The opposite of the Bingo statements make even less sense. Does it have nothing to do with our savannah ancestors? Are there no genetic differences between men and women? Does Science always have to be PC?

Pop Evolutionary Psychology is too much of a strawman these days. There’s lots of good science going on as well. (Psst, one of the founding figures is female)

I consider myself a feminist and I’m a researcher in the evolutionary ecology field. Also, I more or less agree with Christovir. The funny thing about averages is that there are plenty of anecdotes that seem to contradict the norm, but they are noteworthy precisely because they are outliers.

Of course our societal imprinting influences our attitudes, fears and assumptions. We can point to the rise of the bromance in a generation of men raised by feminist-informed mothers telling their sons it’s okay to share feelings and affection with other men. But my guess is that on average, you will continue to see the vast majority of overtly violent crimes perpetrated by men no matter what our current cultural trend may be.

Nature vs. nurture only gets you so far in evolutionary discussions. If we are talking heredity here, it’s genotype vs. phenotype.

Suck it, evolutionary psychologists!

I understood that differently than you did. I took it more as a making fun of the guy who says something along the lines of “But I can’t help looking when she walks by / I can’t hitting on her [etc] – men just evolved to be that way!”

No, men aren’t. You are. That’s the problem with evolutionary psychology. For all the talk of “Oh, it’s reasonable to hypothesise that our desires are shaped by blah blah blah”, they make no attempt to actually scientifically find out what desires most humans have. They just take their own fetishes and assume everyone has them, like you just did.

I can’t make this clear enough: being attracted to skinny 17 year olds is not normal. To normal people, 17 year olds look like children. FFS, they are children.

A quick search through Google Scholar on ‘evolutionary psychology “sexual attraction”‘ gives about 3,000 hits, some from the American Journal of Psychiatry, Nature, Current Anthropology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences … It seems it’s a hot (pardon the pun) research topic.

They just take their own fetishes and assume everyone has them, like you just did.

But replace “fetishes” with “social norms”, and isn’t that just what you did?

To normal people, 17 year olds look like children. FFS, they are children.

Children, in what sense? That they can’t vote? There are moves afoot to lower the voting age to 16 in Denmark and the UK. And they can drive a motorbike and/or a car in many countries. They can’t have sex? But they can in some states, all European countries and many other countries of the world. They can’t buy alcohol or tobacco? They can in many European countries …

As far as examining my privilege goes; I’m not a prick, of course I’ve done some thinking about that. Mind you, I come from an area that was effectively ethnically homogeneous until the late 90s (amazingly, no-one wanted to immigrate to Northern Ireland. Lack of jobs and presence of a war had something to do with that.)

You see, I’ve personally met some of the most horrific evo-psych racists there are, such as Richard Lynn. I abhor them and their ideas, but they are not the concept of evolutionary psychology. Given that we know that some areas of human behaviour are genetic, it is literally impossible that they did not form by evolution. Refusing to study that because of a few mad old bastards is exactly the same as blasting feminism because of the unpalatability of so-called radical feminism as a culture.

Babies have to be separated from bathwater, and the answer to the problem is to attack the ideas and the sacred cows, not the area of investigation. Savonarola would be proud.

On a tangent: I have no idea what the two green people in the bottom right corner of the bingo card are up to.

That’s pretty straight-forward: it’s a caricature of “Men on top of women,” implying that that’s what evolutionary psychology is really all about. A few of the posters have tried to point this out as a caricature, offering analogies of simplified “feminism,” but I think emotions about gender issues are too high to have a particularly nuanced discussion about it.

Some of the more healthy forms of feminism aren’t misandrist, but most American feminism regards men as ‘broken’ and needing to become ‘more feminine’. Female good, male bad. They don’t say it that way, those with views like this rarely do, but the proof is in the action. If I talked about how women were ‘less advanced’ and needed to become ‘more masculine’, I’d be crucified. I think the feminists who do the same thing in reverse deserve the same treatment.

Also, I’m actually an anarcho-socialist who reads the Nation and is actively involved in a commune, I despise Faux News and am a huge fan of Emma Goldman, a great woman and advocate for women’s rights. So, don’t discount me on that measure. I don’t fit into your box, so try and listen when I’m tired of being told my sex is wrong about everything it ever feels. If this was ‘College Feminist Bingo’, I wouldn’t be reading it here, would I?

“I understood that differently than you did. I took it more as a making fun of the guy who says something along the lines of “But I can’t help looking when she walks by / I can’t hitting on her [etc] – men just evolved to be that way!”"

Yeah, that guy is a jerk who can’t control himself. Pointing out that gravity pulls you downward doesn’t excuse you from responsibility if you throw yourself off a tall building.

Children lack secondary sexual characteristics, teenagers have them. All people are attracted to humans of one sex or another displaying secondary sexual characteristics. How we handle that is a function of cultural norms.

So you’re calling him a paedophile. Nice.

Of course, given that a 17 year old can LEGALLY CONSENT TO SEX this argument doesn’t hold a whole lot of water.

Even if you put “evolutionary psychology” in quotes so you weren’t getting thousands of false positives from non-EvPsych psychology and evolutionary research, it would still only show that they mention sexual attraction and not that they researched what sexual desires people have.

“But replace “fetishes” with “social norms”, and isn’t that just what you did?”

You’re saying I have my own social norms? :S

@Adam’s Navel:

“In the thousands of years where human life wasn’t that long, it made sense for attraction to at the very least encompass this group of perfectly fertile potential mates.”

You can imagine for yourself how well an EvPsych just-so story is going to go down as an argument in this thread.

Seriously just because some people that claim to be into evol psych say stupid things doesn’t mean that there is nothing of value in evol psych.

Sigh

‘m lkng t th frmrs, nd lkng t th pgs, nd dmnd f fnd t hrd t tll th dffrnc.

Nobody has molested your comments, so I have no idea why you’re so agitated. Andrea is a former guest blogger. She does not have access to The Big Red Button. The only position that I’ve taken in this thread is against trollish commenters ticking off talking points on their greasy, little agendas.

In other words, it should not be ruled out a priori but it makes sense to insist that any claim jump through lots of hoops first.

It’s the scientific analogue of Godwin’s Law.

Does that also apply to evolutionary psychologists?