purple motes

In 1980, a famous ethologist went into the jungles of Venezuela to videotape Yanomama natives.  He would videotape them seven or eight hours a day.  A graduate student helping him observed:

After a while people started getting unnerved, particularly since he was shooting right at them. They were especially upset about their babies, whom [famous ethologist] was concentrating on in an effort to record mother-child interaction. They were sure that what he was doing was detrimental and harmful. Some of the women were crying about it, and finally two of the men came up and asked me to drive [famous ethologist] out of the village.[*]

What could motivate an ethologist to behave so uncivilly?

Related work: Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (Verso, 2006). Last week, I saw a man in his 50s, sitting alone on a sidewalk table outside a coffee house, apparently reading this.

[*] From Kenneth Good, with David Chanoff, Into the heart: one man’s pursuit of love and knowledge among the Yanomama (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). This is a wonderful book.

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In studying the long tale, I came across these questions from an author thought to be not beautiful:

vous ne puissiez parler un quart d'heure à une Femme si elle n'est pas belle : et que vous sortiez mesme d'une visite, où il en arrivera quelqu'une qui sera laide. Cependant tous les jeunes gens ont presques cette sorte d'injustice : et il y en a mesme qui sont laids, de la derniere laideur, qui ne peuvent souffrir celle d'une Femme. En effet ils veulent que les plus beaux yeux du monde, les regardent favorablement : et ils veulent de plus quelquesfois ne regarder que de belles Femmes, avec les plus laids yeux de la Terre.

[(to the gathered men of the salon) Why can't you spend fifteen minutes talking to a woman who isn't beautiful?  Why must you leave abruptly simply because an unattractive woman arrives on the scene?  It seems that all young men commit this sort of injustice -- even those who are ugly, incredibly ugly, can't endure a woman's ugliness.  In fact, they want the fairest eyes in the world to look favorably upon them while they look upon beautiful women with the ugliest eyes in the world.]

Humans, throughout history, have been shallow and self-absorbed.  Extensively networking and communicating doesn't change those characteristics and may even exacerbate them.

Quoted text: Scudéry, Madeleine. Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (Paris: 1653), p. 6957. In site Artamene. Institut de Littérature Française Moderne. Université de Neuchâtel. [on line: http://www.artamene.org/cyrus10.xml?page=6957].  English translation: Scudéry, Madeleine de, and Karen Newman. 2003. The story of Sapho. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 37.

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Tomorrow in the U.S. is Memorial Day. That is a day for honoring the men and women killed in military service. Choosing to sacrifice one's life for others is a heroic act. Assuming that a particular group of persons naturally and necessarily must make such sacrifices takes away from their heroism.

Men vastly predominate among persons serving and dying in armed forces. Among U.S. soldiers on active duty, men outnumber women by about six to one. Among U.S. soldiers fighting in the Iraq war, male soldiers' deaths outnumber female soldiers' deaths by about forty-two to one. The media has often reported the total number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq: through May 3, 2008, 4,059 killed. That number represents 3,935 men killed and 94 women killed.

Some might say that only men can perform the most dangerous tasks in war. But men also work in the most dangerous jobs outside of war: 5,396 men died at work in the U.S. in 2006, compared to 444 women. Some might say that men's lives are less valuable than women's. I don't believe that. Some might say that wars are men's fault. In a democracy where the majority of voters are women, persons who make such a claim merely display their animosity toward men. The deaths of men should be recognized, not ignored or taken for granted.

The sacrifice of men's lives in war gains more significance if men's lives are more valued. Over the past two hundred years, improvements in diet, safety, and health care have greatly increased human lifespans. From 1900 to 2005 in the U.S., life expectancy at birth rose from 47 years to 78 years. Expecting to have 31 more years of life is a huge benefit. Males, however, have benefited less than females. In 1900, males' life expectancy was two years less than females'. In 2005, males' life expectancy was five years less than females'. The sacrifice of men's lives in war would gain significance with more public concern to increase men's relatively short expected lifespans.

Even much greater disparities in lifespan have attracted little public attention. In the U.S., black males have an expected lifespan eleven years less than that of white females. This is not merely a disadvantage among elites, such as university leaders or presidential candidates, competing for even greater status, authority, and wealth. Eleven years less of life for black males compared to white females is an huge difference in the lives of large groups of persons.

