If you arrived at this page by following a link I posted in a comment discusson with the claim it was child pornography (which I neither approve of nor posses) you’ve done the same thing that allowed the FBI to get extensive search warrants to look for child porn on the computers or in the mail of those who followed the link. While this behavior may not break new legal ground the fact that otherwise law abiding people are willing to follow this link out of mere curiosity, skepticism or the desire to see if I was telling the truth suggests that merely following a link claiming to offer child porn is not a good reason to believe that the person who did so is a bad person.

Additionally I have a significant problem with the idea that merely checking to see if something is child porn could itself be a crime. In particular this seems to have troubling free speech implications. The first ammendment has long been held to protect the consumption of media as well as it’s production. Now there is a good argument that child porn as the product of a criminal act ought to be exempt but the supreme court has ruled that computer generated child porn is protected by the first amendment. If it is illegal to follow the link because it might be real rather than CG child porn this seems to raise troubling issues about your first amendment rights. Moreover, surely you have a first amendment right to read media that is titled to be child porn but isn’t and since you can’t know what the content is until you actually view it how can clicking on the link itself constitutionally qualify as a crime?

Now one might argue that clicking on the link isn’t a crime, it only gives probably cause to believe a crime has been committed. True, I agree that members of a forum populated by pedophiles and perhaps advocates for legalization of child sex/porn are very likely to also possess child porn but clicking on the link is not evidence of a specifc crime and relies on impermissible considerations. It’s also true that people who belong to NORML are likely to have pot at home but surely we don’t want the government to be able to justify searches based on our protected first ammendment activity.

Anyway I haven’t had time to really think this through or research it so I might be missing something but these are my initial thoughts.

As I said yesterday Spitzer deserves to be kicked out of his job for being a raging hypocrite. Or more particularly (since we tolerate some hypocrites) for doing one of the very things which he built his political reputation upon. However, the moralizing, holier than thou finger waving and faux concern is really starting to piss me off. Given the large percentages of the population who have tried soft drugs, visited prostitutes (something like 1/5) or the huge proportion of the population who has looked at porn the zero tolerance policies enforced at businesses and schools across the nation surely require a vast army of hypocrites to enforce. How many prosecutors, police, teachers and principals in our schools did (or still do) smoke pot? How many of them ruin some kids life instead of giving him a second chance while happilly keeping their own (past?) use secret? How many people who do/did view porn go along with it when their aunt, friend or even internet news posting disapproves of the activity? How many enforce their companies zero tolerance policies when someone is caught browsing questionable material rather than offering them a second chance? Who fails to speak up when a fellow teacher, secretary, attorney, whatever gets fired when drunken pictures of them at a party appear on the internet? I could continue but it would be too easy.

Ohh sure everyone has some excuse about why their behavior doesn’t really count. It was a different era back then, the pot now is weaker. I never looked at internet porn, it was just playboy (did you ever forget and accidently take it to work?). But everyone has a story. No doubt Spitzer told himself what he was doing was different because he made sure to give these girls extra cash. If it really is so different then there is no reason to hide it right? Everyone else would see it wasn’t like these bad things. Maybe you say you have to enforce the rules, that’s what the organization expects. But Spitzer could say the same and ultimately the reason our corporations and institutions have zero tolerance policies is that no one has the balls to say, “hey wait a minute, maybe this stuff isn’t that bad.” I’m not saying you need to admit to all your private peccadillos but don’t be so intimidated by them that you jump on the puritanical band wagon.

Ohh and don’t try to pretend that your real concern in this matter is Spitzer’s children or wife. I mean which do you think is going to be worse for them: Spitzer being accused of patronizing a prostitute or being accused of using a prostitute and losing his job. Hell, if your only concern here was the personal harm to his wife and children then why the fuck are you trying to make their lives worse by kicking Spitzer out of his job?

It appears that Spitzer was seeing prostitutes while publicly denouncing people and trying to send people to jail for operating a high end prostitution ring.

In one such case in 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.

“This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer said at the time. “It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.”

