We Still Don’t Need No Stinking Evidence

February 18, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociology isn’t just “common sense,” we tell our students on day one of the intro course. First, one common sense proposition can contradict another. And in any case, the only way to find out if common sense is right is to look at systematic evidence rather than relying on intuition and experience. 

So here is Ross Douthat on Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast on Thursday, talking about his “Let’s Ban Porn” column in the Times (see this post from last week).  Asked about the negative effects of pornography, Douthat says,

I think we spend a lot of time in the media landscape today arguing about studies, and in certain ways in this case I’m appealing to cultural experience and moral intuition

Early in the discussion, Douthat had referred to the “experiment” we have conducted “in using not just pornography but hard core extreme obviously misogynistic pornography as a kind of broad based form of sexual education for young men.” He didn’t specify the outcome variables of this experiment, though the hosts of the show mentioned that at the same time that porn was spreading wildly, the subjects of the experiment (teenagers) were racking up lower rates of casual sex, pregnancy, abortion, and rape.

Nearly an hour into the podcast host David Plotz asks about evidence. Douthat referred to the relation between porn and “anti-social behavior writ large – depression, unhappiness.” I would have thought that unwanted pregnancy and rape were writ just a bit larger than unhappiness. But even with the variables he mentions, Douthat acknowledges that the studies showing a relationship between porn consumption and unhappiness come from a think tank that is hardly neutral (the Witherspoon Institute), and that these studies suffer from the problem of endogeneity, a word that here means that even if there’s a correlation, it’s hard to figure out which is causing which. (Douthat says nothing about the studies that contradict his desired result that porn makes kids unhappy.)

Douthat mentions other outcomes: “Young men are messed up. . . .Relationships just aren’t working that well. . . People seem really unhappy with the dating landscape.” If there’s evidence that all of these were different in some pre-porn paradise, Douthat doesn’t cite it.

For sex conservatives, the question of the evils of porn is just too important to be left to empirical evidence. Nearly ten years ago, I wrote a similar post (“Data? We Don’t Need No Stinking Data”). The names of the conservatives have changed (Kristol out, Douthat in) but the idea is the same.

Does watching porn or listening to make kids more promiscuous? Why waste time figuring out how to get data on the question? Just take it from Irving Kristol (William’s dad) from some years back writing in the Wall Street Journal: Is it not reasonable to think that there may also be such a connection between our popular culture and the plagues of sexual promiscuity among teenagers, teenage illegitimacy, and, yes, the increasing number of rapes committed by teenagers? Here again, we don’t really need social science to confirm what common sense and common observations tell us to be the case.     Can anyone really believe that soft porn in our Hollywood movies, hard porn in our cable movies, and violent porn in our “rap” music is without effect? [emphasis added] By “here again,” he apparently means that there are several other areas where we are better off not trying to get evidence.

In the years since Kristol wrote that, our popular culture became more sexual and more violent. But sexual promiscuity among teenagers, teenage illegitimacy, and, yes, the number of rapes committed by teenagers all decreased.

But What Can We Do When It’s Too Late?

February 17, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

The NRA doesn’t really have to marshal arguments against the gun control laws that will again be proposed in the coming days and weeks. If legislators ain’t gonna legislate, you don’t really need to support your position. But argue they will. Their basic argument is that good guys need guns to defend themselves against bad guys, and the bad guys have lots of guns.

The country is so awash in guns that your only hope is to buy a gun, thus putting still more guns into circulation, creating an even greater need for people to buy guns. It is a feedback loop devoutly wished for by the NRA and gun manufacturers.

They also argue that the huge number of guns (300 million – an average of one per person – and counting) also makes anti-gun action a fool’s errand. As Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg argued (here) four years ago in the wake of the Aurora massacre, “It’s too late.”

It’s Vietnam all over again. In the late 60s, as it became clear that the US war in Vietnam was a mistake, war supporters made a similar argument. “Yeah, you were right about not getting into the war and then sending hundreds of thousands of more troops. But what we can do now? The war is not going well for us, so we have no choice but to send even more troops.” The Bush administration made a similar response when their invasion and de-stabilization of Iraq turned out to have been a predictably terrible idea.

Here’s one idea about what we can do. It’s not really a policy, but it might provide a start on finding a better policy: Stop electing the same kinds of politicians and the same party that got us into this mess in the first place.

