Explaining the "Luiza está no Canadá" meme to your gringo friends...

Been hearing alot about Luiza (who's in Canada), from your Brazilian netacquaintences lately? My pal Regina at Deep Brazil can explain the meme to you:

"Instant Youtube success: Gerardo Rabello, a social columnist from João Pessoa, capital of the state of Paraíba, announces a new construction project and says it is so great that all the family will attend the launching ceremony, apart from his daughter “Luiza, who is in Canada”. The phrase, mysteriously, became viral. In only two days, dozens of “comments” and mockumentaries about it were published on Youtube."

The reason this meme went viral has little to do with the fact that Gerardo Rabello is bragging in an off-handed fashion about his daughter's international travels. It has to do with Brazilian cordiality and family values and also with Brazilian sarcasm when cordiality is taken too far.

Rabello is basically telling us that "Look, I'm putting my family's good name behind this project". This is a traditionalist, kitchy and smarmy sort of thing to do. Maybe it goes over well with the folks from Paraíba, but to the large number of Brazilians living in São Paulo and Rio (the dominant force on the lusophone internet), it sounds like a corny homily to 19th century values. The ad is thus irksome to begin with.

But then Rabello upped the already high smarm factor by explaining to us all why one of his daughters won't be attending this mighty social event of the Paraiban summer. As if we knew his children by name. As if we would wonder why we wouldn't see Luiza at the event. As if we all lived in the same tiny little backlands village or even knew who the hell Gerardo Rabello and his spawn were.

As if, in short, we gave a tremendous fuck.

Urbane, networked Brazil thus responded in false cordial style, dripping with fake bonhomie and neighborly concern.

Suddenly, we all needed to know where Luiza was. What she was doing? Was she eating well? Did she have a boyfriend yet? Was he Canadian...? We demanded that the government investigate why Luiza was still in Canada and worried whether the heartless gringos would deport her. (Certainly not Luiza! Such a nice moça de família!)

And, of course, we're all breathing a hearty sigh of relieved satisfaction now that she's come home to the pátria amada.

People who didn't get this meme or are taken it at face value as a form of instant celebrity manufacture don't understand the depths of Brazilian sarcasm when it combines with false cordiality. There's a reason why "cair na boca do povo" is understood to be a bad thing in Brazil.

The meme is also a good example of why memes become old quickly and how they warp (rather than evolve) into news.

The first folks reporting on Luiza's whereabouts were net nerds who had seen the original commercial first-hand on You-Tube and found it corny beyond belief. They were making arch comments to their friends, who had also seen it. This is precisely the same sort of crowd who loves to wax enthusiastic about the Trololo Guy*. (You know, folks like this...)

Thus was the original iteration of the meme born and it was funny, if not hilarious.

Then legions of script-kiddies and Brazilian adolescents who fancy themselves to be Anonymous got ahold of the meme and started spamming it into everything, making old meme very old, very quickly.

Following this, the Brazilian NORPS** saw the script-kiddies' net graffiti, wondered what was up and had to have everything explained to them. This effectively killed any remaining humor that the meme once had.

Finally, the Old Media got ahold of the Luiza story. The Old Media speaks to people who hardly use the internet at all and whose understanding of memes is on the level of a flatworm's understanding of brain surgery. The only framework the Old Media has for dealing with this sort of thing is to treat Luiza as some sort of minor instant celebrity. And that, friends, is precisely how Globo is dealing with this little bit of internet arcana right at this very moment. 

*If you don't know who the Trololo Guy is, remember: there is no such thing as brain bleach.

**NORP = Normal, Ordinary, Responsible Person. The vast majority of internet users who go on-line simply to check e-mail and send each other pictures of their cats - see expanded definition here.

O Caso Big Lixo Brasil 12

...por Ana Paula da Silva

É com grande horror e espanto que estou acompanhando no que se tornou a grande polêmica  do momento: o caso em que, supostamente, um integrante masculino abusou de uma "sister" debaixo dum edredon.

Bom, sou daquelas pessoas que compartilham a opinião que reality show não passa de um lixo eletrônico, da qual me recuso a dar audiência. Mas também concordo que não se pode condenar quem assista e ache bom. O conceito do que é bom ou ruim é bastante relativo. Pode soar como um clichê esta frase, mas acredito que faça todo sentido relativizar, em meio ao absurdo que se transformou esta polêmica.

