The Doing of Social Science
Or, Why Don’t More Women Care About Ant-Man’s Pym Particles?
Writing in the Washington Free Beacon, Elizabeth Harrington tells us,
The National Science Foundation is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist. The government has awarded two grants for collaborative research to professors at Yale University and New York University to study what the researchers describe as “systematic gender bias” in the online encyclopaedia. […] Noam Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times… has asserted the encyclopaedia is biased because articles about friendship bracelets are shorter than entries about baseball cards. “And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on Sex and the City includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on The Sopranos includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode,” he wrote.
Such are the ruminations of the modern intellectual.
Although not indulged with $200,000 of public money, the mighty blogger Ace does share a few unorthodox ideas. Ideas, I mean, that are unorthodox among many left-leaning academics and New York Times columnists:
The very fact that a site exists which gives an exhaustive, 4000-word-plus citations treatment of Ant-Man is going to skew male… Men (well, those of a nerdly bent) tend to be interested in trivia and obscura; women tend to not be, or at least not so much. I don’t care about Ant-Man, but for some reason I find comfort in knowing that someone out there does care about Ant-Man, and has digested Ant-Man’s fifty year history for me, should my life ever depend on knowing when Ant-Man married Janet Van Dyne… So the real [feminist] complaint boils down to this: The ten percent of a website which could reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers does in fact reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers, and yes, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine does get a more exhaustive, nerdishly-loving treatment than Sex and the City.
The federal government needs to pay people to study this and propose “solutions”? It occurs to me that we’ve spent $202,000 for a “study” which deliberately avoids a very simple explanation: Women just aren’t as interested in this type of crap as men. You don’t have to believe that to at least agree: This should have been one of the explanations scientifically studied, if we’re going to have a scientific study at all.
I’ve seen Die Hard 50 times and I would watch it right now if it were on. I will watch Die Hard only to see the Asian guy steal the candy bar. And when I click on Wikipedia, I’m expecting them to tell me if the Asian guy stealing the candy bar was in the script, or if it was improvised on the day of the shoot. And when Wikipedia doesn’t tell me this (it doesn’t, I've checked), I’m disappointed in it. Do women watch episodes of Sex and the City 50 times? No, they don’t. Maybe the “best” episodes, they’ll watch two or three times… This phenomenon is much more a male trait than a female one. So why isn’t this obvious truism even part of this “study”?
See also Heather Mac Donald on the same non-problem and the “intellectual decadence” of contemporary feminism:
The most straightforward explanation for the differing rates of participation in Wikipedia — and the one that conforms to everyday experience — is that, on average, males and females have different interests and preferred ways of spending their free time.
Heretical, I know. Unthink it immediately.
As a wise man once observed, “Skirts is weird”.
I heard it as “Bitches be crazy.”
Both are empirically true.
”Madame Fatal is notable for being a male superhero who dressed up as an elderly woman and as such is the first cross-dressing hero’.
See, it’s vital to know these things’.
Mrs Doubtfire meets Paul Kersey. Now that would be something to watch. Is John Waters free to direct?
R. Sherman | July 31, 2014 at 13:35:
So what is the solution to this-ahem-problem? Conscript females to write for free during their own leisure time? Refuse to allow anymore “male-centric” articles until some sort of cosmic gender balance is reached?
That’s supposed to be a joke, right? Do you know how Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 has been applied to college athletics?
Title IX reads “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
In 1979, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare ruled that this requires equal participation in college sports by men and women. Colleges tried to expand women’s sports programs to match men’s programs, but women aren’t as interested, despite generous funding and aggressive recruiting.
So hundreds of men’s programs have been abolished to achieve “equality”. In some cases, successful, popular men’s wrestling and hockey programs were dissolved so the funds could be used for women’s basketball or soccer teams that had trouble finding players and no one came to watch.
If this rule was applied to Wikipedia, the administrators would be required to generate additional “female” articles, and when that failed, to remove “excess” “male” articles.
dicentra:
to whose clamoring The X-Files writers acceded, thereby ruining the series in the worst way.
Well, it certainly ended up pretty ruined, but I was unaware of this cause-effect relationship. Could you amplify, or provide a reference or two. Perhaps there is a lengthy Wikipedia entry?
Cheers,
Dean
“Because nothing ruins a perfectly good discussion…than 13-yr-old girls going SQUEE!…”
Or worse, 34-year-old girls.
