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"In my heart, I think a woman has two choices: either she's a feminist or a masochist." --Gloria Steinem
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"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body." --Margaret Sanger
Jan
26
Everything I Need to Know About Love, I Learned From Time Magazine
Filed Under LGBTQ issues, gender, media, patriarchy, sexism, stereotypes, violence against women and girls | Posted by Cara |
This being one of those weeks when I wonder why the fuck I get Time magazine (answer: because it often gets me to read about important things I otherwise wouldn’t read about), their cover story last week was “The Science of Romance.” And it’s more than just a “story,” but an entire section tallying almost 50 pages. For a magazine that usually runs between 80 and 110 pages total, that’s quite a feat.
I had a feeling from looking at the cover that I was going to “learn” an awful lot. And Time surely didn’t disappoint. Below the jump, my newfound knowledge. But break out your Evolutionary Psychologist Bingo Cards first.
From the main article Why We Love:
- Though romance, love and sex are “[hard] to explain by the mere babymaking imperative,” romance, love and sex are all about making babies.
- “Humans are suckers for an attractive face and a very sexy shape.” Strangely enough, what we in West generally see as “attractive” and “sexy” is exactly what nature intended! That’s lucky.
- Those features we’re naturally attracted to are appealing to us because they are signs of fertility. For example, men subconsciously “see ample breats and broad hips as indicators of a woman’s ability to bear and nurse children.” But strangely enough, women don’t look for physical signs that suggest a man is likely to knock them up. Instead, “women see a broad chest and shoulders as a sign of someone who can clobber a steady supply of meat and keep lions away from the cave.” Don’t ask questions. What it’s important for you to know is that men like boobs and women are helpless, man-trapping gold-diggers. Biologically, of course.
- These obsessive, insistent and repeated generalizations about “attractive” appearances makes one wonder how fat, short, skinny and/or flat-chested people ever manage to have sex, let alone find love.
- Kissing is natural and performs many important reproductive functions. All those people in cultures where kissing is not a common part of mating rituals just aren’t doing it right.
- Kissing also allows manly men to pass testosterone to women through saliva, so that women will want to fuck them more. Because women have lower sex drives than men. Biologically.
- Birth control pills cause divorce. No, really. You see, women choose who they want to mate with based on pheromones telling them who will help produce the most and best children. But studies show that hormonal contraception blocks the female ability to sense pheromones. This tiny bit of information therefore proves the fact that so many women taking birth control pills contributes to divorce rates. Because when they get married and go off the pill to have kids (side note: you can’t have kids unless you’re married), they realize they’ve made a “mistake.” Note that there is absolutely no claim of this being shown even through correlation in any study. But it must be true, because the writer decided to bring it up twice.
- If you sleep with someone on the first date or are otherwise “promiscuous,” it means that your genes suck. (”Males or females who volunteer their babymaking services too freely may not be offering up very valuable genes.”)
From Why We Flirt:
- Apparently it’s still okay to refer to sex as men “bedding” women. And men “bed” women even when the woman was the one initiating the flirting.
- “[Harassment], stalking or acquaintance rape” aren’t so much violence — particularly not violence that is perpetuated against women every day all over the world so commonly that it can be referred to as “systematic” unproblematically — but more like “the dark side of flirting.” (Do you seriously think that I could be making this up?)
From Star Pairs:
- It is apparently a good idea to lower your blood pressure temporarily after reading this crap by looking at a super cute photograph of John and Yoko. Bill and Hillary are kind of sweet, too.
From Marry Me:
- Though men get far more health benefits from marriage on average than women do, “the full explanation for this gender gap . . . is undoubtedly more complicated” than the fact that marriage still tends to be an unequal union more often than not, with the extra responsibility falling on women’s shoulders. Instead it’s, well, actually that women generally take on more responsibility in marriage. But let’s not call it that, okay?
From Crazy Love (written, it must be said, by Steven Pinker):
- Men who threaten their female romantic partners when they try to end a relationship (Pinker is at least decent enough to point out that this applies primarily to men) are really just afraid of losing love. They’re not misogynist assholes who think that they can own women and want to place additional claim on/punish their property.
- Men who follow through on their threats of violence are “hotheads.” Really, do we have to use words like “murders?”
- When a man does murder a woman he is/was romantically involved with “everyone loses.” Contrary to popular belief, women don’t lose that one the most. I predict that this will become a new MRA mantra: “but murdering your wife hurts men too!!!“
- Because men sometime act like “hotheads” terrified of losing love, we need a judicial system that punishes murders to combat the problem. Prevention and education efforts, however, clearly are not a necessity. I’m sure that the courts will figure it out just fine.
In General:
- Non-hetero people do not exist. Except, of course in the three (not densely filled) pages containing the obligatory story about gay people that masquerades as “inclusion” so that all the uppity queers will shut up.
- Wait, my bad — the Star Pairs section includes a photograph of Elton John and his husband (and a black couple, too!). Now that’s diversity!