Soube do suposto estupro pelas as redes sociais e, apesar de não assistir ao programa, acessei o vídeo em que os mais exaltados afirmam ter evidencias de um estupro, sem que ainda tenha havido, uma análise técnica das imagens. É o seu olho e sua imaginação funcionando naqueles sete minutos. Confesso que mal consegui distinguir quem era quem no vídeo, já que as imagens foram captadas no escuro embaixo de um grosso cobertor. Bom, os mais radicais podem justificar que minha internet não é boa e a imagem que eu recebi estava turvada. Pode ser. Todos os que estão alegando que de fato houve estupro aparentemente tenham visto algo que eu mal consegui distinguir acontecendo entre um homem e uma mulher naquela cama.

O que me espanta e me horroriza de tudo isto – e acredito que esta atitude deva ser motivo de punição para a Rede Globo – é sugerir que tal cena seja exposta na TV, mesmo que em canal fechado. Agora o que me espanta mais ainda são as opiniões diversas das pessoas. Desde os machistas (“Ela bebeu, queria o que?”), até os que já defendem prisão e – porque não? – o linchamento do “estuprador” Daniel. Parece que até estamos relembrando os velhos tempos em que homens negros eram acusados de estupradores de mulheres brancas e, portanto, mereciam serem linchados baseados só e unicamente na acusação e não em provas concretas.

Toquei no que acredito ser um drama construído neste evento. Um homem negro, jovem, modelo e uma mulher branca jovem, modelo estão neste programa em busca de fama e sucesso instantâneo e aceitam se transformar nos próximos meses em bichos enclausurados, onde recebem comida e boa vida em troca de fazerem graça a um público ávido em ver situações grotescas e de mau gosto em que se envolvam. Enfim, reality shows se transformaram mundo afora num sucesso de público e no Brasil não é diferente.

Já que sabemos – ou devemos saber – estes programas sofrem pesadas interferências na hora em que são editados. Ler esta reportagem, por exemplo, que discute alguns dos truques mais comumente utilizados para dar mais emoção a esses shows....

Devemos pensar, particularmente, em  como os editores  constroem estereótipos dentro dos quais encaixam os participantes. Pelo que andei apurando, Daniel já estava sendo colocado pelos editores do BBB como o garanhão e pegador, quase um tarado que corria atrás das mulheres da casa. Você não precisa saber muito sobre a história de raça e gênero em nosso país para entender porque ele foi personificado assim. Outra menina no show já teria comentado que Daniel a bolinou em outro momento. Ou seja, nada mais natural do que alimentar o imaginário que existe sobre homens negros: máquinas sexuais incontroláveis que são capazes de transar até com uma mulher aparentemente inerte, bêbada, depois de uma festa regada a álcool. Quem acha que o conteúdo “raça” deva ser retirado da análise deste drama realmente não entende como o racismo funciona neste país.

A situação deve ser analisada de uma maneira um pouco mais complexa do que os sete minutos de vídeo editado pode mostrar. Simplesmente apontar vítimas e algozes neste caso infeliz, baseado só e unicamente num vídeo que já tem passado pelas mãos de editores cuja principal tarefa é fazer o público  delirar é, no mínimo, prematuro. Acredito na irresponsabilidade da emissora em explorar uma situação destas, mas discordo daqueles que tratam o caso como se fosse absolutamente factual, uma situação realista em que estivéssemos assistindo uma festa com pessoas “normais”, numa situação normal, em que uma menina é embriagada e depois sofreu abuso sexual. Há que se ter cuidado sobre os fatos, pelo menos até que haja uma análise técnica de TODAS as imagens captadas pelas sempre presentes câmeras da casa BBB.

