Very cool: We humans have landed a space probe on a goddamned comet!
Not cool: when one European Space Agency dude gave an interview about the landing, he was wearing a shirt festooned with cheesecake images of scantily clad women.
Even less cool: when Atlantic magazine science writer Rose Eveleth pointed out that this choice of attire doesn’t exactly broadcast the message that women (other than scantily clad ones) are welcome in STEM, she received a torrent of abuse from angry Twitter dudes, including requests for her to kill herself.
The cherry atop this crap sundae? The nastiest Twitterer of the bunch, who not only went after Eveleth but her defenders as well, is a regular contributor to A Voice for Men.
The whole thing started off with a couple of tweets from Eveleth about the shirt. Here’s one of them:
https://twitter.com/roseveleth/status/532538957490561024
After this, the deluge:
And those are just some of the harassing tweets Eveleth retweeted. (I’ve highlighted the explicit death wishes for your convenience.)
You’ll notice that one of the death wishes (“Please kill yourself”) comes from a fellow named Christopher Cantwell.
If you take a look at his Twitter profile, you’ll see that this self-described “Anarchist, Atheist, Asshole” and Bitcoin fan had similar advice for a number of others who found the shirt troubling.
To wit:
Cantwell has also been sharing some of his charming thoughts about women in STEM.
So how does A Voice for Men respond to this sort of behavior by one of their regular contributors? They repost his blog entry on the, er, controversy, deriding concerns about the shirt as “feminist hysteria” and arguing that the real reason more women aren’t in STEM fields is that, well, they’re just not as smart as he is.
No, really:
The reason you don’t see women in highly technical fields nearly as often as you see men is not because of sexism. It certainly isn’t because of Matt Taylor’s shirt. You can’t even blame this on education anymore, since more women attend college than men. The issue at hand is one of simple aptitude and the choices people make as a result of that aptitude.
You gals remember choices, right? I seem to recall you caring about those things once upon a time.
If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. A society needs leaders and followers. In men, we see very high IQs figuring things out and working out these complex ideas. They document them in easy-to-understand ways for those of lesser intelligence in society and make technology available to all of us. We also see these low IQs, which are more suited to, say, mining the resources that this technology requires and operating the machines the geniuses designed. Women, traditionally carrying the role of raising children and supporting the men who designed and operated the machinery, needed to be somewhere in the middle. They couldn’t well manage the many complex tasks their role in society required of them without being smarter than the worker drones, but there wasn’t any need for them to be super geniuses who could land spacecraft on comets hundreds of millions of miles away either. …
For those of us at the upper end of the IQ spectrum, we are sentenced to a lifetime of watching stupidity like this run rampant. We will watch in horror for all of eternity as idiots dominate the headlines with their hysteria, responsibility avoidance, and demands for state privilege disguised as “equality.” We’ll see brilliant men like Matt Taylor smeared as being the worst type of bigot, simply because he’s smarter than the people who accuse him.
Yeah, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would complain about sexism in STEM.
If you showed off such a picture while you were announcing a major scientific breakthrough on national television, you too would be tacky, disrespectful, and unprofessional.
I mentioned this over at PZ’s, but it is doubly true of this Cantwell creep – imagine the tantrum he would be throwing if Taylor’s tasteless tee had been festooned with Tom of Finland imagery instead?
@strowbridge
Seconded. The current Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity, Simon Lakodo, is especially nasty. He was interviewed by Stephen Fry in his series “Out There” (Trigger Warning, this guy has some seriously twisted ideas about sex and rape):
(from ca. min 35; the whole thing is worth watching)
I am reminded of a beloved moment from Firefly. Truly this guy and Adam Baldwin have much in common.
Having that sort of stuff on display at work is inappropriate and could be harassment, full stop.
No one has said the shirt or the guy wearing it is that bad, even though it’s not “just a shirt” it’s a symptom of a problem, and the problem is what we’re talking about. What is a million times worse than the doofus who wore the shirt is the reaction from misogynists to even a tiny bit of criticism.
I’m not comfortable with showing my deviantart account to coworkers etc. And that mostly just has fangirlish stuff. :/ Must be nice being so privileged that even this tasteless shirt becomes OK.
This article – [https://medium.com/technology-and-society/no-nate-brogrammers-may-not-be-macho-but-thats-not-all-there-is-to-it-2f1fe84c5c9b] – is probably the best – or at least the most charitable – explanation of what the guy could possibly have been thinking doing a professional interview wearing that … object.
