Ha Ha

I just found not one, but two identical paragraph-length comments urging the reader to "BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN!"

I will not publish them, or quote them, but I just wanted to share that piece of information.

(I might express hope that the commenter gets what he wishes for --- a foreign-born wife, particularly one from, oh, maybe Russia or China --- just so he can have his expectations of a demure and submissive little woman utterly confounded. But I would not want any woman to actually wind up married to this loser, so I will instead wish that he spend his life alone with his sense of entitlement.)

More About Stigma

Miri at Brute Reason has a very thought-provoking post up about social stigma, and whether anyone deserves to be stigmatized.

She doesn't think so, and she gives lots of very good reasons, including these:

When a group is stigmatized, they are considered less than human in some ways. Whichever aspect of them is stigmatized becomes the whole of their identity in our eyes,  and often this means that even if they change the actions that caused them to fall into that category in the first place, the stigma remains. ...
...
[W]ielding psychological manipulation as punishment really, really rubs me the wrong way. The attitude that if someone does something bad they deserve to be cast out and hated and seen as inhuman scares me. I think it's very normal and understandable to want to punish someone for doing a horrible thing, but, as I wrote after the Steubenville verdict, I'm not sure that's the most useful and skeptical response. I feel that our primary concern should be preventing people from doing bad things (both first-time and repeat offenses) and not satisfying our own need for revenge by punishing them.

But, as good as these arguments are (and I am still turning them over in my head, and will probably keep this idea, that stigma and ostracism are inhumane and that there is nothing anyone can do that is bad enough to make them deserving of such treatment, for a very long time*), I'm not sure I can follow them all the way.

Between the ongoing story I've been following in my local newspaper about a girl in my city --- identified only by the initials LP --- who was found locked in a closet in her mother's apartment and my discovery of the Homeschoolers Anonymous blog, and also Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism blogging somewhat regularly about the disturbingly popular child-rearing philosophy of Michael and Debi Pearl, my mind has been more preoccupied than usual with the vilest, most extreme forms of child abuse.

I commented on Miri's blog that, if anyone does deserve to have a stigma permanently attached to them, it's the perpetrators of those horrors, particularly the Pearls (who were not content merely to abuse their own children, if indeed they followed their own method, but who wrote books proclaiming their combination of hard-core obedience training, enforced by frequent beatings, and withholding food from "defiant" children is the only thing that will guarantee a child will grow up to be a Godly person who is saved from Hell) and the mother in this ten-part personal narrative on Homeschoolers Anonymous.

Doing that to a child, for as long as the anonymous author's mother did --- from the spread in ages of the various children in the family, and the author's Conclusion where she mentions that her two youngest brothers are still with her parents and the abuse is ongoing, it had to have been more than a decade --- is a world away from, say, committing an armed robbery. This wasn't a single act, this was a long-term campaign this woman waged against her children. She stayed at home, ostensibly "homeschooling" her children throughout this period, so it's hard to see a line between these acts and the rest of her life. 

Yet, with the LP story, which is just as horrific, and which makes me feel just as much rage on the victim's behalf, I can see more of Miri's point. LP's mother was very young when she had LP, and at several points in the story you can see hints of someone who was overwhelmed, and who might never have done what she did to her daughter if she had gotten the help she needed but probably never asked for. It's hard to see whom it would help to stigmatize her, when she was already probably stigmatized for other reasons (poverty, blackness, living in a subsidized apartment, being an unmarried mother of three children by two different fathers), which might well have contributed to her feeling that the only thing she could do with her eldest daughter was to keep her out of sight.

But the Pearls, and the parents in the anonymous woman's story? They're not stigmatized at all, except by people like me, who have no power in their lives or social contact with them, or people who have left the conservative evangelical Christian circles those people move in. Within that community, they are revered as leaders and role models. I'm sure that this knowledge is part of the reason I want so badly to rain down opprobrium upon them: because, unlike Jacole Prince, they're getting off scot-free, and they continue to believe that what they are doing is right.

And Miri does grapple with the problem of great evil in her post, too --- where I chose to focus on child abuse, she wrote about rape. And she made another great point in doing so:

Being a convicted rapist is actually a very stigmatized identity -- it's just that rapists rarely become convicted rapists. Rape is known to be a Very Bad Thing, but rapists know that they can get away with it if they commit it in certain ways. Despite the stigma, rape is pervasive and rape culture exists.

I absolutely see a dynamic like this playing out in mainstream society's attitudes about child abuse; child abuse is so heinous, so evil, so stigmatized that we can't ever believe anyone we know is abusing their child. So we second-guess ourselves when we start to wonder about a child's suspicious bruises, unexplained absences, dirty clothes, poor hygiene etc. The stigma attached to child abuse is terrible, so we are reluctant to call it down on our neighbors' heads, even if we suspect they are abusing their children. What if we're wrong? We'll have ruined an innocent person's life! 

(This will sound painfully familiar to anyone who has been raped, or who has spent any time reading about rape culture.)

Another thing worth pondering about this problem as it pertains to child abuse is that, when the child who is being abused, neglected, or even murdered has a disability, the abusive, neglectful or murderous parent is not stigmatized so much as they are pitied. The poor dear, she was carrying an impossible burden. 

A mother can appear in a film in which she tells the camera she has thought about putting her autistic daughter in the car and driving off a bridge with her, and the main reaction to this film will be sympathy, not shock or horror. 