Now prostitution should clearly be legal. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with explicitly paying money for sex, and let’s not kid ourselves what differentiates prostitution from dating the guy with the nice car is only the explicitness of the transaction. In fact criminalizing prostitution, and thus requiring those women who want to monetize their sexual allure to give up their autonomy and hitch themselves to a rich guy, seems decidedly sexist to me. True, as a practical matter it is right to worry that some women may get treated badly or abused in prostitution but once as a practical matter the question is will less women be hurt if prostitution is legal (or tacitly tolerated) or if it is illegal?. I think the answer is clear. If prostitutes don’t fear arrest they can seek police protection from extortionists and pimps, can receive health care, have worker’s rights and otherwise be protected by the same systems that protect the rest of us but so long as it is illegal we create a shadowy underworld that will trap the most desperate and abused women and use the illegality of their business as a means to subjugate them.

But while some argue that the moral acceptability of prostitution is a defense of Spitzer I couldn’t disagree more. At worst patronizing prostitutes is a relatively minor moral failing. Knowingly placing people in prison who don’t deserve to be there is on the order of kidnapping, rape or murder.¹. Sure, we can’t expect any one politician to undo all that is wrong with our justice system. If Eliot Spitzer had stood up and said, “I think we should legalize prostitution,” his political career probably would have died right there and done no one any good. But it’s one thing to pick your battles carefully, it’s another thing entirely to exercise your discretion to send people to prison for being involved in the same activities you do so you can further your political career. Unless evidence comes to light that Spitzer fought to minimize the penalties or change the law on prostitution he deserves to hang for hypocritically sending people to prison for offenses he must not have thought warranted that treatment. At the very least he doesn’t deserve a free pass from the people when he wouldn’t give that pass to others.

Now some complain about the use of seemingly absurd application of laws like the Mann act or arcane financial crimes to ‘get’ Spitzer. I couldn’t agree more with the queasy unease many people have about stretching these laws to cover Spitzer’s activity to satisfy the people’s moral outrage or serve political ends. But this sort of tactic was Spitzer’s calling card. Two wrongs don’t make a right and I believe we ought to take the high road and refuse to do to Spitzer what he did to others but having made his career on this sort of ‘dirty’ legal trick it’s appropriate that he lose it for the same reason.

Ultimately if this had been Bill Clinton chared with say smoking pot I’d go to the mat for him. Certainly he has never openly spoke in favor of legalization but he didn’t choose to advance his political career by throwing others into prison for the same things he himself did and I got the impression that his administration at least slightly favored liberalization (his pardons, DOJ attitude toward MMJ). However, if we don’t hold people like Spitzer accountable to their own standards we further encourage politicians to victimize the less powerful with faux moral outrage. More on this later.

Now, I’ll leave you with some links for purient interest about the girl he was with and other details. I would feel sorry for her if I didn’t think she was sure to get a generous offer from playboy, likely to get a book deal (or payoffs from other clients) and maybe even have her CD produced.

• people about Kristen
• Hufington Post, lots of links
• Kristen’s MySpace Page, note the creepy guys leaving messages.
• Details About Trysts
• Post Identifies Prostitute

While I think there are unnecessery harms caused by inflexible expectations for academics and by insufficient societal acceptance of male caregivers I’m uncertain that this amounts to gender inequity and totally unconvinced that gender fairness requires universities to redress the problem. After all while we have a societal obligation to eliminate the biases causing women to be paid less for the same work¹ (and thus get less stuff per unit work) it doesn’t follow that gender fairness requires apple to charge women less for a computer. But let’s save the deep theoretical questions about the nature of inequity and fairness for another post and assume for the moment that: the statistically greater career cost children impose on academic women demonstrates a gender inequity that universities have a particular² responsibility to address. Does this provide an argument for the university to subsidize or provide free child care?

There is a temptation to view things like subsidized child care, health insurance for dependents or free health club memberships purely as positive contributions to the beneficiaries. When the benefits of a policy are concrete and easy to see while the harms are diffuse and widely shared it’s hard to give the policies costs fair consideration. Much to our detriment in the legislative process. So for the moment let’s assume there are no externalities, i.e., in the absence of university subsidized child care the day care would still be housed in the same location, the same people would make use of it and the only difference is whether they pay for the child care out of their own pockets or the university covers (part of) the cost. In this case subsidies for child care are a pure transfer from the people without children (or who don’t use child care) to the people with children.

