Here's what my model predicts about the brain of cognitive neuroscientists. I can haz PhD nao?

[alexandraerin]

So, I rather suspect that if Ogas and Gaddam bother to answer their critics (myself included) they're going to seize on the fact that a number of the people who've thrown questions at them are still referring specifically to the survey-driven approach to their "research" they took in the fall of 2009. Since they in fact abandoned that approach, they can easily answer those criticisms by saying, "Oh, yes, obviously there were some problems there. But it was never more than a small part of the overall project and the survey data forms no part of the basis of our results."

And then they'll pretend like they've answered all the objections. All their critics will be referred to as confused and angered individuals who haven't kept up with the developments and so on.

And they will probably "get away with it", more or less, because while they're doing that a small but vocal group of their supporters are smearing all objectors (women and otherwise, laypersons and academics alike) as being "shrieking feminists" who want to shut them down because they dare to postulate that there may be differences between men and women.

(Sidenote: I've just learned that Ogas is himself spreading the "shrieking feminists" meme. I didn't think it was possible for me to lose respect for him. Apparently, there is a bottom below the bottom of the barrel.)

Well, not that I expect it to make much difference, but I'm going to address this head on.

The fact is that I have no motivation to attack the idea of "male brain" and "female brain" in general. I might think there's more room to talk about how much of it is social vs. how much is inherent... Ogas and Gaddam seem happy to assume that the answer to questions like that is always whatever makes their own work more important, but I'm willing to admit that I don't know where the line falls.

But I'm not ardently and philosophically opposed to the idea that there is a difference, or even to the idea that the difference might be fundamental.

Why? Because I am a trans woman. Specifically, I'm a trans woman who gets her kicks way more from prose than porn, who prefers even her most brutal and fetishistic and straightforward erotic stories to have characters who feel things... so, basically, if some sciency-scientist comes along and says that those are female traits found predominantly in female brains, that's not exactly an idea that's repulsive to me, y'know?

So of course the real reason I'm voicing disagreement with their methods is just that: I disagree with their methods.

Whatever generalizations it's possible to draw about men and women... well, in the first place, the researchers rarely (if ever) seem to bother to make it clear that they're talking about generalities. They don't acknowledge exceptions. If they made it clear they were working purely with broad trends that would be one thing, but they seem to prefer to ignore exceptions.

Which is a shame, because if they're trying to learn something about the brain in general... and "male brains" and "female brains" in particular... wouldn't the exceptions be interesting? There are women who hide away in their rooms to masturbate to visual porn "like a man".

I know some women like this. Some are straight, some are gay, some are bi. Some consider themselves to be more fluid than any of those labels suggest.

If there's even a little truth to their models, shouldn't Ogas and Gaddam be intrigued* to know about the existence of these women? Shouldn't they be dying of curiosity to find out what's going on in their brains? Will they show activity in the same areas that men show when they're being visually stimulated? Will they show activity like women who are reading erotica? Will it be something completely different?

But, no. They don't want to know about these women. They only want to know about men and women having experiences that they can easily map to their model. And then they claim that what they find supports this model. This is where we get into the biggest, most fundamental flaw in what they're doing.

Time and time again they have made it clear that as modelers they aren't interested in taking in any information on what's going on in the brain... they're taking that information from past studies and trying to correlate it to other things. Survey data, in their original approach, and data they mine from anonymous search results.

But time and time again when they've explained how they make these correlations, they've made it clear that they are basically pulling things out of their asses. They say themselves that no one else has done this kind of study before, so it's not like there's any established standards or any prior work they can point to in order to back it up.

When they declare that women who write and read slash fic are being aroused by the "erotical illusion" of "seemingly heterosexual" characters having sex with each other and that this reaction mirrors the sub-cortical interaction at play when a guy look at "shemale" (sic) porn, they have no brain scans or other data to back this up. They decided a year and a half ago that these interactions were the same, based on an entirely different rationale.

SurveyFail forced them to throw out that original rationale but the gut feeling that the two were the same remained... so they came up with a model for arousal that explained how the two things could be the same thing.

But... and here's the big but... they never actually established that they were the same thing in the first place.

They declared that they were equivalent, they constructed a model based around that idea, and now they point to the model to prove the equivalence. It's the equivalent of the old "holy scripture is the word of God because holy scripture says so" fallacy, only it's worse because we're being told the holy scripture is the word of God by the guys we watched chiseling it into the rocks in the first place.

I'm not saying there's no room in the scientific process for a scientist to have a gut instinct about how things fit together and propose a model that would explain it. There certainly is! But that's how you start. That's phase one. Phase two would be to come up with a way to test your model to see if it is or isn't consistent with reality. Actually conducting that test is when you get into the area of "experiments", which is what Ogas and Gaddam claim they have conducted when in fact they have barely even strung together a hypothesis.

