Hanson Loves Moose Caca

Warning: this post touches on sensitive topics.

In the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” when Toula was a little girl, she sat alone in the school cafeteria, frizzy haired, big nosed, and unpopular. The blonde girls at the next table asked her what she was eating, and Toula quietly said “moussaka.” The popular girls laughed cruelly, saying “Ewwww, ”moose caca!”” (more)

Imagine that those cruel girls had gone on to tell other kids “Toula says she loves to eat moose caca!” That is how I feel when Noah Smith says:

Why is it that the sciences look like a feminist nirvana compared with the economics profession, which seems to have a built-in bias that prevents women from advancing?

Consider this 2011 blog post by George Mason University economist Robin Hanson. Hanson writes that “gentle, silent rape” of a woman by a man causes less harm than a wife cuckolding her husband:

I [am puzzled] over why our law punishes rape far more than cuckoldry…[M]ost men would rather be raped than cuckolded…Imagine a woman was drugged into unconsciousness and then gently raped, so that she suffered no noticeable physical harm nor any memory of the event, and the rapist tried to keep the event secret…Now compare the two cases, cuckoldry and gentle silent rape.

There was no outcry whatsoever over these remarks, nor any retraction that I could find. (more)

Now I’ve admitted as far back as 2006 that academia, economics included, is biased against women. (Having been in both physics and computer science before, I doubt the situation is much worse in econ.) This one post of mine that Smith points to did induce many negative responses in comments and elsewhere, and of my thousands of blog posts I’d be surprised if much more than a dozen had induced any blog responses by economists whatsoever. And I suggested that we consider that the harms of rape and cuckoldry might be similar; I didn’t claim I knew one to be definitely larger.

But more fundamentally, Noah Smith is plenty smart enough to understand that I was not at all minimizing the harm of rape when I used rape as a reference to ask if other harms might be even bigger. Just as people who accuse others of being like Hitler do not usually intend to praise Hitler, people who compare other harms to rape usually intend to emphasize how big are those other harms, not how small is rape.

But I’m pretty sure Smith knows that. Yet, like the girls who taunted Toula, Smith finds it suits him better to pretend to misunderstand.

Added noon: Steve Sailer weighs in.

Added 2p: Noah Smith and I have been having a twitter conversation on this.

Added 4p: My topic was the relative harm of cuckoldry & rape. Noah Smith says that this topic itself is innately offensive to most women, who think cuckoldry to be of such low harm that comparing it with rape suggests rape to be low harm. He is further offended that I would talk on a topic if I knew it might offend in this way. I said his presuming cuckoldry is of very low harm offends the many men who think it very high harm. He disagrees that there are many such men, and would bet on a poll on the subject, but thinks it offensive to make such a poll, and won’t help with that.

Added 10a Sunday: Heartiste has a poll with over 3700 respondents so far on preferring rape or cuckoldry. Express your opinion there, or start a new poll somewhere.

Added Tuesday: Now Noah Smith wonders out loud if I’m a fake nerd, who pretends not to understand political correctness so I can have an excuse to offend people. Cause people so admire nerds that of course everyone wants to look like one …