The Best Australian Science Writing 2013

by Jane McCredie

  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.

  In The Long Sexual Revolution, Birmingham University social historian Hera Cook notes that 18th-century English women were assumed to be sexually passionate. Cook draws on economic and social changes, fertility-rate patterns, personal accounts, sex surveys and sex manuals to chart the path towards the sexual repression of the Victorian era. This was a time of reduced female economic power due to a shift from production in the home to wage earning, as well as a lifting of community pressure on men to financially support children fathered out of wedlock. In the absence of well-known, reliable birth-control techniques, ‘women could not afford to enjoy sex. The risk made it too expensive a pleasure’. Victorian women turned to sexual restraint to control fertility, argues Cook, ‘a course of desperation that could be sustained only by imposition of a repressive sexual and emotional culture, initially by individuals of their own accord, and then … upon succeeding generations’. Cook describes the trajectory of Victorian women’s sexuality from the mid to late 19th century as one of ‘increasing anxiety and diminishing sexual pleasure’, evidence for the lack of enjoyment in sexual intercourse being ‘remarkably consistent, with only occasional hints of pleasure’. Only with the increasing availability of reliable, accessible contraception in the early 20th century was there a gradual relaxation of sexual attitudes and growing acknowledgement of the existence and importance of female sexual desire, culminating in the introduction of the birth control pill and the sexual revolution.

  Cook’s rich perspective provides a useful reminder of the sheer newness, still, of the possibility of female economic and reproductive autonomy. The historical view forces the reader to consider the continuing effects of a ‘long sexual revolution’ that is surely still taking place, as society continues to divest itself of the remnants of Victorian sexual mores. Take, for example, the moral discomfort felt by couples about the cervical cap. As the author of a 1934 birth control manual observed, since use of the cap suggested premeditated desire on the part of the woman, many couples disapprovingly regarded the mere act of insertion as ‘wanton’ and an unfeminine ‘invitation to sexual intercourse’.

  There are clear remnants of this attitude in contemporary claims that female sexuality is naturally more passive, receptive to the desire of others rather than the active author of its own. This was the basis of Arndt’s controversial recommendation that women submit to men’s approaches and ‘just do it’, since even without prior feelings of desire they can ‘end up enjoying sex if they simply put the canoe in the water and start paddling’. This cultural belief in female sexual passivity is likely to have psychological effects. A vast, decades-old research literature has shown that gender stereotypes influence the way we behave, without us necessarily becoming aware of their influence. Particularly when gender is salient – for example, when a lone woman sits on a corporate board – our social interactions and perception of others and ourselves become more consistent with gender stereotypes. Yet this gendered behaviour is malleable rather than fixed, and male/female differences can even disappear altogether when gender is pushed into the psychological background.

  This may be difficult to achieve in the bedroom. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a social context in which femaleness and sex could impinge on the psyche more effectively than during heterosexual relations. Recently, Rutgers University psychologist Diana Sanchez and her colleagues have been researching how gender stereotypes play out in the sexual domain. They’ve shown that women, but not men, automatically associate sex with submissiveness, and note other research indicating that the psychological effects of this link play out in non-sexual behaviour. Women take longer to interrupt a person who is talking on the phone after being exposed to sex-related words and images, and they even sign their names in a smaller hand. (Men’s signatures, in contrast, are enlarged by sex-priming.) As for sexual behaviour itself, a growing literature suggests that an internalised notion of female sexual passivity can be detrimental to female sexual pleasure. Heterosexual women with stronger mental links between sex and submission have greater difficulty getting aroused and achieving orgasm, and women who take a submissive role during sex experience less arousal (a correlation that isn’t due simply to a lack of desire affecting both behaviour and arousal). Their sexual dissatisfaction, in turn, reduces their partners’ enjoyment.

  It might be argued that our minds merely acquire, and magnify, a biologically decreed gender difference in sexual agency. But when we consider how much female sexuality has changed in the century since a wife’s use of contraception was considered a ‘wanton’ expression of desire, we should surely feel obliged to stretch the imagination as to what changes might lie ahead. A glimpse of a possible future – and a surprising potential intervention for the present – comes from the positive effects of feminism. Women who endorse feminist beliefs report enhanced sexual wellbeing on several fronts – and not, apparently, simply thanks to the effects of those beliefs on men’s propensity to fold washing. Such women are less likely to endorse old-fashioned sexual scripts, are more likely to have sex for pleasure rather than compliance, and enjoy greater sexual satisfaction through a heightened awareness of their own desire. And, in a happy win– win story, women’s feminism is good for the sexual satisfaction of their male partners too.

