Tag Archives: opinion

On Love

January 18, 2010 Deirdre Straughan 3 Comments

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of research about love, relationships, marriage, and divorce. I’m still mystified – and so are the experts. But new technology (fMRI) allows us to look inside the brain in new ways, so perhaps we are finally on the road to explaining the great “mystery of love” which has puzzled philosophers, psychologists, and lovers, probably since the dawn of human consciousness.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

Dr. Helen Fisher postulates (and researches) the theory that humans have evolved three kinds of mating-related love, each driven by separate (but connected) hormonal circuits in the brain:

Lust (associated with testosterone) drives us to mate (well, duh, otherwise the species wouldn’t be here).
Romantic love (dopamine) is a drive – rather than an emotion – which focuses our attention on one person who could potentially be a long-term mate. Focus is the key word here: many of the symptoms of intense romantic love are manifestations of obsessive focus on the object of that love.
Attachment (vasopressin, oxytocin) is a feeling of calm and security, which encourages us to stay with a mate long enough to raise a child.*

Fisher says it is possible to feel any of these three types of love in any combination or order, and to feel each for different people at the same time, though she also states that it is not possible to feel romantic love for more than one person at a time (presumably because of the intense focus involved).

Each type of love can (though it doesn’t necessarily) lead to another: lustful stimulation of the genitals causes dopamine to be produced, triggering romantic love. Orgasm causes a flood of oxytocin and vasopressin, which can lead to attachment, especially when repeated. Conversely, feelings of attachment can morph into romantic love: the “falling in love with your best friend” phenomenon.

Note that, in Fisher’s scenario, the term “real love” is meaningless. If you’re feeling it – and not just pretending to yourself or someone else that you are – it’s real. The important question is: which kind of love are you feeling?

The Evolution of Love

In Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray (1994, updated 2016), Fisher postulates that walking on two legs forced humans to evolve pair bonding. Unlike an ape, whose baby rides on its mother’s back, an upright, bipedal human must carry her (far more helpless) baby in her arms or on her hip. This means that she cannot easily run from predators, take refuge in a tree, or forage for her food. She needs a mate for protection, to help ensure the survival of herself and her child. A male who bonds with a female and helps care for their child ensures that his genes survive and are carried on. So we are selected for pairing up (temporarily) to bear and raise children.

BUT – Fisher believes that: “Humans have evolved a dual reproductive strategy: a drive to pair up to raise children, but also a restlessness and tendency to adultery, divorce, and remarriage.” (quoted from her talk at LeWeb ’08, though the point is also made in her books).

Many species besides humans are monogamous, and for similar reasons: it takes two to successfully raise young. But genetic studies have shown that most “monogamous” species – even those that bond only for a single mating season – are also adulterous.

This behavior has evolved because both sexes are trying to get the best of both genetic worlds. It’s to the female’s advantage to have a steady mate to help raise the young, but she also benefits from having offspring with a genetic variety of males, which gives her own genes a better chance of surviving and being carried on. It’s to the male’s genetic advantage to impregnate as many females as possible, while investing the minimum resources in actually raising the resulting offspring.

Conversely, each has a strong interest in ensuring that their partner does not stray: the male does not want to be tricked into raising some other male’s children, while the female does not want her mate spending resources on some other female, or possibly being lured away for good, leaving her to raise their offspring alone. Hence the irrational, sometimes overwhelming, power of jealousy.

Fisher reports on studies showing that, in pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies, where the sexes have similar “economic” (food gathering) power, pair bonds were/are not expected to last for life. Divorce, though painful, is not difficult: either partner can easily walk away with all of his/her possessions, to start a new life with a new partner.

Fisher believes that humankind’s invention of agriculture made women dependent on men, because plowing required a man’s strength. But a man could not manage a farm alone, nor could land be parceled out and carried away if a relationship ended. “Til death do us part” became the norm for good reason: losing a mate could be fatal.

