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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

First, while I’m not quite convinced I’m open to the argument that sleeping with someone is implicitly understood in our society to incur a commitment to mutual support for any resulting child. Thus I even think a case could be made that it is perfectly fair to require men to pay child support after one night stands. However, if this is the tack you are going to take then you have to allow (at a minimum) for explicit signed agreements repudiating the man’s responsibility. UPDATE:[ On further thought I've decided that the reaction of 'that's unfair' that many men still have to the idea of being required to pay child support for accidental pregnancies after one night stands shows that our society does not (widely enough) implicitly understand a one night stand to involve such an agreement. However, allowing signed contracts otherwise may be a good compromise between pragmatics (most won't sign) and fairness.]

Most of my objections to the current system would disappear if you allowed a man and woman to sign a (simple) contract before having sex absolving one or the other of having to care for an resulting child. I still think the social default should be to assume that casual sex should not produce children but that is just a minor matter once you allow agreements.

Secondly, even when I am deemed liable for another person’s injuries it only seems fair to make me pay what is reasonably necessary to treat these injuries. If I accidentally cut someone with my knife I should have to pay their costs to visit the doctor and purchase antibiotics plus a bit for pain and suffering. If they turn out to be a Christian Scientist it would not be fair for me to pay for their wrongful death because they refused to take antibiotics for their infection. In short fairness requires me to take responsibility for the consequences of my actions to a reasonable person not to bear the burden of their crazy religious beliefs. If we apply this same reasoning to the case of accidental pregnancy it is hard to see why the man should be expected to pay more than the cost of an abortion (especially as I believe early abortions are safer than pregnancy).

However, once again I’m willing to be flexible on this point as long as their is a relatively easy (can be signed in a couple minutes in the hotel room without attorneys or notaries) way for a man and women to sign documents changing the presumptions.

– UPDATE: I think it’s important that society view getting an abortion as the default choice for unplanned pregnancy. Not only because this would prevent many children from being raised by unprepared and perhaps ungrateful parents but because it would alleviate much of the stress of the decision from the woman. The morality of bringing new life into this world is a complex topic and having abortion be the clear societal default would save them the pain of having to mull over this during the tumultuous time after an unplanned pregnancy.

Hence my motive for treating someone not getting an abortion after accidental pregnancy the same as someone who refuses anti-biotics based on crazy religious. Namely ensure they have the right to do so if they wish (it’s their body) but not make others liable for their choice (they pay for the kid/greater sickness). However, on reflection it is unclear to me what the significance of this is when right now this isn’t the clear societal default.

In any case it doesn’t change my overall conclusion. Making men pay for child support after a one night stand is unfair. Yet it is quite possible that such a policy is necessary for overall welfare. If so we should balance fairness against the interests of having two people financially responsible for the child by allowing written contracts to alter the rules about who has to pay but leaving the default (unfairly) that the man must pay child support if it is his child even if it was just a one night stand.

Now on to the question of what fairness requires in a one night stand. Once again I defend the claim I offered in my last post: In informed consensual voluntary activities both parties assume responsibility for any harm to themselves and their bodies absent any agreement otherwise. Of course one can come up with situations where an information asymmetry or dirty dealing undermine this default but neither applies any longer in the canonical one night stand situation. I personally think that our current attitude on the man’s responsibility is a hold over from a time when we assumed any short term sexual encounter between a man and woman involved dirty dealing on the man’s part but that is neither here nor their.

Last time I may not have provided sufficient examples so let me do so now. Anytime two people agree to box both boxers are responsible for their own injuries. This holds true even if one boxer has a medical condition that makes the activity more risky for him. If two (equally) drunk college kids try to unsuccessful replicate a stunt they saw on jackass we expect each kid to pay for their own medical bills no matter who took the more dangerous part of the stunt. If you have the flu and knowing this your friend comes over to visit anyway you don’t become liable for his medical bills if he gets sick (though if you are a nice person you might feel bad and offer). This seems to be a (reasonable) generally applicable moral rule. If two equally informed people consensually enter into some risky activity that requires both of their participation they are both responsible for their own injuries.

