Chads, incels and pseudoscience
November 3, 2023 9:51 AM Subscribe
Evolutionary scholars might be surprised to see sexist worldviews reinforced by the ‘dual mating strategy’ and ‘sexy son’ hypotheses, or by the latest research on the ovulatory cycle. The manosphere has its own version of evolutionary psychology, mingling cutting-edge scientific theories and hypotheses with personal narratives, sexual double standards and misogynistic beliefs.After analysing this phenomenon, this article suggests ways to mitigate it.
(That's not a criticism of the article, just sad recognition of the kinds of ideas that spread around the internet circles it's talking about.)
posted by JHarris at 10:26 AM on November 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 10:26 AM on November 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
In order to analyse the role of evolutionary science in the manosphere, an extensive qualitative study of manosphere discourse was conducted. A selection of discourse, or ‘corpus’, was constituted, spanning three decades (1993–2022), and evenly divided among the five communities. Most of the material was selected for its importance to manosphere communities (‘Quality Content’ section – 70%). This consisted of ‘top posts’, ‘most popular threads’, most viewed videos, etc. Each addition was justified if the website, platform, or book was central to the community, i.e. consistently cited on other manosphere websites, and/or identified as such by researchers. Another section consisted of material selected for its use of evolutionary science and relevance to the analysis (‘Other Related Material’ section – 15%). A third section was randomly sampled on Reddit and forums for representativity (‘Random Sample’ section – 15%). The random sampling schedule and procedures are detailed in Supplementary Material S2. The whole content selection process is summarised in Supplementary Material S3. After transcription of audio and video content, the material covers 9000 pages and contains Reddit posts, forum threads, e-books, books, blogs posts, web articles, online encyclopedia entries, tweets and YouTube videos. The complete list of corpus material is provided in Table S1 (Supplementary Material).That must have been a fun process. Also a good pull quote for next time someone says the humanities are "easy".
posted by pulposus at 10:57 AM on November 3, 2023 [12 favorites]
That must have been a fun process. Also a good pull quote for next time someone says the humanities are "easy".
I don't think the humanities are easy, but this would be an odd choice to make that point given that it's not a humanities article and neither author is in the humanities.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:08 AM on November 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
I don't think the humanities are easy, but this would be an odd choice to make that point given that it's not a humanities article and neither author is in the humanities.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:08 AM on November 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
"Anthropology is both the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences." - Eric Wolf
posted by RobotHero at 11:28 AM on November 3, 2023 [14 favorites]
posted by RobotHero at 11:28 AM on November 3, 2023 [14 favorites]
Since i encourage the derail, let me say something to try to get us back on the article. I was surprised and a little disappointed that the suggestions are basically for people publishing in evolutionary fields or fields describing animal behaviour. I was kind of expecting mitigation strategies for random people when interacting with either people who have bought into these ideologies or people who might be on the brink. I guess it makes sense given the publication venue that the target audience wouldn't be randos on the street, but I was still kind of hoping for more widely-implementable strategies.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:39 AM on November 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:39 AM on November 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
As a good naturalist, I take it as axiomatic that consciousness is a natural phenomenon, having a physiological basis, and hence can properly be regarded as a product of natural selection. Which is to say, I definitely think "evolutionary psychology" should be a thing.
Yet, when I see work labelled as explication of "evolutionary psychology" it seems to be generally just-so stories aimed at arguing that the social relationships of people in advanced societies are "natural" and therefore right. Particularly the bits about female sexual behavior and female secondary sexual characteristics: those tend to illuminate a lot more about the people who write them than about the ostensible topic.
"Evolutionary psychology," I suggest, might be doomed to be the same kind of shithole as economics: a topic that is nominally a discipline that examines reality in an evidence-based way but which really is almost wholly dominated by the preconceptions, views, and opinions that its practitioners bring to the program.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:41 PM on November 3, 2023 [31 favorites]
Yet, when I see work labelled as explication of "evolutionary psychology" it seems to be generally just-so stories aimed at arguing that the social relationships of people in advanced societies are "natural" and therefore right. Particularly the bits about female sexual behavior and female secondary sexual characteristics: those tend to illuminate a lot more about the people who write them than about the ostensible topic.
