bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with social science

May’s book club pick was a book I’d vaguely intended to read back when it was published when I was in college and I simply have never gotten around to: Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. I remember when this book came out and I’m pretty sure I read excerpts in magazines or interviews with the authors or such other press coverage at the time it was published, although now that I think about it I also think it was a hot enough subject in the years immediately following its publication that I read some excerpts or summaries or something multiple times when I was reviewing various social science textbooks for Pearson in 2011-2013 or so.

As a result, the main ideas in this book weren’t brand new to me–I was already familiar with basic psychological concepts like the fundamental attribution error, and terms like “cognitive dissonance.” It was probably a good refresher to go over what they mean, and there was a lot of interesting stuff in the details. I was also at least sort of familiar with some of the problems with police interrogation and general magical thinking in the criminal justice system, though I think that going over the specifics was quite valuable. The scandals around “recovered memories” I knew less about, although I am pretty sure I have read a little bit about it before (I read a lot of psych 101 textbooks when I was working for Pearson, OK?) and knew that “recovered memories” were hokum (dangerous hokum).

This is not all to say that I am so smart or the book is soooo basic or whatever but this is a longstanding area of at least some measure of interest; I’ve always been interested in questions of perception and self-perception and why otherwise apparently normal people are Like That, and the past almost-decade of time spent in activist spaces laboriously trying to establish halfway decent social norms in the face of people who are always super gung-ho for other people to Take Accountability but are all special pleading when it comes to their own behavior has not exactly made the subject any less relevant.

The chapter about conflicts of interest in science funding seems uhh very important and relevant to the various scandals and such contributing to our current “crisis of authority” and general anti-intellectualism/epistemological fuckery going on in society at large. Let us, in fact, compromise the science! This will surely have no bad downstream effects in terms of how much the public trusts science and scientists! Hey, why are all these people rejecting science? Don’t they know we are smart and objective? It’s bad news.

If I have one critique of the book it’s that by the end of it, the examples get so wide-ranging that it starts to feel a little One Weird Trick About All of Human Existence-y, even though the authors are careful not to actually say that and are in fact doing exactly what they set out to do, which is to look at this specific facet of human psychology at work in a range of situations that, you know, humans find themselves in. It’s not that I think they are wrong it’s just that it feels fundamentally weird to read like “This thing that is why these two people’s marriage fell apart is also what was going on in the Iran hostage crisis”; like, this is just an insane set of things put next to each other, even though I suppose it is in fact true that nobody saw themselves as the bad guys in the Iran hostage crisis either. It’s not that the book is necessarily weak when discussing politics–it’s pretty strong in many parts–so much as it is weak when it is zooming around too much instead of making a sober case study of, for example, George W. Bush’s inability to admit that the war in Iraq was a) going poorly and b) based on lies, or the idiotic things the Western imperial powers say when they do torture while also seeing themselves as great defenders of human rights.

A good chunk of the book examines self-justification in family dramas, especially marriages, which is probably more immediately relevant to the average reader than self-justification around doing war crimes. I hope. At any rate, it effectively conveys that this is a basic part of everyday psychology that we could all benefit from developing more self-awareness about. As some of my comrades once said in a training about using the chapter Slack: If you think this isn’t about you, then it’s definitely about you.

In conclusion, it is important to Know Thyself, and also don’t talk to cops–they’re legally allowed to lie to you.

My yearlong read for 2022 was Capital: Volume 1 by the inestimable Karl Marx, because I figured that after five years of doing socialism it was high time I actually read it. I’d read some of the earliest chapters way back in the day when I first got involved, but was only able to make two or three book group meetings before I basically gave up going. This I think prepared me a little bit for the first few chapters on this read, since they are the densest and most difficult to follow, so it was nice to have this be the second attempt.

From a modern perspective, the experience of actually reading the book is very uneven. Some parts of it are perfectly easy to read, describing the conditions in various industries and the history of attempts to improve them. Others are harder to read because they involve more abstract theoretical stuff about value that takes some concentration to get one’s head around. And other parts of it are just tough to read because they are responses to other writings by various political economists and journalists and commentators whose opinions nobody still cares about. Marx spends plenty of time rebutting the ideas of people who are still considered influential, like Adam Smith and Richard Malthus, but apparently there were also a lot of two-bit chatterers participating in The Discourse in the 1860s and Marx was determined to rebut every last one of them.

That said, it was a very valuable and often entertaining read. Some of the incredible length is because Marx does try to repeat stuff until you get it, which I found helpful for remembering what everything means. I am still not sure I could give you an accurate off-the-cuff definition of “valorization of capital” but there are a lot of other little bits of Marxist discourse that make more sense now that I’ve seen them fitted into one big framework. I do feel sort of like I should go back and read it all again until more of it sticks (1,200 pages of content is a lot to remember) but more seriously I think if I do read it again, I should probably read it alongside one of those companion/explainer works.

The other thing I’m tempted to do is jump right into Volume 2 for next year’s read, but I think I will give myself a break and try to tackle one of the books that’s been sitting on my TBR shelf for years instead. Maybe I’ll read Volume 2 for 2024.

Because I am a huge snob and have a chip on my shoulder about vague use (and misuse) of jargon in activist spaces/social justice discourse, I lobbied one of my book clubs to read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, the book that coined the term “emotional labor.” What is “emotional labor” specifically? How does it differ from terms like “emotion work” or “feelings management” that have not become omnipresent buzzwords? What does the book have to say about emotional labor in the workplace, the realm that the term was coined to talk about?