They're not interested in testing, though. They're basically operating at the level of conspiracy theorists: if none of the facts they've collected directly contradicts the worldview they've built, they call that "proof". And like the worst conspiracy theorists, they're perfectly willing to ignore things that do directly contradict their model.

Because their "erotical illusion" rationale? Doesn't hold up. It's based on the idea that women who write and read slash fic are seeing the men in their stories as straight heterosexual men engaged in homosexual acts and the resulting dissonance helps stimulate their libido. Back during SurveyFail, the slash fic community made it perfectly clear to them that comparatively few slashers view their subjects through that sort of lens.

Oh, yes, there are specific stories where the straightness of one (or both) participants is a plot point, and there are the "only for you" stories, but stories where two straight men--presented and read as straight men in the stories--have sex and it's just like "WTF? We're straight and having sex now."... that's not really the gold standard of slash fic.

Such a story would almost have to be porn without plot to be readable... the characters' sexuality and feelings couldn't come up except to the extent that they feel like they're having sex. The doctors made such a big deal out of the idea that female porn is plot driven and character centric and focused on emotions, but still with all that they think that women are sitting there in front of their screens reading about two straight men having sex as straight men and getting off on the dissonance?

It doesn't add up.

On any level.

But it lets them hold on to their gut feeling that women writing and reading porn about gay men is weird and anomalous on the same level that men consuming porn about "shemales". It lets them validate their model.

And here's the amusing thing. The doctors have written about the human tendency to label other people's sexual desires and foibles as being deviant and other while excusing/normalizing their own. Well, as a sidenote I think if they actually did enough research about sex and sexuality to do the kind of study they claim they're doing they would find out that this generalization doesn't hold perfectly... yes, we're all judgmental, but the world is full of people who overestimate their own "perverseness" compared to other people. But that's a sidenote.

My main point here is that the doctors have fallen into the same trap they describe on their blog and in the introduction to their book. Before they conceived their project, they had no experience of slash fic. It had never occurred to them that their might be women out there who like the idea of male/male pairings. And this idea is so alien to them, so strange, so out there that it must have an equally out there explanation.

Basically, they think it's fucked-up, and then try to use SCIENCE! to explain the fucked-up-edness.

So, internet trolls: I've explained why I have no reason to reject out of hand the idea that preferring well-developed erotic prose to visual stimulation is a "female trait" found mostly in "female brains".

And to Drs. Ogas and Gaddam: I've explained my actual objections which do not stem from the mistaken notion that your book is based around your disastrous, ill-advised, and unethical survey attempt from 2009.

And I think that about sums it up. Barring any extraordinary developments that's the last I'm going to say about this matter in this space. I've got too much of my own stuff to do than continue to rail against a book that's probably going to do kind of alright for itself no matter what I say or do. And it's going to do alright because it's exactly the opposite of what Ogas and Gaddam want to believe it is: it's not new. It's not cutting edge. It's just telling the people what they want to hear. It regurgitates old stereotypes with 21st century updates.

Like, a lot of people out there don't know any more about slash fic than Ogas and Gaddam did... but having a couple of guys with a PhD tell them that women who are turned on by men having sex with each other is exactly the same kind of fucked-up as men who like "shemale" porn? That's what we might call "ultrareactionary". People learn how to shove distressing new information about female sexuality into a box at the same instant they learn about it.

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*I wish I remembered where I read about one of the researcher's first exposure to the concept of slash fic, which as far as I can tell was the spark that inspired the project. It was such a delightfully naive response, like, "Oh! Gracious me! There are women who like porn? And it has men having sex with men? How very strange! How completely peculiar! This revolutionary revelation changes everything!"

And then they go out and invent models that help explain away this troubling information.

Other people have already compared Ogas and Gaddam to phrenologists, but I see a different comparison here. They're like the old timey doctors who didn't believe in female orgasm but believed that hysteria and other female problems could be remedied by using hands-on massage or vibration of the sex organs to induce "hysterical paroxysm".

And that in a nutshell is everything that's wrong with these two in lay terms... not everything that's wrong with them on the level of "Is this good science?", but everything that's wrong with them if we ignore the PhDs and just focus on the fact that they think they know something about the world and they've written a book to share it with the world. They know so little about the internet and about female sexuality that they had no clue that slash fic existed or that some women might be into that sort of thing... but as soon as they found out about slash fic they think they know enough about the internet to mine it for data and enough about female sexuality to draw conclusions about how women engage with this form of fiction they just now found out exists.