Men can be made more heroic by everyone insisting on the equal value of men's lives. We should not obscure in sexless categories or inclusive language the vastly disproportionate number of men who die in military service. We should be concerned about men's relative disadvantage in life expectancy. Most importantly, we should do something to show our concern for men's lives.

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Data notes and references: Male and female solders on active duty on Sept. 30, 2007 can be calculated by subtracting from all active duty military personnel the separate tabulation of women only. Here's U.S. military deaths by sex in the Iraq war. The sex distribution is similar to that of the wounded in action. Additional U.S. military casualty statistics here. The Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries provides a tabulation by sex of occupational fatalities. For life expectancy at birth in the U.S. from 1900 to 2005, see Table 27 in Health, United States, 2007. This pattern of male lifespan decreasing relative to female lifespan over the past two hundred years has occurred generally; here's data for France. For additional data and analysis, see Daniel J. Kruger and Randolph M. Nesse (2004), "Sexual selection and the Male:Female Mortality Ratio," Evolutionary Psychology 2, pp. 66-77.

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I saw on a woman's car a bumper sticker that said: "Porn! / It's cheaper than dating!"

As a serious Ph.D. economist, I believe in price elasticity and substitution effects. I also realize that pornography has been the most successful type of paid content on the Internet. But something is missing in that economic analysis. I couldn't put my hand around it.

Then I remembered in the DC metro an advertising poster. The right half of the poster had a big picture of half the face of a smiling woman. The left side of the poster in big letters declared: "Abortion is a reflection that we have not met the needs of women."

Pornography is a poor substitute for a real, live, human person. Men deserve better than pornography. Pornography is a reflection that we have not met the needs of men.

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The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) this fall will release another report lamenting the decline of literary reading. From the late seventeenth century through the early twentieth century, many cultural leaders would have applauded a decline in reading of popular novels. Now, however, such a decline is a cause for grave concern. Fiction has become a major public good.

Appreciating modern fiction requires considerable sophistication. The Executive Summary of the NEA's 2004 report, Reading at Risk, declared:

Reading at Risk presents a distressing but objective overview of national trends. The accelerating declines in literary reading among all demographic groups of American adults indicate an imminent cultural crisis.

The NEA's news release begin with this description:

Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature.... The study also documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002....

The report's Executive Summary included this finding:

4. Women read more literature than men do, but literary reading by both groups is declining at significant rates.

Under that finding was this data:

Thus less than half of American men have read literature for at least as far back as 1982. While the overall share of literary readers declined 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002, the gender protrusion in the share of literary readers (the difference between women's and men's shares of literary readers) has been larger than 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002. In 2002, the gender protrusion was 17.5 percentage points!

Reading at Risk emphasizes the tremendous public importance of literary reading. In the preface to the report, Dana Gioia, Chairman of the NEA, declares:

print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that makes complex communication possible. To lose such intellectual capability -- and the many sorts of human continuity it allows -- would constitute a vast impoverishment.
     More than reading is at stake. As this report unambiguously demonstrates, readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life. The long-term implications of this study not only affect literature but all the arts -- as well as social activities such as volunteerism, philanthropy, and even political engagement.

The gender protrusion is literary reading is much larger than the decline in literary reading that the NEA and many concerned persons, including some who note various flaws in the NEA report other than the lack of interest in the impressive gender protrusion, have addressed. Why hasn't the awesome gender protrusion attracted widespread public interest, or at least concern, or at least notice?

The NEA's press release for Reading at Risk detumesces sex. The press release states:

Women read more literature than men do, but the survey indicates literary reading by both genders is declining. Only slightly more than one-third of adult males now read literature. Reading among women is also declining significantly, but at a slower rate.

The first independent clause of the first sentence has "women" as the subject and indicates that women lead men in the valued activity of concern. That sentence then has an attention-deflecting conjunction ("but" rather than "and") linking to a second independent clause indicating a similarity between the sexes. The second sentence returns to the idea of the first independent clause of the first sentence. It presents a statistic about "adult males." It does not, however, present the parallel statistic about "adult females." The third sentence returns to women and slightly qualifies the second clause of the first sentence. This disjoint prose structure doesn't convey what should be a major concern for those who truly believe that literary reading has great public importance: in 2002, 37.6% of men, in contrast to 55.1% of women, were literary readers.

Good literature is an antidote to conventional master narratives and narrow interests that obscure the continually new reality of the world. When it comes to men, failure of imagination may in fact indicate an imminent cultural crisis.

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