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Who’s Hornier? Ctd

Gavin Mcinnes and his tight jockeys settle the question (NSFW):

A reader chimes in:

The article you posted about the social construction of sexual desire is another great example of how the novelty of counterintuitive claims is actually counterproductive in scientific realms. That men have a stronger (even uncontrollable) sex drive is a culturally reinforced stereotype, yes, but one based in fact. At every level of scientific understanding the fact is confirmed. The sex drive is largely regulated by the production of testosterone. Men produce significantly more testosterone than women, and correspondingly have a greater sex drive. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists note that as childbearing has substantially less cost for males as compared to females, it is to their reproductive advantage to engage in more sex and have more offspring.

If it is culture, and specifically Protestantism, that has defined the female sex drive, you might ask why none of the 40% or so of the world that practices non-Abrahamic religions report a particularly ravenous female population. A published psychology article on sex differences in the sex drive notes (pdf) that in India (Hindu) they also find a significantly higher sex drive in men. Men, as opposed to women, will have sex with “Untouchables”, despite the cultural taboo.

That the author can find a few literary references to the contrary I would suggest is the result of two factors:

1) most authors from antiquity were men, who may be projecting their desires or pandering to their audience 2) there is a very old stereotype of women having less control over their passions (i.e., emotions) in general. For much the same time period that the author is drawing upon to support her contention (ancient greece – mid-20th century), “hysteria” (excess emotionality) remained a recognized medical condition suffered (almost exclusively) by women. That sexual desire might be among the domains that the “weaker sex” could not control would fit nicely with this stereotype.

I do not mean to entirely dismiss social construction/social learning theories. They are very relevant for many topics, but in this case they decidedly incorrect. This is a case in which the wealth of evidence actually supports the stereotype.

How China Sees North Korea

Osnos explains:

Over the years, I’ve spoken to many of the American diplomats involved in negotiations with China and North Korea, and their consensus is clear: for all of North Korea’s instability, China still prefers the status quo to a post-Kim North Korea that could very well end up under the control of Seoul or Washington. So China and the U.S. remain far apart. “Our threat assessments are fundamentally misaligned,” a former American negotiator told me.

From China’s perspective, even if Kim is losing control of the situation, he has not lost it yet, and so China considers anything short of that to be alarmist. As long as North Korea is not threatening Beijing, this is a prisoners’ dilemma we will be facing on our own.

To appease China and hasten North Korea’s end, Beinart wants to America “to pledge formally that America will never station troops on what is now North Korean soil”:

Beijing keeps propping up Pyongyang. According to a February article in Foreign Policy by Fudan University’s Shen Dingli, there are three main reasons. The first is that China fears North Korea’s implosion could send tens or even hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing across the two countries’ 800-mile-long border. The second is that North Korea’s collapse might prompt the millions of ethnic Koreans living on the Chinese side of the border to try to secede and join their kinsmen in a reunified Korea. The third is that if America’s ally South Korea swallows its northern twin, China could suddenly find itself with the U.S. military on its southeastern border.

There’s little the Obama administration can do to allay Beijing’s first two fears. But it can do a lot to allay the third.

Thatcher’s Massive Cojones

One of the smaller aspects of Margaret Thatcher’s unlikely rise to power is relatively unknown to Americans. That’s the story of how she became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975. And the truth of the matter is that it was an inspired strategy on her part and a huge miscalculation by her opponents. She was, truth be told, never supposed to have become party leader. It was her very unelectability that elected her. It was the mother of all bluffs.

She was, after all, a woman – and in the mid-1970s, the idea of a female prime minister was not exactly congenial to the Tory party. She’d had a rough time as Education Secretary in the previous government. She was a minor figure in the grand scheme of things. So when she decided to challenge former prime minister Edward Heath for leadership of the parliamentary party, she was clearly understood to be acting as what’s called a “stalking horse.” She obviously couldn’t beat Heath, but she could reveal serious erosion in his support among his fellow Tory MPs, wound him in a first ballot, allow him to pledge to resign, and then have a new contest among his rightful, more established and palatable inheritors. Her strategy, conjured by her friend Airey Neave (later murdered by the IRA on the eve of her first election), was to tell MPs to vote for her just to get rid of Heath. Then they could have a real contest.

