The downsides to empathy

"You have a SNP in the oxytocin receptor which may make you less empathetic than most people. 
When under stress you may have more difficulty recognizing the emotional state of others which impacts loneliness, parenting, and socializing skills 
Lower levels of reward dependence (reliance on social approval). Lower autonomic arousal while perceiving harm to others." 

Indeed, I've been told by many people that I am not empathetic enough, and I have social skills only slightly better than someone with Asperger's. 

But I object to the characterization of this as "dysfunction". It is different than the norm, sure.
Does empathy imply more morality?  Is lack of empathy a pathology? Not necessarily


Just because I can't tell how you feel from your expression doesn't mean I'm any less likely to care. It just means I need more explicit communication - which is generally a good thing anyway. 
Combined with good communication, I bet it makes for less misunderstandings: while I do worse than average on "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test", I KNOW when I'm not sure, while people who do better are often confident even when they are wrong. Therefor I'm more likely to ask. 

A study published in the journal Science by Dr. Hillel Aviezer of the Psychology Department of the Hebrew University, together with Dr. Yaacov Trope of New York University and Dr. Alexander Todorov of Princeton University, confirms my theory: "viewers in test groups were baffled when shown photographs of people who were undergoing real-life, highly intense positive and negative experiences. " (as opposed to the typical "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test" which uses actors). "When the viewers were asked to judge the emotional valences of the faces they were shown (that is, the positivity or negativity of the faces), their guesses fell within the realm of chance. " 
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1225 
Nobody can really "mind read". But people rated more empathetic absolutely believe they can. Sounds like dysfunction... 

Reliance on social approval is a terrible thing! 
This study http://mic.com/articles/92479/psychologists-have-uncovered-a-troubling-feature-of-people-who-seem-too-nice isn't really about "niceness" as it claims, so much as about the politeness that stems from a high reliance on social approval. In other words, ASDs are a lot less likely to hurt others in order to fit in or be accepted.
The typical human will deliberately choose what they know to be a wrong answer, just so they can fit in with everyone else: http://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
 Reliance on social approval is the basis of peer pressure, of group think, of failure to act in crises (if others are around), of the negative feelings of shame and low-self-esteem. And as the study above shows, it makes people more likely to be evil. I'm at a loss for what positives come from it. It sounds an awful lot like dysfunction to me. 

Lower autonomic arousal while perceiving harm to others is probably a trait you want in, say, a rescuer (USCG Search and Rescue, for example, which I am, or a firefighter or cop or paramedic) - similar as I said above, the fact that I don't have a strong emotional reaction to your distress doesn't mean I don't care. It means I can stay calm and collected during your crises, which makes me more effective at helping you. Do you really want your rescuer to be so sympathetic that they freak out or start crying when they see how much pain you're in? 
A highly sympathetic pediatrician would develop lots of stress from continually causing children pain, even though they know the shots are in the child's best interests. Again, that sounds like dysfunction to me. 

Aspys and similar folk tend to be more intelligent and better at all sort of tasks. The fact of being less common doesn't automatically imply pathology - if it did, being overweight would have to be reclassified as normal, and a healthy BMI would have to be considered disfunction (at least in the US). 
Evolution has gone from pure stimulus response to instinct behavior to emotional reactions to higher order reasoning and logic. I propose the rise of the Aspys, who are less emotional and more logical, is another step in that direction!

Healthcare: the last mainstream superstition

Question:

Have you ever taken a drug that you know for sure works, because you could feel the difference it made?

Unless you happen to be both a pharmaceutical researcher and a theoretical psychologist, you almost definitely answered "yes" to that question.

You thought back to pain pills you've taken, allergy medication, cold remedies, a round of antibiotics, and you experienced the change, you felt it working.  At least, you believe you felt it.

But you are mistaken.  Even if you really did feel something, it is not remotely near enough for you to use the phrase "know for sure".

It simply isn't humanly possible.

There are literally hundreds of steps that could introduce error into the process, from the complexity of biology, to the limitations of awareness, perception, and memory, from the placebo effect and the power of expectation, to dozens of cognitive biases and ways that the human mind is predictably irrational.

If you have been reading my blog a while, you have likely seen all of those links before, but if not - or if you never actually clicked on them and watched or read what they link to - it would be worth while to check them out - especially if you're one of those sort of people who has a body.  If you have ever been to a doctor, taken any form of medicine, ever been sick, ever been injured, or if there is any chance you might ever do any of those things in the future, it would be to your great benefit to read and understand the information at all of those links.

Unless you have read those, everything I write next will be a lot easier to write off and disregard, but for those who have seen them before, I don't want to be too repetitive.
So go click some links, spend a few hours learning, come back and read this here post some other time...

...

Oh, hi!
You're back I see.  That's some crazy stuff, right?  I'm totally not over it yet either.  But hey, this is the world we live in, we gotta work with what we got.

For some reason that I have never even heard a good theory on, American's are apparently far more prone to believing crazy stuff than most of the rest of the developed world.  We have a disproportionate amount of creationists, astrologists, people who believe in ghosts and ESP and faith healing and magnet healing, and "energy fields", people who deny global warming and embrace supply side economics, people who are opposed to vaccines and any form of genetic engineering.

The proportion of people who buy into any one of those examples, however, is less than half - anti-science ignorance is widespread, but it isn't quite mainstream.

There is one area though, where being anti-science is so prevalent that an entire industry is built up around it, and that's health care.

We have the term "alternative medicine".  That's a thing.

What is it an alternative to?  Well... any medicine which has independently and objectively been shown to be effective at treating whatever it is it claims to treat.
Because the term for something which actually works is just "medicine".

No other area of life has an equivalent.

There is no "alternative math", where people base calculations on numerology.
There isn't an "alternative chemistry" industry, which seeks to revive the forgotten wisdom of alchemy.

There is also not many other ways where going backwards is seen as a good thing.  Few people cook over a log fire instead of using natural gas or electricity, based on the fact that people cooked over open fires for thousands of years and therefor it must be better. Other than Richie Norris, no one suggests we should go back to living in teepees. Nobody is seriously advocating we replace telephones with smoke signals or email with pony express riders for long-distance communication.
Health care is the one area where a very significant portion of the population sees ignoring all the progress science has made in understanding how things work as being a good thing.

Of course no one consciously thinks of it that way.  The term is "traditional", not "obsolete".  The reasoning is that people did things a certain way for a really long time, therefor it must be valid.  Presumably if it didn't work people would have given it up by now. 

But we are selective in which invalidated treatments we keep.  Pretty much no one advocates bloodletting, but there are many who take sticking needles in the skin as a serious form of health care.  We are done with trepanation, but you can get health insurance to pay for vertebral subluxation treatments.  Few people think exorcism will cure anything, but, somehow, homeopathy still exists - its silly to even investigate it, because its just water.  There is literally no active ingredient in most homeopathic remedies.   Belief in the four humors is past tense, but there is no challenge in finding people who believe in mysterious "energy fields" around living things.

Don't get me wrong - there really are energy fields.  But they aren't mysterious.  Humans have figured this stuff out.  There are 4 types of force in the universe: 2 types of nuclear force, gravity, and electromagnetism. We all know how gravity works - heavy stuff pulls toward other heavy stuff.  In our daily experience the planet is by far the heaviest thing around, so that means everything gets pulled toward Earth.  Nuclear forces keep all matter together, but we really only interact with it in bombs and power plants.  That leaves electromagnetism, which is fully understood by science, but isn't quite common knowledge yet.

Brief digression for a general science lesson:

Almost everything we commonly think of as "energy" is some form of electromagnatism.  Electricity, obviously.  And magnets.  The entire planet is covered in a giant magnet field, which is why compasses point North.  You can actually see it at the poles, in the form of the Northern (and Southern) Lights

If you can remember back to high school science class, you may realize the close relationship between electricity and magnets: wrap a live wire around a piece of iron, you have an electromagnet.  Move a magnet back and forth inside of a coil of wire, it generates electricity.  That relationship is how every electric generator and every electric motor works.
Then there are electromagnetic waves.  Sounds fancy and sciency, right?  Its just the technical term for "light".  It's all light waves.  Like, the stuff you can see with your eyes, blue and purple and green.
All the different colors of light are arranged in order of how big the light wave is: purple has a small light wave, red has a big one.  That's why rainbows in the sky are in the order they are in.  You can't see it, but the rainbow keeps going, in both directions.  Above purple is ultraviolet (Latin, for "above violet" - hey, what do ya know about that!).  We can't see it with our eyes, but it is there.  If you happened to be a bee, you would see it.  Below red is infrared ("below red") light.  Again, our eyes can't see it, but it is there.  If you put a thermometer just below the red light coming off of a prism, you will see it gets hotter as you go down from purple toward red, and gets even hotter just below red.  Infrared light is where heat lamps get their heat, and it's what night vision goggles see.