Well, it certainly ended up pretty ruined, but I was unaware of this cause-effect relationship. Could you amplify, or provide a reference or two. Perhaps there is a lengthy Wikipedia entry?
One of my first online fandoms was X-Files, on USENET. One of the members used to transcribe all the episodes for the hard-of-hearing, and then she compiled a “companion book” for the series (I see she’s got a few more) since then. She paid pretty close attention to the behind-the-scenes stuff insofar as it was reported.
I can’t remember if it was from her (she wasn’t on the staff nor did she have connections thereon) or from other fans, but I did see a link wherein one of the writers remarked that some of the events preceding Mulder’s departure were to gratify the shippers. He didn’t say “shippers”; he said “fans.”
But we know which ones he meant. The writers had earlier indicated that they had very deliberately made the relationship non-romantic, and the eventual mating was a deliberate accommodation of “fan requests” or some damn thing.
I was a RABIDLY against the Mulder/Scully ship. I often butted heads (IRL) with one shipper who refused to believe that two hot-looking people who spent that much time together wouldn’t be romantically involved; I argued that as fictional characters, they have the characteristics that the writers give them and none else. It doesn’t matter what would happen in reality: if they’re written as platonic then they’re platonic. Period.
She was unmoved and unconvinced: shipping the pair as was emotionally important to her as my insistence on their canonical platonic-tude was to me.
That kind of compulsive match-making is one reason I don’t like most women: I have zero desire to engage in shipping (unless the character is unbelievably hot, and then I ship him with ME).
No, there’s no Wikipedia article on the perfidy of shippers vis-à-vis the demise of a Totally Awesome Partnership; it’s just written on the fleshy tablets of my soul, to my everlasting grief.
@Posted by: Henry | July 31, 2014 at 17:54
Well said!
“hence the tendency to pick apart Star Trek minutiae and insist on internal consistency”
I think the dynamic we really are discussing here is that people tend to bristle and some hardcores double down, when you ruin their suspension of disbelief during an “escapism” event. For lots of nerdy type guys this is shows up as the above.
So that leaves me to the more interesting question, what do women use as escapism? Do they obsess about minor things which ruin their suspension of disbelief? That example about xfiles and relationships, or lots of stuff you could say to wimmin reading a gossip or beauty magazine might draw an interesting parallel.
So that leaves me to the more interesting question, what do women use as escapism? Do they obsess about minor things which ruin their suspension of disbelief? That example about xfiles and relationships, or lots of stuff you could say to wimmin reading a gossip or beauty magazine might draw an interesting parallel.
Relationships and gossip. Social positioning is a Real Big Deal. Beauty magazines kinda come under this subhead because they’re about status enhancement and making one better at capturing a man.
Caveat: I’m kind of halfway between dicentra and most women. I have a lot of masculine, aspie-esque traits when it comes to stuff I enjoy about stories (and I adore trivia), but I also like good relationship psychodrama a whole lot. I just have a saturation point on it after which I do not want to hear any more about so-and-so’s ~adorable~ relationship with such-and-such.
It’s interesting how the she-nerd persona has become fashionable among some feminists – Laurie Penny, for instance, goes to great lengths to let her fans know she’s into comics, science fiction and things like Doctor Who, as if it were complementary to, or an extension of, her supposedly “radical” politics. Which makes me wonder how much of it (if any) is an affectation too.
Events like Comic Con now have much more female participation and gender-bending ‘cosplay’ is apparently a thing. But according to the mindset of our fretful academics and the New York Times, Comic Con should see anything less than attendee gender parity as a social problem, one needing a taxpayer-funded “solution.” Perhaps they’d feel obliged to start offering subsidies to female ticket buyers or have an attendee quota system. To, as they say, “get more women interested.”
So that leaves me to the more interesting question, what do women use as escapism? Do they obsess about minor things which ruin their suspension of disbelief? That example about xfiles and relationships, or lots of stuff you could say to wimmin reading a gossip or beauty magazine might draw an interesting parallel.
I’m not sure if this qualifies, but when my wife and I watch a movie together on television, she tends to spend just as much time looking through each actor’s bio on Wikipedia as she does watching the movie. The number of children and past marriages, and their current relationship status are Kind of a Big Deal.
If we’re giving crap superheroes their own films now, why not Bananaman?
Posted by: Steve 2: Steveageddon | July 31, 2014 at 15:33
What? No Squirrel Girl?
Shouldn’t this be titled “The Undoing of Social Science”?