Neave told everyone as the vote approached that she didn’t have a chance – in fact, her weakness could mean a triumph by Heath which would end any way of getting rid of him as leader before the next election. And Neave was so successful in downplaying her chances and the party was so desperate to fire Heath, and the likely successors were so scared of getting too far out in front, that she won the first round overwhelmingly. So overwhelmingly in fact that the momentum continued and she went on to defeat the establishment candidate, Willie Whitelaw, in the second round.

Old school Tory MPs thought they were using this odd female politician to get rid of a flailing and failed leader. They didn’t realize until it was too late that she had been using them. And it’s worth recalling that her time as opposition leader was not that successful. As she moved toward the right, the centrist wing of her party got more and more nervous. Chauvinists were perturbed. If Callaghan had called an election in the fall of 1978, the polls suggest he would have won. But he dithered. And she pounced.

This was a woman who took risks. And her first move for the party leadership was one of the more stunning and unexpected rewards.

Charts Of The Day

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Here’s one of several charts marking Thatcher’s impact on Britain. If you consider the success of a country measurable by the levels of emigration out and immigration in, then Britain became far more attractive a place to live after her eleven years. But here is where the paradox of Thatcherism truly comes to the fore. Thatcher campaigned on economic liberalization and social conservatism. Here’s what has happened to the marriage rate since her time:

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Thatcher’s fiscal conservatism did not survive her. Blair did what Bush did: spend, spend and borrow and borrow. Watch how she reduces the percentage of public spending as a percentage of GDP – from 49 percent to 39 percent – and then look how Labour let it rip – leaving Britain high and dry today:

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This is the one core difference between Thatcher’s Tories and Reagan’s Republicans. Thatcher actually cut spending significantly and durably. She never promised something for nothing.

More data on growing inequality in Britain and other less flattering statistics here.

Ask Dreher Anything

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[Re-posted with several questions added by readers. If you have a minute to vote for your question preference, we would really appreciate it.]

Long-time readers of the Dish know Dreher well. But for everyone else:

Rod Dreher was a conservative editorial writer and a columnist for The Dallas Morning News, but departed that newspaper in late 2009 to affiliate with the John Templeton Foundation. He wrote a blog previously called “Crunchy Con” at beliefnet.com, then simply called “Rod Dreher” with an emphasis on cultural rather than political topics. … Raised a Methodist, he later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993. He wrote widely in the Catholic press, but covering the Roman Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal, starting in 2002, led him to question his Catholicism, and on October 12, 2006, he announced his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy.

You can follow Rod’s writing at his blog at the American Conservative. He also has a new book out, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life:

[The book] follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie’s death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie’s funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations – Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting.

Some praise for the book:

“If you are not prepared to cry, to learn, and to have your heart cracked open even a little bit by a true story of love, surrender, sacrifice, and family, then please do not read this book. Otherwise, do your soul a favor, and listen carefully to the unforgettable lessons of Ruthie Leming.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is Steel Magnolias for a new generation.” -Sela Ward, Emmy Award-winning actress and author of Homesick

To submit a question for Rod, simply enter it into the above Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care. View the results here. Thanks for your help.

The Obama’s Centrist Budget: Reax

McArdle wonders what Obama hopes to accomplish with his new budget, which leaked last week and will be officially released this week:

It’s unusual for a budget to leak so far ahead of its actual release. The administration is clearly trying to seize the initiative, getting a few days of talk about their budget while the Republicans, who don’t have the actual budget yet, are unable to mount a real attack on it. But it’s not clear to what end he is fighting. Winning the budget messaging war is not going to get us a sound budget, and probably not going to open up much movement on the rest of his policy agenda. The president is defending his flanks while the advance grinds to a halt.

