Most Rapists Don't Know They're Rapists

The idea for this post came from a conversation I had after I posted this link on Facebook yesterday. I was then met with some comments that surprised me, such as:

"Those who rape know damn well that no means no. That's what makes it worthwhile for them. They're not confused by the idea that some women are supposed to play hard to get."

and

"Rapists are sensitive to labeling themselves as such. However, they invariably know, and enjoy, the fact that they're forcing the woman."

and

"The typical rapist attacks serially and is only stopped with a jail sentence, but yes, the 1st time he has non-consensual sex makes him a rapist, and not just "technically."

and

"I've heard from a couple of different sources that rapists are like hunters stalking for their next victim. I heard a statistic that although about 7% of men have attempted or committed rape, the number of women raped is much higher because these men have more than one victim. This statistic comes from a study of young men that ask about some of their behaviors, like, do you get excited/hopeful/aroused when a woman gets sloppy drunk. The study does not use the word rape because, as you point out, even the East Coast Rapist can't call himself that. However, the 7% of the men's answers point to raping behaviors."

To which, I had to respond:

I'm going to try and find some empirical sources, but until then I'll supplement with my own anecdotal evidence. I have a number of friends that have been raped. I also know quite a few people that work for the Sexual Assault Response Prevention Program (SARPP) at my school.

Recently, my school participated in The Clothesline Project which involved survivors of sexual assault writing on t-shirts and hanging them up for all to see. By the end of the day there were hundreds. Some of them were talking about how they didn't let the assault break them, some were talking about how they can't trust men anymore. But most of them involved calling attention to their attacker, either by name, fraternity, or some other means. Almost all of them mentioned that this guy was a friend. I couldn't even count the number of times I saw written "my rapist doesn't know he's a rapist." Because rapes are underreported. 

Why? Because most of the time, they cannot be proven. And people do not want to believe that the quarterback, the valedictorian, or the shy kid could take advantage of a girl. But they do. These men are not predators in the sense that they consciously hold a hatred of women, get off on hurting people, or sit waiting for their next victim. No, these are merely men to whom the notion of consent doesn't matter. 

Part of this is because our culture has inculcated the idea of "playing hard to get" as the article mentions. Regardless of whether or not women do this, most men have the idea that women do. And this means that when they are met with resistance, they just push harder. It is very different from "I am planning on raping someone tonight because that's what turns me on." Those types are rare. It is rather, "But if she didn't want to have sex then why was she making out with me? She totally wanted it, I just helped convince her."

This is misogynistic thinking fueled by the simple idea that women are there for us to consume and use; that they are not autonomous beings who have their own beliefs, desires, and fears. And in that moment, they believe that you're not going to stop, they're afraid that they're right, and they desire to get out. There isn't the black and white line between "rapists" and "everyone else" that most people think there is. To claim that is to be part of the problem; to be a rape denier. To deny the fact that hundreds and thousands of women are assaulted every year by their acquaintances, friends, and even partners. To claim that "rapists" are merely psychopaths as opposed to regular males who merely don't understand consent and happen to be in a situation to exercise their power is blind yourself to the majority of sexual assaults.

The Naturalistic Fallacy: The Way Things Are vs. The Way We Want Them To Be

The Naturalistic fallacy is committed every single time the phrase "but it's natural!" is uttered. When someone states that something is natural--assuming they're right--they have not said anything about the value we should assign to it; they have merely made an existence claim. They are trying to make a value claim based on the implicit assumption that "natural things = good." First let's unpack what it even means to say that something is "natural."

To say something is natural is to broadly say that it has not been contaminated in some way by dirty humans. It's part of the world that exists independent of our interference. The idea of natural gets tricky though when we talk about what is natural for us to do. When people say that a behavior is natural, they seem to be implying that it is a part of our human nature. This can be contrasted with normal, indicates an importance placed on the norms of rules of the society one lives in.

Understanding what is natural for humans is equivalent to understanding human nature. The ties that bind us into the category of humans means that we are far more similar than different. The actual difference in our genomes from person to person is 0.1%. This minute amount accounts for what we actually perceive as gigantic differences. Because we're sensitive to differences and the similarities are just things we take for granted. No one walks around going, "Oh my god, you also use language, sleep, eat food, and have a sex drive?!"

So the "age old question" of nature vs. nurture is not as mysterious as many may think. The goal of most psychological research is to find something that is similar in all of us, and for this to work, it requires the hypothesis that there is a shared human nature. If our individual differences were so extreme that nothing could ever be accurately predicted about human behavior, then psychology as a science would not exist. Through extensive research, we can determine facts about our human nature, but not all of these facts align with how we would like things to be.

