And it turns out that everything culture teaches us about the hymen is wrong.

The closest thing to true is the idea that the hymen can be painful when it’s not used to being stretched – it’s one of a number of potential causes of pain with penetration, but it is by no means the most common.

However: the hymen doesn’t break and stay broken forever, like a freshness seal (with accompanying “use by” date). If a hymen tears or bruises, IT HEALS.

And the size of a hymen doesn’t vary depending on whether or not the vagina has been penetrated. It’s about 2.75mm. There, now you know roughly how big your hymen is.

And it usually doesn’t bleed. Any blood with first penetration is more likely due to general vaginal tearing from lack of lubrication.

What does change when a woman begins having the hymen stretched regularly is that it grows more flexible. Um, is it appropriate to say that, metaphorically, vaginal intercourse is like yoga for your hymen?

So. Pain with first penetration might be the hymen stretching, maybe. Or it might be a variety of other things. And chances are first penetration will just feel really complicated and novel and nothing like what you expect.

We know from research that a small amount of pain over a longer time span results in lower perceived pain than a large amount of pain over a short time span (in other words, tear the band-aid off slowly, don’t rip it off in one go). So if you want to break your own hymen, do it gradually and gently, teaching it to stretch, rather than forcing it to break.

Side note: this is my 400th post!

It’s January.

Scratch that. It’s FUCKING JANUARY.

This same thing happened last year. I spend the month of January sitting in a dark hole. It’s not as bad this year because there’s much less snow and also there is the romantic euphemism to bring me news of the outside world (and chocolate and alcohol) without my actually having to go out into it.

Last year I suggested somatic mindfulness as a strategy for coping with seasonal mood stuff. This year I want to return to the idea of the monkey that lives inside each of us and motivates most of our behaviors.

What does the monkey need? What does the monkey want?

Well, sex is about the creation and survival of the next generation. The monkey doesn’t actually NEED anything from sex; as the brilliant Frank Beach once noted, no one ever died for lack of sex. (Insert predictable joke here.) There is no need, only want.

So what do they want?

Of course, boy monkeys and girl monkeys have different sex wants, due to different reproductive roles, so let’s take girl monkeys for now.

The Girl Monkey – let’s call her Alice – Alice the Girl Monkey wants, ultimately, to make babies (from an evolutionary perspective), but (1) she doesn’t want babies with any old genetic partner and (2) she doesn’t want babies at any old time. Fortunately, she’s hardly ever fertile – one day in every 28, roughly – and loses fertility when she’s already pregnant, when she’s breastfeeding regularly, when her body fat gets dangerously low, and when she’s generally very very stressed. The reproductive part of sex is moderately well in hand (from a biological point of view, anyway).

But then there’s the other aspect of sex, all of its social functions. It bonds Alice to her partner, she can use it as currency in exchange for social favors, she can diffuse conflict with it, she can, indeed, reduce her own stress level with it. And just as Alice the Monkey needs physical challenge and a variety of nourishment, she needs to keep her stress hormones balanced.

But at the same time, those stress hormones might keep her sexual interest flatlining.

Looks like we need to understand about stress.

As I’ve mentioned before stress is not just a response, it’s a cycle. Your body responds to a perceived threat with adrenaline and cortisol, which activates motivation to fight, flee, or freeze, and when you do what your body is pushing you to do and thus escape the threat, it rewards you with all the happy chemicals it can throw at you, activating the relaxation response.

The complicated part is when your stressor goes away but your stress is still there! Just because you’ve dealt with a stressor – say, a relationship conflict – doesn’t mean you’ve dealt with the stress. And it is the stress itself, not the presence of the stressor, that disrupts sexual interest. Alice the Human can resolve a conflict rationally. Alice the Monkey needs to run or fight to lie still and shake for a while, to move all the way through the stress response and into the relaxation response.

