The other day Darksidecat introduced me to what I now consider to be the Greatest Webpage Ever (this week): Regender, a handy tool that will take any web page and, well, regender it, turning male pronouns and references into female and vice versa. It even works with names.
Following Darksidecat’s lead, I have started plugging the writings of some of my favorite manosphere misogynists into the magical regendering machine. The results are, well, instructive. And frequently hilarious. As DSC noted, Roissy and MarkyMark are perfect for this sort of treatment. As is, I discovered, MarkyMark’s longtime pal Christopher in Oregon. Here’s what happens when Christopher of Oregon becomes Christine of Oregon with the help of regender, and all the horrible shit he wrote about women becomes the horrible shit she wrote about men:
Men are whores. They are far more likely to have STD’s than women. Be aware of this. Handle with extreme care. Men are filthy, and they will lie about their infections. Condoms will NOT protect you. …
Men are walking cesspools of filth! Most of them have or will have a permanent STD infection. It is unavoidable. These are FACTS, and not the rantings of an unstable misandrist.
(I’m a very STABLE misandrist, thank you kindly)
Men are DIRTY creatures, pure and simple. Be dignified, and don’t lower yourself to engaging in any filthy behavior with them. You WILL be infected with the diseases they are carrying. A moral, dignified woman does NOT rut like an animal with one of these creatures. Sexual intercourse and oral sex are filthy, disgusting activities, and ruin a woman morally. They spread disease.
Elevate yourself above such filth of the flesh. …
Do not lust after men in your mind. Masturbate only as a last result to relieve tension. Do not lust after men sexually. It weakens you.
Goddess made woman in Her image, and men was made in the image of Satan. Squeal all you want, but history proves me right. A man is a test; a stumbling block for woman. Our life is an adventure. A journey. A pursuit of our creator, and a pursuit of excellence in our personal lives. A man and his filth is part of the obstacle course set before us. If we are wise, and avoid them, we will grow stronger as a result. We will finish the race successfully.
Men was not put here to support us as such, and we will only grow stronger if we AVOID his snares. ..
Christine in Oregon
Woah. Critics of Man Boobz often say that feminists are “just as bad” as the guys I quote. Well, if they were, the posts on their blogs would look a lot like this regendered post. I ask all of you: have you ever seen something so grotesquely misandrist on any feminist web site? I thought not.
Here’s a challenge for all of you: See if you can come up with a regendered post that tops this one from “Christine in Oregon.” You can draw from old posts of mine, or go poking about in the manosphere yourself. Post your results in the thread below, along with a link to the regendered web page you got them from. I’ll highlight the best in a future post.
re the decades of research: I don’t think it’s adjusting for, so much as building on. History before the present isn’t bad, it’s just limited. The same for a lot of psych, but additional work can test the principles against wider study groups.
Stanford allows anyone to take part in their studies. The problem is getting people to know of it. They would be happy to see more people participate. A group in Britain recently redid the Milgram experiment. The had a wide diversity of subjects (and were working in a different, if related cultural setting). The results were appallingly consistent with the first test.
And now I’m off to work.
For a second time: Let’s look at the context you dropped! “Either it’s in BACTERIA, which, you know, divide about ever twenty minutes and therefore have a much faster evolutionary timescale, or if its in mammals, its not evolution but bodily adaptation. ”
Look at my original post. I just wanted to say, that natural selection can only be observed with organisms that evolve very fast, have many generations over a short time. With mammals that’s not the case, but still evolutionary reasoning about mammals is valid.
I have still absolutely no idea what’s your problem with this.
Nobby: It gives, as Pecunium stated, “Just So Stories”. They look at the world, make a claim, and then say “Look at the world! It fits the claim, so it’s right!” That is begging the question.
Marc: I don’t see a problem with that approach.
Which is why you don’t understand science.
Much of human reasoning works the way Nobby described (of course, without the rhethorical baggage).
Humans look at the world, they construct an explanation that fits, what they see, by using rules of inference and scientific theories.
