Author Archives: David Futrelle
Today, Boston! Tomorrow, Toronto!
Scott Adams: Male Chauvinist Peg
Oh, Scott Adams! Can you write anything about that whole man-woman business without being a creepy douche about it? In a recent blog post titled “Pegs and Holes” – which refers to exactly what you think it refers to — Adams offers his take on the powerful men who have been in the news lately because, as Adams puts it, they’ve been “tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world.”
After noting that the “current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior” and that this “seems right” to him – gee, ya think? – Adams decides to get all philosophical on us. (When you’re Scott Adams, this is a very very bad idea.) He writes:
The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?
I’m assuming that Adams doesn’t actually think that baby boys are born with erections, and realizes that it is biology, not society, that hands out penises and vaginas to babies in the first place. I’m just trying to understand the whole pegs and holes metaphor. Why does he think “round” penises and “square” vaginas are somehow incompatible? In the context of consensual sex, after all, penises of all shapes and sizes generally fit into vaginas quite nicely.
As far as I can figure it out, the round-vs-square analogy simply refers to the fact that men can’t simply stick their “round pegs” into any conveniently located “hole” whenever they feel like it. The fact that these “holes” aren’t accessible to any random guy thus renders them “square.” This seems to frustrate Adams, who goes on to complain that “society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness” and that “society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires.”
Looking at Hugh Hefner’s marital history – he’s been married and divorced and just got stood up at the altar – Adams concludes that:
For Hef, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.
What does this even mean? I suspect that over the course of his lifetime, Hef has had about all the sex he could possibly want, and then some. Is it somehow unjust that he couldn’t force his latest fiancée to actually marry him? Or that some women are sexually unavailable – that is, square holes – to him?
It goes without saying that Adams’ notions of human sexuality are profoundly insulting to both men and women . On the one hand, he’s suggesting that men are basically all potential rapists walking around with, er, turgid pegs; and, on the other, he seems to regard women as little more than passive (if stubbornly recalcitrant) receptacles for these male “pegs.”
And so it’s hardly surprising that his grand solution to the conundrum he’s invented is a rather depressing one. After noting that it really wouldn’t be a good thing for men to go around willy-nilly raping women and/or, as he puts it, tweeting their meat, he suggests the real solution is for men to be chemically castrated. And no, I’m not making that up. Here’s Scotty:
I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond. Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.
That might sound to you like a horrible world. But the oxytocin would make us a society of huggers, and no one would be treated as a sex object. You’d have no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages. I think that’s where we’re headed in a few generations.
Is he being serious here, or is this all some satirical “social experiment?” Who the fuck knows. Though I suspect if I accused him of being serious, he’d claim he was being satirical. And vice versa. Because that’s just the way he is.
Also, while I’m at it: the idiomatic expression about pegs and holes posits a square peg and a round hole, not the other way around. Why did Adams reverse this? Why!? Why!!?? Is he trying to drive us all mad?
EDITED TO ADD: Check out Feministe for more on Scott Adams and his peg.
EDITED AGAIN: And Pharyngula as well.
Are false rape accusations the fault of feminism?
If you thought the “meat market” guy from a couple of days ago – you know, the one prattling on about the “market makers of pussy” — was risibly wrongheaded, here’s an even more insidious attempt to reduce the complexities of human sexuality to a question of “supply and demand.” Over on The False Rape Society blog, Pierce Harlan has a new post with the title:
False rape claims: increasingly a tool to skew the current economies of sex, where sex is cheaper than most women prefer
As you might imagine, the post itself is based on some fairly twisty blame-the-victim logic – with some feminist-bashing thrown in for good measure. Let’s wade through the muck here.
According to Harlan, the “cultural tenets governing sexual encounters” have gone all loosey-goosey in recent years, due to birth control, a general loosening of sexual mores and “the feminist-inspired norms that pressure young women to ‘party like the guys.’”
I assume you have all read Mary Wollstonecraft’s classic A Vindication of the Rights of Women to Get Totally Wasted and Fuck Some Dudes.
But, alas, feminists totally don’t understand the law of supply and demand –and that in the market of sex, they are the supply and not the demand (because it’s not like women ever really want to have sex themselves). As a result, the feminist-inspired young women of today are totally flooding the market with cut-rate pussy.
As Harlan explains:
The experts tell us that men have a much easier time obtaining sex than they did in days long gone. … Women who’d prefer to put a higher price tag on their sexuality are finding themselves locked out of the market.