In a post last November, I said (here) that the NRA policy on guns is like addiction: trying to solve a problem by doing more of what caused the problem in the first place. We wouldn’t put a Mexican heroin cartel in charge of the DEA. But we keep electing NRA-certified politicians to write our gun laws. Then, we’re shocked and dismayed that there’s so much gun violence.

Victims and Policies

February 16, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Right-wingers used to smugly say, maybe they still do, that a conservative on crime is a liberal who’s just been mugged. It seems logical. But twenty-five years ago when I was working on a criminology textbook, I could find no systematic evidence showing a link between victimization and political attitudes.

At the time, I thought that the problem might be that while most victimizations might be upsetting, they were not permanently traumatizing. If one day I stepped in dog shit because some inconsiderate New Yorker hadn’t bothered to obey the pooper-scooper law. In the moment, I would to immediately be rethinking my position on the death penalty.

But the emotion was transitory and faded quickly. It was the same when I found the window of my car smashed. Perhaps those victimizations were not serious enough. They were property crimes, not what the UCR calls “crimes against the person.” But I knew people who had been mugged – this was, after all, New York in the bad old days – and they had not adjusted their politics.

During the lockdown at the Stoneman Douglas school in Florida, while the shooter was still at large, one of the students interviewed others hiding with him in a closet.

There is only audio, no video, for the second girl interviewed, but  ABC posted a captioned version on Twitter. Here is a composite screen shot.

Maybe a liberal on gun control is an NRA hopeful who has just been shot at. But maybe not. In any case, whether this girl retains her new position on gun control, the evidence suggests that a mass shooting, even one covered extensively in the media, will have little impact on opinion nationwide. With Republicans in control of the government, yesterday’s killings might not even bring the customary increase in sales of guns and assault rifles.

In states that already have some sentiment in favor of stronger gun laws, a local massacre might be enough to tip the legislative balance. That’s what happened in Connecticut following the slaughter of children in Newtown. But in the legislatures of states like Florida and in Congress in Washington, these mass slaughters – even when the victims are children, even White children – count for little.

The kid who made the video, David Hogg, said on CNN, “We're children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action. Work together. Come over your politics.”

The public may be upset, but the emotion is transitory, unlikely to last much past the funerals of the next few days. The pro-gun forces are strong and steady. It seems unlikely that Hogg’s simple request, despite its wisdom, will have any impact on laws or policies.

Porn and Pandora

February 11, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ross Douthat wants to ban porn. No wonder then that he buries the lede even though it’s the only bit of systematic evidence he cites in his column today.

According to Douthat, we had a chance to ban porn a few decades ago. We could have done it. And we all, especially women, would have been better off – happier in our sex lives. Instead we “surrendered” to smut. But why?

Between the individualistic drift of society, the invention of the internet, and the failure of the Dworkin-Falwell* alliance’s predictions that porn would lead to rising rates of rape, the anti-porn case was marginalized  — with religious conservatism’s surrender to Donald Trump’s playboy candidacy a seeming coup de grace. [emphasis added]

Like Trekkie Monster in “Avenue Q,” I have no doubt that the internet made for much wider consumption of porn. As for US society being more individualistic now than it was 40-50 years ago, I would prefer to see some evidence. But on cause #3 – the failure of those predictions about rape – Douthat glides past an important fact. The rates didn’t just “not rise.” They fell. A lot. If you’re writing an op-ed about the society-wide effects of porn, that’s the lede.

The BJS victimization survey (here) shows that rates of rape and sexual assault in 2010 were less than half of what they were in 1995. More recent BJS surveys show no significant increase since 2010.

The same is true for victimization among college-age women. For both students and non-students, victimization rates in 2013 were about half of what they had been before the internet-porn explosion.

Maybe some John Lott of porn will write a book – More Porn, Less Rape.

Douthat doesn’t like porn. So rather than confront this large but inconvenient fact about porn and sexual assault, he buries it in the middle of a sentence one-third of the way into his column. 

It’s not just porn that Douthat doesn’t like. He doesn’t like sex for sex’s sake. He’s also condescendingly dismissive of any sex education that is not focused on repression.

The sex education programs in my mostly liberal schools featured a touching faith from the adults in charge that they were engaged in a great work of enlightenment, that with the right curricula they could roll back the forces of repression and make sexuality a place of egalitarian pleasure and safety for us all.

