Alexander Bradner, in her essay “Muthering Heights,” makes a telling point:

Unlike our mothers, we grew up fully powerful in classroom environments that acknowledged and even celebrated our achievements…So no wonder we can’t adjust to our midlife mediocrity…

We were “given” the first-class educations and training, making us feel guilty if we don’t use them to their fullest. But then we encounter the rude awakening from the infinite promise of youth that simply empowering women to succeed in high-powered careers doesn’t change society’s assumptions about more important ways we could be spending our time. We find out that equality is still a myth, because expectations about gender roles in families really haven’t changed all that much. This is the source of our guilt when we are working.

When it comes to todays mothers who have the option of working or being supported by a spouse, there also tends to be a “grass is always greener” phenomenon working in opposition to the guilt. Barbara G.S. Hagerty, in “Motherwriter,” states: “From time to time I fantasized about what my life would be like if I did not have the responsibilities and encumbrances of a family….” but when the opportunity arises to have this fantasy fulfilled at an artistic retreat, “…I missed my family. I had underestimated the ballast that they were in my life.” It seems as though if it were easier for these white-collar women to get part-time work, the guilt and the envy might largely disappear (more about this later).

But it is a white-collar problem, isn’t it? Deeply involved in our own worlds, we often fail to acknowledge the wage-earning women who don’t have the luxury to make a “choice” about work and kids, who are just trying to stay afloat. A comment to that effect made by Lindsey Mead (“A Foot in Two Worlds”) at a Harvard Business School alumnae gathering went over by a lead balloon, but although she didn’t have children when she made it, she does now, and admirably stands by her assertion that “having both a career and a family that you adore is one of the world’s great problems.” We should not fail to remember that as frustrating as it can be to want to do a great job both at home and at work, those of us able to strive for both are quite lucky indeed.

I was also glad to see at least one author, Amy Hudock (“Starting Over”) take the same position I do on the disingenuous but now common use of the word “choice” to describe my generation’s phenomenon of so many smart, educated women giving up their careers to stay home with the kids, without a fight. Her choice consisted of her academic employer (UC Berkeley) telling her that the only way she could keep her job after getting pregnant would to drive across the country alone with a weeks-old newborn in winter. Some “choice.” She resigned from a full-time, tenure-track position which is difficult enough to get in the first place, and nearly impossible to reclaim after time off. Her reward was ending up divorced with her career up in smoke. She leaves us with a warning:

Once I thought that U.S. feminism emphasized individual economic independence too much as a reflection of our money-focused community; I was wrong. We cannot emphasize it enough…I should have known that opting out is not a real option; it is financial suicide. And I should have known better than to put the noose around my own neck and call it a choice.

Where are the husbands of these stressed women? Karen Sibert, an anesthesiologist married to another anesthesiologist writes of hers, “It’s lucky that he can cook.” It would seem unnecessary to make such a statement unless one is still dogged by the assumption that the default cook in the family is the mother, even when both mother and father have equally challenging careers. But it’s not that Sibert doesn’t intellectually get this. Further in her essay, she writes,

Over time I have come to terms with what men have known all along: you can’t be a CEO or the president of the United States or even a hardworking wageearner and still make it to all the soccer games… (emphasis added)

But “coming to terms” is not at all the same as being comfortable with it to the point of assumption. Sibert still believes her role in the family is at least partly defined by her gender.

How do we get past this assumption? Unfortunately it is reinforced by books like this telling us that balancing work and family is a woman’s problem, not everyone’s problem. This isn’t the fault of the authors; whether we like it or not, it is because of the current state of our society (or at least the more educated and privileged in our society) that we call this a women’s problem, and Torn speaks to the experiences that women are currently having.

Right now, framing this as a women’s issue is more likely to find this book an audience. But I was mightily glad to read in Windi Padia’s essay, “When I Sneeze, I Pee a Little”:

My husband struggles with this multiple identity question too. He is a working father. I do not mean that he is a father and he works; I mean that he is a man who juggles work and family just as much as I do, if not more.

