psychology stuff – Page 7 – Another angry woman

Evolutionary psychology and anarchy

I hold a particular, burning hatred of The Blank Slate, a seminal popular evolutionary psychology book. It seems to me that many people read it and, without applying any critical thinking, believe themselves to now be experts in human nature and that we’re all hardwired to be bellends so acting like a bellend is completely fine. I’ve basically stopped approving comments that cite The Blank Slate, because they’re always completely wrong.

In short, the author of The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, is a psychologist. Not an evolutionary psychologist: he did some very good work in child language acquisition and visual cognition. It is disappointing to see someone with scientific training write a book so unscientific. Rather than presenting a scientific account, The Blank Slate uses anecdotal evidence and pure speculation to make its point, and the point is that everything is how it is because it’s just human nature and so that’s how it is. The back of the book is full of breathless praise from right-wing newspapers, as it confirms their world view. However, The Blank Slate is not good science. Far from it. I will not critique the whole thing here: for those interested, here is a very comprehensive overview. For a shorter read, I wrote something about evolutionary psychology’s attitude towards gender here, and The Blank Slate is riddled with such problems.

Instead, I am going to focus on one short part of The Blank Slate which is completely wrong: Pinker’s views on anarchism.

In the media this weekend, there has been a lot of conflation of anarchy with lawlessness in commentary on the London riots. Anarchy is distinct from lawlessness: it refers to the absence of imposed political authority, while lawlessness has an implication of disorder. Pinker believes these two concepts to be one and the same:

The generalization that anarchy in the sence of a lack of government leads to anarchy in the sense of violent chaos may be banal, but it is often overlooked in today’s still-romantic climate. (The Blank Slate, p331)

Pinker argues that violence is “a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested social organisms” (The Blank Slate, p329), and that police are the adaptation to this aspect of human nature. Like the rest of Pinker’s book, the evidence is purely anecdotal. What is provided is a series of anecdotes which paint a picture of how we are but one line of riot cops away from a Mad Max dystopia.

At one point, Pinker explains that he used to be an anarchist, and that this changed following the Montreal police strike, where riots broke out. Of this incident, Pinker says:

This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (The Blank Slate, p331)

Empirical test? Pinker is supposed to be a fucking scientist! An anecdote is hardly an empirical test!

The evidence seems cherry-picked. At no point does Pinker discuss anywhere autonomous communities which operate perfectly well without police–take, for example, Greenham Common or any number of communes. The former example, Greenham Common may not sway Pinker, given his rather dated gender politics, but there are plenty of examples of places which have done just fine without any governance from the state.

However, fighting anecdotal evidence with more anecdotal evidence is the wrong approach–it is no better than Pinker’s own method.

Essentially, two hypotheses are proposed by Pinker in his treatment of anarchism:

1. That violence is an integral part of human nature

2. That the only way to stop it is to have a police force

The first hypothesis is not possible to test: this is a shortcoming of evolutionary psychology as a whole: one cannot empirically test whether something is “human nature” or not. We can look at proxies–for example, if violence is genetic, we can study identical twins who were raised apart, though even this methodology is flawed.

The second hypothesis would require controlling for all confounding variables, to test whether a police force is truly necessary and the only thing standing in the way of our horrifying nature. Essentially, one would need people raised in a complete vacuum with no mitigating factors such as economic deprivation or racism. This is, of course, impossible to test.

So what we are left with is a fairy story: we’re all violent, grappling thugs, and it’s only the presence of a policeman that stops us chucking a brick through the nearest window and running off with a spangly new telly.

The other side to the story is equally untestable: the very same two impossible experiments would need to be conducted to test whether we could do a lot better without state-controlled law enforcement.

Basically, there’s no science anywhere. We cannot discuss whether human nature inevitably tends towards looting any more than it inevitably tends towards cooperation. The difference is, anarchism does not tend to pretend it has science on its side: it is a political movement, an analysis of the system we have an a conclusion that we would probably do better without it.

I would feel a lot more comfortable, I think, if people stopped couching their political beliefs in pseudo-science. Rioting is a complex issue with a solution far beyond a little bit of anecdotal storytelling which concludes it’s in our genes. It must, therefore, be treated as such.

Likewise, anarchism is a complex political ideology. It cannot be handwaved away with nonsense and misconceptions.