- In the obligatory gay article, Are Gay Relationships Different?, we learn that yes indeed they are. And not just because of the genitals! While nearly every other page in this entire 50 page package focuses on why heterosexual relationships work, this article is about why homosexual relationships don’t work as well as straight ones.
- The article consists of an at least somewhat self-loathing gay man explaining why he thinks that he and his ex-partner would still be together if they were straight.
- Lesbians exist in this one article, but only vaguely.
- Outside of these three pages, I noticed the word “heterosexual” used exactly once (if someone feels compelled to verify that by doing an exact count, feel free. But personally, I’ve already suffered enough). Because when gay people don’t exist, there’s no need to clarify that they do exist and we’re just completely ignoring that fact because they’re in the minority and might make our readers feel icky.
- Bisexual people do not exist.
- In the pun-tastically titled article about online dating, no mention is made of gay dating sites. The point of dating sites is to get married. Which is why, in largely focusing on eHarmony, there was no need to point out that this is the company’s extremely rational reason for their bigoted insistence on refusing to even allow men looking for men or women looking for women on their site. (It also doesn’t note their creepy practice of matching up the skin tones of couples in their commercials as exactly as possible, even though the men and women are already always the same race).
- The point of love is to get married.
- The point of getting married is to have kids.
- Asexual people? HAHAHAHAHA.
- Trans* people? No, seriously, you’re killing me.
Whew. I sure did learn a lot! Thanks, Time!
[Disclaimer: all quotes, titles, etc. are from my hard copy of the magazine. If anything differs in the online versions I provided for reference, this is why.
Also, before someone wants to accuse me of "ignoring" or trying to "politicize" science, I'm not. I'm sure that there are indeed biological mating urges of which we are unconsciously aware, which is why most people want to have children despite the fact that there's little purely rational reason to do so, why women tend to bond very quickly with their babies and feel protective of them, and why kids masturbate and have sexual urges long before anyone ever explains sex to them. My point here is that this entire section is little more than pop science that you can find on any cable television documentary, filled with generalizations and biases while completely and utterly refusing to acknowledge that fact, often exceedingly ignorant of non-Western cultures, contains extremely few references for any of their claims, regurgitates sexual and gendered stereotypes in a way that lacks any sense of self-awareness and generally just sucks.]
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Comments
21 Comments so far
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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." —Margaret Mead
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"Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less." -- Susan B. Anthony
And you ever wonder why I haven’t read anything outside of the Internet world since the summer of 2006?
Another choice bit from th article, not as related but still showing the inherant privilege.
“Yet while we may build whole institutions around the simple ritual of eating, it never turns us flat-out nuts. Romance does.”
Right, that’s why eating disorders aren’t a life threatening problem. Ever. There aren’t any people out there who spend most of their time obsessing about every little thing they eat or don’t eat. None at all.
If birth control pills cause divorce, what about condoms? Or is it only when women have a say in their reproductive future that divorce happens? Shh don’t ask those questions, it’s all very scientific and bla bla bla.
Ha ha . . . I’ve been avoiding the magazine ever since I saw the cover, and thankfully now that you’ve written this handy-dandy, highly informative and hilarious summary, I won’t ever actually have to read it! Hooray!
this article is about why homosexual relationships don’t work as well as straight ones.
Um . . . they obviously didn’t read the results of this study before they went to press.
Ugh, I remember that bit, N1nj4G1rl. It annoyed me at the time, but enough other things pissed me off in the meantime that I forgot all about it!
And no, of course condoms don’t cause divorce. They don’t mess up women’s mate-finding superpowers like the pill does. Duh.
Oh, and Anna, probably not, but the gay writer of the piece did reference studies that gay couples tend to be more emotionally healthy than straight ones, but then explains how this isn’t really relevant because he and his ex-partner got bored of each other.
Re: the gay article: Meh, I didn’t think it was so bad. It suffers majorly from what Mark Liberman (among others) has called “pop Platonism” — the common tendency to interpret small probabilistic variation as representing fundamental, universal, and definitive differences (e.g., 21% of gay couples broke up, as opposed to 14% of married couples → all gay relationships are less stable than all straight relationships) — but that’s very much par for the course in popular science reportage, and I don’t think the writer is necessarily self-loathing in the way you describe. (Granted, it would be nice if news media reported science better more generally, and I don’t mean to excuse the silliness by saying “everyone does it.” But to me it makes more sense to focus on the more egregious examples, rather than on the examples that happen to bug us specifically for whatever reason. At least this writer made quite clear what claims were made by scientists, and what claims were his own — one benefit of a not-quite-journalistic piece. Normally, journalists are only allowed to give quotes, so they have to take pains to find the one scientist with the unorthodox opinions that make their story.)
