Slashdot Mirror
Debunking a Viral Internet Post About Breastfeeding Racism
You can see the side-by-side pictures in the November 10 editorial by Ruby Hamad. My first thought, upon seeing the pictures, was that this is not a controlled experiment -- the woman on the left is breastfeeding in public, while the woman on the right is breastfeeding against a blank wall inside a presumably private room. While I think breastfeeding in public should be completely normalized, it's not the same thing as breastfeeding in private, and so that might have accounted for the difference in reactions, if there was any.
My second thought was that the data on people's reactions was not collected in a systematic way. According to the editorial, the black photo of the black mother, Karlesha Thurman, was posted on the Facebook page Black Women Do Breastfeed, and "[w]hile Karlesha received many supportive comments, the backlash was so severe, she eventually deleted the photo." The photo of the Australian woman, Jacci Sharkey, was posted by the University of the Sunshine Coast on their Facebook page, where it received 275,000 Facebook "likes", but also, according to the editorial, "more than a few detractors, proving that breastfeeding in public is (still!) a contentious issue for women of all races." There's no apples-to-apples comparison gauging people's reactions to the two photos under similar conditions.
But just because the methodology was imprecise, doesn't mean that the underlying phenomenon might not be real. Maybe Internet users really do have different gut reactions to pictures of black women and white women breastfeeding.
One quick way to get a rough answer is Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, where you can pay legions of workers some small amount of money per person to complete some menial task that can't be automated by a computer. I've used it dozens of times for surveys (such as gauging whether people would strongly prefer slideout keyboard phones) and for amateur psychological experiments (including one experiment which suggested that people who answered a math problem correctly were more likely to disagree with an attorney general's dubious legal argument). So I created a poll on Mechanical Turk, limited to U.S. users and with a payout of 25 cents for each person who answered. The poll asked:
Our academic department has asked everyone to submit a "fun" photo of themselves, so that our photos can be displayed together on the department home page. One of our employees submitted a photo that has caused some internal debate about whether the photo is inappropriate. I wanted to do a poll to get the opinion of a random sample of Internet users of different backgrounds.
Do you think this is an appropriate picture to be used in a photo collection on our academic department home page?
Since the original photos had been published in different contexts anyway, I tried to find a middle ground for the wording of the survey question, to emphasize that the photos were going to be published in a "fun" setting, but still integrated into the women's professional environments. The survey-takers were then (randomly) shown either the black woman's photo or the white woman's photo, and answered "Yes, the image is fine" or "No, the image is inappropriate". Then respondents were asked to fill in their age, gender, ethnicity, and education level.
(One thing that I've found with all of my previous surveys on Mechanical Turk, is that there is strong evidence that survey-takers are not answering randomly. Strong correlations often occur where you would expect them to -- for example, in a survey about what are the greatest causes of global strife, the same people tend to select "Energy shortages" and "Environmental damage" above other options, whereas another subgroup will tend to select both "Atheism" and "Decline of traditional values". And any survey where I've added a textbox for users to enter "more thoughts", most users enter something reasonably thoughtful which corresponds to the multiple-choice answers they've selected. Formal research by the psychologist Samuel Gosling has similarly found that Internet surveys can be useful for psychological research and are not plagued with bot-responders or random answers. So I'm working under that assumption.)
The results: Out of 47 respondents who saw the black girl's picture, 36 said the image was inappropriate (77%). Out of 54 respondents who saw the white girl's picture, 38 said the image was inappropriate (70%). For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed. What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos.
In both surveys, both male and female respondents voted the photos "inappropriate" with about the same frequency. For the black woman's photo, 22 out of 26 men (86%) and 14 out of 21 women (67%) voted the photo inappropriate; for the white woman's photo, 19 out of 30 men (63%) and 19 out of 24 women (79%) voted it inappropriate. There also didn't appear to be any correlation between the age of the respondents and their responses. (You can view the breakdown of answers in terms of respondent demographics here for the black woman's picture and here for the white woman's picture; the crummy layout is because I just copied-and-pasted the output from my own custom-written survey-taking tool, where I usually just view the results for myself.) As for the gap between black and white survey-takers, in the case of the black woman's photo, 24 out of 34 white survey-takers (70%) and 5 out of 6 black survey-takers (83%) voted it inappropriate, while for the white woman's photo, 25 out of 36 white survey-takers (69%) and 4 out of 4 (100%) of black survey-takers voted it inappropriate -- but those discrepancies probably don't mean much, since the population of self-identified black respondents was too small in both cases to draw any conclusions.
Even with small samples, though, I would argue that this is a better way to answer the question of latent racism than to draw fuzzy conclusions based on the trolling comments posted on a Facebook photo. My guess is that even if there was an underlying difference in the frequency of negative comments posted to the two photos, part of it could have been due to the photo being posted in a Facebook group titled "Black Women Do Breastfeed", a group name that is practically begging for trolls to wait for a chance to try and provoke an outraged response. The white woman's photo, on the other hand, was posted on the University of the Sunshine Coast Facebook page, which is not the kind of place that maladjusted nitwits hang out trying to start a flame war. And for the trolls who did post on the white woman's photo, their natural inclination would be to make some immature comment about b00bs; whereas for the trolls posting on the black woman's photo, the easiest cheap shot would be to make it about race. But that doesn't mean that there is actually a racially motivated difference in people's reactions to the photos.