This ancient “ideal” still carries enormous cultural weight, even though most of us today are not farmers and may not even need a partner for economic support.

Love Today

I distill from all this that modern humans are subject to several warring impulses:

We are evolved to mate (just) long enough to produce and raise offspring.
Both sexes are also evolved to cheat, but we mostly do it on the sly because it is enormously threatening to our mates.
Much more recently in human evolutionary history, but long ago in cultural memory, we developed a societal expectation that we will mate with absolute fidelity and forever. It’s important to realize that this expectation is cultural, not evolved.

The prevailing attitude towards love and marriage in American culture is particularly and dangerously idealized. We define “real” love as romance that grows into a lifelong, sexually-faithful attachment. Marriage is further burdened with expectations that our partner will meet our every emotional and physical need, and that, if the love is “real”, we will live together harmoniously forever and ever, amen.

The expected pattern is that you meet “the one,” fall in love, marry, have children, and live happily ever after. Popular culture (from romance novels to chick flicks to self-help books to greeting cards) constantly reinforces this, so we feel cheated or that we have failed if we do not experience this kind of idealized, all-encompassing love – or if it doesn’t last forever.

It seems to me that this American myth of love does more harm than good. We go into marriage expecting far too much of the relationship and of our spouse, and blame them or ourselves when the reality falls short of our expectations. We feel pressured to “make it work” even when one or both partners is irremediably unhappy in a relationship. We feel crushing guilt when a relationship fails. Then we go out searching all over again for “that special someone” to fulfill an impossible ideal, kicking off another cycle of inevitable disappointment.

…and that’s what I’ve figured out so far. Your thoughts?

Related reading:

* According to Fisher, in pre-agricultural societies “long enough to raise a child” is/was probably about four years. More on that another time.

bio, women in technology

Who’s a Guy?

July 30, 2009 Deirdre Straughan 1 Comment

One session I (and many others) attended at the Community Leadership Summit was on women in technology/communities. Frankly, I lost patience very quickly. As I said then, we all have horror stories; I’m more interested in discussing fixes. (Which, with Sara Ford to get the ball rolling, we did.)

One meme that came up repeatedly during this session was the sexism – or otherwise – of using the term “guys” to refer to a mixed group of men and women. In other words, is it offensive to walk into a room containing both sexes and say: “Hi, guys” ?

Some felt that it was sexist, though probably unconsciously so, others felt that anyone who thought so was being over-sensitive. Impasse.

A few days later during OSCON, I found myself in a Moscone Center women’s bathroom at the same time as one of the women whose job during the conference was to make sure that no unbadged person got into a session. We were the only people in the room. She said to me: “You guys are really rare at things like this.”

It took me more than a few milliseconds to parse this. She meant: “Women at technical conferences are rare.” And used the term “guys” to refer to me and women like me.

Case closed. “Guys” no longer refers to men only, so we can stop arguing about whether it’s sexist.

opinion

SxSWi: Is Privacy Dead, or Just Very Confused?

May 9, 2009 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

I attended this session because : danah boyd (one of my heroes) and Judith Donath of MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Center (whom I happen to know personally) were speaking.

Also on the panel (and interesting in their own right):

Siva Vaidyanathan (author of the forthcoming â€œThe Googleization of Everythingâ€), who said (among other things) that privacy is not the opposite of publicity. Privacy is not a substance. It means different things in different contexts.
Alice Marwick, doing her dissertation on the Effect of Social Media on Social Status

What follows is a transcription of my notes, with [my own thoughts and comments].

CEOs these days expect their staff to be familiar with social technology. [Yay! I can haz job!]

There is social value to online relationships â€“ people get real emotional support online.

But the information we put online is valuable to marketers.

[D here: So what? I just wish they’d make it valuable to me. Personally, I would be happy to see advertising that I’m actually interested in.