It’s exactly like the Napoleon example, the claim
“There was a man called Napoleon and he was the emperor of France”
can’t be proven by direct observation, because these times are long gone, but it’s a claim that fits what we see.
Here you can also apply your Occam’s Razor, you like so much: It’s the simplest explanation.
It could theoretically be the case, that Napoleon is a gigantic hoax, this claim would also explain everything. But it’s an extremely complicated explanation, it’s nearly unimaginable that a hoax of this proportion would be possible.
But of course you know that all better, you don’t think that the feeling of hunger is an evolutionary adaption, the hunger is just there and we don’t know the reason, and every claim that hunger makes us survive and because of that was selected by evolution – is adaptive – is just a “Just so story” from unscientific evolutionary psychologists (that somehow still are everywhere in the biology departments).
Marc: That Napolean was the in the artillery, and then was a consul, and then the emperor of France is attested to by outside observation. It was recorded. This is not the case with “rape is ordained by evolution”.
That is a different sort of inference. Hunger is and evolutionary adaptation. Non-autotrophs which don’t sense a need to ingest sustenance die. Rape can’t be compared to that, because lots of organisms which don’t rape survive.
Arguing as to the psychology of rape, and pointing to present responses to it as proof of evolutionary drive are not related, and not testable. If you think either of these is true, well as stated, you don’t understand science.
I would bet real money very few evolutionary psychologists are in biology departments, the way academic departmentalization works. Sociobiologists, maybe.
In terms of how humans think: here’s an exercise I used to do regularly with my first year comp classes. Let’s see if you can figure it out.
“Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492” is taught to most people in the U.S.
It is a complete and total fabrication, i.e. an untruth.
Do you know why?
One of the problems with that approach is that there might be an erroneous preconception, accepted as a given and not challenged, within the claim; observation of the world fits the claim; the claim is deemed to be right, erroneous preconception and all.
An example of this would be Aristotle’s claim that in all of nature, the male of the species is the leader that others will naturally follow. To show his claim as correct, he pointed out how one can observe that the honeybees have a naturally selected leader that they follow. His preconceived notion about the sex of the natural leader stood unchallenged, and his observations of the world then fit his claim and thus his claim was correct.
Pam: YES!
Donna Haraway (primate biologist) did a great analysis of how Victorian scientists observed primates in ZOOS (not their natural habitat at all) and then generalized form that to human “natural” traits.
Culture shapes our observations!
Pam: Aristotle also explained why women have fewer teeth then men.
Only… they don’t.
Pecunium: Yes, Aristotle made some real dandy claims based on speculation of what he observed around him, and I like to trot him out as an example every now and then when someone exalts the observational approach without scrutinizing its shortcomings. And don’t even get me started on his claim of the inferiority of the female due to her inability to raise her body temperature to a sufficient degree to cook her menstrual blood and and produce semen instead, thus part of the reason for her relegation to existing as a breeding vessel only and not fully human.
Now, granted, he didn’t have the luxury of the science and technology that we have today to test the validity of the supporting arguments for his claims (though the conclusion he drew about the number of teeth could probably have been easily tested), but by the time science/technology caught up, the “rightness” of some of his claims had become so ingrained that nobody bothered to rework some of his conclusions.
Ithiliana: The ever popular [sideways glance] Peter Andrew Nolan proclaimed that discrimination against hiring men does indeed exist in both daycare and elementary school systems, because just observe the absence of men working at daycare facilities and as elementary school teachers.
Yep, there’s no need to look into how many men make application to work at daycare facilities and as elementary school teachers.
Now, that’s not to say that discrimination against hiring men to work in those areas may or may not exist, but his observation alone cannot bring us to a conclusion either way, and yet he rests his case on it.
ithiliana: I mentioned the teeth because he had a wife. He could have counted them.
But nope.. he had a reason for it, and that was enough. It was, “just so,” and after that why bother with research, since all had been explained.
Marc: That Napolean was the in the artillery, and then was a consul, and then the emperor of France is attested to by outside observation. It was recorded. This is not the case with “rape is ordained by evolution”.