Besides, if you want to use Facebook to raise awareness of racism, there are properly controlled scientific experiments that have demonstrated the extent of prejudice, such as the infamous 2003 resume callback experiment which showed that resumes with white-sounding names on them received about 50% more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names. A viral story with 24,000 Facebook shares, about two isolated incidents under different circumstances, is not necessarily evidence of racism. It might be. But you have to do some kind of controlled experiment to check first.
Bet they are tripping over themselves to get more research grants
Table-ized A.I.
First we'll post a video of ISIS beheading an innocent hostage.
Then we'll post a video of ISIS beheading Bennett Hasselton.
Afterwards, we'll look at the massive differences in the level of outrage, which is to say we'll have a kegger to celebrate Bennett's demise.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Pretty please?
I was afraid he was back on his meds. What a relief!
us fed up for good with slashdot? this is clearly going downhill.
Somehow the tasks would involve reading Bennett Haselton essays and harvesting the scintillating nuggets of shared wisdom to...
*laughs until cries* Man, this guy is so much fun to hate...
Unless you can find a way to network breastfeeding or find a way to run Lunix on it, I don't see how the topic is appropriate for /.
First photo (black woman) breastfeeding in public with a race-baiting headline ("Black women do...") draws negative comments. Second photo of a woman apparently in private and wearing a wedding band draws positive comments. The editorial has both pictures cropped so you can't see if either woman is wearing a wedding band.
That is the difference between journalism and science. Journalism needs to get attention, science works best with little attention.
You can't trust science articles if they have any outrage.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed."
Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.
"What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos."
No, it doesn't. You cannot draw conclusions from your results without significant data, because as you just said, your results could be due to random chance. I see this all the time in papers submitted for peer review. They'll say something like, "our technique showed benefit over the other techniques, even though the difference was not significant", and try to claim this as a win.
nah, it's a cultural thing. I've found in my travels at least half the world really doesn't give a shit if a woman breastfeeds in public. Would you rather listen to an angry hungry baby?
Another TL:DR useless article by Bennett - please add a feature so we can block his boring, unending essays that no one cares about.
"Bennett Haselton writes"
Yep. Checks out. But I don't believe it.
I also don't understand the point of this post. Is Slashdot hoping to get picked up on HuffPo and on a bunch of mommy blogger sites? I don't really see how Bennett's keyboard diarrhea this week is anything remotely related to "News for Nerds".
OK
People here like to poke fun at the long posts by Bennett Hassleton. This one is actually pretty good.
He saw something, constructed an experiement using readily available resources, got statistically significant results (just about) and made an intereesting post detailing the methodology.
To my mind this is interesting in comparison to more formal academic studies as it shows that you can get reasonable results as a lone wolf with a limited budget and no research institution.
I like this post. Go Bennett.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If the black women are just being less prissy about it, good for them. And yes.. boobies, but not the point.
We're happy to hear your stories. But, listen: maybe they should go on the fridge, instead of the front page of Slashdot.
Ok, bud?
Two words:
Rosie and Roxanne
Can these breasts be used to create decentralized networks of ice cream for Burning Man?
Reminds me of a scene from the show 'Friends'. There is a woman breastfeeding her baby and it is making Joey uncomfortable. Ross says, "This is the most beautiful, natural thing in the world. " Joey replies, "Yeah, but there's a baby sucking on it."
Have gnu, will travel.
First photo's subject says "look at me - I am breastfeeding", second mother says "my baby is so precious" bearsfeeding is not the subject of the photo.
I recall stories tagged with OhNoItsFlorian; well past time for a OhNoItsBennett tag.
Your question mentions a work context and already suggests that the image is inappropriate. The wording is hardly impartial and may sway respondents who might otherwise be unsure how to answer and thus influenced by internalized/unconscious bias.
Also, this is a delicate topic. If you want to people to take your writing seriously, you should work hard at using respectful language. Referring to to the two graduates/mothers as "girls" is belittling.
Anther issue that you bring up is that people who perform mechanical turk tasks see the world differently. Energy shortages are a problem in places like India where a lot of the "turks" live. Having not grown up in America their view of race is completely different than ours and they're not going to bring the usual prejudices with them.
Simply stated, there's no good way to get useful results in this manner.
Do you have ESP?
First, it sounds like your tried to replicate a "study" that had already taken place. In doing so, however, you used a different platform, Mechanical Turk, and did not use any exclusion criteria... but you still made the assumption that the two populations were the same. You do note that you made this assumption, but I would argue that the Facebook and Mechanical Turk populations are not identical -- particularly with respect to their socioeconomic status, maturity, and probably even their race -- all of which would be critical confounding factors in this study. Unless you have some form of data to back these assumptions up, they are invalid. Furthermore, as has been pointed out already, your sample size is entirely too small.
And this is news for nerds how? Because he used Mechanical Turk?
Seriously, stop with the drivel from this Miley Cyrus looking boob, with his winking and mouth gaping. Go ahead. Image search him.
Good Job Bennet -
I assume you are trying to use Slashdot as a research platform to investigate the truthiness of Plato's allegory of the cave. And Slashdoterers jumped at the chance to kick and scream while eschewing the opportunity to discuss the research, your commenatry, or the use of net based survey platform.
Positive proof of nothing, but interesting none the less.
Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual! They have been sexualized in much of our modern cultures but they are not intrinsically so.
One of the things that always amazes me about breastfeeding is how much more uptight our modern western culture is about it than our Victorian Era ancestors were. But today it's perfectly normal to see advertising that is overtly sexual, and almost pornographic in nature, plastered everywhere selling almost anything. Heaven forbid that a Mother feeds her child the highest quality food possible in a natural way, where someone else might see. How about we campaign for people eating disgusting things like fast food burgers and fries go do that in private somewhere?
One of the things that always amazes me about breastfeeding is how much more uptight our modern western culture is about it than our Victorian Era ancestors were. But today it's perfectly normal to see advertising that is overtly sexual, and almost pornographic in nature, plastered everywhere selling almost anything.
The opinion widely held in the USA and UK seems to be that it's nipples that cause the downfall of society, but other than that it's ok. In Europe they seem a bit less nipple-averse.
Really. He's offended by a FACEBOOK posting.
So he decides to write his own "survey" or whatever. Except he knows NOTHING about writing them. Or how to conduct them.
And then he puts it up on Amazon's Mechanical Turk site. Further evidence that he knows NOTHING about conducting a survey.
Which leads him to "analyize" the crap "data" that he has "collected".
The only "News for Nerds" here is how badly this was done. Anyone who publishes is (that would be you, Timothy) is an idiot for doing so. If anyone else had conducted this at any other site it would have been mocked here.
...and on... and on... and on...
Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual! They have been sexualized in much of our modern cultures but they are not intrinsically so.
I'm pretty sure all dimorphism in the human species is intrinsically sexual. Cultures can choose to draw lines wherever they wish.
While the methodology used for the original inquiry (I hesitate to use the word study) is non-statistical and therefore impossible to validly extrapolate from, so is the methodology used to debunk the original. At best, both reports provide anecdotal evidence, but without a statistically valid approach, either could be correct or both could be wrong.
The new orderlies don't check under your tongue.
That's a provably false statement: a shirtless man does not cause the downfall of society. Yet, he has nipples.
Dogs and cats have nipples. Those, also do not cause the downfall of society.
Krusty the Klown has a superfluous third nipple (a trope borrowed from Goldfinger) ... again, no downfall of society. Yet you'd think if two are bad, three must be the sign of end-times, right?
This comes from puritanical people who believe that the sight of a woman's nipples would send humanity into fits of uncontrolled boobies, and that we'd be forced to face the fact that, yes, women have breasts, are in charge of those breasts, and that this is a perfectly normal fact.
This pretty much comes from religion, and nowhere else. You don't see "Atheists Against Boobies" campaigns.
You pretty much just see "God Will Punish You For Boobies" campaigns.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"Outrage Pornography".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
If race were not a factor, then the "easiest cheap shot" would have been the same or similar for both photos. The fact that racial attitudes are baked into us by american culture, and are terrifically difficult to overcome, means that those attitudes are in play in any social situation.
You mean two names.
Oh noes! B(.)(.)Bies and _natural_ instinct of a mother feeding their child. /sarcasm Quick! Get out the pitchforks and pull the racism card out of your ass!
If people are so damn uptight how about a big dish of:
"Grow the fuck up and get over yourself."
This is a NON ISSUE.
a male might find most parts of a woman's body as sexual. get over it.
My main page goes from "Ask Slashdot: How To Unblock Email From My Comcast-Hosted Server?" to "Popular Smartphones Hacked At Mobile Pwn2Own 2014" with no Bennett Haselton at all.
How? This greasemonkey script will prevent you from seeing Bennett Haselton's shit on the main page or an of the "older" pages ( http://slashdot.org/?page=1 ).
http://pastebin.com/RWCxT0jJ (Make sure you're redirecting beta to the real site.)
It just shits through the DOM looking for the shitty firehose/article/content structure and matching whole words against bennett or haselton in either the innerhtml or the plaintext node itself (just in case), then hides the article.
itwbennett is not blocked - does anyone know if it's the same persone? I checked itworld's shitty site but couldn't find anything. There's an amy bennett and some other bennett, but no haseldouche.
>Why all the hate for this dude?
Because Bennet is gaming slashdot for his own gain. He posts a lot of shit articles on totally retarded obvious topics as though they are "brand new ideas!!!!"
How is this for his own gain? My guess he is using it to pad a resume. "I get more of my submissions published on slashdot than any other contributor!" or some such thing.
Nice try Bennett. Nobody in their right mind would call anything you say "educated" or "meaningful". Instead we use words like, "malignantly narcissistic," and "full retard."
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
You are funny and ignorant. You will not "control" a months old baby. Half the world does not have the money to waste on the "tech" you mention.
If your child is too young to control itself out in public, I'd rather you not bring it out in public at all.
Me, me, me, me, me. It's all about me.
Om, nomnomnom...
Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual!
Except that they play a fundamental role in sexual reproduction.
Your dumb is showing. Breasts are fundamental to sexual reproduction. They are sexual.
And neither one includes an Asian woman. RACISM!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Fuck Bennett Haselton and the idiots that promote his idiotic posts! Yes, you timothy! and any other "editor" that posts his crap!