Obesity is a historically recent trend. If you asked most people why this epidemic exists, their response will probably reference that people like to eat a lot, and that some people may be predisposed to having larger body types. This isn't incorrect, but it doesn't completely answer the question. We all like to eat, but why do these people eat so much? Evolutionary psychology has a satisfying answer. In our ancestral past, food was scarce so it made the most sense to eat as much of it as you could whenever possible. The taste that we developed for certain foods was based on their survival value to us. Fruits were appealing because the sugar increased glucose levels that aided in cognitive functioning. Thus, people who ate lots of fruit reproduced more leading to a higher propensity for a sweet tooth in the gene pool. Today, we can create foods that take advantage of this "sweet tooth," leading to such creations that never existed in our ancestral past. Yet even though these foods didn't exist, the cues did, and the cues are still working now, below our conscious awareness.

What this means is that if we stick to "if it is natural, it is good" then it logically follows that obesity, working on natural cues, is good. I doubt anyone would serious defend that view. They might say "The cue is natural, but the result of obesity isn't!" And I would be inclined to agree. Nature and nurture is separable in ways such as these. We have beliefs, attitudes, desires, and fears that we are predisposed to by nature (our genes), and which can be molded ever-so-slightly by nurture (societal influence). The distinction we need to make, which people often fail to do, is that there are plenty of natural things that we don't like, and plenty of natural things that we do like. Similarly, there are plenty of societal things that we don't like, and plenty of societal things that we do like. We just need to stop claiming that everything natural is automatically good because it gives a free pass to plenty of behaviors that we adaptive in our ancestral past that we can rationally say no longer aid us in the world we want to live in today.

Nothing could be less natural than birth control. It is the ultimate anti-evolution technology. If natural selection were allowed to take its course and could keep up with society (this is a thought experiment) future generations would probably possess some mechanism for subverting our birth control techniques.

The entire reason we have a sex drive is because our genes want to make more copies of themselves. That doesn't mean we have to be bound to the idea that if we want sex, we also have to have children. We don't have to in our current society. But those invoking the naturalistic fallacy would have to concede that anyone who engages in sex should want children, since that is what sex is for. The pleasure is a side effect! Individuals that enjoyed sex did it more, individuals that had more sex bore more children, individuals that had children are the only sets of genes that could have survived to the next generation. Cue 4 million years of hominid evolution working with this principle and you have our current sex-obsessed homo sapiens. It is completely natural to desire sex, even lots of sex, but that can't say anything one way or another about whether or not that's a good thing for an individual or for society. Understanding the cause of our desires is extremely important to treating the things that we want to change. If you go around telling people that their sex drive is unnatural and something that someone can control because it's been taught to them, they will not only be confused, but they will have no way of dealing with their (probably) non-existent problem. Clarification is needed. Psychology, anthropology, and biology provide the answers.

The Long Reach of Belief

Often I am asked, why do you care what other people believe? Well, the simple answer is that people tend to act on their beliefs. I know lots of people who don't believe in new age mysticism or God or any host of other supernatural elements, yet they just do not understand why another person's beliefs should effect me. If an individual believes that gay marriage is wrong--forbidden in the bible or otherwise--then he might actually speak out against it, protest gay rights, or use political power to rally against equality.

The issue with many of the beliefs that people hold is that they're not simple matters of taste. I may dislike Nickelback as a band, but the fact that certain people enjoy Nickelback is of no concern to me. Why? Because people liking Nickelback has no effect on my life or that of anyone else who may dislike them. Now we have established a criterion for when beliefs held by others should matter: if the beliefs cause people to act in ways that they otherwise would not.

For example, if a person is secretly racist we may find this deplorable, but if they never act on it, in what way could we know? The chances of someone actually being racist and never acting on it are probably impossible, since these beliefs manifest themselves in subtle ways that we are generally not aware of. But the point is that beliefs lead to actions. And if these actions can hurt, oppress, and generally cause harm to society, then there is warrant for us to care what other people believe.

I've had people tell me that I am just as bad and intolerant of the people I am speaking out against. They've told me that just because I disagree with someone doesn't make them bad, or wrong, or give me a reason to question their beliefs. Let me illustrate a picture: does a person who is racist (something we in the liberal western world tend to think is pretty bad) have the right to say that an anti-racist is discriminating against them? That doesn't really make any sense. The people who fought to free the slaves and for civil rights aren't people we look back on and say "Geez, couldn't they just leave other people's beliefs alone?" I speak out when I think people are being oppressed or harmed.

How do we define harm? There are various ways, so I'll give some examples. When children are taught that humans walked with dinosaurs, the KKK were nice people, and gay people are as awful as rapists and child molesters, their education is harming them. When parents allow their children to die by refusing medical treatment in favor of prayer, their spiritual belief is harming them. When psychics rob people of their money by claiming they can perform spiritual healing, claim they can talk to dead loved ones, or just provide false info to further their personal gain, their credulity in charlatans is harming them. This is just a short list. I could write about a hundred more ways in which people are harmed every day due to the nature of their beliefs.