Despite my pettiness of motivation, I did end up quite genuinely enjoying the book–it was fairly slow going to read, but that’s because I kept stopping to think about things, not because it was particularly difficult. As someone who is not naturally inclined toward fantastic social skills and therefore has a long history of reading advice columns and human sciences textbooks and other stuff that tries to put messy human things in nerd-friendly terms, I have strong opinions at this point about what is woolly vague talking about feelings and what is useful explanatory talking about feelings, and this is pretty squarely the latter. Hochschild walks us through the basics of feelings management in private life, drawing on and critiquing a wealth of earlier social scientists, and then explores what happens–and how it happens–when “feelings rules” are moved into the corporate realm, and someone’s feelings become a product. Her main case study here is Delta flight attendants in the early ‘80s, in part because Delta was consistently one of the highest ranked airlines for customer service, and in part because it was nonunion. (Not-so-fun fact: Delta’s flight attendants are STILL non-union! But they are attempting to unionize: deltaafa.org.) She also does some surveys of college students and, in one particularly interesting chapter, examines the work lives of bill collectors, for whom the particular emotions demanded are far different than those demanded of flight attendants–bill collectors are encouraged to be suspicious, impatient, and angry, so that they can be properly aggressive and disdainful of their debtors.

I’m definitely looking forward to talking about the book although I am somewhat less looking forward to having to draw up some really good meaty questions (I will try, though). One thing I don’t really want to do is summarize the book because I think one of my main takeaways here is oh, everyone on the left (or “left”) who wants to complain about emotional labor really, really should take the time to sit down and read the whole thing; it’ll absolutely give you multiple tools for thinking specifically and concretely about how and why you’re so exhausted and miserable in a way that repeating a phrase you’ve seen on social media ad nauseum absolutely won’t. What is the role of emotion vs. the role of surface behavior in the various aspects of your life? How are the people around you reflecting and enforcing “feelings rules,” and why? Why do some forms of “people telling you what to feel” piss you off so badly, and why do some of them not, and why do people keep trying to tell you your own feelings anyway? When is emotion management “authentic” and when is it not, and why are we so obsessed with “authenticity” anyway? What does putting your feelings at the service of your employer do to your mental health? While reading this book I did a lot of thinking about emotion rules and expectations in social justice spaces, where people are very explicitly trying to challenge and rewrite them to be something less oppressive–and not everyone has quite the same ideas about what that means. For example, I have heard some writers of color despair at the sort of “eat your vegetables” tone in which their books are sometimes recommended to white people–they’d rather people read their books for all the normal reasons one wants to read a book, not because it’s a moral obligation to Read More Authors Of Color, or even because the thing you do actually want to do is Diversify Your Reading.

One thing that really comes through is the continuous expansion of corporations out of their lane, so to speak, to try and continually capture marketing-that-doesn’t-feel-like-marketing, ramping up expectations in their quest to always exceed expectations, generally destroying everything they touch like a fart in search of fresh air. Once it has become expected for service staff to always smile, customers know that they’re supposed to smile, so they become expected to smile extra warmly and sincerely, to surpass the customer-service smile and achieve some other kind of less commercial-seeming smile in the commercial transactions they conduct. It’s enough to make you want to demand openly grumpy flight attendants just to reset things. (On second thought, this line of reaction seems to be what’s driving the “vulnerability porn” phenomenon on various influencer-laden platforms, where audiences now want to be reassured that our influences are just as fucked up and miserable as we are, for authenticity.) Anyway, while the takeaway of the book is certainly not “emotional labor is bad,” which many people seem to think it is, and it is even more certainly not “feelings management is bad,” which many people who think “emotional labor” is just a fancy term for “feelings management” also seem to think it is, one takeaway certainly is that the profit motive is a fucked-up thing to have running our emotional lives, and unfortunately the inevitable capitalist growth imperative does not show any more signs of stopping its inexorable takeover in this realm than it does it any other.

Anyway I am SUPER excited for this discussion! I love to talk about feelings but only in a ruthlessly academic way! No touchy feely stuff, only analysis! Anyway, this is why I have a job where I sit at home and fuck around with documents instead of doing anything client-facing.

Due to time constraints we picked a short book for our next book club, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and although I read it all in one evening I've been mulling over it for several days after before attempting to write a review, and will likely try to reread it before we meet. There's a lot packed into the 106 pages here. The pair of essays -- one short, at just a few pages, the other more than ninety pages long -- combines Baldwin's personal and family history, American history, sociological and cultural commentary, an unnerving dinner with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed, and a call for all of us to truly reckon with America's history and legacy of racism.

The first essay, addressed to Baldwin's nephew (also named James), is personal enough that some of it almost feels a little voyeuristic to read, but its main point -- that at the time it was written, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, celebration was premature, and black Americans had not really been emancipated yet -- is of interest to any reader who is at all invested in America. This letter also introduces a theme Baldwin expounds upon later as well, which that white people, while not "devils" as some movements at the time concluded, were nevertheless not very smart, and that they were in charge of everything was no reason to accept their infantile framing that it was black people who needed to be accepted/assimilated into white society and to become more like white people, because the existing white power structure was dreadful and, within it, people became weird and stupid and dysfunctional (Baldwin writes this in more elegant terms than that, of course) -- in short, he tries to each his nephew to resist internalizing what we now call the white gaze.