I point this out not to argue that parents of disabled children don't deserve sympathy, or much better support than they're currently getting from society at large, but to argue that this reaction leaves no room for the child. They're a person too, and they have the right to food, shelter, medical care, education, love, and as much freedom and autonomy as is developmentally appropriate**. Focusing on how hard it is to care for a disabled child, even if you're only trying to explain the parent's actions, works to excuse the parent and put some of the blame for their fate onto the child. It also works to make life harder for all disabled people, because it makes it sound like we're being unreasonable just by existing, and that attitude is exactly the kind of attitude that resists making accommodations for us, even when those accommodations are not particularly expensive, awkward or difficult.

Particularly when we're talking about children whose disabilities are behavioral, this idea that it's just too hard works to excuse awful things like restraint and seclusion, at home and in school. At its extreme, it can lead to parents keeping their disabled children in dog cages; they see no other way to treat them because it's too hard and it's not like the children are normal children, for whom such treatment would be abusive, no, they're abnormal children for whom it is necessary.

So even while I see that a heavy stigma attached to child abuse can be counterproductive, in that it might discourage people from reporting their suspicions, I also think there are some kinds of abuse that are not heavily stigmatized, that are even excused (i.e., abuse of children with disabilities, which is often framed as a tragic consequence of disability) or met with approval (i.e., abuse within insular communities that don't share the wider culture's norms).

And it makes me furious that there isn't a heavy stigma, that people like, say, Michael and Debi Pearl don't even think they've done anything wrong, and sleep the untroubled sleep of the just.

*"Keeping an idea" is what I do when I read or hear something that blows my mind, but that I do not immediately know whether to accept it as truth. I kept a lot of ideas related to feminism in the (long) time before I decided I was a feminist, and I kept an idea of Richard Dawkins's that I now think I do believe is true, that raising a child to believe in Hell (at least, a Hell that they could go to --- I'm not sure it's true if Hell is only for big evildoers like Hitler and Stalin) is an abusive practice. I'm also keeping the idea that veganism is a moral imperative for those who are able to adopt it. A lot of the ideas that I keep are of the form "actually, this thing that we do all the time is bad, and you should stop doing it/get other people to stop doing it.")

**This notion --- that freedom and autonomy can't be absolute when you're talking about children --- is actually more complicated than it sounds, especially when we're talking about children with disabilities, or dependent adults with disabilities. How can you define what is "developmentally appropriate" for a child whose development has been atypical? Especially if said child is ahead of his age in some ways while also being delayed in others? (This was me, and I suspect it is most autistic people!) I know only this much: the way these decisions are currently made gives too little freedom to developmentally disabled adults.

In Which a Newspaper Article Makes Me Angry

I know, it happens all the time, to everyone. 

I'm still going to write about it, though.

The article that bothered me was this one in today's Kansas City Star, about the controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon joining the University of Missouri's anthropology department as Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor's Chair for Excellence in Anthropology.

Napoleon Chagnon, if you didn't know, is famous (or infamous) for his research on a group of Amazonian indigenous people called Yanomami. He called them "the fierce people" (which he says is a translation of what they call themselves) and said that their way of life was especially violent, characterized by constant warfare and abduction of women from other villages. 

A Yanomami shaman and spokesman, Davi Kopenawa, says that Chagnon's depictions of his people are false, and that he has harmed the Yanomami by making everyone think of them this way [PDF]:

For us, we Yanomami who live in the forest, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon is not our friend. He does not say good things, he doesn't transmit good words. He talks about the Yanomami but his words are only hostile. He is angry and says, 'The Yanomami are bad, the Yanomami fire arrows at one another because of women. The Yanomami beat one another.' He has always thought that. 

Young American men and women think, 'Napoleon knows a lot and transmits true words --- the Yanomami are very bad.' I am not happy about this.

But that wasn't the thing that bothered me about this article; the article actually does address the arguments that Chagnon's research was shoddy, that he mischaracterized the Yanomami, making them out to be far more vicious than they are, and that his activities in the Yanomami villages may have harmed the people he set out to study*.

No, what bothered me was the reductive way they framed the story, as another battle in the ongoing war between partisans of Nature and Nurture.

You often see that in articles about evolutionary psychology, especially when the person or idea being discussed is the subject of controversy.

Here are a couple of examples from the article:

Chagnon ... has been a lightning rod at the center of an academic tempest over evolutionary anthropology. In Darwin's world (and Chagnon's), where the fastest, fiercest, smartest, and perhaps cruelest, survive to pass on their genes, what does that mean to human nature today? 

Those arguing against this sociobiology fiercely contend our behavior and culture are rooted in our environment --- or, at least, one cannot credibly discern the effects of a "mean gene" from a war-ax-wielding ancestor in the family tree. 

... 

[Quoting MU Anthropology Department Chairman R. Lee Lyman] "... The Darwinian perspective might give us unique insight. Chagnon was one of the founders of that approach. Unfortunately, it became a political issue as opposed to a scholastic issue. It was heresy."

(That's a rhetorical trick that particularly annoys me: if someone has a problem with your research or your ideas, don't engage the substance of their critique, just dismiss it as politics. You see this in discussions of gender differences, too. A feminist points out that gender might be more complicated, and more malleable, than the hard-wired "pink brain, blue brain" model popular today, and people roll their eyes at her for letting her politics get in the way of Serious Science**. That maneuver also makes the person whose ideas are being discussed into a heroic figure who is being unfairly silenced, rather than an ordinary researcher whose methods, data, and interpretations of said data are being criticized by other researchers.)

More:

The article [that Chagnon published in Science in 1988 (PDF)], summed up as "killers have more kids" by some, rattled or outraged many in his discipline. Suggesting that brutality might be embroidered into our genes by evolution seemed a slippery slope toward racism or a step backward toward eugenics that saw the forced sterilization of thousands. 

"This is no longer thought to be true. There are, of course, a few holdouts," explained Bill Irons, Northwestern University professor emeritus and a Chagnon ally. "Many anthropologists and many on the political left as well preferred to believe that human behavior was shaped completely by culture."