The results are all too predictable. Women are having sex more often when they secretly are conflicted about it. We’ve frequently reported here about the proven gender “regret asymmetry” where young women have much higher levels of after-the-fact regret than men following sexual hook-ups. Regret too often is transmogrified into feelings of being used, and feeling used too often metamorphoses into a false rape claim.
Does Harlan have any evidence to back up this hypothesis? Yes. And it comes straight from his ass.
Having studied the false rape phenomenon closely for a number of years, it is my conclusion that young women are increasingly resorting to false rape claims as an inappropriate method of skewing the current economies of sex, which favors men and which makes sex cheaper than most women consciously or subconsciously prefer.
In other words: he has spent the last several years searching out news stories on false rape accusations to post on his blog. Because there are almost 7 billion people on planet earth, he has been able to find a fair number of such stories. So he’s concluded that there is some sort of “false rape epidemic” going on. In other words, his conclusion seems to be based almost entirely on what’s known as the “availability heuristic,” which, as Wikipedia puts it, “is a phenomenon (which can result in a cognitive bias) in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.”
Were I to start a blog entitled “The Dudes Peeing on Things You Shouldn’t Pee On Society,” guess what? I too could cite many examples, drawn from the newspapers of the world. Were I to do this for several years, my brain would be stuffed full of stories of men urinating on just about anything that can be urinated on, from prayer rugs to cough drops. This, through the power of the “availability heuristic,” might convince me that we faced an epidemic of inappropriately urinating men, and that this epidemic was getting worse by the hour. (I mean, before I started specifically looking for such stories I almost never heard about this terrible social ill.)
But back to Harlan and his argument, such as it is:
Women are pressured by feminist-inspired norms to make themselves more available to men than ever, but they have also learned that crying rape after-the-fact is a culturally accepted, indeed, feminist approved, antidote to sex they feel was too cheaply obtained. Instead of saying “no” up front, they are retroactively saying “no” — with false rape claims — after-the-fact. And society has given this backward state of affairs its imprimatur.
One solution? Women need to stop having so much sex — for the sake of teh menz. Or as Harlan, still working the creaky economic metaphor, puts it:
One cure is to enhance the value of female sexuality by decreasing the supply and thereby reduce both regret and false rape claims.
But, darn it, this won’t work, because women are out there marching in the street for the right to, you know, have sex when they want to with consenting partners without being shamed for it.
That, of course, can never happen in a society where “slut walks” are celebrated as liberating events, where colleges excuse women from underage drinking charges so long as they report they were raped, and where false rape claims are routinely excused and implicitly encouraged. In short, it can never happen in a society that encourages young women to be promiscuous and to then tell rape lies when that promiscuity results in an unfavorable sexual experience.
Harlan ends his piece with a call to lock up false accusers for a long time.
Certainly malicious false accusers should be charged. Women who identify the wrong guy in a lineup? No.
And it would be nice if Harlan extended the sympathy he shows for falsely accused men to real victims of real rape, a much larger group of people than the falsely accused. But instead he writes pieces like this one, and links in his sidebar to a host of misogynist blogs that, among other things, routinely joke about female victims of rape and murder, that urge men on juries in rape trials to vote to acquit the accused even when he’s clearly guilty, that claim that age of consent laws are inherently man-hating, and that think it would be great if sex robots and artificial wombs rendered women obsolete.
Those actually interested in helping those falsely accused – rather than supporting Harlan’s retrograde agenda — would do better to support The Innocence Project, and to stop reading Harlan’s drivel.
Bostonians and Toronto-ites! Man Boobz Party Time!
Hey Torontoites! Some Man Boobzers are organizing a little get-together for this upcoming weekend. Check the comments here for details as they become available, and post a note if you’re interested. Or check in directly with Ami Angelwings on her blog.
Meanwhile the joint Pervocracy-Man Boobz Boston meetup is happening this Friday (the 17th) at 6:00 PM at the Prudential Center. More details here; check in with Holly (pervocracy@gmail.com) if you’re planning to go.
And if you’re somewhere else and want to organize a get-together, post your location below. I’m going to organize a Chicago get together, probably the weekend after next. And it looks like we’ve got enough people in the Bay Area and in Madison/Milwaukee; anyone want to organize a get-together in either place? (Or have you Bay Area folks already started organizing?) Some DC people have already had a little get together.So let’s do this!!!11!!
Should we start up some actual meetup.com groups? Or it is easier to do it informally here and by email?