Just to make sure that no one thinks there is something special about sex that undermines this presumption consider the situation with STDs. If a man and woman, both fully aware of the others sexual history (suppose they are famous porn stars) have unprotected intercourse and one accidentally infects the other with HIV the infector is not liable for the medical bills of the person they infected. Of course if there is a serious information asymmetry (say the guy knew he was HIV positive and didn’t say anything) this presumption can be rebuffed but it is the presumption. Since pregnancy and child rearing are such emotional issues it seems the best guide we can have to what is fair in that case is the generally applicable rule.

Now people who argue that it is fair for the man to be liable for child support often say things like, “If you don’t want a kid then use a condom,” or the very revealing, “If you weren’t prepared for the consequences you shouldn’t have had sex.” Immediately the form of this argument should jump out at you as invalid. After all the same form of argument would justify drawing and quartering men who got women pregnant (if they weren’t prepared for the consequences then they shouldn’t have…). These arguments are simply part of the wrong debate. They only explain why it is fair to subject an individual to a widely known general rule (men must pay child support) but don’t even speak to why that rule is fair in the first place. However, it is enough to observe that each one of these arguments applies equally well to the case where one party accidentally infects the other with HIV despite the fact that our intuitions point in exactly the opposite direction in that case. Moreover, the asymmetry of risk can’t explain the difference either as our intuition about STDs remains even though we know that for some diseases one sex or the other is at considerably more risk.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we fail to apply our generally applicable rule about personal responsibility when it looks like someone might ‘get away’ with having consequence free sex. At the psychological level much of what is going on here is resentment that men might be able to have free casual sex without even risking consequences. Regardless of what people say intellectually casual sex is still regarded as something morally upstanding people don’t do and there is a certain inclination not to let people ‘get away’ with it. However, this is a subject for another post.

So what is the upshot of all this? Even if widely accepted this reasoning wouldn’t change much for people in relationships. Once people are in a dating relationship I think it is fair to understand them to have made an implicit commitment to deal with any accidental children together. However, have they made an explicit commitments (like I will get an abortion if I get pregnant) this would nullify that implicit commitment (the woman could certainly choose not to get an abortion but the guy wouldn’t be obligated to pay child support). Given the difficulty of establishing who said what to whom when it might be reasonable only to acknowledge written contracts as overcoming the implicit commitments we take to come with a relationships. However, it certainly should be possible for a couple to sign a legally binding contract that specifies that the guy will not be financially or legally responsible for the child. Even if you don’t like my reasoning this should be possible if for no other reason than to let women choose to be single parents.

As far as one night stands the effect accepting this argument would have depends on the facts on the ground. It could very well be that changing the law to make women solely responsible for children of one night stands would significantly increase the number of abortions and decrease the number of unplanned pregnancies. Given that women have more control over whether they have a child (both knowledge of their fertility and the choice to get an abortion) giving them all the responsibility might reduce the number of accidental births. If so then surely we should change the law so that men are not responsible for child support as the result of one night stands. On the other hand if the effect of changing the law would only be to leave more babies without fathers or even increase the rate of unplanned pregnancies we have a tough choice to make between fairness and welfare.

In short I think the current legal rules (except for a few unusual cases) are mostly defensible but ONLY as an unfair system necessary to increase total welfare. What irks me about the defenders of this system is their insistence as presenting it not only as the right solution but as fair despite it’s incongruity with our generally applicable notions of fairness.

Whatever form male contraception eventually takes in this country, it is likely to find an eager audience.

“On some level,” Mr. Kleinman said, “it is just about fairness to women.”

Now certainly if they discovered a reliable method of male contraception that was less of a burden than the pill (or IUD if it is less reliable) is for women than every guy in a relationship who isn’t an ass should start using it. However, this isn’t a matter of fairness but simple consideration. If one party in a relationship incurs large medical bills both whichever party can pay them off the most easily should do so whether or not they are the one who was ill. Similarly no matter who dirtied the dishes the person who doesn’t mind doing them should clean them while their partner who hates doing the dishes should contribute in some other way. The question of fairness just doesn’t apply to individual acts in a relationship but only to the overall distribution of the shared benefits and rewards each party brings to it. Women may often get the short end of the stick in relationships but this is neither the result of nor particularly affected by who ends up handling the birth control.

