Monthly Archives: June 2009

Coleman has little chance of pulling nuts out of the fire

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Legal experts are largely undivided in the opinion that Norm Coleman’s Minnesota Supreme Court bid to overturn a lower judicial panel’s decisions regarding the vote count in the Minnesota Senate race is senseless and has no chance whatsoever of winning.

This opinion was widely held prior to the presentation of arguments by Coleman, but now, with some real face time in the high court behind us, in which we see the arguments for real, and see the reaction by the judges, it is confirmed and certain that Coleman’s fate is sealed.

But what is not known at this time is the fate of Governor Pawlenty. Pawlenty is now known to be stepping aside from the race for re-election for governor of Minnesota, and it is widely believed that he will run for president. I can’t wait to see Pawlenty in a throw down against Obama. But, for Pawlenty to get that far he has to avoid being fallen upon, beaten, chewed up and spit out by his comrades in the Party of No. Which means that when the court rules in favor of Franken, but does not specifically order the governor to issue an elections certificat, Pawlenty CAN NOT issue that certificate. This is clear. As Hamline professor David Shultz recently noted (reported by Paul Demko noted in a recent piece in the Minnesota Independent) “As soon as he signs [the election certificate] voluntarily, he’s dead meat with Republicans nationwide. They’re never going to remember eight years of no new taxes. They’re going to remember you voluntarily put Al Franken in the Senate.”

On the other hand, if he does not sign, the citizens of Minnesota, who are quite tired of this process, will surely snub him if he runs for governor gain.

Which is why he is not going to too that, obviously.

If you are interested in the Minnesota Gubernatorial race, you should check out Mike Haubrich’s interviews with some of the most likely folks to run for Gubernor next time around…

“Rape Switch Hypothesis” still going strong: US rape stats evaluated.

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I would like to go into a little more detail about the rape switch which is being discussed here as well as the statistical trend in rape rates in the US being discussed here
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It has been shown again and again that large numbers of males will carry out what by anyone’s definition is rape, under certain circumstances. Yet at the same time, it seems that in most societies it is impossible to imagine that such a large percentage of men would carry out this heinous act.

It is difficult to have much faith in the data for rape frequency, for two reasons. One is definitional and the other is reporting bias. This is a situation where a certain amount of interpretation and, frankly, hard work is needed in order to get a handle on this. You can’t just look it up in a table. The information that is out there is often embedded in politically biased frames. However, there do seem to be two categories of discussant in this area: Those who want the rape numbers to be low, and those that prefer higher numbers. There are cultural, gender, and other features that go along with each of these groups, and that itself is a potential study.

I’m in the second group. I don’t ‘want’ the numbers to be high. I ‘want’ the numbers to become zero. But the numbers are the numbers, and my thinking is that there is a tendency to err in a certain direction such that while we might have inflated rhetoric in certain sociocultural contexts we more often have deflated numbers. So, when we have estimates of there being a minimum of 200% or 300% increase in incidents under certain circumstances, I’m not going to split the difference between zero and 200%. I’m going to figure it’s at least 300%.

As I have stated before, I have never been comfortable with the rape switch idea for a number of reasons that I will not repeat here, but I cannot get away from thinking that it is not an entirely invalid model. One of the reasons I think this is that here is evidence, and off hand I can’t give you citations but this has been discussed endlessly at conferences I’ve attended, for a kind of homicide switch. I really do not think homicide and rape are even remotely the same thing. I do not believe that rape is simply an extension of violence. Yes, it is violent, and yes, understanding either in the context of the other is useful, and yes, they can have similar social meanings (but often they do not). But conflating rape as a form of violence that just happens to involve the sexual act is a very very big mistake. Having said that both are behaviors that I assume are socially controlled and psychologically potentiated. Both are behaviors that are liable to switch-like behavior.

And that is why I think there could be a “rape switch” of sorts. It is fairly easy to discover in a group of subjects or discussants homicidal possibilities … the homicidal fantasy, or the justification of circumstantially defined homicide (anyone will agree that “someone should have killed Hitler”). But it is hard to find evidence of a rapist possibility, a rapist fantasy, or a justification, these days, in Western society. In the past it was easier to find, and it is probably not entirely gone today. The assertion that rape is an appropriate response to a particular woman’s reticence or some other affect is out there. But you will generally have more luck fishing for proto-homicidal thinking than proto-rape thinking.

But, when certain circumstances arise, rape happens far more often than this would predict. This is a switch-like pattern.

Regarding the rape statistics Stephanie Zvan has presented, I just left a comment over there but I’ll give you the gist of it. I think the drop we see is in part a cultural shift that has occurred in relation to the feminist movement. Good for the feminist movement. But I want to present another, testable, hypothesis. What we are seeing is the latter half of a wartime bulge associated with the Vietnam war, which is dissipating through the late 1970s and through the 1980s.

The light bulb as heater theory of saving energy.