The article makes it sound like there are only two choices for what to believe about human nature and evolution: that human nature is innate, heritable, unchanging and inherently violent, selfish and sexist, or that there is no such thing as human nature, and that people will be whatever the culture around them shapes them to be.

This leaves out a growing body of research within anthropology, primatology, evolutionary  biology and related fields that deals with other factors besides male-on-male conflict that have shaped human evolution.

Examples of people doing this kind of research include: 

1) Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who has studied mating behavior, female reproductive strategies and social organization in langur monkeys, and has developed a theory that kinship networks and shared child-rearing ("alloparenting" or "allomothering," she calls it) were necessary for early humans' survival.

Here is a snippet from an interview she did with Scientific American blogger Eric Michael Johnson, in which she briefly addresses the notion that killers and rapists have more kids, and why she thinks that's not true:

[A]mong hunter-gatherers, the way to breed successfully is to have alloparental help and provisioning help from others. Anybody who goes around killing off his wife's relatives and stealing women is going to have a lower chance of rearing offspring. These warring bands of brothers didn't emerge until fairly recently, after people started to become more sedentary. 

Part two of that interview is here.

2) Frans de  Waal, who studies cooperation, communication, empathy, conflict resolution, reciprocal altruism (i.e., trading favors) and sharing in chimpanzees, bonobos and capuchin monkeys.

3) Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist whose research has mostly dealt with the physiological effects of stress, but who has also studied social hierarchies and aggression in two troops of savanna baboons in Kenya, where he saw the level of violence in one of those troops drop off dramatically when the biggest, meanest dominant males were all killed in an outbreak of tuberculosis. The troop has kept up this more peaceful way of life even now, over 20 years since the dominant-male die-off, when probably every single (current) member of the troop was born after it happened, and every adult male has come from another troop. 

4) Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist who has studied reciprocal altruism, sexual selection, and parental investment in offspring. He wrote an article in 1971 called The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism (PDF), in which he argued that animals who repay other animals' helpful acts were more likely to keep getting help throughout their lives, and thus were more likely to survive longer, have more offspring survive to adulthood, etc.

That's not an exhaustive list, just the names that I, a non-anthropologist who has never taken an anthropology class, know.

*The name they gave him, Shaki, which the article's author translates as "annoying bee," does not suggest that they thought very highly of him, or found him very pleasant company.

**See Simon Baron-Cohen's review of Cordelia Fine's book Delusions of Gender, in which he uses words and phrases like "polemic," "barely veiled agenda," "blurring science and politics," and "extreme social determinism" to describe Fine and her book, when she's really more like a gender agnostic than a proselytizer.

Autistic People Are Human

So I'm a day late but I still want to participate in this campaign to change the Google search results for "autistic people are."

Here is what they are now:

If you can't see the image, it's a screengrab of a Google search box with the phrase "autistic people are" and a list of four choices to complete the phrase. The four words are, in order, "annoying," "smart," "evil," and "retarded." 

Annoying. Evil. Retarded.

Evil? Evil?!

I'll tell you, that one still surprises me. I've seen it before --- seen "autistic" used as shorthand for some moral failing, usually selfishness or a lack of empathy --- but it still astonishes me to see that people apparently see us that way. I'm used to the "empty fortress" stereotypes, where people think we have no inner lives, no thoughts, no feelings, that our words and acts are just random spewage that we cannot possibly have intended, that cannot possibly be directed at any goal, anything we want. We can't want, remember?

That's the stereotype I grew up with. It's a depressing one, and still very much alive. You can see it underlying mainstream America's indifference to the abuse, neglect, and even murder of autistic children by their parents (or other caregivers). "Kids like that are hard to take care of," people will say, "it's no wonder she snapped," or "it's no wonder they weren't up to the job," or "What else were they supposed to do?" And the kids themselves, their deaths don't seem as tragic as the death of a normal child would be. Their lives were cut short, but what kind of a life would it have been, really? These people never grow up, they just get older. Forty years old, sitting in your parents' living room? That's no kind of a life at all. Isn't it almost for the best, to have spared them that?

(No, it's not for the best. In case you were wondering.)

But apparently there's a new stereotype coexisting with this one, that of the stone-cold killer. It cropped up in the coverage of the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and also of the one in Aurora, Colorado. People were asking, like they always do, who had done this, and how could they have done it? And one of the answers was, "It was a disturbed young man who may have been on the autism spectrum."

I don't know exactly when that autism stereotype started to take root in the public mind; it seems to have come up as people have started to be more aware that some autistic people can speak, go to school, attend mainstream classes, and do very well academically. When I was a child, this was not generally known, and people often expressed surprise that a child as articulate and precocious as I was could have autism.

Like Landon Bryce, I blame Simon Baron-Cohen's increasingly popular conception of autism for this development. I know that Professor Baron-Cohen does not think autistic people are evil, or even that we don't have feelings for other people, but the terminology he chose to use --- calling us poor "empathizers" --- conjures exactly that image in a reader's mind. 

All head and no heart. 

This, of course, is one of the reasons why I'm not mollified by seeing "smart" on the list as well: because I know that the Autistic Genius trope can blend seamlessly into the stone-cold killer. Both are unhindered by emotion or personal attachment, both can act with equal ruthlessness. The only difference is in what they do, how they direct their dispassionate efforts.

(The other reason is that smartness is often seen as a consolation prize: oh, you're autistic? You must be GREAT at math! What's that? You're not? Well, what good are you then?!)

So, what would I like people to know that autistic people are? 

Human.

That's all.