  These considerable cultural shifts point to the difficulty of trying to tie the moving target of ‘female sexuality’ to biological roots. In fact, although gender differences in sexuality are often chalked up to hormones, the research paints a dauntingly complex picture at odds with breathless popular claims. While Wolf, for example, claims that ‘oxytocin is women’s emotional superpower’ that puts them at risk of feeling ‘more love, more attachment, and more affection’ after sex than do men, a comprehensive 2005
academic review of the endocrinology of sexual arousal came to an utterly deflationary ending in its section on oxytocin. ‘It is difficult to draw clear conclusions,’ the author writes. ‘The reader is entitled to feel confused,’ he adds, a little mournfully. Nor is there even clear-cut evidence from healthy adult humans for the popular belief that testosterone is deeply implicated in sexual desire. Most studies have failed to find relationships between testosterone levels and libido in healthy men and women, and in a study published this year in Archives of Sexual Behavior, University of Michigan neuroendocrinologist Sari van Anders tested and rejected the hypothesis that men’s higher testosterone levels explain their greater levels of sexual desire. More often, observed relationships are the other way around: sexual behaviour influences hormone levels.

  This growing body of research offers concrete examples of the insight that a gendered sexual culture, as a social phenomenon with the power to inhibit or license particular sexual thoughts, feelings and decisions, is literally incorporated into female bodies. It’s bold to assume that somewhere in the fluid, intertwined mess of biology and culture from which sexual development emerges uniquely for each individual, over a lifetime, there is a universal, timeless and distinctly feminine sexuality.

  However, it’s an idea that may be hard to give up.

  Cook notes that those who were against contraception in the 19th and 20th centuries ‘believed that it would lead women to become promiscuous and adulterous, that the institution of marriage would collapse’. She adds, with charming insouciance, ‘to a remarkable extent, it appears they were correct’. But the sexual revolution also, Cook observes, changed the meaning of sex itself.

  In Rachel Cusk’s novel The Country Life, the prim protagonist, Stella, is confused to find herself ‘increasingly attracted to someone of whom my opinion correspondingly descended’. Stella suspects that his appeal lies in the fact that

  without a rival intelligence to negotiate, without the whole vast and varied territory of taste, intellect and conversation to be explored and cultivated, the sexual domain lay invitingly close by, ripe for momentary plunder … the cheapness of my desire did not make it any less urgent.

  Women’s increasing freedom to both feel and act on ‘cheap’ desires has increased the amount of sex being had, but at the same time ‘made sexual acts less important in people’s lives’, writes Cook. ‘When having sexual intercourse with a person of the opposite sex was tantamount to choosing them as a lifetime partner the act had immense emotional, economic, and symbolic weight attached to it.’

  Today, such significance is optional, and this has led to many expressions of anxiety about a descent into increasingly disconnected, objectifying and emotionally meaningless sex. While in Renaissance Europe it was men’s greater rationality-based restraint that was assumed to keep sexual relations elevated above women’s more base desires, now it is respect for females’ emotionality that some hope will save us. But just as women can enjoy cheap desires, so too can men crave emotionally rich ones (even though the separation of emotional intimacy and sex has become more pronounced for males, too, over recent decades). In every realm of life, as gender gaps narrow, we are reminded that ‘love, tenderness, nurturance; competence, ambition, assertion … are human qualities’, as masculinity scholar Michael Kimmel observed, ‘and all human beings – both women and men – should have equal access to them’. So if the long sexual revolution should lead to a point where the preciousness of sex itself needs preserving – where the sunny and stormy sides of sex become too imbalanced – let it be done not just for women, but for everyone.

  Dating

  Sexual politics

  Did the earth move for you?

  Big Data can tell by your tweets

  if you’re a psychopath:

  That’s only the beginning …

  Kirsten Drysdale

  At the turn of the 20th century, prospectors were rugged, bearded men. They sat on their haunches by mountain streams, rattling pans, sifting through gravel with weather-worn hands in the hope of finding something shiny buried in ancient rock. Very few struck it rich.

  Just over a century later, prospectors have degrees in computer science and, it’s fair to say, a rather different image. They sit on ergonomic office chairs, tapping out algorithms on keyboards running them through huge databases in the hope of finding something useful in the seams of ones-and-zeroes still so new to our planet. What constitutes gold in this new industry? A way of identifying the most persuadable voters is treasure for some, for others it’s predicting trends in criminal activity.