I can imagine someone saying at this point, "Okay, so some people believe some stupid things. But my beliefs don't harm anyone. For example, I don't believe in evolution and it doesn't hurt anyone."

I will attempt to illustrate that the effects of holding a view such as creationism aren't immediately obvious, but just because they aren't immediately obvious doesn't mean there can't be latent harm. For example, if there were only one person who didn't believe in evolution we wouldn't have a problem, but the fact remains that half of Americans reject evolutionary theory. And furthermore, any argument that goes, "Well, me alone doing this action isn't hurting anyone, therefore it is fine," is not justifiable when we imagine the consequences, were everyone to do it. This known as the tragedy of the commons. Therefore, yes, if you and just you alone decide to litter, you won't destroy the world, but if everyone does? Well, we're still trying to fix that mistake.

An anticipated objection at this point is "I understand that littering is bad, but you haven't demonstrated that not believing in evolution is bad."

Allow me to do so.

So we have this thing called scientific progress, where we find out more about the world and because we know more about the world we can do neat things. These include little things like medicine that makes it possible for us to live three times as long as we could a few hundred years ago (thank you biology). All the food and drink that you enjoy, all the pills you pop and the drugs you take (thank you chemistry). That little GPS in your car and in your phone that allows you to find your way (thank you physics). So what does this have to do with evolution? Two things: the first is the smaller point that the understanding of evolution allows us to create medicine such as antibiotics and helps us discover disease-causing genes. The larger point is that the denial of evolution is part of a more substantial problem: the denial of scientific curiosity. If you say to yourself, "I refuse to believe in evolution because it contradicts the bible," then you are liable to say that you refuse to believe in a great number of scientific concepts. And if you don't believe in these things, you won't have an interest in science (you might even disdain it) despite the fact that the life you enjoy today is owed to many things that wouldn't be possible without science. But hey, that's fine, no one is forcing you to become a biologist. But if we all suddenly became incurious and stopped exploring, well, we don't have to imagine what life would be like since history has done a fine job of documenting the dark ages.

Sometimes the harm of a belief is that it manages to oppress a group for no other reason than to oppress them. For example, to argue that racists are oppressed by civil rights would be quite silly. The oppressors do not get to say they are being oppressed when people speak out against them. Otherwise we would have an infinite regress of each person claiming that their rights were violated when another person disagreed with them. The buck has to stop somewhere, and it stops at the opposition. You don't get to simply oppose those who disagree with you ad infinitum; you defend your original position. So when people have beliefs such as an idea that a particular race is inferior their own, they might do something like enslave that race. Even after slavery has ended, the dominant group might continue to oppress that race. We clearly understand the link here between belief and action, and while it isn't one person who keeps the wheels of oppression turning, the mindset that "Racism is okay, even if I'm not a racist" does nothing to help those who are oppressed - it does just the opposite.

So here's how the argument breaks down: sometimes the effect of a belief is apparent, as in:

Racist beliefs --> Racist behavior 

Sometimes it's way more latent, as in:

Science denial --> Kids dying from parent's belief in spiritual healing and lack of belief in modern medicine

Sometimes the path has many stops, as in:

 Evolution denier --> Uninterested in science --> Not enough employment science/technology related fields --> No cure for cancer yet

Sometimes it's a small part of a larger problem, as in:

No issue with racist beliefs --> A system that continues to run based on oppression

In short, beliefs matter a lot.  They have an effect we are unable to see most of the time. We should not write them off as necessarily harmless for that reason alone. I consider myself a feminist, yet for so long I spent time participating in behavior quite clearly anti-feminist and lo and behold, I was completely unaware of it. It wasn't until my consciousness was raised by the efforts of other individuals that I was able to implement change.

Don't be afraid to question things. It's the only way we can get true social change.

"Stop making me think!: The Compartmentalization of Critical Thinking

I am constantly amazed how young undergraduates can spend 3 hours a week for 15 weeks in psychology learning about cognitive biases, reciting the needed information on tests, and yet fail to ever apply what they know in real life. You might think that if a person wrote a paper on confirmation bias, then they probably wouldn't proudly tweet about how their horoscope is so right, because they are such a pisces. Most of us tend to think of our lives inside and outside the classroom as separate places with very little convergence. This belief is common about a great number of things. The late Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously wrote about a concept known as "Nonoverlapping Magisteria."It explained that the worlds of science and religion were in fact not antagonistic, but actually just pertained to completely different domains of knowledge. On this, he said:

"...we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven."