This is good to see, because the work-family problem is essentially unsolvable until the husbands/fathers are made equal parts of the equation we are trying to balance. Tara Bishop’s experience (“Dr. Mom”) is much closer to the norm:

There wasn’t even a debate over who should stay home. My husband made more money than me in his finance job, loved going to work and never felt guilty leaving our son.

One wonders: if Dr. Bishop had made more money, would there have been no debate? Maybe she should ask Amy Schneider (“Are You Fat, or Just Pregnant?”), who lived for her career until, she writes, “[m]y husband and I decided together that I would quit and stay home. Giving up the money (more than half our family income) was hard. Giving up the label and the prestige was harder.”

The power of Dr. Bishop’s open admission of their unequal assumptions about who should be home (translated to that simple word again, “guilt”) should make us all stop and think. This is not to say that her family made the wrong decision for them; but it is to say that no actual decision was ever made. When push comes to shove, it is nearly always the woman who drops out of a career to be at home with kids. It’s simply the default position, and it takes considerable activation energy to overcome that default.

Until we can easily imagine a book on the same topic written by men, and being successful, we will still be missing the necessary tools for families to manage work and family in a satisfactory way. The only way to move forward on this issue is for men to be equal partners in these decisions, and there are several impediments to this. First and foremost are American society’s expectations of men, which are now considerably more constrained than its expectations of women. Women can acceptably wear any clothes they want, whether those clothes are considered masculine or feminine. Men can’t. Women who quit jobs (especially crappy jobs) to stay at home with kids are greeted with approval by most people. Men who do this are not; many men stay in crappy jobs, unhappy, but meeting society’s expectations that they be their family’s primary breadwinner. Until men start considering and making their own “choices”, nothing will change because the playing field is not level.

And there is one change, above all, which could make white-collar families really reassess how they want to divvy up their tasks: Universal health coverage. One topic that was touched on only in passing if at all in “Torn” was the necessity that someone in every family has a full-time job, in order to have access to health care. There are likely a lot more couples than many people believe in which both partners would be happy with a part-time job, so that they could spend a reasonable time with the kids, but not be burned out with carrying the full burden of childcare, at the same time they spend a reasonable amount of time doing work that they enjoy, without getting burned out by the pressure of having to work 60-80 hours a week to keep their job. Why, why why does our division of labor have to be all one or the other, creating this conflict and marital stress? Because of employer-sponsored health insurance, that’s why. We may have started down a road away from this illogical and inefficient system; let’s hope we continue down it without looking back.

Also see the written review of “Torn” on this blog.

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From Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists have long argued that we begin life as amoral animals. One important task of society, particularly of parents, is to turn babies into civilized beings…

Perhaps psychologists have, but they are not actually equipped to make this argument. Any sociobiologist would argue in fact that babies are absolutely predisposed to morality.

Why this disparity? As suggested above, it probably has to do with the definition of “moral.” Psychologists and sociologists seem to have a very abstract concept of this term, which is probably why they don’t think babies should achieve morality – they presumably lack an ability to think in abstract terms.

Sociobiologists on the other hand, people like Frans de Waal, define morality as a set of rules that are necessary to follow in order be a successful member of society. As a corollary, morality exists in all social species, not just humans. Morality is the respect an individual shows to others of the group, so that the others will in turn respect that individual. When everyone plays fair, and by the same set of rules, all members of the society benefit. It is all about reciprocity, because if I cheat you to gain an advantage, you won’t want to deal with me in the future. It is a losing strategy in the long run, even if it gives me an advantage in the short term. Just think about the well known difference between the behavior of domestic dogs and cats: dogs, animals derived from social species, are very trainable because they care so much about what other members of their group (even the human members) think about them. Cats are relatively untrainable because they are derived from solitary species, and so they perceive no reciprocal benefit to pleasing another member of the group. In short, they don’t really care what you think of them.

The babies in Bloom’s article demonstrate that morality is nothing but a set of rules to live by. A baby as young as one year old believed in a study that someone who behaved in an antisocial, unfair way, should be punished. But how does such a young baby already understand these rules so well? Because a baby that is of a social species is designed to start learning the rules governing society from day one. That is the way they will develop into successful adults, and they learn the rules by observing the behavior of older members of their group. (This is why good role models are so important in preventing antisocial behavior in humans.)