The students of the 90s, when Douthat was in those classes, wound up being much less sexually assaultive and sexually victimized than their counterparts of earlier years when sex ed either was not part of the curriculum or was taught as biology just to make it as boring as possible. No matter. Douthat likes those “forces of repression” and wants to see them rolled out again.

Don’t hold your breath, Ross. That Pandora’s box has been opened. Those erotic evils will continue to float unconfined, and Pandora herself has gone into the Internet music biz. So we are all free to pontificate, unconstrained by data, about what would happen if porn were banned. But if we’re going to speculate about the effects of pornography, we should pay at least some attention to the evidence we have about what actually did happen.

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*Andrea Dworkin did not coin the phrase “Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.” That was Robin Morgan. But Dworkin, in her vigorous fight against porn, espoused that causal idea. Falwell is Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. He too did not like porn, though in my very unthorough Google search, I could find no reference to his claiming that it caused rape.

The Social Construction of Brutality

February 4, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Super. It’s Superbowl Sunday. On the front page of the New York Times Review section is an article by the wife of former NFL safety Rob Kelly. The title is “Football Destroyed My Husband’s Mind.” Mood swings, paranoia, depression, irrationality. “Often he would forget to eat. I’d find full bowls of cereal left around the house, on bookshelves or the fireplace mantel.” It’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the result of concussions and other physical insults to the brain.  

The kickoff today is at 6:30.

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Construction Job. In The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckman describe how behaviors that start as a one-off – let’s meet for lunch tomorrow at 1:00 – can become institutionalized as regular practices. It turns into the Tuesday one o’clock lunch – external to the people involved. As more people become a part of it, its reality becomes more and more solid, literally, with buildings and equipment as well as rules and scheduling. We now have an institution that is seemingly unchangeable. Any other way of doing things is unimaginable.
                                                                               
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Imagine That. Last year, after a Penn State student died during a fraternity hazing, Lisa Wade tried to reframe the whole argument.

Imagine a world in which everything was the same about higher education except there have never been Greek organizations. An 18-year-old waltzes into a dean’s office and says, “I want to start an exclusive club on campus that doesn’t allow women and serves mostly white and privileged students and we’re going to throw parties all the time that are illegal, and at these parties, all the bad stuff that happens on campus is going to happen disproportionately. What do you think?”

By “bad stuff” she means rape and less criminal kinds of sexual coercion, drunkenness, physical and psychological intimidation, and brutality resulting in injury, sometimes hospitalization, and the occasional death.

Some people preferred to imagine Lisa being raped or killed for suggesting that their fraternities led to rape and brutality. 

            *            *            *            *

Zero-based Reality Construction. In “zero-based budgeting” no part of an organization has its budget automatically renewed. Instead, budgeteers ask of each item, “Is this necessary? What does it contribute to our goals?”

Imagine a world with no football. A group of athletes puts forward a proposal for a new sport to be played by school teams and professionals. It will cost a lot of money – money that most schools will not recoup. Many who play at the collegiate level and nearly all those who play professionally will live the rest of their lives with some pain and injury. Many will suffer permanent brain injury. Even those who play only in high school are at risk. Should we get started on making this a national institution?

            *            *            *            *

What’s done is done and cannot be undone. Institutions once constructed cannot be unconstructed, at least not quickly and only with great difficulty. Even if everyone agreed that fraternities or football are toxic institutions, nobody could imagine how to get rid of them. So instead, we get minor adjustments – rules about helmets and hits and heads, rules about drinking (requiring “third-party vendors”) or rush (reducing it from eight weeks to six). [Inside Higher Ed]

But there is no such agreement that these institutions do more harm than good, certainly no agreement on fraternities and probably not on football. Millions of us watch football and suffer no apparent harm. What happens to the players is, well, too bad. But that’s the way it is. What can you do?

Enjoy the game.

The Marvelous Mrs. Anachronism

January 29, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The authenticity of the [ancient parchment] scrolls is currently in great doubt, particularly since the word Oldsmobile appears several times in the text.”*

Most language anachronisms are harder to spot than Oldsmobile. But why?

“Mad Men” begins in 1960, but the ad men and women use terms that didn’t enter the language till much later: niche marketing, iconic, enough on her plate, how’d that work out for you, key demographic, bi-coastal, and many others. (“Mad Men posts are here and here.)

