Psychology Today: Megan McArdle Really Hates Sex at Dawn

[Fumesucker]

This is an utterly delicious intellectual defenestration of one of the most vapid morons ever to waste electrons in service to propaganda.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201009/megan-mcardle-really-hates-sex-dawn

But still, every party has the red-faced, humorless, easily-offended type. Yesterday, at The Atlantic web site, Megan McArdle provided a stellar example. Her comments begin strangely, with the admission that she's "in the middle" of the book. Note the urgency to condemn it publicly, even before reading the damned thing! And boy, does she lash out:

• "It reads like horsefeathers . . . like an undergraduate thesis,"
• "breathless rather than scientific"
• "cherry-picked evidence stretched far out of shape to support their theory,"
• "they don't even attempt to paper over the enormous holes in their theory."

Ouch! And that's just the first paragraph. But wait, it gets worse. The second paragraph is worth quoting in full, as it's really a perfect expression of the bug-eyed panic the book provokes in some people:

"For example, like a lot of evolutionary biology critiques, this one leans heavily on bonobos (at least so far). Here's the thing: humans aren't like bonobos. And do you know how I know that we are not like bonobos? Because we're not like bonobos. There's no way observed human societies grew out of a species organized along the lines of a bonobo tribe." (emphasis in original)

Got that? Humans aren't like bonobos because we're not like bonobos. No way! So there! Case closed.

Read the whole piece at the link, it's truly a thing of beauty.

[Warpy]

1. Ouch. Well, Megan won't read that article all the way through, either

The one mistake I found in the article was attributing any sort of intellectual standard to the Atlantic or its writers. They abandoned that back in the 80s when they took a hard turn to the right. The only reason I bought the magazine after that was for the cryptic crossword puzzle in the back, but they dropped that years ago, too, because it made their new conservative reader base feel as dumb as they are.

Megan McArdle is a good fit with a supposedly highbrow conservative magazine.

[HopeHoops]

2. If you don't like sex at dawn, wait ten minutes or have it the night before instead.

One small window of nookie-free time is reasonable to ask of a guy.

[BurtWorm]

3. The comments to McArdle's piece are just as boneheaded.

No pun intended, in case there's one in there somewhere. :hide:

[BurtWorm]

4. By chance, I just came along this review of the book at bookslut.

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_08_016440.php

...

Underneath all the science in Sex at Dawn- some sublime, some silly -- is a call to freedom from nuclear-family tyranny, a call that will resonate with the exhausted married mother trying to care alone all day for young kids; with the adolescent boy whose gay stirrings are to be “cleansed” by his church; with the older teenagers pressured into unrealistic pledges of abstinence; with old married folks who pine for something beyond convention; indeed with anyone who pays a heavy price for a culture’s buy-in to the constraining monogamy-myth of our sexual past.