Pseudo-science Blames Coming Depression on Boobs

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 6:25 AM on April 9, 2008.

Sometimes I think the "Science for Choads" section would be better called the "Science Reporting for Choads", but that would be too narrow to include all the people that make science-y sounding claims with absolutely no evidence to back it up. Via Echidne, the latest "science confirms all your gender prejudices" story is particularly nasty in terms of implication and timing.

WASHINGTON - A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles -- sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

"You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area," said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

Remember: The capitalist patriarchy can do no wrong. That is the first rule. Everything that goes wrong is due to effeminate liberals or actual women.

The war would have gone smashing if not for the effeminate peace movement that stabbed the country in the back, just like a bitch would. Hell, why "stab in the back"? Why not "poison the eggs" to drive home the point? The inevitable abuses when you give men power over women -- rape, domestic violence -- women's fault, of course, for starting shit. Women's inequalities? Women's choice.

But it's going to be hard to explain how a male-dominated financial sector that gambled and deregulated our economy to shreds is actually innocent, because it's some bitches that did it. But here's your proof: These guys would have sober, cautious, hard-working members of society who give back instead of getting greedy if women didn't flaunt the boobage. Housing crisis is all about those terrible women with the sex.

So, we have a finance professor who concludes that this is all the proof you need that women's sexuality is to blame for everything. And in case you didn't get the point, men's stupidity when it comes to the all-powerful female sexuality is to blame for our current economic situation -- you know, instead of greed and deregulation and engineering the tax structure to drain the middle class of wealth and the war.

The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to men's evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women, said Kevin McCabe, professor of economics, law and neuroscience at George Mason University, who wasn't part of the study.

"Risk-taking is a natural way of increasing your relative success, but, of course, there's a downside to it, what we're seeing right now in the economy," McCabe said.

The truth appears to be more mundane, and is actually expressed in the story, before it's quickly covered up with more convenient quotes that put all the blame on the sexy, sexy ladies.

Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, a lead author of the study, says it's all about the power of emotion and arousal and our financial decisions. The trigger doesn't have to be sex -- it could be chocolate or a winning lottery ticket.

"It didn't matter if the sexy woman didn't tell you anything about the odds of winning a roulette game," Knutson said. "What really matters is that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact. That bleeds over into your financial decisions."

My emphasis. It's worth noting, by the way, that the sample size was 15 college-aged men, who are a lot younger than the titans of finance, and they didn't bother to test women, saying they didn't know what pictures aroused women. (Which strikes me as pure bullshit -- actual sexuality researchers have shown for long time that while women might be put off intellectually by porn, either because of the contempt for women in much of it or because women know they're not supposed to like it or else they get called sluts, images of sex tend to get women as aroused as men.) But if you read a slightly less sensational version of the story, it turns out that the findings aren't so much that men get stupid when they see naked women -- making it easy to blame women for our current financial crisis -- but that once the pleasure parts of the brain are activated, people are more willing to engage in risky behavior. Which shouldn't surprise anyone that's caved and eaten a donut once smelled while on a diet.

Knutson and his colleagues studied heterosexual male undergraduate college students. The images the men viewed were intended to stimulate an emotional response. Erotic images were used to elicit a positive response, snakes and spiders to prompt a negative response, and office supplies to trigger a neutral response. ...

"If you go to the casinos, people are wearing skimpy costumes, they're giving you free alcohol, there are bells and lights and things like that, which don't necessarily seem related to the odds of the gambling," Knutson said. "But these are cues that might activate brain regions that encourage risk-taking and therefore get people to gamble more."

Don't forget the cheap food!

What the evidence points to is not some kind of evo psych excuse to put all the blame for male risk-taking on the shoulders of women for the high crime of existing, but something much more mundane than any one who likes to gamble could tell you -- gambling is fun. And anyone who's made a mistake ever could probably tell you that the promise of pleasure does have a capacity to overwhelm rational thought. You don't really need to introduce erotic pictures into the equation to demonstrate that gambling is risky precisely because the pleasure parts of the brain overrule the rational parts, which is why the cardinal rule of gambling is to bring no more money to the table than you're willing to lose, and to make that decision long before the excitement of gambling kicks in.

But what about the stockbroker they interviewed for the AP? Isn't he an expert in the link between sex and financial risk-taking?

The results of the study jibe with the real life on the trading floor, said Phil Flynn, a former Chicago commodities floor trader and current analyst at Alaron Trading Corp.

"I'm not shocked that it may be part of the deal," Flynn said Friday. "When you talk about all the euphemisms for trading (on the floor), they can be used for sex as well."

("Massaging the market" and "hardcore" were about the cleanest that he and his colleagues could come up with.)

He hasn't actually argued that men walk around sporting erections on the trading floor, mind you. What these quotes show is not that he and his colleagues conflate sex and trading so much as they are sexists who deliberately use sexualized language to send the message that theirs is a boys-only club and women are not welcome. Even if a woman is at ease with sexual frankness, she still won't be able to play along, because I'll bet most of the terms he's using are metaphors that put the trader or analyst in the position of a sexual penetrator, and women can't really claim to penetrate anything metaphorically without sounding a little stupid.

The researchers want to do more studies, and actually put women under the microscope. Want to bet that when they come up with evidence that women enjoy gambling, that won't get a shiny spot in the AP science reporting? I'm willing to take that one up, because even though I'm not a college age boy just exposed to pornography, I do like to gamble.

Tagged as: studies, sex, risk

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.