Blaming the Patriarchy for Autistic Children

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: There's a brief passage in Betty Friedan's landmark study of American housewives in the 1950s and '60s, The Feminine Mystique, where she discusses autism. She embraces the understanding of autism popular at the time, which posits that autism is an emotional disturbance arising from the relationship between mother and child. Yet she parts company from other popularizers of this theory by arguing that the confining, constricted nature of the housewife role distorts women's personalities and their relationships with their husbands and children, thereby making psychological problems more, not less, likely in the families where the mothers are full-time housewives.

She was, of course, massively wrong about autism, though I think her overall thesis about women's needs, and the failure of traditional gender roles to meet them, was (and is!) sound. The few paragraphs she devotes to autism aren't crucial to the points she makes in the rest of the book, and the psychogenic theory of autism is pretty much dead today, and hardly in need of aggressive debunking, but she talks about increasing prevalence of autism with an urgency similar to the "autism epidemic" fears of today.
______________________________________________

The Classic Text of the Modern Women's Movement which Exploded the Myth of THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE!

It's the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and instead of talking about the book as a whole, or evaluating it in a modern context (as so many other people, far better informed than I, have already done), I am going to spotlight one small part in the book, where she talks about autism.

(If you've read the book, even recently, you might not even remember her talking about autism at all! The idea might even strike you as anachronistic, given that freaking out over an Autism Epidemic is so pervasive in our time. But it's in there --- it hit me with particular force because I am autistic, and the passage is the kind of thing it's not at all nice to read if you're reading it about yourself.)

If you haven't read this book, do, especially if you're interested in feminism or women's history. As profoundly limited in scope as it is (a quality it shares with the earlier, similar work by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which also concerns itself with society's neglect of women's minds and non-reproductive capacities) --- the only women who show up in its pages are well-educated, middle-and-upper-class white women, who don't have to do hard, physical work (or much of any work) to survive, for whom work outside the home could be intellectually demanding and emotionally rewarding, instead of boring, exhausting, dangerous, soul-killing drudgery, and whose labor is only exploited within the home and never also outside it --- it's still valuable for its detailed enumeration of the psychological costs of limiting women's lives to marriage, home and family.

Off and on throughout the book, and in a more sustained fashion in Chapters Eleven and Twelve, Friedan talks about how, perversely, the 1950s and '60s funneling of women back into the full-time housewife role actually hurt family life and sexual relations. In Chapter Twelve, "Progressive Dehumanization," she describes a pattern she sees of women whose too-early entry into marriage and motherhood precluded their developing authentic selves of their own, and thus rendered them incapable of raising children with all the skills and character traits they needed to become independent, themselves.

(I am going to quote at some length from the chapter, so for readability's sake I'm going to do what I did in this post and not blockquote the entire thing, but instead draw lines above and below the quoted text to separate it from my own. Quotations within the quoted passage I will still blockquote).

Here she brings in autism as the logical endpoint of this Great Chain of Nonbeing, this "progressive dehumanization" as one psychologically stunted generation brings up another, even more psychologically stunted, to the point of being autistic.
___________________________________________________________

At its most extreme, this pattern of progressive dehumanization can be seen in the cases of schizophrenic children: "autistic" or "atypical" children, as they are sometimes called. I visisted a famous clinic which has been studying these children for almost twenty years. During this period, cases of these children, arrested at a very primitive, sub-infantile level, have seemed to some to be on the increase. The authorities differ as to the cause of this strange condition, and whether it is actually on the increase or only seems to be because it is now more often diagnosed. Until quite recently, most of these children were thought to be mentally retarded. But the condition is being seen more frequently now, in hospitals and clinics, by doctors and psychiatrists. And it is not the same as the irreversible, organic types of mental retardation. It can be treated, and sometimes cured.

These children often identify themselves with things, inanimate objects --- cars, radios, etc., or with animals --- pigs, dogs, cats. The crux of the problem seems to be that these children have not organized or developed strong enough selves to cope even with the child's reality; they live on the level of things or of instinctual biological impulse that has not been organized into human framework at all. As for the causes, the authorities felt they "must examine the personality of the mother, who is the medium through which the primitive infant transforms himself into a socialized human being."

At the clinic I visited (The James Jackson Putnam Children's Center in Boston) the workers were cautious about drawing conclusions about these profoundly disturbed children. But one of the doctors said, a bit impatiently, about the increasing stream of "missing egos, fragile egos, poorly developed selves" that he encountered --- "It's just the thing we've always known, that if the parent has a fragile ego, the child will."
Most of the mothers of the children who never developed a core of human self were "extremely immature individuals" themselves, though on the surface they "give the impression of being well-adjusted." They were very dependent on their own mothers, fled this dependency into early marriage, and "have struggled heroically to build and maintain the image they have created of a fine woman, wife and mother."

The need to be a mother, the hope and expectation that through this experience she may become a real person, capable of true emotions, is so desperate that of itself it may create anxiety, ambivalence, fear of failure. Because she is so barren of spontaneous manifestations of maternal feelings, she studies vigilantly all the new methods of upbringing and reads treatises about physical and mental hygiene. [This passage, along with the one a few paragraphs down, comes from Beata Rank (1949), "Adaptation of the Psychoanalytical Technique for the Treatment of Young Children with Atypical Development," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry*, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 130-139]

Her omnipresent care of her child is based not on spontaneity but on following "the picture of what a good mother should be," in the hope that "through identification with the child, her own flesh and blood, she may experience vicariously the joys of real living, of genuine feeling."
___________________________________________________________

(Is anyone else starting to think of the evil Other Mother from "Coraline" yet?)