It's the division of two areas of reality, saying that there is more than one way of knowing. For religion, I go to my bible, for the empirical world, I go to my micro/tele/stethoscope. This compartmentalization of critical thinking happens in more places than the classroom and outside class, religion and science, but I'm going to stick with these two examples for now. I am arguing that what you learn in biology about evolution isn't just true on the test, it's true in the rest of the world. What you learn in sociology about race and class inequality isn't just a simple topic for your paper, it's based on facts about the reality that we live in. But most of us shut down these systems when we pack up and go home for the summer, the weekend, or even just tonight for this party. Nothing kills a person's buzz quite like reminding them that they're wrong, despite the fact that they learned the right answer.

This does not happen to everyone, but it happens to enough people for it to be concerning. It is the explanation for how we have wonderful scientists such as Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, who happens to be a devout Christian. He keeps his religion and science separate. He doesn't tell his colleagues not to run tests, but rather to pray. He does not attribute the success of the treatments at the NIH to God's will (at least, publicly). So why is there a problem? He is still compartmentalizing his critical thinking. He is using it in one area of his life (his work) and not applying it in others (his personal).

To get an idea what I'm talking about, think about a very simple concept that is basic to all religions: prayer. The idea that someone who does science for a living could at the same time believe in prayer is a complete division of reality within the mind of that individual. The issue with prayer is that it has zero verifiability. If it did, if it worked with the certainty you might expect from such a popular activity, then we could just fucking pray away world hunger, racism, and give each of us a million-dollar mansion to live in. Prayer seems to only give us things that could have happened in the absence of prayer. In fact, whenever we attempt to measure the effect of prayer, we have either found no effect, or (ironically) the opposite effect.

Critical thinking isn't always easy, but you actually do it more than you might know. Imagine this scenario: you attempt to turn on your TV with the remote and yet nothing happens when you press the "on" button. The first thing to pop into your head is probably not something along the lines of "god is punishing me" or "evil demons have destroyed my tv." No, you're probably (no matter how religious you are) bound to come up with a physical, natural explanation. The batteries in the remote might be dead, so you switch them from your DVD remote and see if they work. They don't, so you switch them back into the DVD remote to make sure THOSE aren't dead either. When in the DVD remote, they work fine, so it's not the batteries. You attempt to turn the TV on with the power switch on the front but nothing happens. You think the TV itself may have died, but there are other things to check first. You look behind the TV and notice that the plug had merely come out of the socket. You plug it back in and the world as you know it returns.

We have all probably done something like this before. And guess what? You were doing science! You (very quickly) created hypotheses and tested them, looking for results. Why is it easy to think critically in this situation and not others? The easy answer is that the results are instant. With the concept of prayer, you have to wait. And when you have to wait for as long as you do, such as for God to send you a husband, or for your depression to go away, or to get a promotion at your job, then you really have no way of telling if it worked. But, you may remember that you prayed about it. And when you credit prayer, you ignore the fact that you may have done hard work and earned the promotion, that serendipitous circumstance led you to your latest love, or that the medication you're taking is actually responsible for your good mood. In this sense, prayer is antithetical to understanding our world, because it robs us of actual explanations.

So whenever I hear someone say, "Stop making me think!" because I am pointing out their inconsistencies, it makes me sad. It could be that they're a biblical literalist and yet they claim to support gay rights - you can't have it both ways. Or when someone writes that they "don't trust science" from a computer whose technology could not have been built without thousands of scientists doing their job every day. Or when my friends with PhD's--whose job it is to think critically--tell me that they see psychics.

I'm not going to stop making you think, because I believe it is the most important thing you can do.

Slut Shaming and Why It Needs To Stop

What is slut shaming? It is a very simple and subtle thing that many of us do without even being aware of it. It is the process of making women (and men) feel bad about their sexual choices. Often it's the word "slut" or its many synonyms used in conjuncture with a derogatory comment or tone. As in,

"Look at what that girl is wearing, what a slut."

When that is said, several implicit assumptions are made:
1) Girls who wear more "revealing" outfits are "sluts"
2) Being a slut is a bad thing

So let's get a working definition of slut then, since it would be impossible to call it a bad thing if we don't even know what one is!

The simplest definition I can seem to find is someone who has an open sociosexual orientation. This means that they are open to the idea of having sex without being in a committed, monogamous, romantic relationship. Now, most people seem to agree on this definition. But here's the problem: most of us then, by definition, are sluts. What?! How can this be? Sluts are a terrible awful no-good very bad thing... right?

The word "slut" is pejorative, meaning that it can have positive or negative connotations depending on the group that it is used in. A good way to think about this is to talk about America's other favorite set of pejorative words.