But it doesn't stop there.
Microwaves, TV and radio signals, cell phone signals, x-rays, WI FI, radar, it is all light.  A microwave is just a color.  One which the human eye can't see, but the only difference between microwaves and blue is the size of the wave.  All an antenna is is a mechanical eyeball.  A radio sees radiowaves just like your eye sees green.

Even if you personally don't fully understand all the details, realize that it isn't a mystery, all this is very well understood.  It isn't even all that complex.  We know how energy works.  If there is a "life force", it is within the forces that exist in the universe.  And in fact, our nervous system runs on electricity.  Our thoughts, our movements, every part of being alive, it is all powered by chemical energy, adenosine triphosphate breaking down to adenosine diphosphate, and releasing electrically charged ions that can do work in the process.  If you click that last link and try to read it, unless you happen to have been a molecular biology major, chances are most of it is hard to follow.  The important thing to realize is that, as insanely complex as living things are, we have an amazingly high amount of this stuff figured out.

Very few of us fully understand all the details of electronics and computers, down to both the resistor, capacitor and transistor level of the hardware and the line by line code of the software, but we all accept that it is understood, that it works, and we don't reject laptops and cellphones in favor of mysticism, ancient or modern, eastern or western. 

So I was wondering, why do we reject everything biology has learned in favor of tradition?  Why, when science understands biology so well, does such a huge proportion of the population choose to deliberately seek out health care practices and practitioners which explicitly reject the most basic principal of science: "check that you're right"?

I have a few theories.

I suspect the theories are all right, to one degree or another, and they all work together and reinforce each other.

-As complex as computers and airplanes and GPS and every other area of technology is, as complex as meteorology and geology and astronomy are, all of it pales in comparison to molecular biology.

Take this example:

That is fucking mind blowing!  I can barely keep up, but it is... how do you even put it into words?  All those things are going on inside of your body, right now.  And it's just one tiny set of many examples of cellular processes.  There are thousands more like it, and some set of those thousands are happening in every one of your 100 trillion cells 24 hours a day, from conception until several minutes after death.

It is totally overwhelming.

Wouldn't it be nice if it could all be simplified to something a person can wrap their mind around, like "life force", or "positive energy" or "qi"?  Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of having to understand all that amazingly wonderful reality, all health could just be a function of, say, eating the right things or of spinal alignment?

We tend to think of the body like a complicated machine.  When a machine breaks, there is always some specific part that needs fixing or replacing - make the right adjustment, everything is as it should be.

But living things are really nothing at all like machines.  Metabolism is not like burning fuel.  Our joints are not hinges or pivots.  We are more like a bag of soup.  A bag of soup with a frame - but the joints of the frame, instead of being held together by pins, they are held together by strong rubber bands and cushioned by mushy padding.  We are more like a wobbly marionette than a rigid robot.

If the human body is essentially a big chemical bag of soup, and our skeleton is held together by stretchy bendy tendons and ligaments, that rather undermines the entire concept of body "alignment".  What exactly is it being aligned with, and what stops it from lining up "right" on its own?  This doesn't just undermine chiropracty - it undermines most of medical massage, orthopaedic surgery, sports physiology, and physical therapy.

The idea that manipulating body parts, putting them in the "correct" position, stems from thinking of the body as mechanical, when in fact it is fluid and flexible and far more complex than any machine ever built.

Another possible reason for the popularity of anti-science in healthcare, besides for being far more complex than any other area of potential human knowledge, biology and medicine is far more personal.  Nobody is ever going to interact with a neutrino.  Understanding the Higgs Boson doesn't affect your daily life in anyway.  So it's fairly easy to accept that some other people, for whom that is their specialty, know what that stuff is, and you can just trust them on it.  Since everyone has a body, and the health of it is arguably the single most important thing in your life, everyone has incentive to want to know what the hell is going on.

 An answer - any answer - always feels better than "I don't know".  It just feels terrible to have a vague ambiguous open-ended question; especially if its something with a real effect on day to day life, like a disability, illness, or pain.

And an answer we can't comprehend sometimes feels as bad as no answer at all.  

It is an unfortunate side effect of how human psychology works that we feel better having a concrete - but wrong - answer than having one that is accurate, but confusing.

And compounding that, the complexity of molecular biology is so great that, even as much as scientists do know, there is still a huge amount they don't - so in addition to the real answers being confusing, sometimes nobody has an answer at all.

If 10 doctors and specialists say "we don't know", and then one seems confident that they have the answer, we are inclined to accept that last answer, even if we might not have otherwise, because there is nothing better being offered.  But sometimes "nobody really knows" is the most honest answer.  When things are really complex and/or controversial, a professional's confidence should make you less trusting of their opinion, not more.  That confidence is coming from faith.  Faith is the antithesis of science.  It means just making something up, and deciding it's right, without doing the work to double check.

Very closely related to the last reason, it always feel better to do something than to do nothing.  People say that explicitly in times of desperation: "I can't just sit back and do nothing".  But sometimes nothing anyone does will help.  Sometimes doing anything makes it worse.  In the game of soccer, when one team kicks a penalty shot, the statistics say that the goalie has the best chance of blocking the ball if he just stays in the center.  The kick is so fast it is humanly impossible to predict which way it will go.  But almost every goalie, every time, will dive either left or right, and game after game, the kicker scores a goal as the goalie dives out of the way, just because he felt he had to DO something. Because if he just stood there, he would feel like an idiot.

But the truth is: 

Living things have been figuring out how to exist for 3 billion years.  

Without any form of medicine.  

Not modern science based, not alternative tradition based.  

Not any kind.  

Any living thing that hasn't figured out how to heal itself, how to naturally be in optimal alignment, how to get the correct nutrients via appetite, repair its own damage, and generally optimize its own health, went extinct long before humans existed.

Every single day, even without injury or illness, your body creates 300 billion new cells, to replace old worn out ones.  You may have heard the claim that the entire body is replaced every 7-10 years.  It isn't exactly right - different body parts renew at different rates.  Some take 16 years.  Some are replaced every few days.  But, aside from brain cells, your entire body really does replace itself on an ongoing basis.

This is how you heal after injury.  Give the body enough time, and it will replace damaged cells, without you doing anything at all.
Our immune system is more powerful and effective than any drug or remedy humans have ever invented - in fact, the single biggest medical innovation of all time - the vaccine - isn't actually a medicine at all, it is just a way to teach the body's natural immune system how to do its job a little better.

Certainly if you have cancer, or a severe bacterial infection, a compound fracture, diabetes or appendicitis, modern health care can mean the difference between loss of life or limb, and a full recovery.  But for the vast majority of ailments, both physical injury and pathogen, the best possible thing you can do is support your own general health: stay physically fit (balance intense exercise with sufficient rest and recovery), get enough nutrients and calories (but not too many calories), get enough sleep (every night!), and keep emotional stress to a minimum (which, believe it or not, has very little to do with your life circumstances.  It is almost entirely about your outlook).
These four lifestyle choices: exercise, nutrition, sleep, and optimism, correlate far more strongly to overall health than access to any particular form of health care or treatment, more even than access to any form of healthcare at all.

Because of the evolutionary process, because of living cell's incredible ability to repair damage to itself and destroy infections,

Almost every medical problem will heal itself, all on its own.


 With no treatment, just time and nutrition and rest.

And that means that if you take or do any form of "treatment" long enough, it will seem like it "worked", just because your body was repairing itself all along, and you happened to be doing this other stuff at the same time. You end up better, so everyone assumes they got better because of the treatment.  But you probably would have gotten better anyway.  

That is without even considering the placebo effect.