Não houve sequer uma análise pericial do vídeo para se saber o quanto de edição e montagem há nele.  Neste momento, as pessoas estão assistindo e acusando baseado numa imagem editada da Rede Globo – emissora que tem longa história em manipular  a opinião pública através de imagens adulteradas e, as vezes, francamente falsas. Estou impressionada com a repercussão que essas imagens têm feito nas redes sociais e com o alto grau de veemência que está sendo direcionado a Daniel sem ainda sabermos nem a metade dos fatos do caso. Se  Daniel for revelado como estuprador, então acho que deve ser punido. Mas conhecendo bem a história da histeria social em torno da sexualidade masculina e negra, acho que devemos insistir numa apuração total e competente dos fatos do caso antes de gritar a favor pelo linchamento do rapaz.

Outra coisa que me assusta é a insistência de que  Monique há de se reconhecer como vítima de estupro. A mulher não teve domínio sobre seu corpo antes do evento, durante o evento e agora também não tem direito sobre ele depois. Parece que seu corpo agora pertence a um coro de pessoas que só conhece a situação por via de internet e que querem acreditar piamente que um abuso aconteceu e aos “machistas” que  argumentam que  Monique merecia qualquer violência que poderia ter acontecido. Ninguém de fato quer ouvir Monique. Ela deve se conscientizar que é uma vítima ou uma vagaba e não pode ter mais alguma opinião sobre o caso. Muito menos devemos dar ouvidos a Daniel, pois este é um estuprador já condenado e linchado pela a opinião pública. Este episódio nos revela o quanto há de moralismo e racismo na discussão sobre gênero e violência no Brasil.

Soube neste momento que Daniel foi expulso do programa sem que se tivesse nenhum tipo de apuração legal sobre os fatos. Gente: essa é uma questão LEGAL e não um concurso de beleza. Se os fatos comprovarem que  Daniel, de fato, teve relações sexuais com Monique enquanto ela estava inconsciente, então ele é um estuprador e deve responder por seu crime. Se, uma vez que todos os dados estão apurados, não tiver evidência que um estupro aconteceu, então porque expulsá-lo do programa?

Continuo acreditando que este país  acredita em acusações de bruxaria e este fato é simplesmente assustador para uma nação que se diz democrática. Cadê as evidências? Ou vamos continuar vivendo num Brasil onde as emissoras de televisão determinam a culpa e a inocência? Não sei o que assusta mais: o fato da Rede Globo ter criado uma situação esdrúxula como entretenimento ou as pessoas acharem que essa situação pode e deve ser resolvida na base da histeria coletiva.

Poder paralelo no Rio? Ahn, 'tá.

 O Excercito use tanques para ocupar a Rocinha e acabar com o "poder paralelo".

 "Poder paralelo"? Ahn, 'tá...

Na recente operação contra a Rocinha, a polícia encontrou 9 rifles e uma "metralhadora" (termo usado pela imprensa brasileira para qualificar o tipo de cópia barata chinesa do rifle de assalto russo AK47 que vende-se por 800 dólares em todos os shows de armas nos EUA).

Ou o "poder paralelo" andava-se singularmente desarmado, ou essas operações de pacificação são para os gringos verem.

Do meu ponto de visto, a relativa facilidade com que a polícia carioca anda "ocupando" por aí indica o alto nível hiperbólico da retórica midiática a cerca do suposto "poder paralelo" que impregnava a imprensa brasileira no período 1995-2008, e não o bom desempenho atual do Estado.

Pessoalmente, acho que o atual "paz" nas favelas é o resultado de uma série de acordos que tem sido contruida entre os donos de poder e seus sometimes parceiros bandidos e semi-bandidos que mandam em nossas favelas. Me chame de gringo cético, mas vejo a criminalidade no Rio como um ADJUNTO ao poder do Estado e não como uma organização paralela do poder. Vejo a estrutura dessa "organização" muito mais semelhante àquela retratada por Foote-Whyte na "Soceidade da Esquina" do que uma verdadeiro esquema paralelo de poder.

Penso na facilidade com que uma organização paralela poderia ter resistido esse atual incursão na Rocinha. Em Afganistão, por exemplo, onde existem vários poderes legitimamente "paralelos", uma tática comunamente utilizada é misturar óleo diesel e fertilizante numa panela de pressão e enterrar o dispositivo resultante numa estrada de acesso frequentado pelos comboios do governo, onde será ativado por vias do controle remoto (tipicamente um telefone celular ligada a algumas baterias). Tal dispositivo seria facilmente construido por nossos atuais "inimigos públicos" urbanos, se eles tivessem a mínima pretensão de montar um poder verdadeiramente paralelo. A bomba caseira, fabricada dessa maneira, não teria nenhum problema em seriamente avariar os transportes blindados LVTP-7 e M113 utilizados nessas operações (e sempre rotulados pela impressa brasileira, com seu habitual hiperbolismo, de "tanques").

