Sleeping with subordinates

Most of the reaction that I've seen about Weinergate has been variations on what should or shouldn't happen now. Maureen Dowd's take on Weinergate focuses on what men get out of these power differential relationships where men marry up/equal and then cheat down, in yet another illustration of the sexual economy.

Sex with the help (Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn) has a storied and ancient history. Sex with the secretary or work subordinate (Clinton, Gingrich, Edwards) is retro if not ancient. Perhaps the internet difference is not the lack of physical contact, but the wider range of subordinates it allows contact with: blackjack dealer, porn star, college students, and single moms. If this "cheating down" is more about power than sex --- or about insecurity seeking external validation for being a "geek who buffed up" --- the physical acts are beside the point.

Dowd emphasizes the marrying up aspect of these cases of adultery, certainly true in socioeconomic terms, but adultery by high-ranking men has often been about complementing their wives' high socioeconomic status with the reproductive potential of younger women.

In pseudo-economic terms, men have different preferences in different contexts: intelligence and status in public; youth in private. The trophy wife is such a laughable stereotype, and men have gotten used to similarly well-educated wives, that wives are almost always within socially acceptable age and education limits. (Another example of inconsistent preferences is men who are attracted to overweight women in private but would never commit to one in public.)

Few equal status women would agree to an illicit relationship, and as Dowd points out, some lower status women are put off by how pitiful the man seems. Sometimes the lower status women will sometimes accept the sketchy and possibly unsafe sex with a higher status man over the straight-forward relationship with a same status man. Before this current scandal, have we ever found out just how many women turned down these other adulterers and saw them as pitifully validation-seeking? An interesting question is how to interpret the adulterous relationships where the partners are closer in status (e.g., Edwards) --- a sign of healthier self-esteem?

Tables are better than plots (April Fools) and other reading

• A several participant discussion of plots vs. tables begins with a 5 page piece by Andrew Gelman about why tables are better than plots, concluding with "I recommend using Excel, which has some really nice defaults as well as options such as those 3-D colored bar charts." April Fools! The remaining pieces knock down the straw man.
  
• At Society for Research on Child Development this March, I asked NICHD head Alan Guttmacher for the current scope of the "child health and development" that his institute covers since some say that adolescence extends until 25 because the brain is not fully developed until then. He said that age 25 is a fine age to use as the end of child development. The National Campaign has issued areport on young adulthood describing this changing stage of life.
  
• AP grading and what it's like to grade AP exams. I was surprised that 85-90% of these history exams were written by 9th and 10th graders.
  
• Humor in romantic relationships: women have more romantic interest in online dating profiles that are funny (in their opinion) than not funny. No difference for men's assessment of women. Practical implications aside (Do any men like me for my sense of humor?), this study is a great example of how gender could be used as a counterfactual, even though they didn't use it here. Now that people are frequently represented not just by resumes (as in studies of racial discrimination in choosing interview candidates) but by electronic profiles on facebook or dating sites, we can alter gender or other immutable characteristics on the electronic profiles and infer causal effects.
  
• Seating location and voting behavior on FDA advisory committees: those who speak later may have less influence on the vote, perhaps attributable to seating location.
  

Attractiveness ratings

A Psychology Today article about attractiveness ratings in the Add Health data has yielded some interesting responses: that it's wrong offensive inanity and apparently not unprecedented awfulness that can't be replicated in reanalysis and could cause the author to join the Bell Curve author at a conservative think-tank and become an anti-PC crusader.

One aspect that I've not seen discussed is whether the author has anything in common with his research targets given that in other contexts, it's been widely noted that both African-American women (the target of the original article) and Asian men (like the author) are marginalized in the dating marketplace: e.g., on this African-American dating website, OK Cupid's data analysis, and a roundtable where I presented at American Sociological Association included a paper about how gender stereotypes hurt Asian-American men because Asians in general are considered "feminine" and African-American women because African-Americans in general are considered "masculine": hyperfeminine women and hypermasculine men are considered desirable, but feminine men and masculine women are not. Separate research documents how Asian men may feel emasculated, and allegedly business research documents issues with incorrect condom sizes in Asia.

Marginalization is a well-known explanation for bigotry, although of course not an excuse.

Would-be position

My faculty homepage at Stony Brook Medical School, which cancelled my position due to NY State funding cuts. Sigh.

Changing biomarkers may not reduce disease risk

A drug that successfully raises HDL and lowers triglycerides does not reduce heart disease risk. One scientist quoted in the NY Times said that this study indicates that changing biomarkers for disease is not the same thing as preventing the disease. While obvious to many people outside the biomedical world, it's lovely to hear someone from the biomedical complex say that.

Oddly, many folks quoted in the article said that regardless of the study, people should still take the drug or at least talk with their doctor about discontinuing it. Which is a lot like what came out of the National Preventive Services Task Force's report about mammograms for younger women: we want to learn from evidence, but not shake things up.

Throughout the article, different people kept saying that the study implies that raising HDL does not improve heart disease risk, but really they seemed to mean that raising HDL through drugs doesn't work, but as far as I know raising it through exercise and diet does improve heart disease risk.

Everyone already knows the answer: stop eating processed food, start cooking, and exercise. There are no easy answers, but I think that Men's Health magazine has better heart disease prevention than most medical journals. The sooner we get past the nutritional fads that elevate processed foods above unprocessed foods, and use drugs as a short-cut, the healthier we'll be. Isn't it crazy that during the 90s, people saw coconut and chicken with skin and whole milk as dangerous, and pasta and bread and low fat sweetened yogurt as healthy?

Commitment devices versus treatments

Andrew Gelman has an interesting point in a blog entry about religious commitment devices, such as a WWJD bracelet. He says that the bracelet is not a treatment, but rather it goes along with a set of behaviors and commitments, and it's a sign of that. This issue of commitment devices applies as well to my virginity pledge work: like the WWJD bracelent, the pledge may not be an intervention, but rather it could be a sign that someone has a certain identity, so the pledge itself isn't important.

Conversely, Gelman's argument could be critiqued on the grounds that there are folks who have the set of attitudes and behaviors, some of whom have the bracelet and others of them who don't, and conceivably, it would be possible to balance the two groups and get a treatment effect. Whether the treatment effect of wearing a WWJD bracelet could possibly be meaningful is a good question.

More thought needed.

Emerging Adulthood in the Onion

According to the Onion, emerging adulthood never ends, and the country is down to its last 100 adults. The article does raise a serious point. When politicians cite emerging adulthood as a sign of the decline of civilization, do they wonder at what kind of model modern politics sets for adolescents and young adults?

In other Onion news, the Planned Parenthood Abortionplex in Kansas is finally open, offering movies, pedicures, shops, and a million abortions a month. I wonder how many people will think that this article is serious.

** UPDATE ***
Some people do think the Onion article about the abortionplex was literal, such as this person who says REPENT AMERICA.