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Chauntelle Tibbals, Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment : Free review copy. A defense of porn whose Panglossian account is unpersuasive, even if working in porn isn’t doom either. She hasn’t encountered abuse, and “there is no authority more correct than your own informed perspective,” which makes it hard to evaluate her book against others that tell stories that are far more unpleasant. Tibbals’ resentment of other academics seems both justified—she reports a lot of disdain, and she has a right to be angry at mistreatment based on her choice of topic—and unhelpful (I don’t know too many sociology grad students who really get a lot of “networking at symposia, eating free lunches and drinking free cocktails). She doesn’t like a fellow academic’s observation that a panel she organized on porn only featured white people, even though the white women she invited were diverse in other ways, and calls that criticism “uninformed and uncritical,” which doesn’t seem accurate.
She also defends porn with false equivalences (The Fast and the Furious plainly doesn’t impact how people drive—how we know this is unclear—and thus porn can’t be thought to have an impact on real-life sex) that don’t address the ways in which Americans get sex education, in particular, from media. In fact, later on she says that when it comes to sex, we wrongly conflate porn with reality in ways we don’t with horror films—so we get “consumers using adult content as a sexual teaching tool [and] people gauging their selfworth against the images they see in the newest adult scenarios.” I also lost a lot of respect at the point when she indicated that Traci Lords (who made a number of films while several years underage), though she wasn’t exactly to blame for her situation (throwaway kid, addicted to drugs, etc.), wasn’t exactly not to blame either. While I take her point that someone tricked into sex with an underage performer also has reason to feel bad, that doesn’t mean “Traci’s story stopped being about her a long time ago,” or that the people whose businesses were ruined as a result of having to destroy Lords’ films have more grievances than she does. “[W]here is the book about them?” she wonders, having sort of written it, albeit not that well. If she doesn’t like “a system that allowed a teenager to take everything,” does she mean that the films should have been left out there? Should the government have paid the producers for destroying child porn, and how would that work with an I-didn’t-know defense in general? Although she deploys her academic status to gain credibility—and that’s an understandable and acceptable move—the arguments here lack the rigor I’d expect in an academic work. I looked up one of her law review papers, on adult performers and safety/health regulations, and wasn’t more favorably inclined.
Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing: Hmm. A lot of different research areas and claims about women’s reactions versus men’s reactions that usually lose the appropriate overlapping bell curve limitations. They identify people as Warriors (perform well in the face of threat; good in a pinch but can overlook things/not plan longer term) and Worriers (can do really badly faced with an unfamiliar threat, but good at planning, and facing a familiar challenge can outperform Warriors because they practice). Again, it felt like some discussion of spectra was missing; I’m pretty damn competitive and I didn’t see myself in either of those descriptions. Fact I didn’t know: if you’re on a team, increased testosterone increases cooperation with teammates, not competitiveness with them—testosterone seems to increase motivation to do whatever’s socially rewarded in a situation, not “aggression.” I was also left unconvinced by the claim that sports provide a model for democracy, because the rules are in the open and thus people see what “fair play” is and also feel outrage when the rules are violated, which is why the Greeks had the Olympics and democracy. While I accept that corruption in one area of society may influence others, I find it hard to tell a causal narrative.
Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Did you know that automation makes us dumber? We use search engines and autopilots and other machines instead of learning for ourselves, or practicing skills like flying by hand that deteriorate quickly. Automation may also lead to fewer jobs, though that is hotly contested and unclear. Carr raises important concerns—humans may be quite unsuited to the “monitor and jump in to react when something that doesn’t fit into the programming occurs” role, an argument he supports well with respect to flying and driving—but it’s coupled with really unpersuasive claims about the inadequacy of the digital. For example, he quotes architects who claim that architects will never have the same emotional connection, vital to art, with buildings designed on CAD systems rather than drawn on paper. I believe that architects who learned to draw on paper may never be able to fully integrate CAD systems into their processes, but humans are emotion-making dynamos, and I fully expect architects who grow up with CAD systems to cathect without difficulty. Near the end we get a bit of “the solution to the machine is in the machine,” with better-designed programs that force humans out of the ill-suited monitor role and into more participatory roles, and design programs that work more organically, but I was expecting a bit more about simulation. As I understand it, one of the big things simulations can do is give pilots practice—yes, the skies are too crowded for a lot of flying by hand, but you can keep skills from deteriorating by practice in simulators. Also, yes, I’m sure GPS causes deterioration in many people’s navigation skills, but I never had those skills, so it’s only a benefit for me—something he spends a little but not much time acknowledging.
