Medium-Sized Breasts and Gaussian Distributions

Do modern identities originate from a misunderstanding of how psychological traits are sorted?

Credit: Marina Ryazantseva

I

A few months ago, I was arguing with an acquaintance about the term “ambiversion”.

For those of you who aren’t terminally online (and yet are somehow reading this blog in spite of that), there’s a thing called the introvert-extrovert spectrum, and people on the internet are very keen on labelling where precisely they fall on it. Some people are extroverts (outgoing social butterflies), while others are introverts (people who tend to prefer their own company). Another way of looking at the distinction is that extroverts gain energy by being around other people, while introverts expend energy being around other people. In addition to the two extreme points on the spectrum, there are so-called “ambiverts”. As I understand it, an “ambivert” is someone who is neither an extreme introvert nor an extreme extrovert.¹

I have hated this term for as long as I’ve known it existed. But the argument helped me understand why I dislike the term so much. It’s not merely that it’s a term used exclusively by insufferably pretentious bobos trying to make themselves seem more interesting and unique than they really are - there are deeper linguistic reasons why it gets my goat.

Consider other psychological traits which exist on a spectrum. People vary in how trusting they are: some people can meet someone and trust them absolutely after only a brief conversation; other people don’t share their ATM PIN² with anyone, not even their spouses. I have yet to hear anyone describe themselves as “ambitrusting”: no one says “I’m an ambitruster: I trust some people but not others” or “I’m an ambitruster: I trust people I’m close to, but not people I don’t know very well”.

Why don’t they do that? Partly for reasons of euphony: “ambivert” rolls off the tongue, “ambitruster” doesn’t. But mainly, I think, for reasons of sheer redundancy.

One of my favourite books is Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman’s How Not to Write a Novel (which I mentioned in a previous post). It’s nominally a self-help book, but one possessed of the rare virtue that it’s funny and entertaining enough to be worth reading even if you have no immediate interest in the subject matter, nor any practical use for the advice offered. Mittelmark and Newman use their experience as seasoned editors in the publishing industry to catalogue traits commonly found in unpublishable novels which immediately turn them off. A recurring point is the phenomenon wherein unpublished novelists are vaguely aware that novels require description to bring them to life, but don’t seem to understand the function that description serves:

Another version of this is the “large gray elephant,” or the “rectangular room with a floor, walls, and ceiling”. While it is not absolutely a shooting offense to characterize an elephant with attributes that all elephants possess, it is a yawning offense. “An aroused and angry elephant” gives us a specific and striking mental picture. “A large gray elephant” gives us two extra words.

Or, more provocatively:

No one thinks of himself as a brown-haired man of average height. Police-report description in general will be received by the reader much as if it read “Horace was a man with two legs, two arms, and a head on the top.”

A blunder we have seen more than once recently is when authors, reacting against the plethora of “large-breasted” girls in fiction, describe a heroine as having “medium-sized breasts.” This amounts to saying she had breasts.

If you‘re going to tell us something about a character, tell us something that we wouldn‘t have assumed on the basis of species and gender.

No one introduces themselves to you by saying “Hi, I’m Horace, I have two arms and two legs”. “Possessing four limbs” is the default state of any member of the human species. If someone were to tell me that they possess four limbs, they would have given me no information about them that I wouldn’t have automatically assumed purely on the basis of their membership of said species. It’s such a common trait that it’s only worth commenting upon in its absence e.g. amputees, or people suffering from polymelia (this is precisely why we say such people require special accommodations). The trait is a particularly pronounced Gaussian distribution, wherein “four limbs” accurately describes the overwhelming majority of members within the set; members with three or five limbs are exceedingly rare, two or six rarer still.³

What other human traits follow this pattern? Beyond the strictly anatomical, “trusting some people but not others” probably does. If someone were to tell me “I’m an ambitruster: I trust some people but not others”, they would have provided me with no additional information about them that I wouldn’t have assumed anyway. Just as “number of limbs possessed” is only worthy of comment if it differs from the norm, the only points on the “trust” spectrum which are in any way noteworthy are the absence of the trait (extreme paranoia) or the trait taken to excess (Williams syndrome). Extreme trust or distrust are very rare, and most people fall somewhere in the middle.

Likewise with “ambiversion”. Very few people occupy the extremes of the introversion-extroversion spectrum (on the one hand, agoraphobic hermits who actively prefer to be alone, and experience psychic distress among large groups of people; on the other, people who need to be around other people as much as possible, for whom Covid lockdowns were comparable to literal solitary confinement). The great majority of people fall somewhere in between these two poles: sometimes they like to be with their friends, sometimes they prefer to be alone. Telling me that you’re an “ambivert” is like telling me that you’re of average height, or a woman telling me that she has medium-sized breasts: you have told me nothing about yourself that I wouldn’t have already assumed sight unseen.

