Thoughts on Feminism and Its Critics

By Brian Tomasik

First published: . Last nontrivial update: .

Summary

It's obvious that women's rights are important, but it's less clear how far to take the more controversial strands of feminist social commentary. While I'm far from an expert on this topic, I suspect that these debates can be made more productive by remembering the wide variation in human psychology, by taking the other person's perspective, by looking at humans as animals, and by using evidence to help resolve disagreements.

Contents

Introduction

Most educated people in the Western world who aren't religious fundamentalists are at least moderate feminists, even if they don't identify as such. Most people agree with the victories for women's political and social rights during the 20th century and hope to see these same rights extended to oppressed women in other countries. Of course, as with anything else, there are plenty of violations of women's rights in rich countries. Still, it seems likely to me that most feminists should generally focus on female empowerment in developing countries, where oppression of women is much worse and where improvements to quality of life are much cheaper.

Debates about feminism in rich countries may unleash passions on both sides. Much of the controversy that feminism evokes has to do with its more radical strands, including views expressed by some young people on social media.

Human psychological diversity

Generalizations about groups are invidious. Critics of feminism claim that it overgeneralizes about men (e.g.: "Every man in this society benefits from the fact that women are prostituted whether or not every man uses a woman in prostitution."a). And many feminists feel that the anti-feminists are misapplying the most extreme feminist views to feminism as a whole.

I think a decent part of the debate over feminism is just arguing about which kind of feminism is at issue:

Anti-feminist: "How can you say that all men are oppressors? I'm an anti-feminist."
Feminist: "So you don't think women should be able to open a bank account or participate in science?"

One of the most helpful, though obvious, points to keep in mind is that everyone is different, and everyone can have different views on different issues. Campaigns like "Women Against Feminism" help to remind us that any given movement doesn't represent all people that the movement is about. In fact:

Even though many women value the achievements the women's movement has made, most are reluctant to call themselves a feminist outright. Just a quarter of women say they consider themselves a feminist; 70 percent do not.

And of course, there are many debates within feminism as well.

I suspect that some of the animosity on both sides results from insufficient appreciation of psychological diversity. For instance, some feminists oppose pornography because they see it as inherently oppressive, while other feminists contend that pornography can be empowering. I think both of these can be true, depending on the person. Unless all women are unconsciously oppressed by pornography without knowing about it (but is unconscious oppression actually oppression?)b, it seems clear that some women don't find pornography oppressive or degrading, in which case that's what's true for them.

Similarly, some anti-feminists claim that they personally don't mind being objectified or shamed about body image, so women should stop complaining and not worry what others think about them. But people differ on how much they care about the judgment of others, and not everyone can just "get over it" so easily. The psychological impact of social body-image pressure can be as little as zero for people who don't care at all what others think or so strong that it leads to suicide. Extending your own feelings about the issue to everyone fails to account for how minds are different.

Prostitution

As another example of variation among women, consider prostitution. According to Andrea Dworkin:

Prostitution in and of itself is an abuse of a woman's body. [...] In prostitution, no woman stays whole. It is impossible to use a human body in the way women's bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it. It's impossible. And no woman gets whole again later, after.

But other women disagree with this, and a few women are happy with jobs as prostitutes. Though Dworkin is clearly coming from a place of compassion for female victims, she also seems to be legislating her personal feelings on the issue, rather than accepting other women's choices about their own lives.

Of course, it's true that many women only resort to prostitution out of economic desperation, which is tragic. This page says "A large percentage of prostitutes polled in one study of 475 people involved in prostitution reported that they were in a difficult period of their lives and most wanted to leave the occupation." But working long hours at two full-time minimum-wage fast-food jobs is also unpleasant. Certainly many women would rather work two full-time jobs than sell sex, but women are different, and some women prefer prostitution over the alternatives. While it's important to lift people out of poverty so that they aren't forced into prostitution, it's wrong-headed to forbid people from choosing prostitution over something else that they personally judge to be worse, or to tell them that they will not "stay whole" if they choose prostitution.c

That said, one could make a reasonable counterargument that if prostitution can be safely reduced—which is a big if—then buyers will spend their money on other products, and some of that spending will provide jobs to other desperate people, without the high emotional toll that prostitution takes on some women. There are also complications with sex trafficking that make this, like most political issues, a very complex question not reducible to simple reasoning on either side.