In the middle school years, kids are prone to use words like "gay" to talk about things that they don't like. They might say, "this class is so gay," or "I hate this band, they're so gay," when neither the class nor the band contain any homosexuals nor homosexual behavior. Are these kids confused about the meaning of the word? No. If you ask them, they get it right. But when asked why they use the word like that, they'll probably shrug. Everyone knows that when they say something is gay it doesn't mean actually gay. Right. But if the connotation is that "gay" is a synonym for "things that are bad," suddenly this doesn't seem okay anymore. Most progressive teens start getting aware of this around high school and stop calling things gay. They even might call out others that use it, stating that use of the word in that pejorative sense is homophobic. What predicts this kind of pro-LGBT behavior? Knowing someone who is gay. That is why gay rights campaigns urge people to come out of the closet if they can. The single biggest aid to fighting homophobia has been the realization that, hey, lots of people are gay, and they're just people like the rest of us.

What does this have to do with slut shaming? Well, because when it comes to the word "slut," we're still in middle school. We know what it means, but we use it talk about people we don't like, almost exclusively women. In fact, when men are called sluts, it's usually in the form of the euphemistic "man whore." It is far more acceptable for men to be sexually promiscuous and open about their exploits than it is for women. So instead, we have lots of women who are sexually free in this sense, but they feel bad about their own behavior. They feel bad because we have taught them to feel bad. They slut shame themselves. This is because they're in the slut closet and don't want to come out into a world that disdains what they do. But where does this slut shaming come from?

There are evolutionary reasons why men and women have different sexual preferences and strategies. It our ancestral past, it was an adaptive strategy for women to be very choosy with whom they mated with. This was because they would bear the burden of carrying a child to term, being unable to mate in the interim, and then raising said child. So it made sense that women would care more: their investment was higher. Men invested a few minutes of work, and that was all they needed to pass their genes on.

The truth is that these behaviors are rooted in human nature, but reinforced by our society. Because we subvert human nature all the time. Why do we like to eat, often to the point of it being unhealthy? Because it was adaptive in our past to eat as much as we could because food was scare. Now we have obesity, an unintended side effect of this drive. Likewise, most of the sex in we have as a species in this contemporary age is not for procreation. But that's what sex is biologically for. It feels good because those who enjoyed it had more offspring, so we have a species that loves to fuck, and that most of the time is not thinking about having children.

Today we have a set of men and women who seem to police women who might not be as choosy about their sex partners. If you asked them why, they probably couldn't tell you. Evolutionary theory gives us some clues, but its not the entire story. The fact is that when people engage in slut shaming, they are not thinking, "Look at that silly girl! By not being more choosy about her sexual partners and waiting to invest in a man who will also invest in her, she is liable to make a mistake and possibly end up with a poor genetic recombination with a man who will not aid in raising the child!"

There are many dark, undesirable sides of human nature. The fact that it may have been adaptive to be misogynistic, xenophobic, and violent in our past does not mean that because they have some "natural" origin, that they get a free moral pass. We are able to evaluate behaviors in a way that we couldn't then. We are not bound by the chains of human nature; our society allows us to move past it, most people just never consider it.

The idea of taking the word back is appealing to some people. This is what happened with the gay community. Nowadays, you might hear someone describe their friend as "gay", and it will mean just that: that their friend prefers to engage in sex with people of the same gender. So could we do the same with slut? Could slut just mean someone that enjoys sex and doesn't need the restrictions of a traditional relationship to engage in it?

I want to now ask what I feel is the most important question of all: what, if anything, is wrong with being a slut?

I think the people over www.slutsunite.org get it right.

Most people would agree with what is written there. And then suddenly, given that, what's wrong with being a slut?

It's your sex life. As long as you are being safe, sane, consensual, then do what you want. Life is too short to feel bad about doing what feels good.

Skeptic: A Dirty Word

Throughout most of my life, whenever I heard the word "skeptic" I immediately associated it with "cynic" - someone who just didn't believe in anything; someone who hated everything; thought everything was bullshit. Well, now I'm both of those things, and the descriptors that childhood me pulled out weren't actually that far from the truth. But now, when I say proudly that I'm a skeptic, I still often get looks from people that might normally indicate that I just whipped out my dick and pissed on them. What what does it really mean to call oneself a skeptic?

The word skeptic is conditional, meaning that the existence of people who call themselves skeptics is dependent on the fact that most people are not skeptical. For example, there is a not a word for people who don't believe in Santa Clause or for non-astrologers. The label exists because there is a marked difference from the rest of the population - it indicates a subset. Just like the word atheist wouldn't exist if there weren't theists, skepticism is an outlook on the world built on the credulous shoulders of lay folk. 