"Evolutionary psychology," I suggest, might be doomed to be the same kind of shithole as economics: a topic that is nominally a discipline that examines reality in an evidence-based way but which really is almost wholly dominated by the preconceptions, views, and opinions that its practitioners bring to the program.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:41 PM on November 3, 2023 [31 favorites]
Must be a bummer to be in EP. You have to worry about people attacking you for your work because of the political inferences those people draw from it, and other people (mis)using your work for the political axes they have to grind. It must lead to all kinds of interesting questions simply dying on the vine because who needs the hassle. Doesn't happen so much to oceanographers.
posted by MattD at 12:55 PM on November 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by MattD at 12:55 PM on November 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
It's an interesting paper, especially if you're not really familiar with the communities or the science. I'm only slightly familiar with both and learned a lot. This paragraph sums it up best:
Our analysis reveals the prevalence of EP hypotheses on female mating in the manosphere, often drawn from reputable scientific sources. However, their manosphere renditions mostly obscure the fact that female mating strategies are hypothetical, unconscious, and supposed to have evolved aggregately over time. Interestingly, hypotheses on the evolution of male sexuality are not discussed much in the manosphere: as if only women were strategising fitness-maximising animals. Moreover, hypotheses on female sexuality are received in an emotional, moralistic, and conservative framework, causing biased interpretations of the scientific literature.
They co-opt scientific language and findings either without understanding them, or understanding them incorrectly, or relying on others misunderstanding them (or more likely, not even checking), and of course do all this in order to fit a preconceived narrative of victimhood. This approach is so familiar!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:39 PM on November 3, 2023 [7 favorites]
Our analysis reveals the prevalence of EP hypotheses on female mating in the manosphere, often drawn from reputable scientific sources. However, their manosphere renditions mostly obscure the fact that female mating strategies are hypothetical, unconscious, and supposed to have evolved aggregately over time. Interestingly, hypotheses on the evolution of male sexuality are not discussed much in the manosphere: as if only women were strategising fitness-maximising animals. Moreover, hypotheses on female sexuality are received in an emotional, moralistic, and conservative framework, causing biased interpretations of the scientific literature.
They co-opt scientific language and findings either without understanding them, or understanding them incorrectly, or relying on others misunderstanding them (or more likely, not even checking), and of course do all this in order to fit a preconceived narrative of victimhood. This approach is so familiar!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:39 PM on November 3, 2023 [7 favorites]
Aardvark Cheeselog has it right: people who are doing good work on the evolutionary aspects of behavior do not call themselves evolutionary psychologists. Typically, you'll see them label themselves as behavioral ecologists, primatologists, anthropologists, or sometimes behavior geneticists--although there are plenty of people in behavior genetics with lazy and overly simplistic takes on genetics, too.
I feel like I trot out this anecdote all the time, but I did my PhD at UT Austin, which has a really powerful set of sexual selection and display researchers in the EEB department, right? And UT Austin also has a really prominent evolutionary psychologist in the form of David Buss, and a few others besides. And yet, in eight years of my PhD, I never saw anyone from evolutionary psychology come sniffing around to so much as a departmental seminar. Paleontology folks, yes, but not once an evolutionary psychologist. (To be fair to them, there are good reasons: no one detests evolutionary psychology like behavioral ecologists and ethologists.)
I've spent my entire career at the intersection of genetics, evolution, and behavior, right? And the thing you have to understand about this space is that it will absolutely make sure you understand that a "discipline" is not necessarily defined by the topics you study; it's defined by the people, ideas, and conversations that you take part in and which shape your work. The discipline of evolutionary psychology is--I don't want to say wholly worthless, there might be something there I have never seen that is useful, but I have gone looking for highly cited evolutionary psychology papers on a number of occasions to try and find it and I constantly find highly cited papers that don't bother to test a single one of their 'evolutionary' priors. Instead, the acceptable evidence is all based on undergraduate survey results. It is so, so, so frustrating.
Actually, I know one evo psych paper I like a lot, but I like it because I completely ignore the framework, discussion, and much of the analysis. It's just that the researchers in question asked a couple hundred college undergrads what reasons they had had for engaging in sexual behavior, and they turned in a couple hundred different answers between them. I like the dataset because it illustrates how extraordinarily plastic, flexible, and variable humans are about sex and sexuality, which is exactly one of the problems with trying to untangle human sexuality from an evolutionary standpoint: it's such an environmentally sensitive trait that figuring out what, if anything, is genetic is a tall order.
posted by sciatrix at 1:51 PM on November 3, 2023 [41 favorites]
I feel like I trot out this anecdote all the time, but I did my PhD at UT Austin, which has a really powerful set of sexual selection and display researchers in the EEB department, right? And UT Austin also has a really prominent evolutionary psychologist in the form of David Buss, and a few others besides. And yet, in eight years of my PhD, I never saw anyone from evolutionary psychology come sniffing around to so much as a departmental seminar. Paleontology folks, yes, but not once an evolutionary psychologist. (To be fair to them, there are good reasons: no one detests evolutionary psychology like behavioral ecologists and ethologists.)
