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.
This is again chasing ppl’s tails :
So I have some questions :] These are not questions trying to “get” you btw :] I just want to know what you think more, and flesh things out more, I think it would help w/ your complaints that ppl here do not understand what you’re saying or aren’t interested in a discussion, b/c I think they dun fully understand what you are proposing :]
How do you feel about statutory rape? What changes would you make to the laws? :]
Regardless of whether you believe they would be accepted or not, what would a legal system ideally look like? What other laws would you like changed? Or believe that are too harsh or not harsh enuf, b/c of the way our minds have been evolutionarily conditioned to believe (like as you say, we only THINK rape is bad, but in an objective legal system it should not be)? :]
You’re proposing some interesting ideas I’ve never heard before, and you seem to have a strong idea of what’s unjust and what you would want changed and etc, so I’m curious :] And also I’m curious what harms do you believe our current ideas of rape and how it intersects w/ law are causing?
Don’t you just love dudes trying to be all Spock-like and pretend that emotions and morality have no place in serious discussion?
I’m having kind of a difficult time believing that the guy who is arguing that rape punishment is too harsh, psychological injury doesn’t matter, and the only reason anyone gives a shit about rape is because our stupid reptile brains tol’ us to is now appealing to us to buy into the above because one of the guys who writes about that kind of stuff LOOKS LIKE SOMEONE’S NICE OLD GRANDPAW.
Maybe I can believe all that. It all has that fresh new-ass scent. Smells like it’s all coming from the same place.
I dunno him, (I’m trying to xD ) but from what I’ve observed.. I think as a gay man (i got that right i hope?) he is understandably wary of and understands the problems around making laws based only on emotions and ideas of “morality” : (as am I, tho this doesn’t mean I believe necessarily that rape is about purely emotions and morality xD i’m just pointing out why I think this might be important to him) :]
Marc, how is exactly is consent an abstract about which generalizations can be applied?
Rape is not an issue of sexual morality. It’s an issue of consent.
Abstract thought and generalizations about sexual morality would be relevant and applicable in a discussion about homosexuality, or bisexuality if you objected to them. They’d be relevant and applicable in a discussion about the man who videotaped himself giving another man he’d met on the internet permission to kill and eat him.
How is the issue of consent an issue of sexual morality? How is consent an abstract concept?
I can. Having your boundaries invaded like that can be traumatic, especially for a man that has not been conditioned to expect this kind of unwelcome attention from women. I completely understand the guy’s need for therapy just from hearing the first minute of the report.
I hope you don’t think we should see it as a joke or find it funny.
Well, it’s about what the public thinks.
If Cenk Uygur said something about a female victim he had lost his job and he would instantly be one of the most infamous Internet personalities.
How can we explain this?
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY.
Well sure, Marc. If you have to rely on a pseudoscience that invents cheap but compelling explanations out of whole cloth and doesn’t even try to meet any kind of scientific standard for its theories — if that’s the only place you can find this theory that that totally appeals to you in some utterly groinal way, then I guess you best buy into it, proselytize for it, and defend it to strangers on the internet.Jesus fuck, Marc.
1. Women have no place in my sexual fantasies, how can this theory appeal to me in a “groinal way”?
2. It’s not pseudoscience. The vast majority of evolutionary psychologists support a position similar to Ruse’s (READ: “Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females”).
Marc’s discussion of rape and his “questioning” of our perception of it reminds me of the dialogue from Woody Allen’s Love and Death:
Boris: Murder is immoral.
Sonya: Immorality is subjective.
Boris: Yes, but subjectivity is objective.
Sonya: Not in a rational scheme of perception.
Boris: Perception is irrational. It implies immanence.
Sonya: But judgment of any system or a priori relation of phenomena exists in any rational or metaphysical or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstracted empirical concept such as being or to be or to occur in the thing itself or of the thing itself.
Boris: Yes, I’ve said that many times.
It is pseudoscience, because the rest of the scientific community (of which I am a part) tends to think of it as bullshit, because it does not make testable theories that rule out purely cultural ideas, and relies on, as Ilithiana mentioned, only a small subset of human culture. Not nearly enough to base it on ‘evolution’.
And we can easily blame that on the culture surrounding the incident. If we go to, say, the middle east, and a woman grabs a man’s crotch, I’m pretty sure we’d have a hell of a different situation.
Also, again, why is cheating not so bad if it’s all based around spreading semen?
@Ami
Yeah, that could very well be it. I just deal with too many guys IRL convinced that they are ‘logical’ by virtue of being men.