Take car advertising. How often does any of us buy a car? Yet it seems that every other ad on TV or at the movies is for a car. I’d like to know which is larger: the number of cars sold in the US each year, or the number of car ads shown? For most people, buying a car is a relatively rare event. Much of that advertising must be a waste of car companies’ money, and it’s certainly a waste of my time and attention, which I resent.

I was intensely interested in information about cars for a few weeks last summer, and again this March when I was buying a first car for my daughter. For myself, I ended up leasing a Toyota Rav4. I knew I liked this car because I had driven it as a rental for several weeks, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the sticker price. Then I discovered (on the Toyota website) a great lease deal that I qualified for, so I was able to get my dream car. I only test-drove one other (a used Hyundai SUV). No doubt the fact that the Rav4 was available as a rental at that time and place was part of a marketing effort – in my case, a very effective one.

For Ross, I did a lot more research, entirely online, for a good â€œstarterâ€ car that would last a while. She drove only one model â€“ the Honda Fit â€“ and that’s what she now owns (or rather, what the bank owns and I’m now paying for). A key selling point was Consumer Reports’ safety rating on this model (a big concern for me as the mother of a new driver).

If I’ve ever noticed either of these cars advertised in print or media, I don’t remember it. I do remember examples of advertising that had a negative impact on me, e.g. the painfully obvious product placement of Lexus in Desperate Housewives and Fiat in Montalbano.

So all the money spent showing me car ads was wasted. As Judith Donath said, there should be rewards for accurate targeting. In fact, there would be: I would buy!]

Judith Donath is interested in visualization of online identity/history.

Is online identity meaningful? You have different public faces for different spheres. We try to maintain control of our various public personas, but the web is causing the collapse of personalities.

[Which is to say: It’s hard to be one kind of person in your private life and a very different kind of person in your professional life, if much of both is viewable online. Coincidentally, a woman at another session I attended described trying to juggle two identities in Second Life. She said: “I’m trying to live two lives. And it’s killing me!”

I guess I’ve been lucky that I’ve always been myself, online and off. ]

It’s hard to know how others see you. We need technology to show us a mirror of the trails we have left behind (an area of research interest for Judith right now).

SV: There was a movement towards privacy in the mid-70s which resulted in current laws, e.g., no branch of government can share information about you with any other branch.

danah boyd: Young people see privacy differently. They do not see their homes as private spaces because they do not have control there â€“ their parents can invade their rooms at any time.

Young people are also very aware of the role of power imbalances in privacy, and they find ways to trick the system.

â€œBecause she puts so many things online, people think that’s all that’s going on.â€ [Now there’s a topic I could write reams on. But not today.]

SV: personal information is a currency.

JD: Time is also a context.

Discussion on health insurance, privacy and employability [ a topic I’ve written about myself].

Privacy and personal presentations of the self:

Privacy is a historically recent concept. People used to live in small tribes/communities in which everyone knew everyone else’s business.

[Me again: If you’ve ever lived in a small town, you know exactly what this is like.

It seems to me that the solution is simply not to do anything that you would be ashamed to have held up to public scrutiny. Obviously, this requires a society in which very little is grounds for shame. And this may be exactly what is happening in America. As Judith said: â€œWe are creating what may be the most open and accepting society [in history] because we can see so much [online] about people’s divergent behaviors.â€

The film â€œMilkâ€ portrays how (some) young gay people living in middle America in the 1970s saw Harvey Milk – an openly gay man – on the news, and realized that they could go and be themselves in larger cities that had gay communities. For that to happen, Milk had to make enough of a stir to appear in the national news, and perhaps he died for it. Nowadays, all sorts of â€œdifferencesâ€ can be researched online, and anyone can find kindred spirits and support. (Yes, there are some cases in which this is worrying.)]

JD: In a society of millions of people trying to keep up with what their norms are, that’s the function of celebrity: to give us a basis for comparison/discussion. [D: I find this idea frightening. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears as social norms?]