Children of Dudes
Ladies, your days are numbered! The sexy lady sexbots are only a few years off, which will free men of the onerous task of having sex with your cootie-ridden human bodies, and pretty soon you won’t be needed for anything at all, not even making babies. At least according to this comment by “JR” on Roissy’s blog, which was recently highlighted on the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog:
I think the obvious gender-wide frustration of women today can partly be explained by this lowered value of children/reproduction altogether. Women understand that their primary purpose will always be tied up with reproduction and not civilization-altering achievement; now that this purpose has been largely removed, what do they have left? … [M]en are as useful as ever, whereas women’s role as child-bearer is rapidly becoming unnecessary and in many cases even harmful.
Babies? We don’t need no stinkin babies!
And if after a few years of childless Children of Men-style dystopia we male humans decide that maybe it would be good if we, collectively, had a few kids, well, by then some clever dude will have invented an artificial womb. And then, ladies, you’re toast! (Which we dudes will be eating a lot of in the future, by the way, as actual cooking, not to mention sammich-making, is for bitches.) As Mr. Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology explains:
Before … our current level of technology, women were in complete and total control of reproduction. Women could get knocked up by one guy and claim another guy is the dad and there was no way of knowing what the truth was. First came increased scientific knowledge about reproduction. Before that the process of reproduction would have been considered to be almost magical given women room to exercise total control. This lessened women’s control over reproduction. In the 20th century came paternity testing so men could know without a doubt who a child’s father is. Now women have no room to hide except that the law allows for paternity fraud. Eventually we will have artificial wombs which will allow men to have children without women if they so choose. The artificial womb represents control of reproduction being wrestled away from women. This is a pretty direct progression of how women become less and less necessary in reproduction.
Of course, there’s that whole issue of actually raising the little buggers. But don’t worry, dudes are totally better at this, too!
[W]omen’s role as child bearer in many cases is becoming harmful. … All the pathologies caused by single mothers do not need to be repeated here. Beyond single motherhood take a look at younger women in their 20s. How many of them would you really trust to be mothers even if divorce wasn’t an issue? Take a look at the current crop of teenage girls, and it’s clear they will be even worse for motherhood than women currently in their 20s. Don’t forget all the misandry that these women carry which will have a negative impact on any sons you might have with them. … All things being equal the two parent family is probably better for raising children, but all things are not equal. Because of divorce the two parent family can become single motherhood at the drop of a hat. Single fatherhood from the beginning is better than that. Even without divorce women are increasingly unqualified to be mothers. … We are getting to a point where single fatherhood may be the superior system of raising children, especially when it comes to raising sons.
In your face, ladies! Moms suck! DudeMoms rule!!!!
Of course, not all dudes want to be single fathers. As savethemales notes in the comments on Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology,
Robogirls can take the place of mothers and assist in raising children for the biological dads who employed artificial wombs in the labs to incubate their babies. Personally, I never want kids and frankly, what reason is there? Children and women are a big liability. Actuarial escape velocity and transhumanism will be the answer and logical choice over procreation for many men.
I have no idea what he just said there, but I am totally 100% behind it. Except maybe for the part about Robogirls. I mean, how do we know for sure that Robogirls aren’t going to teach robomisandry to our dude-children?
Personally, I wouldn’t trust my artificial-womb-born dude-children to anyone but a RoboDudeMom.
Meet the Meat Market Makers
Uh oh! Trouble in mansophere paradise! Over on MGTOWforums, the “ghost” calling himself MrLahey is throwing down the gauntlet to all the pickup artists out there who dare to consider themselves allies of MGTOWers. Apparently PUAs are violating the terms of the Cock Blockade; by screwing women, they are evidently screwing over their brethren. MrLahey, who apparently once took an Economics class, explains:
Ghosts are driven to celibacy due to current market conditions, voluntarily or not, it is done in this particular context of risk aversion. I dare say any ghost would prefer, all else the same, to be sexually active, and wishes the risk-reward was different so he could participate in the meat market.
The conditions that make a man ghost are legal, practical and moral. Too risky, too high a price, too time consuming. … Now those conditions that make a man ghost do not exist in a vacuum, but are created by the sum of interactions of the meat market players, right ? The sexually active are the traders and the market makers of pussy, ensuring market liquidity.