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A custom here in Minnesota is to dangle a light bulb near the water meter or any other water-carrying pipes that are in your unheated basement. You don’t need a switch. You just have a light socket on a wire, and at the beginning of winter you screw in a 100 watt light bulb, and at the end of winter, you loosen the light bulb so it stays off for the summer. This prevents the pipes from freezing and provides light in the basement at the same time.

This sort of practice has led me to wonder if compact fluorescents should be pulled out of some of the light sockets during the winter, and replaced with incandescent, because, after all, they are generating heat. I’ve wondered if this is in any way efficient.

Well, it turns out that it probably isn’t assuming you are heating your house with natural gas, and have a reasonably efficient furnace. How do I know this? By reading a blog post called Compact Paradox over at Thinking for Free.

Classic News: The Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal

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One fall afternoon … I was summoned to… a windowless room on an upper floor, where men dressed in crisp white garments instructed me to remove all of my clothes. … four-inch metal pins were affixed… to my vertebrae at regular intervals from my neck down. I was positioned against a wall; a floodlight illuminated my pin-spiked profile and a camera captured it. … I’d been told that this “posture photo” was … routine… Those whose pins described … erratic postural curve were required to attend remedial posture classes.

1995 New York Times by Ron Rosenbaum.

Is there a rape switch?

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This question is shorthand for a larger and more nuanced set of questions that has emerged over the last 24 hours here and here as people engage in this very interesting and important discussion about rape, especially wartime rape and related post-apocalyptic rape cultures.

“The switch” is a term I first heard from a student, who wrote a term paper for me on this in 1993. The basic idea of a switch would be supported if more or less randomly (though age biased, likely) selected men, put into a certain situation, tended to commit rape on a much larger scale … or more exactly, a much larger percentage of the men rape under those circumstances … than would ever be predicted based on anything anyone knows about these men before or after the circumstances prevail.

In other words, when all the young men stay home, they are mostly not going to rape anyone. In contrast, when the same exact men go off to war, an alarming percentage of them rape. Switch off, switch on.

In the gentile society in which we imagine ourselves living (at least according to many of the comments on the above cited post) the switch is off, and stays off for most people’s lives. But there are circumstances in which most men’s switch is turned on. The switch being on does not mean that rape will happen. It simply means that the man (with the switch on) is now a rapist, whether he actually rapes or not (but he probably will), and when the switch is off, he is not (so he probably won’t). It is a bit of a metaphor, and a strained one (see comments by commenter Elizabeth) at that.

The evidence for what is often known as “wartime rape” (which the student would simply refer to as the conditions under which the switch is on) is both hard to adduce and overwhelmingly strong. There are a lot of reasons why it is difficult to enumerate rape in wartime. However, people have been thinking and writing about this for a long time, and even collecting some data, and those who are in the business of psychology, sociology, criminology, and behavioral biology who study such things as rape and homicide have largely come to the understanding that rape in wartime is often quite common, that American soldiers in Vietnam represent a middling case (which means it is shocking and disturbing) while Bosnia/Serbia represents a truly over the top example.

But there are many (see comments on the posts cited above) who simply refuse to accept this, mainly for the simple reason that it can’t be so, or if that does not work as the reason, because it is an affront to the men in the military to suggest this. I understand this second point quite well, and some of my best friends are men who were in Vietnam. For the moment, I simply choose to believe that none of the men I happen to know ever raped anybody. They are men that I know would never do that. But as a scientist I have come to accept that it is quite likely that men have something that can be described metaphorically as a rape switch, that those men whom I know are not special, and that while the switch has been off the whole time I’ve known them, it was probably on while they were serving in long term combat rolls in Vietnam. At the moment, I’m not asking any questions.

ResearchBlogging.orgWould you like some evidence? The evidence is complex, abundant, and cited all over the place. If you are a person who simply does not want to believe this, then I can do little to help you. But if you are a person who wants to insist it is not true, please consider addressing the evidence. I can give you a starting place.

The following quote comes from Gottschall (2004). The sources cited by Gottschall are all included below.

While there are no reliable statistics on wartime rape due to the reporting biases of the opposing sides and the reluctance of victims to come forward, these increases can range from the calculated 300% to 400% increases over American civilian rape rates that accompanied American breakouts in France and Germany toward the end of World War II (Morris, 2000, p. 170) to rates of increase that likely reached into the thousands in the weeks after the Red Army first swept into Berlin and committed between 20,000 and 100,000 rapes (Brownmiller, 1975; Ryan, 1966; Siefert, 1994). Incidentally, these figures represent good examples of the mushiness of wartime rape statistics: The American figures are almost certainly underestimated because they are based solely on rapes reported to authorities, and estimates of the number of Red Army rapes in Berlin climb as high as 1,000,000 (Grossman, 1999, p. 164). A partial list of countries that have been identified as loci of mass rapes conducted by military or paramilitary forces just in the 20th century includes Belgium and Russia during World War I; Russia, Japan, Italy, Korea, China, the Philippines, and Germany during World War II; and in one or more conflicts, Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burma, Bosnia, Cambodia, Congo, Croatia, Cyprus, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Kosovo, Liberia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Pakistan, Rwanda, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam, Zaire, and Zimbabwe.1

1This list is drawn from the following sources: Amnesty International (1997, 1998, 2000); Barstow (2000, p. 3); Brownmiller (1975); Chelela (1998); Ghiglieri (2000, p. 90); Littlewood (1997); Menon (1998); Neier (1998, pp. 172-191); Oosterveld (1998, pp. 64-67); Swiss and Giller (1993); Tanaka (1999, pp. 174-176); Thomas and Regan (1994).