A Martian perspective

It can be helpful to look at these debates from the outside. Imagine that you're a Martian watching Earth, seeing various primates taking various sides on 21st-century feminism. You would see a diversity of creatures, both within and between the group with XX chromosomes and the group with XY chromosomes. Gender might be one helpful predictor variable for your ethological models, but it wouldn't be a sharp dividing line.

Looking at people as we would look at other animals can be instructive. For instance, we can see how evolution wires animals to prefer and avoid different things. A dung beetle is rewarded by consuming dung. An earthworm tries to escape sunlight. And so too, different people enjoy and are traumatized by different things.

While evolutionary psychology (EP) can be misused, I think EP can actually support feminists. For instance:

In general, empirical evidence can help resolve some disputes that typically devolve into shouting matches. For example, how do movies and television, female stereotypes in video games, and standards of beauty affect male attitudes toward women, rates of sexual violence, etc.? Do feminist memes make women and men happier and healthier? Of course, such studies are difficult, and I'm usually skeptical of multiple-regression analysis.

Men and women perceive things differently

As the EP discussion illustrates, men may not intuitively understand that certain behaviors are distressing to women. This suggests value in educating men about how women (on average) have different neural wiring (due to both biology and culture) and thus perceive things differently. In this way, highlighting gender differences may assist with gender equality (in the utilitarian sense of "equal consideration of interests", not in the Harrison Bergeron sense).

The SNL segment "Weekend Update: Leslie Jones on Vacation" depicts as humorous a woman making sexual comments to a man and touching him without consent. If the gender roles were reversed, there would be an outcry about sexual harassment. Is this a double standard? Those who believe people of different genders should be treated exactly the same would say "yes" and should presumably condemn the SNL segment. However, if we recognize that men and women (on average!) have different reactions to unsolicited sexual advances, then the behavior shown on SNL is less deserving of condemnation. And the lack of public outcry about the SNL segment suggests to me that most people recognize this, at least implicitly if not in their public creeds. (Of course, there are some men for whom sexual advances of the type shown in the SNL segment would be traumatic.)

During Donald Trump's presidency, the relatively woke writers at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert mocked Trump for being fat numerous times. It's hard to imagine the show's writers doing the same for a female president, even a crazy right-wing one. This double standard plausibly makes sense because insecurity about one's weight is more common and generally more self-destructive for women than for men.

Reddit user k0uch describes his experience at one women-run hair salon: "at the one I went to they would always giggle when a single, tall guy would go in. I would routinely get one stylist[']s tits rubbed all over my head, which wasn't too bad." (In the context of this passage, it seems that "wasn't too bad" means "felt kinda nice" rather than "was bad but not too bad".) Once again, if the gender roles were reversed, there would be an outcry about sexual harassment, because those behaviors would make many women uncomfortable, while I would guess that most men would be flattered by them.

Gender construction

Biology can also help show the absurdity of an extreme "gender constructivism" view. Read about the ethology of practically any non-human species, and you'll see that males and females have (quite) different behaviors, especially when it comes to mating. In most species, as we would expect based on differences in parental investment, females are choosy about mates, and males have to demonstrate their fitness before females will accept them. There are too many examples of this point to mention, but here's one:

When it comes to mating, male fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) put on quite the display. Coming across a likely female, a male will follow her around, exude pheromones, play a song on one wing and lick and tap at her genitalia. The female fly will then decide whether to mate. [...]

