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.
Amused,
Agreed. I was thinking about Ion’s and my previous disagreement about film representations of physically aggressive women/superheroines and didn’t mean that aggression is always bad–just the typical MRA alignment of a specific kind of aggression with what they think of as natural masculinity. I agree with you about entitlement.
Aw, ask and ye shall receive! Thanks David!
I realize that Scott Adams isn’t taking trans people into account when he inflicts his views on the internet, but countering his drivel with ‘biology gives men penises and women vaginas’ is still bloody cissexist. There are better ways to counter his stupidity than erasing people like me.
Victor — hadn’t seen that. I wrote this shortly after the whole thing erupted on Feministe, and don’t have anything to add to that.
Well, obviously he’s a modern-day Jonathan Swift and an ABSOLUTE GENIUS! It’s just that his regular dickslob… I mean “readers” are so much smarter than any of youse.
For some reason this — “To be fair, if a man meets and marries the right woman, and she fulfills his needs, he might have no desire to tweet his meat to strangers” — sounds an awful lot to me like blaming Weiner’s wife, which is despicable. I’m sure it’s “irony.”
“And there’s no real middle ground because that would look like tweeting a picture of your junk with your underpants still on. Some things just don’t have a compromise solution.”
Well, tweeting a picture of your junk to someone who has consented to receive it and is of age, without using government resources or lying about it, before you’ve entered into a committed monogamous relationship MIGHT be one option. But what do I know? I’m no genius. I intentionally failed Twitter.
Hey, have I mentioned that my grandma is friends with Hefner’s first wife? Trufax. Not that it matters. Just thought I’d throw that in there for the Bee trivia competition later tonight.
First problem with this is the failure to properly define what is natural and what is not. Is playing basketball natural? How about using fire? What about beehives, are they natural?
Yes. Yes. No.
Before primitive human *males* invented spears, or discovered fire, all they had were rocks with which to kill the mammoths and feed their families. Only the tallest, most accurate at throwing the rocks, or ones with above-average jumping ability could hope to puncture the eye of the mammoth and topple it. Occasionally women would join them in their hunts. The ones that tried to participate were often killed, while the ones that stood on the sidelines, survived. The ones who shook branches of leaves to encourage their man to take down the mammoth, had an even better chance of surviving and passing on their genes as their men hunted better when such encouragement was present. And logically, the female humans best suited to that were smaller and thinner than the other ones.
This is like speaking to 3rd graders.
Erm, David? Am I the only one that thinks Adams wasn’t talking about penises and vaginas when talking about pegs and holes? Isn’t that just a common metaphor for not “fitting in” to society? Isn’t he saying that men are born with a certain nature, then expected by society to have an antithetical nature? Or were you being facetious?
@Kirbywarp David is a feminist man, which makes him the sexual equivalent of an anorexic. It is well known that anorexics whose bodies are in “starvation mode” develop impulses to horde and obsess over food, even when they cannot or cannot allow themselves to eat. This is the same with feminist men. They are restricted by feminist dogma from every indulging in sex less they “rape” a poor helpless woman. Because of this, they start to obsess about sexual acts until it consumes and permeates every thought they have.
notNick, point taken. I’ve reworded it.
Thanks, David 🙂
I thought David was the titular head of all orgies but I guess I was wrong!
Nominated for the Comment Hall of Fame!
Adams is looking more at the ‘problem’ of men getting into some sort of sex scandal and absolutely destroying their reputation/career. The reason this blog post was made was due to Weiner’s recent antics (and probably influenced by Tiger Woods etc too). What do you do to help someone who is in Weiner’s position (fit, good looking, good career, high profile) but who doesn’t have enough self-control? Do we just watch him crash and burn?
Anyone who thinks he said “All men are rapists” needs to get over their own insecurities. I’m not a rapist, and neither are you. Yet, rape DOES happen. There is a % of men who are scum that do that. His conclusions were, as a side effect of a drug given to everyone that removes all sexual drive, rape wouldn’t happen. Not because the drug is given to ME or YOU, but because actual rapists are also given the drug.
Admittedly the post is poorly written in a lot of ways. Comments like “a wife that fufills a mans needs stops him from tweeting his meat” don’t do anything to help Adams, although he probably didn’t mean it that way (your milage may vary). Just keep in mind, the general ‘topic’ of the post was “How do we stop people from destroying their careers through sex scandals?”