Now some of the people who don’t use child care are the male academics whose wives stay at home. But in my experience few academics still marry women willing to stay at home the whole seven years until their kids start school and even then sometimes their wives may be busy. Thus this is primarily a transfer payment from the university employees who don’t have children to those who do have children. But the very problem we were trying to redress was that succesful female academics are much less likely than their male counterparts to have children. The article I discussed yesterday cited the figure that 70% of men with tenure are married with children while only 44% of women. Thus on net subsidizing child care is likely to take money out of the pockets of female academics and place it in the pockets of male academics.

Now maybe free child care would increase the number of female academics with children enough that it would be a net transfer from male academics to female ones. Heck, maybe social factors even mean that male academics would take advantage of child care services at such a low rate that it would be a net transfer to female academics without any shift in the numbers. However, these are tough empirical questions that require hard data and don’t dispute the central point that this isn’t a well thought out way to address the supposed inequity.

Ultimately, if the goal was for the university to redress the inequity created by the uneven division of child raising duties between the sexes no program that doesn’t compensate female academics who choose to give up having kids should be considered. Moreover, the benefits that a daycare can provide are limited parents still need to take care of the children at home. If the goal was either to redress an unfairness or to stem the loss of women in academia wouldn’t a strictly better solution be to pay women more than men? This would capture both the women who gave up kids and those who didn’t and let them use the money to pay for child care or hire a maid to clean up after the kid or whatever.

It’s considerations like this that make me unable to escape the conclusion that the fairness based demands for child care have more to do with emotional wants than any compelling policy analysis. The fact that people will support subsidizing child care but are unlikely to support direct cash payments suggests a fundamental incoherence that is better explained in terms of emotional salience than by theoretical considerations. I speculate that the demand for subsidized child care arises because female academics find the tension between academic success and raising their children frustrating and feel it’s unfair they have to make a choice when they see men getting to have both. Since the cost of child care is a salient obstacle to the ‘fair’ outcome it is understandable that people would assume the lack of free child care is unfair. However, the fact that the beneficiaries don’t line up with the supposed victims of unfairness and the lack of a sound theoretical principle that picks out this agent (the university) and this fix (free child care) suggest that emotional salience and valid moral principles diverge in this case.

Note that I fully believe the university should act to help parents when it is doing more than making transfers from non-parents to parents. For instance I think the university should help avoid the inefficiency and difficulties of finding nearby daycare by creating on campus childcare. It should just charge the users of the facility what it costs them to run it. I also think universities should offer special loans to graduate student families to pay for that child care they don’t need to pay back until they are earning more money (in general it should offer more of these loans to grad students for other reasons too but I suspect families are good credit risks). There are lots of good reasons for many of these policies. However, the correct arguments for many of these policies will be data heavy analysisses comparing relative costs and benefits not outrage inspiring calls for gender fairness.

In my last post I discussed the views of UC Berkeley’s graduate Dean on academic support for families at length. Here I want to offer the quick 10,000 foot conceptual overview and some thoughts about why people have the strange views they do.

The arguments given about the problems for women with babies in academia all focused on the extra time and energy women put into childcare. Now if women put more effort into children simply because they find raising children more rewarding (relative to men) the fact more women than men drop out to raise children is actually the desired outcome. It’s what would result from perfectly fair mutually beneficial trades. On the other hand if you think that the extra effort women put into childrearing isn’t the result of fair deals then the target should be on encouraging women to put less effort into childrearing, not making the unfair division of labor slightly less bad for women.

The only plausible argument (and that wasn’t mentioned) for gender inequity is the biological constraint that women face. Yet once again looked at from an appropriate economic point of view most women seem to on net value the experience of giving birth to children more than they dislike the constraint of having to reproduce early. Moreover, once these sorts of biological differences are taken into account the greater difficulty men have finding random sex or their shorter lifespans are unfairnesses that employers ought to take into account.