Chait’s view:

Mainly this appears to be a message strategy aimed at advocates of BipartisanThink, who have been blaming Obama for failing to offer the plan he has in fact been offering. The strategy is that, by converting their offer to Boehner from an “offer” to a “budget,” it will prove that Obama is Serious. On the one hand, this strikes me as completely ridiculous. On the other hand, it might actually work! BipartisanThinkers like Ron Fournier (“a gutsy change in strategy”) and Joe Scarborough (“Now THIS is a real budget … exciting”) are gushing with praise.

Josh Marshall is less cynical:

In conversations with the president’s key advisors and the President himself over the last three years one point that has always come out to me very clearly is that the President really believes in the importance of the Grand Bargain. He thinks it’s an important goal purely on its own terms. That’s something I don’t think a lot of his diehard supporters fully grasp. He thinks it’s important in longrange fiscal terms (and there’s some reality to that). But he always believes it’s important for the country and even for the Democratic party to have a big global agreement that settles the big fiscal policy for a generation and let’s the country get on to other issues — social and cultural issues, the environment, building the economy etc.

Drum’s notes that Obama’s budget “sounds as if it mostly embodies the president’s sequester-replacement plan that’s been on offer for the past two months”:

This will be an interesting test of the theory that one of the things preventing a deal has been simple Republican ignorance of what Obama has offered. Once these things are in the official budget, there’s simply no way to ignore them. They’ll get a ton of coverage—including massive outrage from the liberal base—and there will be enough detail that even Bill O’Reilly should be satisfied that Obama is offering a “real plan.” The fact that Obama is proposing serious cuts in entitlements will finally be impossible to ignore.

Peter Orzag puts Obama’s chained CPI proposal, which would reduce future increases in Social Security payments, in perspective :

President Barack Obama deserves credit for political courage in being willing to adopt the chained CPI — in the face of strong opposition from members of his party. But if switching to the chained index reduces the 10-year deficit by less than $150 billion and the 75-year Social Security actuarial gap by less than 10 percent, can a “grand bargain” built around it really be all that grand? And if it reduces benefits for an 85- year-old retiree by less than 2 percent, is it really so destructive?

And Collender expects the budget to have very little impact:

The reality is that the Obama 2014 budget has already been declared dead on arrival by the House GOP leadership. Minutes after the first leaks appeared last week about the Obama budget proposing to change in the way the CPI is calculated so that payments to Social Security recipients would be lowered, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) denounced both the chained CPI proposal and the administration’s efforts to tie that change to additional revenues. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) then repeated the denunciation on CNBC later in the week.

Studying Stupidity

Sally Adee is pleasantly surprised to find that Gustave Flaubert devoted the end of his career to the pursuit:

He had spent his whole life analyzing the automatic thoughts and platitudes of the chattering classes. … Eventually that obsession became so great that he devoted himself to a last great work, a compendium of every variation of human idiocy. The novel Bouvard et Pecuchet  and its companion volume, Dictionnaire des idées reçues  (the Dictionary of Received Ideas) were to be a kind of encyclopedia of stupidity and object lesson. To that end the eponymous protagonists in Bouvard et Pecuchet are a Laurel and Hardy-style duo who make their way through all the spheres of life and in the process experience stupidity in all its guises, from shopkeepers to academics. What unites their stupidity is a lazy over-reliance on received wisdom.

For more on the science and history of stupidity, check out Adee’s piece at New Scientist (free registration required). From the introduction:

The idea that intelligence and stupidity are simply opposing ends of a single spectrum is a surprisingly modern one.

The Renaissance theologian Erasmus painted Folly – or Stultitia in Latin – as a distinct entity in her own right, descended from the god of wealth and the nymph of youth; others saw it as a combination of vanity, stubbornness and imitation. It was only in the middle of the 18th century that stupidity became conflated with mediocre intelligence, says Matthijs van Boxsel, a Dutch historian who has written many books about stupidity. “Around that time, the bourgeoisie rose to power, and reason became a new norm with the Enlightenment,” he says. “That put every man in charge of his own fate.”

