Throughout the past several decades, the United States has seen a steady increase in women’s status. Overt sexism is on the decline and women are becoming increasingly well represented in prestigious, high-paying jobs. Despite these welcome improvements, many gender-typed norms related to heterosexual courtship and marriage have remained remarkably stable over time.

For example, it is relatively rare for women to propose marriage to men. In addition, the majority of women still take their husband’s last name upon marriage, whereas few men consider taking their wife’s last name. People typically adhere to marriage-related norms in the name of tradition or romance.

However, there is also reason to believe that these norms are subtle manifestations of sexism within heterosexual romantic relationships. In the present study, we sought to establish an empirical connection between women’s and men’s marriage- tradition preferences and their level of sexism. We began by examining participants’ personal preferences regarding marriage proposals and marital name changes. We then tested whether endorsing benevolent sexism was predictive of holding traditional marriage preferences.

{ Journal of Adolescent Research | PDF }

painting { Gérard Gasiorowski, L’Approche, Des Limites de ma pensée, 1970 }

A census of workplace microbes found that men’s offices have significantly more than women’s, and offices in New York have more than those in San Francisco.

{ PLoS One | NY Times }

There is ample evidence that women do not react to competition as men do and are less willing to enter a competition than men. In this paper, we use personality variables to understand the underlying motives of women (and men) to enter a competition or avoid it. We use the Big Five personality factors, where especially neuroticism [tendency to experience negative emotional states] has been related to performance in achievement settings. We first test whether scores on the Big Five are related to performance in our experiment, and second how this is related to incentives. We can show that the sex difference in the willingness to enter a competition is mediated by neuroticism and further that neuroticism is negatively related to performance in competiton. This raises the possibility that those women who do not choose competitive incentives “know” that they should not.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women’s bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men. In our blood and in the brain, oxytocin appears to be the chemical elixir that creates bonds of trust not just in our intimate relationships but also in our business dealings, in politics and in society at large.

Known primarily as a female reproductive hormone, oxytocin controls contractions during labor, which is where many women encounter it as Pitocin, the synthetic version that doctors inject in expectant mothers to induce delivery. Oxytocin is also responsible for the calm, focused attention that mothers lavish on their babies while breast-feeding. And it is abundant, too, on wedding nights (we hope) because it helps to create the warm glow that both women and men feel during sex, a massage or even a hug.

Since 2001, my colleagues and I have conducted a number of experiments showing that when someone’s level of oxytocin goes up, he or she responds more generously and caringly, even with complete strangers. (…)

In our studies, we found that a small percentage of subjects never shared any money; analysis of their blood indicated that their oxytocin receptors were malfunctioning.

{ Paul J. Zak/WSJ | Continue reading }

polaroid { Robert Whitman }

Why should we deal with pornography from a feminist perspective? The answer to this question is straightforward. Pornography is the key mass media genre in which sexuality is made visible and performed. Sexuality, on the other hand, is one of the main areas where gender and gender relations are negotiated. In this article, I will examine different – and in particular conflicting – feminist positions with respect to pornography which have been developed from the 1970s until today. The focus will be on the issue of the construction of sexual and gender identities. I will analyze how these identities in regards to the pornographic body are negotiated or even shifted within these different feminist discourses and practices. Dildos and cyborgs will be discussed in the final part of this article, which deals with current queer-feminist debates in the field of so called post-porn.

At the beginning of the seventies, in a phase of almost complete legalization of pornography in most of the western countries, the pornographic movie left the underground and was allowed into new public spheres. Pornography as a film genre developed into a mass product and was increasingly available even in cinemas. It was during that period that the sexual revolution came to an end, or rather began to transform itself into something new.

{ Gender Forum | Continue reading }

image { James Victore }

Under the transgender umbrella, a distinct subset of “Bigender” individuals report blending or alternating gender states. It came to our attention that many (perhaps most) bigender individuals experience involuntary alternation between male and female states, or between male, female, and additional androgynous or othergendered identities (”Multigender”). (…)

A survey of the transgender community by the San Francisco Department of Public Health found that about 3% of genetic males and 8% of genetically female transgendered individuals identified as bigender. To our knowledge, however, no scientific literature has attempted to explain or even describe bigenderism.

{ Medical Hypotheses | via Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

How did the gender symbols originate in biology? What do ♀ and ♂ actually stand for?