What then to explain this widespread convinction that it is a type of gender inequity not to offer support for having families? Well whenever we are frustrated we would like to find something unfair to blame it on and this case makes that particularly easy. The nature of parenting is to obscure relative differences in desire to childcare. No one comes out and places dollar value on offspring and our culture strongly discourages doing so thus it is difficult to emotionally appreciate the statistical differences in attitude towards children that account for the difference in childrearing effort. Moreover, our culture makes it easy to think of having kids as some kind of unquantifiable inherent good rather than something with different values to different people.

So I believe I’ve talked about how useless and inherently misleading the concept of objectification is before but today at Informal Debate Society¹ it was on full display. The problem is that people call things objectifying using one criteria but justify the fact that objectification is wrong using a different criteria. It should always be possible to eliminate any (non-primitive) term from an argument by replacing it with a definition or description without reducing the strength of the argument and arguments that involve the word objectification almost always fail this test.

Now I happen to think that the notion of objectification is hopelessly confused but most people seem to find this difficult to swallow since they think they know objectification when they see it. In particular most people would take the example of stereotypical pornography where some big breasted woman gets down on all fours so the guy can fuck her brains out while she moans in ecstasy only to get up on her knees before the guy finishes so she can worship his phallus and talk about how much she wants his cum on her face². This seems to be very near the prototype most people have of objectification but I challenge anyone to give a good argument that it actually is objectification without wrenching the meaning of objectification out of contact with the idea of treating like an object.

In the situation I described the woman was portrayed as a submissive worshiper who appeared to derive most of her enjoyment pleasing the man. One might even be able to make the case that this is a degrading depiction of the woman³ or that it is somehow bad in some other way (though I’m skeptical). However, none of this is evidence that the woman is being treated like an object. The things which tend to make people say it is degrading, like the woman begging the guy to cum on her or moaning while having sex are all about the woman having certain desires and wants, e.g., to please the guy. The exact opposite of treating someone like an object. In fact it would appear that hardcore pornography is treating the woman less as an object than everyone does without thinking when you ask the person next to you to hold something or hand you something.

Now obviously I don’t deny that one can assign some definition to objectification that renders this example objectifying. After all people reliably term certain acts/depictions as objectifying so you could just define the word to refer to whatever triggers that ascription. However, this is totally useless in an argument. It is only because we believe the notion of objectification has a particular relation to the idea of treating someone as an object that we can make the leap from some act being objectifying to it being bad or problematic. I mean if the closesest natural kind we can find that tracks objectification was merely feels physical sexual attraction it would be obvious that calling something objectifying didn’t mean it was bad.

In short I challenge anyone to come up with a notion of objectification that meets the following three criteria.

• Those things we traditionally regard as objectifying fall under the definition but those things we don’t. For instance males drooling over Pam Anderson should qualify as objectifying while women reading pride and prejudice and dreaming about Darcy doesn’t. Getting excited by the thought of getting to sleep with the girl in your class with the long legs and short skirt should count but not being excited about a date with a doctor or otherwise mooning after macho/high status guys shouldn’t.
• There should be a relatively simple (and compelling) argument that objectification is bad and other things being equal we would be better off without it.
• Most people would recognize it as being reasonably close to the idea of treating like an object or otherwise recognizable as a refinement of what they are groping at when they try to define the term.

If you can’t meet these criteria you shouldn’t use the word in earnest (without qualification) as the potential to confuse or under gird false inferences will outweigh any benefit.

Senator Craig (R-Idaho) was recently arrested in the men’s restroom at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on charges of “Interference with Privacy” and “Disorderly Conduct”. Now I recommend everyone read the accusations since it’s pretty funny to hear about a republican senator soliciting gay sex in an airport restroom but I’m baffled and slightly disturbed by the charges. If the officer in the case is to be believed Senator Craig seems to have acted in a way that strongly suggests he was trying to solicit anonymous gay sex in the restroom but how does this qualify as either interference with privacy or disorderly conduct?

