There are many articles in conservative mainstream media on the death of masculinity. That, basically, any progress for women only comes at the expense of men, that women are destroying men... and on and on it goes. Consider the assumptions in this... that women prefer girl students, that women aren't wearing burqas so they deserve to be raped on college campuses... (because men can't control themselves - when we know men can control themselves, why aren't men bitterly offended by this assumption? - and if men can't control themselves then perhaps they should go live somewhere else?) But people who think feminism is bad for men, ignore how bad the status quo is for men, for instance the high suicide rate for men, men raping men, men killing men, men being much more likely to experience violence at the hands of men than women do. Basically, in this system, men have a serious man problem.

We, men and women, go together into the future. But as things stand if things aren't working for women and we know things aren't working for men, then perhaps we need to figure out what is going on for both genders.

My take on disappearing masculinity is that of the bully, the man who feels entitled to sex and doesn't think that's rape. As many people have pointed out that this kind of masculinity is really toxic. And that it's as bad for the man as it is for those around them.

However there are things that will never die, like bravery. The bravery of protecting those who have less power than them, those who stand up for others, who risk their lives for others. I would like to think this kind of bravery isn't restricted to men alone. But they do get most of the credit for it. And many of us wouldn't be here if it wasn't for this bravery.

It should go without saying every time a woman gets pregnant she is risking her life for another. That history is full of women who have died in childbirth and so we should remember that many of us wouldn't be here if it wasn't for this bravery and after all, the woman often didn't get a choice in getting pregnant, yet she risks her life anyway. While often men's bravery is always a choice.

Society no longer works for women because women don't (as often) die in childbirth. Women have to have things to do because there is no longer a need for women to reproduce like the human race is about to go extinct. Pandemics which wiped out huge portions of the population are a thing of the past, and husbands leave, die, and sometimes can no longer support the family because of health or accident or whatever reason and the women have to support the family instead. Besides the woman may have had kids because her husband wanted children and he wants to stay at home and look after them. Why shouldn't women get the recognition they deserve both in terms of money and promotions?

But it's my experience that the toxic masculinity of Trump and other conservative men is coming to an end. It seems like their bullying and their entitlement will no longer be tolerated by either gender. That their entitlement is toxic for everyone, the environment and our future.

We go together into the future.

I was asked to write about the psychology of sex workers. Having never being a sex worker, a user of such services or a psychologist I thought I'd improvise a little and talk about the psychology of those who use their services.

For a start we seldom talk about men, and men probably use sex workers of either gender more often than women do. Indeed when articles on the internet talk about the users of sex workers services, they exclusively refer to men.

If men are hiring prostitutes, and using them for sex rather than merely talking to them, I think it's primarily for human contact.

We are primates after all, animals that spend hours grooming all members of their group.

In our society touching is nearly forbidden. We spent the first 9 months of our lives completely encased in human contact. While women can hug and touch their friends, men cannot ask for affection in our society. However it is completely okay for men to ask for and have sex. And the only other socially acceptable way for men to have human contact is via handshake and physical violence. All of limited social acceptability.

If men hug each other it is usually done while hitting the other male on the back and then it's usually only between close male relatives, like father and son, who have a good relationship.

In my opinion, men generally use sex as a substitute for affection. Sex is macho, affection is wussy.

And as such, sex therapists, marriage counselors use the frequency of sex in a marriage as a barometer for how healthy that marriage is. That's great if the sex isn't excruciatingly painful for the woman; or, the man or his partner (male or female) doesn't place undue pressure on him to perform. Nevertheless, I suspect affection would provide many of the benefits that sex supposedly delivers without the need for often invasive contraception or the risk of unwanted pregnancy. But I think the therapists who recommend sex are thinking about his ego when they advocate sex improving self image because it would definitely not be macho to say they engage in frequent cuddling, for instance.

The usual way for men to get regular sex (affection) is having a partner. But maintaining a relationship can be difficult for some men. Either they aren't emotionally/financially ready, or equipped for a partner's needs. So prostitutes may fill that need as well. The other need that prostitutes might help satisfy is loneliness. The need for intimate/personal conversations to have conversations with someone who isn't a man.  When I used to talk to clients (all men) I used to have a stockpile of topics I could discuss with them and it would involve sports and cars, these topics were extremely abstract.

Loneliness and our need to touch and be touched are what, I think, drives prostitution. But what about hormones? Yes, sex is really for procreation and our bodies are driven to procreate because of hormones. But do we really want to risk unwanted pregnancy and STDs just so one gender can relieve their hormones that could be easily relieved with masturbation?

I assumed when I was asked to write on prostitution why women took on a profession that would make them reviled. Everyone needs money in our society. Not all women have someone who can support them and men always seem to want sex - goddess knows how many times I've been asked if I was working while wearing sweats, exercising, just walking down a street or waiting for my husband...