The ladies among us are likely (like, 90%) to recognize the experience of feeling desirous of sex under circumstances of relationship happiness: when you feel cared for, understood, supported, special, safe… ya know, loved. And you may recognize the experience of NOT wanting sex when you feel stressed, threatened, overwhelmed, exhausted, or under-appreciated; then sexual interest, like a shy ferret, hides behind the sofa and won’t come out until everyone goes away.

I’ve been playing with this simile lately: emotions are like tunnels. You have to move all the way through them or you’re stuck just sitting there in the dark.

Monkey are good at moving through their emotions to get to the calm and peace at the end of them. Humans in the industrialized west are TERRIBLE at it. It’s a skill well worth learning. Okay.

Anyway. That’s how I’ve been lately. How are you?

calm submissive

While I’ve been lying in bed, I’ve been listening to John Bradshaw’s Dog Sense, which is chock full of fascinating stuff about the science of dogs, how they evolved, how they develop, how they learn, etc. It’s not a training book, isn’t trying to be a training book, but it does offer critiques of various training methods, inevitably supporting Ian Dunbar’s positive reinforcement approach and maligning Cesar Millan as scientifically deficient. Which is true, Dunbar totally has the science and Cesar has no science.

Then yesterday I completed a mandatory online sexual harassment training and I had the response that I imagine Ian Dunbar has when he hears Cesar talk about dog psychology: “GAAAH! NOOOOO, THAT’S NOT RIGHT OH MY GOD THIS IS GONNA MAKE PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW BETTER THINK ALL KINDS OF WEIRD THINGS!!!”

But. I mean. Maybe it’s okay?

A while ago I wrote me and Cesar Millan. I read his stuff and watched his show when I got a dog. I read Ian Dunbar’s book too, and watched lots of his videos, and it was helpful – ish. He taught me how to shape my dog’s behavior through reward and denial of reward. Nice.

But Dunbar’s advice was to get a puppy that had had lots of contact with humans, and train it from scratch. Which I didn’t do. I did what every dog advocate in the world would want me to do: I adopted a 7 year old dog that had been tortured and then had lived in an orphanage for 5 years. He had fears and insecurities and poor social skills and worse leash manners.

So what did I learn from Cesar Millan’s book that I didn’t learn from the science? I learned that my dog needs me to create a stable, secure psychological structure, so that he knows where he belongs in the world. I learned that needs me to stay calm. I learned WHY being calm and patient is important, which motivated me to do it. It turns out that reason is technically wrong, but it’s close enough to be very very helpful.

As a person who is wrapping up writing a guide about relationships (it’ll be available sometime in February I think, at goodinbed.com), this is a really useful bit of insight:

Just because something is grounded in the best science (Ian Dunbar) doesn’t mean it’s the thing that will be most helpful to people in an imperfect situation. And just because something is technically wrong doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry the important message.

It’s weird for me because I LOVE science and I share with John Bradshaw a puzzlement that the people who get TV shows as “experts” are hardly ever the people with academic credentials and scientific expertise. Yet the guy with the credentials and the expertise (Dunbar) hasn’t been anything like as helpful to me in having a positive relationship with me dog as the guy with unsubstantiated ideas but a dazzlingly useful approach (Millan).

So maybe – maybe – the sexual harassment program, despite being wrong, is actually helpful for people who don’t know about these kinds of things.

I can’t even tell you how foreign that idea is to me.

My guide is all science. I think (I hope!) it’s also really helpful. It happens to have very much the same message about human relationships as Cesar has about dog relationships: stay calm, listen, don’t assume that what your partner needs is the same as what you need, and don’t make your feelings more important (or less important) than your partner’s.

And if the science doesn’t work, turn to folk wisdom. I’ve also been watching a lot of West Wing, and there’s a whole episode grounded in Ephesians: “Be subject to one another.”

If you can’t do it because the science says so, maybe do it because it’s in the frackin’ Bible.

*sigh*

I’ve spent the last week with gradually diminishing cramps; at this point it just feels like a bad period, manageable with meds. It turns out that a judicious combination of naproxen and alcohol is the most effective approach – not good in the long term, but it’ll do for the time being.

