with this. I don’t know how to let my defenses down while the surrender-hungry part of my brain is still so strong. I’m not at all convinced that that would be a wise thing to do. So for me, right now, anyone who tries to convince me of something using emotional tactics, or blunt statements that don’t explicitly acknowledge their uncertainty or my right to think differently, is likely to trigger a shitstorm of defensiveness. If anyone who’s been through this has any advice, let me know.

For those still sulky about Gina’s scientific criticism of The Avengers, here’s a writeup on my other blog from a more tropes-and-narratives point of view, and which is much more complimentary (not to say gushing. We really fansibbed over this movie, what can I say?)

And also, just as an aside, it’s a mark of maturity to be able to appreciate that a movie might be awesome in some dimensions (narratively, for example) but flawed in others (scientifically, for example).