Now, it is worth clearing up the difference between a skeptic, a conspiracy theory, and an anti-realist, since these three are often mixed up. A skeptic is someone who values evidence, and considers it the primary basis for truth. A conspiracy theorist is someone who is paranoid and generally believes the government is covering up the truth of what's really going on. They usually talk of secret societies running the world, such as the free masons and the illuminati. They may believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, that global warming is a conspiracy, or that Barack Obama's birth story is false. An anti-realist is someone who has such a high bar for "proof" and "truth" that essentially nothing could ever be true or real to them. This leads to a view known as solipsism, which essentially makes it impossible to have a conversation with such individuals.

Being a skeptic is seen as a negative thing to many people because it implies doubt, the opposite of belief, and belief is a thing that we like. We like it so much that we think people should just believe in things all the time for whatever reason they want. We say things like "faith is a virtue", which by definition is the belief in something without--or in spite of--evidence, often to the contrary. Being a skeptic means you take up this radical view of like, wanting proof and stuff. Aliens? Sure. Where's the proof, brah? Until then, take your cryptozoology and shove it.

"So, what do you believe in?"

I could get into an argument about how the word "belief" is misleading, but it's easier to say what I don't "believe" in. Here's a nice list.

So go on, continue to lament me for having a personal relationship with reality. The truth is you all value proof more than you think.

"Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever." - Sam Harris

The "Good Ol' Days" Are Less Good, More Ol'

Whatever your social media site of choice, you have no doubt encountered some infographic that intended to inform you how much better shit was back in the day. It probably rattled off a list of arbitrary things that were popular during that time and ended smugly with some assertion of how, because of this random shit, therefore, all shit was much mo' betta. It may have looked something like this:

But were things really better than just because that's when you happened to be a kid? There doesn't seem to be any good reason to think so. What is funny about most of the people who post things like this, is that they weren't even born until the mid-to-late 90's. I was born in 1987, do I call myself "an 80's kid" - fuck no, for two reasons: First, it's stupid and unnecessary and stupefyingly pretentious to claim to be better in anyway because you were born at a time, something need I remind you that you had zero control over. Second, because even if I were to buy into the bullshit, my life had nothing to do with the 80's. I GREW UP in the 90's. So, yes, I do remember all the stupid bullshit that these kids pretend to get nostalgic about. Were there cool things in the 90's? Sure, but it's really easy to talk about the few shows you miss without remembering how much everything else sucked. This is a matter of something known as confirmation bias. It amounts to remembering the hits and forgetting the misses. So if we want to paint a pretty picture of the 90's, we write about all the shit that we miss (which, we actually still have access to, thanks to the fucking future technology developed post-90's, you unthankful little shitbags), and we forget about all the shit we don't miss, such as this:

So when you post stupid shit like this,

probably FROM an iphone you spoiled little brat, then go trade it in and complain that your parents didn't get you a little piece-of-shit, black-and-white keychain "virtual" pet that required zero input to  get any actual output.

Where the fuck does this elitism come from? I'd almost be wiling to say, "You're not a real 90's kid if you don't fucking shut up about how much it rules to be a stupid fucking 90's kid", but alas it's not just those born sometime in the past 13 to 22 years. Because I've also seen shit like this:

This sounds more like 80's white-trash to me. What I love is the caveat of "still turned out okay", as opposed to what? Every person raised by domestic violence and actually thinking they're not okay? No, everyone thinks they are their imaginary God's gift to fucking humanity and owe it all to the crappy fucking childhoods they had, which they can now in their ripe old age turn back to and say, "Yeah! I had the best shitty childhood and it was awesome!" No, you are bad and you should feel bad about yourself. Everyone thinks their youth was awesome and the rest of us just don't get it.

We've all heard old people (like, real old people, as in grandparents and scary homeless people) talk about how great the "good ol' days" were. Same fucking thing happening here. Do you want to know the answer? It's confirmation bias combined with the fact that our memories are mostly fiction, and being a kid is awesome because you don't know how to filter out what is and isn't useful. So you have a memory of your childhood/youth/whathaveyou being sweet, when it was rarely that at all. Every generation will say the same fucking thing, but their childhoods sucked just as much, but because they were fucking stupid, worthless kids, they couldn't fucking remember it, and now that they're old enough to reflect, they'd rather bask in elitism of whatever happened to be their youth, than just admit that shit today is better than it ever was in any of the ways that really matter.

Labels: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I often complain about how unnecessary it is that we feel the need to label everything, especially our relationships. Often when two people start seeing each other, they will eventually reach a point where deem it necessary to DTR (define the relationship), which amounts to putting a label on it. The label serves two main purposes: it helps the couple understand what they are, and it lets outsiders know how to cognitively categorize them. The problem with these labels is that we have a tendency to not ascertain that the agreed upon label shares the same qualities to each person. If I ask a girl, "So are we friends or dating?" and she responds, "We're dating." - I could take that to mean we are going on dates, while she means we are in a romantic relationship. There is a world of difference between these two conceptions of "dating", and yet we throw the word around and expect people to immediately understand which version (I'm sure there are even more) that we're talking about.