This argument wasn’t about Ruse’s theory. It was about evolutionary psychology in general.
You all made the claim that evolutionary psychology is unscientific in principle because it’s claims aren’t testable.
Testable, as it’s mostly understood, means verifiable by direct observation (for example by doing an experiment).
But there are many scientific truths that are not testable because they are just the result of inference and the application of an scientific theory.
Nobody can travel 8 light years to Sirius A and measure the temperature to verify that it is really 10.000 Kelvin there. It’s the application of a scientific theory (analyzing the spectrum of the light Sirius emits etc. etc.) that gives us this result.
Nobody can fly back in time and look if Napoleon really existed, it’s not testable by direct observation, not “attested to by outside observation”. We need inference, interpretation. Saying “it was recorded” is not enough, because… why should we believe these records? Records surely can’t be infallible evidence, otherwise it would be irrational not to believe that Jesus walked over water.
It’s still inference, the right interpretation of what we see. We don’t say “Jesus walked over water is a historical truth because that’s what records like the gospels say”. We judge it as very implausible that natural laws were broken, so we become skeptical of the records. That’s an application of a scientific theory (Archimedes’ principle), which says “Jesus should have immediately sunk into the water”.
Ruse’s claim that the reaction to rape is an adaption in humans is not something he just makes up, he applies the theory of natural selection here: Courtship systems are found in many, many species so (given their complexity) they probably are an evolutionary adaption. Rape means ignoring the courtship system, so evolution has somehow make sure that this doesn’t happen too often, so it’s probable some defense mechanisms evolved. It’s as simple as that.
That is a different sort of inference. Hunger is and evolutionary adaptation. Non-autotrophs which don’t sense a need to ingest sustenance die. Rape can’t be compared to that, because lots of organisms which don’t rape survive.
There’s so much wrong with this argument, I can’t cover it all.
1. I only gave the “hunger”-example to prove once and for all that evolutionary psychology is not unscientific in principle. I didn’t want to compare hunger with rape.
2. It’s not Ruse’s theory that rape is an evolutionary adaption in humans. Ruse just claims that the reaction to rape (that we care about it, that we see it as a such bad thing) is an evolutionary adaption.
In other species like the water bug it is indisputable that the reaction to rape is an evolutionary adaption: the female water bug even evolved a special body shape that makes it easier to escape the grip of the male which tries to rape her.
3. It’s not about the survival of an organism, it’s about his ability to pass it’s genes (which is of course connected to it’s survival) or to reproduce. Animals without a sex drive also don’t die, but it’s an unequivocally accepted truth that the existence of sex drive is an evolutionary adaption.
4. That an organism could still reproduce without a certain trait, doesn’t prove that this trait is not an adaption.
Arguing as to the psychology of rape, and pointing to present responses to it as proof of evolutionary drive are not related, and not testable. If you think either of these is true, well as stated, you don’t understand science.
I don’t understand this sentence but I doubt I miss something important.
Marc: Let’s take the idea of temperature measurement.
If we have a given spectra, which, when tested = “x”, and it’s consistently “x” then either it’s the case that something which radiates at that spectra =”x”, that or there is no consistency to the model, and once you leave earth all bets are off.
Yes, it’s inference, but it’s testable inference.
Now, if you want to say that the historical record, the contemporaneous testimony of tens of thousands of sources are all a hoax; which is what saying it’s not possible to, “test” the existence of Napoleon is doing, you are free to do that.
But that’s not the same as evpsych spinning a just-so story and explaining that reactions to rape which match a small set of those in the known history of human interaction are, “evolutionary adaptation.”
Even things which might not seem testable (the use of the large bony structures on hadrosaurs) can be tested. More to the point, those which aren’t testable aren’t touted as proven. Evpsych is being touted as proven.
It’s not. And most of it isn’t testable, which means it can’t be proven.
Which is why it’s bunk.
She looks like she knows what she wants! Its a good message beucase too many guys just go along with what the girl wants beucase its easy and maybe they want sex but they’re not really making a conscious choice.