So that leaves me to the more interesting question, what do women use as escapism? Do they obsess about minor things which ruin their suspension of disbelief? That example about xfiles and relationships, or lots of stuff you could say to wimmin reading a gossip or beauty magazine might draw an interesting parallel.
When that fails, there’s always romance novels. The ones with a totally-not-objectified male on the cover.
I suppose mystery novels might have a female-dominated readership as well.
Events like Comic Con now have much more female participation and gender-bending ‘cosplay’ is apparently a thing.
One of the cardinal differences between the sexes: a woman dressed as a male character is attractive, a man dressed as a female character is creepy.
One of the tensions behind the scenes is that a lot of the female attendees are there to make friends and form emotional bonds with other attendees. Some of them prefer to express this new friendship physically. No, not like you are thinking, usually the preferred physical means of expression is a hug; you actually see people with signs around saying ‘Free Hugs!’. Or, rather, saw, as another predominantly female group of attendees noticed this sometimes involved males, and males are icky, so this was SEXUAL HARASSMENT and MUST BE STOPPED, so rules were put into place.
Half the drama of geekdom is the tension between women that see a male-dominated social environment as a place to get attention by appealing to the inherent attention given a good looking female by males (who, as a bonus, likely shares some interests with them) and women that see an alternate social environment being contaminated by the MALE GAZE.
great points!
Of interest:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/but_this_is_an_artist/
Funny how producing the same work for less money is rejected because if a company does it it’s no longer “artistic.” Makes you wonder about the value of the original. Would The Last Supper be an inferior work if it was made to order by a company that provided pleasant artwork?
Would The Last Supper be an inferior work if it was made to order by a company that provided pleasant artwork?
Well, actually, . . . The Last Supper . . . was made to order by a company that provided pleasant artwork . . .
And someone even did a Wiki article on some pleasant artwork: . . . was commissioned as part of a scheme of renovations to the church and its convent buildings by Leonardo’s patron Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan.
So it wasn’t commissioned by BP, Tesco, or Apple, however . . . . . . . .
Bitchez be crazy: the memes.
One of the tensions behind the scenes is that a lot of the female attendees are there to make friends and form emotional bonds with other attendees.
In all likelihood, some know each other from online fandom, so a “defictionalization” is going on. I ended up meeting tons of online friends and acquaintances at Lumos 2003…
…while dodging the squeeeeeing teenaged girls (and some older) who, besotted by fanfic, totally befouled the screening of HP2, wherein every 30 seconds they giggled at the double-entendre some slashficcer had inserted into the narrative.
Shippers ruin the world.
Every. Time.
Shippers ruin the world.
Every. Time.
Unless you give them something shiny to distract them. “You can go squee over Twilight while us fans that are more emotionally driven by things going boom go watch something else.”
Which, of course, leads back into the thesis that different groups of people go to movies for different things, and that some reasons are more represented amongst certain groups than others. Which leads to perceived sexual imbalances amongst, say, Wikipedia authors…
I am an engineer. This means that I use the results from real science experiments to design real things that actually get used by people to do stuff that they want to do.
These studies done by social “scientists” are used by politicians to do “social engineering”, to change behavior that they find abhorent, which in many cases, does no one any harm, and which, in many cases, gives lots of people pleasure.
If my creations hurt people, I can be sued. People can ask for their money back if it doesn’t work as advertised. The results of social engineering failures are just ignored, or worse, more money is thrown at the same people to create more junk “science” to support throwing away even more money on hare-brained ideological schemes.
Social “Science” has corrupted real science very badly. They have corrupted the language and the methodology, they misuse statistics, and they are steadily corrupting the public understanding of science to the point where non-technical people cannot differentiate real science from quackery.
They have a lot to answer for.
The results of social engineering failures are just ignored,
The experiment failed because TEA Party. So let’s sic the IRS, EPA, OSHA, etc at them.
You can go squee over Twilight
Alas, during the rise of HP, Twilight wasn’t shiny enough to divert the rascals. There was Just Enough Teen Romance in HP to keep the shippers interested.
:: grumble ::
Alas, during the rise of HP, Twilight wasn’t shiny enough to divert the rascals. There was Just Enough Teen Romance in HP to keep the shippers interested.
Ah, yes, The Transformers Saga: Breaking Wind, Parts One and Two, and all that . . . . or was that Broken Down? I can never remember.