The relevant parts of the interference with privacy statute forbid the following behavior:

(1) surreptitiously gazes, stares, or peeps in the window or other aperture of a sleeping room in a hotel, as defined in section 327.70 subdivision 3, a tanning booth, or other place where a reasonable person would have an expectation of privacy and has exposed or is likely to expose their intimate parts, as defined in section 609.341, subdivision 5, or the clothing covering the immediate area of the intimate parts; and (2) does so with intent to intrude upon or interfere with the privacy of the occupant

Yes, some courts have (reasonably) ruled that peeking into restroom stalls to catch a glimpse of someone’s privates qualifies as an offense under this provision. However, Senator Craig obviously did not peek into the stall “with the intent to intrude or interfere with the privacy of the occupant.” Just the opposite, Craig presumably peeked into that stall in an attempt to avoid embarrassing the occupant (and himself) with an unwanted solicitation for gay sex and was likely hoping to see someone fully clothed (and therefore occupying the stall for other reasons)¹.

The relevant parts of the disorderly conduct statute read as follows:

Whoever does any of the following in a public or private place, including on a school bus, knowing, or having reasonable grounds to know that it will, or will tend to, alarm, anger or disturb others or provoke an assault or breach of the peace, is guilty of disorderly conduct, which is a misdemeanor: … (3) Engages in offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct or in offensive, obscene, or abusive language tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others.

In my opinion the breadth of this statute and the qualification “reasonably” make it unconstitutionally vague. Furthermore the fact that the statute criminalizes merely “offensive” conduct that is likely to “reasonably to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment” means it runs afoul of the first amendment as well. After all chanting “abortion is murder” outside of a family planning facility is offensive conduct that reasonably arouses anger and resentment. Still, even if we ignore these problems and try to offer a ‘reasonable’ interpretation of this law that doesn’t include behavior that obviously wasn’t intended to be criminalized I don’t think it supports a charge against Senator Craig.

Suppose I pick up my girlfriend at the airport and while waiting for our bags I verbalize my intention to anally violate her as soon as we get home. Now this might lack class and be somewhat rude but surely it isn’t the sort of conduct that the legislature meant to include in their definition of disorderly conduct. Even if my girlfriend’s friend is present and I let her know she is welcome to join in it still doesn’t qualify as disorderly conduct, even if she is offended by the offer. In short even unwanted solicitations to engage in sexual activity aren’t enough to qualify as disorderly conduct². The fact that Senator Craig was suggesting an illegal act (indecent exposure/public sex) isn’t relevant since only the conduct Craig actually engaged in is relevant to this statute. The only thing that distinguishes Senator Craig’s solicitation from those we are certain don’t qualify as illegal activity is the greater distaste many people have for the sort of sex he suggested. So not only would this charge likely be dismissed by the court (at least on appeal) it should be obvious even to the police that it’s bogus.

Now some sites are already gloating about a reactionary senator getting caught soliciting anonymous gay sex, and I can’t deny feeling a certain satisfaction myself, but I’m horrified at the behavior of the police in bringing these sorts of charges. Unfortunately, do to the embarrassing nature of the accusations I suspect most of those charged plead guilty like Senator Craig and try and make the charges disappear. Now I agree we might want to discourage anonymous sex in airport restrooms (though I’m suspect we could put our police officers to better uses) but that’s not an excuse to charge people with what amounts to a crime of ‘being disgusting.’

Fair treatment and freedom from puritanical moral impulses requires that we don’t enforce, or better yet make, laws which penalize some vague notion of acting inappropriately. If you want to charge people for soliciting (but not having) anonymous sex in public restrooms you need to pass a law against it. Most certainly we shouldn’t have our police going around and charging people for things the police should damn well know aren’t really illegal and counting on embarrassment to make sure they don’t protest. That is blackmail and harassment not good police work.

UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only one who feels like this.

So I couldn’t resist commenting on this story at Gene Expression about how smarter people have less sex. Tyler Cowen’s original post on the subject can be found here but it’s the analysis from the first link that I really wanted to talk about. In particular the arguments made suggesting that more intelligent individuals have a lower libido are particularly dubious.

