OkCupid, Rough Sex Dating Data and Psychology Today’s Problem: Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa

The image above is not, as you might be hoping, a tag cloud indicating what you can expect in the men’s room vs. the ladies’ room of your local dive bar. On the contrary, it’s part of a fresh crunch of the famous/infamous OkCupid data about online dating, as detailed in this piece in the Daily Mail. And yes, it does say “Profile words that best indicate someone prefers rough sex vs. gentle sex.” Really. That’s really what it says; you aren’t dreaming that part.

The Daily Mail, which published this piece Sunday morning, was riffing on the LA Times piece that came out Monday, which makes the science-fiction writer part of my brain bend backwards through a series of time anomalies.

OkCupid, in case you don’t know, maintains the world’s largest storehouse of data about online dating, which is creepy as hell if you ask me. They apparently employ an army of math nerds to hole up in giant subterranean bunkers with freezers full of Hot Pockets and cases of Brawndo, massaging this data till it squee’s so they can issue press releases indicating that iPhone users have more sex, for instance, or that gay men are no more promiscuous than straight people. I find generalizations like these to be extremely questionable, even though their dissection of data completely fascinates me. I love data, even if I question just how prejudiced OkCupid’s filter might be.

I am flabbergasted that the Daily Mail, in this day and age, could run a sexually shaming lead like: “More people have ventured into the potentially hazardous waters of online dating than would care to admit….” in which the author “establishes” right out of the gate that online dating is shameful. This has been going on since the days when techno-dating meant paying $2 a minute to leave voicemails in response to personal ads in the back of the SF Weekly and the Guardian. I’m not sure what the hell patrons of online dating services should be “ashamed” of — that they don’t just have willing partners tackling them in the street?

I despise the cultural myth that says taking a proactive and creative approach to your own dating life is a shameful act.

But that’s just the start of things I despise about this piece in the Daily Mail, and the far better-written piece in the Times that it basically rips off. In fact, there’s so much to despise I don’t know where to begin.

Chief among them is the fact that one of the experts the L.A. Times cites is none other than evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa.

Does his name ring a bell? It should. Dr. Kanazawa is the guy who authored last week’s infamous article, “Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?,” which Psychology Today pulled from its website. That wasn’t until after, as Ujala Sehgal at Media Bistro put it:

[Psychology Today] tried to soften the piece by tacking on this headline instead: “Why Are African-American Women Rated Less Attractive Than Other Women, but Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?”

[Link.]

Incidentally, does anyone know why the the print edition of Psychology Today features a cover photo of a woman of apparent African descent wearing a necklace of carrots? Is that, like…a thing? I’m not sure I even want to know.

In case you want to experience the shocking racism and crappy science up close and personal, you can read Kanazawa’s original article on the Something Awful forums, which I got via Sehgal’s article, and she from Jezebel.

Or, if you’d prefer, you can just bask in the terrifyingly illuminating experience of reading something like this:

It is very interesting to note that, even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others… Nor can the race difference in intelligence […] account for the race difference in physical attractiveness among women.

Here’s another Kanazawa doozy. It’s quoted by Psychology Today blogger, Stanton Peele, who I’ll talk about in a moment:

…Because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races.

If, like me, you lose sleep over extremist groups, you might recognize this flavor of rhetoric. It sounds a lot like what I read on Stormfront.org, the largest “white nationalist,” neo-Nazi website. I will, of course, not link to Stormfront, but here’s a Wikipedia page about them. Were you to, say, Google “stormfront white aryan kanazawa,” you would discover California-based neo-Nazis hurtling joyful Sieg Heil!’s at the Tokyo-born, Bulgarian-educated Kanazawa’s views. I’m sorry, was that dickish of me? I must be a little worked up after combing through hate websites — like, for instance, Psychology Today, where taking down Kanazawa’s recent article doesn’t even, actually, eliminate his genocidal propaganda.

You heard me: Genocidal. No, I’m not being a hysterical liberal. (I may be hysterical, and I may be liberal, but in this instance, at least, I’m not just being a hysterical liberal). I don’t pull the term “genocide” out of my ass lightly, any more than I go cruising neo-Nazi websites lightly.

But when I am forced to do exactly those things, I’m left in the bizarre position of pointing out that Kanazawa, in his May, 2011 piece in Psychology Today, was apparently on his good behavior. In that piece, there’s one important thing he actually does right. He refrains from to advocate dropping “35” nuclear bombs as a method of foreign policy.

That is exactly what he once did, but hey, it was a really long time ago. You remember those times, right? Terrorism had just come to our doorstep. We Americans were still so raw from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that we just couldn’t be expected to be in our right minds!

I mean, back then any amount of racist fanaticism was tolerated in the service of the War on Terror, right? It was 2008.

That’s when Kanazawa, by way of advocating Ann Coulter’s election as President instead of Hilary Clinton, said the following, in “Why We Are Losing This War,” a piece that is still live on Psychology Today‘s website. Here’s Dr. Kanazawa:

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running.

Check that link, people. Psychology Today.

Psychology Today shouldn’t just be ashamed of Kanazawa’s May, 2011 piece, or any of the other offensive drivel that he’s published since then. Psychology Today should be ashamed that it didn’t pull the plug on him when he used “evolutionary psychology” to argue for dropping 35 nuclear bombs (not 34, not 36) on the Middle East, “killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children.”