But the problem here is the macho. Men pretending or completely unaware they are pretending to be impervious to needing anything. Needing makes men vulnerable, but that lack of vulnerability makes men commit suicide at high rates 3.5x that of women in the USA, because men cannot ask for help, affection, intimacy... things they need but pretend they don't because it just wouldn't be macho.

Over the past few days I've blogged about systems and disappearing women, but I haven't stressed much about why it's important that humans utilize what both (all) genders bring to the table, together they are better than just one gender carrying the intellectual weight for the species and convincing everyone that there is only one way of seeing the universe.

I think it will take time for women to fully understand the science they bring because for so long we've only been told only about male science, but in my opinion we know so little about ourselves, we've been too busy looking outside ourselves in context with our society to see what we do. How can we go to the stars when we know so little about ourselves? How can we make that trip without spending so much time with ourselves?

No doubt men have uncovered some of women's science already - while women were raising the next generation, dying in childbirth, managing their homes, cooking, cleaning and making money to survive, they had little free time to do their own science themselves. It's only recently women have been making any impact on society, like Rachel Carson, Elinor Ostrom, Jane Goodall, Grace Hopper, to name just a few. While none of these women used calculus to any great extent, they made major impact on society, and probably all will have an impact on any journey to mars.

It reminds me of the story of the potatoes and monkeys. While washing potatoes doesn't require calculus, no doubt it helped the monkey's more directly than mere abstract reasoning.

So long our society has looked for absolutes like there is absolute good, absolute truth, absolute knowable things, when all these things exist in context. For instance symbols take their meaning from the symbols around them. The internet gives the impression that symbols are restricted to math and perhaps astrology, I posit that we communicate entirely in symbols. All the words we use, the letters of our alphabet, numbers, all of language, data science... are symbols. And as a data scientist, I posit that learning is nothing more than the building indices between symbols. However as a data scientist I am in a front row seat to see men mystifying the field with with words like 'machine learning' when it is clear they don't know what 'learning' actually means, or AI - artificial intelligence, when they don't know what 'intelligence' means... and then they think things like the system, indeed, can spontaneously become consciousness. I was once told by a man that he knew it would becomes conscious because he'd done a course on 'ontology' once - which is still one of the funniest things I've ever heard. Indeed what they call data science is nothing like what I'd call even 'science' because the 'deep learning' isn't repeatable. It's a kind of 'crossing your fingers and hope it works' thing.

Another thing considered an absolute is 'good'. To me good is relative and perspective - in some instances a good may be bad, and what may be intended as a good may result in bad, and depends on the motivation of actions and circumstances... Hence there can't be an absolute good - or at least in my opinion. This may impact religious beliefs. However I like what the Dalai Lama says 'Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them'.

I remember reading once there is nothing bad a human can do that no good can come of it. I don't know if this is true either. But then it's not possible to know all things. So there is no absolute 'bad' either, it is also relative; and thus is morality.

In my opinion, men tend to think more in terms of absolutes rather than look for the relative nature of the universe.

There is much of our universe we've misunderstood and sometimes forgotten and until we reconsider our perspective on the universe will we be unable to traverse space. Because in my opinion the incredible spaces between the objects in our universe is to protect the universe from us. Until we've understood the relative nature of morality will we know how to deal with the rest of the universe.

Because everything in the universe is connected. Men tend to think in tasks - or atoms there is this idea that everything is independent, discrete, distinct - it's why men think they can build stuff (businesses...) completely by themselves rather than seeing they are using the building blocks from society. That they need the rest of society for the technology they use to build other stuff with. What we need is a much more holistic approach to the universe.

We know all particles have a de Broglie wavelength, even you and I. While our wavelength is beyond microscopic small - nevertheless it disperses us, in a sense, connects us in/to the universe.

While men think in terms of discrete tasks, this will be beyond them.

Of course, my ideas are independent from those who've gone before me, and knowledge isn't absolute either, it is relative as well. Some men have had ideas as well who were influenced by women that we've forgotten about or ignored because that's what men do, they disappear women. Until we realize women have something to offer and get credit for their thoughts and ideas we will never reach the stars.

In my previous post I started talking about systems and how women tended to be better at being able to see the big picture; and the problem with men managing  big projects is that they tend to be task-focused rather than looking at the consequences of the big picture.