Yeah, my dick is inherently functional too. I piss with it. But I'm pretty sure women wouldn't be cool with me whipping it out and pissing in public whenever I felt like it.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This is educational for us Nerds as breasts have another, all natural and nurturing use not at all related to their common portrayal as fun bags.
Many people have babies, fewer breastfeed. You must be using a new definition of the word "fundamental".
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Breasts have no purpose except attracting a mate, and feeding offspring, both of which are closely related to sexual activity. It's like saying that people shouldn't associate penises with sex, because they are used for other things too. I agree that many cultures are too uptight about teh boobs, but I don't think that is because they have wrongfully associated breasts with sex. I think it's because sex is still taboo in many places, and also because females are treated as sex objects more than men are.
We don't need a campaign of public breastfeeding or more nudity to solve the problem, we just need more gender equality and general comfort with sexuality. I agree with you that advertising is way over the line and a big contributor to the problem though.
Lastly, an otherwise pretty decent post was ruined when you decided to get holier-than-thou on anybody who ever eats a burger. People who might otherwise listen to you will stop as soon as you get pretentious and judgmental about perfectly normal eating habits.
When humans evolved to walk upright, they needed a full frontal display. You would approach a woman from the front, and require something to strongly indicate sexual maturity. Most animals walking on all fours do not naturally expose their breasts prominently, and their breasts remain small to the point that sexing of various animals requires examination of the genitals (and you can see a dog's big nuts hanging down from behind, so you can imagine how cursory of a glance this requires). Many animals also have a heightened sense of smell, and are sensitive to other cues such as coloration (notably contrast and saturation, more than hue).
Tits are, in fact, one way of screaming "WOMAN!" at people.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual!
Sexual here is used to mean "to do with the sex or gender of the person in question". DUH that they are sexual as only the female sex has them.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Breasts are fundamental to sexual reproduction.
Lolwut? They play no role whatsoever in reproduction. They are only useful, optionally, to nourish the newborn - long after the reproduction is a done. The optional part is kinda important: you can feed a newborn quite well using nothing but plant-derived stuff, for example. If I were ever to hear a medical doctor call breasts "reproductive organs", I'd be looking for a different one, you know. Where you got that crazy idea I can't fathom.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Apart from pissing outside of restrooms being unsanitary, I do agree that we're a bit oversensitive about the so-called privates. It's a cultural thing, there's no rational reason for it, not even a moral one if one were to separate rationality and morality.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Despite not being able to find anything of "significance" (there is actually a 7% difference in his own data!), Bennett starts not with the neutral headline "Do Black Women Experience Discrimination Breastfeeding", but with "Debunking" -- which assumes is patently false. This assumption is probably because of the amount of experience he has breastfeeding. Or being black.
I'm a white male as well, but sheesh, white priviledge much sir?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
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There's psychology, then there's psychology. The kind of neuropsychology I've seen done produces rather decent, reproducible results, not subject to a whole lot of interpretation...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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If you successfully hid this post from yourself, I have to ask, how is it you're here now telling others how to also hide it?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Why did you switch from "breasts" to "breastfeed"?
The breasts are fundamental to sexual reproduction because they play a part in sexual attraction, which leads to sex, which leads to babies.
Breastfeeding is not.
It's finally the year of Linux on the breastop!
That is factually incorrect. Both men and women have breasts. In fact there are hormone therapies that have been used to allow a father to breast feed his child, without actually altering his sex, when the mother was not able or present to do so. The size and shape of breasts is a good example of sexual dimorphism but both sexes have them.
...Read on to see the kind of results Bennett found. ...
Well, there's 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back....
That is an intersting thought but I wouldn't bet on it holding true. Some dimorphic attributes could be attributed to social standing among the cultural group. For example being of lower standing could result in receiving less calories, leading to the disfavored gender selecting for being able to survive with less calories, being of smaller stature and such.
Yes, cultures can and do draw their own arbitrary lines all over the place, for example some muslim cultures consider a woman's hair to be sexual, which is why they require it to be covered in public. We aren't even talking full on hijab here, just requiring that the hair be covered by a wrap or scarf. Try floating that in a Western culture, where even though hair is acknowledged as being an important trait so far as attraction is concerned, the idea of having to cover it up or not flaunt it is viewed as ridiculous.
"Except that they play a fundamental role in sexual reproduction."
Care to elaborate on that? I've fathered 2 children so far through sexual reproduction. And at no point do I remember breasts playing a fundamental role in that process. If you are refering to how they can be used as a selective trait then you could just as easily argue that my steady job, calm demeanor, personal hygene habits, and social skills are all fundamental in sexual reproduction.
Nice try Bennett. Nobody in their right mind would call anything you say "educated" or "meaningful". Instead we use words like, "malignantly narcissistic," and "full retard."
What the hell is the matter with you? Everyone knows that Bennett isn't full retard! He's full-on retard! Geez Louise! get it straight. WTF is wrong with people!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
The plot thickens.
Given the data (36 out of 47 found one photo inappropriate, 38 out of 54 found the other photo inappropriate), a chi-squared test without Yates's correction shows X2(1, N = 101) = 0.497, p = .481; thus, not significant. It would be nice if Mr. Haselton had posted a link to the raw data so we could look at it for ourselves. (Sorry for not using the Greek letter and superscript, but Slashdot didn't seem to like them.)