Incidentally, this is also why studies searching for “genetic” differences between genders using babies and toddlers are completely idiotic, because they make the bizarre assumption that a three-year-old has not yet had the chance to absorb the rules for behavior that apply to its specific gender. Psychologists and sociologists fail to understand this simple truth, because they are not trained in sociobiology. Perhaps if they knew more evolutionary biology they would think more deeply about the broader context of human behavior. But what is baffling is that they think they can study the brain and human interactions without understanding the basic biology of social animals.

Click on the links to find out what these are all about.

It seems that the mainstream conservative position on this can be adequately summarized as, “So what? As long as there is freedom in where people are allowed to live, there is school choice (and hey while we’re on the topic, aren’t vouchers a great way to increase school choice?).” It is an argument crafted from the point of view of individual rights, which many people have trouble disagreeing with in principle.

But liberals, on the other hand, tend to see segregation as more evidence of institutionalized racism. They might respond, “How can you say that minorities have choice? A higher proportion of minorities live in poverty, and the associated lack of opportunity means that they have to go to schools that are populated mainly by other people just like them (ever heard of white flight?). Plus, they have the double whammy that keeping property-tax spending on schools local means that the poor kids who need a leg-up in education the most are stuck in the worst schools.”

The key problem we need to recognize is that while there are some political reasons for the re-segregation of schools, on a simpler level there always is a natural human tendency to gravitate toward groups of people more “like us,” whether that similarity lies in wealth, race, religion, etc. It goes both ways – it’s not just whites and rich people who gravitate toward each other, but blacks and poor people as well. A white man I know who was involved in a voluntary busing program in Denver in the 1960s told me that the bus driver had to take a different route each day because if he went the same way, people of both races would throw rocks at the bus.

So if this tendency is natural, what’s wrong with it? Identifying the difference between “in-group” and “out-group” members is a clear byproduct of humans’ evolutionary history as social animals. The rules we make about distinguishing these probably worked fairly well for us in pre-technological times. But as horses, ships, trains, planes, telephones, and now the internet brought more and more disparate groups of humans into casual contact with each other, the problems associated with our love of in-group increased exponentially. The high-level of internet vitriol aimed from one group to another is a direct result of the lack of social cost to negative interactions, which are almost inevitable when interactions are anonymous.

In our now small yet heterogeneous world, we interact continually with people on a much larger scale than did the original social groups which shaped our evolution, and it turns out that our natural circle-the-wagons tendencies are damaging on that larger social and political scale, because the larger scale affects us all a lot through state and federal policy.

And this brings us to why integration is so important. School integration has been known to have positive academic effects on children (that is, actual integration, not the political violence that has often accompanied it) for a long time (Maynor and Katzenmeyer, 1974). Although some argue that racial tensions can be raised by forced integration, this is likely an artifact of time and scale. There is no doubt that a lot of bigotry comes from the ease in which the out-group can be placed in the category of “other”; if people actually interact face-to-face with the “other” on a daily (and equal) basis, much of the knee jerk conflict disappears. As an obvious example of this, just notice what is currently happening with acceptance of gays in this country. When gays were largely closeted, very few heterosexuals believed that they knew any, so it was easy to demonize them. The reason that younger people are clearly so much more accepting of homosexuals is they have grown up among open gays. These days, almost every heterosexual has a known gay acquaintance, if not friend, and with that knowledge comes the realization that gays are actually human beings pretty much the same as the rest of us. This realization takes time for some people, but although there are of course violently anti-gay holdouts, the great majority of people come around eventually to a more sympathetic point of view. The same holds with people of a different race.