When faced with a suitor, the female fly must first assess whether the male is a good bet for a mate. But her considerations do not end there. Many other factors affect whether a female fly will be receptive to a male’s entreaties. “She needs to look at her internal state, whether she’s a virgin or not, whether she has mated recently, is she sleepy, hungry and so forth,” Baker says. (Virgins are more likely to mate.)

A female fly integrates all these cues when a male comes a’courting. If receptive, she will slow down and wait, opening her vaginal plates to allow the male to copulate. If she is not receptive, Baker says, a female fly gets violent. She might fly or run away, kick and even thrust her ovipositor (the organ used to lay eggs) in a hapless suitor’s face, “which discourages him substantially.”

Here's one more example, this one about female rabbits:

scanning for present males and gathering information about their movements might also be relevant: especially younger males are sometimes harassing females outside their oestrus by showing courtship behaviour (pers. obs.), and females are usually terminating these apparently unwanted approaches by chasing the young males away.

Of course, many parts of our concepts of gender are socially constructed and vary from culture to culture. As with most other nature/nurture questions, the truth is that gender is a complex product of both nature and nurture acting in concert. Picking out exactly how much of which behavior is due to genes vs. idiosyncrasies of culture vs. interactions of biology with culture is a messy empirical project that needn't be controversial in principle.

The reason essentialism vs. constructivism issues are often controversial is because empirical facts can be misapplied to support certain social attitudes, such as the idea that because females in most animal species are less aggressive, female humans should be less competitive in realms like business and politics. This is just bad moral philosophy, but because it's a common way of thinking, feminists may sometimes try to patch the problem by emphasizing gender construction. I'm not a purist, and if hiding real biological gender differences can help to take the edge off of appeal-to-nature gender shoehorning in society at large, then maybe it's not so bad.

Biologists who are annoyed by the anti-scientific attitude of extreme "men and women are mentally identical" proponents might consider a strategy of focusing on ways in which women seem to outperform men for potentially biological reasons, since such hypotheses highlight the possibility of biological sex differences without provoking as much backlash. For example, such biologists might point to findings that girls are better at language than boys (although proving that such differences are at least partly genetic rather than purely environmental is tricky).

A utilitarian perspective

One thing we can learn from the strength of modern-feminist statements and the backlash that some of them receive is that many people have intense emotions on these matters. While we wouldn't want to implement all Tumblr-feminist statements into law, all such statements tell us something important: namely, that this particular person feels strongly about this particular topic, even if you yourself can't internalize why that person would care about it. These sentiments on both sides can then be aggregated into a more comprehensive utilitarian analysis. (One of the virtues of utilitarianism is that it forces you to take the other person's perspective when analyzing an issue, rather than apotheosizing your own personal feelings about an activity into a deontological command. Of course, utilitarianism has plenty of wiggle room for arbitrariness in its own ways, such as when doing interpersonal comparisons of utility.)

One possible argument against pornography is that, even if none of the actors or viewers is harmed by it, some women (and a few men) are ideologically strongly opposed to the general existence of pornography. In principle, such ideological opposition to people's porn-viewing preferences counts in a utilitarian analysis, in a similar way as the ideological opposition by fundamentalist Christians against gay sex and birth control also counts somewhat in a utilitarian analysis. However, in practice it seems doubtful that these preferences about what other people do in the privacy of their bedrooms should win out when making policy.

Most of the policy and strategic questions that modern feminism faces are complex. For instance, what are the social ripple effects of talking about patriarchy and oppression? Do these frameworks empower women, or do they make women feel worse about their lots in life (in a similar way as psychological rumination can worsen depression)? Do extreme views turn people away from feminism and thereby hurt the women who benefit from moderate feminism that's focused on the most serious injustices? How do these ideas affect our children's memetic landscape and Earth's far future? As is the case with most other political topics, these are complicated issues with non-obvious answers. Passions play a role, by informing what kinds of outcomes we want, but passions alone won't tell us which kinds of rhetoric and social movements will have the best long-run effects.