Simple because breasts are commonly associated with sexual attractiveness does not make them sexual organs. Other things that have been commonly associated with sexual attractiveness in relatively recent history:
Narrow waists
Pale complexions
Hair, in all it's infinite varieties
Ankles
Knees
Feet, bare, deliberaly misshapen or both
Necks, some people even deliberately elongate them
Stretched ear lobes
And that is just the female traits I can think of off the top of my head. Simply because something is a selective trait does not make it a sexual body part. Your example of a penis doesn't work because one of it's functions actually is a part of intercourse. Breasts do not serve any such purpose, they can of course be a part of foreplay but so can a back/foot/neck/scalp rub, or really pretty much anything else. You would be amazed at the warmup type effects that can be had from doing the dishes, folding laundry, sweeping the floors, or taking the kids out for a walk. Practically speaking almost anything can be involved or related to sexual activity, but it doesn't make those things sexual objects or activities.
The burger comment was meant to point out the absurdity of people getting all hot and bothered about the eating/feeding habits of a child and mother. Hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people don't find the consumption of fast food burgers disgusting and banning, or discouraging others from the eating of such food in public obviously is ridiculous.
I've fathered 2 children so far through sexual reproduction. And at no point do I remember breasts playing a fundamental role in that process....... you could just as easily argue that my steady job, calm demeanor, personal hygene habits, and social skills are all fundamental in sexual reproduction.
I find women's breasts a huge (sorry) part in my sexual "process", and if it is only Western society that has caused that attitude (as some have said here) then - bring it on. Many women themselves are also turned on by their own breasts, as part of their own arousal. I had a busty GF who would get a breast out to admire it herself in a public place if there were no people about - I would tell her off about it. You are missing a lot if women's breasts mean nothing to you (or your partner); I am feeling sorry for you..
However, some women do not have much to show in the breast department, so it is just as well that there are guys like you who will be quite happy with that.
Humans don't naturally expose a huge amount of breast, since they don't become large naturally. It's only with the advent of adequate medicine and an abundance (excess?) of nutrition that some women find themselves large mammaries
On the contrary, from your argument, it sounds like it was small breasts that were unnatural (underfed and ill). In fact, I have known obese women with small breasts, and slim women with large ones (if you don't know any women, look in some porn websites, you will find all combinations).
Let's just say you're not doing well with your arguments since you're not very well informed about the subject of women. (Which should have been obvious, this being /. and all...)
Actually he was talking about dogs, mostly. His point about women was that they stand upright and their front has breasts on it (of some size or other) if they are of post-puberty maturity - do you dispute that?
Perhaps you prefer Homer Simpson's description of women : "Like a refrigerator, - about 5'2" high and give you beer". It leaves the breasts out of it.
Oh I'm not trying to deny that I find breasts attractive and an effective turn on. I also find the femine shape(s) in general to be attractive. My wife also has one of the most seductive smiles I've ever seen. And she's got a wicked sense of humor. All of those things can be selective traits of various strengths, but they aren't actually required in the fundamentals of sex. Just because there are foot fetishists out there we don't have laws requiring everyone to wear close toed shoes in public.
And I'll be the first to admit that I find it a little awkward to be around a breast feeding woman in public. Why you may ask, because I feel the need to exercise greater self restraint and refrain from staring like an asshole. But I know that it is my hangup and my problem, not the mother's.
I haven't locked into my account in years and it took me three tries to get my password right. Yes, I'm a dirty lurker, sorry. All I wanted to say is: please don't turn this place into a white knight, red pill, feminist, anti-feminist, racist, pro-life, fedora or whatever place.
This and geekhack are like the last BIG places where nerds can still be nerds without explaining themselves about the lack of women, blacks or x-men in our community. Neogaf was once such place, take a look now at this hellhole. They think that video games are misogynist. All we have left now are mostly very tiny, VERY specific forums and sites that are getting updates once every blue moon. I don't want to read more books than I do already. I want to feel as a part of a nice community, even if only as reader.
Please leave this kind of "news" where they belong. On Facebook. Or Neogaf.
Thanks for reading. See you guys in 2024. I hope I can remember my pass until then.
I have a sister in law that is both a huge puritan and who has a medical condition that prevents her from producing nutritionally sufficient milk. The medical condition was not a commonly known fact in our extended family. So, when her six year old son observed my wife breastfeeding our infant daughter and asked some basic questions, all hell broke loose when my wife answered them in an age appropriate manner. Some people you just can't reach...
undoing accidental mod
I think that's just nitpicking. As far as everyday language use is concerned, men don't normally have breasts. It's as simple as that. Yeah, there's enough gland tissue there that can be made to grow etc., but it's mostly immaterial other than men getting breast cancer. Still, in normal, everyday use of the language, we all know that women have breasts, and men don't.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
No, I honestly wouldn't care if someone was masturbating in a restroom. But I wouldn't care about breastfeeding either. Enough of this puritan nonsense.
In which case I assume you object to uncovered beards in public.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Once in a while I trawl through /. with the script disabled in order to tell people how easy it is to block this shit.
Breasts may be sexual to you, but that's your problem. Are a cow's udders sexual? Not even to other cows, as far as we can tell. I have never understood men's obsession with breasts, even as a straight man myself. I can only surmise that this stems from prevailing attitudes exactly like the one discussed here, that breast-feeding in public is somehow "inappropriate", which in turn indicates an entrenched prudishness in parts of western culture that is simply baffling. It's like how the sight of an uncovered ankle in Victorian times allegedly excited men, simply because it was something the culture denied them. Same with breasts now. Once all women are comfortable everywhere breastfeeding in public, a new generation of men will grow up (in every sense) not being titillated by them. It's that unwarranted obsession which is "inappropriate".