Yes, he did just use the phrase “market makers of pussy.” And evidently not as a joke. He continues on with this metaphor:
So when the ghost leaves the market, the ones left to play it, and thus able to sustain or modify the conditions of the trade are the men left in the field : manginas, white knights, puas and mgtow. …
The reason I believe women get away with exorbitant prices (associated risks) for pussy is the existing demand, which sustains the price and favors similar conditions for each subsequent iteration of the trade. … I fail to understand how catering to a woman’s skewed entitlement and grandiose sense of self-worth (telling her lies, buying her things for sex, investing more time in entertaining her than in actual sex … etc) can ever be helpful or instrumental to bring the market price (risks and costs) of pussy down.
The rattling sound you hear is Adam Smith’s skeleton rolling in its grave.
Kitty Video Open Thread!
Sometimes, you just have to post cat videos. This is one of those times. The theme today: Cats making adorable noises! Please discuss which of these cats is the most adorable. Or any other topic you wish. Open thread! Kitty videos! Two great tastes that taste great together.
Fun with charts, or why MGTOWers don’t understand marriage trends
As we’ve seen again and again on this blog, misogynists love to talk about how much better men are than women when it comes to things like math, logic, and scientific thinking generally. Unfortunately, their posts and comments online – filled with breathtaking failures of logic, absurd unsourced assertions and magical thinking — do not seem to bear out this hypothesis. I would compare the scientific thinking of most manosphere misogynists with that of the creationists, but frankly that would be insulting to creationists.
A case in point: a graph – provenance unknown – posted in a recent MGTOWforums discussion of marriage. The standard line amongst the lady haters is that marriage is on the way out , because men are “waking up” to the evils of marriage in an allegedly feminist state and deciding to, well, go their own way. The reality: while the marriage rate has been falling fairly steadily for the last quarter-century or so, for a variety of reasons, most people do marry at some point in their lives; it would be silly to assume that a trend over the course of several decades heralds the death of a social institution that has lasted (and has had many previous ups and downs) for millennia.
Of course, that’s not the way the MGTOWers in question see it. Their proof that marriage is doomed – doomed, I say – lies in this little graph which charts with mathematical precision the exact date range within which marriage will vanish forever from this good earth:
Now, there are many problems with this little graph. For one thing, what happens AFTER the projected marriage rate goes to zero? Does the marriage rate bounce like a rubber ball back into the positive realm? Or does it go below zero, with unmarried couples divorcing one another – just in case?
Second, this chart is based on a tiny number of data points – a mere 25 year sliver of the millennia-long history of divorce. If you go back a mere century and a half – see the chart below, taken from a paper you can find here — you’ll see that the marriage rate doesn’t conform to any neat mathematical formula; it jumps up and down, affected not only by slow-moving cultural changes but by events in the real world – look at the gigantic spike in marriage after World War II.
But the main issue here is that there is simply no way you can come up with a neat equation to predict the future of marriage because THE WORLD DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. History isn’t math. It cannot be predicted in advance, and any attempt to do so — especially one based on a tiny sliver of data — is doomed to failure. (Well, certain aspects of reality can be predicted — like when Halley’s comet will next return (assuming it’s not eaten by a giant space monster we haven’t discovered yet). Orbits can be calculated with mathematical precision; social trends cannot.)
To illustrate the dangers of extrapolation, let’s consider the little chart below, prepared by a helpful assistant (who happens to have access to a scanner). The chart provides some interesting data on the age of a hypothetical cat named “Fluffy” and her projected life expectancy. As you can see, Fluffy was hypothetically born in 2001, making her ten years old today, with her age increasing by one every year. (Just pretend that the numbers line up properly; my assistant, despite her many other charms, is not big on precision, and may have been drunk when she prepared this chart.) Based on this data (which show Fluffy’s age increasing by one every year), we could project that by the time the next century rolls around our dear little cat will be 99 years old.
If projecting the future were as easy as drawing little lines on graphs, the world would be a much simpler, and much less interesting, place to live. Most of us realize this. MRAs and MGTOWers, not so much.
Men’s Rights Reddit explains it all to you
Apparently we feminists simply can’t understand the Men’s Rights Movement, because
feminist ideology is still stuck in the 19th century concept that women are second class citizens when objectively they are in a better position than men. … The[y] just cannot grasp that in modern western society men are second class citizens.
Luckily, the good fellows at the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit are here to put us straight.
Oh, and while they’re at it, they would also like to explain to us at great length why the whole Slutwalk thing is so silly. I mean, telling women to not dress like sluts if they don’t want to get raped is just good common sense! And obviously dudes have a much greater understanding of the topic of rape and personal safety in general than silly ladies with their silly lady brains and their silly tendency to get drunk on silly lady drinks.
