Bits and Bobs

I've spent most of my Saturday napping. Hopefully you've been far more productive! Here's some interesting and have a wonderful week.

- The controversial Heidelberg Project turns a decaying community in Detroit into a colourful, surrealist, work of art.

- Anders Ramsell painted nearly 13,000 watercolours to make this 34-minute paraphrased version of Blade Runner. It's amazing and beautiful.

- The Beckham recently donated some designer apparel to a charity shop to raise money for the victims of the recent Philippines typhoon. Here's a list of the best charity shops to frequent when looking for designer gear.

- The Atlantic has a really interesting article about massive data mining and how it's changing employment. There's a section about names and CV bias that reminds me of a chapter from Freakonomics. I don't know if I find this sort of large-scale data analysis interesting or scary.

- While we're on the theme of large-scale data analysis - here's an interesting article looking at how anthropologists use twitter to study movement patterns.

- Do you want to read about the kinky sex lives of spies? Of course you do!

- Film special effects these days are pretty spectacular but here are some things that still don't look right. For me, I always think that flying looks odd in a film - no matter how great the other special effects are.

War Between Women

 Don't be fooled by the smiles; we all hate each other...sluts...

A study was recently published in the journal, Aggressive Behaviour, which apparently shows that women will act bitchy towards other women they see as promiscuous. Several websites have reported on the study but, disappointingly, haven't pointed out how epicly flawed it is. In the study, 86 participants were left in a room with another woman (either a friend or a stranger) and told they would be contributing to a study on friendship. Instead they were interrupted by another woman. Half the women encountered a pretty, blonde woman in a blue t-shirt and sensible chinos. The other half encountered the same woman in a hot-pink, low-cut top, mini-skirt and knee-high boots.

The participants' reactions to this interloper were assessed according to a 'bitchiness' score of 1-10.  The authors of the study, Vaillancourt and Sharma, found that the participants were more likely to be bitchy when the 'sexy' woman walked into the room and that their bitchiness was more pronounced when the participants were with friends, rather than strangers. The authors concluded that women stifle each other's sexuality through indirect aggression, bitchiness, because women use sex to negotiate with men and it is therefore in their best interest to punish promiscuous women to maintain a limited supply of sex. Vaillancourt's study is small but supposedly demonstrates slut-shaming in an experimental context.

To me, the first, and most obvious, criticism is the very concept of a 'bitchiness score'. Observing someone's reactions and placing them on a 'scale of bitch' seems preposterously unscientific, even by psychology's standards. Is an eye-roll more bitchy than a laugh? Is a smirk more bitchy than a glare? And facial expressions may not always accurately portray someone's opinions. A participant may have an excellent poker face - that doesn't mean she's not thinking bitchy things. Given psychologists' propensity for questionnaires, why not use a carefully crafted questionnaire to quantify the participants' opinions rather than the far less rigourous method of observation? Of course observation can be an invaluable tool for scientists in experiments but you can't arbitrarily assign numbers to vague observations and then think you can make meaningful conclusions from an analysis of those numbers. 

I also question whether the woman's differing outfits really convey what the authors want them to convey to the participants. 'Sexiness' is an incredibly subjective attribute. I don't think her outfit looks sexy, I think it looks immensely unflattering (hot-pink is no one's friend). And even if we were to decide that there is only one universally recognised standard of 'sexiness', sexy is not coterminous with promiscuous. I can think that someone is sexy and not think of them as a potential home-wrecker.

Even if we were to accept that bitchiness can be objectively measured, and that 'sexiness' and 'promiscuity' were both coterminous and universally recognised, the study still fails to show that women slut-shame other women because it excludes men. Various news sites have picked up on this study to conclude that there exists a war between women. But if men also show this same behaviour against people they perceive to be their sexual rivals, clearly we don't have a war between women but just war between people. Other studies have in fact shown that both men and women display competitive behaviour, using strategies of self-promotion and competitor derogation. This experiment is only half of the story and any conclusions about female behaviour, as separate from human behaviour more generally, are completely unfounded.

Going Dutch

During my three years as an undergraduate student I was not once asked out on a date, leading me to come to the conclusion that I was to live my life as some crazy hermit. I had even started picking out names for the hundreds of cats I was inevitably going to acquire. I was thus taken a bit by surprise when I moved to London just over a year ago and suddenly found myself the regular recipient of dinner invitations (probably facilitated by the fact that I was now taking a Masters course that was over 80% male). However while one would expect this turn of events to be warmly welcomed, I instead find myself getting frustrated on a regular basis due to altercations when it comes to paying the bill. When eating out with friends, paying the bill is a relatively simple affair with the total amount being split equally between the diners. This seems a perfectly sensible and efficient way of divvying up a bill and I am left perplexed as to why the men I have dated this last year have been so belligerently averse to such a system.

At the end of almost every date I go on, I am left fighting over the bill. I am frequently surprised with just how irate my date gets during these disputes. On one particular occasion, when I insisted that I pay for my own food, my date replied that he gets offended when a girl wants to pay for her bill. This sentiment particularly irked me; he’s allowed to be offended when a woman offers to pay, but when a man offers to pay I’m supposed to feel grateful? Why am I not allowed to be offended?

I always insist on paying for my half of the bill. Often the man responds by saying that he’s ‘old-fashioned’ (which I have come to realise is code for chauvinist and backwards) and that he considers it gentlemanly to pay the bill. But a man paying the bill for a woman is not gentlemanly. Frankly, it is somewhat insidious. Reading any anthropology or sociology text on reciprocity makes it pretty clear that nothing comes for free. When someone pays for you, you are then bound to that person. You don’t have to repay that person immediately but there is an obligation of reciprocity inherent in any seeming ‘gift’. In Mauss’ eponymous study on exchange, he argues that while gifts appear voluntary, “in fact they are given and repaid under obligation.” Gift-giving forms relationships that join people to each other. As an example, he discusses the Maori concept of hau, the ‘spirit’ of a gift which creates a link between the giver and the receiver. If the gift is not reciprocated, the spirit will make the receiver ill.

Like Mauss, Malinowski emphasises the importance of reciprocity in his analysis of the Kula of the Trobriand Islands. Kula (literally meaning ‘ring’) is a form of exchange linking islands and communities in an unbreakable circuit. Soulava, long necklaces made from red shells, and mwali, bracelets made from white shells, are constantly exchanged in opposite directions around the circuit. The Kula serves many purposes: it fosters inter-tribal cooperation; facilitates trade; cements social hierarchies; and denotes personal honour. The exchange of soulava and mwali forms a “lifelong relationship,” which ”implies various mutual duties.”

Some may argue that I am overreacting with my opposition to having my meals paid for by a man. But these studies, and others like them, demonstrate that reciprocity, and the links it creates between individuals, is a powerful social force that may lead women into future actions that they are not comfortable with. A university friend of mine was once given a highly sought-after ticket to a ball by a male friend and her first comment was, “oh great… now I’m going to have to have sex with him.”

I don’t mind being treated every once in a while and I don’t think that the men I have dated over the last year were necessarily trying to entrap me into some future promise of sex. But constantly being paid for is degrading and humiliating. Healthy relationships require an equal distribution of power and this is impossible when one individual is indebted to another.

Bibliography

Malinowski B (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, George Routledge & Sons, Ltd

 Mauss M (1950) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London: Routledge