And now we have “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, set in roughly the same time and place as “Mad Men,” New York City 1958, though the social geography is slightly different – downtown comedy clubs and Upper West Side Jews rather than Madison Avenue and WASPs. The trailer for Season One summarizes the concept and setting.

From the opening shot with Checker cabs through to the final frame, everything is visually perfect for 1958 – clothes, interiors. But then (at 1:42) Midge says, “This comedy thing – it has to work.” But that construction – “this _____ thing” with any noun in the blank – was all but unknown before the mid-sixties, and it didn’t become widely used until the 1980s.

Many other people have noticed the language anachronisms on this show. A twentysomething I know caught “touch base with.” My own list includes: reach out to, alternate universe, scam, low bar, talking trash, I’m fine with, out of the loop, perp walk, kick [some big-time comedy] ass, she has been killing it, wackadoodle, crunching the numbers.

At first I thought that the writer/creators just didn’t care. But on a recent interview on KCRW’s “The Business,” they said this.



Here’s a slightly edited transcript

Q: Do you ever do the research and say, “Would a woman in the 50s do this?” A: We have this delightful researcher who has like twelve masters degrees in everything in the world, and all she gets is like “Did they say *** back in nineteen-fif . . You [Palladino] had a couple where I was like that just feels too modern. We don’t want to get caught out with that stuff ’cause everyone around us is so good – our production designer, our costumes, our props . .  And the last thing I want to do, when everyone is making sure that the piping on the wall and the colors are all correct, is that we’re the ones that come in and throw in a bunch of dialogue that’s not appropriate.

If they’re so good about the props and costumes, how can they throw in a bunch of dialogue that has so many anachronisms? Part of the answer, I think, is that our dominant sense is sight. We are much more likely to notice an object that doesn’t look right than a word that doesn’t sound right. Second, these visual things are the object of deliberate thought. We consciously choose our cars and clothes and colors. We also know that someone has consciously designed them and that the designers are deliberately trying to make them new and different. Not so our words. Nobody is advertising “wheelhouse” or “drill down” as the must-have word for this year. All the influencing and being influenced occurs out of our awareness. As a result, our language seems “natural” – unplanned and spontaneous rather than arbitrary. So we assume that this must be the way people always speak and have always spoken. 

That’s especially true for people who were not around during the historical period in question. If you weren’t watching club performers in 1958, you might just assume that the emcee then, as now, would say, “Let’s give it up for. . .” And if you weren’t familiar with stand-up comedy from that period, you might assume that comics then would ask, as Mrs. Maisel does, “What’s up with that?”

In fact, her whole style of stand-up is an anachronism, but that’s a matter for another blog post. The writers are familiar with the new comedy of  the late 50s – Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx, and others. And there’s a reference to Nichols and May that includes a glaring anachronism. When a male comic offers to work with Midge as a duo, her manager Susie advises against it.

SUSIE: He wants to fuck you. MIDGE:  He wants me to work with him. He says we’ll be like Nichols and May. Nichols and May don’t fuck. SUSIE Nichols and May totally fuck.

Nichols and May did in fact have a brief romantic involvement. But in 1958, nobody “totally” fucked. Nobody “totally” did anything.

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[A few months after I posted this, I had second thoughts about language anachronisms in contemporary TV shows. That post is here.]

[Update, Feb. 3, 2019. Some commenters have mentioned the profanity. In a more recent post (here), I suggested that what was anachronistic was not the amount of profanity but the specific words. Sixty years ago, the intensifier of choice among White middle-class New Yorkers would have been goddam, not fucking.]

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* From Woody Allen’s essay about six parchment scrolls discovered by a wandering shepherd in cave near the Gulf of Aqaba.

Punishment and Crime

January 25, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

When a criminal case is front-page news, the sentence matters not for its effect on the criminal but for its effect on the rest of us. As I said (here) about the Stanford swimming team rapist, punishment is not about crime.

The headlines in the local papers this morning confirm this idea.

What’s important about the sentence and the judge’s statement is that they express a collective outrage at Nassar. Nobody seriously expects the sentence to have any deterrent effect on other potential criminals. Nor was the sentence necessary to keep Nassar from further crimes. Federal courts had already sentenced him to sixty years for kiddie porn. The purpose of the sentence is to allow the rest of us to feel good. That function of sentencing marches under the banner of “retribution” or sometimes “justice.” But it might just as well be called “vengeance.”