Race relations are far from ideal, but no one can deny that they progressed mightily in the 60s and 70s. Integration must have been part of the reason. But backsliding is a real danger with the current generation if people go back to their segregated lives, whether or not it is due to active ideology, or just complacency. Our innate social tendencies make this the path of least resistance, so for us to stay on the alternate path toward racial equality, we have to work at it continually. Even if this is ultimately a sisyphean task, and we can never reach a stable end point, the very act of trying will make us a better country in the long run. When we give up the ideal of racial integration and equality because of the notion that the only way to achieve it violates individual rights which are sacrosanct, society becomes more fractured and the isolationism feeds back on increased resistance to coming back together.

A fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals seems to be that conservatives believe that individual rights should always trump all else, while liberals see societal cohesiveness as at least equally important (whether or not a given liberal’s proposed methods to get there are valid or not is a separate issue). Sociobiology tells us that the needs of the social group support the needs of the individual – we know that individual humans cannot survive without society. Societies, though, have to have lots of rules for them to function properly (meaning, for individuals to be successful within that society). Whether or not individualists like it, the security and stability of our planet depends on us overcoming our innate small-group tendencies to recognize that our default social group is now largely defined on a much, much larger scale than our brains want it to be. The issues in figuring out how to get along better may be complex and difficult, but this does not change the imperative. We can start to retrain our brains though, by spending less time in the echo chamber of the internet, and more time making an effort to interact face-to-face, and with an open mind, with people who are not like us.

Reference

Maynor, W., and Katzenmeyer, W.G., 1974. Academic performance and school integration: a multi-ethnic analysis. The Journal of Negro Education 43(1):30-38

If an artist is focused on making an artistic connection, does it prevent him from making connections on a personal level? Sondheim seems to be saying that is often the case, as both his main characters have been unsuccessful romantically, while making artistic breakthroughs.

Sondheim’s fictional version of Georges Seurat, the impressionist painter of the late 19th century, strives for order, design, tension, balance, and harmony in his work. The real Seurat developed a new technique that became known as “pointillism,” based on the scientific notion that the human eye blends separate pixels of different color into one overall color. For example, many pixels of red and blue next to each other look purple to the eye, as if the colors were directly mixed themselves. (This principle is what allows us to perceive so many different shades of color on televisions and computer monitors, which display all their information in pixels.) The fictional Seurat has broken through to something new in art, but generally his art is not successful; it is perceived as bizarre. Without support from other people, Seurat is left with only his own belief that he is doing something significant. But his obsession with his work sucks him into it, making him oblivious to the few people who care about him.

The artist of the second act is Seurat’s fictional great-grandson, George, who is struggling to do something new with his art. While the Seurat of the first act abandoned human relationships for the sake of his innovative art, George’s world a hundred years later is one in which he must develop those relationships to allow him to produce his own visions, which require substantial funding. More fundamentally though, he is suffering from artists’ block, unable to see his way to produce something new. To simply a rehash previous ideas would not be a way to make true art.

The themes in the show do not apply only to artists. Any of us might understand the importance of order, design, tension, balance, and harmony in our lives:

• Order: We all arrange the pieces of our lives into a narrative, “putting it together.”
• Design: Without design, what coherent accomplishments are possible? An aimless life could be considered a wasted life.
• Tension: We all have tasks we need to accomplish, improvements to make, ways in which we want to improve ourselves and our lives. This is was drives us to accomplish more.
• Balance: How do we reconcile our internal, personal needs and those of others with whom we have relationships? Our internal world, which can never be completely known by another, must balance in someway with our life in the external world in which we interact with others.
• Harmony: It is possible for all of us to be at peace with how these elements function in our lives. This is the willingness to be happy with how it has all meshed.

In his brilliant music for “Sunday in the Park with George,” Sondheim illustrates these concepts. In one example, there is a recurring musical theme that is a succinct representation of both pointillism and the artist’s struggle with the components of his art, particularly expressing tension that needs to be resolved into harmony. Listen to this short theme below:

The last note of the theme is the leading tone (major seventh note of the scale), which uniquely holds tension. This note, more than any other in the scale, aches to resolve to the tonic (first note of the scale). But it does not do so, leaving the tension hanging, the sequence unfinished. This represents the tension for Seurat in always working intently on something that has yet to be finished, that cuts him off from engaging successfully with people apart from through his art. The idea is eloquently expressed in his song “Finishing the Hat.”