E, no entanto, não vemos no Brasil nenhuma das táticas ou tecnologias rotinaeiramente utilizadas pelos pretendentes ao poder mundo afora, mesmo pelas organizações mais pobres e impopulares oriundas das populações mais miseráveis do planeta.

Resta só duas conclusões: ou o CV e seus semelhantes são compostos de integrantes singularmente burros, ou o objetivo desses grupos não é disputar o poder com o Estado e sim vender suas drogas em paz, lucrando-se com o comércio.

Se aceitamos a segunda hipótese, então todas essas ocupações são facilmente organizadas, na grande maioria dos casos, através de tratados temporários que permitem a comercialização das drogas e que focalizam os esforços da polícia em outras atividades de repressão - atividades que não tangem nas interesses dos assim-chamados "gangues do tráfico".

Em outras palavras, para sensivelmente diminuir o nível de violência no Estado do Rio de Janeiro, a única coisa que o Governo há de fazer é declarar uma trégua informal mas efetiva na "Guerra Contra as Drogas". Sendo que o grosso da violência que vara o Rio é oriundo dessa violência, utilizar o poder do Estado para congelar as atuais linhas de batalha entre o CV, os ADA, o TC e seus aliados/adversários milicianos resultaria numa queda imediata nos confrontos armados na nossa cidade.

Minha hipótese é que é isto que está contecendo no Rio. Resta saber o que a história vai mostrar.

Marnia Robinson, Gary Wilson and The Good Men Project Magazine

Recently, I've been involved in a series of debates over on The Good Men Project magazine with Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson, two self-proclaimed sexperts who (based on their writings around the blogosphere and Marnia's newly published book) seem to believe that orgasm is the root of all evil.

As far as I can tell, Marnia and Gary believe that the chemical reactions created in the brain by orgasms are dangerously addictive. Pornography makes one want to masturbate to orgasm and is thus dangerous. "Internet porography" (by which Wilson and Robinson apparently mean anything at all on the internet that gives you a chubby or that deep, mysterious stirring inside) is particularly evil in this respect because it gives us multiple images on demand and thus causes human beings to masturbate non-stop.

Of course, all of this is so much moral entrepeneurial bullshit, in my opinion. Marnia - an ex-corporate lawyer with as much formal study and training in matters sexual as I have in nuclear science - has a bone to pick about sex and is very good at cutting and pasting links to scientific studies to apparently "prove" her pet theories about human sex.

A few weeks ago, I got into a verbal tussle with "Garnia" (for they never post as a singular entity) as I call them here on The Good Men Project Magazine. I admit to going out of bounds into the realm of ad hominem attacks, because nothing gets my dander up more than people misusing science to create sexual stigmas and push for a particular brand of sexual morality. TGMP's editor Lisa Findley rightly censored me and I shut up.

This week, however, Garnia came back to The Good Men Project Magazine with another article banging the drum of sexual panic once again and telling us all how orgasm and "internet porn" will make slaves of us and our children.

Taking my censorship seriously, I replied to their article in a rational way, staying as far as I could from ad hominems, but not sparing critical commentary when it came to trashing their theory.

Result: more censorship.

I then e-mailed Lisa Hickey to ask what the problem was. Ms. Hickey, The Good Men Project's chief CEO and publisher, gave me the surprising information that Gary and Marnia were being allowed to moderate their own comments section on The Good Man Project and that they considered my attack on their theory to be a personal attack on themselves.

This is quite disturbing news, which should be shared out there among you sex and gender bloggers.

Personally, I have no problem with the fact that two people who I consider to be hucksters and charlatans of the worst sort are posting article after article on one of the only non-MRA-oriented men's issues blog-magazines out there. Hey, it takes all kinds and I'm personally in favor of the complete and free exchange of ideas.

But Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson are moral entrepeneurs with a very specific and radical view of human sexuality (to wit: orgasms are bad) who are wrapping their political beliefs in the trappings of scientific research. Gary and Marnia have block-censored any attempts to engage with their "facts" by pointing out logical and scientific holes in their data.By giving them control over their comments section, TGMP makes it effectively impossible to critique the couple's claims and thus, effectively, gives them a chunk of editorial control over TGMP itself.

Below, you'll find my response to Garnia's latest article, "Can you trust your Johnson?". This went up and was taken down several times on The Good Men Project Magazine before I found out from Ms. Hickey that she'd ceded editorial control over the comments section to Garnia. My response is not a masterpiece, by any shot, but the censorship of it by Garnia, aided and abetted by TGMP Magazine, deserves to be confronted.


I think it shows just precisely how nervous Garnia are about their theory: real science and logic can't be let anywhere near it for fear that it will fall apart like a cardboard suitcase in the rain.


*********************

Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson’s main affirmation is this: “Porn has changed – a lot.”

According to the authors, internet surfing for porn “keeps the reward circuit [of the brain] buzzing” by “spiking dopamine levels”. We look for porn with anticipation and are rewarded when we find it, so we go back and do it again. And again. And again. Literally ad nauseaum.

The authors, it should be noted, have never scientifically studied porn use first hand, although they run a website where they claim to receive many “self-reports” (what scientists properly call “anecdotal reports”) from self-acclaimed “hard-core porn users”. Presuming that Robinson and Wilson’s  informants do indeed exist in real life and are accurately reporting their experiences (a very large presumption in these days when kids flood sites such as “Your Brain on Porn” with fake and exaggerated stories simply “for the lulz”), one needs to ask exactly how representative of the porn-using population these people are?

In their article, the authors present what they apparently see as a fairly typical internet porn session:

“Using three high definition screens, with nine windows open, to search for new scenes, genres, whatever, until you find just the right shot to take you home. After a five-minute breather you can search via Google for something you’ve never seen, so you can whack away once more”

Like Gary and Marnia, I happen to know many “porn users”: not a single one of them enjoys sexual imagery in the manner described above. Of course, this is anecdotal, too, but I’d be willing to bet that if all the people out there reading my words were to be honest with themselves, they’d have to admit that the situation above, clearly described as a sort of “baseline” for the kind of “internet porn” Wilson and Robinson are talking about, is extremely rare.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it isn’t. This just begs another question: if someone was so “addicted” to “porn” that they would buy three monitors to get themselves off, how is this sort of experience essentially different from accumulating a huge video, DVD or MP4 collection and viewing it on three different T.V. screens?

Wilson and Robsinson would have us believe that there’s some sort of deep “novelty” factor in “internet porn” and this factor “keeps the brain buzzing”. But given the evidence they cite and their extremely open-ended, dopamine-based understanding of addiction, it would make just as much sense for a true dopamine addict to have their own “library” of special images on DvD which they use to get off without having to go through the constant boredom of digging through page after page of crappy, uninteresting images to find just the “right shot to take them home”.  

If the real goal was to constantly flood the brain with dopamine, browsing a meticulously selected video collection would be the way to go. And, of course, that sort of “porn experience” has nothing necessarily to do with the internet. The person who was that much of a dopamine junky, using sexual images to get their fix, would probably be very quickly frustrated by what they would consider to be the low quality (i.e. unappealing images) of most internet porn. Put simply, browsing about the internet pornocloud wouldn’t be a reliable enough way to get themselves off in a quick, reliable fashion.

So no, porn has “not changed a lot”. The distribution of it has perhaps changed. I’d be willing to agree that a so-called “porn junky” now has easier access to images and thus a much easier time of it when it comes to building her own library. But that’s not the point the authors are making: they’re claiming that the internet itself has made a difference by offering up appealing images in a much more high-speed way and that this presentation of imagery is in and of itself so radically different that it can easily “addict” the average person. That is simply not true.

This leads us to another huge assumption that Wilson and Robinson seem to make: porn is porn is porn.

Neither of the authors bothers to ever define porn, either here or in any other writing I’ve ever read by them. However, if one were to take their dopamine-based understanding of “addiction” seriously, then the only logical definition of “porn” must be “anything at all that turns a given person on”. Furthermore, Robinson and Wilson seem to think that all sexual imagery is equally titillating to everyone, at least in potential. If it weren’t, their “gradually heavier fixes” model simply doesn’t work.