The whole experience has given me a much more profound empathy into the experience of survivors of all forms of genital trauma, especially childbirth. Everything from sexual violence to childbirth, the vagina, cervix, and uterus are targets for pain, but there’s a cultural paradox around more-or-less voluntary physiological trauma like IUD placement or (more significantly) childbirth, where you experience it with full consent and even appreciation, but your body really doesn’t know the difference between that and, say, being shot.

I’ve taught about the changes that come with motherhood – physical exhaustion combined with emotional upheaval combined with the potential for tearing, scarring, and sensitivity – that can cause a woman’s interest in sex to take a nose dive. But before my IUD placement, I don’t think I adequately appreciated the ways that the juggernaut of childbirth could transform a woman’s relationship with her vagina, altering her entire body’s feelings about her pelvis and genitals.

See, by Sunday afternoon I was thinking clearly enough to notice a kind of “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” mental block around my entire pelvis. My brain was definitely in self-protection mode, after just the small, brief trauma of having the uterus penetrated with something less than half an inch in diameter.

With childbirth, the fundamental MEANING of those body parts would change, from sexual to… well, women with different cultural backgrounds/baggage would construct different narratives to account for it, but essentially, they’d be transformed into a lockbox.

If motherhood were vital to your identity and sex never was, you might view your genitals and pelvis as sacred and untouchable. You might view yourself just as a mother and not as a subject of sexual experience.

If you always enjoyed sex and want to continue enjoying it, you might experience the lockdown as “being broken,” a symptom of damage that will go away once the baby sleeps through the night, once the baby stops breastfeeding, once the baby is in daycare, once the baby goes to school… waiting for the life event that will unlock the door, when in fact the lock is triggered not by external events but by internal processing of the physiological trauma.

Like, my sister IM’d me just now to tell me that she’s cooking “tasty chicken thighs” for dinner. And just the word “thighs” made me lock up a little bit inside. If my minuscule little IUD experience can slam on my psychophysiological brakes to such an extent, what might happen inside the embodied mind of a mother?

I’ll be going to a couple somatic experiencing sessions to move through the physiological trauma. I know enough about this process that I could probably do the work on my own, but having the guidance and supportive of a practitioner gives focus and intensity to the process.

So I guess some advice: if you’ve experienced any kind of genital trauma, whether voluntary like IUD placement that goes poorly or childbirth, or involuntary, like sexual assault, the key to reversing that “lockdown” experience (what are other useful ways to describe it?) is to grieve, to listen to what your body knows, to move all the way through the stress response cycle, allow it to complete, so that your body can relax and begin creating a new meaning.

Also, use lube. I cannot stress this enough.

Step 0. Take 1,000mg of ibuprophen before arriving at the doctor’s office. Wear comfy, warm clothes. (I always get cold at the doctor’s.) The usual pee in a cup/ blood pressure and heartrate/naked from the waist down rigmarole. The doc comes in. Okay.

Step 1. Describe to the patient what is about to happen.

DR: The first step is I’m going to feel the position of your uterus. Then we measure the depth of your uterus. This is called sounding –

ME: LOLZ. Like a well?

DR: Yes! You know, most people don’t know that term. Are you familiar with Mark Twain?

ME: Uh, sure.

DR: Well “mark twain” was what you called when you were sounding the depth of the river, so he chose that as his pen name.

ME: And now I’m going to name my IUD Mark Twain. Or Mr T for short.

DR: Well, then the next step is to place the Mirena. This is what it looks like. (He shows me an IUD in its kit, identical to the one I keep in my office to show to students.)

ME: Uh-huh.

DR: Now, they did tell you that because you’ve never had children this is likely to be more a uncomfortable procedure for you?

ME: Yeah. Um, listen in 2000 I had a colposcopy and cervical biopsy and I experienced a lot of vasovagal sensations and nearly passed out.

DR: Oh I see. Well, we’ll make sure we’re set up for that.

(It transpires that “set up for that” consists of having smelling salts in the room. I kid you not.)