The human body generally fights off a cold in barely over a week, with no drugs or remedy of any kind.

Say you start feeling symptoms a day or two after you first catch it, the next day you start taking a remedy, and then a couple days later the cold is mostly subsided.  People will almost universally assume that the remedy cured the cold, but it didn't do anything.  There is no substance that can reduce the length of a cold. Anything which reduces symptoms (like a fever reducer) will increase the length of the cold, because the medicine isn't fighting the virus, it is fighting your body's natural response to the virus.

But as a single individual there is no way for you to test taking the remedy and not taking it side-by-side to see which gets you better faster.  You have to either take it or not take it.

This is the whole reason clinical trials and studies were invented in the first place. 

And then people figured out that just being in the trial made people get better, because of the placebo effect, and they had to introduce the double blind placebo trial.

Placebos genuinely make people feel better - and that has much more significance than you realize.  It affects you more than you ever realized, and more than you want to admit.  This is why you got my first question, in the opening line to this essay, wrong. You can not know a medicine, or any medical procedure is working because you "feel" it working, because there is no possible way you can control for the placebo effect in your own personal first hand experience. 

It is not humanly possible for anyone to answer "yes" to that question and be right. Read about it at the link below:

Investigation into the placebo effect

I know, you already know about placebos.
Remember that question I opened this blog post with?

"Have you ever taken a drug that you know for sure works, because you could feel the difference it made?"

If you answered "yes" to that question (and admit it, you did), then you don't really understand the significance of the placebo effect.  You may understand, intellectually, that it happens, but there is a disconnect, a cognitive dissonance, where you think you are an exception.  You think you can feel the difference a drug or physical therapy makes objectively. Placebos seem like a fascinating phenomenon that affects other people.  Millions and millions of other people.

Even if you accept that, for example, you don't always know all of your subconscious motivations for your behavior, everyone thinks they can "know" their own body objectively.

But believing that is just as ridiculous as thinking you can "tell" from the moment of conception that you are pregnant (it takes between one and two weeks for the egg to implant, so there is no change to feel before then), or that you can "feel" when somebody is looking at you, (you can't).

You, my dear reader, are a human.  You have all the limitations that all humans have.

There is so much more to the placebo effect than we normally think about.  The placebo effect is deep.  Fascinating.  And extremely important, extremely relevant to daily life as living creatures.  I would highly recommend reading  some more about it - for example this and this and this.  It should be required for any person who has a body.

You would think every single medical professional, in any field, would know this stuff, but the unfortunate reality is that doctors aren't remotely scientists in any sense of the word.  Not just the "alternative" folk, but regular, med school graduating, AMA member, licensed professional doctors.  They are largely guessing.  They don't keep up on research.  They get influenced by the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, and by what school they happened to go to and what their co-workers happen to beileve:

http://www.utne.com/science-and-technology/a-study-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away.aspx

Read it.  It's scary stuff. You should not trust your doctor.  Doctors are just people, and they make all the same normal mistakes that all humans make.  Question them.  Get a second opinion, from a doctor in a totally different field.  Get a third opinion.  Take advantage of the age of the internet and do some research on your own.  Try to prove them wrong, even if you suspect they are right.  Every good scientist sets out to prove her own hypothesis wrong before publishing, because it's in searching for contrary data that confirmation bias is undermined.  Its easy to find what you are looking for, but finding what you are looking for is poor evidence that you are actually right.  Search for what you aren't looking for.

We tend to assume, maybe because of all the training they get, maybe because of the white coats, that doctors are like scientists for health, but they aren't.

If a molecular biologist is like an engineer, a doctor is like a mechanic.
The engineer designs brand new inventions, and to do that they have to have extensive understanding of materials science, newtonian physics, mechanics, and advanced mathematics.  The mechanic only needs to understand enough mechanics to figure out how the thing the engineer designed is supposed to work, in order to fix it when it breaks.  It is an important job (its MY job!), but you shouldn't assume a mechanic understands all of the how and why of which materials were chosen or why they were put together just so.  

Similarly, while science at large has figured out a myriad of metabolic pathways, enzymatic processes, and all of the other stuff going on behind the scenes within the human body, doctors tend to only scratch the surface enough to diagnose a few particular problems, and suggest possible ways to help correct them.

A doctor is a mechanic for the body.

Like mechanics, they often seem to believe they know more than they really do, diagnose based on "intuition", and frequently stray from their specialty (or are quick to see every illness as somehow related to their particular specialty).  Given how complex life is, any doctor who finds a simple cause and effect relationship should be at least a little suspect. Given how much there is left for science to learn about how everything works, the more confident a doctor is, the less you should trust them.  Think of them more like weather forecasters - they have more training and equipment than you, so they can give you a better prediction than you can make by guessing, but everything they say has a percentage likelihood of being wrong.  The best doctors know this, and they will be upfront with you about it.  Never discount a medical professional for saying "I don't know".  That is usually the most honest possible answer, and when it comes to your health, an ambiguous truth will at least not do as much damage as a confident mistake can.

All that stuff makes people turn away from modern medicine, and to "alternative" medicine, but that's even worse.  Much much worse.  By definition, alternative medicine is anything which has been already proven in tests to NOT work.

People are drawn to the easy answers, to the alternative health care provider's sense of certainty, to their rejection of "artificial" pharmaceuticals in favor of "natural" treatments - never mind that drugs are derived of naturally occurring compounds, that plenty of herbs are bad for you or even deadly, that cooking food is a process of chemistry, or that the animal body is the biggest, most complex chemical factory that has ever existed.

Some people suggest never eating anything with an ingredient list you don't recognize and can't pronounce.
You want to see a list of scary looking chemicals?

• oligosaccharides
  pantothenic acid
  selenium
  manganese
  lipoprotein lipase
  inactivated alkaline phosphatase
  lactoperoxidase
  C16:0 ß-hydroxy fatty acids
  conjugated linoleic acid*
  phosphorus
  α-lactalbumin
  blood serum albumin
  transferrin
  high proline micelle
  methionine
  cholin
  galactose
  cerebrosides

Gross, huh?  You would never want to eat that weird crap.  Probably something Pfizer created, or Monsanto maybe.

Nope.

Those are all chemicals that are naturally present in milk.

*(which is a TRANSfat omg!!!!!!!! - but wait, aren't transfats all man-made and added by the evil food industry????  What's that?  Some transfats are naturally occurring? How can that be, when everything natural is good and healthy, and all transfats are created by evil corporations??)

Chemicals.
A chemical is anything that is made of matter.  In other words, everything.  Everything you eat and drink is made of chemicals.  You are made of chemicals.  Everything you can see or touch or smell is made of chemicals. Nothing exists that isn't chemicals.  This is not just semantics.  When ever anyone says anything about "chemicals" meaning something "unnatural" or toxic or synthetic or whatever, its coming from ignorance of science.

What is the real difference between a drug made in a factory by a pharmaceutical company and an "all natural" remedy? There are laws requiring the drug company to extensively test their product for effectiveness and side-effects before they are allowed to sell it, while anything not officially classified as a drug has no regulations and  no testing standards.

So far I've listed a bunch of reasons why people might be even more prone to accept superstition in the realm of health care than any other area, but I have found, when discussing this with people in the past, that people are particularly resistant to hearing contradictory evidence to their medical treatments, not just intellectually, but emotionally.

I think, beyond just the normal ways the human mind is always irrational, there are a couple other specific reasons why this is a sticky one:

 - Personal relationships.
This seems to be one of the biggest reasons that alternative medicine is still so popular, despite being proven not to work over and over again.  Its not just that everyone is superstitious.  It's that mainstream medicine has been so totally enveloped by capitalism that doctors don't have time to treat their patients like people.  Which makes people prefer to gravitate to those who actually do treat them like people. 
Compounded by the fact that such a huge amount of physical illness really is closely tied in with the mental and emotional (up to 90% of all doctor visits are for "conditions" caused by stress); sometimes the alternative practitioner really does get better results - just not because of their actual treatments. 
The results are  despite the treatments; they are because of the emotional connection they build with the patient.  