There were shades of Sondheim’s Seurat character reflected in Calvin Tomkins’ profile of the artist Bruce Nauman in a recent New Yorker. Like the fictional modern artist George, Nauman says:

…he hoped he’d figure out how to make art without such a struggle, but it never happened. “My dad once said, ‘You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day,’ but I think you do…Maybe not every day, but pretty often.”

And, like Sondheim’s Seurat, Nauman’s relationships suffered because of his art. His first wife could not “…accept the emotional distance that her husband seemed to require. ‘My feelings are in my work,’ he told her…Bruce was a supportive husband and attentive father, she said, but ‘he was an artist first.’”

Sondheim’s Seurat died a lonely man. Nauman, by contrast, seems to have found someone who can balance with the demands of his art: another artist, Susan Rothenberg. Perhaps because she has similar passions she has empathy for his artistic needs, and so they have found harmony:

I’ve finally realized I don’t need to know the stuff Bruce is unable to tell me. I think we love each other very much…I’m very satisfied with hm, and very happy living about ninety-two percent of my life by myself. I don’t think I’ll ever know Bruce, but he is mine…

People from both extreme ends of the political spectrum claim to have logically thought through their positions, but that process always carries bias along with it. The root of our social biases is in-group vs. out-group mentality – how we distinguish those ‘with’ us from those ‘against.’

The power of this effect is striking. Asburn-Nardo and colleagues (2001) showed that anti-out-group biases emerge quickly even in the absence of any negative information about the out-group; it is strong even when groups are randomly assigned. This unconscious response is rooted in the limbic system of the brain, which also is associated with emotions such as fear. We cannot truly control our emotions, and likewise it is not a conscious process when we notoriously assimilate weak evidence to support our views, and ignore strong evidence that would refute them.

This response is likely rooted in humans’ evolutionary history as a social species (Tobena et al., 1999). When so much depends upon interactions with other individuals, shorthand for ‘us’ versus ‘them’ is important. Humans love to make rules, probably because rules help us to navigate society.

The less we interact face-to-face, the more of a problem bias becomes, though, so conflict due to ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality is not going to go away any time soon. At the same time, a lot of people are successful much of the time at suppressing unconscious biases, and even to the point of changing their minds occasionally. If they weren’t, power would not shift so easily between political parties due to dissatisfaction of the electorate with their leaders.

Populations tend to follow a normal distribution for about any trait you can measure. There’s no reason this would not be true for the magnitude of the tendency to reinforce biases dividing in-group and out-group. On one end of the scale are those derided (by people on the opposite end of the scale) as “bleeding-heart liberals” – by definition they have more empathy than average for people in out-groups.

The opposite of the bleeding-heart liberal is someone who is more hostile to out-groups than average. But the opposites are not perfectly balanced, because a tendency in this group is easily reinforced by fear-mongering, which appeals to the unconscious limbic system. Indeed, Ito et al. (1998) presented evidence that we react much more strongly to a negative stimulus than a positive one. This makes sense given that fear, stress and the like activate the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system, which among other responses, increases adrenaline as part of the well-known “fight-or-flight” response. The parasymathetic response is simply the absence of of the sympathetic response; there is no equivalent effect that positive stimuli have on the body, and the mind.

This all means that arguments appealing to reason are paradoxically less compelling, because they require a conscious effort by the listener to respond in rational manner. Arguments based on fear work better in general because they appeal to our unconscious, requiring no intellectual investment on the part of the listener.

The “hostile” end of the in-groups vs. out-groups spectrum would be less able to overcome these unconscious tendencies with conscious reason. This is a possible explanation for hard-core right-wing pro-Bush Americans holding steady at a polled 20% of the population, despite what the majority of the population sees as a disasterously failed presidency. One might hypothesize that fear has a greater effect on the opinions of this 20% than on other people. Their social and political views are colored to a greater extent by emotion than those of other people, who are better at using their conscious mind to overcome instinctive biases; thus the use of political “code-words” that appeal to their baser natures.