He argued in favor of that. It was not a thought experiment! “Thought experiment” was just the thin excuse Kanazawa used to shroud his advocacy of genocide in a supposed hypothetical!

You might think Kanazawa could not get any worse. But he can, and he does. He frames that 2008 article as an attack on the bumper sticker, “Hate is Not a Family Value.” He explicitly believes hate is a family value. He says, referring to the perceived war of the United States against “our enemies,” in which he grossly misuses the works of Thomas Friedman to establish, as Kanazawa puts it:

…A global clash of civilizations with localized struggles against enemies ranging from al Qaeda in the Middle East, to Jemaah Islamiyah in the South East Asia, to the Chechen rebels in Russia, to the Taliban in Afghanistan, to the Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel, to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. World War III, which began on September 11, 2001, has been going on for nearly seven years now, but there is no end in sight.

It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” (As I explain elsewhere, we are not really fighting terrorists.) We may be losing this war because our enemies have a full range of human emotions while we don’t.

[Link.]

Another of Kanazawa’s doozies, from March of this year? His Psychology Today piece Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?

Unfortunately, the response of Psychology Today to any of this stuff has been sadly lacking and packed with CYA.

Afraid that his “specialty” will be tarnished by Kanazawa, NYU Prof Scott Barry Kaufman claims that he and 35 of the top evolutionary psychologists in the world think Satoshi Kanazawa is off his nut — a conclusion they came to looking at his methodology on an unrelated issue. Kaufman claims that Kanazawa, with his shaky logic and crappy methodology, does not speak for evolutionary psychology as a field.

Au Contraire! says psychologist and attorney Stanton Peele, an addiction specialist who’s spent the last 35 years developing alternatives to the 12-step model. (I checked Peele out a bit…he doesn’t appear at first glance to be a sex-negative whacko, which I kinda always expect nowadays when I hear the word “addiction” someplace like Psychology Today. But Peele seems more or less fine in my book.) Anyway, Peele takes the entire field of Evolutionary Psychology to task in his post, Au Contraire: Satoshi Kanazawa IS Evolutionary Psychology. Peele has been slugging it out with Kanazawa for a while now. He last attacked Kanazawa in December, in a piece called Is Evolutionary Psychology Total, Utter, and Dangerous Bullshit?, where he took Kanazawa to task for Kanazawa’s weird claim that binge-drinking is a marker of intelligence.

In Peele’s more recent post he railed against:

…[Evolutionary Psychology’s] fantasy version of the human species as the end result of a deterministic evolutionary process that makes people think and act in the ways they say people must  — that is, according to their own preferred prejudices (like Kanazawa’s ideal woman — who is NOT African-American!)….Kanazawa missed the social and psychological realities of intelligence — instead reducing intelligence to a one-to-one behavioral mapping. This is exactly his blinkered view of beauty and its objective determination that he tried to sell us…Kanazawa’s and evolutionary psychology’s blinders shut out everything important about humanity.

Then again, Psychology Today blogger and University of South Florida graduate student Nathan Heflick writes an entirely reasonable post opposing Kanazawa, but to my mind fucked it all up by slapping a racist and sexist, not to mention unscientific, title on the piece, highlighting the dangerous risk of dehumanization inherent in even having conversations like this one. His post is titled I Think Black Women Are Beautiful! Satoshi Kanazawa, Your Rebuttal?

Apart from that title’s other problems…why the hell is Satoshi Kanazawa still being asked for a “rebuttal”?

And why, five days later, does the L.A. Times quote him as an “expert” on a related topic, when the only thing he’s expert at, clearly, is bending his perceptions of data to suit his own hateful prejudices?

And getting press. Kanazawa’s great at that.

I’m not going to attack the whole field of evolutionary psychology (yet), because I don’t know enough about it. And in concept, I find it fascinating. But the mainstream press loves to feature stories in which some asshat makes headlines delivering some revoltingly dehumanizing message about sex and partnering based on imagined data, a tiny set of data, or no data at all. Those stories usually reify the abstract prejudices about sex, gender, race, class and society that linger in Americans’ backbrains waiting for an “excuse” to come out and play. And it sure seems like a hell of a lot of the time…the person making those hateful pronouncements is an evolutionary psychologist.

But I don’t want to draw a conclusion from a small set of data, so I’ll hold off on making a judgement against the entire EvPsych field.

But as for Satoshi Kanazawa? He’s given us lots of data about himself.

He’s a lazy scientist and an ignorant, racist, sexist, classist, bigoted asshole with an explicit, stated genocidal agenda. He does not have anything positive to contribute to a rational, pluralistic society.

Reporters and publishers: Stop treating him like an expert!

And the next time (or the next thousand times) the mainstream press trots out some new and dubious “truth” about dating and sex that OkCupid — now owned by corporate monolith Match.com — helpfully dug up for us from its vast storehouse of “truth,” aka “data,” by way of promoting a product…take it with a grain of salt. If reporters are interpreting that data through a racist, sexist, bigoted lens provided by the likes of Satoshi Kanazawa…what other bigoted and ignorant shortcuts are they taking with reality?

Sexual behavior is not a computer program. The press should start treating us like we’re human.