Scott Huler, On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make our World Work: Reasonably entertaining look at the unnoticed systems that make most parts of the US much more livable (as long as we maintain them, which we pretty much aren’t …). Focusing on Raleigh, North Carolina, Huler investigates sewer pipes, water connections, electric wires, and road systems, pointing out the ways in which we depend on these large endeavors and the continual maintenance work of people whose expertise is largely invisible. If you like infrastructure, worth a read.
Eri Hotta, Japan 1941: How did Japan decide to enter a war that everyone involved in the decision at the highest levels knew was unwinnable? Hotta’s answer comes from the complex political/military arrangements of imperial Japan, where every decision required multiple rounds of consultation and everyone in a position to say “no” just left that awkward endeavor to someone else. Hotta attributes a small role to Japan’s culture of indirect speech, where certain expressions of opposition could be misinterpreted (perhaps willfully) as support, but the people involved could be open in private and just weren’t willing to take the risk involved of publicly opposing Japanese aggression. I wanted more discussion of the true pro-war militarists, including the radicals who were assassinating public officials they perceived as insufficiently war-prone, because I felt like that was a big part of the story, but Hotta didn’t go into detail about any of the militarists, concentrating instead on the people with the power to prevent the conflict who instead let it happen.
Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger: What is the role of the committed researcher who studies controversial topics or groups who’ve been historically oppressed? Dreger’s book, focusing on sexuality/gender, argues that the best course is always to tell the truth and be damned, and that social movements need to be more accepting of research as long as it is conducted in good faith and not doing harm to the subjects, even if they fear harm to the general cause. Dreger’s a sharp writer with a background in these controversies: she started out doing research on the historical treatment of intersex bodies, but became an activist when she found out that treatment of intersex babies was no better and often worse than it had been historically. She describes partial success in getting doctors to understand that, though there are certain conditions that require surgical intervention to improve health, cosmetic/gender-assigning surgery on young children--on the grounds that the alternative is social stigma--should be avoided.
Then she spends a while defending a Northwestern professor’s research on transgender women; he came under fire for (1) saying some dumb things and allowing a really dumb, exploitative cover for his book, and (2) maintaining that one category of transgender women identifies as such because they receive sexual pleasure from understanding/imagining themselves as women. If that’s where the science takes you, she says, then you have to say that, even if it risks feeding into a narrative of sexual deviance against which transgender people are quite rightly fighting. She cuts him a lot of slack for being well-meaning in the dumb things he said, and I’m pretty sure that it’s not okay to sleep with the subjects of your books unless (at the very minimum) you disclose that even if they aren’t in any way vulnerable to your power. (He refuses to say whether he slept with one of his subjects because he says it shouldn’t matter; this strikes me as bullshit, though it doesn’t invalidate all his research.)
Finally she recounts her experience on the other side—trying to halt a doctor’s use of an unapproved treatment on fetuses at risk of being intersex, which was designed to prevent girls from having externally male genitalia and also to prevent them from being lesbians. She finds that the institutions that are supposed to protect vulnerable patients aren’t doing their job, because the doctor is able to say she’s not doing “research,” even as she gets grants to research outcomes in these patients. It’s an engaging but crotchety book, and hard to take larger lessons from.