So, of course, when someone challenges the validity of the alternative "treatment", the patient will naturally immediately feel this is an attack on their own personal doctor.  Their own personal doctor is a good person!  S/he is honest and caring and hard working, s/he has a real medical degree and 3 decades of experience and has helped 1000s of people! 
Questioning their belief is seen as a character attack. Even though the same person might dispute a particular religion even while they have close personal friends or relatives who hold that religion, or dispute an economic theory without feeling it is an attack on all who believe it.

It is not a statement on the integrity of any individual.  Doctors are human.  Humans make mistakes. Alternative medicine practitioners believe wholeheartedly, they get invested in their own mistakes and suffer confirmation bias and the backfire effect and all the rest.  That doesn't make them bad people.  It doesn't make them all con men and tricksters.  Most, certainly the vast majority, are totally sincere.  Just like the billions of people who believe in a particular religion, the strength of conviction doesn't mean they are right.

 - People always hate to be mistaken, but they especially feel bad about it if they have spent significant time or money, investing in something that turns out to be wrong.
Nobody likes to feel stupid, and we especially hate feeling like suckers.  So, instead of correcting the view later once we have more information, we usually ignore the new information, or look for a way to justify the old belief.

 - If it feels like it's working, then most people feel it's safer to just keep doing it than to stop, and risk relapse.
If you read some of the links on placebo, there are lots of examples of people asking to continue their treatment even after they are told it was fake!  They KNEW the drug wasn't helping, but they were afraid to change the conditions that led to feeling better.  It's an extreme example of the natural human faulty reasoning of post hoc ergo prompter hoc which is the basis of almost all forms of superstition.  If humans do that even when they know for sure the drug was a fake, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that people will cling to treatments that, as far as they know, might actually be working - even if that "might" is just based on not knowing enough biology and related science to objectively evaluate it.

Between the fact that the body heals itself regardless of what we do the vast majority of the time, and the fact that the placebo effect makes us feel better if we do or take anything that we are told will help, it is no wonder that every form of alternative healing seems to work to those who seek it out.

The treatments always seem to "work" in that the person gets better - or, at least, feels better temporarily.

Of course, there is a huge difference between feeling better for a little while, and actually getting better.  
This is when it really gets me - when the "treatment" isn't even supposedly a cure, when the "treatment" is supposed to continue indefinitely.   I have no numbers to back this up, so maybe I'm wrong, but from personal observation, alternative health care providers seem to much more frequently prescribe "treatments" to patients which are supposed to be regular, and for a lifetime.

I think most of the medical folk who prescribe such things are sincere, but it is certainly convenient that their cures require a lifelong prescription - and the accompanying lifetime of payments.

This seems to be particularly prevalent among the various structuralists, and in particular following any large - but one-time - injury.  Remember when I pointed out that the entire body renews itself regularly?  Different bones heal at different rates, anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months. Torn muscles, tendons, and ligaments, heal within 2 months, and even the most severe damage, that requiring surgery to reattach something torn all the way through, heals within 4 months.  If a person is being treated for an injury that occurred years ago, they really aren't being treated for that injury at all.  That injury has long since healed on its own.

Its important to keep in mind - even with a scientifically validated drug or surgery or other procedure, nothing that medical care can do can actually heal you.  Only the body can do that.  The best treatments serve to facilitate that healing, to remove any obstacles to healing.  Health is the body's default natural state.

I am beginning to suspect that in a lot of these cases the "cure" itself is actually prolonging the problem.

Sometimes this is by interfering with the body's natural self-healing. Sometimes they may make things worse by direct action - unintended drug interactions and side effects, or physical therapies that damage tissues.

In some cases the treatment may prolong injury in the same way that cold remedies do: they make the patient feel better (temporarily), and with their pain masked, they don't rest as much as they need to in order to allow the body to heal.  Contrariwise, oftentimes a person will be told to avoid use of a body part for so long that the muscles and tendons get weak and inflexible, which in turn makes them more prone to future injury.
The most obvious example of this is back injuries.  Someone who has ever strained their back tries to avoid ever doing anything that might stress it, and consequently the muscles bones tendons and ligaments of the lower core atrophy and get weaker and weaker, to the point where they are at much higher risk of injury than they would have been if they had taken the opposite approach, and engaged in a (careful, gradual) consistent program of progressive-load weight-bearing resistance training, and higher risk even then if they had just maintained normal everyday activities.


Most of the time the treatment itself is probably neutral, but the false diagnoses produces a "nocebo effect". They tell you something is wrong with you, they tell you to expect certain symptoms (unless you let them heal you), and you experience what you are expecting. They tell you the symptoms will recur within a certain amount of time, and because you are expecting it, you feel it. The nocebo effect is equally as strong as the placebo effect. You may recall from some of the links above how being told to expect certain negative side effects caused them intensely in patients of both fake drugs and fake acupuncture.

Anytime a health care provider tells you that the problem is something fundamentally wrong with you, or a natural tendency to go out of alignment, out of balance, to absorb negative energy, to build up toxins that need cleansing, whatever it is, the fact of having been told that will make you far more prone to feeling negative symptoms in the future - or to interpret minor unrelated things as being that sign you were waiting for - and that feels like it validates what you were told, and justifies giving them some more money (and time) to let them "heal" you.

I don't think the practitioner does this deliberately, any more than bloodletters and other dark age doctors who killed more of their patients than they helped did it deliberately.   But as a patient, we all owe it to ourselves not to put blind faith in an industry or ideology which has gotten so much wrong all throughout history, and whose track record even today is - debatable. At best.

I'm not trying to tell anyone else what to do or think or believe. 

I just feel a responsibility to share information I have had the privilege of having access to.

I can say, for myself, that I once was a fan of alternative medicine myself, but today I am skeptical of all forms of medicine. Before I take any medical advice, I need to know for myself the clinical trials that have been involved, the efficacy rate, the side-effects and complications, I need some references to independent research, (independent of anyone who is in anyway in the profit chain), and perhaps most of all, I have to understand the process, the cause and effect - how it works, and why.  Lucky for me - for all of us - we happen to live in an age where all of this information is available, for free, from the comfort of home.  For something which has such a profound impact on quality of life, it should be worth a few hours of research.

I think understanding the world at all requires a healthy level of skepticism, but most especially when it comes to health care.  For one thing, the stakes are particularly high.  For another, throughout the history of civilization, medical practice has gotten things wrong much more often than it has gotten them right.
Look at the 4 humors, or bloodletting, or leeches, exorcisms, lobotomies, and the hundreds of downright silly superstitions that nearly every culture has had at some point - so much stuff that we look back on now and think "what in the hell could those people possibly have been thinking?"

And yet, we are so filled with hubris that we never stop to think how, 100 years from now people will look back on us today and think the same thing.

You trust yourself WAY too much

Think about all the stuff you know, on all the millions of topics there are to know stuff about - numbers, names, relationships, science, history, skills, where you left your keys...
Now think about how many times in your life you have been mistaken about something you had been pretty sure of.

Of all the stuff you "know" right now, a fair percentage of it is wrong.

For some strange reason, nobody seems to notice this, and everyone goes on being sure about all manner of things - frequently including things that there is no possible way they could know for sure.

We (humans) have figured out a fair bit about our own minds.
Our awareness, perception, and recall are all very, very bad; yet we almost all almost always remain confident that our own perception accurately portrays the world outside our heads, that our memories accurately reflect what actually happened.

But you don't have to take my word for it.


The following 3 documentaries are really fun. They are interactive - if you have any doubt about your own limitations, if you don't doubt your self as much as you should - these videos should cure you of that, and grant you some humility.
And they do it in a totally entertaining way.

Watch 'em!!!

(Embedding isn't working, blogger won't upload, and Nat Geo won't allow it on youtube, so you will have to click on the links to watch)

  National Geographic: Test Your Brain Episode 1 - Pay Attention

  National Geographic: Test Your Brain Episode 2 - Perception

  National Geographic: Test Your Brain Episode 3 - Memory



No, I'm serious, click, watch.



Its free!
They are each 45 minutes long, but what you learn from it will make your life better forever.
They will help you make smarter decisions.

And aside from all that, it's filled with tricky games and puzzles, magic tricks (which they then explain) and tests, and if you don't enjoy it, I offer you a rock solid no-questions-asked, double-your-money-back-guarantee.