The second essay is a mostly autobiographical set of musings about growing up and learning to face the world and all its absurdities and atrocities, and the many temptations and pitfalls and escapes that Baldwin either avoided or did not. He speaks of his terror of falling into a life of crime as he became closer in age to the criminals that haunted the streets of Harlem where he grew up, and of the somewhat self-aggrandizing refuge he found in the Church as a youth pastor -- and then, eventually, how he grew to find it hypocritical and leave it behind him. He writes about the Nation of Islam movement and about why it appealed to people, and he explains both why he thinks it's wrong and that he understands what it's an entirely understandable response to. There is a tendency in much of American liberalism, at least right now, to expend much more fury and moralizing denunciation upon the people supposedly on one's same "side" who are doing it wrong than against the actual forces of oppression, in order to show off that you are one of the reasonable ones and to try and keep your "side" in line. The results are usually a bad look. Baldwin here manages to avoid any sort of ostentatious pearl-clutching or unsightly scrambling to distance himself from the Nation of Islam movement; it is in part a testament to his great empathy and in part a testament to his skill as a writer that he instead portrays the movement and the dinner with a profound sadness and with a tension and feeling of uneasiness that makes this section of the essay especially unputdownable. He writes about the people who join the Nation of Islam in largely sociological terms, describing them as sort of getting entangled in hatred and its weird mythology the way other excellent writers have written about family members sinking into addiction or crime. Though he's understanding of the course of despair and frustration that leads to people joining what is essentially a cult, he doesn't gloss over the fact that it is a supremacist hate group, and that no amount of explanation actually makes that anything other than ugly.

Baldwin reserves some of his profound sadness for his insights into the psychology of white Americans, some of which still rings 100% true and some of which rings slightly less true until you remember he was writing in 1962 and you figure that if it's not completely true now it squares 100% with everything we know about the '50s. Sometimes I forget how weird the '50s must have been until I see, like, advertisements or TV footage or something like that from then, and it's just modern enough that the ways in which it is alien make me feel like I'm on bad drugs, with people smoking on airplanes and all the movies in eye-watering Technicolor. Baldwin describes us as "slightly mad victims of our own brainwashing," which is certainly true, and as being terrified of sensuality, which is something we have made some progress on in some spaces and pretended to make progress on in others, and made no progress on whatsoever in large swaths of American life. Some of the things Baldwin says about stress and psychotherapy, about the aridity of life under the sway of capitalism and its fantasies, have only become more true since the postwar boom ended and the economic deprivation that used to characterize Harlem has hollowed out the entire middle class (even as Harlem becomes gentrified out of existence, from what I hear).

For me personally, it was Baldwin's criticisms of Christianity that interested me the most. He talks about Christianity's history as an imperial power, allied with imperialist nations and foisted upon unwilling populations to "save" them, though the only thing they really needed saving from was the Christians. And he talks about the role of the black Church in ways that echo with criticisms I've read about the Irish Catholic Church, especially in pre-revolutionary Ireland, but the Church he is describing is also in other ways clearly very different, and not only because Catholic Mass tends to be a very stiff and formal affair. But I'm always very interested in people's stories of apostasy, especially people who were once very serious and therefore whose apostasy had to be very serious as well. Baldwin discusses the purposes that his Church serves, both in the community and in his life, purposes both good and bad, and how he came around to where the good parts had outlived their usefulness and stopped outweighing the various hypocrisies that tend to accumulate in religions once they've been around a while.

It is distressing how much of this essay is still relevant, even as the Nation of Islam has been largely reduced to a set of footnotes on the SPLC's hatewatch map. But America as a whole has still not really gotten around to doing much of the real reckoning with race that Baldwin requested of us, though more liberal sectors have started to do more in just the past couple years, as the elections of Barack Obama and the ensuing "whitelash" have brought racial issues front and center in a way we haven't seen in quite a while. We also put an idiot racist kleptocrat and a bunch of Nazis in the White House, though, which unfortunately is going to have a bigger immediate impact on a lot of people's lives than all the interesting new documentaries that are out recently, and I say that as someone who think these sorts of documentaries are really important. (Everyone should go see I Am Not Your Negro.) I'm looking forward to discussing this book with the book group and probably to reading a lot more Baldwin in the future.

After the election, I decided to start a book club.

The first meeting is in January, well before inauguration. For our first book, we picked Sarah Jaffe's Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.

Necessary Trouble covers a bunch of the different protest/activist movements that have arisen in the U.S. since the financial crisis hit in 2008: Starting with the Tea Party, it moves on chapter by chapter to cover Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Our Homes, the Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, Moral Mondays, and a number of climate actions. The section on climate actions, mostly the anti-fracking movement, are kept for the end of the book so that it ends on a maximally apocalyptic note: These are the people fighting government's attempts to literally burn the earth and poison people to make a buck.

Jaffe contextualizes each movement in terms of the events and policies that led up to it being born, often giving recap that go far back into the history of capitalism and of the United States. She ties that in with the stories of activists within each movement, providing in-depth interviews about how and why they got involved and what the movement means to them.