There's also a difference between what's ideal and what's feasible. For instance, I personally suspect that the world would be better off if makeup use was rare, since makeup wastes time and money and can sometimes contain harmful chemicals. And I suspect that makeup doesn't even make men any happier in the long run, in light of the hedonic treadmill and such. But makeup is a tragedy of the commons in which there's incentive for individuals to use it to gain an advantage (both in mate competition and for general halo effect). So we probably can't achieve a makeup-free society, although we can aim for smaller moves in that direction. Also, it's possible that desire for makeup is sometimes due to more than just social pressure, since some women seem to really enjoy makeup.

As another example, I would prefer a society in which no one publicly shamed another person, no one made insulting jokes intended to hurt someone's feelings, and so on. This is not necessarily a feminism thing but a broader wish that people shouldn't be jerks.f But this isn't going to happen, and the hard question is how far to take social censure of those who do make insults or uncouth comments. There are costs to too much political correctness, in terms of shutting down honest exploration. Despite being associated with social liberals, political correctness is in some sense an authoritarian project aiming for greater conformity. Of course, there can be benefits as well, if preventing speech that some perceive as hateful reduces rates of low self-esteem and depression. It's very non-obvious where to strike the balance.

An empathy technique for men

I think ordinary attempts at role reversal often fail across the gender divide. If men try to understand catcalling by imagining themselves being catcalled by women, then I suspect most men would find the experience not only acceptable but flattering. Likewise, unsolicited and explicit sexual propositions or nude pictures from women they don't know would be received well by many men and at the very least wouldn't be traumatizing.

One helpful suggestion that I've heard is not to imagine women doing these things to you but to instead imagine a burly, 300-pound gay man doing these things to you. If necessary, you could imagine that the large man doesn't look very friendly, carries a knife in his pocket, etc. In this case it seems more intuitively clear why catcalling or out-of-the-blue propositioning, especially in a non-public area, would be unsettling—namely, there's some nontrivial risk of violence following.

I would guess that many men don't realize how frightened women might be of them. Most men are harmless and don't have bad intent, but a few bad apples require that women are on alert for the whole bunch. (Cenk Uygur has made this point.) In a similar way, most software you can download from the Internet is harmless, but a few downloads contain malware, so you have to be cautious regarding all downloads and use anti-virus software.

I don't think this empathy technique alone suffices to make all feminist concerns more understandable to men. For example, this thought experiment doesn't explain what would be wrong with the existence of a 300-pound men's equivalent of Playboy magazine featuring attractive 150-pound men, unless such imagery causally contributed to a society where physical violence was more common. Perhaps 300-pound men's Playboy could be argued against on grounds other than its potential to cause violence, such as if it led to devaluing of 150-pound men's contributions in the workplace. But what if most 300-pound men weren't affected by the magazine in that way?

Rating attractiveness

Mainstream feminism typically censures openly rating the attractiveness of other people, such as when men assign women numbers on a 10-point scale. I agree that it's generally a best practice to be cautious about sexual remarks like these in professional settings, for the simple reason that it's good to be polite and respectful in such settings in general. However, I think this topic raises some interesting issues.

In general, I think society is too inhibited with regard to talking about sexual things. There's plenty of sexual content in the media, but people are often embarrassed to bring up sexual topics in face-to-face conversations, and those who do may be shunned. I suspect that if people talked more openly about their sexual thoughts, people would feel less repressed, and there might be more tolerance for differences. LGBT people "coming out of the closet" is an example of this.

Biologically, sexual desire seems to me pretty similar to food desire. Food and sexual rewards both involve similar brain mechanisms, and we can "hunger" for both types of stimuli when deprived of them. Food rewards show sensory-specific satiety, and sexual rewards show the Coolidge effect. Both food and sexual tastes are partly genetically hard-coded and partly shaped by stimuli during childhood. When we look at both food and potential sexual partners, our brains compute estimates of how desirable those things would be to obtain. Despite these commonalities between food and sex, there's a big difference in social attitudes. It's perfectly normal to talk about one's favorite foods with a stranger, but it's taboo to talk about the celebrities one finds most attractive, unless you're with close friends of the same gender.