Sexual selection is often about the features that suggest an individual is about being able to provide, care for, and protect offspring. Large breasts and a narrow waist both suggest capability in this area. Just like broad shoulders and height suggest so for a man.
The thing is, feeding a baby is an inherent part of the reproduction of the species, just as intercourse is. Breasts are the only organ that is exclusively related to reproduction - they serve literally no other purpose, and are an active hindrance in many other ways.
You haven't addressed that contention, so all the examples of other traits considered don't really impact my argument.
Wait, what? Something that has sexual characteristics can also perform other functions. I'm not sure what analogy you're trying to get at with the bathroom thing... I don't get offended when someone urinates in the restroom, and I don't get offended when someone breastfeeds in public or wherever. Those are both non-sexual behaviors with body parts that also have sexual functionality. I would probably find it inappropriate if someone was using those body parts to arouse themselves in public.
The point is, a body part that has a non-sexual function can still very well be an inherent part of the sexual process. So I'm saying that just because breastfeeding is not directly sexual, doesn't mean that breasts don't have an inherent sexual aspect due to our biology. And I would argue that they do, for a large variety of reasons - not least because when we are referring to the "sex" of a person we really mean whether they possess the physical features associated with being male or the physical features associated with being a woman. Anything on that short list of physical indicators is rightly called a sexual organ.
I'm not saying that breastfeeding in public is sexual. I'm just saying it is fine to accept the sexual aspects of breasts while simultaneously affirming the utility in child rearing. It isn't either/or.
Feeding a child is only about 9 months removed from having sex. You can't have (typically, biologically speaking) one without the other. So I'm saying it is inherently associated with reproduction. It isn't a stretch to say that men would be biologically predisposed to "sexualize" breasts because of an instinct to look for a partner that could feed a child (not that it matters in reality, I'm well aware that cup size has little to do with milk production).
I guess the question would be this - is there any body part that is rightly considered "sexual"? If you don't believe so, we'll have to agree to disagree.
Dunno, I was all about the tits, m'self.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Breasts are secondary sexual characteristics. They're inconvenient to the point of being a natural survival hazard in many women and the fatty tissue that we're really talking about when we talk about breasts doesn't really serve any particularly beneficial purpose except to attract mates.
The real question is why certain segments of society get their underwear in a twist about sexual characteristics.
This is clearly false as a matter of evolutionary biology.
Breasts need only be very small to serve the function of feeding a nursing child. Many types of apes have very tiny breasts and are perfectly able to nurse their offspring. Human breasts are much larger than any purely functional explanation would predict.
So why do female humans have such large breasts, despite the problems that large breasts can cause? Sex-selective pressure. The same reason peacocks have such giant useless tails. Human breasts are inherently secondary sexual markers and, as such, like a peacock's tail will be subject to selective pressure in that capacity. As women's breasts evolved to be larger to exaggerate the secondary sexual characteristic this display would, in itself, be evidence of sexual fitness and good genes and thus men would experience selective pressure to prefer larger than needed female breasts.
So, umm, no. They are an inherent sexual advertisement. Then again so are lots of things. Women's hips and men's shoulders and voices are also secondary sexual characteristics and the other sex has almost surely experienced sexual pressure to respond to such things (among a great many others...don't say it isn't true just because you don't like them...all I need to prove is that these features attract mates in every society more often than a random non gender specific feature).
Perhaps what you mean to say is that breasts aren't inherently pornographic? Maybe, but that's an implicitly moral and cultural judgement and clearly goes further than you want to claim. Perhaps you mean something like "showing your breasts isn't an intrinsically an indication of sexual intent" but then again neither is anything short of behavior biologically probable to lead to pregnancy (fucking...or even deliberate mutual sexual stimulation which tends to make people fuck). What conveys intent is always the fact that the other person *knows* you realize they would be inclined to interpret the action in that fashion and that you choose to do so in that knowledge. Society could decide that :-) meant you want to fuck and that would make sending a smiley face openly sexual since that's what everyone understands it to mean.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
You're not under the impression that the fatty tissue that visibly differentiates male and female breasts is functional in feeding babies, are you? There's really no reason for one sex (either one) to have large external breasts except as a sexual signalling device. Breasts in the human species are sexual organs.
I also don't understand your insistence that recognizing breasts as sexual organs is misogyny. You could claim that shaming women who expose their breasts is misogynistic, but I think you'll find that the people who do that also tend to object to exposed penises, asses and pelvises in general, so a more likely motive would seem to be plain old gender neutral sexual repression.
I'm very much in favour of women breast feeding wherever they like. I also think it's very counterproductive to incorrectly attribute things to misogyny or some mysterious "patriarchy", and to claim that sexual organs aren't. Breast feeding in public isn't okay because breasts aren't sexual, it's okay because flashing a secondary sexual characteristic in order to feed a baby is just fine.
Your argument defeats itself.
First, "large" is relative. It's sure as hell larger than pure function requires. And no it's not "some" women. Go look at an ape sometime and let me know what women raised with good food and health you know of who have a similarly unobtrusive breasts. Even sub A cups put the animals to shame.