So to examine the fairness question we need to look at more fleeting contacts like one night stands. Here many people would argue that because the man is a partner in the sex act he should be equally responsible for all of the consequences. Yet is this really a generally applicable rule we follow? If I don’t ask the women I’m sleeping with if she’s married am I equally at fault for breaking up her marriage because she couldn’t have cheated without someone to cheat with? Surely not! We sensibly assign people responsibility for consequences in their own lives even when they acted with another person to bring those about. All other things being equal it is the person with the most knowledge or control over the situation we hold accountable for the consequences not anyone whose actions were causally necessary for that results.

At it’s most basic level a women’s fertility is just susceptibility to a certain form of parasitic infection by a man’s sperm. What differentiates pregnancy from a mono infection is the fact that many people want to get pregnant and it exacts a much greater cost. So what do our intuitions about fairness say about people who are particularly susceptible to mono? Say that I have an immune deficiency which makes mono a grave health risk and if I want to kiss or share utensils with anyone I must either take a daily pill with mild side effects (in most people) or have them do the same. Now women I ask on dates might try to show they are nice by offering to take the pill inside of me but surely it would not be unfair for them to expect me to take the pill to protect against my vulnerability. If this example isn’t convincing try replacing mono with flu and kiss with touch. Surely it isn’t remotely reasonable to think that fairness requires everyone who wants to touch me or shake my hand to take prophylactic pills because of my vulnerability to infection when I could do the same. Yet in these cases the person doing the kissing or touching is just as necessary to produce the infection as the man is to getting the girl pregnant.

The fact that the ability to get pregnant is viewed as desirable only strengthens my argument. One might feel that your poor friend who is so vulnerable to flu has enough of a burden and you should take the prophylactic pill rather than him. However, if the same mutation that made your friend so vulnerable to flu gave him super powers and he deliberately choose to endure taking his prophylactic pill rather than give up his super powers there would be no question that fairness placed no burden on you to be the one who took the pill. In general we think the person who gains the benefit ought to be the one who endures the costs of that benefit. Yet as most women view the ability to get pregnant as a benefit the same argument applies equally well here.

At this point the best you can do is somehow argue that women are in total worse off than men as they must choose between dealing with birth control and giving up biological offspring all together. Of course this argument only works if women would really prefer it if it was the man who carried and nursed the baby gaining the special closeness to the child that relationship brings. Some women would prefer this but I suspect most would not. However, if you are going to try and expand the argument this way it becomes a question of which gender is more screwed over by biology and the evidence clearly indicates that it is men who are at the disadvantage. In the only two ways that truly matter, quantity and quality of life, women consistently do better than men. Not only do women live longer than men on average they self-report themselves as being happier than men as well. Of course self-reports aren’t perfect but it is the best evidence we have [UPDATE: removed incorrect fact about depression].

Moreover, it is hard to see why the man is morally obligated (more than just the nice thing to do) to ensure birth control is used because of the possible effect on the woman while a woman is not morally obligated to get an abortion after a one night stand just because knowing he has a child will have a significant effect on the man’s life. Ultimately the man’s feelings are his responsibility and impose no obligation that the woman get an abortion (w/o prior agreement) and similarly (absent agreement) the effect on the woman’s body of their consensual act is her responsibility. Since the woman has the most control and knowledge over her body the default should be that she is responsible for the effects on her body and the man the effects on his body. If the man has a heart condition that makes having vigorous sex a risk for him then by default it’s his responsibility to manage that risk just like it’s the woman’s default responsibility to manage her own body including the risk of pregnancy.

Of course none of this changes the fact that nice people try to help each other out. If a woman suspects that the guy she is with might have a heart condition the nice thing to do might be to offer to get on top so he doesn’t have to exert himself. Similarly if the guy knows that the woman might get pregnant he would be a dick not to offer to use a condom. However, there is nothing unfair about the default expectation we use everywhere else that each person in a consensual act is responsible for the consequences to themselves. Of course since men are often more eager to have one night stands than women it would be perfectly reasonable for women to demand that men take care of birth control as part of the deal of getting to sleep with them but that’s another matter entirely.

