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Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character: Character matters to children’s success (and adults) and can be taught in school, but not in the sense of the moral virtues. Rather, the character that education should aim for involves performance virtues—sticking to something even when it’s hard, learning from failure, believing that one will eventually succeed. Character matters, but this shouldn’t be seen as an excuse for inaction until somehow poor-performing children magically develop character. To the contrary, character traits are profoundly affected by circumstances, especially trauma that increases stress; compensating for the many harms and uncertainties associated with poverty requires deliberate and targeted intervention. Tough offers some examples of programs with high success rates that focus on teaching perserverance and related skills; the problem is that they involve long-term commitment to the well-being of poor people, which isn’t currently as popular as firing teachers.
Daniel Bergner, What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire: Relatively short book; the NYT feature has a lot of the highlights, though the details were also interesting. Bergner sets out to suggest that many Western ideas about women’s sexuality are mistaken—at least the official ones about women not wanting sex/sex outside of a monogamous relationship as much as men do. The unofficial ones, in which women are dangerously out of control unless heavily repressed, could be reinforced by the science he discusses, though there’s nothing here about “out of control.” Evolutionary stories of male promiscuity and female pickiness aren’t consistent with the evidence from our animal relations or from non-self-reported measures of female desire. At least when women aren’t afraid of male violence (a very very big when that he doesn’t spend much time on), women seem plenty lustful—at least when it comes to strangers/new relationships. It’s only in longterm exclusive relationships that women’s desire seems to flag, and Bergner spends a chunk of the book on pharmaceutical and psychotherapeutic attempts to fix this within monogamy. Long-term intimacy, he suggests, may kill desire for many women; drugs or specific behavioral interventions may sometimes bring the spice back. One of the most striking parts of the book comes when he discusses the fears expressed by pharmaceutical researchers that their drug would be too effective, making women wantonly/indiscriminately desire sex. It’s hilarious, except for how 44% of US parents won’t vaccinate their daughters against HPV.
As others have noted, Bergner seems relatively untroubled by a project of associating women with greater/more “animal” desire than men, even though he repeatedly acknowledges the social stigma (and more) that women expressing sexual desire face. He also discusses research on women’s rape fantasies as fantasies and their relationship to the idea of desireability as central to women’s desire; researchers are very nervous about how to present this, and he has an extended discussion with one about the extent to which culture/misogyny affects the content of fantasies. I don’t know how much cross-cultural research there is on this, but comparative studies would seem to be relevant.
Key pieces of research include: when faced with a variety of images of sex and nudity, including animals having sex, men who identify as straight react most strongly to the heterosexual/lesbian scenes and not much to the gay male scenes, and vice versa for gay men; by contrast, women who identify as straight and lesbian both reacted to everything with physical signs of arousal (genital engorgement). (Self-identified bisexuals apparently weren’t part of the study.) The exception: women weren’t turned on by a naked, physically fit man whose penis was visibly flaccid and thus not signalling desire. However, both men and women self-reported reactions consistent with their reported sexuality—so women said they were only turned on by a small number of the things they saw. Bergner notes but does not give much attention to the question of what this means. Are women disconnected from their own physical reactions? Or is desire something different than engorged genitals? Another study, on which Bergner ended the book, showed how a very simple manipulation could change what we often think is basic in male-female relationships—that men are less picky. Speed dating studies showed that heterosexual women were more selective than heterosexual men in choosing candidates for follow-up dates. But all the studies had a confounding variable: in all of them, women sat in place while the men rotated. When a researcher changed that setup, so the women rotated—and therefore had the chance to perceive themselves as the ones making the “move”—men were choosier and women were less selective. Given the weight of culture, that’s a pretty astonishing result from one intervention.
Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo: Amazing story of Alex Dumas, general of the French Revolution and father of Alexandre Dumas père: titled aristocrat, military stalwart, and—often written out of his history—biracial child of a wastrel father and slave mother (her status was somewhat unclear). He adhered to the ideals of the Revolution in no small part because the French abolished slavery—which was economically quite valuable to them in their colonies—long before any other modern nation did so, and they did it because slavery was wrong. Reiss tells the story of Dumas’s father, then Dumas, recounting a career of glory that ended in pain when Dumas was captured by enemies of France, just as Napoleon’s rise changed the political climate. Napoleon instituted vicious racial codes and attempted to reverse the Haitian revolution by invading; his former hero was now an embarrassment. Dumas died in poverty, his widow denied the pension to which she was entitled by stonewalling bureaucrats. But the glory in between makes for a gripping story, and a reminder that racism can surge shockingly quickly (and sometimes retreat too).
Cecil C. Kuhne III, The Little Book of Foodie Law: A very specialized gift book for that food-loving lawyer in your life; it has a bunch of capsule accounts of food-related cases (intellectual property, regulation, and tort), a bunch of somewhat related recipes, and a bunch of somewhat related photos, but not a lot of effort was put into making the photos really match the cases (for example, finding pictures of the actual products involved).