Data confidentiality: do not fill in the Guardian riot survey.

Following yesterday’s riots in Tottenham, the Guardian has launched a survey to seek further information about what happened. It is spun as an attempt to understand why the riots took place following in a rich academic tradition of post-riot interviewing.

If you were in Tottenham, do not fill in the survey.

Here’s the thing: with academic research, there are certain rules surrounding how survey information is used. Before one does a survey, one has to apply for ethical permission and fulfil criteria to make sure that the data stay confidential, with those who provided it remaining completely confidential. This means that research surrounding sensitive issues such as illegal activity can be gathered without putting the participant at risk. On the flip side, it means more honest responses which will help researchers gain a better understanding of the issue. What is collected in academic surveys is completely unidentifiable. It’s research ethics.

The Guardian survey does not do this.

There is no guarantee of confidentiality to be seen. Information which could possibly lead to the arrest of the survey participant or acquaintances with no guarantee of any safeguards. Given that political policing and political sentencing are so prevalent these days, it is not safe to fill in this survey. Given that the phone-hacking scandal has exposed that it is almost commonplace for information to exchange hands between journalists and police, it is not safe to fill in this survey. You may land yourself in trouble. You may land your friends in trouble.

Show solidarity. Stay safe. Do not fill in the survey.

Maturity and making peace with the establishment

I recently took the Political Compass test. I rather predictably ended up in the bottom left (the anarchist corner), though I do not think it is a brilliant measure of where a person lies politically–some of the questions were worded poorly, and I think more than two dimensions are required to measure political leanings and… That is essentially beside the point. This post is about one of the questions on the test:

“Making peace with the establishment is an important aspect of maturity.”

I have heard this line before. I have heard it from trolls. I have heard it from friends. It is nigh-on memetic. Grow the fuck up and accept the system.

I vehemently disagree. To unpick this statement, let us turn to the work of Jean Piaget, a hugely influential developmental psychologist. Piaget’s research focused on how children learned, and how they mature cognitively. Through observation and experimenting with teaching, he identified key cognitive milestones which children pass as they mature.

According to Piaget, children are natural, curious “mini-scientists”. As they grow older, they develop and refine the ability to develop and test hypotheses, building an understanding of how the world works. Maturity is dynamic, as conceptualised here: a constant quest of questioning everything. Making peace with the establishment is the opposite of this: making peace with the establishment is to take a step back from logical experimentation and exploration.

Acceptance of the establishment also requires the belief that everyone thinks the same way: that the established set of default options is what is generally accepted as correct and that anyone who believes otherwise is somehow strange. The belief that everyone thinks in the same way as you is known as egocentrism. According to Piaget, one should grow out of this belief by the age of seven.

Unswerving acquiescence has an ancient tradition. In is apparent in the Bible: 1 Corinthians 3 is basically St Paul bollocking the Corinthians for being immature and telling them to grow the fuck up and do what God tells them. A little later in the same book, the famous quote comes up:

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Here, Paul is talking about settling down into a monogamous relationship and starting the traditional family favoured by the system.

For two thousand years, submission to the established order has been incentivised by dangling the carrot of maturity. When boiled down, it sounds like a schoolyard taunt. “If you don’t do as we say, you’re a baby“. It is the clique setting the rules, enforcing their law in any way they can. The law of the playground plays out on a large scale, and many of us buy it wholesale.

In a way, I was lucky to be so thoroughly unpopular at school that nothing I could do would gain social approval. I grew immune to such disdain and therefore had the means to allow myself to flourish. I read, I tried on identities. I experimented with views and beliefs. I learned all I could. And I came to the conclusion that something was not right in the world, and I fight what I, through Piaget’s top level of reasoning, concluded was correct. I accept I may be wrong, and presented with good evidence can be swayed.

I arrived where I am through thought. Surely this is more mature than blind acceptance?

Unseen sexism and journalistic misinterpretation of a research study

I seem to have reached the point where people send me things that will piss me off enough to blog about. Today, Nat sent me this: “Feminism’s misdirected targets”, a Guardian article

The article reports a research study called “Seeing The Unseen“, which is about attention paid to everyday sexism. The paper aimed to investigate whether people who were more likely to endorse benevolent sexist or modern sexist beliefs did so because they were unaware of sexist behaviour around them. The paper is open-source and, in a pleasant subversion of expectations, is actually linked in the Guardian article. At face value, it would almost appear as though the journalist had read the research paper, which is as much to be expected given that it is a freely-accessible paper.