Of course the 20% believe they have rationally thought out their views, because the emotional appeal of fear and divisiveness occurs at an unconscious level. The opposite 20% who prefer to love all mankind do not have an equally negative impact on society, because their views promote peace rather than conflict.

So Dick Cheney will always have the ear of people for whom fear drives political opinion; clearly he is one of them himself. It is much harder task for a president appealing to rationality to persuade. The main advantage to Obama right now is that the blatant politics of fear of the last eight years have been abysmally unsuccessful to the point that most of those who were swept up in it post-9/11 have now asserted conscious control over baser instincts that they now recognize to be destructive to society in general. But not all of them, thanks to the bell curve.

References

Ashburn-Nardo, L., Voils, C.I., and Monteith, M.J., 2001. Implicit associations as the seeds of intergroup bias: How easily do they take root? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(5)789-799. 0022-3514/01/S5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.81.5.789

Ito, T.A., Larsen, J.T., Smith, N.K. and Cacioppo, J.T., 1998. Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: the negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(4):887-900.

Tobena , A. Marks, I. Dar, R. 1999. Advantages of bias and prejudice: An exploration of their neurocognitive templates. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 23:1047-1058.

Except possibly for the most committed long-term breast-feeders, breasts spend the majority of their lives as secondary sexual characteristics, arguably unnecessary for reproduction, but certainly unnecessary post-reproduction. Although they may be considered necessary by some for mate attraction, they clearly have the broader role in most societies as a gender cue. And most of our human societies are obsessed with gender cues.

For example, it seems very important to most American mothers (and probably some dads too) that the gender of an infant be instantly identifiable. The problem with humans is, there are no characteristics other than genitals with which we can make this distinction before puberty. So, even moms wearing jeans, T-shirts and ball caps tend to dress their infant daughters as if they were on their way to all-pink Princess Land. At least during babyhood, blue is supposed to be reserved for boys.

Beginning during toddlerhood more cues are used; now that kids have enough to work with, hair length and style is often the primary cue. Certainly there remain girly (i.e. pink) clothes that boys aren’t allowed to wear, but notice that the babies in pink, frilly dresses often morph into jeans-wearing little kids.

Of course there is the interesting asymmetry in cultural gender cues. Women may “cross dress,” but it just doesn’t have the impact of a man wearing women’s clothing, because basically, a woman is allowed in our society to wear “men’s” clothing, while a man is not allowed to wear “women’s.”

The Atlantic’s recent piece on transgenderism in pre-adolescents is a perfect illustration of our inability to see beyond cultural constructs regarding gender. Although the article presumes to explore both sides of the issue – whether or not we should let little kids have sex changes – it actually misses the entire crux of the problem.

We should be discussing not whether people should get sex changes, but why people feel the need to get them. Anecdotally, it appears that more transgenders are men who change to women. This pattern is consistent with the idea that perhaps many transgenders do not so much want to have the genitalia of the other sex, but do have personal preferences about clothing, behavioral roles, etc. that are associated strongly with the opposite sex in their culture. Oversimplified, a man might think: I would like to wear pink frilly dresses. Men in my society are not allowed to wear pink frilly dresses. Therefore, I want to be a woman.

Because of the cultural asymmetry of our patriarchal society, women who prefer to dress or behave more like cultural norms for men are more easily socially accepted than vice versa. In the Atlantic’s story (by Hanna Rosin), the “transgenderism” among children certainly seemed biased toward boys wanting to be girls. It was clear however that the focal child of the story simply wanted to wear girls’ clothes and have girls for friends. As a prepubescent, he doesn’t yet know what his genitals are really for, so he can’t possibly understand what it means yet to swap them out.

Parents who actually use hormones to render their pre-pubescent children effectively sterile – and perhaps more to the point, less sexually sensitive – should be open to charges of abuse. It’s appalling that a society would find this action more acceptable than the idea of a boy wearing a dress to school, but apparently that’s where we are.