A couple key themes continually emerge. One is that many of these crises have been a long time coming and will not be easily solved. Another is a theme among the activists that so many of them found themselves ashamed of being in the sorts of situations that instigated these movements--of losing their jobs or retirement savings in the financial crash, of being foreclosed on, of holding student debt. Americans really, really want to be hard-working and self-sufficient, and this is part of what's allowed things to get as bad as they have: People will tell themselves that they should individually work harder to overcome whatever's being thrown at them instead of insisting upon being treated fairly, which we tend to believe sounds like petulant whining--that if someone's treating you unfairly, you should be awesome enough to make them treat you fairly, instead of complaining that they're not. The result of this is that the powers that be have been able to tilt the playing field ENORMOUSLY in their own favor before folks who see themselves as average hardworking Americans are willing to admit that they haven't been able to overcome the enormous structural disadvantages they've been put at and maybe you fuckers should just stop stacking the deck. Americans are highly prone to believing that there is still shame in losing even if the other guy was cheating, because you should have been awesome enough to stop the other guy from cheating you.

The book is very hopeful--hopeful that Americans are willing to learn and to organize and to come together in solidarity to get into "good trouble" and demand change. But it also warns of the temptations of the dark side of populism, the scapegoating, tribalist kind illustrated by Trump, who had not yet been, to our eternal shame and possibly to the end of our democracy, barely elected on a technicality with some help via cheating. (And yeah, in true American fashion, I'm pretty ashamed that the Clinton campaign couldn't still beat him even with the cheating, because he's the worst con man ever.) The hopefulness is alternately infectious--Americans have been organizing and fighting; we'll be able to do it more--and depressing. Frankly, the emotional whiplash is a little hard to take.

I learned a lot, though, even as someone who tried to follow these movements relatively closely on social media when they first happened. (For example, I didn't know that Lehman Brothers had gotten its start selling security bonds on slaves--honestly, and this is probably stupid of me, I hadn't realized you could create any sort of financial instruments with slaves as collateral, even though now that I think about it that's precisely what the "chattel" designation means. And I hadn't realized how much of what some of these banks got up to in the mortgage crisis was actually fraud--as in, already illegal--rather than just goddamn stupid.) And the book is so well-written that even though its subject matter is so heavy, it'll make you want to get out into the streets and crash your Congresscritter's next town hall. (My Congressman doesn't have a Town Hall scheduled so I called his office and asked him to have one. Le sigh.)

Highly recommended reading for the resistance. I can't wait to discuss it at book club.

Well, this has been quite a week for consuming media that pisses me right the fuck off! Largely because I am a miserable glutton for punishment when I'm ill.

Anyway, I had been intending to read Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference for a while, but wanted to wait for a time when I didn't mind giving myself apoplexy. I knew it was about bad science, and bad science pisses me right the fuck off, particularly when bad science is held up over good any-sort-of-knowledge-from-other-fields because it's, like, sciencier. (My favorite example, where by "favorite" I mean "I almost fell out of my chair due to sheer appalled-ness when I first heard of it," is the study conducted a year or two ago that was widely reported as "proving" the "biological" and "evolutionary" basis for why pink is a girl color, when, in fact, pink as a girl color was invented by department stores in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, pink was considered a "more decided and manly color" than docile, feminine blue.) In addition to debunking some very crappy evo-psych, Fine also gives an excellent overview of the current field of neuroimaging--a field that, while it certainly can be useful and is quite scientifically exciting, is still in its infancy and prone to error--and relates it to some rather terrifying behavioral research (that nobody's ever heard about, because behavioral research isn't exciting enough to make the corporate news) indicating that people's ability to detect blatant nonsense goes right out the window when accompanied with a picture of a brain scan or a couple of words of neurobabble. Some of the overreaches in interpretation of "differences in brain activity" that show up on various imaging studies are seriously mindboggling, especially when you consider that we don't actually have perfect knowledge of what every tiny part of the brain does, and that you can get a response that shows up on an MRI by showing emotionally distressing photographs to a dead salmon.

If you don't get around to ever reading this book and you aren't as interested as I am in nitpicking bad science, here are the three major things I think you should know and remember:
1. Never take seriously any claims made by Louenn Brizendine.
2. Never take seriously any claims made by Simon Baron-Cohen.
3. Never take seriously any claims made by Leonard Sax.

These are the three most notorious hacks in the field of popularizing pseudoscientific neurononsense. Brizendine in particular is so bad that she caught the attention of Mark Liberman, the guy who runs LanguageLog, a linguistics blog with no particular focus on gender (except the grammatical kind) or even other social sciences. Liberman heard Brizendine's claim that women speak 20,000 words per day and men speak 7,000, and, being a professional studier of language and its use, wondered where she had gotten that number and why he had never heard it before. It turns out, that number is basically a pop psych urban legend--it is not the result of any study whatsoever. (Actual studies show that men and women both talk a lot, about 16,000 words per day for college educated persons. Also, anyone who thinks men only speak seven thousand words per day has never met...well, pretty much any of the men that I've ever met.) Appalled at this lack of scholarly rigor, the otherwise gender-uninterested Liberman found himself writing a massively long and fascinating series of posts at LanguageLog exhaustively fact-checking Brizendine's research and finding it somewhere between "riddled with errors" and "absurdly academically dishonest". (Another reason to adore LanguageLog! He suffers so we don't have to!)