However, I don’t think Jennifer Abel did read the whole paper. Abel gleefully takes apart a measure used in the study:

But the study didn’t ask women to seek sexism in discussions about women’s proper roles in marriage, combat or any other positions. Instead, it asked women to note:

“[If they] observed a man helping a woman with a task because he assumed that, as a woman, she should not have to grapple with it (eg, long drive, selection of a new laptop, carrying shopping bags).”

This is not true. It says, as clear as day in Table 1 of the article, what was measured. Among these things are hearing traditional stereotypes about women, heard traditional beliefs about relationships, heard paternalistic stereotypes about women, and witnessing traditional or paternalistic treatment of women. How this does not translate as seeking sexism in discussions about women’s proper roles in marriage, combat or and other positions, I do not know. Perhaps Abel didn’t look at the table. It is also worth noting that many of these observations are lifted directly from the gold-standard measure of benevolent sexism.

The measure Abel does report is not perfect, and I do wish the authors of the research paper had provided more context as to why these incidents were selected. It is a worthy critique based upon what is otherwise a fundamental misunderstanding of the research.

For the rest of the article, Abel builds to the thesis that feminism is targeting the wrong kind of sexism, and we should focus our energies on more hostile forms of sexism. This is erroneous on two fronts. Philosophically, it buys into the myth that one should only focus on one fight at a time rather than using all tools in the box. Scientifically, it is also wrong: benevolent sexism has real-world implications for women. Fighting benevolent sexism is therefore not a “misdirected target”. It is a valid target, a source of oppression. To say that it is misdirected is plain wrong.

Furthermore, there is some confusion in the article about Abel’s beliefs. Towards the beginning, she (incorrectly) outlines the journal in which the journal appears*:

in the current issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly. (Speaking of sexist beliefs, there is the idea that any questions about my psyche can be answered “Because hers is a woman‘s mind.”)

Yet later in the article, Abel says:

Even if humanity builds the feminist utopia of my dreams, there will still be certain traits more common in one sex than the other. I suspect, for example, people who choose careers working with young children will always skew overwhelmingly towards females.

Which one is it? Is it that men and women are fundamentally different in their minds, or is that untrue? The answer to that question is that it is untrue, which Abel touched upon at the beginning of the article and then changed her mind. Apparently she did not read Delusions of Gender.

Abel ends by saying that feminism has been hijacked by fundamentalists, feminists who believe benevolent sexism to be a major problem. It is a major problem. The evidence behind it suggests it to be a major problem. Abel clearly did not read this evidence.

One can hardly blame her; Abel is, after all, a journalist without scientific training, and a lot of the literature is paywalled. This is a shortcoming of science: how can journalists be expected to report adequately on an area of research if they cannot access some of the pertinent research? Furthermore, how can the piece be expected to accurately report when the piece was written by someone unfamiliar with reading research papers, then edited by someone unfamiliar with reading research papers, then published by someone unfamiliar with reading research papers?

It is a shame that even decent, doing-it-largely-right science reporting is still so poor. Every time it is in the media, misconceptions about benevolent sexism crop up, with the “but it’s not a valid target” being the most frequent response.

Science-types are traditionally quite rubbish at engaging with the media, and media-types are traditionally quite rubbish at engaging with science. I wish that more were involved in both. Perhaps, then, we would see accurately-reported research.

*In fact, Psychology of Women Quarterly makes no claims to cover the psychology of all women, any more than the discipline of women’s studies claims to understand every single woman ever.

A toolkit for spotting prejudice

Have you ever read something and thought, “that’s prejudiced”, but without the ability to put your finger on exactly how? There are speeches and writings and quotes which seem sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic or transphobic, yet there is no exact quote that can be pulled out and easily called out for what it is.

This is because there are subtle ways of using language, barely perceptible, which reflect stereotyping and prejudice. In spotting these, one can call out the speaker or writer and address the grubby prejudice that lies beneath.

