When women suggest indirectly to stop or slow down sexual intimacy, men interpret these messages as requests to escalate sexual intimacy. This is due to men’s faulty introspection, according to a University of California study.

If she says, “It’s getting late,” he interprets this to mean “Let’s speed things up,” because that is what he would mean if he said it. (This research “does not address rape or other situations in which a man indeed understands ‘no’ but ignores it,” according to the news release.)

In one study, Motley gave 30 female and 60 male UC Davis undergraduates a multiple-choice questionnaire that asked about 16 common “female resistance messages.” The messages ranged from very direct — “Let’s stop this” — to very indirect — “I’m seeing someone else.” Four potential interpretations were listed for each message; only one was “stop.”

For “I’m seeing someone else,” for example, the following four interpretations were listed:

a) You want to go further but you want him to know that it doesn’t mean that you’re committed to him;

b) You want to go further but you want him to be discreet, so that the other guy doesn’t find out;

c) You want to go further but you want him to realize, in case you end up “going together,” that you may do this with someone else while you’re seeing him;

d) You don’t want to go further.

The women in the study were asked to recall a time when they used one of the messages, and to choose the answer that best matched what they meant when they said it. Half of the men were asked to recall a time when they were with a woman who communicated each message, and to choose the interpretation that best matched what they thought the woman meant when she said it. The other 30 men were instructed to choose the interpretation that best matched what they would mean if they were to communicate the messages.

By the way, for the average woman, her intended meaning is d) You don’t want to go further.

The questionnaire study showed that men were accurate at interpreting direct resistance messages like “Let’s stop this.” But they were as apt to interpret “Let’s be friends” to mean “keep going” as to mean “stop.” And few of them would mean “stop” if they were to deliver any of the indirect messages themselves.

This is amusing in a horrible way. What is fascinating about this is that there are multiple interpretations of “I’m seeing someone else,” and “Let’s be friends,” and that the male-centric interpretations assume that wanting casual sex and cheating is more likely that wanting to stop/slow down sexual intimacy.

In related studies, Motley has also shown that most women use indirect messages out of concern that men will be offended or angered by direct messages — but that most men actually accept direct resistance messages easily and without negative reactions.

This is even more intriguing. It is probably the case that women experience street harassment and find that rejecting sexual advances often results in anger/offense and being called a “bitch,” or in extreme cases, results in threats of death or rape. These studies that show men accept direct resistance messages “easily and without negative reactions” should be investigated for more details.

Motley’s book also offers practical recommendations for dealing with this type of miscommunication:

• Men need to be aware of the many ways that women may say “stop” without using the word “stop.”
• When a man asks himself during intimacy, “Why did she say that?” he should not try to answer the question by imagining what he would mean if he said the same thing.
• When in doubt, ask. “So it’s getting late; does that mean we should stop?”
• Women should use direct messages.
• A woman who cannot be direct should at least work a direct message into the indirect one: “It’s getting late, so I’d like to stop.”

Women should definitely use direct messages, as should men and genderqueer people. Both direct and indirect communication are important skills that must be cultivated, but explicit statements can be understood by a wider range of people and are less culturally dependent.

References:

• University of California (2008, April 25). Sexual Intimacy: Why College Men May Hear ‘Yes’ When Women Mean ‘No’. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 4, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2008/04/080424140251.htm

Hate speech may stifle free speech by monopolizing the marketplace of ideas. Some types of arguments hinder rather than contribute to productive discussion (such as logical fallacies), and some hate speech may fall into this category. Additionally, some hate speech, or rather certain framings of how the world is, limit the scope of discussion and who is allowed to debate.

Generally, some practises can never be questioned in debate. Logical fallacies are not acceptable arguments, and persisting in logical fallacies is considered bad form rather than a valid avenue of discussion. Is it possible that some types of hate speech are inherently fallacious?

Is hate speech ad hominem?

Description of ad hominem:

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting). This type of “argument” has the following form:

1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B makes an attack on person A.
3. Therefore A’s claim is false.

The reason why an Ad Hominem (of any kind) is a fallacy is that the character, circumstances, or actions of a person do not (in most cases) have a bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made (or the quality of the argument being made).

