A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
This was the original headline in the Post Everything op-ed by Bradley Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson.
Apparently, many outraged readers pointed out the “blame the victim” assumption in the headline. Or as Erin Gloria Ryan, at Jezebel translated it, “Violence Against Women Will End When You Sluts Get Married.”
Others pointed out that the data did not support that claim. Wilcox, the lead author, tweeted.
The new headline wasn’t much better.
Offensive terms like “baby daddy” have been removed, but the idea is the same. And while Wilcox didn’t write those headlines, they do represent his thesis: marriage as protection.
And, most fundamentally, for the girls and women in their lives, married fathers provide direct protection by watching out for the physical welfare of their wives and daughters, and indirect protection by increasing the odds they live in safe homes and are not exposed to men likely to pose a threat. So, women: if you’re the product of a good marriage, and feel safer as a consequence, lift a glass to dear old dad this Sunday.
Philip Cohen (here) has looked at the data, which clearly shows the trend Wilcox has been wringing his hands about for a long time: marriage in the US is on the decline. Wilcox would predict that the fall in marriage rates would result in huge increases in violence against wives and girlfriends.
But it hasn’t. In this same period, the data show, “intimate partner violence” has also declined. (Cohen’s analysis requires a bit of statistical sophistication, but his discussion makes the data clear, and his post is well worth reading.)
There are ecological-fallacy problems in the data, as Cohen acknowledges. But such problems have not prevented Wilcox from drawing shaky conclusions about the broad benefits of marriage. Philip even provides a parody version of Wilcox’s strategy, though Cohen uses the data to draw the opposite conclusions about marriage.
We had reason to believe marriage was harmful, on average . . . as if marriage feeds off itself in a violence loop. . . . The bottom line is that intimate partner violence is much less common in years when marriage is more rare.
Cohen is kidding. Sort of. Underlying the traditional marriage – the one Wilcox takes as the ideal – is a power imbalance. For Wilcox, that’s a good thing. As he says, husband/fathers provide “protection,” both direct and indirect.
But the marriage-as-protection trope reminded me of something Philip Slater wrote forty years ago:
In relation to women, men have taken the stance assumed by the warrior-aristocrat toward the peasant: “If you feed me, I will protect you.” Before long, of course, every protection contract becomes a protection racket: “Give me what I want and I will protect you against me.
Slate ran an article by L.V. Anderson decrying the tendency of Ivy League graduates to be vague about their educational credentials. Asked where they went to school, they say, “New Haven,” or “Boston,” or “New Jersey.”
If . . . you refuse to tell someone you went to Harvard, that reflects poorly on you – it implies that, on some level, you buy into the overblown mythos of Harvard and the presumption of Ivy League superiority.
Anderson’s course of study, wherever it was, must not have included even a paragraph of Goffman. One of the basic ideas of Presentation of Self is that people seek to control the impressions others make of them, and they do this by controlling the information others get. It’s not about what mythos Ivy Leaguers buy into. It’s about the mythos others have bought.
Ivy Leaguers have a very good notion, usually based on experience, of the impression that “Harvard” or “Yale” creates in others’ minds. Alyssa Metzger in the Chronicle sets the record straight.
When I would visit my former local bar in Philly . . . a reply of “In Boston” usually led to them returning to their beers with an “Oh cool … my friend’s sister goes to BU” . . . If I said, “At Harvard,” it tended to lead to them turning on their stools to face me, wide-eyed, with an “Oh wow … you must be really smart.” I wasn’t Allyssa, I was SMART PERSON (TM)— more object than person.
Who wants to be seen as an exemplar of a stereotype? And stereotype we do, even those of us who should know better. A few years ago (here) I reported a conversation from my playground days. I had gotten to know another playground dad (weekdays at the playground, the dad sample is a very small n). Brad was a Juilliard grad who was eking out a living as a conductor with a regional orchestra – five concerts a year.
One day we were sitting on the bench, and Brad asked me where I’d gotten my Ph.D. I guess we’d never talked much about higher education. Harvard, I told him.
“I didn’t know that,” he said, surprised, “and I’ve known you all this time.”
“Don’t be impressed,” I said.
“But I am,” he said. From his voice and the look on his face, I could see that he meant it. I wanted to convince him not to be.
“Oh Brad,” I said, my voice rising in mock awe, “You went to Juilliard?! You must be this really great and talented musician. Juilliard – wow!” Or something like that.
He laughed.
“See what I mean?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. Then a pause. “But I’m still impressed.”
Harvard grads don’t want to lie. So they tell the veritas, just not the whole veritas. Yalies may shade the veritas in order to present themselves in the lux that best fits the situation. But, as Goffman pointed out, that’s what we all do all the time.
June 7, 2014 Posted before post time by Jay Livingston
At Freakonomics Steven Levitt argues for making “a place bet on California Chrome” mostly because the odds to win will be so low.
When California Chrome won the Preakness, a $2 bet to win returned $3. A $2 bet to place also returned $3! . . . You can’t know with certainty what the place payout will be ahead of time because it depends on what other horse finishes in the top two, but if you watch the allocation of money in the place pool you can get a pretty good idea. Sometimes crazy things happen. When Big Brown won the Preakness, he paid $2.40 to win, $2.60 to place, and $2.40 to show!
Levitt is right when he says that the place payout depends on which other horse finishes in the top two. But he’s wrong when he says that you can get a pretty good idea by watching the place pool. The Tote board at the track does show how much money is bet on each horse to win, to place, and to show. The place payout is determined by taking all the losing bets and dividing them up among people who bet on the winner and those who bet on the place horse.