This is why history focuses on specific men in history, like Churchill, generals, presidents because all those men who worked for The Man disappear into the hierarchical organization that allowed The Man to accomplish whatever task, such as running a country or winning a war... Thus The Man appears greater because he (in large part is due to his organization, attributed to his leadership) achieved something big. [In my opinion, this is why men who build businesses or corporations don't think they needed their employees, customers, government... to help them build their business - all those people he depended on for help disappear in the task of building the business]

This is primary reason we have so many problems with environmental collapse: men are focused on their quarterly reports to stockholders rather than the fuck-up their industry is causing the planet. Pollution is beyond the scope of their task, to make money; the rest is irrelevant. They only care about what involves money and what will hurt their corporation and how they will continue to make money.

My husband says that when you are (a man and) part of a hierarchy you are only looking at your boss and those below you to get the task done. This very quickly narrows your perspective. And men who get to the top of corporations likely were raised never having to tidy their bedrooms - that was either a job for their mother or the maid/nanny.

Women are generally better at being able to see the consequences of their actions because they focus on more than the immediate tasks to be accomplished; instead, they anticipate and plan for the consequences of what they do.  This may be primarily due to social conditioning -- after all, men, and seemingly especially those men who are groomed for positions of privilege and leadership in our society, are often raised to believe that the rules do not apply to them ("boys will be boys!") whereas women are raised to respect the rules... and thus have to be more aware of the consequences of their actions.

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Why is the difference between how men and women think important?

Men tend to follow the leader, line up behind other men, and seldom learn to think outside the box. This is especially evident when it comes to Artificial Intelligence. The men who implement AI don't try to make it better by experimenting seriously with the algorithms. It takes women to truly experiment;  we see but one example, historically, with Admiral Hopper especially. She was told not to write a compiler by her male bosses, who were quite happy with the idea of having one, perhaps two computers, per town - they weren't interested in putting computers into every home. But Hopper wrote the compiler and here we are.

The same old ugly techniques of developing AI becomes a problem when you hear about cases like Google's awful racist image-recognition misfire (which was patched, rather than carefully understood).  It seems to me that for really outside the box thinking, you need women, because men do tend to (in no small part due to social conditioning) fall in line. Men can really only see one way to solve the problems with AI.

And this is important for space travel - okay wait a minute, how did we get from AI to space travel?

Well I think our civilization won't come of age until we learn to live in harmony with our environment. We might have to manage our environment but we must master ourselves to live with the confines of our environment because we depend on it. We and our technology can only function within a very narrow range of temperatures and even if we build colonies on the moon and Mars we will still be dependent upon earth for technology and our environment.

Our biggest problem is that we are all so dependent upon each other we don't see how the person who builds the circuit board in our mouse depends on, for instance, the technology of growing coffee. And the many steps in a supply chain are needed to make something as taken-for-granted as computer mice. So when we are living in our colony on the Moon we will still need the next shipment from earth for something as seemingly prosaic as a replacement mouse.

However mastering our environment -- controlling our use of it so it becomes sustainable -- will be a major milestone for our civilization. It will signal that we have come of age, that we are an adult species.  We have made steps towards our civilization's adulthood before - by walking on the moon and seeing a new perspective of ourselves and the universe. We avoided a nuclear war (so far) - and the cold war ended (or so we thought) without a nuclear war.

These are milestones - but the other one will be to manage our world - by managing our environment and making sure we don't get wiped out by an asteroid. We have been lucky so far but these steps are salient in protecting the future of our species.

Because in my opinion - while space is massive - it is massive, in some sense, to protect the rest of the universe from us. And we won't be able to traverse space until women break us out of Einstein's light box - because you see that is what limits our ability to traverse space. The same thing that cripples our AI - calculus, at least as a way, or rather, THE way, of understanding everything.

In my opinion we need to realize what women bring to the table - which so far men think is pretty useless because they think they know everything - they make everything mysterious to control knowledge - and thus women and their knowledge has been marginalized.

There are vastly different ways of seeing the universe than merely using calculus (the mathematical backbone of physics).

But women's ideas have become mainstream for the benefit of men. One of the fundamental axioms of womanhood is that women form equalities. It doesn't take much to step from equalities to the notion that 'all men are created equal'.

Another is women being upset about rape has led to people being wary of their sons (as well as our daughters) being raped by older men.

Another fundamental law of the universe is that everything is recycled. Everything. Whether it is in our environment or in our universe - all will be recycled sooner or later. This isn't very interesting to men who are focused on their profit & loss statements. But it will be fundamental to off planet colonies. In my opinion until recycling underpins our technology our whole civilization will be unsustainable.

These are merely a few examples of women can bring to the table that will benefit all of us. And until we give women and their minds all the recognition they deserve then our society will not function as it will need to to survive.

(to We know so little about ourselves in society - how men operate, how women operate - how they interact with each other. Unfortunately research on how society operates is relegated to women's studies, perhaps philosophy, perhaps sociology, but no self respecting man would be caught dead in the area unless he wanted to 'score' or is trans - either way, this is pretty much a man free zone.