She also defends porn with false equivalences (The Fast and the Furious plainly doesn’t impact how people drive—how we know this is unclear—and thus porn can’t be thought to have an impact on real-life sex) that don’t address the ways in which Americans get sex education, in particular, from media. In fact, later on she says that when it comes to sex, we wrongly conflate porn with reality in ways we don’t with horror films—so we get “consumers using adult content as a sexual teaching tool [and] people gauging their selfworth against the images they see in the newest adult scenarios.” I also lost a lot of respect at the point when she indicated that Traci Lords (who made a number of films while several years underage), though she wasn’t exactly to blame for her situation (throwaway kid, addicted to drugs, etc.), wasn’t exactly not to blame either. While I take her point that someone tricked into sex with an underage performer also has reason to feel bad, that doesn’t mean “Traci’s story stopped being about her a long time ago,” or that the people whose businesses were ruined as a result of having to destroy Lords’ films have more grievances than she does. “[W]here is the book about them?” she wonders, having sort of written it, albeit not that well. If she doesn’t like “a system that allowed a teenager to take everything,” does she mean that the films should have been left out there? Should the government have paid the producers for destroying child porn, and how would that work with an I-didn’t-know defense in general? Although she deploys her academic status to gain credibility—and that’s an understandable and acceptable move—the arguments here lack the rigor I’d expect in an academic work. I looked up one of her law review papers, on adult performers and safety/health regulations, and wasn’t more favorably inclined.
Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing: Hmm. A lot of different research areas and claims about women’s reactions versus men’s reactions that usually lose the appropriate overlapping bell curve limitations. They identify people as Warriors (perform well in the face of threat; good in a pinch but can overlook things/not plan longer term) and Worriers (can do really badly faced with an unfamiliar threat, but good at planning, and facing a familiar challenge can outperform Warriors because they practice). Again, it felt like some discussion of spectra was missing; I’m pretty damn competitive and I didn’t see myself in either of those descriptions. Fact I didn’t know: if you’re on a team, increased testosterone increases cooperation with teammates, not competitiveness with them—testosterone seems to increase motivation to do whatever’s socially rewarded in a situation, not “aggression.” I was also left unconvinced by the claim that sports provide a model for democracy, because the rules are in the open and thus people see what “fair play” is and also feel outrage when the rules are violated, which is why the Greeks had the Olympics and democracy. While I accept that corruption in one area of society may influence others, I find it hard to tell a causal narrative.
Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Did you know that automation makes us dumber? We use search engines and autopilots and other machines instead of learning for ourselves, or practicing skills like flying by hand that deteriorate quickly. Automation may also lead to fewer jobs, though that is hotly contested and unclear. Carr raises important concerns—humans may be quite unsuited to the “monitor and jump in to react when something that doesn’t fit into the programming occurs” role, an argument he supports well with respect to flying and driving—but it’s coupled with really unpersuasive claims about the inadequacy of the digital. For example, he quotes architects who claim that architects will never have the same emotional connection, vital to art, with buildings designed on CAD systems rather than drawn on paper. I believe that architects who learned to draw on paper may never be able to fully integrate CAD systems into their processes, but humans are emotion-making dynamos, and I fully expect architects who grow up with CAD systems to cathect without difficulty. Near the end we get a bit of “the solution to the machine is in the machine,” with better-designed programs that force humans out of the ill-suited monitor role and into more participatory roles, and design programs that work more organically, but I was expecting a bit more about simulation. As I understand it, one of the big things simulations can do is give pilots practice—yes, the skies are too crowded for a lot of flying by hand, but you can keep skills from deteriorating by practice in simulators. Also, yes, I’m sure GPS causes deterioration in many people’s navigation skills, but I never had those skills, so it’s only a benefit for me—something he spends a little but not much time acknowledging.
Scott Huler, On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make our World Work: Reasonably entertaining look at the unnoticed systems that make most parts of the US much more livable (as long as we maintain them, which we pretty much aren’t …). Focusing on Raleigh, North Carolina, Huler investigates sewer pipes, water connections, electric wires, and road systems, pointing out the ways in which we depend on these large endeavors and the continual maintenance work of people whose expertise is largely invisible. If you like infrastructure, worth a read.