What no “expert” in the story questioned was American society’s (and probably most others’) need to pigeonhole individuals into a fairly arbitrary idea of “gender.” Why cannot even those who think about these gender issues all the time question the assumed vital necessity that a boy’s favorite color can under no circumstances be pink? One step back is all that is needed to see the patent absurdity of this rule. And yet it is absolute, never questioned.

It was clear that Rosin misses the point completely, given this statement about the transgender boy’s mother: “Tina had no easy explanation for where Brandon’s behavior came from. Gender roles are not very fluid in their no-stoplight town, where Confederate flags line the main street.” It is exactly in a society with stricter gender roles that you would expect to find more “transgender” individuals, because the acceptable behavioral and fashion preferences by each gender are more narrowly defined. If the kid were growing up in Greenwich Village, there’s a better than even chance he would not feel the need to become a girl in order to act “like” one.

Which is probably the biggest reason why the idea of losing one’s breasts is abhorrent to women who are in a long-term relationship and intend to have no more children, who make an effort to save their breasts, or reconstruct if they cannot. It is the reason why male-to-female transgenders have them made. Breasts are a major cue for gender, and most people want to be easily identified as their gender. There’s nothing strange about this. Clear identification of everybody’s gender is a hugely important cue for social interactions. But imagine for a moment if it were not – that as a cultural species, we recognized that the pigeonholing of gender is not actually necessary for a functional modern society that claims to believe in gender equality, and is perhaps even counterproductive. Imagine if we acknowledged that by immediately labeling someone’s gender (as with race), we tend to see a trait first, rather than an individual, and so we just decided not to worry about the stereotypes anymore. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Breast conservation treatment is an appropriate method of primary therapy for the majority of women with Stage I and II breast cancer and is preferable because it provides survival equivalent to total mastectomy and axillary dissection while preserving the breast.

Better sites for the layperson weighing the pros and cons of these options are those of the Mayo Clinic and BreastCancer.org. These pages place greater emphasis on the state of mind of the patient. All things being equal, the question really boils down to, how emotionally attached are you to your breasts?

Given that the NIH statement seems to assume the patient has the necessary general good health to withstand either major surgery or six weeks of radiation, the word “preferable” seems to jump out. Why is it assumed that “preserving the breast” is preferable?

Well, likely it is for many women. Perhaps most. But have these women ever asked themselves why? It would be interesting to know how many women are as in love their breasts as doctors seem to assume. True, once you amputate a body part, you can’t have it back. Then again, if cancer recurrs, you may end up with a mastectomy anyway, in addition to the radiation you had before.

And what is “survival equivalent” anyway? Pretty much just time until death, statistically. There is nothing in that statement to do with quality of life, which clearly can be affected negatively if cancer comes back to a body part that you really don’t need, even if you don’t happen to die from it any faster.

Even many women who choose (or have to have) mastectomies then choose to undergo another major surgery (or more) to make fake breasts. Reconstruction is major because if you use your own body tissues, you actually have to have muscle from your abdomen or buttocks transplanted to the new “breast” so it will have a decent blood supply. This assumes you aren’t already using that muscle for some other purpose, which many of us probably are. And although you may be shaped roughly as before after surgery, there is no sensation in that region anyway, so it really is just for show.

What does a woman lose when she loses the outline of her breasts? Why are breasts presumed to have deep emotional meaning to their owner apart from the feelings of those in sexual pursuit of their owner? Is their value inherently felt or imposed by society? Given the many obvious advantages of not having breasts – men get along just fine without them – one could just as easily imagine them as emotionally easy to part with as a gall bladder. For some of us at least, they certainly are. Given the rampant epidemic that is breast cancer in women, these are not trivial questions.

More on the meaning of breasts…

Of course the main problem with this argument is that it assumes rational economic behavior by human beings, which over the last decade or so has been increasingly shown to be a false assumption. Economic models thus have to be rewritten to take into account that most of us do not act in our best interest, a lot of the time.

This is true in many arenas. There are many versions of the following experiment:

…the ultimatum game. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your partner accepts it, you each get to keep your share. If, however, your partner rejects it, neither of you gets any money.