______________________________________________________________

And thus, the child is reduced from "passive inertia" to "screaming in the night" to non-humanness. "The passive child is less of a threat because he does not make exaggerated demands on the mother, who feels constantly in danger of revealing that emotionally she has little or nothing to offer, that she is a fraud." When she discovers that she cannot really find her own fulfillment through the child:

... she fights desperately for control, no longer of herself perhaps, but of the child. The struggles over toilet training and weaning are generally battles in which she tries to redeem herself. The child becomes the real victim --- victim of the mother's helplessness which, in turn, creates an aggression in her that mounts to destruction. The only way for the child to survive is to retreat, to withdraw, not only from the dangerous mother, but from the whole world as well.

And so he becomes a "thing," or an animal, or "a restless wanderer in search of no one and no place, weaving about the room, circling the walls as if they were bars he would break through."

In this clinic, the doctors were often able to trace a similar pattern back several generations. The dehumanization was indeed progressive.
______________________________________________________________

The first thing about this passage that jumps out at me is the objectification of the autistic children Friedan and her expert interlocutors are observing. 

It's just so explicit: autistic people are not human, we're not even conscious. We represent the endpoint of a multigenerational loss of humanity. It's kind of ironic and weird that a book whose aim is to prove that women's minds are more complex, capable of more and needing more, than the psych experts of the time thought possible, would make the same kind of categorical dismissal of the possibility of any inner life in another group of people.

Maybe it's not that weird. And the point she's trying to make --- that people who are shunted into parenthood without any opportunity to live their own lives, or find out what they really want (including whether they want to be parents!) tend to make poor parents --- is a valid one; it's just that autistic people are neither "dehumanized" nor the result of poor parenting. We're as fully human as anyone else.

Moving on: You can see Bruno Bettelheim's** "refrigerator mother" theory of autism supplying most of the basic theory here; it's just that Friedan is more sympathetic to the mothers than he is. Both writers (and Friedan was trained as a psychologist, too) think autism is a state of psychological emptiness (no self, no thoughts, no capacity to relate to others) caused by something going wrong in the mother/child relationship --- something the mother does wrong. Bettelheim thought children became autistic because their mothers rejected them --- at some level (whether they were aware of it or not) they "wish(ed) that (their) child(ren) should not exist." For Friedan, the problem starts earlier: the mothers' own emotional development is curtailed, because they never had a chance to do anything other than marry young and have children, so the mothers lean too hard on their young children for emotional support, which then stunts the children's emotional growth to an even greater extent. Mother and child are both victims, and the social order is to blame.

I see no difference at all between Friedan and Bettelheim in their degree of empathy for actual autistic children (and perish the thought that they might consider autistic adults): there is none. The whole point of both of their theories is that we are not people, we have no inner lives worth considering; they only differ on how we came to be that way. We represent the end stage of some pathology, whether it is social (patriarchy, in Friedan) or personal (refrigerator motherhood, in Bettelheim).

*Am I the only person who finds the term "orthopsychiatry" to be very creepy? It has a connotation of straightening, of bringing into line, that I don't think belongs in the mental-health profession. I know (partially from reading The Feminine Mystique itself, although The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd also helped give me this impression) that that was indeed the aim of psychiatry in those days --- to bring people into line, to help them "adjust" --- but it still creeps me out a lot.

**Bettelheim isn't cited in any of the sections describing autism, probably because The Feminine Mystique predated his most famous work about autism, The Empty Fortress, by four years. But he had been running his Orthogenic School for "disturbed" children since the mid-1940s, and had written at least two things (an essay for Scientific American magazine, and an article about feral children, whom he believed were really autistic) about autism prior to The Feminine Mystique's publication in 1963. Bettelheim is quoted at length elsewhere in the chapter --- Friedan devotes a lot of space to his observations of his fellow prisoners in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Also, William Long, who has written a series of articles on how various writers have understood autism throughout its history, believes that Bettelheim must have been popularizing his theories of autism long before he published The Empty Fortress, because Bernard Rimland criticizes Bettelheim and his "psychogenic" view of autism in his own book, Early Infantile Autism, published in 1964.

Is Fear of Vaccines a Liberal Thing?

That's what I had always thought --- that the right wing can have their creationists, their global warming deniers, their opposition to stem-cell research, and whatever else, but we on the left have to claim the lion's share of the anti-vaccination crowd.

Photo taken by Flickr user captaincinema

I believed this mostly for two reasons: first, most of the anti-vaccination rhetoric I had heard focused on scary chemicals that may or may not be present in vaccines, and scary-chemical rhetoric is also a staple of diverse left-leaning causes ranging from the legitimate (i.e., environmentalism) to the kooky (alternative medicine, the cult of the "natural"). The second reason is that, to the extent that the anti-vaccine celebrities I'd heard of can be said to have politics, their politics tend to be Democratic. The one obvious example is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a Democrat and prominent environmentalist, and the two other anti-vaccine celebrities I can think of, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, aren't involved very much in U.S. politics, but the profiles of them I linked to suggest that they're Democratic-leaning.  

Anti-vaccine booth at the 2008 Netroots Nation convention in Austin, TX. Photo credit: Lindsay Beyerstein

The famous science writer Chris Mooney was also under the impression that anti-vaccine-ism is a crank ideology peculiar to the left, though I'm not sure he is anymore.

The mass freakout on the right over Gardasil made me reevaluate that impression, though.

It's true, Gardasil is a special case because it's a vaccine for adolescents --- and, initially, adolescent girls, although it's now recommended for all young people --- meant to protect against the cancer-causing strains of human papillomavirus, which spreads through genital contact. That puts it squarely in the middle of the Religious Right's Freakout Zone, which encompasses anything involving young women and sex.

I would've been perfectly content to accept just that explanation for the anti-Gardasil backlash, but then Michele Bachmann came out with her howler about Gardasil causing developmental disabilities. That sounded so much like what I had been hearing from Jenny McCarthy et al. that I started wondering whether anti-vaccine crankery was actually bipartisan.