Symbolic racism

Following the Civil Rights movement and the overturning of the openly bigoted Jim Crow laws, racism in the United States took a different form: symbolic racism. Symbolic racism is characterised by three markers: a belief that minorities are being too demanding, resentment about special favours for minorities and denial of continuing discrimination. This is probably one of the easiest forms of subtle prejudice to spot, and it applies far beyond its original conception in “modern racism” towards African Americans. Take, for example, the headline of this [clean linked] Daily Express article: “NOW MUSLIMS DEMAND FULL SHARIA LAW“. Ignoring the fact that the article is patently untrue waffle, the headline alone displays a belief that Muslims are too demanding with the phrase “demand” and the qualifier “now”. Apparently those pesky Muslims are constantly making demands.

For an example of belief in special favours, one needs to look no further than cries of “reverse racism” or “reverse sexism”. It displays an alarming resentment for a push towards equality, constructed as a “special favour”. It abounds in discourse surrounding maternity leave and women-only spaces. It can also be seen in the standard right-wing battle cry that the outgroup du jour has more human rights than they do, presumably because of political correctness gone mad.

Denial of continuing discrimination is also rife. The justification goes that nominally, the law provides equality in the form of anti-discrimination laws (another “special favour” and often seen as an unreasonable demand). Therefore, everything is magically non-discriminatory. This phenomenon has been noticed by many, and is often seen for what it is. I will comment no further, therefore, and direct you to Privilege Denying Dude, which makes me smile.

Dehumanising language

Dehumanisation is an attempt to make a person or group of people appear less human by taking away their individuality. Much of the research into dehumanisation has focused on genocidal propaganda, where it is often fairly easy to spot: take, for example, this famous Nazi children’s book which compares Jews to a poisonous fungus, or use of the word “cockroach” to describe enemy combatants in the Rwandan genocide, or Morrissey’s description of Chinese people as “a subspecies“. The aim of dehumanisation is to turn an outgroup from people to a homogenous, subhuman mass, often by likening them to animals or machines.

As with symbolic racism, use of dehumanising language is often more subtle than describing every single person in the world’s most populous country as members of a subspecies. For example, sexual objectification of women is a form of dehumanisation: taking away the humanity and individuality of a woman and turning her into a pair of tits and a willingness to fuck. Words like “cougar” and “bitch” are also inherently dehumanising, with overt comparisons of a person to an animal. Concern about birth rates in immigration populations is also usually dehumanising. The word “breeding” invariably crops up somewhere.

A classic example of subtle, throwaway use of dehumanising language comes from the “bigoted woman” scandal. In a public event, an audience member asked Gordon Brown the question “all these eastern European what are coming in, where are they flocking from?”. Gordon Brown was later recorded bemoaning the fact that he had to answer a question from a “bigoted woman”. Notwithstanding the fact that the question is patently easy to answer–Eastern Europeans are clearly coming from Eastern Europe, the question did contain dehumanising language. The word “flocking” is typically applied to birds, usually migrating birds. It casts migrants as a mass of flapping creatures, rather than human beings. Much as it pains me to say it, I agree with Gordon Brown. The question reflected a degree of prejudice. She probably was a bigoted woman.

The Linguistic Intergroup Bias

Perhaps you have read through the piece, and you have managed to find none of the markers of symbolic prejudice, nor any language which ascribes unhuman characteristics to people? Look at the use of verbs.

The Linguistic Intergroup Bias is well-documented effect and crops up in the way people use words to describe an event. Consider two fictional scenarios: A, where a black man (Albert) punches a white man (Bob) and B, where Albert rescues Bob from a fire.

Concrete verbs: A, Albert hit Bob; B, Albert rescued Bob
Interpretive action verbs: A, Albert hurt Bob; B, Albert helped Bob
State verbs: A, Albert hates Bob; B, Albert likes Bob
General dispositional adjectives: A, Albert is violent; B, Albert is heroic

According to this model, were a white person to describe these scenarios, in scenario A, which reflects negatively on Albert, the describer would be more likely to use the more abstract types of description. To describe scenario B, which reflects positively on Albert, the white describer would be more likely to use the more concrete forms of description. If a black person were to describe the two scenarios the opposite is more likely to be true: more concrete verbs to describe the negative incident; more abstract for the positive incident.