We want people to pay attention to us. What is the value of that?

funny signs

“It takes a while…”

November 12, 2008 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Jenny Holzer, selections from The Living Series, 1989

Beh, truth be told – not that long.

bio, living in the USA, opinion, politics

Americans’ Phobia of Socialized Medicine

October 11, 2008 Deirdre Straughan 11 Comments

I am baffled by the people I encounter in this country who think that “socialized medicine” is evil. I’m not sure how they arrive at this conclusion. It seems that, for some, anything they can label “socialist” is automatically frightening. But we have state-run fire and police departments and military (among many other things), and the vast majority of Americans would agree that these areas of common human endeavor are best run by government.

Why, therefore, do so many instantly discard the idea that governments can effectively provide health care? Other countries’ governments are managing national health systems quite well. Do we have so little faith in the abilities of our own government?

I’ve seen socialized medicine working for my own family. I lived in Italy for 17 years (my Italian husband is still there), and have written about my (mostly positive) experiences with Italy’s national health system.

My father lives in England with his British wife, and the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has done very well by them. Just a few weeks ago, Dad had a $60,000 operation – paid for by the British government, and he’s not even a citizen! – to implant an electronic device which interrupts pain signals from his body to his brain: a last-ditch remedy for ten years of extreme, chronic pain due to arthritis. And it’s working.

In Italy, my mother-in-law had a mastectomy within days of a tumor being discovered, and her chemotherapy and related medications were free. When our daughter broke her arm, a compound fracture requiring surgery, the surgery, hospital stay, and follow-up care were free. When I had my own cancer scares, all the tests were done within days, and I paid less than 100 euros for the biopsy. I’ve been under treatment for glaucoma for years; with my doctor’s prescription in Italy, the medicine costs 2 euros a month.

Because health care is universal in these countries, medical privacy need not be a huge concern: you’re going to get treated, no matter what you’ve got. Whereas, in the US, you must jealously guard information about any chronic or genetic condition you may have, for fear that it will damage your chances for employment and insurance.

The Problem of Choice

Some Americans fear that a government-run health system would limit their choices, which is likely true. But is that such a bad thing? Too much choice can be as bad as too little, especially when it requires so much time and knowledge to understand what’s on offer and make an informed decision.

One of the most difficult transitions for me in moving back to the US has been precisely this. I’m an intelligent and highly-educated person, but simply comprehending my health insurance options (and, thank Sun, I have options!) has been largely beyond me so far. I have insurance, but that’s about all I know, pending further study that I haven’t had time for. I can imagine how overwhelming this must seem to someone much younger (or older) and/or less experienced than I.

In Italy, things are a lot simpler. You choose a family doctor from a limited list of local practitioners, most likely someone whose office is convenient to your home. When you’re sick, you visit that doctor during his/her office hours (some by appointment, some you just sit around and wait). If you need a specialist or tests, the family doctor writes an authorization and you schedule an appointment, which will be available later or sooner depending on how busy your local providers are and how urgent your medical situation is. I once scheduled a routine mammogram 8 or 10 months in advance, but when I needed one in a hurry for a suspicious lump, it was performed within 24 hours. (NB: Bi-annual mammograms are free for all women over 45. Socialized health systems are big on preventive medicine, because it makes economic sense.)

And if you want choice in Italy, you can pay out of your own pocket to go to whatever practitioner you like.

Of course, no system is perfect. Malpractice can happen anywhere. My father-in-law was probably killed in Italy by an anesthesiologist too old to be administering an epidural. My aunt’s botched hiatal hernia operation (in Austin, Texas) led to ten years of agony and, eventually, her death. Malpractice suits are rare in Texas, so she never got the money needed to help fix what the doctor screwed up. Penny-pinching by the Medicare system (America’s version of national health, available only to the elderly and used only by those who have no choice) likely exacerbated her problems and also contributed to her death. Being poor and uninsured limits your choices far more than a national health system does.

Given all this, I don’t understand why so many Americans have such a knee-jerk negative reaction to nationalizing health care. Can anyone explain this to me?

Countries Beginning with I

Tag Archives: opinion