II

So “ambivert” is just unnecessary linguistic clutter, no more informative than a person announcing that they have the usual number of ears and noses at their disposal. And so many other adjectives recently in vogue fall into this category. Take “flexitarian”. While I have met plenty of vegetarians and vegans in my life, they are still very much a minority; and while, to the best of my knowledge, I have never personally met someone who eats meat exclusively, I’m sure such people must exist. So “eating meat sometimes, but not exclusively” is yet another trait like “possessing four limbs”, “trusting some people but not others” and “neither hermit nor social butterfly”: so common as to be unworthy of comment, and only the absence of the trait is any way noteworthy. If someone tells me that they are vegetarian, they have given me a specific piece of information about themselves which gives me a more complete impression of their lifestyle. Moreover, this information is actionable, and can be used to make informed predictions (e.g. if I invite them over for dinner, I know not to prepare steak). But “flexitarian” just means “I eat meat sometimes, but not exclusively”, which is what I would have automatically assumed.

How did it become so fashionable to describe oneself as such, using a fancy word to describe a trait so common as to be meaningless? The default explanation among the woke-sceptical is that such people are “snowflakes”: they want to be seen as special and unique, but are hampered in this goal by the critical defect of not actually possessing any special or unique traits. Hence, they dress up their perfectly ordinary traits using language which implies that they are far more unusual than they really are.

I also suspect there’s a bit of a “stolen valour” dynamic at play. Whatever one thinks of vegetarianism, few can deny that it requires significant sacrifices and changes to one’s lifestyle to adhere to (at least in the West). Calling yourself “flexitarian” is a sneaky way to try to appropriate some of the social status and respect justifiably afforded to vegetarians and vegans, while making few or any of the sacrifices and lifestyle changes vegetarians and vegans have made to earn that respect.⁴

However, I’d like to advance a more charitable explanation of the trend. It’s possible that terms like “ambivert” originate from an honest misapprehension of the terms under discussion and specifically what they refer to, as a result of the admittedly inconsistent way the English language categorises psychological traits.

III

Consider the introvert-extrovert spectrum, in the toy graph below. The further away you get from the centre, the more pronounced the trait becomes. Extreme introversion and extroversion are both very rare, and most people fall in between the extremes. I understand that anything to the left of the centre is “introvert” and anything to the right is “extrovert”. When someone says “I’m an introvert”; I understand them to mean that they fall somewhere in the blue-lined sector in the graph. They can further clarify precisely where they fall on the spectrum using qualifiers: “I’m a bit of an introvert”, “I’m very introverted” etc. On the basis of a person saying “I’m an introvert”, I would not immediately assume that they are a literal hermit (i.e. that they sit in the solid blue sector). And vice versa for extroverts.

My internal model of how the introversion-extroversion spectrum looks. An “introvert” falls somewhere in the blue-lined half of the spectrum (including extreme introversion on the far left), while an “extrovert” falls somewhere in the red-lined half (including extreme extroversion on the far right).

But there are other traits where we don’t categorise people this way. If someone tells me that they are an amputee, they mean that they sit at the far left of the normal distribution of “number of functioning limbs possessed”. We do not say that someone with full use of their right arm but partial paralysis in their left is on the left-hand side of the “number of limbs possessed” distribution: you can’t be “a little bit amputated” any more than you can be “a little bit pregnant”.

Could this explain “ambiversion”? When I hear someone say “I’m an introvert”, I take it to mean “I sit somewhere in the blue-lined sector”. But perhaps other people mistakenly think that “introversion-extroversion” is a trait like “number of limbs possessed”, whereby you only label yourself as “I’m a [Trait X]” if you sit on the extreme end of the spectrum. Hence, when someone says “I’m an introvert”, these people take that to mean “I’m a housebound shut-in”, as opposed to “I don’t like going to clubs that much, but still very much enjoy having dinner with friends, or my weekly book club”. Having reflected upon themselves and correctly observing that they are neither a housebound shut-in nor an insatiable party animal, these people decide to take a third option and call themselves “ambivert”.

One alternate model of how the introversion-extroversion spectrum might feel from the inside. “Introvert” only refers to extreme introversion, “extrovert” only refers to extreme extroversion, and everyone else is “ambivert”.

I’m calling it a “mistake”, but this is of course rather prescriptivist of me. The categories were made for man and all that. But for reasons of simplicity, clarity and consistency, I think it’s far more convenient if we limit discussions of where a given person falls on the introversion-extroversion spectrum to the two polar positions. No one disagrees that there are only two poles: some people just think that we need a specific term for “the centre” of this spectrum, even though we don’t do this for any other psychological trait (as I said above, no one calls themselves “ambitrusting”, and nor do they call themselves “ambi-agreeable”, “ambi-neurotic” or similar).

Plus, if fashion and signalling plays any role in this trend at all, you can be confident that eventually the term “ambivert” will come to be seen as passé, and then people will invent a whole host of new terms, one for each decile of the spectrum. “Demiverts” are only around the corner, mark my words.