The reason Big Brown paid more to place than to win was that horse who finished second, Macho Again, at 40-1 was the second longest shot in the race. That meant more money in the place pool to be divided (all the money bet on the other ten horses) and fewer people that it would be divided among So if you are betting a heavy favorite to place, you not only have to watch the place pool bets, but you also have to pray that the horses with big money bet on them finish no better than third.
Levitt’s best bet is Commanding Curve to win. The odds will be attractive. A dollar on California Chrome, if he wins, will get you fifty cents; if you bet him to place, you might win only a dime. The morning line on Commanding Curve is 15-1, but I expect it will by lower by post time. Commanding Curve closed six lengths on California Chrome in the final furlong of the Derby, an indication that he might have the stamina for the added quarter-mile of the Belmont. Commanding Curve also skipped the Preakness, giving him an extra two weeks of rest.
My own long shot is Wicked Strong, another possible closer. The morning line is 6-1, but I predict it will be higher. He had some bad racing luck in the Derby and still got fourth.
Finally, I cannot do a post on horse racing without reiterating my pet peeve about the incorrect use of “track record” that has become so widespread (see my earlier post here). In racing, where the term originates, it does not refer to a horse’s past performances. It refers to the record time at that track for a given distance. People don’t have track records, tracks do. The Belmont stakes is a mile and a half. The fastest time for that distance at Belmont – the track record – is 2:24. That’s way fast, and here’s what it looked like.
In a sport where the difference between win and place is usually a fraction of a second, Secretariat is four or five seconds ahead of the rest.
UPDATE: Both Levitt and I were wrong. The winner was Tonalist at 8-1, a horse who had raced only four times and only once against top horses, though he won that one (a grade-2 stakes). The place horse was an even longer shot, Commissioner at 20-1.
Usually, you want to match up with someone at about your level, or a little higher. The trouble is that many people overestimate their own level. Maybe that’s especially true of men.
One summer many years ago at the tennis courts, a guy I didn’t know came over and asked me if I’d like to play. I hadn’t arranged a game with anyone, but I didn’t want to wind up playing some patzer.
“Are you any good?” I asked. He paused.
“Well, I’m not Jimmy Connors,” he said (I told this was many years ago), “but neither are you.”
In chess and other games, serious players have ratings. Give a roomful of possible partners, they can sort through the ratings and find a match with someone at roughly the same level. It’s called assortative mating, though that term usually refers to the other kind of mating, not chess. It’s the basis of the conflict in this poignant scene from “Louie.” (The scene was also played on a recent “Fresh Air” interview with Louis C.K.)
Vanessa is not a ten, neither is Louie. According to principles of assortative mating, the tens will wind up with other tens, the nines with nines, and so on down the attractiveness scale. One problem in the “Louie” scene is that Louie seems to have an inflated view of his own attractiveness. He’s aiming higher than Vanessa. That’s typical. So is the importance that Louie, the man, places on physical attractiveness. This excerpt begins with Louie telling Vanessa that she’s a really beautiful . . . . He can’t bring himself to say “girl”; he was probably going to say “person” or worse, “human being.” In any case, he’s obviously not saying what he thinks.
Or as Dan Ariely and colleagues concluded from their study of HotOrNot members (here)*
[Men] were significantly more influenced by the consensus physical attractiveness of their potential dates than females were. [Men also] were less affected by how attractive they themselves were . . . In making date choices, males are less influenced by their own rated attractiveness than females are.
Another dating site, OK Cupid, found a similar pattern when they looked at data about who gets messages (here).** They asked their customers to rate profile photos of the opposite sex on a scale of 0 to 5. They then tracked the number of messages for people at each level of attractiveness. The graph below shows what women thought and what they did – that is, how attractive they found men, and who they sent messages to.
Men who were rated 0 or 1 got fewer messages than their proportion in the population. That figures. But even men who were only moderately attractive got more than their share. Generally, the fewer men at a level of attractiveness, the fewer total messages women sent. The male 4s, for example, constituted only 2% of the population, and they got only 4% of all the messages. The Vanessas on OK Cupid are not sending a lot of inquiries to guys who look like George Clooney.
But look at the men.
Men are more generous in their estimates of beauty than are women. But they also ignore the Vanessas of the world (or at least the world of OK Cupid) and flock after the more attractive women, even though there are fewer of those women. Only 15% of the women were rated as a 4, but they received about 26% of the messages. Women rated 5 received messages triple their proportion in the population.
What about those with so-so looks? Women rated as 2s received only about 10% of the messages sent by men. But men at that same level received 25% of the messages women sent. The women seem more realistic.
Vanessa too has no illusions about her own attractiveness. She refers to herself as “a fat girl,” and when Louie, trying to be kind, says, “You’re not fat,” she says: “You know what the meanest thing is you can say to a fat girl? [pause] ‘You’re not fat.’”*** But it’s only when she challenges Louie’s view of his own attractiveness that their relationship starts to change.
Y’know if you were standing over there looking at us, you know what you’d see?
What?
That we totally match. We’re actually a great couple together.
She doesn’t explain what she means by “totally match.” It could be their interests or ideas or personalities, but the imaginary stranger looking at them from over there couldn’t know about any of that. What that generalized other could see is that they are at roughly the same place on the assortative mating attractiveness scale.
-------------------------------- * Ariely discusses this research in his book The Upside of Irrationality. ** OK Cupid was founded by Harvard math graduates. On the Website’s blog, they would post graphs like these – big data that could be very useful for the site’s members. A few years ago, they sold out to Match.com, and the data analyses ended.
*** This occurs early in the clip, at about 0:25. The entire 7and a half minutes is worth watching.