This is unfortunate because we really know so little about ourselves and how we operate. And because we don't it means we have no way to fix the myriad of things that are going wrong with our society.

A lot of these things are male things, like men suiciding, men raping each other, male on male violence which is all about the hierarchy's imposed upon society, how to gain ranks on this hierarchy... much of this we know but it's code. We aren't allowed to talk about it, we can't appear vulnerable, we have to adhere to social norms, be attractive, be funny, be not too clever, but clever enough, be average sized, be rich... We should really study these things because much of this have devastating impacts on individuals.

The other thing that seems to happen with amazing regularity is using women to make men look better and this can be done by saying essentially no woman can ever achieve anything because all women are less than men. This I have seen so many times even by men who pretend to foster the accomplishments of women. I have seen this particularly when it comes to Admiral Hopper (who?).

I've seen this especially when we talk about computer history - they say things like Babbage-Turing instead of Lovelace-Hopper. This how women are edited out of history.

Turing may have done useful things with computers but he didn't invent the compiler, which gave us operating systems for computers; the internet, the web, the IoT, AI, smart phones and basically filled our homes and offices with computers and other devices.

In my opinion Hopper gave us the 21st century in much the same way Tesla gave us the 20th century.
But when you read about her, they say things like she invented COBOL (which is not very sexy - not like JAVA or python - which are all based on Hopper's original compiler). That she coined the term 'bug' - cute but hardly groundbreaking. Or if they mention she invented the compiler, it is often 'Hopper and her team'. But when it comes to other male inventors they never ever mention the team, while they no doubt had one.

One of the things you men do is use other people, especially women.

For instance, I know this guy who writes 'academic' material and he says he can't distinguish between my thoughts and his own and so it is unnecessary to credit me because he also talks to his wife. I told my husband that this person can't remember the difference between his thoughts and mine and my husband said that should be all the more reason to credit me. This guy did say that I was supposedly influenced by his ideas. I can remember all the ideas he has given me over the years on one hand.

However, he never comes to me with an idea to discuss - he only comes with boring stories of how people aren't delivering what they said they would to the point I said don't tell me anymore of this drivel. And so now he has nothing to tell me at all.

Given that we often speak for about an hour to 90mins a week I then go on to fill in the time with my ideas and what interests me. I know sometimes the stuff I say isn't profound but he definitely considers it more interesting than anything that he shares with me, because these ideas get repeated back to me as his own.

I once asked him for a reference and he gave me this sorry excuse of a reference that he even doubted my achievements and asked me to give him proof. I gave him proof. Nevertheless the reference was given grudgingly and written without interest or thought.

I asked him today if he ever acknowledged me in these endless books he never stops blathering about. He said perhaps he did once - a long time ago. So he has been passing off my ideas as his own and not crediting me. I feel completely disappeared.

I find it curious that this person calls himself an academic when he doesn't understand the concept of plagiarism.

Other things men do is mystify things that aren't mysterious. Men like to make things complicated so it will make them look more intelligent or clever.

I remember explaining to this 'academic' person how computer programming was simple yet he started telling me I was really doing something else.

Yet he can't even write computer code. In my opinion, men shouldn't write computer code because they make it too hard for them to do. Women are much better at doing system thinking, as women who run households are capable of managing many problems at once and dovetailing them in together. Men tend to think in terms of tasks rather than looking at the whole picture.

We see this problem with men doing housekeeping all the time. Men focus on one task at a time, women often see many tasks at once and optimize the completion of the tasks at once.

We see this in the packing problem which men tend to out perform women on because men tend to make this an abstract (to be fair he used the word abstract - but this was the first time I'd verbalized this concept and no doubt would have summarized it as abstract later) problem. I saw this on a show called Brain Games that men were able to pack a car trunk quicker and more efficiently than a woman - you see the woman considering what to put where but the man just puts objects in. I rather think the woman is actually trying to organize the objects going into the trunk instead, like diapers, want this to be easily accessible, yet away from food, clothes go at the bottom because won't be needing them until we've arrived... At least that's how I pack the car trunk. I am also solving many problems at once when I am packing the dishwasher, and while I am optimizing for exposing the dirtiest dishes to water flow, I am trying also to get as much as possible in and also remembering how I will unpack it knowing where dishes are stored and how far I can reach to return those dishes into cupboards easily and efficiently.

All of my code is bug free, unlike men's code. I have written systems that have never developed a bug, this is situation normal for me. But perhaps I am not normal. Men on average just can't do it.

But this is something that isn't studied. It is possible that a lot more software could be bug free if women wrote it instead of men. But men have taken over an area that was invented and once performed exclusively by women.

Of course we are all on bell curves - some people are better than others at somethings - regardless of gender.