While her takedowns of bad evopsych and the semi-religious treatment given to pictures of brains are awesome, I think my favorite part of the book is the gentle scorn heaped upon passive, ill-thought-out, Larry Summers-style "gender-neutral parenting," where educated, intelligent, well-intentioned, white upper-middle-class parents with approximately no sociological imagination and, apparently, no familiarity with any social sciences whatsoever, half-assedly give their little girl a truck or refrain from beating the shit out of their son if he looks at a Barbie, self-congratulatorily label it "gender-neutral parenting," and then act all surprised when their child develops a recognizable gender identity and decide it must be biological. Fine lays out the problems with this kind of thinking in way the fuck kinder terms than I will: too many people who really ought to be smarter than that, considering their incredibly educated and privileged positions in life, nevertheless subscribe to the ridiculous Western rugged-individualism myth that we aren't affected by our environments, we totally are who we are and got where we've gotten all by ourselves by the power of our own personal awesomeness, we don't have a culture (or at least our culture doesn't affect us) because culture is for those weird, weak, uncivilized other people and we're too smart for that. This irrational belief in our imperviousness to the entirety of our own life experiences frequently becomes modified when said privileged rugged individuals have children, to the now equally self-centered belief that children are ruggedly individualistic and utterly impervious to all life experiences except the influence of parents. Combined with the even more irrational belief that the only kind of parental behavior is conscious and deliberate parental behavior, highly educated parents reach the bizarre conclusion that anything their child says or does that they didn't deliberately set out intending to teach them must be completely biological. I'll be right back; I have to go vomit from laughing so hard.

Since nice white people are likely the primary audience for this book, Fine doesn't rip soi-disant "gender-neutral" parents a new one with the mockery she does the bad social scientists and popularizers. Instead, she lays out a detailed list, in the form of a nice nonthreatening thought-experiment, of some of the ways gender is communicated to small children on a daily basis. Then she lays out an even more interesting list of the steps Sandra Bem (the psychologist who invented the Bem Sex Role Inventory) and her husband took to attempt to actually gender-neutrally rear their children. (After setting out this list, even Fine cannot help but have a few laughs at the expense of other "gender-neutral" parents.) From then she goes into a lot of really fascinating psychological studies about both parents and children's responses to perceived gender cues. My main takeaway from this is that I can never have children because I don't have the stamina to consciously do the opposite of all the long list of things we're trained to unconsciously do when we gender children for the entirety of another person's life, but I am the sort of person who would totally beat myself up just about forever when I found myself doing things "wrong"; ie, in keeping with discernible gender norms.

(Before you ask, and also because my Mom reads this blog (hi, Mom!): no, I am not upset with my parents about gendering me as a child. I don't think they ever claimed to raise me "gender-neutral," just "not sexist," which I think they did a good job of. The degree of work it would take to gender-neutrally raise a child is flat-out impossible, and since socialization is absolutely required for a child's brain development and the development of, for example, verbal skills, there has to be a trade-off between exposure to dysfunctional gender norms and, y'know, being isolated. I was raised with a deliberate, healthy, and I think pretty effective dose of earnest 90's girl-power feminism starting at a very early age, and I had some of my own personal forms of misfit-ness that I think helped keep me positioned somewhat "outside" certain aspects of femininity (and, as I got older, develop some self-awareness of my own internalizations of dysfunctional cultural tropes, even if getting over them is quite another issue). I think some of this distance definitely was "paid for" in social skills, so Louenn Brizendine can take her blather about my brain being biologically hardwired to read people's body language and shove it. I'm twenty-four years old and I'm still working really hard on interpreting any sort of body language as anything other than "This person will think it is weird if I talk to them.")

Overall, I must say I found the book to be excellently done--a wide variety of very complex research is rendered accessible to reasonably intelligent laypersons, and Fine's writing style is witty and much gentler in tone than in substance (certainly much gentler than anything I say about similar topics; bad science puts me in Sneering Disdainful Elitism mode turned up to 11). She pops a lot of stubbornly pernicious cultural myths with science and humor, and with bonus humorously bad science from the Victorian era. So read this book, and next time someone tries to be all like "I know this isn't politically correct, but such-and-such gendered behavior hasn't been completely disappeared from society even though ladies can vote and wear pants now, therefore SCIENCE," you can be like "No, actually, SCIENCE" except your science will be not totally bogus.

Current Mood: nerdy

I borrowed my mother's copy of Susan Cain's new book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which I read mostly on the noisy subway.

I liked this book immensely, largely because it was very validating. It was all about all the things that we fail to sufficiently value due to the "extrovert ideal" that's been reigning for the past century or so. It even has evo-psych about how introverts are evolutionarily important! As far as I can tell, it is relatively not-totally-bogus evo-psych (they mention actual specific genes at one point!) but I suppose I can't quite be sure, since the whole point of evo-psych is to believe the stuff that you personally like and feel makes you look good.

Other introverts, as well as the parents/spouses/bosses/teachers/etc of introverts, might benefit from this book somewhat more than I did on a personal level, as I am already familiar with some of the basic psychological literature about introversion and extroversion, and also because I was lucky enough that my family didn't totally freak out about me being an introverted nerd like the parents of some of the kids interviewed in this book (although I certainly had my fair share of the obligatory alienation all introverts must feel in a public school). (It also just doesn't seem to have occurred to me to spend a lot of time wondering what was wrong with me, because I spent so much time wondering what was wrong with the extroverts I knew... *is stuck-up*) But I could definitely relate to a lot of the material in the book, including both the anecdata and the psychological studies (although I don't have any idea how 'reactive' a baby I was, only that I was apparently very spacey even then).