I've spent my entire career at the intersection of genetics, evolution, and behavior, right? And the thing you have to understand about this space is that it will absolutely make sure you understand that a "discipline" is not necessarily defined by the topics you study; it's defined by the people, ideas, and conversations that you take part in and which shape your work. The discipline of evolutionary psychology is--I don't want to say wholly worthless, there might be something there I have never seen that is useful, but I have gone looking for highly cited evolutionary psychology papers on a number of occasions to try and find it and I constantly find highly cited papers that don't bother to test a single one of their 'evolutionary' priors. Instead, the acceptable evidence is all based on undergraduate survey results. It is so, so, so frustrating.
Actually, I know one evo psych paper I like a lot, but I like it because I completely ignore the framework, discussion, and much of the analysis. It's just that the researchers in question asked a couple hundred college undergrads what reasons they had had for engaging in sexual behavior, and they turned in a couple hundred different answers between them. I like the dataset because it illustrates how extraordinarily plastic, flexible, and variable humans are about sex and sexuality, which is exactly one of the problems with trying to untangle human sexuality from an evolutionary standpoint: it's such an environmentally sensitive trait that figuring out what, if anything, is genetic is a tall order.
posted by sciatrix at 1:51 PM on November 3, 2023 [41 favorites]
Okay, kneejerk cranky complaints aside, let's look at this paper--which is an anthropologist's look at the way these theories are promulgated and spread through the manosphere.
(The question of what is science and what is humanities honestly gets to be a tiresome one after a while: I have read history papers every bit as technically rigorous as any biology paper, for example, and ideally disciplines swap expertise and collaborate in order to derive better knowledge anyway.)
One of the things that really irritates me about the sexual selection paradigms that these folks are picking up is that they are super into the idea of choosy females picking among hypercompetitive males--but female animals in species where sexual success is largely determined by male/male competition often don't actually have strong preferences. In fact, a lot of these chucklefucks assume that sexual competition is really fierce and strong, but that's just not universally true: often, even in preference-mediated systems, female preference varies a lot and often changes traits of emphasis or even directions of preference from year to year!
And of course males also exert preferences, just as females often compete among themselves, and nowhere is this combination of display, preference, and choice more equitable between sexes than in *checks notes* socially monogamous species that invest a lot in biparental care, which last I checked sure does describe humans. Funny thing, that!
There's also so much emphasis on the idea that "good genes" are an objectively true thing, when honestly even "good genes" proponents are generally the first to tell you that which genes are good in any given moment is highly contextual. In general, I am pretty critical of indirect effects/"good genes" models of sexual selection, not least because I think there's too many stochastic barriers to good causality. My whole Thing in that corner of the field is that I think it makes much more sense to look at condition-dependence of sexually selected traits--which is the generally agreed mechanism by which resource availability is tied to sexual displays--as a function of resource allocation in an unpredictable environment by males themselves. On the female end of things, it explains things equally well to allow female preferences to be arbitrary, or even to be sensory exploitation of known biases in female or unisex sensory adaptations. Sometimes the displays just let females find males in order to mate with them!
It is so frustrating!
posted by sciatrix at 2:14 PM on November 3, 2023 [26 favorites]
(The question of what is science and what is humanities honestly gets to be a tiresome one after a while: I have read history papers every bit as technically rigorous as any biology paper, for example, and ideally disciplines swap expertise and collaborate in order to derive better knowledge anyway.)
One of the things that really irritates me about the sexual selection paradigms that these folks are picking up is that they are super into the idea of choosy females picking among hypercompetitive males--but female animals in species where sexual success is largely determined by male/male competition often don't actually have strong preferences. In fact, a lot of these chucklefucks assume that sexual competition is really fierce and strong, but that's just not universally true: often, even in preference-mediated systems, female preference varies a lot and often changes traits of emphasis or even directions of preference from year to year!
And of course males also exert preferences, just as females often compete among themselves, and nowhere is this combination of display, preference, and choice more equitable between sexes than in *checks notes* socially monogamous species that invest a lot in biparental care, which last I checked sure does describe humans. Funny thing, that!
There's also so much emphasis on the idea that "good genes" are an objectively true thing, when honestly even "good genes" proponents are generally the first to tell you that which genes are good in any given moment is highly contextual. In general, I am pretty critical of indirect effects/"good genes" models of sexual selection, not least because I think there's too many stochastic barriers to good causality. My whole Thing in that corner of the field is that I think it makes much more sense to look at condition-dependence of sexually selected traits--which is the generally agreed mechanism by which resource availability is tied to sexual displays--as a function of resource allocation in an unpredictable environment by males themselves. On the female end of things, it explains things equally well to allow female preferences to be arbitrary, or even to be sensory exploitation of known biases in female or unisex sensory adaptations. Sometimes the displays just let females find males in order to mate with them!