The effect of this use of language is to imply how frequently such behaviour occurs: when one uses concrete verbs, it makes the behaviour seem as though it were a one-off. At a more abstract level, the behaviour seems to be something that person always does. As the different levels of abstraction vary by whether one is describing a member of the ingroup or a member of the outgroup, there is clearly an element of stereotyping going on here. It is thought that the effect emerges due to various expectations: because of the stereotype white people hold that black people are violent, they will use language that reflects this. There is also some evidence to show that these levels language use can help maintain stereotypes.

Furthermore, one [unfortunately paywalled] study noted that people who were more likely to use the Linguistic Intergroup Bias were also more likely to display implicit prejudice towards women or black people. While the participants did not express overt racism, they were more threatened by pictures of black faces. This experiment shows that this particular linguistic trick is related to prejudice. When reading a newspaper article or listening to a slightly racist friend speak, pay attention to the verbs they are using. It is a barely-perceptible marker of prejudice.

Conclusions

Prejudice is still going strong, but it is masked in linguistic gymnastics. When people deny discrimination against trans people or complain about a flock of immigrants, when they talk about unreasonable feminist demands or describe a disabled benefit claimant without using a single verb, they are being prejudiced. There is a vast body of research beneath this. From now on, if you do not appreciate their tone, you can call them out.

If 30% of board members were women, we’d still be fucked

This article from Laurie Penny talks about the currently fashionable trend for trying to put more women in the boardroom as it is good for business. In particular, it references the “30 Per Cent Club”, a campaign group who aim for representation of 30% women on boards. Laurie discusses the political perspective very eloquently, and if you have not yet read the article, I strongly recommend you do so. Here, I provide some supplemental notes on the shaky science behind the 30 Per Cent Club.

The 30% figure is claimed to be evidence based, drawn from a 2007 report which found that businesses with more than 30% women on the board tended to do better, using a measure of success which is not in the public domain and ignoring any other possible explanations for the pattern, for example, that businesses with a better equality record might perform better due to being nicer places to work. The study was not well-conducted, and explanations for why this effect emerges are similarly problematic.

The notion that having more women in charge is good for a business rests on the assumption that men’s brains and women’s brains are fundamentally, innately different. Men are believed to be more likely to take risks, and these risks do not always pay off. This risk-taking behaviour has been put forward as an explanation for the financial crash. The evidence supporting this claim comes from a naturalistic study of City traders: those with higher levels of male sex hormone testosterone were more likely to take risks in investment. The sample size of the study was small; testosterone was only measured at the beginning and end of the day, not during trading; and, crucially, consisted entirely of men. From these results, a conclusion has been drawn by some that women must make better investors and therefore we need more women on the boards because women will not be distracted by all those manly endogenous steroids floating around.

Curiously, the explanation that men’s brains and women’s brains are fundamentally, innately different has also been used as an explanation for why there are fewer women in business in the first place. By this line of reason, men’s brains are set up for analysing, while women’s brains are set up for empathising. In work, the analytical person is better suited. At home, the empathic person is better suited. Men and women are just different, and have different roles. It’s not discrimination at all!

That innate, hardwired, cognitive differences between men and women can explain two opposing phenomena is not surprising, as the innate, hardwired, cognitive differences between men and women may not be as innate and hardwired as generally believed. Differences in performance on empathising or analytical tasks disappears when people are told that men and women perform the same on those tests, while the neuroimaging and hormonal tests are often as problematic as the testosterone study which “proves” that women make better investors. Building on this shaky foundation of research, the 30% Club campaigns for an arbitrary figure of gender representation in the hope of fixing a broken system with the power of women’s intuition. It is benevolent sexism: the belief that women are just better at this sort of thing than men, because they are different, and putting more women at the top will be beneficial as it will maximise profit.

In an ideal world, perhaps, women would already be represented in positions of power in numbers proportionate to their existence: 50%.

We still need to talk about consensus

A while back, I posted a few points about consensus decision-making and stimulated a wonderful discussion on its use. In the first piece, I highlighted some major issues I had with the process:

That discussions are most frequently hijacked by a “core group”
That those who speak most tend to be from privileged groups: i.e. they are usually white, cisgendered able-bodied men
That the process can lead to a phenomenon called groupthink which impedes good decision making.

After brilliant discussion in the comments, a partial solution was happened upon: applying the principles of enthusiastic sexual consent to the consensus process. This solution, though, mostly solves the problem of groupthink. The first two, the core group and the unchecked privilege, remain problematic and deserve further discussion.