Step 2. And so I set myself up in the stirrups. He inserts two fingers and palpates my abdomen – this is the “feeling the position of my uterus” part. No problems here.

DR: Relax that muscle just as much as you can. Good.

ME: (deep, slow breaths, relaxing pelvic floor muscle. I’m good at this.)

And then.

Oh and then.

I get “sounded.”

At first it was just a bit of pressure and a pinch, like a Pap smear, …but then.

I yelped like a kicked puppy and jolted my hips off the table.

DR: Try not to pull away like that.

WHAT?!?!

ME: Okay. I’ll do everything I can.

He coaches me to breathe slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth. “Slower than that,” he says. I teach that kind of thing; I’m working on it. But it FUCKING HURTS.

Step 3. Placing the Mirena.

Feels like stabbing my uterus. The assistant puts in ice pack behind my neck and I press my hands to it, desperately trying to shut the gate on the stabbing pain shuddering from my uterus to my toes and back up to my teeth.

Step 4. Cut the strings, while soothing at the patient who is shaking and crying, pale lipped and trying not to hyperventilate, pass out, or throw up. And it’s over.

DR: Roll over slowly on your left side for a minute or two. It’s not that hard for everyone. You’ve got a small uterus.

ME: (through slow, shallow breaths, lying in the recovery position) Well. It’s not the size that counts.

You learn something new about yourself every day. Me, I have a small uterus. Which has no consequences in my life until I decide to go for long-term contraception.

I lay on the table in the office for about an hour, sipping juice and rotating an ice pack from my forehead to my lower back, until I could sit up without feeling dizzy and the pain resembled really bad menstrual cramps. The doctor continued to soothe at me, telling me, “Make sure you tell your guy about this and get him to buy you something real nice.”

I swear to god he said that. I couldn’t have made that up if I tried.

All I could think to say was, “I’m going to have to cancel my meetings for this afternoon.”

Eventually I could put on my shoes and stand, at which point I drove home, got in bed, and have barely left it since. I played a lot of Angry Birds an listened to Ian Carmichael reading “Strong Poison.”

It’s been nearly 12 hours and the pain has subsided to the intensity of slightly bad cramps. I expect it’ll be tolerable without meds in the next 24 hours or so.

And after that, I’ve got 5 years of worry-free pregnancy prevention, for the cost of about two months of contraceptive pills.

Worth it? I expect it will be.

It doesn’t hurt for everyone – some women, and even some women who have never had children, have quite benign experience with getting an IUD.

But I do wish someone had let me know ahead of time how much it MIGHT hurt, so that I could have, for example, take more pain meds beforehand and brought someone with to drive me home.

My advice then: be prepared for the worst. Hope for the best. Take what comes. It’s an amazing piece of technology and I fully appreciate what it means for me and how privileged I am to live at a time when such effective and effortless birth control is readily available covered by my health insurance.

But prepare for the worst, just in case.

(Can you tell I’m working on my class for next spring?)

It’s particularly hard for my class, since there is no “next” class for them to take. There is only this; if they want to go deeper, they have to go to graduate school. And really, they have to go to grad school at Indiana University. So I feel an urgent need to give them as MUCH AS I CAN in just 13 2-hour lectures.

Last year, toward the end of the semester, I began thinking closely about how I was teaching, and I realized I was teaching in multiple voices at the same time. Like a fugue. Like this:

Or maybe more like this (Ernst Toch’s Geographic Fugue):

Multiple voices, each performing a variation on a central theme.

What are the voices?

1. Basic sexual and relationship health information.
2. Cultural attitudes that shape sexual and relationship health.
3. The science that generates research on both sexual health and cultural attitudes.
4. The cultural attitudes that shape the science that generates research

The challenges of teaching in multiple voices?

If you don’t know how to listen, it’ll sound messy and chaotic and overwhelming. And if you only hear one of the voices, you haven’t received the entire work. And if I can’t be sure that you’ve received the entire work, how do I know you’ve really understood any of it?