There have been a lot of polls about people's attitudes toward vaccination, but I can't find very many that also include respondents' political affiliation. 

Chris Mooney wrote about two polls suggesting that anti-vaccine sentiments are spread evenly across the political spectrum: a USA Today/Gallup poll from 2009 that asked people to identify themselves as liberal, conservative or moderate and then asked them whether they had heard of Jenny McCarthy and whether they agreed with her or not; and a Pew poll, also from 2009, that asked, among lots of other things, whether children should be required to be vaccinated or whether that choice should be left to their parents.

With above photo, anti-vaccine protest signs at a Tea Party Express rally held on April 8, 2010 in St. Paul, MN. Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue

Larger version of printout attached to sign in lower half of the above pair of photos

Mike the Mad Biologist wrote about another Pew poll from 2009, this one asking people whether they would get the swine flu vaccine if it were available to them. It found Republicans and Independents more likely than not to refuse it (54% to 41%), while Democrats were almost 2:1 in favor of getting the vaccine. Republicans were also the most likely (54%), and Democrats the least (35%), to say that the news media were overstating the danger of swine flu.

Another poll, this one conducted just a couple months ago by You Gov, found that greater percentages of Republicans than Democrats said they were "not so confident" or "not confident at all" that the current vaccine schedule recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services is safe. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say they were "very confident" or "somewhat confident," although strong majorities of both parties fall into those two groups.

That poll also asked people which conditions they think vaccines can cause, and Republicans were slightly more likely than Democrats to say vaccines cause autism.

I don't know what the New World Order is, but this graphic is a great example of attributing nefarious motivation to vaccine makers

It's also worth pointing out that there are different fears that underlie different people's opposition to vaccines. Some people might be afraid of Big Pharma profiting off their sickness; others might be afraid of the government telling them what to do with their bodies, or with their children's bodies, and other people might be afraid of the Scary Chemicals in vaccines. 

You can see appeals to all of these different fears in anti-vaccine rhetoric: most obvious (to me, at least) is the Scary Chemicals rhetoric that emphasizes what kinds of scary-sounding things are in vaccines (or, in the case of thimerosal, used to be in vaccines), but there's also the tactic of discrediting anything a medical professional says about vaccines by saying they're being paid off by the pharmaceutical companies. 

One type of anti-vaccine rhetoric I hadn't noticed before I started writing this post is the kind that objects to mandatory vaccines. Even when there's a very good reason for it, like requiring health-care workers to be fully vaccinated because they're in contact with lots and lots of 1) sick people and 2) people whose immunity is compromised.

People protesting a proposal to make swine flu vaccination mandatory for health care workers in New York state in 2009. Both photos taken by Louise McCoy for The Epoch Times

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how a libertarian-minded person, probably a lot like the people in the two Tea Party pictures above, might see mandatory vaccination as yet another unwarranted government intrusion into their affairs.  

This old article in the Seattle Weekly about the antivaccination movement in Washington state makes note of the movement's bipartisan appeal:

A closer look at [Washington state Department of Health] data reveals the potent mix of demographics that makes vaccine resistance such a sturdy presence in the state. Some of the highest [vaccine] exemption rates are in eastern Washington, where any kind of government mandate --- whether immunization or taxation --- is viewed with hostility. 

At the opposite end of the political spectrum are the liberal enclaves of western Washington, which are also resistant to vaccines. At Vashon Island's public elementary school, 25 percent of students have skipped at least one vaccine. At the Seattle Waldorf School, ... the number is a whopping 47 percent. 

These schools are part of well-educated and affluent communities that one might think would be most likely to follow the recommendations of scientists and doctors. But in fact, as journalist Seth Mnookin points out in his new book The Panic Virus, they perfectly reflect the base of today's anti-vaccine movement. Its constituents are part of what you might call the suburban counterculture --- parenthood and affluence mixed with creative aspirations, a crunchy-chewy lifestyle, and an inclination to question authority.

Finally, let's look at laws making it easier for people to opt out of vaccination.

Here is a list of states whose laws allow parents to refuse to vaccinate their children for "philosophical" reasons:

• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Idaho
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• North Dakota
• Pennsylvania
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Texas
• Utah
• Vermont
• Washington
• Wisconsin

As you can see, it's a pretty mixed bag of "red states" and "blue states."

One More Air-Pollution Study

In the last post I confused this study (PDF) with an earlier one by the same group of researchers; I wrote about the earlier one, but linked to a post on Paul Whiteley's blog about the more recent one, which was published just last November.

(I also started describing this one, and then switched to describing the earlier one; in my last post, only one of the studies I mentioned used air-pollution data from the EPA's air-monitoring stations. The earlier study by these authors only used proximity to high-traffic roadways as their variable indicating pollution exposure.)

This paper combined the methods of the two studies I wrote about in the last post; it used the same pool of children born in California between 1997 and 2006 and drew on two sources of data on air pollution at the time and place those children were born: the EPA's air-quality data that I wrote about yesterday, and a computer model of average traffic flow, and exhaust emissions, along California's major roadways.

To some extent, you could see it as a more geographically dispersed version of the study I described yesterday that looked at prenatal exposure to air pollution in just Los Angeles County. 

(Weirdly, the LA-County-only study, though restricted to a smaller geographic area, involved way more people than the two traffic-related studies: 7,603 autistic and 75,782 control subjects, as opposed to this study's 279 autistic and 245 control subjects.)

But the relatively straightforward EPA data, which are direct measurements of the concentration of various pollutants at regular intervals, and which are only abstracted from each child's actual prenatal exposure in that 1) they do not measure what concentration of those pollutants actually got into the mothers' bodies, much less the fetuses', and 2) they were taken at sites some distance away from where the children actually live. 