Probably this difference makes some sense. Because sexual tastes concern other humans, people may take personally comments about sexual attraction, while few people take personally your dislike of cabbage or enjoyment of carrots. And talking about sexual matters might make others, especially women, fear that you might be warming up for sexual assault. Perhaps partly for these reasons, talking openly about sexual topics in a workplace setting can constitute sexual harassment.

While I generally oppose norms that discourage open discussion of some topic, the norm against verbalizing one's inner attractiveness estimates of other people in professional settings seems probably net good. Following are two arguments.

The first is that such statements may make some subset of listeners feel pretty bad about themselves. You might reply that people should just toughen up and not worry what others say about them, and teaching psychological resilience does seem valuable. But changing the stimuli that sensitive people are exposed to can also be part of the solution. Personally I don't care much what people say about my attractiveness, or most of my other traits for that matter. However, I would, for example, feel somewhat bad if someone I respect said I was stupid, and I imagine that other people may feel similarly or even worse about being called unattractive. And regardless of whether I can muster in my own mind an emotional analogue of how it feels to be rated on attractiveness, it's clear from third-person self-reports that some people feel very bad about such things. (See "First-Person vs. Third-Person Empathy".)

The second argument against publicly voiced attractiveness ratings, and the culture that surrounds them, is that they can encourage wasteful or destructive behavior in women, from spending enormous amounts of time on clothes and makeup to dieting and eating disorders. While some amount of women's inclinations toward these things may be biological (for example, non-human animals can also develop anorexia), a lot seem to be culturally driven.

The idea of including more plus-size and makeup-free models in fashion magazines seems laudable, not just because it may help present-day women feel less pressured about their looks but, more speculatively, because insofar as sexual tastes are learned by sexual imprinting during childhood, it may change the beauty standards of the next generation? (I don't know if that's at all plausible.) At the same time, such an effort seems difficult to pull off on a large scale, for a similar reason as it's difficult to convince Americans to consistently eat more vegetables. There's a reason that almost all movie and TV stars are highly attractive according to mainstream beauty standards.

Similarly, conventional beauty standards seem unlikely to be deposed from their role in dating. While it's certainly unfair that some people have much more dating success based on factors out of their control, it's not clear what can be done about this—other than weird solutions like taxing beautiful people. Social norms can sometimes override deep-seated hedonic drives, such as when in-the-closet gay men marry women rather than men, but usually such norms aren't conducive to a happy society.

I think it's plausibly healthy that many forms of entertainment, such as sitcoms, remain domains in which one can hear "crass" sexual commentary without much taboo surrounding it, since this may help viewers not feel ashamed for having their own sexual thoughts that would get them in social trouble if vocalized (such as "XYZ actress is super hot"). Fiction and comedy are important channels in which people can speak relatively more freely because it's understood that the works of art don't necessarily represent the author's actual views. On the other hand, it's possible that such forms of entertainment make crass behavior more likely in real life. The question is similar to the issue of violence in entertainment—whether it's a safe outlet for existing human impulses or whether it actually encourages the intensification of those impulses.

Regardless of where we set social norms, some people will end up feeling oppressed and uncomfortable with the situation. We can and try to find norms that hurt fewer total people, but there are no easy answers, because pushing the boundaries too far in one direction will harm those whose personalities and preferences lie in the other direction. This is why the "culture wars" are really like a war: there are always winners and losers. That said, some cultural changes do seem to have more winners than losers, or winners whose wins are much bigger in magnitude than the losses of the losers, and we should generally favor those changes.

A personal case study for the radical-flank effect

Most of my writing is about issues like animal suffering, consciousness, and suffering-focused ethics. On many of these topics, my stances are pretty radical relative to those of my peers. I'm sometimes warned that holding radical views on these issues may turn people away from the more moderate versions of these concerns—throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I agree this is a dilemma, though I tend to favor being explicit about my actual views for various reasons.