How much should you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your game partner is a rational, self-interested money-maximizer — the very embodiment of Homo economicus — he isn’t going to turn down a free 10 bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that offer much less than a $70-$30 split are usually rejected.

Meaning: humans are a social species, and no one lives in a bubble. Context is everything, even when it comes to financial gain.

Land-use is a different matter however. Private-property enthusiasts will assert that a rancher will happily overgraze public land he is leasing. But if his ranch is all private, he will manage it to ensure a healthier ecosystem, because this makes sense for the long term, right?

In practice this is not so. Certainly, the tragedy of the commons does hold here; public land is routinely overgrazed. But the opposite is not true, because ranchers routinely overgraze their own land, too, even though that is clearly bad for ranch productivity in the long term. Why does this happen?

It happens because decisions regarding land-use are much more complex than a simple formula for maximizing profits over the long term. First of all, ranchers behave as if their leased public land is private anyway; usually these leases have been in place for generations, and are essentially giveaways (often $1/acre), and thus the ranchers have a strong sense of entitlement to the land. Any attempt by the feds to change anything about how the leases currently work is met with outrage because the government is going to “ruin” the rancher. Nowhere is there any publicly stated acknowledgment that the rancher is getting a great deal.

Second, ranching practices (at least in the northwest) have been handed down for generations after being developed in a much wetter era. Economic theory predicting rational behavior makes the enormous assumption that the knowledge is available to make rational decisions. A few progressive ranchers in this area are waking up to the fact that the “drought” the west is suffering is here to stay, and are learning how to change their methods to keep the land healthy in the current environment. For many ranches, this can be as simple as changing grazing practices from using fences to using herders. But for those who do not have the cultural knowledge, this can be a daunting shift.

On top of this, any subsistence ranching or farming is concerned much more with maximizing profits in the immediate future, without worrying about the long term. The most obvious example of this is farms in the deforested tropics. Everyone knows the soil in tropical forests is extremely poor, and after just a couple years of farming, the nutrients are fully depleted and the farms are abandoned. Does this keep people from cutting down forests for subsistence farms? No, because when you are living hand-to-mouth, you are focused on getting through the current year. Economists call this “discounting” the long term effects of decisions, so that a benefit obtained years from now is worth much less than one obtained now. This is a rational position, but it is arguable that for most people (such as those who obtained adjustable-rate mortgages in the last few years) the future is discounted much more highly than is mathematically “rational.”

Although the threats facing ranchers are not equally severe, the idea of having to quit production on a family ranch that has been working for generations is nothing less than disaster to those who face it. Their culture and tradition, and thus their entire sense of self, is wrapped up in that ranch. In Texas, for example, it is common for a “rancher” to keep a few cows on an overgrazed piece of family-owned land at a loss, while working a full time job in the city to actually make a living. It makes no financial sense to keep the ranch going, but it saves cultural face which is obviously much more important.

Finally, there is the obvious difference between individuals trying to make a living and corporations which need to maximize short-term profits at all costs. Our financial system seems to reward this corporate strategy, because the actual individual making a decision can jump ship before it is time to pay the piper for a bad one. They themselves do not own the resources they are exploiting, so making the resources privately owned (by the corporation) makes no difference to their protection. It is much easier for a corporation to run a ranch into the ground and then sell it off in parcels for development (although many private ranch owners do the same thing eventually) because a corporation has no cultural connection to the land.

The value of federal lands is that although they can be overexploited, there are mechanisms in place, such as regulation and public comment, to put a halt to their destruction. A hundred years ago, certainly the attitude was that the National Forests were there precisely for maximizing exploitation – after all, some private landowners might not want their land to be logged. Today, though, the ethic is different. Ecosystems have an inherent value to many more people than they once did, and this has changed forest service policy to include preservation as a mandate. Though the inertia to bring it about might be extreme, there is at least the possibility that public pressure can change federal land-use policy to better reflect the majority’s conservation values. Naturally, those who make a living exploiting federal land view such policy changes as a “taking.” But it is really a taking-back for the taxpayers who supplied that land for free in the first place.