So it's not a perfect data source, but it's still a lot more directly reflective of reality than this computer model seems to be:

The principal model inputs are roadway geometry, link-based traffic volumes, period-specific meteorological conditions (wind speed and direction, atmospheric stability, and mixing heights), and vehicle emission rates. Detailed roadway geometry data and annual average daily traffic counts were obtained from Tele Atlas/Geographic Data Technology in 2005. These data represent an integration of state-, county-, and city-level traffic counts collected between 1995 and 2000. Because our period of interest was from 1997 to 2008, the counts were scaled to represent individual years based on estimated growth in county average vehicle-miles-traveled data. Traffic counts were assigned to roadways based on location and street names. Traffic volumes on roadways without count data (mostly small roads) were estimated based on median volumes for similar class roads in small geographic regions. Meteorological data from 56 local monitoring stations were matched to the dates and locations of interest. Vehicle fleet average emission factors were based on the California Air Resource Board's EMFAC2007 (version 2.3) model. Annual average emission factors were calculated by year (1997-2008) for travel on freeways (65 mph), state highways (50 mph), arterials (35 mph), and collector roads (30 mph) (to convert to kilometers, multiply by 1.6). We used the CALINE4 model to estimate locally varying ambient concentrations of nitrogen oxides contributed by freeways, nonfreeways, and all roads located within 5 km of each child's home. Previously, we have used the CALINE4 model to estimate concentrations of other traffic-related pollutants, including elemental carbon and carbon monoxide, and found that they were almost perfectly correlated (around 0.99) with estimates for nitrogen oxides. Thus, our model-based concentrations should be viewed as an indicator of the traffic-related pollutant mixture rather than of any pollutant specifically.

So, to arrive at an estimate of how much of a certain category of air pollution (traffic-related air pollution) each mother and child in their study had been exposed to, they used a computer model to come up with average emissions for vehicles all over the state, traveling at various average speeds corresponding with their various categories of roads, for each year in their study. Then they entered that, along with all the other types of data mentioned above (winds, atmospheric conditions, traffic volume, road layout) into another computer model to arrive at the final answer.

I'm not criticizing their model; it actually seems like a pretty good one to my untrained eye. But my point is that there's a lot of extrapolating, averaging, assuming that what's true for location x will also be true for location y, and other things that make the model work but aren't grounded in direct observation and thus might not actually be true. 

That will be the case for any model, and this one has a few serious gaps in its data pool. They're missing eight years of traffic data from their eleven-year "period of interest," so they have to guess at what those numbers might be based on expected growth in traffic volumes. They're also missing traffic counts for some roads, so they estimate them based on the counts for other, similarly-sized roads.

It bears repeating that this model was not their only source of data on pollution exposure; they also used direct measurements taken by the EPA air-monitoring station(s) nearest to study participants' houses throughout the study period.

For traffic-related air pollution --- the type of pollution exposure they modeled rather than measured directly --- they found a difference between the highest- and lowest-exposure groups (with the former three times as likely to develop autism as the latter), but no difference between the lowest-exposure group and the two groups in the middle.

For the specific pollutants measured at EPA air-monitoring stations --- coarse and fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, ozone --- they found an increased likelihood of autism associated with greater exposure to particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, but not ozone. This effect was strongest during the third trimester of pregnancy. 

Unlike the other study I described that used the EPA air-quality data, this one did not find any change in the pattern when they adjusted for sociodemographic variables like child's sex, race/ethnicity, parents' educational level, mother's age, or mother's smoking during pregnancy.

Volk, H., Lurmann, F., Penfold, B., Hertz-Picciotto, I., & McConnell R. (2013). Traffic-Related Air Pollution, Particulate Matter, and AutismAir Pollution, Particulate Matter, and Autism JAMA Psychiatry, 70 (1) DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2013.266

Bizarre Things Purported to Cause Autism: Early Exposure to Air Pollution

A quick note: my (very) occasional "Bizarre Things..." series was never intended solely as a crank roundup. No, in my mind I resolved to cover every autism hypothesis*, however well- or ill-founded, plausible or implausible, that I ever heard of and thought "well, that's weird!"

Indeed, I have tagged (though not titled) a post discussing a pretty rigorous, well-thought-out study investigating something that's been common wisdom for a long, long time with the "bizarre hypotheses" label just because its tentative conclusion --- that there may be something more to the relationship between autism diagnoses and social class than the fact that rich people can afford to get their children seen by specialists and poor people can't --- surprised me.

So sometimes bizarreness is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Anyway, on to the business at hand.

Paul Whiteley has written a couple of posts on the idea that exposure to air pollution might play a role in determining whether a kid develops autism; he talks specifically about these two studies working with the same two data sets: the state of California's Department of Developmental Services' records of all children diagnosed with autism in the state, and where they lived at , and also data from the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Ambient Air Monitoring Program.

I've written about the former data set before, but not the latter. The EPA measures six major outdoor air pollutants (I'm sure they do a lot more, too, but these six are the ones that affect air-quality indices): two sizes of "particulate matter" (dust, ash, soot, smog), the "coarse" particles measuring between 2.5 and 10 micrometers in diameter or length, and "fine" particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers; carbon monoxide; nitrogen oxides; sulfur dioxide; lead; and ozone. They have monitoring stations set up all over the country, particularly thick on the ground near big, sprawling cities. How often the stations record measurements varies with what kind of equipment is being used to take them; some pollutants can only be measured daily, or once every few days, though some can be measured hourly. Either way, it's a huge volume of data.

The authors of the more recent study (PDF) restricted their analysis to Los Angeles County, so I can actually tell you how many monitoring stations' data that would encompass.