At the time of writing the prior pieces, I had not yet read “The Tyrrany of Structurelessness“, an essay which highlights these problems in structureless organisation, which was written in the 1970s. It is sad that these problems are still running strong in activist groups: I am hardly the only one who has noticed that core groups tend to take control.

There is a psychological phenomenon at play here: that of minority influence. Minority influence involves a person or small group of people swaying the decision of the majority: this was demonstrated by having people view blue slides of varying brightness and judge the colour. When a minority argued that the blue slide was actually green, the majority tended to follow. Minority influence can affect how people judge a colour. It is hardly surprising therefore that it can sway a group decision towards the views of very few.

Its facilitation of minority influence is both a strength and a weakness of consensus decision making. It is a strength in that it theoretically, it allows outsider’s views to sway the views of others. It is a weakness, though, that in practice the minority who hold the sway are the core group; they are the loud, privileged people.

In The Tyrrany of Structurelessness, a selection of solutions are proposed for countering this dominance by a small group:

Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures
Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them
Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonanbly possible
Rotation of tasks among individuals
Allocation of tasks along rational criteria
Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible
Equal access to resources needed by the group

Applied to consensus decision making, with decent facilitation, these recommendations can certainly make headway, although they do not address some severe problems head-on: particularly that of privilege.

In an impassioned call to arms Forty Shades of Grey says:

It’s time to start kicking arse and taking names. And this time, I mean all of you. I’m sick of being alienated from scenes I like, and I’m not the only one.

Here’s the deal: Challenging one dominant ideal in society (patriarchy, theism, capitalism etc.), whilst displaying sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic or any other discriminatory traits is not on, and I’m calling you all out on it.

It is not enough to simply say “well, our group doesn’t discriminate” when patriarchal, white, cis-centric values are the norm.

If you’re not actively fighting oppression, you’re propagating it.

I am displaying consensus jazz hands to this sentiment. While many of those who dominate meetings claim to be feminists and fighters of oppression, quite the opposite is true. They sway collective decisions. It is time to call this crap not just in social situations, but as part of formal discussions. We will be accused of derailing for raising a process point, identifying that the same privileged few are those who take over a supposedly collective decision, yet it is imperative to call it where we see it.

When we clear out the shit in our own backyard, maybe we can take on the world.

Reasons to hate Topshop

I do not have real, human enemies. There are, however, institutions which I hate as deeply as though they had crapped in my shoe. In fact, what they do is a lot worse than crapping in any shoes.

Take, for example, Topshop. There are so, so many reasons to hate Topshop.

Firstly, I have an almost Pavlovian reflex to quickly utter the phrase “pay-your-tax” following the word Topshop. A quick history lesson for the uninitiated: Topshop is owned by a company called the Arcadia Group. The Arcadia Group’s business is run entirely by one Sir Philip Green, who is also, coincidentally, a government advisor on which public services to cut. Despite Green’s active role in the company, Arcadia is registered in the name of Green’s wife, who happens to be a resident of Monaco. In Monaco, one does not have to pay tax on personal tax. By exploiting this loophole, Arcadia have avoided paying approximately £285 million of tax. In December, Topshop was targeted by activist group UK Uncut, who exist mostly to point out how thoroughly unnecessary any cuts to public services are, when one could just ensure that the super-rich paid all of the tax they are supposed to pay.

That Topshop do not pay their fair share–no more than anyone else, just the amount they are supposed to pay–is thoroughly unfair when vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected by government policy. To put this into perspective, from £1.2 billion pounds, no tax was paid. The £285 million tax bill avoided would hardly make a difference to the Greens, and push the full dividend to slightly less than a billion pounds in one year. Despite this, they decided to grow richer. £285 million on its own is more than one could reasonably spend in a lifetime, yet it is equivalent to a year’s pay for 20, 000 NHS nurses. This money could mean the world to many.

In order to further maximise their profits and procure Philip Green yet another yacht, Topshop and the Arcadia Group use sweatshops for labour. This report suggests that workers who manufacture clothes sold by Arcadia are paid about 40p per hour. For comparison, the unpaid tax bill alone is worth more than £32, 500 per hour. This horrifying exploitation of people–human beings–in the name of allowing the already-rich to grow even richer is unjustifiably wrong.