Not all personal attacks are ad hominem, as sometimes a negative characteristic about a debater is relevant to the topic. For example, if the debate is about one debater’s level of sexual attractiveness, a claim that the debater under discussion is ugly would not be ad hominem. However, is hate speech (directed against ethnic minorities, queer folk, people with disabilities, etc.) necessarily ad hominem?

For example, let us say that the debate is about whether all members of a minority group are involved in a global conspiracy. An implicit assumption in this debate is that any member of that minority group is not allowed to participate in the discussion. If a member of that minority, Person A, provides reasons why he is not involved in a global conspiracy, the other debaters, who are of the majority group, can argue that Person A’s testimony is invalid because he belongs to that minority group.

Read the rest of this entry »

Q: Why are Asians successful in America? Do Asians have a higher intelligence than non-Asians? Are Asians more hard-working?

A: Asian immigrants in the United States and their descendants are more successful on average because they are highly self-selected. Overseas immigrants are a biased sample and not representative of their original country’s general population. They tend to be economic immigrants coming from the middle and upper classes, with a higher degree of education and wealth. However, the subset of overseas immigrants (including Asians) that are refugees suffer extreme poverty, on average, because they are more representative of the general population of their originating countries.

All non-whites in the United States are subject to racial discrimination in employment, and are denied white privilege. Even the Asians that arrive with or inherit economic and educational privileges suffer from racism in employment, as they need to have more education than a white person to receive the same pay. They also bump into the glass ceiling.

The United States is not a meritocracy. Racism, sexism, and inherited wealth are determinants of who is in power.

Q: Where is the data that supports this explanation?

A: Sociologist Stephen Klineberg conducted a 1996 survey of Asians in Houston and found that there was little or no social mobility among Asians.

[...] Klineberg revealed that nearly 40 percent of Asian respondents said their fathers had been doctors, lawyers, corporate managers or other professionals, compared to about 30 percent of Anglos, 20 percent of Blacks, and 15 percent of Hispanics.

[...]

The occupational profiles of the Asian respondents and their fathers suggest little or no upward social mobility. For example, 44 percent of the Indians and Pakistanis in Houston are in professional or managerial positions, but so were 47 percent of their fathers. Among the Vietnamese, 28 percent are in low-skilled production or laboring jobs as were 30 percent of their fathers.

From the same study, Klineberg found that although Asians, on average, are more likely to have college degrees compared to Anglos, their income and employment positions are lower than Anglos.

While nearly 60 percent of Asian adults in Harris County have college degrees, compared to about 40 percent of Anglo adults, Asians report considerably lower household incomes and are more apt to work in lower status positions than Anglos.

Sociologist C.N. Le reviews research on the “returns in education”, which shows that non-whites, including Asians, earn less than whites with equal qualifications.

Recent research from scholars such as Timothy Fong, Roderick Harrison, and Paul Ong, to name just a few, continues to confirm these findings that controlling for other variables, Asian Americans still earn less money than Whites with virtually equal qualifications. Once again, for each statistic that suggests everything is picture-perfect for Asian Americans, there is another that proves otherwise.

Guofang Li, an academic researcher and assistant professor in the University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education, debunks the myth that Asians are by nature more academically successful than other minorities:

Although many Asian students do quite well in school and on standardized tests, Li maintains their success often reflects the additional expensive private schooling provided by upper- and middle-class parents on evenings and weekends.

[...]

The persistence of these ideas, says Li, prevents us from unraveling the social realities of those who face problems in the educational system. Furthermore, she says, they authorize a flat denial of racism and structures of social dominance, and silence those who are not economically successful.

More data and explanations debunking this “model minority” myth can be found in the section below.