You can get an A in my class without every recognizing voices 3 and 4. But then you’ll be confused and frustrated by, for example, the lecture on sex research. Since the students bring different knowledge with them, only some of them will be able to hear all the voices at once. Last year, I had maybe 6 who Got the whole thing, all four voices. Out of 187.

Which seems to demand that I consider for whom I’m teaching. If I design my class KNOWING that most of the students won’t get half of what I’m teaching, won’t even NOTICE it, why not spend more time on the stuff they’ll all get, and go deeper into it?

When I consider that question seriously, this is the answer I get: boredom. My own boredom.

I can only care so much about the statistics on who uses which form of contraception or condom efficacy research or frameworks for thinking about gender. The basics of sexual health and (especially) the cultural attitudes about sexual health bore me senseless, and I can easily cover what I believe any sexually literate person should know is about half the time allotted to me. And the rest of the time I use to talk about the REALLY COOL SHIT.

It turns out the “AS MUCH AS I CAN” referenced above is qualified with “OF THE STUFF I REALLY LOVE.” Like most works of art, the curriculum of my class is an act of love – in this case, a love for the science that generates the knowledge that I’m there to teach.

Your starting point is learning to complete the stress response cycle so that your body can relax, in the knowledge that there are no lions coming to get you. So when you have the thoughts, for example, about your ex, you practice replacing them with thoughts of running or fighting. This is the skill of noticing what tension/stress/anxiety feels like, accepting it (emotion coaching), and giving yourself permission to finish the stress response so that your body can shift into relaxation. AWARENESS and NON-JUDGMENT are the two key skills here, as you allow your body to finish what it has started. (It’s a central skill in listening, right? You would always allow your partner to finish saying what they needed to say – it’s rude to interrupt, we’re all taught from an early age. So listen to your body with as much respect as you would listen to your partner.)

And be aware of the trap of feeling like you have to “be in control” of your body. Your body is aware of and remembers a lot more things than your mind, and you can only learn from it if you abandon yourself to its wisdom. Geez, does that sound hokey or what? But it’s completely true!

Once your body is able to relax without feeling worried about being relaxed, the second step is practicing being aware of what relaxing feels like. Breathing is central to this, as you’ve probably learned in your experiences with progressive muscle relaxation and other stress management techniques. You may find that relaxing can still trigger anxiety, and that’s fine because you’re practicing META-calm, as well as regular calm; i.e., feeling calm about feeling anxious, feeling calm about feeling stressed, feeling calm about feeling panic, feeling calm about feeling relaxed.

And eventually you move into the body satisfaction realm, which I expect will come pretty naturally when you’ve got the other skills down. Remember that you’re relearning the meta-emotions, how you feel about how you feel. In a meta-coaching framework, we recognize that negative feelings are the normal, healthy response to negative life events, and when we allow ourselves to move all the way through an emotion, we’ll get to the calm that comes at the end of it.

Also, Julia Heiman’s “Becoming Orgasmic” is the book with the series of exercises and writing that helps to untangle to knots more directly related to sexuality.

Increasingly, I find that being a sex educator entails being a worry educator too, helping people learn to turn off their chattering, noisy minds and pay attention to their internal experience. It’s a task sex educators and therapists have been working at for more than 30 years. And the culture just keeps getting noisier and it keeps lying to you about what your body is supposed to do, be, and look like. We’re swimming upstream.

I often say that my job is to teach people to “Be in control of your brain, so that your brain isn’t in control of you.” It’s a challenging skill, made more challenging by the pace of life and our chronic need to fill time with STUFF, noise, flickering images, information from the outside.

What America really needs? To make our sex lives better? Is a culture that values the information you get from your INSIDES as much as information from the outside.

But there’s no profit in that, so. Ya know. Do your best, and welcome the fact that your best won’t be perfect. How’s that for advice?

I’ve been trying to work out what the administration gains from this betrayal of science and public health, because I simply cannot tolerate the idea that someone as intelligent and clear-thinking as Obama really BELIEVES that this is a “common sense” decision that makes sense to him as a father of two girls. That’s BULLSHIT. It’s got to be political.