On Christian Wiman’s “My Bright Abyss”

by Matthew Sitman

By now, Dish readers probably know something about Christian Wiman – we’ve featured his work, especially incisive passages from his sterling essays, many times over the last few months. This week his new book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, was released, a book many of us anxiously have awaited for some time. The basics of his story are, by now, well-known: a brilliant young poet who, since 2003, has edited Poetry magazine, he was diagnosed with an extraordinarily rare, incurable form of cancer, and My Bright Abyss reflects on his Christian faith in the face of extreme suffering and death.

My copy arrived Tuesday afternoon and I finished reading it late Thursday night around 3am, carried through its final pages on the basis of pure exhilaration. It is no exaggeration to say that I’ve waited my entire adult life to read a book like this. It is impossible to summarize or even categorize. Though personal, it is not really a memoir – there only is the barest narrative arc to it. (In this sense, the term “meditation” truly was apt.) The book is written aphoristically, filled with short, dense examinations of God, love, Christ, suffering, poetry, and more. In terms of organization and structure, it most reminds me of Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, a book Wiman frequently references. It also is astonishingly learned – the range of Wiman’s reading, the abundance of literary and theological references, is remarkable. I will have to read it many more times to fully absorb its import.

As such, reviewers likely are to be baffled by it. Dwight Garner’s NYT piece particularly seems to miss the mark. My jaw dropped when I read this line from his review: “…there are many moments in ‘My Bright Abyss’ where he preaches as broadly — and, to my ears, as gratingly — as Joel Osteen.” I can say, without hesitation, that there is not a figure more different from Osteen in the firmament of American Christianity than Wiman. Again and again in the book, you can feel Wiman pushing up against the limits of language when trying to grapple with God; indeed, this constitutes one of his great themes. A paradoxical statement from Wiman, or an aphoristic declaration, surely has no real connection to one of Osteen’s gauzy, sentimental one-liners. It makes me think Garner just did not read the book carefully, or felt some strange need to concoct objections to Wiman’s efforts. Garner simply has no feel for what Wiman is trying to do.

Such a suspicion is borne out when Garner asserts the following:

[Wiman] writes things like the following, about himself and his wife: “Last night we wondered whether people who do not have the love of God in them — or who have it but do not acknowledge it, or reject it — whether such people could fully feel human love.”

This strikes me as smug and aggressive nonsense, of the sort that made Richard Dawkins declare, “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

Of course, Wiman is not “smug and aggressive” in the least, and it is impossible to read Wiman’s book and believe he is not, desperately, trying to understand the world. Wiman is ruminating on a passage from Hans Urs von Balthasar, the great 20th century theologian, not making a bald assertion. And he immediately says, right after the lines Garner quotes, that “I have a complicated reaction to this.” Meaning, a complicated reaction to the very sentiment Garner reads so simplistically. Indeed, the entire section that Garner lifts this one sentence from is a puzzled, complex meditation on how human love relates to divine love. Wiman writes this about himself and the woman who would become his wife:

I don’t think the human love preceded the divine love, exactly; as I have already said, I never experienced a conversion so much as a faith that had long been latent within me. But it was human love that reawakened divine love.

This seems to me a significant addendum to what so bothers Garner, a hesitation about cause and effect, and – as the rest of the section makes clear – an acknowledgment he and his wife’s shared religious search added intensity and force to the love that exists between them.

If I were to suggest why, whether believer or not, you should read My Bright Abyss, it would be because Wiman asks the most difficult questions I can imagine about life and death with unflinching honesty. As he admits above, it is not a simplistic “conversion” account. You do not finish the book with a sense of closure, that you can put your anxieties and uncertainties aside for pat answers. Wiman makes the skeptic confront uncomfortable possibilities – he asks the doubter to doubt even his doubt. And he makes the believer realize how much of what passes for faith is idolatrous nonsense, evasions and wishful unthinking.