Map showing the locations of all the EPA air monitoring stations in LA County --- made by me!

This PDF lists, among lots and lots of other things, all the EPA air-monitoring stations in California and where they are located. Within Los Angeles County, it looks like there are nineteen: one in Commerce, one in Azusa, one in Burbank, one in Industry, one in Compton, one in Glendora, one at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), two in Long Beach, two in Los Angeles, one in Pasadena, one in Pico Rivera, one in Pomona, one in Vernon, one in Reseda, one in Santa Clarita, one in Santa Fe Springs, and one at the Van Nuys Airport. So I guess that's technically five that are somehow part of LA or attached to it. Not all of them measure every one of the six pollutants, either, but you can see which of them track what in the PDF I linked earlier.

The earlier study** focused on families living near highways throughout the state of California, and while I might theoretically be able to put together a list of all the cities and towns that have highways running through them, and cross-check that with the EPA's records of where their monitoring stations are (assuming they publicize them all), it sounds like more armchair detective work*** than I want to do. So I can't tell you how many stations are contributing their data to this study, but I'd guess that it's more than the LA County-only study used.

Anyway, both studies involved matching the geographic location of each autistic child in the study with some other spatial variable: for the earlier study, this other variable was distance between where they were born and a freeway or major road; for the more recent study, it was the EPA monitoring station nearest to where they were born. In that study, the researchers looked at the measurements for each pollutant recorded nearest to each child's birthplace averaged over each trimester of gestation.

Both studies compared their autistic subjects to same-age, same-sex peers from the same general area (LA County for the one study, not specified for the other); the ratio was 1:1 in the smaller, older study and 10:1 (control:autism) in the bigger, newer one. So the idea was, I guess, to check whether kids living in the same county, city, suburb, or whatever as a kid with autism tended to have lower prenatal exposure to air pollution (new study) or live somewhat further away from the closest high-traffic road (old study), than the kid with autism.

What did they find? It's complicated; in the newer, just-LA-county study, they found that exposure to some of the six pollutants was actually associated with a slightly lower likelihood of having an autism diagnosis, at least in the (more****) raw data. The only pollutant to show a significant increase in odds ratio (a measure of how much more likely a child exposed to a given pollutant is to develop autism than an unexposed child; if it's less than 1, it means less likely, more than 1 means more likely) before logistic regression was ozone, which gave a 1.19 odds ratio. (That's also the biggest increase found anywhere in this study, regression or no).

After adjusting for a bunch of variables they had expected to correlate with pollution exposure (maternal age, maternal education, race/ethnicity, gestational age and others), the odds ratio for ozone went down while the odds ratios for the other pollutants (nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter) went up. Where they had been sitting at about 0.8 or 0.9 (i.e., maybe ten, fifteen or twenty percent less likely?), they moved to about 1.05. 

I have only the faintest notion of what a logistic regression actually does, but my understanding of it is that, when researchers have a lot of variables closely intertwined with the variable they're trying to study, they use a logistic regression to "correct for" those other variables. It's like a way to try and zero in on the one strand in the snarl that you're trying to trace.

Anyway, they also did another regression, this time by maternal education only, and compared odds ratios for autism risk associated with each pollutant among three groups: mothers with less than a high-school education, mothers with a high-school education, and mothers with more than a high-school education. Except for ozone, the odds ratio for each pollutant went up slightly as maternal education increased, with the biggest differences between the least- and most-educated categories. 

Somehow, the mother's level of education affects how strongly exposure to these airborne pollutants predicts whether her children develop autism.

I have absolutely no clue what to make of that, if I'm even reading it right.

The roads study's outcome was less brain-twisting: they found a correlation between living near a freeway (i.e., a state or interstate highway) and getting a diagnosis of autism, but they found no such correlation for other high-traffic roads. Since it's probably not the case that different kinds of pollutants are being spewed out by vehicles on highways vs. other big, heavily-traveled roads*****, I'm going to follow David Gorski's lead and write off the freeway association as an artifact of data-dredging.

Becerra, T., Wilhelm, M., Olsen, J., Cockburn, M., & Ritz, B. (2012). Ambient Air Pollution and Autism in Los Angeles County, California Environmental Health Perspectives DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1205827

Volk, H., Hertz-Picciotto, I., Delwiche, L., Lurmann, F., & McConnell, R. (2010). Residential Proximity to Freeways and Autism in the CHARGE Study Environmental Health Perspectives, 119 (6), 873-877 DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1002835

*Yes, I have yet to do posts on the big ones, like mercury, thimerosal (really part of the mercury one, but some people propose mercury-based explanations that don't mention thimerosal, so they probably deserve separate posts --- anyway the thimerosal one would be long enough even if it weren't folded into a larger post on mercury compounds), MMR. It's less a matter of not knowing what I want to say than it is a matter of figuring out whether, or how, to marshal all the available evidence.

**I belatedly find out that this study is actually a precursor to the one Whiteley is writing about, not the same one. The one he writes about takes an approach that looks to me like a blend of the two I'm writing about now: looking at both air-pollution data and proximity to high-traffic roads.

***Actually, it's not even armchair detective work, as I am not in an armchair when I use the computer. It's armless-hard-wooden-chair detective work, which is somewhat more grueling than armchair detective work. 

****I'm not sure how much, if any, of the data in this paper can be considered "raw" when you consider how much tinkering they did with the air-pollution data.

*****You could perhaps make an argument that it could be the case, what with there probably being more trucks on the highways than not, and with trucks using diesel instead of gasoline. I am unsure if that would make a difference in how much particulate matter or nitrogen oxides are produced, and also quite skeptical that such a difference would show up at all in a study like this.