So. I investigated some.

Rates of abortion among girls aged 15 and under is less than one per 10,000, compared with around 1 in 1,000 among girls aged 15-17 (these two groups combined represent about 6.4% of all abortions performed) and slightly over 2 per thousand among girls aged 18-19, according to the Guttmacher Institute. So the public health impact on reducing access to effective contraception is far less than, say, the impact of not allowing it for OTC sale to women over 17, which is what the Bush administration did until 2006, three YEARS after the FDA advised that it was safe.

This is not to minimize the importance of reducing barriers to access to girls under the age of 17. If you’re that girl whose condom broke or whose partner forced you to have sex without a condom or who can’t ask your parents about getting birth control, then being able to walk into a store, pick up a box, and buy it, is TOTALLY CRUCIAL. (Though, as Cora Breuner points out in the Time article linked above, how many of those girls have $50 to buy EC?)

But say you’re a president. And say you want to make a public decision that will make you look good to people who don’t know much about these issues and are much better at being scared of young people’s sexuality than they are at being compassionate toward young people who have sex – because those ignorant, non-compassionate people are swing voters – but you want to do it without actually fucking up public health outcomes in a major way.

You’re not significantly increasing the pregnancy rate or the abortion rate, as measured at the population level, because those girls represent such a small proportion of the abortions performed in the U.S. And you’re not even meaningfully increasing the pregnancy rate, since access to EC is not correlated at the population level with reductions in the pregnancy rate. It’ll be easy to point to data that show that no harm was done.

And in 2012, when you’ve been elected for your second and final term, you can reverse the decision, with someone brilliant like Elizabeth Warren in the wings, knowing that the number of girls who suffered over the previous 11 months is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of women and girls who would suffer under any of the Republican contenders’ administrations.

(FYI: a handy summary of the age-and-EC research by RHTP (PDF).)

I’m not trying to be an apologist here – the decision is fraudulent and a vicious strike against both science and women’s reproductive health and rights. It’s BULLSHIT and it makes me angry. But I’ve respected a great deal of what the President has done, especially the measured, patient, and collaborative approach he has brought, even when the Republicans didn’t (in my view) deserve such respectful treatment. He’s Melanie Hamilton to my Rhett Butler: he’s all the things I can never be but that I respect as good and decent. So what in the world could induce Melanie Hamilton to support such a stupid decision?

Long-term harm reduction.

It’s an idea.

But don’t let this idea stop you from calling your representative, your Senators, and the white house, to explain to them that it’s BULLSHIT. BULL. SHIT.

My favorite part is on page two of the Psychology Today article, where Brian talks about problems in the media’s coverage of the study, which parallels my thinking on mainstream journalism reporting science:

1. Writers were either confused or deliberately choosing the more extreme, less representative central tendency (the mean rather than the median) to report.

2. Writers emphasized the central tendency, to the exclusion of standard deviation, when one of the most compelling results of the study was the wide variability among subjects.

3. Writers also emphasized the sex part, paying inadequate attention to the fact that thoughts about sleep and food were as frequent as thoughts about sex.

4. Writers emphasized population-level differences between men and women, neglecting to clarify that there was lots of overlap so that, even though the men on average reported more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep), many of the individual women had more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep) than many of the individual men.

5. Writers generalized the results to All People, rather than recognizing the delimitations of the population studied: college students, who are likely to be WEIRD.

What can we really conclude about frequency of thoughts about sex? We think about sex about as often as we think about food and sleep, and we vary a great deal from each other in all three topics.

I wanted to insert another thought here, too:

Hunger and sleep are both drive motivation systems, with a powerful homeostatic mechanism punishing an organism for failing to get adequate food (hunger) or sleep (fatigue). Sex, in contrast, is an incentive motivation system, pushing an organism toward appetitive stimuli, rewarding the organism for exposure to positive experiences rather than punishing it for not getting enough.

(This is not so simple a binary as I’ve made it sound.)