Feminism provides an interesting chance for me to look at this situation from the other side, as someone who doesn't hold radical views confronting those who do. Do radical feminists turn me off from moderate feminism (a negative radical-flank effect)? Or do radical feminists make moderate feminism appear more reasonable by comparison (a positive radical-flank effect)? I'm not sure, and I think there may be some of both.

One person in the comment thread on Meltzer (2016) proclaims: "All porn is RAPE. Women getting paid for 'allowing' bodies penetrated and used by men is not sex." This statement is emotionally off-putting because it cheapens the badness of rape by equating it with a consensual transaction that, if morally problematic at all, is at least vastly less morally problematic in most cases. Associating feminism with blanket anti-porn sentiments and similarly strong views in other domains makes me less inclined to self-identify as a feminist—a word that arguably means too many different things to be usefully applied. On the other hand, radical feminists do spark discussion about these topics. And once such discussion is sparked, I'm receptive to the concern that some women go into porn out of desperation and are upset by their work. (Other women in porn actually enjoy what they do.) I don't think my initial emotional reaction against certain radical-feminist statements permanently hinders my sympathy with many of the concerns of moderate feminists.

While I'm not sure whether radical feminist ideas turn me away from moderate ideas, I am turned away by extreme feminist behavior—such as shouting down opponents, name-calling, trying to get men's-rights events cancelled, and shunning anyone who questions the Thought Police. For example, Laci Green made a video expressing her interest in constructive dialogue about feminism with anti-feminists, and in response: "I actually had a friend of mine—a good friend of mine—[...] who wanted to make a petition to shut my channel down [...]. The goal is to silence. No other opinions should be heard." Of course, there are plenty of examples of egregious behavior by anti-feminists, such as rape and death threats against Anita Sarkeesian.

Elite vs. mass movements

I've sometimes heard the view that not only might it be a waste of time to popularize certain ideas "to the masses", but doing so might actually be harmful if "dumbing down" of the ideas causes serious scholars to not want to engage with the topic. Intuitively I dislike this elitist viewpoint, though that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.

One argument against elitism is that, ideally, scholars should judge a topic based on its most serious advocates and not be biased by the "noise" of less careful presentations. For example, before you reject feminism entirely, you should engage with the best feminist arguments developed by careful thinkers, rather than reacting negatively against vitriolic feminist comments on social media. (I give this just as an example. I personally am a novice regarding feminism and have not had a chance to read much serious feminist scholarship.) However, while intellectuals "should" theoretically steelman ideas without being turned away by the noise, in practice this doesn't always happen. Plus, even if some intellectuals do agree with the movement, they may worry about being associated with the less savory activists who carry the same flag.

A second reason I'm reticent about an elitist strategy is that a more widespread message will reach many more total people, including future elites. For example, I assume that many feminist scholars are better known, even in scholarly circles, than they would be otherwise on account of feminism's popularity in society at large. Of course, if the mass-media version of a message is sufficiently distasteful, then this greater awareness can be net bad for a movement.

In cases of social movements like feminism, there's a third argument against elitism, which is that feminism is ultimately about the individual experiences of real people, and everyone has their own experiences to contribute to the conversation. In contrast, movements regarding highly technical subjects may not need to be engaged with directly by everyone in society.

Footnotes

  1. Blanket statements about "all men" seem to be a form of reverse sexism. It's plausible that some radical feminists fall into the same kinds of us-vs.-them and scapegoating cognitive patterns as racists do.  (back)
  2. Alternatively, feminists might claim that even when porn production doesn't harm the female actors, it harms society as a whole. For instance: "Radical feminists charge that pornography eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, and reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment. MacKinnon argued that pornography leads to an increase in sexual violence against women through fostering rape myths." These hypotheses are largely testable, and various studies of the issue have found conflicting results.