Oh, I see. Marc is gay. Gotcha. *regrets time spent googling Michael Ruse’s personal history*
OK, Marc, so scratch your literal reading of “groinal” and insert “primal” or “basic.” The point is, here’s an idea that someone’s put out there that relies on an observation of “how things are” and a basic understanding of evolution. That someone is trying to prove that “how things are” is the result of evolution. He thinks about it for a minute, scratches his head, and voila! That thing that he though might be the result of evolution? It totally is! And guess what: It’s an easy enough explanation that it appeals to lunkheads all over the place who like easy but catchy ideas.
That’s the meaningful scientific method behind evo psych. It is based in nothing.
The problem with evolutionary psychologists is that they construct a theory justifying some sexist bullshit, then pick out certain facts of history and anthropology (or invent them out of whole cloth) and completely ignore others. Evolutionary psychology is West-centric, often American-centric, and post-1920’s centric in often hilarious ways. That debacle about why women are supposedly hard-wired to prefer pink over blue is just one amusing example. (In fact, pink was considered for centuries to be a “masculine” color and blue a “feminine” one, and the tradition of pink for baby girls and blue for baby boys is actually a very recent one.)
And it’s the same with rape. Sexual coercion is actually a pretty poor evolutionary adaptation, if you think about it. After all, the objective is to pass on your genes, not to merely shoot your load. And women are notoriously averse to taking good care of babies conceived as a result of rape. If men evolved to rape, how come women haven’t evolved to bond to children conceived in rape? Throughout history, and since prehistoric times, children conceived as a result of rape had a very high likelihood of being aborted, abandoned, killed at birth, sold into slavery or otherwise treated in a way which would ensure an early death and make further reproduction very unlikely. Obtaining consent, by contrast — of the woman and the community — is essential to actually, you know, passing on one’s genes, as opposed to merely depositing sperm. So it would make much more sense to say that humans evolved to seek consent and to find sexual violence abhorrent, and that therefore rapists fail to live up to their evolutionary imperative. Rape is an evolutionary dead-end. Funny how these “experts” ignore that.
I should add that I love that Marc proves that evo psych isn’t psuedo science by pointing out that other evolutionary psychologists agree with it.
“It’s not pseudoscience. The vast majority of evolutionary psychologists support a position similar to Ruse’s”
“Well, it’s about what the public thinks.”
Are you not a part of ‘public’? Do you mindlessly submit to majority rule? Do you take no responsibility for what you think is right or wrong, for what little part you play in influencing those around you?
I for one think that newscaster was out of line and should lose his job.
@Amnesia His point isn’t quite that, he’s saying that evo psych lets us know what ‘people’ think, and so the reaction of the public to this guy proves evo psych is right.
Despite, again, other completely valid ways of explaining it that doesn’t have to do with an ‘evolution’ theory based on the observations of a small part of the world over only a few centuries.
And, of course, none of us arguing against it count as people. Why? Cause…. edge cases! Right!
If evolutionary psychology is unscientific for you, any explanation that uses natural selection (excluding something very simple that can be observed because it doesn’t take 100.000 years or so, like antibiotics resistance) must be unscientific for you.
What’s the difference between mental traits and bodily traits?
And we can easily blame that on the culture surrounding the incident. If we go to, say, the middle east, and a woman grabs a man’s crotch, I’m pretty sure we’d have a hell of a different situation.
But for a totally different reason. They are afraid of indecent women there 😉
Show me ONE culture in the world, where they would have compassion with the man because of what he had to endure.
Doesn’t exist, explanation: evo-psych.
It is pseudoscience, because the rest of the scientific community (of which I am a part) tends to think of it as bullshit, because it does not make testable theories that rule out purely cultural ideas, and relies on, as Ilithiana mentioned, only a small subset of human culture. Not nearly enough to base it on ‘evolution’.
Then they’re testable. If the evo-psych claims something but you can show that it’s different in different cultures, you refuted his claim.
I would be better to put it that way:
What’s the difference between behavioral traits and bodily traits?
@Marc Antibiotic resistance is a different case. 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. The closest thing we can see is the development of lactose tolerance, which took quite a few centuries to actually become noticeable. And even so it’s an imperfect variation.
I did just give you a culture. She would be seen as a woman attacking the man sexually. She would probably be stoned for assaulting that man. And yet the guy isn’t seen as being attacked? Because that just does’t make sense.
And i just did. Saying ‘it’s different!’ doesn’t actually answer the question. If I give my PI a theory about how a protein works, and he says ‘why doesn’t it work that way when grad student B does it?’ and I say “it’s different!” He would stare at me for a bit and then probably throw me out of his office. In evo psych, apparently that’s just fine.