“How does that relate to the Silver’s charged defense that his team could not be “bro-y” people? Simple: among the mostly male, smart, geeky groups that most programmers and technical people come from, there is a way of existing that is, yes, often fairly exclusionary to women but not in ways that Silver and his friends recognize as male privilege. When they think of male privilege, they are thinking of “macho” jocks and have come to believe their own habitus as completely natural, all about merit, and also in opposition to macho culture. But if brogrammer culture opposes macho culture, it does not follow that brogrammer culture is automatically welcoming to other excluded groups, such as women.”
(Sorry, I suck at formatting.)
At best, the message he thinks that shirt sends out is, “Hey, guys, remember being dorky frustrated teenagers? Nostalgia FTW!” In other words, at best he assumes that dorky can’t be sexist because hey, dorks are the victims here.
Bina said:
“Also, I can’t help noticing how many of them bothered to tell her how “unattractive” she is. Which makes me wonder how many of them need their eyes examined, and also stinks of projection.”
I don’t think dudes like this actually think in terms of ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’. They might use the words, but they aren’t meaningful mental categories: to admit a woman is attractive is to admit to yourself she has the power to influence your thoughts and feelings, and that CAN’T BE. Maybe if they’re women on a shirt – ie imaginary women created for men by men who can never Mace you – but not if she’s a real human being.
Their real mental categories are “fuckable” and “unfuckable”. The latter comprises both women they wouldn’t want to fuck and women who wouldn’t fuck them; they just pretend it’s all the former because of sour grapes. And in their cosmology, if a woman isn’t “fuckable” she shouldn’t be alive. It’s like they own the universe and women have to pay a sex tax.
“Just a shirt”, yeah, sure…
Where I live, if a colleague shows up to work wearing this kind of atrocity, it constitutes sexual harrassment of coworkers. also, you could sue your employer if he doesn’t stop his employees from doing that immediately after you have complained about it.
We have come a far way. Let’s not go back, please?
Oh goodie. Creepy Cupcake and their libido updates are back. That’s just what this thread about sexually-inappropriate behaviour needs.
I think all that acidic sarcasm just made my keyboard melt.
This story pretty much sums up my feelings about the entire human race on any given day.
On the one hand, we’re achieving some pretty amazing stuff on a daily basis – like landing a freakin’ piece of tech on a comet 300 million miles away (and it still works after being in space for 10 years! Well.. mostly).
On the other hand.. we still can’t manage not to be arseholes to each other (or not destroy the planet).
Some days I find it really hard not to be super cynical and pessimistic about everything. 🙁
You know, I keep trying to find an equally offensive shirt for women to wear as a sort-of-protest when they go to these sorts of events but I can’t seem to find any naked-bishounen shirts anywhere on the web…
I did find a cool “Yaoi Fantasy” t-shirt though…
http://www.zazzle.co.uk/yaoi_fantasy_t_shirt-23575531947113774
As far as the t-shirt incident goes, my guess is that Matt Taylor is going to go the way of Larry Summers, Lazar Greenfield, and the “Dongle Guy”: he is going to get summarily fired. In the end none of his accomplishments (or non-accomplishments as I keep reading here) are going to matter. He is going to lose his job and get blacklisted, all because he wore an offensive t-shirt and some people raised a stink about it.
And for some reason I have a really big problem with that.
Apart from the fact that it reinforces the notion of feminism as the “big bad thought-police”, I believe that science in general is not advanced by very nice people.
Yeah, the scientific community is vast and comprises of people from all walks of life but you will find that some of those great scientists and inventors that advanced our understanding of the world were, for lack of a better description, misogynistic creeps. I know for a fact that Einstein and Tesla had less than charitable views of women and didn’t think they should be scientists.
This doesn’t mean that their views on women are correct (the “appeal to authority” is a well documented fallacy). Women can be great scientists in all fields (google Margulis and the Endosymbiosis Theory). But ultimately I believe it’s wrong to dismiss the work of scientists, blacklisting them, and preventing them from ever working again because at some point in their lives they say something sexist or offensive.
Would somebody else have figured out how to land a spacecraft on a comet if Matt Taylor wasn’t around? Probably. There were other scientists who were working on the project and they would figure it out eventually. In the end though his work was essential in figuring out out how to do it faster, which is why, ultimately, he deserves at least some of the praises he gets in his field.
Does this make his shirt less offensive or inappropriate? No, but I still think it will be a pity for him to lose his job over this.
Lensman: If he doesn’t want to lose his job, he could try not being a dumbass. You are just arguing that if people are important enough or powerful enough, they no longer have to be responsible for their own actions, and that’s nonsense.
Wearing a shirt on international television counts as a “Thought” now? What, are we all figments of this moron’s imagination?
Didn’t read past there.
Why can’t we slam men for dressing unprofessional in a professional setting again?
Well, if he were sacked, that would just be the organisation scapegoating him.