The answer starts in antiquity, when planets and gods were almost synonymous.

{ Byte Size Biology | Continue reading }

The noun ‘sin’ is feminine in German (die Sünde) but masculine in Russian (rpex). (…)

They investigated 790 paintings of German, French, Italian and Spanish artists that represent a personification of abstract entities such as sin, love, time and justice. Afterwards they compared the personified gender with the grammatical gender of the artist’s mother tongue.

What they found out: Personified gender matched the grammatical gender in 78% of the cases. (…)

It may give answers to German women who always have to wonder why southwestern European men are so much more charming: In Italiy, France and Spain the sin is a man.

{ United Academics | Continue reading | More: Frontiers in Psychology }

photo { Juergen Teller }

Most American bookstores stock a plurality of titles on sex differences. One popular series explains (figuratively) that men are from Mars, women from Venus, and that understanding these differences can demystify and provide behavioral guidelines on a date, in the bedroom, while raising children and, after things fall apart, when starting over following a breakup. Among other things, such popular books reflect and reinforce popular stereotypes that women are more emotional than men, particularly regarding sadness. Scientific evidence, in contrast, makes quite clear that the sexes are more similar than different in emotional experience, suggesting that stereotypes generally overstate emotional sex differences.

The contrast between popular stereotypes about emotional sex differences versus scientific demonstrations of those sex differences naturally raises the question: Why don’t people’s personal emotional experiences dissuade beliefs in stereotypic sex differences? If women and men don’t experience emotions of different intensity, why do they believe that they do? We think that one reason is that stereotypes can influence people’s memory of their own emotions, which consequently reinforce stereotypic sex differences. We hypothesize, specifically, that stereotypes influence memory of emotion such that people recall their own emotions more stereotypically when the relative accessibility of those stereotypes is high. Procedures that increase stereo- types’ relative accessibility, such as cognitive load and priming, should therefore increase stereotypic sex differences in emotion memory.

(…)

The results of three experiments provide evidence that the relative accessibility of stereotypes about sex difference influences people’s memory of very recent emotions.

{ Journal of Experimental Social Psychology | PDF }

photo { Francesco Nazardo }

In fact, it was because of my feminism that I wanted to like Erotic Capital: Whether from nature or nurture, women have traditionally excelled at “soft skills” like taking the emotional temperature of others, listening, adjusting one’s behavior to any given situation, and cooperating. These all happen to be skills that, until fairly recently, have been undercompensated in the workplace. In Hakim’s book I anticipated a deftly written argument that would reclaim the value of women’s work so that maybe we’d eventually start paying people in the professions that make use of those skills — say, teaching and nursing — their true value.

That’s the book I wanted to read. The book I actually read was more like this: Men supposedly have higher sex drives than women, creating a “male sex deficit,” which means men are always in a state of wanting more of what women supply. (…) So women who are willing to address that deficit, by either having actual sex with men suffering from it or presenting themselves in an enchanting manner to exploit it, have erotic capital that can be traded for other forms of capital.

Erotic capital has many guises: from “trophy wives” whose skilled self-presentation becomes a part of a man’s public persona, to men or women who style themselves in such a way as to garner attention at their workplace, to women with otherwise limited means who sell their erotic capacity (whether forthrightly, as with sex workers and performers, or more covertly, as with sales jobs) to establish themselves. It’s “sell yourself” meets “sex sells.” What’s most surprising about all this is that Hakim seems to think she’s saying something new. (…)

That she fails to name a single feminist who has actually come out against presenting oneself well (as opposed to presenting oneself as stereotypically feminine) indicates that she’s attacking a straw feminist, not an actual one. Where are the radical feminists urging women to not use their people skills on the job? Who are these radical feminists who blame women for wearing makeup to work instead of directing their critiques at institutions that demand women do so? Hakim falsely asserts that feminists have been fighting for the eradication of charisma and charm instead of the eradication of coyness and the deployment of sex appeal as woman’s strongest — or only — weapons.

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

A new analysis of personality tests taken by 10,000 men and women in America has found there is only a 10% overlap between the sexes where they share the same kind of personalities.

(…)

Researchers, from Italy and the Manchester Business School, say the reason we think men and women are similar is that we have been using the wrong methods to assess them.