For instance here is the primary argument that individuals with high IQ may have lower libidos (emphasis/links from original):

Perhaps more revealing, HS, also showed that intelligence correlates with less sex within marriage for the same age range. While still consistent with pregnancy fears and competing interests, lower sex drive seems like a better fit. In fact another revealing finding from the Counterpoint survey was that while 95% of US men and 70% of women masturbate, this number is only 68% of men and 20% of women at MIT!

Looking only at MIT seems to be a huge biasing factor given that we know foreign students are massively overrepresented at MIT. With many students coming from societies with more traditional attitudes (or just different) about sexuality it would be an error to try and chalk up these differences to intelligence. Still intuitively it seems plausible that nerds (rather than smart people in general) masturbate less than other groups but a much better explanation for this is that sexual experience makes people comfortable with sex. It stands to reason that having had regular sex in a relationship would make one more comfortable with your sexuality than you would have been if you had remained a virgin. In other words there is no reason to believe that the lack of masturbation at MIT causes the lack of sex at MIT rather than vice versa.

The study about sex during marriage is equally uncompelling as it only gives self-reported sexual frequency. Thus this could just as well reflect a correlation between lower intelligence and exaggeration of sexual frequency. Either because of a desire to live up to some macho ideal or simple self-projection of a ‘normal’ amount¹ of sex². In any case it isn’t very conclusive.

Finally let’s look at what Gene Expression cites as the supposed explanation of this effect:

So intelligent people have lower libidos and less masculine physiques. What hormone is responsible for both sex drive and masculine builds? That’s right: testosterone. And two new papers suggest that testosterone may depress IQ. One team found that salivary testosterone levels were lower for preadolescent boys with IQs above 130 and below 70. (the same two groups most likely to be virgins in adolescence)

While there seems to be some fairly compelling research connecting testosterone levels in the low male range/high female range with high intelligence the correlation between Testosterone levels and sex drive is weak and it’s far from obvious that adding more Testosterone to healthy individuals would increase their sex drive.

Also I want to challenge the duality proposed between people with higher intelligence being more sexually conservative or more sexually adventurous. It can both be true that smarter people are more likely to visit a prostitute (there is a larger high risk tail) while the median individual is actually more sexually conservative. I’ll avoid giving personal examples here but based on the people I know this certainly seems like a reasonable possibility.

Ultimately I’m not sure why smarter people end up getting less sex. I suspect some of it has to do with being told they are less sexually desirable, either directly by reducing their pool of sexual partners or indirectly by reducing their confidence. But it could also be that most sex is the result of bad judgment (drunk party sex) or girls being pressured into sex and smart girls/guys are less susceptible to these things. It could be a lot of things but right now we don’t have much hard evidence for any of them.

In public discourse we are constantly being bombarded with lectures about the safe way to behave. We are reminded that abstinence is the only surefire way to avoid pregnancy/STDs, that recreational drugs could have unknown harmful effects, and that no level of smoking is safe. Unlike most of the other messages we are exposed to these seem to sneak in under our defenses. Even people with liberal sexual attitudes do not usually object to the claim that abstinence is the only surefire way to avoid pregnancy or advise a teen that it’s absolutely impossible to get pregnant in some fashion. In effect these sorts of warnings carry a stealth moral payload that bypasses our standard defenses by exploiting the ambiguity between the literal claim that something is risk free and the conversational practice of rounding sufficiently small probabilities to zero. Unfortunately this effect frequently allows puritanical, luddite or other narrow minded groups to exert inappropriate influence over society, particularly the way we educate our children.

This is best illustrated with an example. Unsurprisingly many teenagers are paranoid about pregnancy and wonder if they could get pregnant as a result of dry humping while wearing underwear. The answers tend to look like this:

Look, it’s like this: sperm can go through anything that has holes in it. Your clothes, though they may look solid, are not. Especially if they get wet with “juices.” The ONE thing sperm can’t go through is a condom. Just USE one. It’s not that hard. You can wear one even if you don’t have intercourse, and are just dry humping.

Even when the event is absurdly unlikely people aren’t willing to tell teens that they can’t get pregnant this way. On the other hand when people ask if they could get HIV by shaking hands or through other casual contact they get answers like this:

Remember that HIV cannot be transmitted through casual contact. A person cannot become infected with HIV from a handshake, a sneeze, a hug, or from sharing cups and dishes, tools, telephones, computer keyboards, bathroom facilities, or drinking fountains. You cannot simply “catch” HIV from air, food, water, insects, or animals.