Secondly, the fact that women, given adequate nutrition health etc.., are disposed to evolve larger breasts *proves* that breast size is a good advertisement for underlying sexual fitness. In other words, since those women with good health who had plenty of food would have had larger breasts in the evolutionary environment it would be super surprising if men in that environment weren't selected to respond to a true signal of reproductive fitness like this.
I mean your post itself basically admits that breasts function like a peacock's tail. They are disposed, when nutrition and health allow, to grow substantially larger than needed despite the inherent reduction in fitness that larger breasts pose (backs, running speed etc.. etc..).
Sure, there is nothing special about breasts. They are like men's shoulders or voices or women's hips. They are constrained by certain functional requirements but serve as an indicator of sexual fitness as well and tend to draw interest of the opposite sex.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Umm, so why would an otherwise disadvantageous feature like enlarged breasts (bad for balance, backs etc..) be selected for to such a degree that it was universal among human females. Other than sexual display you got nothing.
Any display that functions as a valid signal of sexual fitness that can be picked up by evolution will picked up by evolution and used in mate selection. Why would breasts be so different? Do you doubt that women are attracted to deep male voices or larger shoulders and men have evolved to overemphasize these traits as a result?
You might say, "showing breasts isn't biologically determined to convey a sexual invitation." This is no doubt true. Then again so little of human behavior isn't so modulated by culture that anything short of penetration isn't determined by biology to be a sexual invitation with high probability. In our culture It's not at all absurd to think a girl might merely be a friend despite the fact that she bent down, spread her legs and rubbed her ass up against your cock if she was dancing with you at a club. Even more can be done in special contexts like movies or film without conveying an actual sexual invitation. On the other hand showing an uncovered face, in other cultures, can convey sexual invitation.
Sorry, but there just isn't a nice line to be drawn. Nearly everything humans do is partly sexual, even the most innocent play in childhood mimes and explores behavior that will later be used to attract mates and nothing short of sex is necessarily conveys sexual intent.
Ignore the idiots obsessed with the connection to reproduction. It doesn't even make sense to connect what biologically follows from child birth to sexual behavior. Screaming in pain is biologically caused by child birth yet is the farthest thing possible from openly sexual.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Except cows udders aren't larger than you would expect given evolutionary pressures ignoring mate selection. Breasts and the depth of male voice and 1,000 other things are no different than a peacock's tail. The result of selective pressure purely on the basis of their ability to attract sexual mates despite the inherent uselessness or even harm to survival and physical reproduction they provide.
I mean evolution selects for those who get the best mates. What the hell *wouldn't* be sexual? I bet even bad teenage poetry has a biological basis in sex selection for mates with greater intelligence/wordplay. It's useless but a good signal of a desirable trait.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
My wife just looked at these pictures and mentioned how the white woman is looking at her infant, while the black woman is looking like she's having a good time. I don't think anyone else mentioned this, and I certainly didn't notice it, but that could very well have a subliminal influence on my decision on which one is right and which one's wrong.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
Actually it has concern has little to do with 'a certified union' and is more of a concern with the epidemic of single mothers forced to live on social welfare programs to support their kids, being given incentives to not have 2 parent families, and punished by the welfare systems if they attempt to establish or maintain a two parent household.
http://newsblogs.chicagotribun...
http://www.census.gov/prod/201...
http://www.actrochester.org/ch...
http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
These are just a few examples of the concern and impact this is having on society, and especially effecting certain ethnic groups.
Unfortunately while all of the corruption exist in Government this won't be fixed. You can do your own searching to find out why that is, but I'll give you a hint. Milton Friedman was one of many that explained this situation and why people want it that way.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's all about context. Nursing a child is not a sexual act. Stop trying to sexualize it, you freak.
If this were true then mothers would have no problems with men staring at them while nursing. Breasts are sexual in Western cultures in the vast majority of situations in which they are exposed, and the mind doesn't immediately ignore that context.
Breastfeeding in public is one of those strange issues that causes a lot of argument but doesn't seem to actually bother many people. It's natural to feel slightly uncomfortable around it, so you politely don't stare, and mothers try to be as discreet as possible.
No, feeding a child is not part of reproduction. Once the child is born, congratulations, you have reproduced. Rearing the child will involve feeding it, which is best accomplished through breastfeeding but also suitably done through bottle feeding, or any of the other artificial methods historically used. Is a baby bottle now a sexual item that should only be sold at adult novelty stores? At what age do we consider the child old enough that whatever they use to eat is no longer a sexual object 2, 5, 8, 12, how about 18? Hell as a mature adult, rearing further offspring, maintaining my life is obviously part of reproducing right? So can I count all my eating utensils, dinner ware, and cooking implements as sexual objects?
Honestly trying to say that breasts are the only purely sexual organ because they are used to feed children is an enormous stretch. Besides what about the Ovaries, Uterus, and vagina? Exactly what besides sex are those organs for? I suppose the argument could be made that they produce hormones, but the major point of those hormones seems to be sex drive and femininity.
I'm not sure that a narrow waist is actually an indication of a good birthing physiology. I believe it is actually wide hips which people think indicates a lower risk of mortality in child birth. However by constricting the waist artificially it makes whatever hips are present seem wider.