Further reading:

• How Whites Use Asians to Further Anti-Black Racism by Tim Wise
• Myth: Asian-Americans are a model minority by Steve Kangas
• A Brief History of the ”Model Minority” Stereotype by Andrew Chin
• Black Immigrants: the new model minority? by Wendi Muse
• Survey Examines Asian Mobility (Rice University)
• The Model Minority Image by C. N. Le
• Researcher Debunks “Myth” that Asians Are, by Nature, More Academically Successful than Other Minorities (University at Buffalo)

If you ask an Asian in Canada, “Where are you from?”, the person may be take offense at being assumed a foreigner because of her race, or she may be happy to tell you about her motherland. Foreign-born and native-born Asian Canadians are different. They should not be lumped together and treated the same.

Although you cannot tell if an Asian individual is foreign-born or Canadian-born by looking at his physical features (being born and raised in a Western country does not change small, slanted eyes into large, round eyes), we have data on Asian Canadian visible minorities as an aggregate and where they are from.

2 in 3 Japanese are Canadian-born:

1 in 4 Chinese are Canadian-born (”Canadian-Born Chinese” or “CBCs”):

1 in 3 South Asians are Canadian-born (so-called “Canadian-Born Confused Desis” or “CBCDs”):

On average, 3 in 10 visible minorities were Canadian-born. The breakdown of the Canadian-born percentages across the individual visible minority groups are shown below.

(The “Canadian-born occurrence” column is an extrapolation from the percentage, not explicitly listed in the analysis series article.)

Sources:

• Statistics Canada. 2008. Canada’s Ethnocultural Mosaic, 2006 Census. 2006 Census. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 97-562-X. Ottawa. Released April 2, 2008.

Visible minorities accounted for 42.9% or 2,174,100 of the population in Toronto (Census Metropolitan Area), according to the 2006 Census. The largest visible minority groups in Toronto were South Asian (684,100), Chinese (486,300), Black (352,200), and Filipino (172,000).

The census metropolitan area (CMA) of Toronto had the largest proportion of visible minorities among all CMAs in Canada. 94.0% of the visible minority population in Toronto (CMA) lived in one of six municipalities: the City of Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, Richmond Hill, or Vaughan. The municipalities of Markham and Brampton had the highest proportion of visible minorities within the Toronto CMA.

Markham: 65.4% visible minorities

The municipality of Markham, Ontario had the highest percentage (65.4%) of visible minorities in Canada, surpassing the visible minority percentage of Richmond, British Columbia (65.1%). The two largest visible minority groups in Markham are Chinese (89,300) and South Asian (45,000).

Brampton: 57.0% visible minorities

The municipality with the second-highest proportion of visible minorities within the Toronto CMA was Brampton, Ontario, with 57.0% visible minorities. The largest visible minority groups in Brampton were South Asian (136,800) and Black (53,300).

Visible minorities made up 49.0% of Mississauga, 46.9% of the City of Toronto, and 45.7% of Richmond Hill.

Sources:

• Statistics Canada. 2007. 2006 Community Profiles. 2006 Census. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 92-591-XWE. Ottawa. Released March 13 2007.
• Statistics Canada. 2008. Canada’s Ethnocultural Mosaic, 2006 Census. 2006 Census. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 97-562-X. Ottawa. Released April 2, 2008.

Visible minorities made up 16.2% of the total population in Canada in 2006, according to the newly-released 2006 Census data.

Visible minorities are defined as “persons, other than Aboriginal persons, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.”

Interestingly, South Asians have surpassed Chinese as the largest visible minority group.

The South Asians became Canada’s largest visible minority group in 2006, surpassing Chinese for the first time. The populations of both were well over 1 million.

The 2006 Census enumerated an estimated 1,262,900 individuals who identified themselves as South Asian, a growth rate of 37.7% from 917,100 individuals in 2001. They represented one-quarter (24.9%) of all visible minorities, or 4.0% of the total population in Canada.

In contrast, the number of individuals who identified themselves as Chinese increased 18.2% from 1,029,400 in 2001 to 1,216,600 in 2006. Chinese accounted for 24.0% of the visible minority population and 3.9% of the total Canadian population.

The number of those identifying themselves as Black, the third largest visible minority group, rose 18.4% from 662,200 individuals in 2001 to an estimated 783,800. They accounted for 15.5% of the visible minority population and 2.5% of the total population in 2006.