IV

That brings me to my next point, and now we’re moving into more controversial territory. Could this honest misapprehension of how psychological traits are distributed and sorted help to explain the popularity of concepts like “grey-asexual” or “non-binary”?

People naturally vary in their level of sex drive. If a person lacks a sex drive, or it’s so low as to be functionally absent, we say that that person is “asexual”. If a person has an unusually high sex drive, we call them a “hypersexual”, “sex addict” or “nymphomaniac” (Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother, Samantha Jones from Sex and the City). People at the extremes are rare, and most people fall somewhere in the middle. In this regard “sex drive” is a trait like “number of limbs” where we have specific terms for people at the extremes but no real term for the great unwashed in the middle. So perhaps the so-called “grey-asexuals” are making the same category error as “ambiverts”: they correctly observe that they are neither asexual nor hypersexual, and hence conclude that they must be some third thing: “grey-asexual”, as opposed to just “a person with a low (but very much present) sex drive”.

A possibly contributing factor: millennials and Gen Z people, far and away the most likely demographics to identify as “asexual” or “grey-asexual”, are having far less sex and consuming far more pornography than previous generations. If most of your understanding of what sex is like comes from pornography (which overwhelmingly depicts people on the hypersexual end of the spectrum), it’s possible that this could skew your impressions of what a normal sex drive looks like, to the point that you come to believe that your normal sex drive is in fact below average.

Now consider gender⁵. We might facetiously say that every human being exists on a spectrum from He-Man to Barbie. Very few people fully adhere to a classical, idealised vision of masculinity (physically strong; knows his way around a garage; can’t cook but LOVES TO GRILL) or femininity (emotionally nurturing; wearing pink on Wednesdays; breasts which, contra Mittelmark and Newman, are not “medium-sized”). Just like introversion-extroversion or sex drive, gender is a spectral trait which follows a Gaussian distribution: occupying the extremes is rare, most people fall somewhere in the middle. Hence, I interpret the statement “I am a man” to mean “I sit somewhere on the cobalt-lined side of the gender distribution” - closer to He-Man than to Barbie.

My internal model of how gender works. A “man” is someone who sits on the cobalt-lined side of the distribution (including “peak masculinity”, represented by He-Man). A “woman” is anyone who sits on the pink-lined side of the distribution (including “peak femininity”, represented by Barbie).

But perhaps “non-binary” people are making the same kind of mistake as “ambiverts” and “grey-asexuals”, and interpreting the statement “I am a man” to mean “I fully identify with the He-Man vision of how a man is supposed to look and behave”. So such people look inwards and think “I am neither He-Man nor Barbie. I must be some other thing.” Hence “non-binary”, “demigirl”, “demiboy” and the whole host of other gender neologisms.

An alternative model of how gender might work for someone else. A “man” is a “peak masculine” person, a “woman” is a “peak feminine” person, and everyone else is “non-binary”.

Indeed, this strikes me as a perfectly understandable mistake to make, at least in some social circles. If you’ve been raised in an environment which is hypersensitive to gender non-conformance, to the point that even banal and harmless instances of same are interpreted as potential red flags for gender dysphoria, how could any reasonable person fail to come away thinking that the terms “man” and “woman” only refer to He-Man or Barbie respectively?

This comic is crude in both messaging and execution, but succinctly encapsulates how heightened sensitivity to transgenderism can unintentionally strengthen and reify existing gender roles.

I must emphasise that my intention here is not to criticise grey-asexual or non-binary people (not all of them, anyway). Some people really are just pretentious and terminally self-absorbed, the kinds of people who think “I’m female but I don’t like to wear makeup, guess I must be neither man nor woman” as opposed to “I’m a woman who prefers not to makeup”; or who think “I only masturbate once a week, guess I’m neither sexual nor asexual” as opposed to “I’m not a particularly sexual person”.

But I don’t think all non-binary or grey-asexual people are pretentious or terminally self-absorbed. Some of them may well have arrived at their self-identification as a result of an honest and understandable misapprehension of how psychological traits are distributed.

1. Before I started writing this post I was under the impression that the term “ambivert” had been coined quite recently (possibly since Myers-Briggs typology was starting to gain a foothold in dating apps and social media platforms). But according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it was first used in 1927.

2. Did that annoy you? Good.

3. And it’s not symmetrical (if you’ll pardon the pun). Having fewer limbs than four is extremely rare, but far more common than having more than four limbs. This study estimates the prevalence of US adults missing a limb at about 1 in 190 (or 0.52%), whereas polymelia is so rare as to make any estimate of its prevalence effectively meaningless.

4. As much as I dislike the term, I must grant that it is at least a more honest descriptor than people who call themselves vegetarian/vegan but are no such thing. I once referred to such people as “transvegetarian”: they’re not vegetarian, but they identify as such.

5. In order to keep controversy to a minimum, I’m treating gender as entirely independent from anatomical sex for this article.