Daniel Bergner, What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire: Relatively short book; the NYT feature has a lot of the highlights, though the details were also interesting. Bergner sets out to suggest that many Western ideas about women’s sexuality are mistaken—at least the official ones about women not wanting sex/sex outside of a monogamous relationship as much as men do. The unofficial ones, in which women are dangerously out of control unless heavily repressed, could be reinforced by the science he discusses, though there’s nothing here about “out of control.” Evolutionary stories of male promiscuity and female pickiness aren’t consistent with the evidence from our animal relations or from non-self-reported measures of female desire. At least when women aren’t afraid of male violence (a very very big when that he doesn’t spend much time on), women seem plenty lustful—at least when it comes to strangers/new relationships. It’s only in longterm exclusive relationships that women’s desire seems to flag, and Bergner spends a chunk of the book on pharmaceutical and psychotherapeutic attempts to fix this within monogamy. Long-term intimacy, he suggests, may kill desire for many women; drugs or specific behavioral interventions may sometimes bring the spice back. One of the most striking parts of the book comes when he discusses the fears expressed by pharmaceutical researchers that their drug would be too effective, making women wantonly/indiscriminately desire sex. It’s hilarious, except for how 44% of US parents won’t vaccinate their daughters against HPV.
As others have noted, Bergner seems relatively untroubled by a project of associating women with greater/more “animal” desire than men, even though he repeatedly acknowledges the social stigma (and more) that women expressing sexual desire face. He also discusses research on women’s rape fantasies as fantasies and their relationship to the idea of desireability as central to women’s desire; researchers are very nervous about how to present this, and he has an extended discussion with one about the extent to which culture/misogyny affects the content of fantasies. I don’t know how much cross-cultural research there is on this, but comparative studies would seem to be relevant.
Key pieces of research include: when faced with a variety of images of sex and nudity, including animals having sex, men who identify as straight react most strongly to the heterosexual/lesbian scenes and not much to the gay male scenes, and vice versa for gay men; by contrast, women who identify as straight and lesbian both reacted to everything with physical signs of arousal (genital engorgement). (Self-identified bisexuals apparently weren’t part of the study.) The exception: women weren’t turned on by a naked, physically fit man whose penis was visibly flaccid and thus not signalling desire. However, both men and women self-reported reactions consistent with their reported sexuality—so women said they were only turned on by a small number of the things they saw. Bergner notes but does not give much attention to the question of what this means. Are women disconnected from their own physical reactions? Or is desire something different than engorged genitals? Another study, on which Bergner ended the book, showed how a very simple manipulation could change what we often think is basic in male-female relationships—that men are less picky. Speed dating studies showed that heterosexual women were more selective than heterosexual men in choosing candidates for follow-up dates. But all the studies had a confounding variable: in all of them, women sat in place while the men rotated. When a researcher changed that setup, so the women rotated—and therefore had the chance to perceive themselves as the ones making the “move”—men were choosier and women were less selective. Given the weight of culture, that’s a pretty astonishing result from one intervention.
Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo: Amazing story of Alex Dumas, general of the French Revolution and father of Alexandre Dumas père: titled aristocrat, military stalwart, and—often written out of his history—biracial child of a wastrel father and slave mother (her status was somewhat unclear). He adhered to the ideals of the Revolution in no small part because the French abolished slavery—which was economically quite valuable to them in their colonies—long before any other modern nation did so, and they did it because slavery was wrong. Reiss tells the story of Dumas’s father, then Dumas, recounting a career of glory that ended in pain when Dumas was captured by enemies of France, just as Napoleon’s rise changed the political climate. Napoleon instituted vicious racial codes and attempted to reverse the Haitian revolution by invading; his former hero was now an embarrassment. Dumas died in poverty, his widow denied the pension to which she was entitled by stonewalling bureaucrats. But the glory in between makes for a gripping story, and a reminder that racism can surge shockingly quickly (and sometimes retreat too).
Cecil C. Kuhne III, The Little Book of Foodie Law: A very specialized gift book for that food-loving lawyer in your life; it has a bunch of capsule accounts of food-related cases (intellectual property, regulation, and tort), a bunch of somewhat related recipes, and a bunch of somewhat related photos, but not a lot of effort was put into making the photos really match the cases (for example, finding pictures of the actual products involved).
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What always gets me about this, is that no one ever seems to mention the fact that women want GOOD sex. What seems obvious to me, but that I have never seen mentioned ANYWHERE EVER, is that a main reason women wouldn't jump in the sack with any man anytime, the way that men are presumed to want to do with women, is that women might be far less likely to orgasm in this situation.
(Partly because women are less likely to orgasm just from fucking, and partly because of other oft-cited pressures -- fear of STD/pregnancy, body image issues, etc.)
Does the book get into this at all?
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Good to know - and yes, I agree that such difficulties are often culturally constructed. (Except the part about coming from penetration only ;)
And it's just not the case, outside of fantasy, that women would have good sex with any dude, any time. Sex, sure. Good sex, not so much!