Other visible minority groups included Filipinos, who represented 8.1% of the visible minority population, Latin Americans (6.0%), Arabs (5.2%), Southeast Asians (4.7%), West Asians (3.1%), Koreans (2.8%) and Japanese (1.6%).

Related webpages:

• Canada’s Ethnocultural Mosaic, 2006 Census: Summary

Some anti-oppressive thinkers distrust powerful institutions, and end up distrusting the scientific institution and even scientific knowledge itself. However, scientific knowledge and scientific practise are not inherently oppressive. The oppressions that appear to come from science actually come from the upper-class white male domination of scientific disciplines.

Science is not the enemy; the practise of science is a productive method for understanding ourselves and our world. When some scientific studies overgeneralize and/or neglect certain groups of people, the problem is bad science, not science.

One of the serious problems with the lack of diversity in the practise within certain knowledge domains is that some important aspects of reality are not even considered, leading the researchers to overgeneralize and draw incorrect conclusions. This problem comes from the fact that scientific practise is a social activity, subject to the biases and prejudices of the scientists. In contrast, the scientific methods of gathering empirical data to refute hypotheses, and using statistical methods to determine statistical significance, are perfectly sound.

It is illogical to assume without reason that the results of a given scientific study (especially one that you do not particularly like) must be false. There is no contradiction between truth and justice. Anti-oppressive thinkers should not be afraid of science.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently, the United Nations thinks that recognizing race is racist. Here is an article from last year, March 08, 2007:

UNITED NATIONS - Canada’s use of the term “visible minorities” to identify people it considers susceptible to racial discrimination came under fire at the United Nations Wednesday - for being racist.

The world body’s anti-racism watchdog says in a report on Ottawa’s efforts to eliminate racial discrimination in Canada that the words might contravene an international treaty aimed at combating racism.

For people who want to discuss racism, this accusation is sounds familiar. A person who points out an instance of subtle racism is often accused of being racist herself. The accuser argues that this person is racist for noticing race. Would this be the reasoning of the UN committee?

Canada’s Employment Equity Act defines “visible minorities” as “persons, other than aboriginal people, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.”

To the committee, highlighting a certain group does not appear to be consistent with Article One of the convention, which says racial discrimination occurs when equitable treatment is upset by “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin.”

Recognizing race is making a distinction, but recognizing race does not necessarily lead to exclusion, restriction, or preference. “Visible minority” is a meaningful and intuitive term that recognizes that those who do not appear to be “white” may be discriminated against because of their physical racial appearance, which is a separate factor from their ethnicity, language, and culture.

An explanation of why colorblindness subverts antiracist work is well-articulated by Magniloquence in the post Race Relations 101: Colorblindness:

I don’t want [my race] to not be a problem for you; I don’t want race to be problematic.

The distinction may seem subtle, but it really isn’t. When a person says “I don’t see color” as a way of saying “your race is not a problem for me,” it casts the problem as race. Race is not the problem, racism is.

The news article on the UN accusation continues:

Speaking at the committee grilling of Canada last month, committee member Patrick Thornberry went further.

“The use of the term seemed to somehow indicate that ‘whiteness’ was the standard, all others differing from that being visible,” says the British international law professor, according to UN note-takers.

First, let us bring up the normative versus descriptive distinction. In philosophy, a normative statement is a statement about how things should be, while a descriptive statement is a statement about how things are.

Normatively, whiteness should not be the standard, and all others differing from that should not have a unique visibility due to their non-whiteness. Descriptively, however, it is true that ‘whiteness’ is the standard, and that all others differing from that do have a unique visibility due to their non-whiteness.

Rachel’s Tavern notes that the inability to make this [normative versus descriptive] distinction is one of the central problems with colorblindness:

Moreover, like most people I hear discuss race, she was unable to make a distinction between “should racial issues/identities matter” and “do racial issues/identities matter.” This is, of course, one of the central problems with colorblindness. Maybe in an ideal world where race was never invented race wouldn’t matter, but we don’t live in that world.

