Quickies
Quickies: PMS, LGBT atheists, girls playing D&D, and maternity leave
- An unproductive story of reproduction and PMS – Cordelia Fine on the theory that PMS evolved to drive away infertile men.
- LGBT Americans are “significantly less religious” and there’s almost no gender difference – “LGBT organizations that present LGBT people as religious in an attempt to make us seem mainstream and nice — and that throw LGBT atheists under the bus — need to wake the fuck up. LGBT organizations that bend over backwards to court interfaith alliances, while ignoring alliance-building with atheist organizations and communities, need to wake the fuck up. Major LGBT conferences that have approximately 764,906 sessions about religion, with three sessions about atheism, need to wake the fuck up.” From Amy.
- Watch a mini documentary about a group of girls playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time – “When filmmaker Meredith Jacobson overheard her boyfriend tell a group of 9-11 year old boys that young girls aren’t interested in playing D&D, the producer wanted to prove that the joy of role-playing games knows no gender—and thus the idea for DnDnG was born.”
- A tale of two maternity leaves – “While the United States prides itself on its family values, it is one of only three industrialized nations not offering maternity care. The other two are Papua New Guinea and Oman.
- Cute Animal Friday! This video brought to you by my absolute love of tiny grey kittens. And to really amp up the cute, fennec fox pups.
I do enjoy me some Cordelia Fine debunking. Even if we ignore the excellent points she makes about premenstrual syndrome and early human relationships, you would think this hypothesis is easily disproved. Women who are pregnant are much more likely to suffer from the negative emotional effects of hormones. If cave-lady’s being a little cranky from bloating were enough to scare off the cave-gents, pregnant stereotype cave-lady crying out of the blue and demanding pickles and mammoth-milk ice cream at 3 am would send him running.
On the D&D thing, I can’t believe there are really still people still saying women aren’t interested in that.
Oh, you’d be surprised the nerdy things men can’t imagine women enjoying.
How would PMS make women only unbearable to infertile men? That…doesn’t make any sense.
As I understand it, with a fertile man, the woman would be perpetually pregnant* (or nursing), thus suppressing her insufferable PMS.**
[*] and barefoot and in the cave-kitchen, making mammoth sandwiches.
[**] isn’t it another tenet of evo-psych that insanity is inherited from one’s children? With lots of kids, wouldn’t she be unbearable 24 by 7 by 365, not just a few days each month? Think it through, people!***
[***] this paleo-evo-psych stuff always reminds me of a bad episode of the Flintstones.
When humans evolved, the difficult part of reproduction was not getting pregnant, it was having a child not die before age 5 due to infection.
Over evolutionary time, the average woman had 2 children survive and reproduce. We know that because if the average was slightly higher (2.1 for example), over a few hundred generations the population would have reached levels we know did not happen. (1.05)^500 = 4×10^10.