David,
Sorry to hear that this old post is your last word on the matter. I was genuinely looking forward to your response. (seriously, I have been refreshing your site pretty often in the last two days, waiting for your response.)
Among other things, the post is basically saying that you are no longer welcome at Feministe because you have both a penis and an ever so slightly independent opinion. I figured that if there was no truth to this, you would be quick to slap the spearhead post down with your usual wit. I thought even if it was true you might be able to correct the misogynist, evil, woman hating, MRN slant on the situation.
Not that you care, or even perhaps believe, but it’s really disappointing that you won’t do either.
That post on the Spearhead is pretty ridiculous – plenty of white women and women of colour have been called out on that site – it’s not just something that commentariat do to straight, white, cis gendered men. Chally was totally awesome and left because she was so over the fights she had to have on the site defending her opinion and the way she said it. Not quite sure how David could make a funny/witty post about that…
Victor, there is no truth to that, but there’s also not much point in trying to rebut the crap that MRAs say about me; they’re going to believe whatever they want about me regardless of what I say.
Also this (I had to comment on it cos it ticked me off): “That’s why Futrelle wasn’t allowed to contribute to Feministe anymore. Because within a week of posting, it was clear that this man, misguided douchebag that he is, was the best writer on the damn site, period.”
This seems to me to be confirmation bias – note that at Spearhead they think women can’t write (e.g. http://manboobz.com/2011/06/04/the-spearhead-on-lady-lit-part-2-poetry-slam/) – and it seems to me that there’s some kind of mysterious connection between thinking that the ladies can’t write literature EVA, and that they think the best writer on feministe is a straight white guy. No offense David – I do enjoy your writing – but David’s work is not the best that feministe has ever seen. That has no impact on why he doesn’t post there – it was because of a difference of opinion about ablest language.
Meh. Mildly irritating post and no way is David going to be able to change their minds on it.
Snap!
Yeah, that “best writer” bit is just silly. Also, I’m not banned there; I was invited to guest post while Jill was out of town. She came back. I stopped guest-posting. At some point I expect I will post there again.
Jill is a fucking idiot.
@Lyn srsly -_-;; Also the issue about ppl pretending to be other ppl and being taken differently, is not that men are hated, or cis ppl can’t talk about video games when trans ppl are around, or w/e… it’s when talking about oppressions that real ppl face, ppl who face those oppressions and are of that group have actual lived exps, and thoughts and opinions formed by those and it isn’t just hypothetical theory :
And when ppl make up caricatures, they are implying that they’ve had lived experiences as that group and their opinions were formed by those, and more than that they make up experiences they claim that they have personally experienced in order to throw more weight behind their opinion. It’s extremely dishonest. It’s no different than ppl making up military service and situations on the battlefield they’ve never actually been in in order to justify their various stances on military issues. (Former Blue Jays coach Tim Johnson infamously did this to motivate his players and was rightfully fired for it)
We regularly weigh the opinions of ppl who have been thru experiences relating to a specific subject differently than those who have not, not that they are necessarily RIGHT, but that they have a point of view we may not have, whether that means nething to us is up to us. But we have former athletes as commentators, we have police officers and former army personnel to comment on crime and military issues. Former politicians are political analysts. Ppl even do this in the negative sense, accusing ppl of bias, accusing rape survivors of bias or being too emotional to be rational, etc etc etc… it’s funny that suddenly ppl are claiming that real lived experiences do not matter xD
A more accurate comparison wouldn’t be if David pretended to be a woman (he’d still get the same treatment, rightly or wrongly) but if he had pretended to be a disabled person w/ a long history of mental illness and then made up experiences to back up why he felt it was okay to say the words that some ppl felt were offensive. -_-;; It’s not that he would have just changed the superficial elements of how ppl viewed him, it’s that he’d have changed his background too, innately who he claimed to be, and the experiences that he claims shaped him, as well as making up experiences to back up his point of view and refute critics. And I think we all agree that would be extremely dishonest if not screwed up >:|
MRAL: Here, let me try that.
Men’s Rights Activist Lieutenant is a fucking idiot.
Pecunium: Here, let me try that.
FUCK YOU.
@MRAL and Pecunium: OOH, Let me try that!
I love you all and wish you happy and fulfilling lives.
…
Fuck.
Kirbywarp. Thank you, you shouldn’t have. 🙂