Other Related articles:

• Misreading the Dream: Color-Blindness and the Distortion of Martin Luther King Jr. by Tim Wise

If you condemn people of ethnicity P who live in your country based on the actions of foreigners of ethnicity P living in a different country, your reasoning is illogical. At a basic level, this is fallacious because

• If individual x has property P and individual y also has property P, one cannot conclude that x = y.
• If individual x has property P and individual y also has property P, one cannot conclude that if x has some property Q, y also has property Q.

In the ethnicity example, if a foreigner x of ethnicity P in a different country participates in action Q that is morally questionable, one cannot condemn a minority y in your country for action Q simply because that individual is also of ethnicity P.

For example, if a Muslim in a Western country complains that her rights were violated by the state, it is illogical to argue that this individual is being hypocritical because the laws in Saudi Arabia are worse in terms of human rights violations. Here, the individual y who complained about the violation is not necessary the person x who carried out a human rights violation, even though both x and y have property P, being Muslim. Furthermore, it is not the case that if some w has property P and property Q, all z who have property P also have property Q.

At a second level, this reasoning is fallacious because it assumes that minorities of ethnicity P in countries like the United States and Canada are representative of people of ethnicity P living in countries where ethnicity P is the majority. This is often not the case, as those who choose to immigrate to a Western country tend to be sympathetic towards Western values, and may even be escaping persecution from their original country. Cuban Americans on average tend to be anti-communist despite or perhaps because of the fact that Cuba is a communist country. Iranian Americans on average tend to be actively against Muslim fundamentalism despite or because of Iran having a Muslim fundamentalist government. Making generalizations about ethnic minorities based on foreigners living in a different country is simply ignorant, and often ironic.

At a third level, this reasoning is racist because it assumes that Canadian-born Canadians and American-born Americans of Asian, Middle Eastern, or Latino descent are somehow “the same as” or interchangeable with foreigners. This is known as the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype. For example, the tastes, culture, and politics of a fourth-generation American of Asian descent are often inferred from the tastes, culture, and politics of her ancestral country instead of her native country and country of origin, the United States. On the other hand, the tastes, culture, and politics of a second-generation American of Western European descent are assumed to be American. The perception of foreignness when it comes to native-born North Americans of Asian, Middle Eastern, or Latino descent is almost always a result of racial prejudices rather than the “culture” manifested by these individuals.

Related webpages:

• Asian Americans and the Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome by Frank H. Wu - An analysis and history of the perpetual foreigner syndrome as it relates to Asian Americans, explaining why it is racist and making references to “color-blindness”, color-consciousness, and the reality of participating in racial discrimination without being mindful of it.
• “Asking Permission” by X. Dean Lim - Humourous video about equating “Asian” with “foreign”. Rather than the reverse situation shown in this thought experiment, in practise, there are more situations where an Asian American is alone and under the scrutiny of the white American majority, so social pressure usually works against him.

Two sociologists argue that blonde women are inherently more attractive than non-blonde women, because blonde hair is a biological marker of youth. The book is called Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, and an excerpt was featured in a Psychology Today article in 2007. Here is part of the excerpt:

Blond hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age. Typically, young girls with light blond hair become women with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond women are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women.

Light-coloured hair among children is a characteristic of Europeans, and is not universal. Babies of Asian and African descent almost always have black hair.

It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing.

Since light-coloured hair among youth is not universal among humans, the argument that heterosexual male humans are attracted to blondes because of genetics is absurd. Have Asian and African men evolved to prefer blondes as well? How would this occur, if blond hair was a rather late mutation in human evolution, confined to Northern Europe? Light-coloured hair in non-Caucasian Asian and African populations before contact with Northern European genes were markers of albinism.

However, perhaps the authors were not making this argument, and were merely arguing that contemporary males find blonde females more attractive because blonde hair is still correlated with youth, among Caucasians. That is, perhaps contemporary heterosexual males see or meet a large sample of Caucasians throughout their lives, and unconsciously extrapolate the correlation between blonde hair and youth. Perhaps the blonde-youth correlation is a result of exposure to Caucasians, rather than hard-wired. This interpretation is more reasonable, given that the authors were trained in sociology rather than biology.

Unfortunately, the full title of the book is Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire– Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do and is an evolutionary psychology book.