And you still haven’t answered me about cheating.
And to be perfectly clear, you are saying that our culture is purely, or at least mostly, an evolutionary thing. And yet when Iraq culture doesn’t fit the model, it’s different? Whence do those differences come from, pray tell? Are they somehow evolved differently?
And sorry for the triple post >.< But a last thing (for now):
When a real scientific theory is disproven, the scientist does (or should, at least) go back and say 'oh, okay, then we need to rework this theory or start over". The proper, scientific response, is not to say "But that's different!“. If your theory does not fit observable evidence, it’s not that that evidence is wrong. it’s that your theory is broken.
No, I would not!
But now you’re appealing to my emotions or moral intuitions. We don’t argue about them.
Yes you are-you are trying to say that “well rape is XYZ because of how we feel about it.”
Either it has nothing to do with emotions or it has something or everything.
Taking the agg assault thing-if someone is beaten half to death with a crowbar after a really bad bar disagreement, it is different then someone being beaten half to death because a person thinks the victim is gay. Both are agg assault but one is considered worse then the other. Why? Moral/emotional judgments made by society in general.
The victims’ psychological harm will be different as well-the bar fight victim will be upset that s/he was beaten but not devastated (unless winning argument is really that important.) A gay man or woman will be upset not only because they were beaten but because the person who did it hates them for who they love.
Yes, that Wanderer was me. Like I said, I used to hang around here but stopped a few months ago, the only posts I’ve made recently have been in this thread and to pimp out a YTMND and ask our host about a picture. Sorry if it seemed like I was hiding something, hehe. I should have been more clear.
To respond to Marc’s points:
1: I don’t think pecunium is a troll, in fact, I found most of his points to be cogent and worth reading, albeit coming from an intellectual position I am farther from these days (again, this is why I don’t pop by much anymore). However, I will let him defend his statements, Instead, allow me to concentrate on some of yours.
2: As we heard, it’s even punishable by a life sentence in some US-states, the average sentence for rape is nearly 12 years in the US.
There are other reasons beyond “evolutionary biology” which could explain this–is the sentence for rape equally high in European, Asian, etc. countries? I’m not sure, but while I’d have to check, I doubt it. This indicates that our reaction to rape in less biological than cultural, since if evolutionary biology could explain it punishments for rape would be more similar across more human cultures. This is not to say I have as much disdain for evo-psych as the other commenters here do (I don’t), but in this case, you’re putting too much faith in it, IMO.
3: It can’t be psychological damage: I gave abundant examples that acts that can inflict enormous psychological harm (paternity fraud, cheating, libel) are not even a crime at all. If libel is not even a criminal offense in the US it only strengthens my point (god, how I hate this Pecunium nonsense “blah blah it’s just a civil offense, hah, I proved you wrong”).
Well, okay, for the purposes of argument let’s concede this point for now and move on to the next one.
4: It can’t be unwanted pregnancy either because that’s easy to fix.
Not really, no. Like I said above, abortions often cost a pretty penny and that’s not even going into the complications which can arise as a result (health issues, loss of fertility, etc.). The potential risk of causing someone hundreds, possibly more, dollars worth of damages justifies some degree of punishment for rape.
5: So that leaves us with STDs. If you compare it with DUI, what are the actual sentences for DUI? Much less than for rape, much, much less. And also I don’t think that the chance to kill or permanently injure someone if you drive under influence but is much less than the chance to infect someone with an incurable STD like AIDS or Hepatitis B.
This isn’t necessarily true, Marc, for what it’s worth while the U.S doesn’t punish DUI that harshly, other countries are significantly more hardcore about it. They *lash* you for DUI in Singapore, for instance. You could argue that we either punish rape too harshly or DUI too lightly, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with questioning the severity of punishment for rape–should someone get the death penalty for it? Of course not, that’s too high. To insist it’s simply a “misdemeanor” or “barely even a crime at all,” however, is problematic.
Hiya Marc,
So, I’ve only been half following the convo thus far, but this is going a really weird place and I wanted to join in. Trouble is I can’t be bothered to look through pages and pages of diversions, side tracks, bar raisings, and so forth.
So I’d like to ask; what is your point re: rape? Why do you think what you do? I’d like to see if I can help clear some stuff up (or at least muddy the waters more).
*bets Marc won’t actually answer, since he’s been asked this upthread*
The trolls never stick around for the *really* interesting questions. : /
@Molly:
Like, what they actually think? 😛
@Kirby: Exactly!