    Of course, it also matters what kind of porn is under discussion: "Rubin writes that anti-pornography feminists exaggerate the dangers of pornography by showing the most shocking pornographic images (such as those associated with sadomasochism) out of context, in a way that implies that the women depicted are actually being raped, rather than emphasizing that these scenes depict fantasies and use actors who have consented to being shown in such a way (Rubin, 1984)."  (back)

  3. Here's one woman's perspective:

    I was in my second year of college and struggling to make ends meet. [...]

    I figured I could try being an escort. It turned out to be pretty easy work for me, and I only needed to see clients one or two days a week to cover my expenses.

    [...] Sometimes I received lectures about how I was enabling the patriarchy by choosing to be a sex worker. I was derided and called selfish for choosing a line of work that encourages sexism against women, and I was accused of being a traitor to the feminist cause. [...]

    One friend – or someone I thought was a friend, at the time – told everyone in my social circle that there must be something psychologically wrong with me, because nobody in her right mind would ever choose to be a prostitute. She said she’d read that people in the sex industry are only there because they’ve been forced into it, or because they were sexually abused as children and then make warped decisions about their sexuality as adults. Soon the rumour in my extended group of friends was that I had been sexually abused as a child and that I was mentally unstable. People pitied me. I was humiliated.

    [...] I am bombarded with negative images about sex work in the media, and that only makes me feel worse. [...]

    I think I’ve internalized the societal hatred of sex workers. I am embarrassed to be a sex worker, even though I like my job, I’m good at it, and I’ve made exceptional progress in my career over the past few years. [...]

    Sometimes I think the only way out of this mess it to stop working as an escort and leave the sex industry behind. It would be hard to quit, though, because the work is relatively easy, my schedule is flexible, and I make twice as much money doing sex work as I could doing any other job I’m qualified for.

    [...] I wish I’d known what I was getting myself into before I jumped into this line of work. But most of all, I wish I’d never become a prostitute in the first place.

      (back)

  4. This paper says:

    we now know that body image is a stronger concern for women (cf. Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Singh, 1993), and is linked to women’s self-esteem, and self-perceived physical and sexual attractiveness (cf. Cash, Winstead, & Janda, 1986; Davies & Furnham, 1986; Jackson, 1992; Koff, Rierdan, & Stubbs, 1990; Lerner, Karabenick, & Stuart, 1973; Secord & Jourard, 1953; Thomas & Freeman, 1990; Wade, submitted). The heightened importance of body image for and among women and the aforementioned body image relationships can be explained in many ways. One such way is in terms of evolutionary psychology and reproductive concerns (cf. Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Henss, 1995; Singh, 1993, 1994; Singh & Luis, 1995; Townsend, 1989, cited in Singh, 1993; Wade, submitted).

      (back)

  5. This study reports:

    Chemical castration via administration of CPA and MPA has been found effective in reducing recidivism in sexual offenders with paraphilias in some small-scale, controlled studies (e.g., Fedoroff et al. 1992; Maletzky, Tolan, and McFarland 2006; Meyer et al. 1992). However, other studies found no significant effect (e.g., Hucker, Langevin, and Bain 1988; Maletzky 1991).

      (back)

  6. In general, we should treat people as individuals and try to avoid harming them. TJ Kirk: "all individuals are different, and [...] lumping people into groups is nothing more than a recipe for really bad arguments based completely on stereotypes". There are plenty of men, often of low socioeconomic status, who are more oppressed than most women are (where I'm measuring "oppression" by how much societally caused suffering that person endures).

    An exception to the principle of treating people as individuals may be when the problems that people face are caused by existing group-based stereotypes. For example, in cases of genuine racism or sexism, we need to talk about race and sex in order to address the issue. However, I suspect it's tempting for our tribalistic primate brains to overemphasize identity membership and us-vs.-them thinking when examining social ills, rather than just focusing on helping people in general with whatever problems they have. For example, I suspect that one of the best ways to help racial minorities in the USA is to reduce poverty (such as through, say, universal health insurance), rather than exploring ever more intricate nuances of social-justice theory.  (back)