It is so frustrating!
posted by sciatrix at 2:14 PM on November 3, 2023 [26 favorites]
I still have to rtfa but I just want to drop a +1 for humanities. I just had the one intro class but more of what I learned in that class comes up in my regular life per credit-hour more than anything else. Probably one of the most enriching classes I've taken.
posted by VTX at 2:43 PM on November 3, 2023
posted by VTX at 2:43 PM on November 3, 2023
> "Evolutionary psychology," I suggest, might be doomed to be the same kind of shithole as economics: a topic that is nominally a discipline that examines reality in an evidence-based way but which really is almost wholly dominated by the preconceptions, views, and opinions that its practitioners bring to the program.
i feel like it is useful to make one addition to the list at the end of this sentence, one that’s present implicitly but (i feel) needs to nevertheless be made explicit:
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:53 PM on November 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
i feel like it is useful to make one addition to the list at the end of this sentence, one that’s present implicitly but (i feel) needs to nevertheless be made explicit:
but which really is almost wholly dominated eby the preconceptions, views, material interests, and opinions that its practitioners bring to the programthese aren’t just preconceptions and views and opinions, they’re preconceptions and views and opinions that when deployed by a powerful man can make that man money and connections and otherwise (on a psychological level and on an outside-the-head level) shore up that man’s position of power.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:53 PM on November 3, 2023 [6 favorites]
Doesn't happen so much to oceanographers.
Looks like someone hasn’t been seapilled.
posted by star gentle uterus at 3:57 PM on November 3, 2023 [15 favorites]
Looks like someone hasn’t been seapilled.
posted by star gentle uterus at 3:57 PM on November 3, 2023 [15 favorites]
In my experience as a rock band roadie, popular male musicians are often over matched by their wives.
I suspect that is because the selection process for each is far different. The woman has out competed many other women for his attention, while he is a nerd who wasted his high school years practicing drums in a garage.
posted by Repack Rider at 4:19 PM on November 3, 2023 [13 favorites]
I suspect that is because the selection process for each is far different. The woman has out competed many other women for his attention, while he is a nerd who wasted his high school years practicing drums in a garage.
posted by Repack Rider at 4:19 PM on November 3, 2023 [13 favorites]
'We're not here to analyse these creatures.' -Ellen Ripley
posted by Cardinal Fang at 4:41 PM on November 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 4:41 PM on November 3, 2023 [5 favorites]
Women are scum...cheat on their...
I am unclear about the difference between Evolutionary Psychology and Cultural Anthropology. I never heard the word "manosphere" before I read this article.
Oddly, the (all male) inhabitants of the manosphere didn't examine their sexual proclivities--the incells didn't seem to proclivate like the rest of us. Theirs is a dark and frightening world. To make sense, wouldn't any discussion of sexuality need to compare or at least contrast male and female sexual practices?
Extra-pair mating. It's cheating if you violate an understanding. Are we hard-wired to pair bond? For bonobos, sex appears to be a social activity as well as a reproductive one. I have long viewed recreational sex as just that and different from a pair-bonding agreement. Variations include serial monogamy and ships passing in the night. Sex as a tool of oppression hasn't been a part of my life.
I am sensitive to the use of pejoratives that promote racism, misogyny, and a few other odious -isms. Dumb Blonde jokes come to mind, or jokes that punch down. MeFi has been campaigning valiantly against this stuff for some time.
The Bachaud and Johns paper paints a bleak picture of the manosphere. Even worse, the posts cited represent the thoughts of real people who live in that world 24/7
posted by mule98J at 11:04 AM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
I am unclear about the difference between Evolutionary Psychology and Cultural Anthropology. I never heard the word "manosphere" before I read this article.
Oddly, the (all male) inhabitants of the manosphere didn't examine their sexual proclivities--the incells didn't seem to proclivate like the rest of us. Theirs is a dark and frightening world. To make sense, wouldn't any discussion of sexuality need to compare or at least contrast male and female sexual practices?
Extra-pair mating. It's cheating if you violate an understanding. Are we hard-wired to pair bond? For bonobos, sex appears to be a social activity as well as a reproductive one. I have long viewed recreational sex as just that and different from a pair-bonding agreement. Variations include serial monogamy and ships passing in the night. Sex as a tool of oppression hasn't been a part of my life.
I am sensitive to the use of pejoratives that promote racism, misogyny, and a few other odious -isms. Dumb Blonde jokes come to mind, or jokes that punch down. MeFi has been campaigning valiantly against this stuff for some time.
The Bachaud and Johns paper paints a bleak picture of the manosphere. Even worse, the posts cited represent the thoughts of real people who live in that world 24/7
posted by mule98J at 11:04 AM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
More paranoid worldview from the people who brought you gatekeeping and cryptocurrency.
posted by BYiro at 3:05 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by BYiro at 3:05 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
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Yep!
posted by JHarris at 10:25 AM on November 3, 2023 [2 favorites]