I think I was actually most interested in the explication of extroverts; I think it could help me try to differentiate between when an extroverted person is just being more extroverted at me than I would like and when they are actually being an asshole. I admit I do still find some common "extrovert" traits puzzling and straight-up rude no matter what bizarre leaps of logic their actors use to justify them, such as "ritual opposition", which is where you don't necessarily disagree with something someone says, but you pretend to because you think your job in a conversation-slash-debate-clearly-these-are-the-same-thing-always is to be The Other Side, and then you get all confused when the other person thinks you're mean for picking a fight. I think I particularly have trouble with this concept because it never comes with a discussion of what sorts of conversations this "conversational style" is for, and I still think it's an asshole idiot move when someone's like "Such-and-such thing happened to me this morning" and you're all like "Are you sure? I think it probably didn't. Have you considered that you're crazy, or possibly just making shit up? ...What do you mean I'm being mean? I AM JUST TRYING TO HAVE, LIKE, A DEBATE" Eh, maybe I've just known a lot of assholes. But I am trying to work on differentiating better between extroversion and self-centered douchebaggery, and learning more about extroversion might help.

Yes, I am super judgy. I AM WORKING ON IT.

This book is a must-read for anyone who is having a difficult time "getting" the introverts in their lives, and any introverts who want to read a bit about how totally awesome they are.

Current Mood: energetic

Man, I don't even want to write this review, because I'm going to get all pissed off again and I would much rather go keep reading The Hunger Games; it would be better for my blood pressure. Anyway, I read Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. I did this for a few reasons: One, I am woefully behind on my familiarity with the sort of big "canonical" feminist texts and I am really easily guilted into feeling like a bad person for not having read something because I think I am supposed to have read everything. Secondly, Backlash is apparenty like The Big Keystone Book That Kicked Off The Third Wave, and so far I have only read The Big Keystone Book That Kicked Off The First Wave, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and it was awesome. (I'll get around to The Feminine Mystique, um, one of these days.) Thirdly, my eighties and early nineties history is TERRIBLE. All my history schoolings ended around the Vietnam War, because that is when my teachers, being a generation older than me, thought "history" ended and "current events that everyone knows about" begins, but I wasn't born until 1987. The first big political anything I remember being aware of was the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and that only after it became a big scandal--I was too busy playing with slap bracelets and shit to know anything about the witch-hunting that preceded it. So I was hoping this book would fill in that fifteen-year gap in my understanding of how the universe works. Which it did, and more.

The book is split into four parts. The first part compares the 80s backlash to other backlashes following advancements in women's rights, and the ways in which, even during the next "spurt" of feminism, these backlashes are essentially never talked about, leading to the popular misconception that women's rights have only ever gotten better. This is a myth that drives me batshit, because it is still held by all sorts of totally well-meaning people who seem to think that if there's any rights or socials standing women don't have yet, it must be because we either don't really want it or we're too dumb to have realized it yet, because if we wanted it, we'd have it. Because nobody (or at least not many people) are ever fighting against feminism. I think most people have some sort of vague idea that the suffrage movement was only a couple of years long, and the nice gentlemanly men "gave" women the vote as soon as they'd acclimated to the idea, maybe some of them didn't sign on immediately because it had never occurred to them before and they were surprised for a few minutes, but then only a small group of dedicated Terrible People really opposed it. We don't like to think about the fact that it took almost a hundred years for well-meaning, perfectly respectful, highly educated, liberal gentlemen to start thinking of it as anything other than patently absurd, or that suffragists were jailed, beaten, force-fed, etc. for years before we won the vote. Any demand for increase in women's rights has only ever been met with reactions ranging from violent hostility to condescending indifference, and any real or percieved success in increasing women's rights has inspired powerful backlashes in which the people who control the institutions that shape society come up with new and creative ways to fuck up women's lives, or to encourage women to fuck up their own. Abortion and birth control, unreliable as they were, were perfectly legal throughout most of American history until the late Victorian era, until a combination of racist fears about not enough white babies and the rising demand for increased women's education caused the medical, political, and media establishments to suddenly decide it was immoral and ban it. The post-World War II backlash was especially nasty, purging women from factories and back into the kitchen en masse, and replacing the smart and funny female leads of 30s and 40s cinema with stomach-churningly misogynistic "comedies" like How To Murder Your Wife. The 80s backlash was a clearly foreseeable occurrence--for the few people with a strong enough knowledge of women's history to be aware of the history of backlashes. Many of the basic myths of the 80s backlash--the "man shortage," the "infertility epidemic," the supposed increase in nervous/mental disorders brought on by thinking about stuff other than babies--are recycled from earlier backlashes, too. Faludi dedicates several pages to uncovering the absurd misuse of statistics and incomplete studies that the media seized on to create the "marriagiability expiration date" myth (the one that said a woman over 30 had less than a 5% chance of ever getting married). It reads like a bizarre comedy of errors, except it's not remotely funny. It appears mainstream media science writers were even more douchetastic and scientifically illiterate in the 80s than they are today, and that's saying a lot.