My girlfriend is working as a bartender and she cut her self by cutting fruit. Then she shaked[sic] hand with some guy has AIDS and he had sweat[sic] hands. [Could she have gotten infected?]

Nope! Even if sweaty hands poz-guy had also picked his nose, peed on his fingers and upchucked a Big Mac all over his hands before the handshake, your girlfriend’s HIV risk remains completely nonexistent. (Tears, sweat, saliva, nasal mucous, urine, vomitus and feces do not transmit HIV, unless there is visible blood.)

But similar sorts of scenarios can be imagined for the transmission of an HIV virus as for a sperm. If we are going to worry over the limited number of sperm in a guy’s precum worming their way through the cotton mesh of a girl’s panties and sneaking all the way up her vagina we should certainly be worrying about unnoticed cuts or rogue HIV viruses that managed to sneak into mucus. Of course what we really should be doing is rounding down the risks in both cases to zero, as we usually do with sufficiently low probabilities. Interestingly if you start asking question about whether you can get HIV from certain kinds of sexual contact all the sudden the answers start to resemble those given about pregnancy suggesting that it is the cultural attitude to the ‘risky’ activity that is biasing the answers.

If this phenomena only occurred when talking about sex it would be troubling but of limited harm. Unfortunately we can see the same effect when talking about the risks of drug use, cigarette smoking, airline safety and posting personal information online. For instance compare the frequent claims that there is no safe level of secondhand smoke to the way we treat the safe level of mercury in fish or other types of non morally suspect exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. Or the way the potential of unknown harms from marijuana are treated differently than that of prescription medication. Making a broad oversimplification there seems to be a bias toward emphasizing the risks when the benefits of the activity are only pleasure or convenience while this bias is absent when it has more puritanically acceptable benefits.

Obviously this practice has the harmful consequences of creating unnecessary worry and helping demonize many perfectly reasonable behaviors as well as distorting the implicit cost/benefit analysis we make about policies like taking large tubes of toothpaste on airlines. Just because some people think teens shouldn’t be experimenting with sex doesn’t mean the rest of us should help keep teens unnecessarily worried about pregnancy or STDs. Even worse this practice impairs our ability to warn about real risks. When we won’t tell teens that dry humping wearing underwear is a surefire way to prevent pregnancy should it really be that surprising when they don’t heed warnings about pulling out being an ineffective method of birth control? Ultimately we would be much better to dispense with this bias and base our decisions on an unbiased estimation of probability and explicit value judgments about the underlying activities but what can we do to prevent this effect?

The best and easiest thing we can do is to be aware of this effect and refuse to fall victim to it ourselves. When someone asks if some activity could get them pregnant or if miniscule amounts of secondhand smoke are dangerous don’t just let yourself be pulled along by the ‘yes it’s possible’ crowd. Instead, explicitly compare the risk to familiar risks people routinely round to zero. Don’t say, “yes, it is possible but very unlikely you could get pregnant that way,” say, “yes it’s possible but you’re more likely to die in a car crash on your way over.” If you’re a bit more ambitious you might even want to point out when blogs and publications fall victim to this subtle, but dangerous bias. It’s probably unrealistic to think that we could ever eliminate such a deep seated bias from the larger culture. However, by making more people aware of the problem, particularly doctors, we can try to minimize the harms it causes.

So frequently one hears people (mostly women but some men too) about how the women in mass media are ‘unnaturally’ skinny or create unrealistic expectations. Now some of this is no doubt just undirected bitching, the same way guys always bitch about assholes getting the girl. However, other people clearly think this is a serious problem that can be changed. For instance the rule barring exceptionally skinny models from some fashion shows. Or this article about Leonard Nimoy’s nude photographs of heavy women. A perfect example of the attitude one usually hears is this snippet from the article.