Then there is this image, which until yesterday was featured prominently on Topshop’s website:

The model is so slim, it seems as though it has been photoshopped, like the classic botched airbrushing in which a Ralph Lauren model ended up with hips smaller than her head. I do not know whether the image has been doctored or if it is a photographic trick, or if, indeed, the model really is that thin. I am disinclined to believe the latter, as in all of the other photographs, the model does not look that unrealistically thin.

The article which managed to catch the screengrab before Topshop took it down calls for discussion over whether such images are a risk for eating disorder, but such a discussion is not necessary: science has cleared up the matter [article sadly paywalled]. A large number of studies have been conducted to understand whether exposure to “thin-ideal” pictures in the media is linked to eating disorders. Some have found that it is, while others found that it is not. In order to work out what the “true” effect is, the authors in the study above took all of the available data and put it together in the same spreadsheet. This is called a meta-analysis, and basically means turning a lot of small studies into one huge study. The authors found that exposure to images in the media like the image Topshop thought appropriate to use was linked to body dissatisfaction, internalising the thin-ideal, and effects on eating behaviours and beliefs about food. In other words, these images are dangerous. While they may not be sufficient to trigger an eating disorder on their own, they are certainly a contributing factor. For Topshop to run such a picture is therefore highly irresponsible.

Not only could this picture possibly facilitate eating disorders, it also represents some fairly tired gender stereotypes, selling women the ability to look “ladylike”. “Ladylike” is one of those unpleasant words used to regulate women’s behaviour. Being ladylike is submission, being ladylike is to accept the role prescribed for you, and, apparently, being ladylike requires buying Topshop’s products. Make sure you stay polished, ladies! That the words were run next to that picture speaks volumes: to be ladylike is to be feeble, frail, fragile. It is not enough to capitulate to docile femininity. You have to buy your own oppression. It is, frankly, fraudulent.

But perhaps you don’t care about how Topshop is a case study in the interplay between the foul side of capitalism and murky misogyny, with just a splash of dangerous body policing. Maybe you don’t care because this sort of thing doesn’t bother you much. Perhaps you don’t care because it is not like Topshop is the only company doing this. Let’s face it, they’re all at it. We just have the numbers and brazen evidence for Topshop. Even if you don’t care, there is still reason enough to hate Topshop.

Their products are really awful quality and terrible value for money. They are not built to last. They are horribly overpriced for what you get. I should know. Before I declared Topshop my nemesis, I bought clothes from there. It was always dimly disappointing.

I cannot go in there any more. I have participated in UK Uncut actions in Topshop, I have tweeted vitriol about them with my name and my face, and the last time I tried to enter a Topshop I was told politely by security to leave. By Topshop security’s standards, I understand that this was fairly lenient treatment.

I do not feel a sense of loss. I do not feel like I am missing out on their sub-par clothing, or their Stone Age attitude towards women or the opportunity to donate to Philip Green’s yacht fund.

If anything, I am relieved. I do not have to waste my energy on a boycott.

Girls, pitchforks and media feeding frenzies

I write this piece with a tickle of glee on the inside as I watch the News of the World eat itself and the rest of the media circle to peck over its corpse.

It was not a sudden realisation by the British public that they had been fed crap–vapid crap, dangerous crap, misogynistic crap, downright boring crap–by the News of the World that sparked the fury. It all started with a teenage girl.

I am going to assume that you have read the paper at least once this week, and are aware that the News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s voicemail, interfering with a police investigation and giving false hope to her worried family. Even by tabloid standards, this was pretty low, and later revelations in the ensuing feeding frenzy showed it was even worse. It is hardly surprising, though.

It took a tragically murdered young woman to make this story interesting. It took a tragically murdered young woman to make this story front page news. It took a tragically murdered young woman to make people care.

This is not surprising in the slightest, either. We have been trained by our media to react when something bad happens to a young woman. Take, for example, newspaper reporting on drug deaths. Such reporting is horribly distorted, with deaths from “media fad” substances grossly overreported, while those from commonplace, “unsexy” substances go unreported. In particular, drug deaths of teenage girls, are hugely, disproportionately reported [article sadly paywalled]. This distortion has an effect on public opinion.

