The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 (19 page)

One consistent voice of reason in the debate has been that
of Alan Stern, formerly of the Southwest Research Institute. Stern is principal investigator with
New Horizons
, and you have to have some sympathy for his view. When his spacecraft was launched, it was on its way to a planet – but now it isn't. Stern has criticised the IAU's resolution, calling it ‘an awful definition; it's sloppy science and it would never pass peer review'. He cites the fact that several of the Solar System's planets, including the Earth and Jupiter, have not entirely cleared their neighbourhood of debris and therefore do not strictly meet the new criteria for planethood. Perhaps in deference to this view, the IAU executive committee announced a new type of celestial object in June 2008 – the ‘plutoid', which is basically a dwarf planet in an orbit beyond Neptune. Currently, Eris, Pluto, Makemake and Haumea are the only known plutoids, but it is very likely that, as observations improve, other Kuiper Belt objects will turn out to be spherical and therefore qualify. The plutoid's definition, too, has been widely criticised, but this time because the term sounds too much like an unpleasant skin complaint.

My own view is that, while I agree the IAU's definition of a planet is not perfect, it's a lot better than what we had before – which was essentially nothing. The reclassification of Pluto shows science in action, as researchers come to terms with new information and act appropriately upon it. To have done otherwise would have been to deny what nature is telling us.

Classification

Cast out

Explosive

Many-worlds quantum mechanics vs earth-based grease monkeys

gareth roi jones

Quantum mechanics

(those most dizzyingly complex

of celestial craftsman)

allow small particles

(electrons, atoms, & whatnots) to exist

in a ‘superposition of states'

in opposition to what we observe

in our ‘real' daily earth-based life

where things are in one state or another

a coin is either heads or tails after flipping

                                                             not both

a car is either moving or stationary

                                                not both

a bill is either reasonably priced for the services rendered

or from a qualified mechanic

                                          not both

Schrödinger disliked this superposition notion

& posited the paradox of the entangled cat

callously trapped, unobserved, in a sealed steel chamber

alongside a potentially broken flask of hydrocyanic acid

both dead & alive at the same time

challenging the counter-intuitiveness

of the mathematics behind quantum states

in a classic case of
reductio ad absurdum

(however, his position on exorbitant repair bills is, sadly, not recorded)

the only moral I can draw is this:

where possible don't get a real grease monkey to fix your car

always go for an Austrian physicist

Dead and alive

Paradox

The vagina dialogues

Cordelia Fine

In every healthy young man the instinct of sex is present, controlled or allowed to run riot according to his strength of self-control and elevation of mind. Some young women possess it in as great, and in rare cases even a greater degree; but in the majority of healthy women before marriage it lies in a more or less dormant condition, and occasionally is altogether absent. – Margaret Stephens
, Women & Marriage: A Handbook
(1910)

My nine-year-old son recently found the DVD case for a documentary that explores positive celebrations of female sexuality in India, Cuba, China and Uganda. He read out the title
, The Sunny Side of Sex
, then asked me: ‘Is there a stormy side too?'

‘Oh, yes,' I replied.

When Rebecca Jordan-Young, a socio-medical scientist at Columbia University, interviewed psychobiological researchers of sex differences, she was repeatedly told that ‘masculine and feminine sexuality are simply “common-sense” ideas'. As one scientist told her: ‘Most people … don't have any problem understanding that male sexuality is different from female sexuality. It's a no-brainer'.

Yet, argues Jordan-Young in her recent book
Brain Storm
, ‘from this side of the sexual revolutions of the 20th century, it is easy to lose track of just how much has changed, and how rapidly'. As she shows, only 30 or 40 years ago scientists categorised so many sexual behaviours as distinctly masculine – the initiation of sex, intense physical desire, masturbation, erotic dreams, arousal to narratives – that it was hardly an exaggeration to say that ‘sexuality itself was seen as a masculine trait'. The psychobiologists' account of normal female sexual feelings and behaviour all but rendered ‘female sexuality' an oxymoron. Female sexual imagination was restricted to ‘wedding fantasies' (presumably not of an ‘Ooh,
Reverend!
' variety). As for tens of millions of women finding sexual titillation in
Fifty Shades of Grey
, to the psychobiologists of the time, this would have indicated an epidemic of abnormal sexuality on a catastrophic scale.

A 1968 scientific report captures the romanticism, passivity, emotionality and exclusivity ascribed to female sexuality. Women, the authors assumed, don't experience anything so crude as genital arousal ‘such as might lead to masturbation in the absence of a partner', but rather a ‘sentimental arousal … which leads to romantic longing for the loved one alone and which will, in his absence, require waiting for his return'.

The researchers were exploring the idea that testosterone permanently ‘masculinises' the brain in utero, resulting in ‘male' and ‘female' brains with distinct sexualities (as well as divergent interests and skills). However, the ‘common-sense' notions of the feminine and masculine sexualities that testosterone differences might explain shifted, presumably in belated response to changes in attitudes and behaviour sparked by the 1960s sexual revolution. From the 1980s onwards, elements of bodily desire and agency – like genital arousal and libido – became common-sense features in scientific models of human, rather than male, sexuality. Yet the changes went unremarked by the researchers,
who didn't draw attention to, or most likely even notice, the fact that the male and female sexualities supposedly explained by in utero testosterone had significantly changed. This meant that the psychobiologists ‘reinforced the notion that “masculine” and “feminine” sexuality are universal, timeless constructs and created the illusion of a seamless line of evidence supporting human sexuality as hardwired by hormones'.

