JUNK SCIENCE is nothing new. But it may been taken to a new low by Psychology Today and "researcher" Satoshi Kanazawa.
Psychology Today was recently forced to pull an article by Kanazawa, an "evolutionary psychologist," after howls of outrage and a flood of furious comments that managed to crash the magazine's website. The title of the article? "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?"
As ThinkProgress noted, the premise of the paper seemed to be "based on some scientifically unsound assumption that seemed to come from a 1940s eugenics fantasy." It included this "gem" of a premise:
Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently. Men with higher levels of testosterone have more masculine features and are therefore more physically attractive. In contrast, women with higher levels of testosterone also have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive. The race differences in the level of testosterone can therefore potentially explain why black women are less physically attractive than women of other races, while (net of intelligence) black men are more physically attractive than men of other races.
According to ThinkProgress:
That direct quote from the article comes not from Psychology Today, which has since taken the piece down, but from a response article in the [American] Prospect, brilliantly titled, 'Why is Satoshi Kanazawa a Huge Asshole?' His premise was also based on a study in which "interviewers rated the physical attractiveness of its respondents on a five-point scale, with 1 being very unattractive and 5 being very attractive. On 'average' women were found more physically attractive than men, but Black women were far less attractive than white, Asian and Native American women, according to the study. The study found that Black men were not less attractive in comparison to other races," according to BET.
So basically, rather than asking whether the respondents in that study were providing their answers based on internalized racism, or delving into the subjectivity of attractiveness based on each individual human (both far more interesting topics) this dude just decided that "black women aren't pretty." So not only is he wrong, he is a bad scientist...and probably stupid.
"Stupid" pretty much sums it up. So does "deeply misogynistic."
As Jezebel.com's Anna North noted in March, Kanazawa "has made it his mission to oppose feminism, which he defines as 'the radical notion that women are men.'"
Kanazawa's blog in Psychology Today has previously included suchs gems as the idea that:
Money, promotions, the corner office, social status, and political power are what make men happy (as long as they win, of course, but then dropping out is by definition a defeat). Spending time with their children is what makes women happy.
In one column titled "Why modern feminism is illogical, unnecessary and evil," he wrote:
[M]odern feminism is unnecessary, because its entire raison d'être is the unquestioned assumption that women are and have historically always been worse off than men. The fact that men and women are fundamentally different and want different things makes it difficult to compare their welfare directly, to assess which sex is better off; for example, the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women. However, in the only two biologically meaningful measures of welfare--longevity and reproductive success--women are and have always been slightly better off than men.
Other columns this "man of science" has written include dissertations on why all women are, essentially, prostitutes and why right-wing author Ann Coulter should be president. (That last answer was, he said, because if Coulter had been president on September 11, 2001, "On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the U.S. military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.")
So, according to Kanazawa, women have it great and nuking the Middle East was the way to go. Perhaps a good psychologist could help him with his issues.