Part II focuses on pop culture--anti-feminism in movies, TV, pop psychology, advertising, and the fashion and cosmetics industries. My favorite part of this chapter was the stuff about the fashion industry, partly because this was a part of the backlash that overshot itself and therefore failed, and partly because it was so over-the-top. Apparently, in late 1987, major fashion designers were all mad about how women were buying suits and stuff to go to work in, and started trying really hard to bring back frilly, ridiculous semi-Victorian wear. Like, AS WORK CLOTHES. They tried to dress it up in feminist language, being all like "Now you can choose your choosy choices to exercise your right to dress like a Victorian baby doll at the office!" It was really big on huuuuuuuge poufs and bows and flowers and crinolines and bustles and shit. The media raved about it. It may have been amusing on a runway, but women in the 80s just kept right on wearing suits and other "Dress for Success" type stuff until Christian Lacroix' manhood was insulted and the media turned viciously on John Molloy, the poor dude who wrote "Dress for Success," for supposedly single-handedly tipping off American ladies that by this time, bustles were costume, not clothing. (Because we're so dumb we couldn't figure that out without a dude to tell us. IN 1987. Also, you know who was responsible for turning bustles into costume instead of clothing? The feminist Dress Reform movement.) The underwear industry also decided to engineer a Revival Of Lacy Underthings, which totally flopped--the only underwear people to make any money were Jockey, who introduced the exact opposite product ("underwear that won't ride up, won't fall apart in the wash, and actually is the size promised on the label"), and Victoria's Secret, who had a brilliant little scam going where the front half of their store sold lacy underthings to dudes and the back half of their store made 50% of their revenue at the Miscellaneous Cotton Panties table, where the women shopped. Faludi's retelling of the failure of High Femininity and the non-existence of the Intimate Apparel Explosion of 1987 are masterful, dryly pointing out details such as which retail ladies pimping "The Right to Look Feminine At Work" were wearing suits.

Marcus, get me that AIG report or you are FIRED. Hey... hey, stop laughing!

Being a person of the Gothy persuasion, I am all for taking people seriously when they are wearing ridiculous costumes, as well as the right to wear ridiculous costumes whenever you damn well feel like it. This... wasn't that. It's only a "choice" to wear froufrou impractical shit if you have the option of taking it off and wearing pants when you decide it's time to sit down and focus on something else now.

The best thing about this narrative is that it didn't work. Eighties ladies just stopped buying clothes, basically. There are some fabulous on-scene reportings from Faludi hanging out in department stores listening to women complain about the options, refuse to buy things, or return shit they'd already bought. The apparel market dropped like a stone. I read about it and laughed my Timberlands-to-my-corporate-job-wearing butt off.

The third part of this book is scarier because this part's about politics--the professional antifeminists and antifeminist organizations. It covers stuff I knew about already, like Randall Terrorist--I mean, Terry--and Operation Rescue, and some stuff I'd vaguely heard about but wasn't really familiar with, like what exactly got targeted for neutering under "Reagan Administration=Ill-Advised Budget Cuts" and the politics and personalities behind, for example, the extreme downgrading of the government's equal opportunity employment office. I think my favorite part of Part 3 was Faludi's rundown of the 80's leading anti-feminist personalities, because many of them are so pathetic it's hilarious. There are some whiny dudes whining about how feminism has made men feel bad about themselves because women don't stay home and wipe their butts for them anymore, like George Gilder, and there is the poet Robert Bly, who hosted a bunch of "man retreats" that basically involved going into the woods and pounding your chest and acting like a gorilla, which personally I think sounds like it could be perfectly healthy for getting away from civilization and letting loose once in a while if it weren't framed as some sort of "women have neutered us and made us soft with their jobs-having and not wanting to be raped and stuff" New Age masculinity crap. The best interviews, for sheer irony, are with the little Phyllis Shlafly copycats, such as Beverly LaHaye from Concerned Women from America. These women are clearly living the "having it all" feminist dream--they have jobs that they love, and their husbands stay home a lot to take care of the kids and cook dinner while mommy write books and travels. Apparently, the trick to making your dude not pitch an overgrown temper tantrum about making dinner twice a week is to have a job that is totally about pimping male supremacy. (I think this is a brilliant strategy and that more women should just pretend that whatever their job actually is, it is TOTALLY about upholding male supremacy. Any dude dumb enough to think his dick'll fall off if he changes a diaper should be dumb enough to buy that, right?) Then there are personalities I am more familiar with, like Camille Paglia, who became an antifeminist-who-calls-herself-a-feminist in order to get media attention because she was upset that her brilliance wasn't properly recognized doing regular literary criticism, so became pointlessly contrarian instead. (By the way, I have read some of Camille Paglia's regular literary criticism, and if she was being recognized at all it was too much. She writes exactly the sort of crap people talk about when they are disparaging literary criticism as being pointless and about nothing. She wrote a piece on Moby Dick that was basically just a long list of concave shapes versus pointy shapes throughout the whole novel; it was like the jokes we would all make before getting down to serious business in the class at 8:55 in the morning, except not funny.) Sadly, it appears that Betty Friedan backtracked a lot during the 80s, because she was pissed about not "owning" what she saw as "her" movement anymore. (She also said mean things about Gloria Steinem.)