It is worth asking what the purpose of these labels is at a broader level. Labels serve their purpose by taking a continuous variable and making it discrete by restricting the range on that variable. Think about how age works. Is there a difference in a person who is 20 years and 364 days old, and someone who is 21 years old? Not really. But we have to draw the line somewhere in order to get coherent categories. Without categories, we'd be lost on many subjects. Similarly, this distinction of labeling is how we take a piece like this and draw an arbitrary line where blue ends and green begins:

But you could also argue that there is a third color in there between them. Or maybe there are five colors. If you looked at any individual pixel, it would look indistinguishable from its neighbor, yet we can see the gradient changing colors. This is both the purpose and problem with labels. When you want to paint your house teal and the only listed options are green or blue, what do you do? Imagine that everyone can see the middle of the gradient, but there was no name for teal - and teal was what you wanted. So clearly this act of labeling becomes problematic sometimes. What about in relationships? What is it that defines the label we get it? I'm going to propose how things are currently (for most people), and then how I think they should be. 

People get their own idea of what constitutes a relationship from their experience. You witness your family, friends, and fictional characters entering and leaving various relationships throughout your whole life. In the same way that we learn the meaning of most words without ever being told directly, we form a schema of a relationship. A schema is a set of characteristics that defines something. It is similar to the word concept, except that each schema is filled with other schemas which link to other schemas. If that sounds confusing, maybe this confusing picture will help:

Imagine that the word "relationship" is in the middle. Each person is going to have a different set of other schemas branching out, which means that each person's idea of what a relationship is, is going to be fundamentally different. Now, a relationship is a trickier and broader concept than an egg. So when two people decide to be "in a relationship", they're bringing different schemas to the table. The problem is, rarely do people ever define the word "relationship" when they define the relationship. 

What is desired from the labeling is a concreteness that is otherwise fleeting. When discussing abstract concepts such as thoughts and feelings, there is no object in the world that we can point to and say, "This! This is what I mean!" in the same way that we do for physical objects. Because we cannot do this, we are left hoping that we use these words in the same way when we frequently do not.

What I instead propose is that relationship categories should be defined based on their qualities, not the qualities based on the relationship category. To make the example simple, imagine that there were five qualities relationships could have:

1. General interest [y] or [n]
2. Physical intimacy [y] or [n]
3. Priority over other individuals [y] or [n]
4. Exclusivity [y] or [n]
5. Living together [y] or [n]

If you just have (1), then it sounds like friendship. If you have (1) and (2), you probably have some form of a friends with benefits. If you have (1), (2), and (3), then it sounds something like a polyamorous "main" or an open relationship. If you have (1), (2), (3), and (4) that sounds like a traditional committed, monogamous, romantic relationship (CMRR). If you have all 5, then that sounds like a possible engagement or marriage, or it could just be a CMRR living together. The point of this all is that relationships are built on qualities, qualities that far outnumber the ones I've listed here. I didn't even include the other possible, non-sequential combinations such as (1) and (3), maybe we'd call that best friends.

The issue is that the number of categorical labels we have is finite in practice, whereas the the number of possibilities is infinite in principle. The labels we have just don't cut it, and they're not informative. This is partly why I eschew them altogether when it comes to my relationships. Everyone is a "friend" although I do varying things with each of my friends. But no one else feels the need to get different labels for "the friend I go shopping with" and "the friend I play video games with" - they all collapse into friend, which we generally understand. It's when sex gets involved that we want all sorts of labels - and it's where I disagree that sex is important enough to warrant the change.

Fifty Shades of "Everyone is doing it"

You may or may not have heard of a little book called Fifty Shades of Grey. It's been on top of Amazon's best seller list for three months now. The success of the novel is an interesting story. It is by no means the first erotic fiction to be written; thousands of erotic/romance novels are published every year. This book got popular the way many books do - good luck on word of mouth circuit. But here is the interesting thing about the word of mouth with this book: the word of mouth is not entirely positive. Tons of readers (myself included) have picked up a copy of this book because we're heard that this erotic tale gives its audience the wrong impression of what a BDSM relationship is like. But I know that I am in no place to criticize the content until I've read it. Likewise, I know others who have heard it's just a ridiculous, trashy novel - they just want to read it because everyone is reading it. They want to be part of the conversation.

What many people don't know is that Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan fiction. That doesn't make it inherently bad, but it is done explain a bit of the character development. And now, E. L. James has managed to take her Twilight fan fiction and turn it into something amazing - a book that people want to read even if they think it's pure crap. And that, is kind of amazing.