The personality test included 15 scales, collected under five headings: 



Extraversion (warmth, liveliness, social boldness, privateness and self reliance.

Anxiety (emotional stability, vigilance, apprehension and tension.)


Tough-mindedness (warmth, sensitivity, abstractedness and openness to change).


Independence (dominance, social boldness, vigilance and openness to change). 


Self Control (liveliness, rule-consciousness and perfectionism.)

When comparing men’s and women’s overall personality profiles using the new method very large differences between the sexes became apparent. (…)

“We believe we have made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated.”

Women scored higher than men on Sensitivity (sensitive, aesthetic, sentimental), Warmth (warm, outgoing and attentive to others) and Apprehension (apprehensive, self-doubting and worrying.)

Men outscored women on Dominance (dominant, forceful, aggressive) and Emotional Stability (emotionally stable, adaptive, mature).

{ Mirror | Continue reading | PLoS One | full paper }

There are two different types of alcohol-induced blackout: en bloc, a complete loss of memory for the affected time period; and fragmentary, where bits and pieces of memories remain. The en bloc blackout is more likely to occur when a large quantity of alcohol is ingested within a small time period.

(…)

Alcohol primarily interferes with the ability to form new long–term memories, leaving intact previously established long–term memories and the ability to keep new information active in memory for brief periods. … Blackouts are much more common among social drinkers—including college drinkers—than was previously assumed, and have been found to encompass events ranging from conversations to intercourse. Mechanisms underlying alcohol–induced memory impairments include disruption of activity in the hippocampus, a brain region that plays a central role in the formation of new autobiographical memories.

(…)

Women are more susceptible to alcohol blackouts than men (and recover more slowly) because of their generally less muscular body composition, and gender differences in pharmacokinetics.

{ The Neurocritic | Continue reading }

“I’m sorry” is infamous for its inadequacy. It often seems flippant, insincere, or incomplete, as in “I’m sorry you feel that way” or “I’m sorry, but…” (…)

Researchers found evidence to support the widely-held assumption that women apologize more frequently than men. They also found, however, that women reported committing more offenses than men, and this difference fully accounted for the apology finding. In other words, men apologized for the same proportion of the offenses that they believed they had committed — they just didn’t report committing as many offenses.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

related { Why Some People Say ‘Sorry’ Before Others }

This research examined the relative sexual attractiveness of individuals showing emotion expressions of happiness, pride, and shame compared with a neutral control. (…)

A large gender difference emerged in the sexual attractiveness of happy displays: happiness was the most attractive female emotion expression, and one of the least attractive in males. In contrast, pride showed the reverse pattern; it was the most attractive male expression, and one of the least attractive in women.

{ The Impact of Emotion Expressions on Sexual Attraction | PDF | via Overcoming Bias }

Human faces show marked sexual shape dimorphism, and this affects their attractiveness. Humans also show marked height dimorphism, which means that men typically view women’s faces from slightly above and women typically view men’s faces from slightly below.

We tested the idea that this perspective difference may be the evolutionary origin of the face shape dimorphism by having males and females rate the masculinity/femininity and attractiveness of male and female faces that had been manipulated in pitch (forward or backward tilt), simulating viewing the face from slightly above or below.

As predicted, tilting female faces upwards decreased their perceived femininity and attractiveness, whereas tilting them downwards increased their perceived femininity and attractiveness.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Billy Kid }

I think for a long time there was an assumption that men were the proper human beings and women were sort of an inferior copy; and the question was: Could women be almost as good as men? Then there was a brief period of arguing that there were no differences, that they were equal. But since about 1980 almost all the literature on gender differences either says women are better or some say there are still no differences. But it’s become sort of taboo to see men as superior in any way. I look at things as the world is more built on tradeoffs, and any lasting difference is likely to be because of a tradeoff. So, being better at one thing is likely to be connected to being not as good at something else. (…)

A lot of people argue that women are more social than men. What are some of the other dimensions that women are allegedly superior to men in tradeoffs? Being more social is an important one. I think being less aggressive and competitive and all those things. I think there’s just general assumption that it would be better if men were more like women, and the Psychology of Men’s groups and the American Psychological Association say that there’s a lot of assumptions that men should change to be more like women. More empathetic, express themselves better, show their feelings, cry more–those sort of things. (…)