In short, Wiman’s book is the beginning of a conversation we very much need to have, and he clears away so much of the accumulated ridiculousness that has grown-up around discussions of religion in this country. He clarifies the questions we should be asking more than he offers “solutions.” Please read this book – for now, I only can urge that you approach this elegant, difficult testimony to what faith – always mingled with doubt, and always seeking to connect with lived experience – can mean in the modern world with honesty and an open heart. It truly is an essential book for our times.

For more, see Casey Cep’s very smart review in TNR here, and check out some brilliant selections from the book here.

The Demand For American Sperm

by Zoe Pollock

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It’s increasing:

Why is US sperm so popular? It’s not about the superior fitness of American males, exactly. One reason is that the US’s immigration history means lots of ethnic diversity. For some would-be mothers from other parts of the world, this can give US product a leg up over places like Denmark, another sperm exporting powerhouse. Another is all that tracking and testing: the U.S. has some of the world’s highest standards for disease testing and donor screening. The FDA defines sperm as human tissue, and regulates it much as it does the donation of organs.

Paying anonymous donors has also helped:

Unlike many countries, the US allows men to donate anonymously and to be paid for doing so, leading to a comparatively larger donor pool; sperm donations in other countries plummeted following laws prohibiting anonymous donation or payment. After Britain ended anonymity for sperm donors in 2005, the wait for sperm could take years — in part because fewer men agreed to share their sperm with multiple women or with women they didn’t know personally. In Canada, concerns about the commercialization of human reproduction led to a ban on paying donors in 2005; by 2011 a single sperm bank with 35 active donors made up the entire national supply, according to the Toronto magazine The Grid. (In contrast, [Seattle Sperm Bank] alone has more than 140 active donors). Today, more than 90 percent of donor sperm used in Canada is imported from the US.

Anti-Social Media?

by Doug Allen

James Shakespeare encourages you to stop sharing your experiences on social media:

It’s natural to want to share experiences with the people you care about. After all, the classic postcard greeting is ‘Wish you were here’. But I think our reasons for sharing experiences on IMG_2003social media are more cynical than that. It’s not sharing, it’s bragging. When we log in to Facebook or Twitter we see an infinitely updating stream of people enjoying themselves. It’s not real life, of course, because people overwhelmingly post about the good things whereas all the crappy, dull or deep stuff doesn’t get mentioned. But despite this obvious superficiality, it subconsciously makes us feel like everyone is having a better time than us. We try to compete by curating our own life experiences to make it look like we’re also having non-stop fun and doing important things. It breeds in us a Pavlovian response that means every time something good is happening to us we must broadcast it to as many people as possible. …

The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focused on making them look attractive to other people. Your experience of something, even if similar to the experience of many others, is unique and cannot be reproduced within the constraints of social media. So internalise that experience instead. Think about it. Go home and think about it some more. Write about it in more than 140 characters; on paper even. Paint a picture of it. Talk about it face to face with your friends. Talk about how it made you feel.

I’m always a little put off by sweeping generalizations about people’s motivations for sharing on social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or anything else. Sure, there may be a lot of people who use these services as Shakespeare describes, carefully curating their every post to make their life seem as fulfilling as possible. But there are also myriad other ways to use social media that are not nearly so cynical.

Personally, I choose not to have a big presence on social media, with one notable exception: Instagram.

I don’t like broadcasting the day-to-day details of my life to a wide audience with status posts, or tweeting my possibly deep but probably less-deep-than-I-think thoughts. But I thoroughly enjoy the cleanliness and focus of Instagram, and the way that it gives me a brief window into the lives of my friends. When I post Instagram photos (I’ll confess, the large majority of which are cat-related), I hope that those who follow me see it the same way: not as an attempt to package and reproduce my experience for others, or as a form of bragging, but as a way to share, if only briefly, my experiences with those I think might enjoy the opportunity to share in them. It’s not necessarily a “wish you were here,” nor is it a “look at how cool my life is”; rather, I think of it as “I enjoyed this, maybe you will too.”

(Photo: From my Instagram feed, watching the 2012 Presidential debates with my cat. Personally, I don’t think this makes me look like I’m “having non-stop fun and doing important things.”)