“The average American woman, according to articles I’ve read, weighs 25 percent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold,” Mr. Nimoy said, his breathing slightly labored by allergies and a mild case of emphysema. “So, most women will not be able to look like those models. But they’re being presented with clothes, cosmetics, surgery, diet pills, diet programs, therapy, with the idea that they can aspire to look like those people. It’s a big, big industry. Billions of dollars. And the cruelest part of it is that these women are being told, ‘You don’t look right.’ ”

Notice that the essential argument leveled against skinny models and actresses is that most women can’t look like them. In other words the complaint really is that models are prettier than most women. This is like objecting to holding up famous scientists as role models for children (or scientists) because most people are not smart enough to live up to that standard. Of course the standard objection is that beauty is culturally relative so, unlike intelligence, it’s not true that models are objectively prettier than most women. Of course this accepted point of view is very much in evidence in Nimoy’s comments.

Mr. Nimoy …. admits that before he began this project, it had never occurred to him that beauty might be culture driven, that a fat body in Africa is treated quite differently from one in the United States. “In some cultures their weight is a sign of affluence: their husbands can afford to feed them well,” he noted.

As I’ve argued before valuing heavy women as status symbols is not necessarily the same thing as finding them pretty. However, studies do seem to back up the claim that weight preferences vary from culture to culture (though it is more unclear for the waist-to-hip ratio). But one should remember that these cultures face different pressures so it is unclear if you could have a culture valuing heavier women where, as in the states, it is poverty associated with obesity. In fact, far from revealing the comforting fact that beauty is malleable these results are suggestive of the far more troubling hypothesis that beauty always tracks social status.

But so what if beauty is culturally relative? This doesn’t change the fact that every society will find some women to be prettier than others. Whether our culture finds fat women, skinny women or women with one breast to be the most attractive our models and actresses will still be chosen to be the more attractive than the vast majority of people can hope to achieve. Sure we could replace diet pills and fad diets with other forms of cosmetic alteration but the idea that we could change the fundamental human drive to improve our looks or stop rating some people as more attractive than others is absurd. Besides, as I’ve observed before (e.g. with my post on enzyte) their is nothing special going on here with body image. Their is always a trade off between showing people/items/situations people find desirable and making them feel bad because they lack them.

Now perhaps one might think that weight is a particularly harmful thing to base attractiveness upon. Indeed there are some reasonable arguments for this point of view. Since weight often appears to be under individual control but often isn’t really people tend to be blamed/blame themselves for looking unattractive. On the other hand weight is partially under our control which means that to some degree the ‘goods’ of attractiveness will be biased towards those who care the most about them. One also might argue that a focus on weight encourages particularly harmful patterns of behavior (anorexia). However, the evidence for this point of view is scanty at best.

Despite what is often claimed most sex symbols are within the healthy weight range and the vast majority of men prefer women who are not unhealthily skinny. Certainly anorexia is a problem but it seems to be a particular sort of psychological issue that drives women to exaggerate a sexual characteristic far beyond what is actually considered attractive. I fully expect that if our model of attractiveness was heavier than the average woman we would have girls fattening themselves up to dangerously unhealthy levels. Given almost any notion of an ideal body shape their is some way to exaggerate that (in the direction it is from average) that is unhealthy. Frankly I find the whole thing with banning super skinny fashion models particularly ironic as these models are chosen for a certain aesthetic look and are not what people find ideally attractive and some women naturally have these body types at some ages. Thus the same groups that oppose telling women their body type isn’t okay are doing just that.

I know I’ve posted about this before but the whole situation just boggles my mind. It seems that these people who protest skinny models identify skinniness with attractiveness so strongly themselves they don’t realize that most of the things they object to are a consequence of any shared notion of beauty.

Now this doesn’t mean that projects like Nimoy’s aren’t beneficial. Our culture would certainly be better off realizing that their preferences about looks may not be shared by everyone. While I think a shared culture will always entail a common notion of attractiveness (the unfortunate tracking of social status) the harms could be mitigated by greater awareness of minority opinions about looks. We could also do with less moral derision of overweight people as this greatly increases suffering. Despite the example of cigarettes it is possible to believe that (too much of) something is really unhealthy and a bad idea without imbuing it with moral significance.