Well, yeah, while HP is all out warfare, the story is anchored in a rather standard high school—which for me has repeatedly brought up the question of; If Hogwarts is merely high school, what does Uni look like!?!?!?— . . .
By contrast, for Twee-lite, the main characters sparkle, float through the air, are visible in daylight, are particularly fixated on adolescents instead of adults—-in short, Vampires. My. Ass.: That is Tinker Bell—are any of the Lost Boys really any older than, say, eleven? Twee-lite shippers would have to be pedophiles, really . . .
Of interest:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/but_this_is_an_artist/
Funny how producing the same work for less money is rejected because if a company does it it’s no longer “artistic.” Makes you wonder about the value of the original. Would The Last Supper be an inferior work if it was made to order by a company that provided pleasant artwork?
I don’t even…
I need to go lie down
The milk crate saga is even funnier than the Tim Blair article suggests. After the Mayor of Sydney announced the $2M milk crate, it was discovered that a Melbourne artist had already “created” a giant milk crate in the southern city. No matter, it was decided, the Sydney work was still “valid”. So with any intellectual property issues settled, it was wide open for the construction firm to offer to build the Sydney crate for a mere $500K.
@Hal
I was pretty sure it was a commissioned work. I once saw some da Vinci artwork and notes and such on display. He clearly saw himself as a craftsman, not as an “artiste” in the modern sense. I had much more respect for him, having seen that.
I think the company’s offer is fascinating because it really gets into the intersection of intent and meaning vs. the final product when it comes to modern art. Presumably a giant milk crate is only interesting to have because of the “artistic” idea of a giant milk crate. It’s not particularly edifying or beautiful to look at once it’s actually constructed. So if a company builds it, why is it being built? It probably wasn’t the city’s idea to build this exact sculpture. Its only value is that an artist thought of it, essentially. So if a company builds it then the “thought” is sort of lost; the “art” is sullied by lowly commerce.
And yet, much of the great artwork of the past was done on commission. The Last Supper would still be equally beautiful, even if it was first produced by Bob’s Pretty Paintings Co., Ltd. Therein lies a big difference in the way we view art. Beauty can’t really be undone by the identity of the one creating it, but pretension can be made ridiculous that way.
Maybe Guardianistas don’t sing.
That would imply talent, so probably not.
Regarding Sex and the City, I’m guess I’m one of the few males who liked it, having had two girlfriends (one of whom is promoted to wife) who watched it. I think I saw every episode at least twice, and did like the portrayal of 90s NYC as well as some of the story lines. I think it was quite fresh in its day, but having watched it recently it hasn’t aged well.
Surprised people don’t know that Da Vinci’s work was commissioned, right down to the Mona Lisa which is, after all, merely somebody’s portrait. He didn’t paint it for fun. Similarly, Rossini’s operas were commissioned by somebody else, as were Mozart’s AFAIK. These guys were professionals, producing works for those who were paying for their skills.
Not sure what the difference is between accepting a commission, and tailoring your work to the grant application criteria, which is what most artists I know do.
Accepting a commission from a private citizen who pays for the work with his own money for the benefit, presumably, of himself. A grant, presumably money taken from citizens in the form of taxes, is spending someone else’s money for the benefit of someone else. Milton Friedman spoke of how these different arrangements effect the quality and cost of a product or service.
http://youtu.be/5RDMdc5r5z8
Yeah, but from the artist’s point of view, you’re still deciding what art to make according to the preferences of who’s paying you.
Which customer do you suppose will be more demanding? Won’t the nature of that relationship effect the art and the artist?
Don’t really know. The point I was trying to make is, artists funded by grants have no right to who look down on artists funded by commissions.
Agree. Absurd that it would be that way. If anything, artists funded by commissions would be entitled to look down upon artists funded by grants.
Having spent part of last week wandering round Verona and Mantua marveling at the art and architecture I was reminded that these masterpieces were commisioned by rich men showing off.
Of course the Baroque marble facade was also bolted on to the early renaissance Cathedral of Saint Peter the Apostle in Mantua by a rich man showing off.
The class of person who could be described as an ‘Artist’ really only came into being in the last two hundred years or so. Before that, most ‘Art’ was regarded as decoration and ‘Artists’ merely as skilled tradesmen. Men like DaVinci and Michaelangelo were really jack-of-all-trades who made sculptures, paintings and frescoes but also designed fortifications, weapons and uniforms for whoever they could persuade to pay them. In other words they had to produce something of value for their customers, they never had the idea that someone should pay them for simply ‘Being’.