Young women are “ideal victims”. Due to benevolent sexism, when something bad happens to a young woman, it becomes much more shocking and the ensuing moral outrage will be stronger. The media know this, and use this to push their agendas. They may use it as an excuse to name and shame paedophiles, or to campaign against a drug. A bogeyman becomes infinitely worse when he has harmed a young woman.

Trained by this, it took an old story about a murdered young woman to provoke anger at a tabloid which has behaved exactly as it always has.

I feel a frission of schadenfreude as I watch the News of the World strung up by its own rhetoric. It had spent so long trying to shape our opinions by using young women, that it seems fitting that its own undoing was caused by their involvement in a tragic story.

Do I feel uncomfortable that we are playing the tabloids at their own game, sharpening our pitchforks as we, perhaps, capitalise on a tragedy? Of course.

I do, however, want to see the vile, misogynistic, hate-fuelled rag burn. I am glad it is by the tools that they sold to us.

Techno and rat cocks and Class As, oh my!

Readers, you have been very good to me these past few months, and I have an end-of-term treat for you.

Let me present to you what is quite possibly the greatest academic paper ever written: Effects on rat sexual behaviour of acute MDMA (ecstasy) alone or in combination with loud music by Cagiano and colleagues. The paper is open-source and I would thoroughly recommend reading it through as it contains some absolutely blindingly brilliant lines. The keywords alone are the stuff of genius: MDMA, Loud music, Sexual behavior, % of ejaculating rats, Copulatory efficiency.

Those who have ever taken MDMA or attempted to fuck someone with a penis who has taken MDMA will be familiar with a problem which can most delicately be described as incredibly willing spirit in combination with incredibly weak flesh. Less delicately, “disappearing cock syndrome”. Cagiano and colleagues politely describe the problem as “impairing human sex drive and behaviour”.

Like good scientists, Cagiano and colleagues acknoweledge that there are a number of confounders to studying the effect of MDMA on vanishing dicks, such as environmental context. For these reasons, the authors decided that the best way to study the effect of MDMA on sexual behaviour would be to introduce the variable of loud music, as MDMA is often consumed in places surrounded by the sort of music that can really only be appreciated with a vast quantity of chemical aid. Therefore, the authors decided it may also be prudent to study the effect of music.

In the study, therefore, some male rats were given varying doses of MDMA, others only a placebo, and some were exposed to music while some where not. The authors are coy about the type of music used: in the introduction, techno music is discussed, while in the method section we are only given information about the sound frequency of the music. Given the frequencies involved, it seems more likely to be techo than dubstep.

The rats were then put in the dark with a “sexually receptive” female rat, and their behaviour was monitored. The authors were fairly thorough about the aspects of sexual behaviour they were observing, including exciting-sounding conscepts such as “mount latency”, “ejaculation latency” and “next intromission in each copulatory series”. Sexual vocalisations were also recorded, including “duration of the 22 kHZ post-ejaculatory vocalisation in each copulatory series”. I can only assume that this means the grunt a male rat makes when he spunks, which is educational.

Until I read this paper, I had never really thought much about what rats do when they fuck. After reading this fairly comprehensive account of various aspects of rat-shagging, I am now, unwillingly, intimately familiar.

The researchers found that MDMA does indeed impair sexual performance in male rats at the higher dose. Surrounded by a lot of statistics, the authors describe how the rats took longer to get going, more of them failed to fuck at all, and they were less likely to ejaculate if they did manage to fuck. Some of this may seem somewhat familiar to anyone who has ever been fucked by a penis-owner on MDMA, or been that penis-owner.

The music had an effect on sexual behaviour among all of the rats: it meant that they ejaculated faster. Fucking to techno music apparently speeds up the time to orgasm. In the rats who had high doses of MDMA, presence of techno music was the only way they could actually manage to come. Without the music, they were highly unlikely to achieve ejaculation. The music also improved how many times the rats were able to fuck, and how frequently they attempted: at the high doses of MDMA, the rats showed higher levels of “copulatory efficiency”.

Again, some of this may sound familiar.

Of course, as a rat study, its results are not necessarily applicable to human experience, and female rat behaviour was not studied at all. It is an amusing study,one which raises a knowing smirk and a giggle. Its major contribution to science is that it provides an empirical account that environmental factors do interact with MDMA and affect what happens, which is quite important.

As with all science, please don’t try this at home, as it is a branch of research in its infancy. Nobody should have to expose themselves to techno until its necessity is proved.