If you make it to the 5 minute mark without getting sucked in, well... I just don't know what's wrong with you.

 You may not have an entire 2 and a half hours right now, but do come back and watch the other two as soon as you have a chance to give it your undivided attention.

 And when you finish, take some time to reflect on what it all implies.



Its fun and interesting, but it is really one of the most profound realizations a human can have, to fully internalize this information, to accept how this affects us literally every day, to acknowledge what it implies about everything we think we know.

 As all the games and puzzles in the 3 videos showed you - you, reading these words right now - are not an exception.

 It isn't just some interesting psychological study, weird guys in labs coats doing stuff to dogs and rats which is ethically questionable, or surveys with tricky worded questions taken by college kids.

 This stuff affects you every second of every day, every piece of information you take in is processed by the same brain that failed all the tests in these documentaries.
 Which means you should always be aware that what you remember is not necessarily what actually happened, you should know there was always something going on that you missed, know that every single experience is subject to misperception, and you should question the stuff you are confident about just as much as you question those who disagree with you.

 This is not to say you can never know anything with confidence. It just means that personal experience should not outweigh better evidence. Maybe you saw something that looked like a ghost once, but given how imperfect our awareness, perception, and memory is, the more objective evidence against it should outweigh your personal experience.

Get over your ego.

You aren't always right.

 Even things you are 100% certain about, sometimes turn out to be wrong.

 Maybe you should be 100% certain less often.

This isn't an insult to you personally, it is just the nature of the human brain. We weren't optimized for our modern world, nor, for that matter, for understanding the world and getting to underlying truth's. We were optimized for survival on the savanna, and sometimes superstition leads to better chances at survival than careful objective analysis. Our world today is a million times more complex than eat or be eaten though, so it is in our own best interests to learn what our brain's limitations are, so that we can learn to compensate for them.

So, who do we trust, if we can't even trust our own senses? Not somebody else, that's for sure. Somebody else makes all the exact same mistakes as we make, but with the added disadvantage that they haven't seen those videos, they haven't been to the You Are Not So Smart blog or heard the podcast

   

and so their misinformed opinions don't even have the chance to compensate for the human mind's natural errors, because they aren't aware of them.

Enter Science!

Science is not guys in lab coats with fancy degrees and expensive equipment.
Science is just a method for checking if a particular idea is right or not, as objectively as possible.
Its a way to compensate for all the limitations of the brain that those documentaries I linked to just taught us about.
No one person can make a scientific proclamation and have it actually be science - it is crowd sourced, anyone can check, even up to and including you, whether the things it suggests actually pan out under testing and double testing. That's what makes it more reliable than personal experience, or even the collected opinions of thousands of people.

But I won't go into that in too much detail, because I already have, quite extensively, here:

  Science!


  http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/2013/05/science.html

Quote on Consumerism from the founder of Early Retirement Extreme

"The problem is that most of us have become utterly dependent on this industrial-technological  system  for  all  of  our  needs  and  wants.  Shopping is as important as oxygen to us. Close down the malls for a few days and people go crazy. We no longer think of ourselves as citizens but as ”consumers”, a descriptive term that I've always found kind of derogatory. This dependence  is  so  fundamental  that  it  goes unseen, much like fish don't see the water they swim in. Consequentially, the only solution we can think of whenever we struggle with unfulfilled needs or wants is to ”earn more” and start a side-business, negotiate a raise, and gamble on some more education – it's an investment in your future (ha!). The only perceived way to a better so-called standard-of-living is to work harder and smarter and earn more. However, what this often results in is more environmental damage or at best reshufling money from suckers to scammers." - Jacob Lund Fisker

Wearing the Skirt

Been thinking a bit recently about gender.

Thanks, primarily, of all things, to being more active on Facebook than I've ever been.

Which exposed me to:

http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

(A ruler can only lead with the consent of at least most of the people. Women make up slightly more than half of the population. Sure, today institutions are set up that hold the status quo, but how did it get this way in the first place? This is a pretty plausible theory of how and it puts a lot of other stuff into a different perspective too.)

and this

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tabathaleggett/lego-just-got-told-off-by-a-7-year-old-girl

(I'm afraid the larger issue is that we all assume the standard lego person is male. The standard lego person looks like this:

which has no features which indicate gender.
Kind of like when cartoons give a female animal character long hair or eye lashes, lipstick, or (human type) breasts - even if she isn't a mammal - because if a cartoon animal just looks like an animal "obviously" it must be male(??)
It goes way deeper than corporations and marketing. We have all internalized it. Even the girl who wrote the letter.)

and then this



www.buzzfeed.com/marietelling/this-powerful-video-shows-men-what-it-feels-like-to-be-subje

(Overall, this was great. I love that it was made, and I hope some of the guys who treat women so disrespectfully see it, and it gets through... There is one problem I have with this video though - the last scene perpetuates a belief, shared by almost everyone, which is based more on misogyny than fact.
The guy really was "asking for it" when he yelled back at the gang members. Not because of how he was dressed or any signals he gave off, but because he YELLED BACK AT GANG MEMBERS!...
every male above about the age of 13 who lives in an area with street crime knows that doing that will get the shit beat out of you.  Because the reality is that men are the victims of violent crime by strangers over 1/3 more often (down from twice as often a couple decades ago). What any male with even an ounce of street smarts does when a group of 4 dangerous looking teens starts harassing him verbally is ignore it, let it go, and continue with his life. Sometimes women yell or insult them back - and the reason they think this is ok is because most of the time they can get away with it - almost all men, even the low life scum who look for excuses to attack strangers, have internalized the (sexist) rule of "never hit a woman".
But then, in the few instances where it does escalate to violence - and despite the fact that it escalates to violence more often with men - we take those examples and pretend it proves that women are disproportionately victims. It isn't because the statistics actually support it. Its because our misogynist society starts out with the premise that women are victims as a given, and then looks for the evidence to support it.)

followed by this

http://imgur.com/a/RmAjE

(It may be true, as far as it goes - but I can think of more than a couple examples where the FriendZoner does choose to go out with the guy who WOULD take advantage of her when she's drunk, or who WON'T listen to her when she is upset. As though she is only attracted to people she wouldn't actually be friends with. Not saying it is universal, but it seems to be pretty common. She might even be even be attracted to The Nice Guy - if only he acted like more of a jerk. That doesn't make her an evil bitch. But it does maybe make her judgement a little suspect.)

and then, finally this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/does-a-more-equal-marriage-mean-less-sex.html

(I can say, for me personally, I feel no pressure to fit a masculine role, but I have experienced what it talks about first hand - it could easily have been about my marriage. And it was mostly her; she wanted equality and friendship in principal, but was attracted to the jerk who didn't respect women. It looks a lot to me like what I was talking about earlier about the Nice Guy not being sexually attractive by virtue of being a nice guy - that makes him seem like a brother, which is anti-sexy... If it is because of societal expectations and gender roles, then why do lesbian couples experience the exact same patterns?)

all of which, of course, I had comments on, usually lengthy (compared to a typical online comment) and most of which drew responses from others, which in turn got me thinking even more.

I feel like there is a bit of a common theme running beneath the surface, one which is touched on, or at least alluded to, by things I've written before

 (like  Sexual Dimorphism, and Caveman Love,  
FemDom vs. Feminism: Power doesn't come from penetration,
The Oldest Profession,   and 
What does our gut reaction to the word "rape" say about our subconscious beliefs about women's agency?  )

but is never really spelled out explicitly, mainly because even I take the world as it is for granted, and even though I actually have thought about this in the same terms before, I didn't actually remember in the moments I was writing any of those.

Its nothing particularly revolutionary - in fact, it seems it should be obvious, and I'm sure many others have thought of, and have written about the same thing, but it still seems to escape our daily consciousness, even people whose primary focus in life it these sort of issues.

I had been trying to pin down what exactly it is that I don't like about the word feminism, why I prefer "egalitarianism", for several months now.  It isn't just that all people should be treated fairly and with respect - I think it's totally valid that any group which has disproportionate challenges in society get more focus in order to change that.  And its not just that using the root "fem" to apply to females implies that all women are (or should be) "feminine", which is a social construct to which not all females conform (so does feminism not aim to help them?).

The last of the essays I read finally helped solidify what it actually is...

Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, the focus was on allowing women to participate in democracy.  Around the time of world war II (due to necessity) women entered the work force in large numbers and after, due partly to that, partly to politics, and partly to technology, women were more and more free to be something other than a house wife, even if they got married.  In the 50s and 60s there was a struggle to change American culture to allow women to wear pants - and while that success has become so common place that its a complete non-issue today, the phrase taken from that transition still has the same meaning today - if a woman "wears the pants" in the relationship, it means she is the head of the household.

We've come a really really long way in allowing a woman complete freedom to choosing any role in life that she is capable of and interested in, even though we aren't quite all there yet - there are still some roles in the military that are closed off by gender, regardless of ability, and we still have yet to have a single female president - but those last few are within sight of changing.

But what was neglected all along, because of the focus on women specifically, was, well...    men, and their roles. 

I don't mean that in a "it's so unfair" kind of way. 
The vast majority of women are heterosexual, and the vast majority have at least one serious intimate relationship at some point in life.  So the social roles expected of men are directly relevant to women.  For one thing, the things that women traditionally did still need to get done.  Allowing women to enter what was once men's sphere, while not allowing men to enter women's, leads directly to the modern challenges of women who want to have both a career and a family.

See, while it has become acceptable for women to - both literally and figuratively - wear pants, it never became acceptable for men to wear the skirt. 

Again, both literally and figuratively.

A woman wearing pants is not a transvestite, no one assumes she is gay on that basis alone (never mind that the majority of male cross dressers are straight anyway, I'm just talking about public perception), and it doesn't even make her not "feminine".  A average man wearing a skirt (not a kilt, an actual skirt), who isn't dressing up as a female as a sex fetish, joke, or political statement, simply isn't done.  Anywhere.  Ever.

In the figurative sense it is slowly changing to at least a small degree.  There are male school teachers, flight attendants, receptionists, and nurses, and none of those are seen as particularly shocking.  There is even such a thing as a stay-at-home dad, though its extremely rare (~3% of married couples - and this includes involuntarily unemployed fathers), and depending on the specific American sub-culture, still frequently (usually?) stigmatized.

I can imagine attempted explanations for this going along the lines of male machismo, or that patriarchy controlled the terms of change as women were allowed political and economic power, but those explanations wouldn't really explain why men would want to deprive themselves of choice, and besides, they are a bit circular.  They tend to assume that half the population of the world has no influence on culture - even after political and economic power were won / granted.

I would expect some people's responses to point to the theoretical "matriarchal" societies prehistoric societies - unfortunately, as nice as that myth is, there isn't any actual evidence to support it having ever been true, anywhere: https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/eller-myth.html  and  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy )

I remember reading an article about the difficulties of modern educated Russian women in finding husbands. 
Manufacturing and other traditionally-male semi-skilled labor jobs - jobs which once provided a comfortable and respectable life - were in decline, leaving a lot of men struggling to adapt.  Meanwhile, more women graduated universities than men, and began taking higher level professional jobs.

The trouble finding husbands wasn't due to a deficit of smart, kind, hard-working men.  It was that the women, even though they had enough income to support themselves and a family, were unwilling to partner with someone who earned less than them.
Surveys found that the average single man was willing to marry a woman with more education or more income (as well as one with less) than himself, but this was not reciprocal.

It was women's choices, preferences, biases, that was controlling the situation.

My friend who shared that last link above (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/does-a-more-equal-marriage-mean-less-sex.html)

suggested that the reason women insist on their partner's being traditionally "masculine" and dominant (in sexual relations, if nowhere else) is because of their internalized sexism.

I could see that.  It certainly fits with the conclusions I came to in my "perceptions of rape and feminism" blog post. 

That explanation definately would make sense: men have had about about half a century to get used to the idea of strong independent women, several generations have grown up taking female police officers and business leaders and politicians for granted - men my age or younger don't actually remember the time when women were barred from traditionally male roles.  However the stay-at-home-dad, the sensitive nurturing husband, the sexually submissive boyfriend, these things are relatively new.  Perhaps it will just take more transition time for women to adapt to egalitarianism, to start seeing "feminine" men as being sexy, the way men have accepted "masculine" women can be sexy.

That explanation is appealing, but it begs the question of why similar patterns seem to emerge in the generally egalitarian gay female relationships, but not in the generally not egalitarian gay male relationships. It also doesn't explain satisfactorily why so many straight women accept, or prefer, egalitarianism in every aspect of a relationship, except for sexually, where she enjoys it more if the male takes charge.

The alternative is that this may be rooted in biology.  That could make sense too: the creep who sees every attractive female primarily as a potential sex partner, who doesn't want to take "no" for an answer, is likely to get more lifetime sex partners than the respectful guy who sees women as people first and foremost, and prefers his partner to be his friend and equal - if only because of the numbers; the bad boy is constantly trying to get some, while the nice guy is waiting for someone to give him a sign that she's interested.  Pre-birth control it means jerks are going to have more children.  Assuming that some degree of personality traits are genetic, from the stand point of a female who (subconsciously) wants to maximize not just the number of offspring, but of grand- and great-grand-children, then it makes sense to have sons who will have lots of kids with lots of different partners, and so it makes sense to find a partner who will pass on some disrespectful womanizing genes.  She would still want a relationship with a guy who actually cares about her, who will take good care of the family, but the jerk would be sexy - after all, humanity also evolved hundreds of thousands of years before paternity tests.

This explanation is much less encouraging - it implies that this phenomenon will be a hell of a lot harder to change overtime, maybe even that there may be relatively little we can do about it.  It could mean we may never expect to eliminate sexual harassment or date rape, since the dynamic set up by women being turned on by "alpha males" actively encourages both.  It would mean nice guys would always continue to finish last, sleazy pick-up-artists would always be successful, stay-at-home-dads will never become common. 

But not necessarily.  The human brain is pretty complex, and culture has managed to have us go against instinct before (most notably in the suppression of violence).

Either way, in order to address it, we have to understand it.  And before we can understand it, we have to become aware (and/or admit) that it even exists in the first place.

So. 
Tell me, my heterosexual female readership:

Am I totally off-base on this? 
I could be totally wrong. 
Correct me if I am. 
I am very open to being proved wrong. 
I would love it if I was wrong. 

All of my personal experience, not to mention the statistics, tell me I'm not, but I'm still open to new information.

Are there actually lots and lots of exceptions, and I just don't know about it?

Do you, personally, find it sexier when your partner takes charge in the bedroom?

Have you ever turned down a male friend who was interested in you, even though you liked him and he was attractive because you "see him like a brother" or you "know him too well" or "you just don't see him that way? 
If so, why are trusting and being comfortable with a person anti-sexy traits? 
If you would want your partner to be your friend, why would you not consider a close friend as a candidate for partner?

Have you ever not said what you wanted, or not made the first move, because you wanted the guy to be the one to initiate?

Have you ever had a guy be uncomfortably sexually aggressive, perhaps even to a point that made you dislike him as a person, but still found yourself turned on by the situation?

Regardless of if you would actually want it in the real world, have you ever had a fantasy of being forced, or does the idea seem at all sexy, or if you ever actually have been, was it, on any level, sexy or enjoyable?

Do you prefer to be submissive, (even if only in terms of sex)?

Do you tend to think of intercourse as him fucking you, (as opposed to you fucking him)?

Do you sympathize with the women from the article?

How about the examples in my blog post on the topic? 

It certainly resonated with my own personal experience (of course, a couple of the anecdotes were drawn from my personal experience), but I have a fairly small sample size.

Do you prefer that your partner be physically taller than you?

Has the guy been the one to first express romantic interest in more than half of your relationships and/or dates?

You don't have to tell me, or answer out loud, I'm just asking you to question yourself, to be aware of the answers. 

If the answer to, not necessarily all, but even just any one of them is yes, why do you think that is? 
Is it something you've learned, something you've internalized from cultural expectations, or do you suspect its something deeper, more primal than that?

If the answer to any of them is yes, how do you reconcile that with your values and principals around feminism and equality and power?