So I wonder how frequency of sex thoughts compares with other incentive motivation systems, like exploration (what’s a thought about “exploration”? Heck, what’s a thought about “sex”?)

One example from this morning: this recent article in Wired, which says, in short, that seeing photos of people without clothes on changes the viewer’s perception of that person’s mental capacities – specifically decreased ratings of “agency” (“the capacity to act, plan and exert self-control”) and increased ratings of “experience” (“the capacity to feel pain, pleasure and emotions”).

Given my recent mental perambulations about objectification and the media, it sparked my interest, so I went and read the whole paper. ‘Cz, nerd.

The authors’ point is that rather than causing “objectification” – i.e., perceiving someone as having less overall mind – focus on bodies actually results in a “redistribution of mind,” causing them to be perceived more in terms of experience and less in terms of agency.

Which to me sounds like an important but ultimately minute point – to me, objectification means decreased perceived agency, and indeed the research they cite in their lit review confirms this, for the most part. They write, in part:

In one discussion, for example, Nussbaum (1995) outlines a number of components of objectification, among them “denial of autonomy,” which is failing to ascribe the capacity for choice and self-determination; “inertness,” which is failing to ascribe the capacity for agency and action; and “denial of subjectivity,” which is failing to ascribe the capacity for experience and feelings.

The part they’re refining/refuting has to do with “denial of subjectivity.” It turns out, according to this series of experiments, that when you break down assessments of “mind” into these two variables, agency and experience, nakedness decreases perceived agency but increases perceived experience. However, in the results of experiment three, they do report that “there was an overall less mind ascribed to naked targets” (i.e., people in the photographs) than to clothed subjects, though this is a mathematical artefact of the fact that subjects rated the people in the images overall as having less agency (“mind”) and more experience (“body”).

In relation to my Body of a Blogger post, they confirmed previous research that found that ratings of attractiveness increase ratings of both agency and experience. In other words, pretty people are viewed as both more capable and more sensitive.

So the important question for me is, “Does this matter? Does this change how we consider the problem of objectification?” To which I can’t help thinking, “No. My conceptualization of the problem remains the same.”

And why is that, Emily? Well. They do definitely TRY. The final experiment (out of 6) explores the “up side” of increased experience attribution. It involved subjects believing that they’re shocking their partner, with the goal of protecting their partner from harm and therefore only shocking them as much as they felt their partner could tolerate. In the conditions where subjects were shown images of their male “partner” (actually a confederate) with their shirt off, they shocked the person at a lower level than when they were shown a picture of their partner with their shirt on. So participants inflicted less harm, conclude the researchers, when people are perceived more as bodies than as minds.

And that kinda sounds like bullshit to me. In the photographs, the “shocking” nodes are either attached to the person’s skin or to the person’s clothes, so couldn’t they be responding to the basic physics of the problem, that shocks to your clothes are less direct and therefore less painful than shocks to your skin, rather than to their perception of the person as “more able to experience pain”? They are more able to experience pain because the nodes are taped to their skin rather than to their shirts, surely.

So. Does this idea that people are perceived more as “experiencers” and less as “actors” when they have their clothes off change how I think about objectification? Does it help me to talk with my students (or with anyone) about this phenomenon? Er, nope.

An important thing to note that hardly anyone ever bothers saying out loud so let me just take this opportunity: all the results are about PERCEPTIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHS OF BODIES, not perceptions of bodies per se. This is also a primary shortcoming of mate selection research in humans: people rate images – photographs or even stimuli as impoverished as LINE DRAWINGS. What relationship does the perception of a line drawing have to a person’s perception of a human body? Fuck knows. If there is research that compares how people’s attributions of mind are the same or different depending on whether they’re seeing bodies or photographs, I would love to hear about it.

Another important thing to note is that “mind” is a cultural construction and therefore varies from culture to culture, so the whole idea of “attribution of mind” and the impact on behavior or judgments can only be interpreted in the context of culture.

So I suppose this is another example of interesting but unhelpful.