As it turns out, however, human sexual interest is hardly a “one-stop shopping” affair. People have VASTLY different tastes when it comes to sex. If the men and women I’ve listened to are any indication (and once again, yes, this is anecdotal, so use your own honest experience as a guide), most of the stuff on the internet that’s designed to sexually titillate isn’t very interesting to most people. People tend to have pretty specific tastes when it comes to sexual imagery – sometimes even fetishisticly specific. Yes, they want “new images”: but they want new images of more-or-less the same kind.

A woman who’s into watching gay gang-bang sex doesn’t suddenly become interested in dog and pony shows or Two Girls, One Cup just because they are out there on the internet. The idea that average peoples’ sexual tastes are so flexible that simply offering up images of sexual acts of a radically different nature can change their tastes on a basic level is simply not supported by scientific evidence (and let’s put a qualifier on that) ANYWHERE.

Finally, although Robinson and Wilson distance themselves from this position, their views, if proven correct, do in fact mean that one could “reprogram” a straight person into a gay person, or vice-versa, simply by exposing them to “novelty on demand, surprising and shocking visuals”.

Fortunately, that is not how human sexuality works out there in the empirically-occurring universe. People generally do not grow new sexual interests simply because they are exposed to “surprising and shocking visuals”. Be honest with yourself: you know this and I know this. We know what kind of erotica we like and, when we are interested in looking at erotica, we tend to go back to the same kinds of things again and again. We don’t suddenly become interested in the things we qualify as “yucky stuff” simply because we run across them on the sites we surf. And we certainly don’t become “addicted” to that stuff.

Now yes, I’m aware that there are all sorts of individual exceptions to this rule and that there probably is a small minority of people out there who are exactly as Wilson and Robinson describe them. The problem is, this minority is being held up to the world by the authors as if they were the new norm, being inexorably created by our evolutionary-driven brain chemistry.

But it’s Wilson and Robinson’s emphasis on “addiction as brain chemistry” that’s the really interesting part of their argument. After all, if we take their definition of “addiction” seriously, it’s sexual release itself that is the real culprit here, not porn. Porn is simply the means through which people achieve sexual release. What gets the dopamine flooding, of course, is orgasm.

Now that’s damned interesting, seeing as how the female capacity for multiple orgasms in one sitting (laying?) has been bandied about by feminism for the better part of four decades now as God’s Gift to Womenkind. An entire industry of vibrators and sex toys has been built off of the fact that when the ladies go to it, they don’t even have to take a “five minute breather” before they get back to the serious business of, as we say here in Brazil, “making like a crab” (think about it).

So if Robinson and Wilson are correct, the masturbation-positive emphasis on female multiple orgasms that Western culture has been living since the early 1970s, at least, should have already produced two generations of hopeless female dopamine addicts.

Again, I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide for themselves, based on their own experience, if this is true.

Evolutionary Psychology and Sexuality

I've recently been having a discussion with Jen Wading regaring evolutionary psychology and its use by one Ms. Amy Alkon on her blog, "Advice Goddess". (The particular posting in question can be found here.)

As some readers might be aware, I have problems with evpsych, not so much as a field (hey, it generates a lot of whacko theories, but then again, so does anthropology. Leví-Strauss and his views on structural cybernetics, anyone?), but the miraculous and myriad uses that its untrained or self-trained proponents put it to in trying to explain human sexuality as some sort of field subject to univeral rules.

Ms. Alkon is apparently one of these pop evpsych practicioners and Jen wanted to know more about the holes in her theories. I thought it'd be useful to post our conversation here, because this sort of thing comes up a lot in internet discussions and I'd like to be able to refer people to a set document regarding ev psych and why it isn't a magic key which unlocks the mystery of human sexuality.

Jen started out byindicating she didn't quite understand what biodeterminism was, so I gave her a pocket definition:

Biodeterminism = Biology is the primary and ultimate explanation for our social behaviors.

Ferinstince: Women are naturally less promiscuous than men because, biologically speaking, they have more investment in a baby than men do.