The headlines also make it clear that this same motivation is the basis for sentiments favoring the death penalty. Proponents may talk about deterrence and saving lives, but their real argument is the moral one – that the criminal is so evil that he (almost always he, rarely she) does not deserve to live. But it’s not the criminal’s death per se that they want. The criminal who commits suicide or dies of illness has “cheated” us of our chance for vengeance. (See this 2006 post, “Cheating the Executioner.”)

We want the strongest expression of our moral outrage – and that is a sentence of death. Anything less will not do. So even though Nassar’s crimes were not capital offenses, the judge pretended that she was handing down a death sentence. Predictably, “death warrant” was the part of her statement that the newspapers ran in the headlines. Even the sedate New York Times had the money quote in a subhead, after “Gymnasts’ Abuse Draws Sentence Likely to Be Life.”

In these celebrated cases, what’s important then is the judge’s pronouncing the sentence. Whether the sentence is actually carried out usually escapes notice. Most people sentenced to death are not executed, and for the few who are, the execution comes so many years later that the crime has been all but forgotten. Go back to a case of a few years ago, a case where prosecutors and the much of the general public claimed that the only way to achieve justice was to execute the convicted person. Ask people if that criminal is still alive. Most will not know, and most will not care enough to bother to find out. The moment of truth was the handing down of the sentence. What happens later doesn’t count much on ledger of moral sentiments. There are exceptions – Charles Manson was never going to be paroled – but they are just that, exceptions

Harley Barber Was Right

January 20, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Harley Barber’s Finsta video – the one where she repeats the word nigger a dozen times in a minute – went viral. But in all the criticism, nobody (as far as I know) bothered to note that she is essentially correct: Language norms vary from region to region and from group to group. Or in Barber’s formulation of this idea:

I’m in the South now, bitch so everyone can fuck off.  I’m from New Jersey. So I can say nigger as much as I want.

Here’s the entire video.

She could have been more specific. She’s not just in the South. She’s in Alabama, and even more specifically, she’s in a car surrounded by her University of Alabama Alpha Phi sorority sisters. Her point is that if she had been in New Jersey, the people around her might have said, “You know Harley, we don’t think that way or use that word these days. And even if you do have those sentiments, it’s not a good idea to make a video of yourself expressing them, especially with that word. And if you do make a video, it’s a really bad idea to post it on Instagram.”

But her sorority sisters seem to be in complete agreement with her. That’s to be expected. Alpha Phi has a reputation for its retrograde mentality regarding race and gender. Their 2015 recruiting video looked like a casting call for The Bachelor except that all the girls are White.

As a writer at AL.com (the newspaper/media consortium) put it, Alpha Phi in this video presents itself as “all so racially and aesthetically homogeneous and forced, so hyper-feminine, so reductive and objectifying, so Stepford Wives: College Edition.” (The sorority soon took down the video, though you can see it here in a TV news story.)

The message was not lost on Harley Barber. Her video begins,

I’ve wanted to be in Alpha Phi since fucking high school and nobody fucking understands how much I love Alpha Phi

A couple of other observations about the incident:

1. Language norms change. Barber says fuck or fucking more times than she says nigger. As far as I know, nobody has voiced any objections.

2. Money makes it OK. In Barber’s reasoning, wealth and conspicuous consumption justify morally questionable attitudes.

And if anyone else wants to snake me for saying nigger on my finsta, I’m a in a fur vest. I want you to buy my fur vest. Cause fuck you. Go to Neiman Marcus and buy my fur vest

Neiman-Marcus fur vests go for as little as $600, but most are $2500 and up. Barber is not alone in resolving moral questions by looking at financial success. (See this earlier post about similar defenses of chicanery by JP Morgan during the financial crisis)

3.  Ideas and essence.  A day or two later in her fifteen minutes of fame, Barber issued an apology: “I’m an idiot. There’s no excuse. I did something really bad.” I would guess that if you asked Barber, “Are you a racist?” she would say No, and she would be sincere. Many other people are calling her a racist, and they are just as adamant. The trouble is that the question “Is she a racist?” is the wrong question. First, it assumes that ideas and attitudes are permanent and essential. Second, it also assumes what we might call the racism-binary – that each person either is or is not a racist. Both those assumptions are questionable if not flat out wrong. Much of the reporting about the incident got it right. Headlines referred to a “racist video” or “racist rant,” not a “racist co-ed.”