The attitudes we have about the man being responsible for the woman getting pregnant are relics of an anti-feminist past. If we started from the assumption that women freely choose to have one night stands just like men and there was nothing wrong with this I think the obvious model that everyone takes responsibility for the consequences to their own bodies/lives wouldn’t even be up for debate. It’s only the vague residue of puritan ethics whispering in our ear that sex outside of marriage is evil and that the perpetrators must therefore share the punishment or that women are not truly responsible for their own actions that cause us to come up with different standards for sex than other activities.

If you don’t agree with this last part then explain why sex seems to be viewed differently than other consensual acts? With disease, boxing or sports the default position is always that each person assumes responsibility over what might happen to their body. What makes pregnancy different?

But what really blows my mind are the comments on the article. These are comments by a relatively tech savy, liberal, anti-Bush crowd and they literally include a fair number of people demanding that people like this get the death penalty and many more who are outrage that the judge didn’t lock this guy up and throw away the key because he had previously exposed himself to children. Yes apparently people are eager to sentence someone who pulls down his pants to far worse punishments than people who beat their wives, steal senior citizens retirement funds, or even some kinds of rape.

Moreover, some brief thought reveals that this has little to nothing to do with the crime itself and everything to do with the man’s desires. People are responding to a sexual desire towards children not any act. If you doubt this look at how people react to a pedophile who is so morally upright as to refuse to ever indulge his raging desire. Instead of regarding such a person as a moral paragon as they would someone who resisted other sorts of temptation they view them as a sicko who ought to be punished. Indeed the public has been fairly vocal about prosecuting people for any pornography involving the idea of sex with young children even if it is only written or computer generated irrelevant of any issue of encouraging molestation.

Obviously people just have a deep psychological need to push away their disgust at the notion of children as sexual objects and feel righteous condemnation. I’ve known this for some time but it really does make me sick to observe how pervasive and extreme the reaction is and disappointed to observe the lack of any influence of reason on the process. I mean I can think of little that is more selfish than counterproductively punishing people and thereby increasing the danger to children just so you can expiate your disgust.

As you can guess this also indicates my opinion on the sex offender proposition on our ballot. I just haven’t remarked on it because it is so obviously bad. The experience of other states, experts in criminal recidivism and good sense cry out that this measure will increase sex offenses by making families less likely to report offenders and, as John Stewart said, creating roving bands of homeless child molesters. Not to mention the severe drain on law enforcement resources by the totally useless monitoring system that will tell us where everyone who was arrested for streaking in college is at every moment.

Case in point is the discussion of Phat Girlz they just had. They had the director on the program who was explaining that her movie is a romance that portrays blacks in a positive way and was complaining that blacks didn’t want to see positive portrayals in the media. Now this might be the case but it really irked me that the panel sat around for like 10 minutes talking about this (and to their credit they did seem inclined to just chalk up the poor performance to bad marketing) and during the entire time no one mentioned the fact that it was a fat girl involved in the romance and that the movie had been very explicitly marketed as being about fat girls.

Now first of all I suspect many people, like myself, are skeptical of movies that seem to have too sharp of a moral/social point. A movie where all the ads center around the fact that fat girls can find love with attractive men as well makes one suspect that cinematic/artistic considerations might have been secondary to making this moral point. But more importantly why didn’t anyone raise the possibility that people don’t want to see a romance about a fat girl. It might be nice (though might discourage people from being as health conscious) if people found fat girls as attractive as skinny girls but they don’t and part of the appeal of a romance movie is that you sorta fall in love with the characters yourself.

I mean I have every sympathy for significanty overweight girls looking for romance, and at the very least think it would be nice if more women wh didn’t fit the traditional stereotype of good looks had romantic success (though seemingly equating romantic success with dating a thin, rich doctor seems hypocritical), but it is ridiculous not to consider this as an explanation for why the movie didn’t do as well as expected.