* * * * *

The X-rated gender gap remains today and, as with the gaps in, say, science, politics, business or child care, many claim that it's an inevitable consequence of essentially different male and female natures. Evolutionary psychology has provided one well-known explanation. Because females bear the substantial biological costs of nutrient-rich eggs, gestation, birth and lactation, their reproductive potential is mostly constrained by access to the material resources and support they need to rear a relatively limited number of young. Women therefore do best if their mating strategy is to seek a good provider within a committed relationship. This strategy can work for men, too, but unlike women they can score reproductive wins in casual sexual encounters, from which they walk away having invested only a little time, some pleasurable effort and a mere teaspoonful or so of sperm. And so, this kind of account claims, men evolved a sexual nature more powerful, persistent and promiscuous than that of women.

Although the majority of gender differences in sexual behaviour and attitudes are small, the exceptions seem broadly consistent with received ideas. For example, women report sexual desires that are, on average, less frequent and insistent, and they are approximately twice as likely as men to report that they take little interest or find little pleasure in sex. This difference is prominently illustrated on the cover of sex therapist Bettina Arndt's
book
The Sex Diaries
. A man sits with folded arms at the leftmost edge of a bed and looks with frustration at the stop sign held by his female partner, who is positioned far right and wears an expression of beleaguered irritation. It's an instantly understandable visual reference to the ‘fragile, feeble female libido' that is such a poor match for his ‘constant sparking sexual energy'. An early diary entry by one of Arndt's volunteers, Nadia, a married mother aged 41, captures it concisely: ‘My sex drive is zero and I really only do it for him'.

Women also report engaging less often in sexual activities that are largely bereft of emotional intimacy, such as masturbation, pornography use and casual sex. But although this is consistent with the idea that emotional context is more important for women, enjoying sexual pleasure for its own sake is stigmatised for females, and this may lead to under-reporting. For example, women who thought they were attached to a lie detector admitted to significantly more masturbation and pornography use than did women who weren't hooked up to the bogus machine, and who thought their responses might be seen by someone else. (Similarly, that men apparently engage in more casual sex with women than women do with men is a longstanding mathematical mystery, the solution to which may well also lie in creative self-reporting.)

So thoroughly relationship-embedded is female sexuality often thought to be that hopeful heterosexual partners are advised by sex therapists that ‘foreplay is everything that happens in the twenty-four hours preceding penile insertion', according to Louann Brizendine, author of
The Female Brain
. True, one can't help but think this might be a helpful perspective for those performing at absolute rock-bottom. In
The Sex Diaries
, for example, Nadia's husband describes, in the very same diary entry, both Nadia's discovery that he has been masturbating to pornography in his truck when he hands over his semen-soiled jumper for her
to wash – a gesture difficult to rival as the antithesis of romance – and his irritation at her lack of sexual interest in him. (Interestingly, when Nadia's husband goes away, with the help of a vibrator her sex drive accelerates rapidly from ‘zero'.)

But the most recent popular book on female sexuality to hit the shelves, Naomi Wolf 's
Vagina
, seems to erase altogether the boundary between lust and emotional connection, in its emphasis on the importance of romancing and household chores for female sexual arousal. Wolf writes that ‘his gazing at her, or praising her, or even folding a load of laundry, is not merely rightly thought of as highly effective foreplay; it is actually, from the female body's point of view, an essential part of good sex itself '. Certainly, there is little to object to in a pile of washing neatly folded by someone else. But for all that
Vagina
‘radically reframes' its eponymous heroine as nothing less than the source of transcendental orgasms, the site of the female soul and, flatteringly, the centre of the universe, there's something not just reactionary but also disappointingly mundane about a vision of female sexuality that sees such potent eroticism in laundry.

More than one startled reviewer has commented on Wolf 's blithe assumption that her prescriptions for a happy vagina are based not on highly culturally specific preferences – ‘perhaps shaped by romance novels and Laura Ashley bedroom sets', as one
Feministe
blogger tartly suggested – but in our evolutionary past. It's a crucial point. Certainly, the sexes differ, quite starkly, when it comes to their reproductive equipment and roles. The evolutionary principle that this should contribute to male/female differences in sexual feelings and preferences is compelling (although there are fascinatingly divergent views regarding what those differences should be, not to mention why, when and how). But it's vital to remember how gendered behaviour has changed in the past, and to ask how it might change in the future. Over the course of several decades notions that women might, for
instance, participate fully in the political process, go to university or practise law changed from dangerous feminist delusion to unremarkable reality. And it is not only outside the bedroom that females have been gradually acknowledged to be able to enjoy aspects of life previously considered exclusively masculine. In the early 20th century, access to reliable contraception decoupled female sexual activity from the costs of pregnancy, gestation and birth, enabling women for the first time in history to join men in sexual activity without risking lifelong consequences. The impact on their sexuality was revolutionary.