Evolution and Sexual Selection, Or: Why Men and Women be Actin' Different In Da Club

Paramount to understanding much of human interaction is the theory of evolution, specifically how it relates to sexual selection. This is important because most of what we do (in many domains, not just sex) is not based on well-thought out reasons that we completely understand. In fact, most reasons amount to circular arguments or tautologies (ie: "Because I just want to!") that tell us nothing about what's really going on.

So when your average guy says, "Man, look at the tits on that girl!" - he is indicating his attraction. What he doesn't know is why he should be attracted to protruding mounds of fat on her chest, when the same amount on her stomach would generally indicate disinterest. If you asked Mr. Average Guy, he could not tell you. He might be able to bullshit, but he won't give you a real reason. Here's what's really going on in his head: "Man, the size of that girl's bossom in ratio to her waist indicates that she is healthy and fertile, ready for childbearing, and I wish to procreate with her in order to produce offspring with a high chance of survival so that my genetic components may be passed on."

But he doesn't know that.

Similarly, when a guy wants to bang every girl in the club, it's because it was an adaptive strategy in the environment our brains evolved - around 200,000 years ago. No, there were not clubs 200,000 years ago. But there were plains with plenty of fertile females. Since our genes want to make more copies of themselves, they built bodies that could do this with sexual reproduction. They also built bodies that would enjoy sex so we want to do it. They also built bodies that just wanted to basically fuck all the time so these genes would get like, really spread.

But how come females are generally more selective? I know there are some girls who are down to bang everything (no hate) and guys who are super picky, but I am talking in generalizations here - bear with me. They are selective because of something known as sexual selection. This is because in a world before birth control, if you banged a girl, chances are she was gonna be having a baby. But the investment for making a child is anything but congruent. If there are unlimited, willing females, a male can fuck them all and make many, many children. For any given woman though, there is a 9-month investment, on top of having to raise the child to maturity so it doesn't drown in it's own vomit or something. This is why women are typically the choosers when it comes to sex. So when they see a hot guy, they might be like, "Oh girl, that man I been talking to is fiiiiiine. I might go home with him tonightttt." - but they couldn't tell you why in any way that wouldn't be circular. Here's what's really going on in their head: "Oh girl, that man seems like he is of the right genetic composure to create suitable offspring, and his demeanor indicates that he will stick around for the raising of said offspring, so my genetic components can be passed on."

No one in their right mind thinks like that.

Doesn't mean it isn't true though.

So you want to know why that girl/guy won't bang you? Fucking evolution, man.

The Beginning

I had been thinking for awhile about starting a blog, but for one reason or another, never got around to it. Instead, I collected ideas that I wished to write about.

I have decided to finally give the blogosphere another go with my new blog "On Becoming Sentient" - I'd like to talk a little bit about what the title means.

Sentience is generally defined as the ability to have subjective, conscious, perceptual experience. It is one of (if not the) differentiating factor(s) between human beings and the machines we create. As of yet, our robots are not self-aware. Whether they ever will be is yet to be seen, although science-fiction supplies us with no shortage of thought experiments on what the outcomes might be like. 

Human beings are not robots - or are we? I will argue - in this blog - that we are robots, albeit a very different, special kind of robot. This idea was first borne to me some time ago when reading about Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis:

"You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

We are far-less in control than we think. We did not choose our parents, our birthplace, our genes, or any of the important things that set up who we are today. Instead, we make small choices that affect us in subtle ways. Our sensitivity to these slight changes allows us to devote great amounts of time to what others might call "trivial." The similarities between any two individuals are far more numerous than the differences. This tendency to focus on what is different between ourselves and others hurts our ability to notice how similar we are.

I generalize with the pronoun we because is it something we are all guilty of. But it is important to note that this method of thought is not our fault. It is rather the natural state of things, that can be only be escaped through patience and persistence. This form of escape is what I refer to as becoming sentient.

To become sentient is to acknowledge that the illusion of free will is just that - an illusion. It is to understand that the drives you feel (produced by millions of years of evolution) are no more in your control than the next sentence I type. It is to understand that you are just as insignificant as I am; as any individual is to anyone else in the grand scheme of the cosmos. It is to acknowledge a lack of rules or meaning set out from on-high. It is to understand all this and not feel sad, broken, or terrified. It is to understand insignificance and revel in it. It is to create meaning where the universe has given none.

This process is not easy, and I do not expect anyone to read the above paragraphs and immediately agree with me. In fact, I would be skeptical if anyone took all my claims at face value and felt none worth challenging. This introduction is not meant to convince, but to give the reader an idea of the content to come.

Not every post will relate to this thesis specifically; it should be thought of as a uniting theme running underneath every word. That is to say, the ideas I plan to present will make the most sense in the light of this framework.

Thank you for reading the first of many posts to come.