My sense is we really have changed the way we bring up children. It’s a much more girl-centered environment. I don’t have as much contact with the schools, but my wife goes there and so on, and she says: It seems like with each decision they have to make, if there’s one way that’s better for boys and one better for girls, they feel like it would be sexist to do the way that’s better for boys, so they just do the way that’s better for girls. Over and over all those decisions get made like that; and especially girls are more desired as students there; they mature a little bit faster. (…) Women generally run the schools and they are making the decisions; and the girls are the better students. And they are trying quite earnestly to be fair to both, but each time it seems, well, we should do it the way that’s better for girls. So, we end up kind of raising our boys like girls, which is probably not going to produce the best results. (…)

The real experts on intelligence come in and say: Well, in adulthood there is a tiny difference; that the male is slightly higher than the female. In measured IQ tests? On IQ tests. But it’s such a small difference as to be trivial. The more meaningful difference is the greater difference at the extremes. My sense is it goes with the difference rates of reproduction. In essence, males are nature’s way of rolling the dice, because if you think of it constantly experimenting, to try a new variation or a new mutation, most of those experiments will turn out badly. Every so often you will have one that turns out well and moves the species forward. So, you want the bad ones to be flushed out of the gene pool right away and not reproduce. Whereas you want the good ones to reproduce a lot. And male reproductive variance is like that. In other words, some men have no children at all, and some men have a lot of children. Whereas women tend to cluster in the middle. Relatively few women throughout history have had no children at all. Certainly fewer women than men have gone childless.

{ Roy Baumeister/EconTalk | Continue reading }

In a world where nearly half the population is male—the sex with higher levels of testosterone and its potential for causing aggressive behavior—the female majority, by better translating emotions into words, must have mitigated countless dangerous conflicts. We should not underestimate the role that may have been played by this verbally skilled, moderating majority in the evolution of language itself.

Of all the calls, hoots, and screeches issued by our chimpanzee relatives, the only ones that sound a little like human speech are the coos exchanged in quiet moods by mothers with their young; the first language may have been “motherese.”

{ The NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Billy Kidd }

Past research, feminist theory and parental admonishments all have long suggested that when men see a woman wearing little or nothing, they focus on her body and think less of her mind. The new findings by Gray, et al. both expand and change our understanding of how paying attention to someone’s body can alter how both men and women view both women and men.

“An important thing about our study is that, unlike much previous research, ours applies to both sexes. It also calls into question the nature of objectification because people without clothes are not seen as mindless objects, but they are instead attributed a different kind of mind,” says UMD’s Gray.”

“We also show that this effect can happen even without the removal of clothes. Simply focusing on someone’s attractiveness, in essence concentrating on their body rather than their mind, makes you see her or him as less of an agent [someone who acts and plans] more of an experiencer.”

Traditional research and theories on objectification suggest that we see the mind of others on a continuum between the full mind of a normal human and the mindlessness of an inanimate object. The idea of objectification is that looking at someone in a sexual context—such as in pornography—leads people to focus on physical characteristics, turning them into an object without a mind or moral status.
However, recent findings indicate that rather than looking at others on a continuum from object to human, we see others as having two aspects of mind: agency and experience. Agency is the capacity to act, plan and exert self-control, whereas experience is the capacity to feel pain, pleasure and emotions. Various factors – including the amount of skin shown – can shift which type of mind we see in another person.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Men and women are what is termed sexually dysmorphic in terms of finger lengths. In women, the index and ring fingers are generally the same length, while in men the index finger is generally shorter.

Researchers from UC Berkeley created a stir in 2000 when they reported that lesbian women tended to have a ratio of the two finger lengths that was more typical of men. But the situation was more complicated for men. The team found no difference in the ratio between gay and straight men unless they had several older brothers — a factor which had previously been linked to being homosexual. Such men were found to have an unusually low ratio of the finger lengths.

Other recent research has suggested that men with a lower ratio have a more symmetrical face and are more attractive to women, a phenomenon known as the “sexy ratio.”

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

The longer a man’s ring finger when compared with his index finger, the longer the length of his penis, according to Korean researchers.

{ ABC | Continue reading }

The length of a man’s fingers can provide clues to his risk of prostate cancer, according to new research.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

The length of a man’s fourth finger has been linked to his libido.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

Men with longer ring fingers more likely to be rich.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { Erica Segovia }