I could see if it was just any one individual, a person can have any particular preference - "that is what I believe in principal, this just happens to be what I personally like, and my personal tastes have no political meaning". That seems to be the most common self-justification, the most common way to reconcile principal and practice, politics and desire.  On the surface it seems like a perfectly reasonable answer, and it allows a person to not have to think about uncomfortable questions.
But if its universal, or an overwhelming trend, if even just more than 50% of straight women answer "yes" to any of the above questions, then there are obviously sociopolitical implications. 
Or, at least, it seems obvious to me - yet it seems like nobody notices.
 

I come across sexually assertive women, anti-sexism activists, queer women who challenge traditional concepts of gender, all wanting to be dominated sexually.
In a different context these same women will object to, for example, sexual harassment, but somehow see no connection between the two.  Men who harass are like spam or telemarketers or junk mail - all it takes is one positive response in 10,000 to make the strategy successful, but if the positive response rate was absolute zero, they wouldn't waste their time.  And it shouldn't be surprising that some women respond positively to what others call harassment, if in other contexts a power differential is seen as desirable.

As I pointed out in the rape and feminism blog post, if we want to reduce date rape, it is absolutely vital that women not ever say "no" when they really mean "yes" - and surveys find that the majority of young, sexually active women, by their own admission, have done exactly that at some point in their lives (61%).  When I first read the statistic, I assumed it was due to cultural expectations, a way to avoid 'slut shaming' - "There's bound to be talk tomorrow" ... "At least I'm gonna say that I tried" - but after reading the NY Times article that inspired what I'm writing now, I wonder if there's more to it after all.

"Ninety percent of these women said that fear of appearing promiscuous was an important reason for their behavior.  Many said that they wanted their dates to wait, or “talk me into it.”  And some said that they told their dates no because they “wanted him to be more physically aggressive." [emphasis mine]

So far the push for equality has been focused on the tangible for women - legal status, employment, dress; and the mental/emotional for men - how they are supposed to think about women.

We've pretty much ignored the physical world of men - there is no law protecting men who choose to wear a skirt to work - while the mental/emotional for women has been pretty much ignored too.

There are no college or corporate educational videos, no pamphlets or handouts, no protest rallies or petitions, that address how women view men or sexuality.  We tell men not to look at women as sexual objects, and leave it at that, as though it were a given that we don't need to tell women not to want to be looked at as sexual objects - even though there is a lot of evidence that says they many (most?) do.  The former will never succeed without the latter, because the message men get from women in their personal lives will always outweigh the message they get from activists or the human resources department.

So.

Whoever reads this:

speak up! comment.  I want to hear different ideas and viewpoints and opinions and theories and personal experiences and thoughts and feelings.

I know people stumble across this blog somehow or other - I can see the internal statistics.  Some of you even stay on the page long enough to read.

You can even comment anonymously if you want.

Could you have a passionate and fulfilling sex life with a man who, figuratively speaking, wears the skirt in the relationship?

Why or why not?

Is it possible that the current dynamic will ever change, and, if so, how might that happen?

Not a great start to the new year / new life

Lets see...

After almost 2 months of trying to sell my RV trailer with no success, I finally found not one, but at least 2 serious buyers who had the cash and wanted to buy within the week.
Then I got about 7 calls and emails of other people interested in seeing it (after I listed it for $500 more than the first two were expecting), and I was considering if I should try to get the best price or just get it sold and over with.

And so, of course, that's when it gets stolen.

Its 35ft long, 15ft tall, 8ft wide, and 7500lbs.  It requires a 3/4-ton truck and a class IV hitch at a minimum to move.  It had a solid hitch lock on it.
Someone, some how, hooked it up in the middle of the night and took off.  Several witnesses (people interested in buying, and the police, who were about to ticket it for being in one place too long) saw it one afternoon, I went to move it the next morning, gone.





My building's janitor died suddenly and unexpectedly.  He had some ongoing health problems, but they seemed mostly controlled.  There may have been some drug use other than the prescribed kind, its not that clear.
It sucks, because, as he did clean ups for the building and I did repairs, we ended up working together fairly often, and I got to know him better than anyone of my other neighbors.  He was a good guy.  I last talked to him a day or two before he passed out on the street and was hospitalized.  I haven't known many people personally who have died.  A neighbor who I barely spoke to once, my grandmother who I met a couple times and talked to on the phone sometimes.  The closest to me was my brother.  When that happened I was living in a different state, and I hadn't interacted with him for at least a year, and only sporadically for a few years before then.  Of course I knew him much better, was closer to him, but in one sense the distance meant it didn't feel as real and immediate as this time, when it was someone I had seen and spoken to just days before.

That is sad and unfortunate in its own right of course. On top of that, it means I am now responsible for the stuff he used to do.  And it turns out he was going above and beyond, cleaning up after some extremely lazy and irresponsible neighbors.  Several households here apparently can't be bothered to carry their own trash all the way down one or two flights of stairs to put it in the dumpster.  When our janitor died, bags of garbage almost immediately started piling up on the stairs and landings and balconies behind the building.
Followed closely, of course, by the more civilized tenants calling me to complain about the garbage.
The culture of poverty is very disheartening.



There was a tense and uncomfortable interaction with my recent girlfriend, who I am still friends with, still work with, and who didn't want to break up.  I was trying to avoid hurting her, but the way the timing worked out, the attempt itself caused some hurt.  Having been on both sides of that now, its hard to say which feels worse - being the one who is left, or the one who does the leaving.  They both suck.  In different ways, but both a lot.  I really really hate hurting or disappointing people.  Especially people I care about.



Of course, as I mentioned in my last post, I ended a brief fling.  Or rather, I should say, she ended it.  So that hurt a bit.  Not terribly, but the timing wasn't great.  The worst of it lasted about a day and a half, maybe 2 days.  Then I reconnected with two other women I was beginning to get to know before I got distracted by her, and that helped me regain some perspective and clear my mind, and more importantly clear my heart.




Then I started a huge work project with my recent-ex / current friend.  It involved moving a large amount of concrete up a steep incline, about 4 stories worth of steep driveways and rock stairs and dirt paths, to where we will build a giant chicken coop and fully enclosed run.  1000lbs worth.  My back was sore for days afterward, so much it was hard to get up out of a chair or walk around. 
Ok, ok - all the rest of these have been emotional hurt, and this was just physical.
But it added to the stress non-the-less.




I failed my advancement test to move to a higher rank in the Coast Guard for a 2nd time.
From those who I've talked to, most fail it a few times.  Its kind of a stupid test - lots of esoteric numbers to memorize that you would just look up in a reference manual in real life, and very little practical stuff on how to actually run and maintain the systems.  In fact, the entire thing is being completely re-done.  Sometime in the next year.  So, probably after I finally pass the current one.  Oh well.



I haven't been working nearly as much as I'd like to.  This year the slow economy finally caught up to my business.  I haven't had to dip into savings, but I keep looking at my retirement fund each month, and it is just flat-lining.  Each month I am more and more behind on my long-term goals.  I am already behind, because I didn't even start trying to save until I was 30 years old.  And I really like to at least partially retire early, while I still have the health and strength to fully enjoy it and appreciate it.  I could be volunteering and taking classes and writing and who knows, maybe even traveling the world by bike!  But 40 grand is not going to last the rest of my life...
In my reluctance to move any money from savings to pay for daily life, I actually bounced a check!  Haven't done that in many many many years. 
Selling the RV would have been really nice.
At least it was insured, so maybe I'll recover something...



And now the most recent addition to this string of unfortunate events:



The woman I recently stopped dating has for some reason gotten the idea that every number she receives from a blocked or unknown number is actually me, calling to harass her, or, I don't know, beg her back, or something, I really don't know.
She doesn't just suspect this, she "KNOWS" it.  She sent me an angry email to leave her alone, and she said not to bother to deny I'm calling over and over, because she "knows" its really me, and nothing I say will make any difference.

What makes this not just paranoid, but a little insane, is that she said that the person calling ("me") is leaving messages.  Which means all she would need to do to find out who is actually calling is just listen to one of the messages!!!!  That would answer it, with actual absolute certainty.  But she thinks she doesn't have to listen to it, because her intuition tells her that its me.

This would be why I always argue against intuition so strongly. 
The strength of the feeling behind it does not make it any more likely to actually be correct. 

