Misreading Sexual Signals

To an observer from another era, it comes as a mild shock that young men today have troubling discerning women's erotic interest in them.

But researchers at Indiana University and Yale find women are better at interpreting facial expressions and body language, according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science, and that a substantial percentage of young men are clueless in potentially sexual situations.

Reporting on the research, CNN describes the experience of college administrator at an academic conference in conversation with an attractive woman over a glass of wine, who undid the clasp holding her hair in a bun, let it fall and flipped it side to side. A sign of interest? No, he decided. "I told myself to get real." The woman went off to her room with a puzzled expression--to shampoo her hair, no doubt.

In an era when claims of sexual harassment can follow misreading, such caution is understandable, but it may reflect a difference in communication styles between the sexes, says a "dating coach" who suggests men pay less attention to what women say than how it's said--citing such positive signs as touching on the arm, maintaining eye contact and smiling while talking.

It wasn't simple back in my day either, when we somehow managed without academic researchers or dating coaches, but then again we may have been missing out on all the nuances in the fine art of flirting.

William F. Buckley Jr.

Urbane, witty and maddeningly supercilious, he was the liberals' favorite conservative. William F. Buckley Jr., who died today, went to Yale, found it not to his liking, wrote a best-seller about his disdain and went on to make conservatism intellectually respectable in the second half of 20th century America.

In 1955, he founded National Review with his brother-in-law, F. Brent Bozell, but being a magazine editor was only a part-time occupation. Buckley leaves behind a torrent of words, on the pages of books and periodicals and in the medium that came of age with him, television.

My favorite memory, among many, is of his 1968 stint as a network commentator, paired with his liberal doppelganger, the elegant novelist and playwright Gore Vidal.

They ended a dispute on some minor point by calling one another "a pro crypto Nazi" and "a queer." Buckley won the argument by warning Vidal, "Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face..."

In 2006, Buckley rendered his verdict on George W. Bush: "Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology--with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress," he told a TV interviewer. "And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge."

As always, well said.

Torturing Questions

News today that members of Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, failed to protest when they were briefed about waterboarding and other harsh techniques of interrogation five years ago recalls the disturbing Milgram experiments of the 1960s.

A Yale professor wanted to find out how much pain people would inflict on others for what they believed to be a good cause.

"Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others," Prof. Stanley Milgram reported, "and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."

We still don't know the answer to that question, which was originally raised in an effort to see behind the Eichmann defense for Nazi atrocities during World War War II, "I was only following orders." But we should keep trying to find out.

Today's revelation about waterboarding further underscores how dicey individual morality can become under social pressure. According to the Washington Post, "officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support.

"'Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,' said [Porter] Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. 'And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.'"

All this is clearly intended to relieve pressure on the Administration for its secrecy, including the destruction of torture tapes, but if involving lawmakers clears the air of some holier-than-thou posturing, it doesn't absolve anyone or lessen the need to move forward in the public debate on what kind of people we are and want to be.

What Stanley Milgram wrote in 1974, looking back on his experiments, might be as good a place as any to start:

"There was a time, perhaps, when people were able to give a fully human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor things changed. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of overall direction. He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his own actions.

"Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-b into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the ground that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act. The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society."

As today's furor over torture goes on, it might help to think about that.

Racial Preferences: Obama/Thomas

In 1974, a future Supreme Court Justice graduated from Yale Law School. In 1991, a future US Senator and Presidential candidate received his law degree from Harvard.

But there is more than a generation gap between two men of color who went on to live out success stories in American public life. Aside from differences in temperament, there is a sharp contrast in how they overcame racial prejudice and at what emotional cost.

Reviewing Thomas' recent memoirs, Jeffrey Toobin notes in the New Yorker, "The young law student quickly came to resent the fact that he had benefitted from preferential admissions.'As much as it stung to be told that I’d done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it,' he writes...

"Thomas never explains what Yale did to him that was so terrible. When he didn’t receive the job offers he wanted from law firms, he interpreted the slight as reflecting what 'a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference...' Later, Thomas peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and put it on the frame of his law degree. 'I never did change my mind about its value,' he writes."

There is a sharp contrast between Clarence Thomas' seething resentment and Barack Obama's law school experience, as described today by Dean Barnett in the conservative Daily Standard:

"Regardless of his classmates' politics, they all said pretty much the same thing. They adored him. The only thing that varied was the intensity with which they adored him. Some spoke like they were eager to bear his children. And those were the guys. Others merely professed a profound fondness and respect for their former classmate."

Barnett goes on to add: "Barack Obama graduated right near the top of his law school class. That fact, along with his presidency of the Law Review, makes his uniform popularity all the more impressive. Law schools are intensely competitive places. People who thrive to an unseemly extent, as Obama did, are usually subject to an array of resentments...

"The people that Obama so thoroughly charmed generally weren't the charm-prone types."

As newly minted lawyers, they took different paths, Thomas into Washington politics, Obama into working as a community organizer in Chicago. If he becomes the first African-American president, he is not likely to find a sympathetic racial compatriot on the Supreme Court.