Part 4, for me, was the scariest, because Part 4 covers the rise of extreme pronatalism. I also found it informative because there's a lot of matieral there about women in blue-collar occupations, which is a thing I don't know all that much about because I am from a professional-class area and have been on college track my entire life and don't know a whole lot of working-class people. Also, one of the hallmarks of rich white professional-class people like me is that the fact that I even know that there are other people whose lives are not like mine, and I mean really not like mine at all, is the direct result of an unusual amount of history reading and years of extremely long lectures from my father drilling family history into my head so I would appreciate how privileged I am. As I result, I have what is apparently a completely fuckin' unique amost my peer group ability to realize that we don't know everything about everything about everybody, particularly people unlike us whom we don't interact with at all. This rare and magical ability, in addition to being missing against stuck-up college-track white boys like my asshole ex who say things like "I don't see a lot of women trying to get into construction" like they were looking or something when they really weren't, was sadly ALSO missing amongst the totally smart white dude lawyers and judges that handled a number of court cases concerning employment discrimination in blue-collar jobs during the Reagan Administration. The least scary court case concerns employment discrimination amongst saleswomen at Sears, who were barred from the big-ticket commission jobs, which were the ones which made a lot of money. The excuses the white-collar professional-class dudes came up with to explain why women just didn't want and didn't apply for those jobs were pretty much the exact opposite of the testimonies of the large numbers of women who did want and were trying to apply for those jobs (which is why they brought the damn lawsuits). Sears also was using some really odd ways to screen women from jobs, such as giving applicants for big-ticket sales jobs a "vigor test", which contained questions like "Have you ever played on a football team?" and "Do you have a low voice?" (Apparently, high scores on the vigor test were loosely associated with *lower* success as a salesman.)

The most scary case concerns American Cyanamid, an industrial chemicals plant. Chemical and electronics plants were like ALL OVER the new "fetal protection" laws that had become so fashionable lately, and applied them unscientifically and with extreme prejudice. Record numbers of women had been enrolling in --and acing--trade schools, but had been having trouble finding jobs, by which I mean companies would flat-out refuse to hire them unless they were being threatened with government audits, and when they did get the jobs their co-workers were violently, VIOLENTLY hostile to them. I'm talking hit them in the head with a 2-by-4, smear feces on things they had to clean, deliberatly train them to do things incorrectly so they would fuck up and get fired VIOLENTLY HOSTILE. When "fetal protection" became popular, all the chemical and industrial companies had to do was identify whatever substances they were working with as fetal hazards and boom, they could fire all the ladies of reproductive age! American Cyanamid did this with no care whatsoever for actual scientific research on what does and does not constitute a reproductive hazard. They correctly identified lead as a reproductive health hazard for women, but ignored that it was also a known reproductive health hazard for men. (Several years later, OSHA would force them to reduce their lead exposure levels anyway.) They also basically decided that most of their other chemicals, being chemicals, were probably hazardous. They pulled some weird bullshit seniority thing that caused them to be able to layoff twenty-eight of their thirty-five female employees, then told the remaining seven that they could only keep their jobs if they got sterilized. (YES, THERE WERE WOMEN IN THE 1980S, WHICH WAS NOT VERY LONG AGO, WHO WERE REQUIRED TO GET STERILIZED AS A JOB REQUIREMENT. YOU WANT TO TELL ME AGAIN HOW YOU "JUST DON'T SEE" MANY WOMEN APPLYING FOR BLUE-COLLAR CHEMICAL PLANT JOBS?) Five of these women actually did get sterilized; in the next few years, the company found ways to lay them off eventually. When this case went up to the Supreme Court, the judge decided that there was nothing wrong with this because the women had "a choice." Forced back into the world of low-paying "women's work," now made more difficult by their reputation as troublemakers, and bombarded with an onslought of doofy 80s media messages about "cocooning" and "new traditionalism" and other retro fifties bullshit defining their womanhood as their ability to have children, the plaintiffs all developed depression problems. And pretend-well-meaning rich guys continued to go around being all "Well, I guess ladies are just too ladylike to do industrial work. I'm sure it's all 110% solely and completely due to the nature of the work itself, because we're all post-feminist and shit now."

If that's not an argument for making sure you know something about what you're spouting on about before you decide to have a really strong opinion on it, I don't know what it. But apparently admitting that you don't know something just because it has nothing to do with you and you've never learned a damn thing about it is, like, not manly and things. This was also a thread underlying a lot of anti-feminist sentiment amongst younger guys in the 80s, who were apparently incapable of paying any attention to economic factors such as the government's economic policies in evaluating their economic stagnation, and decided to blame it all on underpaid secretaries.

Faludi didn't particularly go into this but it seems relevant to a lot of other stuff I've been reading lately about US culture war politics/politics of resentment, and this is the issue of class, and particularly our country's history of pretending we totally don't have class at all because it's not strictly codified like in England. This leads to mixing up economics with identity politics in a bad way--namely, poor dudes don't think of themselves as poor dudes, they think of themselves as rich dudes who haven't gotten all their money yet. They don't think of guys with so much money that they couldn't imagine what it's like to be anything like the working-class men as different, as other, the way they think women or black people or homosexuals are other. They think the spoiled trust fund baby men are just themselves, in the future. And they wouldn't fuck themselves over, would they? It must be somebody else fucking them over. Somebody that they're never going to be. Like women; they'll never be women. Of course, this is exactly how obscenely rich spoiled dudes like Reagan want it--divided and conquered, different classes of paeons keeping each other defeated, scared, and in line by misguided horizontal attacks instead of facing off against the actual problems. This is why women were specifically excluded from the Fourteeth Amendment, forcing a nasty split between the black civil rights movement and the women's movement that has never completely healed. It worked, and it keeps fucking working, and we keep fucking falling for it.

And this is why we need to teach economics and labor history in, like, eighth fucking grade.

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