Sure you'll conclude that, just with low confidence.
You don't know what you are doing, genius. Stick to your field of expertise, which is apparently automated censorship. Also, your editor forgot to correct two instances of the world "girl" from your article. That's generally an offensive term for any adult female, regardless of skin tone.
Not at all. I merely pointed out that a piece of one's body can be gender-specific (sexual), no matter what function it has.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I am actually a statistician. And this 'study' looks pretty worthless.
The problem is the issue of a 'huge gap'. What gap is huge? Well, we can try and do a power calculation. How big does the gap between the black and white targets *need* to be, to have a good chance of showing up in this test?
This is simple enough to calculate. Plug in some numbers:
1. Sample size in each group - 50
2. Level of Significance - 0.05
3. Power - i.e. the desired probability of finding there to be a significant difference, *if a difference exists*. I've chosen a standard number of 0.8 - i.e. allow for a 20% chance of missing a true effect by accident.
Fixing the proportion of inappropriates for the white woman at 70%, we find.... 91.8%.
In other words, with this sample size, we actually only rule out a difference of 70% vs 91.8%, or in other words, an over 2/3rds drop in the proportion of people finding the picture appropriate.
To rephrase: if the truth was that 2/3rds of the people who think a white woman is breastfeeding would *not* think a black person breastfeeding is appropriate - a situation that I think you'd agree is very racist - then we'd miss such an effect in an experiment like this over 1/5th the time. Even assuming the experiment was conducted ideally, and no one was just randomly clicking to earn money.
This article is meaningless.
You're right of course - I should've mentioned that. Male nipples are just fine.
You get nipples in UK newspapers and on TV, so I don't think we have quite reached the gold standard of nipple paranoia that the US demonstrates.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual!
Except that they play a fundamental role in sexual reproduction.
I think you're doing it wrong.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'll be in my debunk.
Couldn't we do the blind men and the elephant instead?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Boobs are specific to the female sex*, therefore you consider them sexual. Beards are specific to the male sex*, therefore you should consider them sexual. If somebody has an objection to bare boobs because they're a secondary sexual characteristic, that person should object to bare beards for the same reason.
*Yeah, there are exceptions. In both cases. I don't know if there's more or less than twice as many male boobs as female beards.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
This article, from an evolutionary psychologist, entirely demonstrates my point. Breasts have evolved to be the way that they are because of sexual selection.
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
The point is that you select a mate based on what will best help your own genes to propagate. Males will be inclined to look for a woman that is 1: sexually mature (has breasts and wider hips than waist) 2: able to carry and deliver a child and feed the child until it is able to eat something besides breastmilk.
If you don't satisfy those minimal criteria, your genes aren't getting passed on. So by the only measure that matters in evolution, you haven't reproduced. The artificial methods you've suggested (bottles, etc) didn't exist during the vast majority of human history. They have nothing to do with it.
Now, we know that the features we've discussed are not actually reliable indicators of fitness (large-chested women can have trouble breastfeeding, and small-chested women can produce plenty of milk) but they key in to those things that a male will be biologically inclined to look at when choosing a mate. The reason that sex in advertising is so pernicious is because it taps into deep, instinctual biological impulses we have.
From the article: "The sex appeal of rounded female buttocks and plump breasts is both universal and unique to the human primate" - this is cited in more depth there, but the point is that you are arguing against human nature. Again, the answer is not to pretend that sexual body parts aren't what they are. It is to stop this weird culture of sexual obsession combined with prudery, accept that sex is just a part of life like any other, and be adults about the whole thing.
One could argue that the process of reproduction is not over until the offspring are self-sustaining and in a world without tech, most children would die without breast milk. In that way, breasts are part of reproduction. - Devil's Advocate.
Depends on the context. If you stuck a bunch of humans in an area with limited access to food other than what an adult could eat, which meant that the only children that could survive had to be breast fed, then you could argue that in this context, breasts are required to successfully "reproduce".
If a single celled organism splits and the other copy keeps dying, would you say it's able to "reproduce"? I'm not arguing the scientific definition, but a more general definition.
Breasts are most definitely not intrinsically sexual!
To quote good old Oscar: "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.". So, in that Wilde sense you are wrong. On the other hand, that would make falling leaves about sex too, and I am not sure there are a lot of people who thinks so. Other than in the bible-belt of the US of course. In that area everything is indeed about sex, even sex. Perhaps we should nuke the whole damned thing, from New Mexico to Florida in a wide belt. We could leave Austin of course, Austin is just weirdly normal.
Because he thinks hes far more of an expert than he is, on everything. He has the answers for Burning Man's problems, he is a legal scholar qualified to question hundreds of years of legal thought on the 4th and 5th amendments, he can definitively say that network filtering is never appropriate, and so on.
If someone asks a question in humility, no harm no foul.
If someone were to say "I've never studied quantum physics before, but this weekend I picked up a book on it... read on for my thoughts on the state of quantum physics in 2014...", then, well you'd have a Bennett Haselton post.
"Except that they play a fundamental role in sexual reproduction."
Care to elaborate on that?
Mammalian offspring drink breast milk.
Without breast milk mammalian offspring can't survive.
Without surviving offspring, sexual reproduction is unsuccessful.
We have artificial substitutes for breast milk, penises, vaginas, etc, but that doesn't change how we instinctively view these things.