He is obviously a really sexist shitty person (forget the shirt, look at his comments about the project being “… sexy, but not easy”) but his ability to be that obviously, obliviously sexist when representing the organisation — in public — on a historic day — is entirely down to the organisation.
Nobody has ever cared enough about corporate standards to say to him “you’re not going out front dressed like that, are you”. I don’t know how long he’s been on the team, but this was a 20 year project. You’d think they’d have learned something about management (what is and isn’t acceptable workwear, for example) and about PR (what standards of dress and grooming are and aren’t required for television appearances, for example) in one if not both of those decades.
The fact that they haven’t insisted on some minimum standard of decorum for a person with his responsibilities says at least as much about the organisation as it does about the individual.
@lensman:
I don’t give a rat’s about what you do or don’t believe. You made this statement and then continued on as though you had stated some type of inerrant fact rather than an opinion you pulled out of your arse.
And I fucking noticed what you did there, we’re discussing a man and you bring your damn point to include women as well. Fuck off you dishonest shit, including women in science only as being unidentified in a morass of scientists who are arseholes is not fucking helping women in science either.
And the two guys you pulled out as evidence, Einstein died in 1955 and Tesla in 1943. Way to prove your point that current science is being advanced by not particularly nice men. Who fucking cares what Einstein and Tesla were like – were they on TV in the past week wearing an offensive bowling shirt?
Who the fuck is asking for this? Who has dismissed his work? How come it’s “his” work even though he apparently managed a team – do you think he manufactured, launched, and placed that bloody space probe all by his little male self? He may be a competent scientist – I have no evidence either way – but he’s a piss poor team leader/manager.
So only he alone, out of every other qualified person, was competent to do this? Don’t make me fucking laugh. You obviously don’t work in any STEM field.
“Anarchist”, my ass.
M. :
Curious, isn’t it, how it’s always threads about sexual harassment or assault that bring out creepy cupcake’s boner updates. I call troll.
lensman, read everything pallygirl wrote, then go fuck yourself. One precious male is soooooo important, can’t be doing anything to say this behaviour is unacceptable now, can we? Don’t suppose it occurs to you that the countless examples of misogyny in the STEM fields are keeping out, and driving out, women who contribute every fucking bit as much as all these oh-so-special dudes who somehow get a pass on being lousy human beings?
Just fuck you.
“Does this make his shirt less offensive or inappropriate? No, but I still think it will be a pity for him to lose his job over this.”
I don’t think anyone’s suggesting anything more extreme than an official telling-off and a non-sexist dress code, are they? No one’s even proposing a non-dorky dress code: the world’s full of ugly shirts he could wear that aren’t all boobies and be-hinds.
Don’t virgin-shame or sex-shame, here, please, @anonny. Whether he does or does not have sex (or with whom) is none of our business and nothing for him to be shamed for. You are buying into toxic masculinity that a man who doesn’t “have sex” is some kind of failure.
You are also implying that if only some “girl” had sex with him, he would cease behaving like a misogynist idiot which is blatent bullshit.
My dad is a lifelong member of the T of STEM. He loves wearing tacky, unconventional shirts — we’re talking loud floral Hawaiian prints, or old school Warner Brothers cartoon characters. His work is all behind the scenes, and he’s an excellent employee, so his bosses are cool with him indulging in his dorky stylings.
And yet, he would not be caught dead in a shirt covered in sexualized women, even when he wasn’t at work. This is largely because he actually, y’know, thinks of women as real people and not as eye candy.
But beyond that? If he was asked to represent his company on TV, he would put on a crisp, plain shirt and maybe even a tie. He wouldn’t even need to be told. And this is a man who has all the fashion sense of Weird Al’s stage persona.
Seriously, this is not that hard, which makes it all the more frustrating that the dudebro brigade is claiming it should be off-limits for criticism.
He should be reprimanded at the very least; as plenty of people have pointed out, this sort of thing is creating a hostile work environment, same as if he had girly calendars up on the walls. It says altogether too much about the group that he was allowed to wear this at all, let alone on this occasion. It says a hell of a lot about him that he’d wear this thing and didn’t die of embarrassment at getting it as a present. My reaction to a man who’d wear this in any social situation would be “Creep, get out of his vicinity immediately.” My reaction in a workplace would be that he should get one warning only, be made to change it immediately (in fact be sent home for the day) and that anything else like this would mean he’s out.
I’d also say that not letting him anywhere near a camera or an interviewer for a while would be a good idea, at least until he gets a clue as to what’s acceptable to wear/say and what’s not. Let the more reasonable folks in the team do all the fancy media stuff.
Shiraz said:
It’s not like this question ever needed an answer but here it is, anyway.
A quote from his About page, maybe?
I bet you are about as shocked as I was.