Re: “Non-hetero people do not exist.”: Heck, given how poorly GLBT issues are often treated, I almost wish that approach were more popular. :-P (O.K., not really. Normalization is half the battle, and things can’t improve if we don’t discuss them, and … yeah. Still.)
yeah, that makes sense . . . not at all :)
(I meant Cara’s comment, not Ran’s!)
Well I don’t think the “we would still be together if we were straight,” which is presented as a good thing, is exactly self-loving. And towards the end of the article he seems to also argue that gay couples break up more often because they have confidence and identity issues.
Yes, the piece was navel-gazing — which is a big part of why it annoyed me. If the package had acknowledged the existence of non-hetero people throughout its other articles, it wouldn’t have gotten under my skin nearly as much. But this is the ONLY thing they saw fit to print about experiences of same-sex love in 50 pages. A piece about this guy’s breakup. I mean . . . come on.
HA HA HA!!! You are the AWESOME! This post was hilarious! “All those people in cultures where kissing is not a common part of mating rituals just aren’t doing it right.
LOLZ. I guess that summarizes the problem with all the “LOVE SCIENCE”. That they dismiss whatever disproves their points as “abnormalities”.
But I do think these people aren’t just engaging in harmless “pop” media babble. People do believe this crap. And it ends up affecting all of us at the most intimate level.
Fair enough. :-)
Also on the crap-science front: A median time-to-divorce of 7.9 years does not say anything about the “seven-year itch” theory. All it means is that half the time the divorce happens within 7.9 years, and half the time it takes longer. (I guess this might also fall into the pop-Platonism category: if you assume that all divorces happen after roughly the same amount of time, then a median of 7.9 years means that all divorces take about 7.9 years, suggesting the cascade starts around seven years … but no one ever articulates these assumptions, because then they’d feel stupid. Somehow, stupid assumptions are considered more O.K. when they’re left implicit.)
The irony for me is that I didn’t renew my TIME subscription last year because my college mail service is crap and would deliver a month’s worth of issues all at once. Today I opened my mailbox to find a “reinstatement notice” trying to persuade me to resubscribe for the low low rate of blahdiblah. Now I’m glad I ripped that thing up to pieces. I think I truly stopped liking TIME early last year, after they ran that feature article about “crisis pregnancy centers,” trying to make them seem as legitimate endeavors aimed at helping women. *snort*
I remember that cover story, Shyva. I don’t remember it being that bad, though. I do remember being kind of happy that they brought they’re existence to the public’s attention, since they had been flying under the radar for so long. But maybe my memory is spotty.
Hmm. So what are single people, then? Tragic failures just waiting for the biological imperative to kick in?
How can they publish something that relies entirely on stereotypes and not at all on research? Jeez, it sounds like the content of these “science of love” stories haven’t changed much in the past decade or so, and that the quality doesn’t vary much between tabloids and magazines that purport to be journalism.
“My point here is that this entire section is little more than pop science that you can find on any cable television documentary”
…wow, you pretty just described the entire field of evolutionary psychology.
Evo psych is misused a lot, but I think it is still a valuable scientific discourse.
It’s not just misused, it’s muddle-headed from the beginning. I’m not just talking about “pop scientists” like Pinker, but the more professionally oriented evolutionary psychologists, like Cosmides, for example. They’ve had thirty years, and they havent yet found a single inherited human behavioural trait that has been shown to have adapted via natural selection.
I’m sure cryptozoology is a valuable discourse and an interestuing set of theories to have floating around in case we ever have a reason to use them, but that doesn’t make it anything more than a pseudoscience untill we actually find the Loch Ness Monster.
“They’ve had thirty years, and they havent yet found a single inherited human behavioural trait that has been shown to have adapted via natural selection.”
So, you mean men aren’t programed to be sluts, like only blonds, and to be incapable of not being misogynists?
You mean evo psych is just an excuse for all the worst human behaviors with the veneer of credibility?
Again, I don’t think women are programmed to be sluts, nor do I think men are incapable of being misogynists. That’s not mutually exclusive with me believing that evo psych is both valuable and misapplied. I have read many articles that invoked evolutionary psychology in a way that made me sick to my stomach. Betty, I am vehemently against people who use it as a means to justify dangerous behavior or ugly cultural stigmas. I think evo psych and feminism will often be fundamentally at odds with each other, and probably rightly so from the feminist side, when given some of the trash you read on the subject. Still, to discount the whole field, I think, is a mistake.
And to say you gave the field 30 years and it has yielded nothing is an arbitrary time frame and not a valid critique. If all other scientific fields had been around for 30 years, and evo psych was the only one to supposedly yield no results, to which I disagree, then maybe that could be a credible criticism.
And I’ll be damned if you rag on cryptozoology.
YOU ARE FUNNY!!!! Thanks for making my evening. “Don’t ask questions” had me in stitches, because by then, well, I had a couple. :D
[...] asked myself once, I’ve asked myself a million times why the hell I keep on getting Time magazine. In fact, I did cancel it a while ago, but only so it [...]