Sources:

Amnesty International. (1997, February 19). Rape, killings and other human rights violations by the security forces. Retrieved March 1, 2003, from http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engAFR620061997

Amnesty International. (1998, November 23). Democratic Republic of Congo: War against unarmed civilians. Retrieved April 15, 2003, from http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engAFR620361998

Amnesty International. (2000, June 30). Sierra Leone: Rape and other forms of sexual violence must be stopped. Retrieved April 20, 2003, from http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/2000/15104800.htm

Barstow, A. (2000). Introduction. In A. Barstow (Ed.), War’s dirty secret: Rape, prostitution, and other crimes against women (pp. 1-12). Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press.

Brownmiller, S. (1975). Against our will: Men, women, rape. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Brownmiller, S. (1993, January 4). Making female bodies the battlefield. Newsweek, 37.

Chelala, C. (1998). Algerian abortion controversy highlights rape of war victims. Lancet, 351, 1413-1414.

Ghiglieri, M. P. (2000). The dark side of man: Tracing the origins of male violence. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

Gottschall, Jonathan (2004). Explaining wartime rape Journal of sex research, May

Grossman, A. (1999). A question of silence: The rape of German women by Soviet occupation soldiers. In N. Dombrowski (Ed.), Women and war in the twentieth century (pp. 116-137). New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Littlewood, R. (1997). Military rape. Anthropology Today, 13, 7 17.

MacKinnon, C. A. (1994b). Turning rape into pornography: Postmodern genocide. In A. Stiglmayer (Ed.), Mass rape: The war against women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (pp. 73-81). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Menon, R. (1998). Borders and bodies: Recovering women in the national interest. In 1. L. Sajor (Ed.), Common grounds: Violence against women in war and armed conflict situations (pp. 301 338). Quezon City, Phillipines: Asian Center for Women’s Human Rights.

Morris, M. (2000). In war and peace: Rape, war, and military culture. In A. Barstow (Ed.), War’s dirty secret: Rape, prostitution, and other crimes against women (pp. 167-203). Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press.

Neier, A. (1998). War crimes: Brutality, genocide, terror, and the struggle for justice. New York: Random House.

Oosterveld, V. (1998). When women are the spoils of war. UNESCO Courier, 51, 64-67.

Ryan, C. (1966). The last battle. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Siefert, R. (1994). War and rape: A preliminary analysis. In A. Stiglmayer (Ed.), Mass rape: The war against women in Bosnia-Herzigovina (pp. 54-72). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Swiss, S., & Giller, J. (1993). Rape as a crime of war: A medical perspective. JAMA, 270, 612-615.

Tanaka, Y. (1999). Introduction. In M. R. Henson (Ed.), Comfort woman: A Filipina’s story of prostitution and slavery under the Japanese military (pp. vii-xxi). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Thomas, D., & Regan, R. (1994). Rape in war: Challenging the tradition of impunity. SAIS Review, 14, 81-99.

Math gender gap is not genetic

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Or to put it more accurately, yet another study seems to show that girls learn from their teachers, parents, and peers that they are not supposed to be good at math. Sterotypes can be fulfilled. Pleas stop doing that, everyone.

Here is some press on this story.

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers continue to find evidence that shows there is no innate difference in the math ability of males and females.

“There is a persistent stereotype that girls and women are just not as good at math as boys and men,” said UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde. “And the data we have indicates that’s just not true. I really think it’s important to get that word out and to chip away at that myth.”

Hyde and Janet Mertz, UW-Madison professor of oncology, co-authored an analysis of data compiled on math performance at all levels in the United States and abroad. The report, titled “Gender, Culture and Mathematics Performance,” was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I hope to eventually read the actual study. I’ll get back to you on that.

What I had for lunch today.

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I am having lunch in an eatery, a cafeteria sort of place, where you get your food, pay at the cash register, and sit down somewhere. At one table is a woman reading. At another table there is a young man eating a muffin. At another table is a pair of women having a quiet conversation. At another table is a man looking over some papers. I’m off to the side with my laptop out writing this.

And in the middle table is a woman with a fairly large voice standing at her table making a series of phone calls. She is discussing personnel related issues and contract related issues connected to something involving photo shoots. Certain people (who are named) are hard to get a hold of. Others make her laugh out loud. The words “Let me tell you this confidentially…” followed by some confidential stuff wafted from her general direction a few moments ago (inspiring me to write this post).

Of all of the instances of this sort of flagrant violation of privacy and imposition of one’s own existence on surrounding innocents, this is the most egregious I’ve seen save one, and that was in an airport waiting area.

When you are speaking on the phone to someone, do you ever wonder if it is just the two of you engaged in the conversation?