Here is someone who has faith in her intuition that I would call and harass her for weeks after we stopped talking no less strong than other people have faith in God, when in fact I haven't called her ever.  Even when we were still dating!  Her phone has a broken speaker, so we always connected by chat or text.  She stopped talking to me during a chat mid-conversation, and I gave up.  I moved on, I scheduled dates with other people (people who I have a much higher OKCupid match % with anyway!  In fact, my number 1 and 2 highest matches in my area.  So its not been all bad news recently), I was living my own life, totally unaware that somewhere else in the world someone was experiencing an imaginary version of me tormenting her.

I don't know exactly why this bothers me so much.

Maybe because I told her so much about myself, my thoughts and feelings and fears and dreams, because I was totally honest and held nothing back, and this is apparently the impression she got from all that: that I am a likely stalker.

Why should I care what this one random person who I will never have to interact with ever again thinks?

I know, intellectually, that this has nothing to do with me.  It has to do with her having had a crappy life where many of the people she was close to, family, long term partner, turned out to not be trustworthy or caring people. Her family was anything but supportive during the transition from child to adult years, one of the times many of us need it the most. 
She was manipulated and deceived in a pretty major way by her partner for years and years.  That's a pretty good reason to become cynical and jaded and paranoid, isn't it? 

If you have never gotten close to anyone who is actually honest and straight-forward and isn't trying to take advantage of you, then of course your intuition is going to be confused by me, its going to be trying to figure out what my angle is. 
Its like Kelly said about Darryl:
"Darryl Philbin is the most complicated man that I have ever met. I mean who says exactly what they're thinking? What kinda game is that?"

But on an emotional level, it still hurts.  Obviously making phone calls is not the biggest deal, but it feels like a smaller version of being falsely accused of something like murder or rape. 
Is this really how I come across? 
Why would anyone think that about me? 

And I feel particularly helpless, because there is no possible way I can defend myself.  If I were to say anything to her, like "just listen to the god-damn message! you will see it isn't me", or offer my phone records, or point out that if I wanted to contact her, I would have just sent a text so that she would actually get it, or point out my last blog post that clearly shows I got that it was over back then and was already in the process of moving on - the very fact that I contacted her to communicate one of those messages, it would be contacting her, and that in itself would reinforce the idea that I am trying to contact her!

Its a classic Catch-22!!!!

It wouldn't be so bad if it was just that someone once thought that.  But its present tense.  It is presumably future tense.  Shes still going to get phone calls from "unknown".  Everyone does.  Maybe it's different people each time, and she is just ignoring all of their messages.  Maybe it's telemarketers.  Maybe she really does have a stalker, she just doesn't know who it is! 
Her ex is a drug addict who she is still in contact with, who she had been giving money to even after they broke up, until just recently.  Seems like a pretty likely candidate. And as long as the calls don't stop, she will presumably continue to assume (or rather, "know") that its me. 

Even if she were to eventually discover that future calls weren't me, I have little doubt it wouldn't shake her faith that the past calls really were.  That's how the human mind works - we hate for our versions of reality to be wrong so strongly that we will bend information in whatever way is necessary to fit the pre-written story.


This is perhaps why normal people are guarded around new people they meet that they don't know that well yet.  You never know when a seemingly normal, intelligent person will turn out to actually be mildly insane.

I should have known better.  There were some red-flags that reminded me of my ex-wife, and while she never did this specific thing, it was the sort she would do.  She was frequently convinced that her intuition of my thoughts, feelings, and motives were more accurate and genuine than me actually stating what they were, and she would then respond to her wrong assumptions while ignoring anything I said. 
But of course, I wasn't lying, and I was self-aware, and she was just wrong.  And it caused a lot of (totally unnecessary!) conflict.  A whole lot.  She had the same tendency to assume the worst possible motives for other peoples actions (not just mine).  She had the same extreme difficulty in letting her guard down around others, because she was never really sure anyone was trustworthy.

I think that maybe the biggest part of why this is affecting me so much.  Because it reminds me of my failed marriage.  Because I feel like I didn't learn as much from it as I thought I did.

And because I fear that maybe it says something about me if I am specifically attracted to people who are emotionally unhealthy.  I don't know if that is really true, but there is definitely a part of me that wants to reach out and help people I feel close to.  Its a sort of protective instinct, I think, or just a desire to be helpful, maybe to be needed, I really don't know.  I have the patience and the understanding of how the mind works.  I know I can actually help people get over mental blocks, because I have done it successfully in the past.  Its just that there is one factor that I have no control over.  And it happens to be the biggest one.  The other person has to want to change.  And most people don't.  If they did, most people would have already, on their own, or at least started to. 
You don't go into a relationship thinking "this is a problem, but its one that can be fixed".  Not unless they are saying they know its a problem, and they want to work on it.  Maybe not even then.

But come on.  You can't take a sample size of 2 and call it a pattern.  Yes, there was an element of this in a love interest from very long ago - but that person was actually very receptive to working through her past trauma and learning to trust people, and I like to think I may have actually helped in that process.  And there was no such element at all in my fling with Valerie.  If she had any emotional hang-ups, I never knew about them.  We just got excited about each other, had lots of fun, and realized we weren't compatible as partners.  We tried being friends, but she kept giving me these romantic looks, and she admitted years later it was hard for her to transition to friends after what we had experienced together.  She was healthy.  I fell for her.  So I'm not specifically attracted to people who aren't.

Maybe it bothers me because I didn't see it coming.  At all.  Like, I saw signs that she probably would never be able to completely trust another person, that she thought she knew my internal state better than me.  That she broke it off didn't surprise me.  The fact that she would think I would keep bothering her wasn't even a total shock.

But the part where she is convinced even if I just say "I haven't called you", the part where she is so sure that she doesn't even listen to the message, that caught me completely by surprise.  Refusing to listen means that she WANTS to believe its me.  She doesn't want to be proven wrong.  For some reason, a reason I can't even begin to guess at, her version of reality demands that I be someone completely different than I am.  How would it shake her foundational understanding of reality to find out that I am actually off living my own life, not thinking about her?  Why is that something a person would be desperate to not be proven wrong about?


I always assume the best of everyone.
I always take people at their word, take what they say at face value.
Living here, in this building in East Oakland, I'm beginning to learn that people really do lie.  A lot.  I'm learning to be skeptical of people's words.  I don't like learning that.  I'd rather live my life in blissful ignorance.  I want to believe that other people are sincere.  I want to believe that other people are trying to be good people, that they are trying to understand the world, and that they are doing the best they can given limitations of intelligence and knowledge.  I want to believe that, outside of pick-up artists, salesmen, con-artists, pimps, drug dealers, hypnotists, and politicians, that people are not manipulative.  Real, ordinary people, are not manipulative.  People say what they mean and mean what they say.  Don't they?  Why wouldn't they?  It makes the world a better place.  And people are sane.  Aside from the nutcases and the coo-coo-clock people, the ranting homeless and the institutionalized, people try to see the world as it really is, they don't just see what fits the story they make up inside their heads.  Right?  The guy who does the blog/podcast at YouAreNotSoSmart.com says that this is exactly what basically everybody does.  The only difference between you and I and the guy who thinks he is Jesus is that our stories fit reality a little closer.  But when presented with new information that conflicts with our stories, we reject it, or find a way to rationalize it.  Everyone does that.  That's all she is doing.  Its not about me.  Its that, just like my story says nobody is manipulative or dishonest, her story says everybody is.  And meeting me, getting to know me, I don't fit that story.  So she had to invent a way to make me fit her story.
That was apparently much easier to do when she didn't have to actually interact with me.

So I guess that's a positive way to look at it.

And that's where I am going to end this post.  Because I insist that everything I look at have a positive spin.
All of these things, the whole series of less than wonderful things to happen this month, someday I will look back and they will all be past tense.  They are all temporary.
Much worse things could happen.  Much worse things have happened, and are happening to people all the time.
It is just wearing me down that there are so many in such a small span of time.  It's cortisol that makes me feel this way.  Its stress.
I need sex and cuddling and a few good nights sleep (the first two will help with the third) and to spend some time in a less toxic environment and some more friends (so that at any given moment there is someone to talk to) and some rest.  I need some time to pass.  Eventually I'll get all of those things, and life will go back to its default state of basically good all the time.