Eri Hotta, Japan 1941: How did Japan decide to enter a war that everyone involved in the decision at the highest levels knew was unwinnable? Hotta’s answer comes from the complex political/military arrangements of imperial Japan, where every decision required multiple rounds of consultation and everyone in a position to say “no” just left that awkward endeavor to someone else. Hotta attributes a small role to Japan’s culture of indirect speech, where certain expressions of opposition could be misinterpreted (perhaps willfully) as support, but the people involved could be open in private and just weren’t willing to take the risk involved of publicly opposing Japanese aggression. I wanted more discussion of the true pro-war militarists, including the radicals who were assassinating public officials they perceived as insufficiently war-prone, because I felt like that was a big part of the story, but Hotta didn’t go into detail about any of the militarists, concentrating instead on the people with the power to prevent the conflict who instead let it happen.
Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger: What is the role of the committed researcher who studies controversial topics or groups who’ve been historically oppressed? Dreger’s book, focusing on sexuality/gender, argues that the best course is always to tell the truth and be damned, and that social movements need to be more accepting of research as long as it is conducted in good faith and not doing harm to the subjects, even if they fear harm to the general cause. Dreger’s a sharp writer with a background in these controversies: she started out doing research on the historical treatment of intersex bodies, but became an activist when she found out that treatment of intersex babies was no better and often worse than it had been historically. She describes partial success in getting doctors to understand that, though there are certain conditions that require surgical intervention to improve health, cosmetic/gender-assigning surgery on young children--on the grounds that the alternative is social stigma--should be avoided.
Then she spends a while defending a Northwestern professor’s research on transgender women; he came under fire for (1) saying some dumb things and allowing a really dumb, exploitative cover for his book, and (2) maintaining that one category of transgender women identifies as such because they receive sexual pleasure from understanding/imagining themselves as women. If that’s where the science takes you, she says, then you have to say that, even if it risks feeding into a narrative of sexual deviance against which transgender people are quite rightly fighting. She cuts him a lot of slack for being well-meaning in the dumb things he said, and I’m pretty sure that it’s not okay to sleep with the subjects of your books unless (at the very minimum) you disclose that even if they aren’t in any way vulnerable to your power. (He refuses to say whether he slept with one of his subjects because he says it shouldn’t matter; this strikes me as bullshit, though it doesn’t invalidate all his research.)
Finally she recounts her experience on the other side—trying to halt a doctor’s use of an unapproved treatment on fetuses at risk of being intersex, which was designed to prevent girls from having externally male genitalia and also to prevent them from being lesbians. She finds that the institutions that are supposed to protect vulnerable patients aren’t doing their job, because the doctor is able to say she’s not doing “research,” even as she gets grants to research outcomes in these patients. It’s an engaging but crotchety book, and hard to take larger lessons from.
From:
no subject
I would challenge that statement of Mr. Carr in a general way. To give one instance: Rather than engage in the tedium of making a watermark on 150 photographs, I could write a script that would do it for me. And so why not?
Learning code [in my case Python] does include the use of libraries but also gives me the chance to generate my own entries as well as combine other snippets in interesting ways. And no doubt, tight code is sexy.
Re: Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger:
I have been friends with two intersexed females, one of whom had an intersexed sister. From them I learned that intersexed females ["pseudohermaphrodite or Androgen Insufficiency Syndrome] are brought up as female because their bodies are unable to respond to androgen, and that all of them are either lesbian or bisexual.
I'm not as sure as she might be [if I am reading the review correctly] that gender reassignment should not be performed on AIS females. The main problem is that there is no response to androgen. The secondary problem is that AIS females [although they are male by chromosomes] have male external genitalia which would subject them to derogatory comments in both the male and female school gym locker rooms. Thus, choosing to do nothing is also to choose to subject the AIS female to a bad time in gym class. Later on, the AIS female who chooses to go male will find that there is zero response to male hormones.
A doctor, researcher, professional-- well there is that pesky rule about not sleeping with one's patients. I don't think I could justify that happening either.
Thanks for your reviews. They are very informative.