Because Reddit Men’s Rights is not completely dominated by retrograde MRA misogynists, there are actually some decent comments mixed in with all the patronizing nonsense. Enjoy?
Blogger: SlutWalkers deserve to be raped
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the most odious misogynist bullshit I have seen thus far on the topic of the Slutwalks: a post on The Third Edge of the Sword, a blog that seems to go out of its way to be offensive and “edgy,” that takes victim blaming to a whole new level. Here’s the basic, er, argument of the post, which the author has put in giant pink letters so we won’t miss it:
Every woman marching in the Edmonton Slut Walk is publicly declaring herself a slut. This means every woman there desires sex with any and all partners. Any sexual activity you initiate with them comes with implied consent. They cannot say no, and if they do understand all their ‘no’s mean yes. They are all asking for it. They want it bad. Now. From you. Go get ‘em!
Some other highlights:
[I]f you … dress slutty, men are going to stare at you. We’re going to catcall. We are going to tell you all sorts of sexual things we want to do to your body. And if you dress slutty and wave your ass in our face, we will do them. The organizers of this event are not oblivious to this point: what they want is a fake sexual revolution. They want to be able to impersonate sluts without actually being sluts, and that’s unacceptable. If you don’t want to be treated as a piece of meat, don’t marinate and grill yourself and sit perched on a piece of garlic toast. You dress slutty, you show off the goods, you try to get a reaction, you will get one. Hint: it’s not always going to be the one you want. …
The “reaction” he has in mind is rape. By calling rape a “reaction” instead of what it is — a criminal assault on someone, an act of sexual violence, a violation — he of course is attempting to switch the blame to the victim. He spells out his “logic” in more detail:
[W]hen you impersonate a slut we don’t fine you, and we don’t throw you in jail. There’s really only one punishment for dressing like a streetwalker when you aren’t one: you do have to endure the occasional rape. You should really suffer it in silence. Accept the character flaw within you that caused this, and move on. Police and court resources are already busy enough with real criminals: like actual rapists who do nasty things to their niece or the homeless native chick passed out under the bridge, or a conservatively dressed urban professional walking to her car, or a girl out jogging in a track suit. To equate the act of actually violating and raping one of these people with having sex with a girl who’s every square millimetre of public persona screams anybody who wants to can screw me right now is ridiculous.
Once again, this brand of misogyny leads to some conclusions that are pretty misandrist – namely, the notion that men are at heart rapists who can’t control their violent urges:
If you go out on the street in an outfit that would make Britney Spears feel uncomfortable, you do so knowing that your ultimate aim is to make men want you. Well, they want you now. Congrats. Oh, wait, you mean you didn’t understand what that implied? That in the great Bell curve of sexual congress you’ve just pushed everybody on the right-hand side of the -2 std devs line past that imaginary barrier that says “there is no power in the universe powerful enough to stop me from sliding my finger inside your panties”? I call bullshit. You do know. But you want to be a virginal slut, to dress in ways that makes men helpless to their urges but still leaves you fully in restrictive control.
The blogger concludes by arguing that the Slutwalkers are all “lying bitches” because they dress like they wasn’t to be raped, but do not actually want to be raped. Then he makes this lovely suggestion:
If your wife is one of them, I’m very very sorry. Maybe a good rape might make her a little more manageable around the house.
Now this post is an atmittedly extreme example of a misogynistic response to the Slutwalks. But the basic “logic” of this blogger’s would-be argument is essentially identical to that of many MRA and other “manosphere” pieces I’ve seen on the subject, the main difference between them being that this guy embraces the logical conclusion of his argument — that Slutwalkers deserve to be raped — while the MRAs who make essentially the same argument (and fling the same sorts of insults at the Slutwalkers) make a show of saying that they don’t really think the Slutwalkers “deserve” it. And maybe they’ve convinced themselves that this caveat means something . But in that case the extreme reaction that manosphere misogynists have had to the Slutwalks – the insults thrown at the Slutwalkers, the “jokey” references to rape, the prurient sneering – makes little sense. If you argue that women are “asking for it” when they dress like “sluts,” you’re essentially saying they deserve it. You’re making the same argument this guy is making, but pretending you aren’t.
NOTE: The graphic above is taken from the official web site for the Edmonton SlutWalk 2011, which took place a week ago. Here are some pictures of the march.

