  Data miners rely far less on luck for their livelihoods than the prospectors of old. Many earn six-figure salaries for their work – that’s pay dirt. And their fields of exploration are no ordinary geography. These people are drilling into ‘Big Data’ – the 2.5 quintillion bytes of information created daily by businesses, individuals, financial institutions, government departments, research labs and countless other organisations around the world. The potential economic value of insights hidden within this resource recently prompted the World Economic Forum to declare it a new asset class and is pushing the concept of ‘data equity’ – already well understood by web companies such as Google and Facebook – into the mainstream.

  Finding those virtual nuggets is a complicated task. For a start, a big data set can include all manner of records: years – sometimes decades – of financial transactions, exchange rates, web history, air temperature, blood pressure, crime rates, personal attributes, Facebook ‘likes’, status updates, videos …

  This pithy tweet from a Canadian analyst probably explains big data best for the layperson:

  @SHamelCP: ‘Simplest definition of BigData ever: “it doesn’t fit in Excel”’ :)

  Nowhere near. But volume is only one of the three Vs pushing the ‘data tsunami’ beyond the capacity of traditional business analysis tools and into the hands of data scientists. Velocity, or the speed with which new information is acquired and the demand to act upon it in real time, and variety – messy, ‘unstructured’ data such as images, raw text and multimedia – have, until now, also made harnessing the latent power of all this information a monumental challenge.

  Hence the latest tech boom: the value of the global big data market is projected to top the US $50 billion mark by 2017, a tenfold increase from 2012. And business opportunities are manifold, ranging from storage and data management to analytical services and consulting.

  Big players include established computing giants, such as IBM, Intel and HP, and traditional business-intelligence providers, while hundreds of big-data-focused start-ups have entered the fray. The rush is well and truly on.

  ‘It’s exploding right now, in terms of interest, in terms of activity in the vendor community – and everybody is now talking about big data from an end-user perspective,’ says Jeff Kelly, a techindustry analyst speaking from his office in Marlborough, Massachusetts – the US state which is aiming to become the world’s big data hub. ‘People want to know how they can use the data they’ve been collecting for years – now that the technology has become available and affordable and they can actually do something with it, instead of it just sitting in a repository somewhere.’

  Kelly covers the big data world for open-source research company Wikibon, and authored the first comprehensive report on the size of the global market. ‘We’re seeing interest from all kinds of areas – financial services, healthcare, retail – I can’t find an industry I don’t think will be impacted by this to some degree.’

  In Australia interest is also gathering pace, says Richard Price, vice president of systems at business-intelligence provider Oracle ANZ in Melbourne. ‘Businesses are realising that this will become a source of competitive advantage. In a big data world, any organisation that fails to sufficiently leverage its analytical insights will be left behind.’

  Anthony Goldbloom, an Australian entrepreneur who recently moved his big data start-up, Kaggle, to Silicon Valley,
puts the buzz into perspective. ‘Put it this way: the first quarter of 2012 saw more venture capital investment in big data companies than in consumer internet companies.’ We are most definitely, he says, in ‘the era of big data’.

  Numbers fill out the picture: The May 2011 report Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity by the McKinsey Global Institute claims using big data could provide US $300 billion annual value to healthcare in the United States and €100 billion of efficiency savings to Europe’s public sector. In research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2012 for French professional services firm Capgemini, senior executives reported an average of 26 per cent company performance improvement over the previous three years thanks to big data – a figure they expected to rise to 41 per cent over the next three years.

  They weren’t identified, but some of those executives were likely from large banks, where big data is already being deployed to improve fraud detection.

  ‘They know everything you bought, when you bought it, how you bought it – when you look at that across all the years it’s easy to spot when something out of the ordinary happens. In the past you couldn’t crunch that much data, so you might say, “This is a little out of the ordinary but we can’t say how much out of the ordinary because we don’t have enough to go on.” Now, you can act on it immediately,’ explains Kelly.

  At Predictive Analytics World, the premier commercial-datascience conference, the sessions include movie studios ‘using big data to optimise and predict opening week at the box office’, and ‘Pfizer: Right Medicine, Right Patient’. Even Navy SEALs are covered, in ‘US Special Forces: Hiring and Selecting Key Personnel Using Predictive Analytics’, while marketing research firm Nielsen caters for those with more of an eye for profit, with a financial services session titled ‘Finding Consumers More Accurately and Actionably Using Data Mining Tools’.