Jen then responded:


So would something such as this be considered biodeterminism?

commenter: "There are all types of men and all types of women and saying there is only one correct way for them to proceed is overly simple."
 
Amy Alkon: No, it's absolutely not. There are variances in people, but we have evolved human psychology that is more similar than it is different. As a woman, you take a risk in approaching a man because he is likely to devalue you (because his genes are well aware that sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive, per Daly and Wilson). 

My answer follows below...

It is extremely biodeterminist.

It also points out a main problem with evpsych: most of its proponents simply haven't read sweet fuck-all in ethnography so they tend to blithely assume that whatever their own culture does is somehow a transhuman norm.

Take the "higamous, hogamous women are monogamous; hogamous, higamous men are polygamous" crap Amy seems to support. Yes, it MAY be a fact that "women invest more in their children" than men, biologically speaking, but to go from that to "women thus need to play hard to get" in the dating game" ignores a shitload of research in so-called "primitive" societies which shows plenty of examples of women being sexually aggressive and not biologically monogamous. Folks who use evpsych to explain their dating problems tend to presume that "marriage" means "never fucking anyone other than one's husband". But just to pull one example out of a hat, there are many, many societies where women's sexual favors are "given" to guests as a matter of course. Certain traditional Eskimo societies spring to mind, but our own society also tosses up plenty of examples where monogamy isn't the rule...

So how does all this square with the idea that women's sexually is somehow driven by the relative rarity of their eggs?

In fact, there are plenty of serious biologists (Jared Diamond springs to mind) who point out that human sexual receptivity (which is constant) combined with the fact that human women have hidden ovulation may suggest that NOT KNOWING who the father of one's child is may in fact be the glue that held early human societies together. In this reading, it would be biologically in the woman's interest to have an "official" mate and yet also have sex with other guys now and again. That way there'd be one man with a primary interest in her children, but all men in the band would have at least SOME interest in her children.

This is even more likely when one takes into consideration that early human bands were small and very probably inbred, so from a pure "Darwinian transmission of the genes" rule, pulling for the team as a whole became a very solid evolutionary strategy rather than just pulling for one's own whelps. It's also notable in this context that anthropology and psychology have both looked long and hard at the birth of the incest taboo as the possible foundation-stone of "modern" human sociology.

Evpsych people - especially the self-taught amateurs - also generally preume that there's been no substantial biological evolution among human beings for the last 250 thousand years (generally true) and that this thus means we are basically larger, naked, tool-using, walking chimps (largely false). When we learned how to manipulate symbols via speach and especially when culture was born some 40,000 years ago with the birth of abstract thought, we became socially-programmed, culture-bearing animals. Sure, biology still INFLUENCES us. It does not, however, DETERMINE our behavior: culture plays a much larger role than biology in determining what you do and, of course, there is always individual agency to take into consideration.

Take my country, for example. There's no evolutionary reason for anyone to use clothes in a climate like Brazil's and yet everyone I see around me is using them. That's a fact created by our history and society, not our genes. And our sexual behavior - especially our supposed penchant for greater acceptance of "trans-racial" and extra-marital sex - can be much more convincingly traced back to slavery and its consequences rather than any particular combination of genes.

Evpsych people (and again, particularly the amateurs) like to hand-wave everything discovered by sociology and anthropology over the last 200 years as "squishy science" and thus not even worth looking at. They thus miss out on social science's one indisbutable contribution to human knowledge: its dense and varied descriptions of thousands of diversified human societies. And in the field of sexual mores, it's REALLY diverse. One of the things evpsych amateurs ignore is that today's norm of "civilization" is quite well linked, scientifically speaking, to a norm of hypergamous marriage, female subordination and female sexual passivity. Given that the vast majority of the world is now "civilized", evpsych people point to the majority of today's peoples as "proof" that these characteristics are transhuman norms. What they should be doing, were they truly serious about their field, is looking into the vast corpus collected by anthopologists re: "non-civilized" sexual behavior in order to see if it meets their predictions.



It generally doesn't.

This shit is convincing in theory. Where it fails is when we look at what people REALY do as opposed to what evpsych theorists think they should be doing according to there readings of Wilson and Dawkins.