You know, sometimes it takes a real man to put things into perspective. So it’s good that we have soMENi over on the MGTOWforums to set us all straight on the real lesson to be drawn from that whole atheist elevator controversy:
Considering MEN invented elevators and the electricity to power them, women should avoid MEN’s elevators and use a fucking rope instead to ascend to their rooms.
Oops! Men invented rope too. Oh well, flap your arms b!tch. Doing that might reduce all that excess energy going to your moaning mouth.
And … cut.
That’s a wrap.
There’s nothing more to say.
No more atheist elevator posts for me.
MRAL knows perfectly well why few people here like him. It’s because he tells the truth about how all women are stuck-up bitches and that’s why he can’t get laid, and the radical feminists and
manginasbrainwashed men on this blog don’t like hearing the truth.Times like this, I become more sure that the internet is just one massive experiment in collective satire writing, for an audience that perpetually doesn’t get the joke.
MRAL: Care to explain how you come to the conclusion men are more pain tolerant than women?
1: Pain is complex.
2: The models used to measure it, are (IMO) flawed, as they measure one aspect (pain from heat).
3: The actual differences appear to be small.
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=51160
To measure the differences in pain tolerance between men and women, Fillingim uses something called effect size, which compares the differences between the groups to the differences within each group. On a scale of small, moderate, and large, the pain tolerance difference between men and women is considered moderate. In degrees centigrade that translates to a difference of one degree to a degree and a half.
“So they are not so great that you would say, ‘Here comes a women and she will have more pain no matter what else is going on,'” he says. “It is also not so small that they should be ignored for other factors.”
Also, from anectdotal experience, childbirth is the second most painful thing in the world… kidney stones come first (this is what women who’d had both told me, when I had a kidney stone). How much worse? Some. It’s not quantifiable.
More to the point, even if we assume that other things (a broken leg, etc.) are more painful. Those aren’t things most of us are going to experience. Not even a significant portion will.
A really large portion of the population is going to give birth. And it hurts. It can be fatal. It can lead to long-term pain (prolapsed uterus, fistula, perineal tearing).
Non-trivial.
And 15 pounds? Pretty hard to swallow considering the largest baby in the history of Texas was just born, and he weighed 16 pounds.
Logic fail:
1: There is proof that a birthweight of 15 lbs is possible.
2: Texas is not the only place with people having babies. As the following will show, it’s not true that, “everything is bigger in Texas”
3: A woman in Indonesia gave birth to a 19.2 lb child.
4: A Russian woman gave birth to a 17.2 lb child in 2007
5: The heaviest infant ever born in the US was 23.75 lbs, though it died 11 hours after birth.
6: The heaviest known infant to survive was born in Italy, in 1955, at 22.5 lbs.
A birthweight of 15 lbs is large, but not, prima facie ridiculous.
The math on Einstein’s general theory of relativity was done by his first wife. He was a great theoretician, but she was a much better mathematician than he was.
The reason childbirth comes up (though I think it a weak argument, tactically, cf MRAL: this thread), is because the misogynists (not limited to MRA types) are arguing inventions (by other men) make them special snowflakes.
They ignore inventions by women. They pretend laws which made it impossible for women to take part in the various processes which made invention possible might affect the record. They ignore the women who actually did invent things. They pretend to know who invented things which pre-exist records.
So people point out that, were it not for women, there would be no men. It’s true, but not relevant. I don’t want to be confused with a concern troll, because I think men who pretend that just because something is natural, it’s trivial, are being moronic asshats, but I think it’s handing them a derail; and making it harder for those (like MRAL) to actually have the stupidity of the, “Men made everything good in the world” sorts shown to them.
You have a point, Pecunium. We made a couple comments about pregnancy, and MRAL made a snide comment about pregnancy, and then the thread turned into a don’t-insult-pregnancy-it-is-actually-quite-hard dogpile instead of a don’t-pretend-that-women-never-invented-anything-important dogpile.
I’m equally amused by either dogpile, though. It’s the form, not the content, that amuses me.
I have to share:
Dude is hooked up to electrical current to simulate pain of labour, fails.
I was 11.5lb at birth, I thought that was huge! *big admiration for Elizabeth’s grandmother!*
Pecunium, I think your comment is mostly on-target, but
2: The models used to measure it, are (IMO) flawed, as they measure one aspect (pain from heat).
The Mythbusters episode I mentioned suggested pretty strongly that one of the common, non-injurious methods for measuring pain tolerance is pain from cold; in fact, because it is inherently safer, that is the method they used.
Zombie: One of the quirks of pain receptors is they measure hot/cold the same.
Hiram Maxim (of machine gun fame) was fond of practical jokes. As with many his, were less than kind. He’d read this little snippet, and wanted to test it. So he had a poker sitting in the fire. He had another, out of sight, which was practically frozen. He engage in a bit of ledgerdemain to hide that he was pulling the cold one out as he laid it on the neck of one of the maids in his household staff.
She felt the poker, shrieked and thought she had been burned. He laughed. She quit; and said it felt as if he’s laid something redhot against her skin.
For some reason, he had a hard time keeping household help.
Which is to say, I don’t think that’s really expanding the dataset.
I don’t buy this shit. Since women are the only people who give birth
Is he implying that if cis men (I’m assuming he doesn’t count trans men as men in this case) could give birth, they’d talk about how easy it is? o_O
So I can claim credit for nething invented by a Chinese person right? o_O Or nething based on something the Chinese made? (since the elevators we are using now aren’t exactly the ones that were original there.. do we count the little inventions that give us what we have now? Like the push buttons? how about elevator muzak? xD )
I think you ppl should be grateful to use Chinese, and not turn us down if we hit on you while you’re using something we invented. xD
*us
I suspect a troll will counter “THEN WHAT ABOUT THINGS WHITE PPL MADE” (tho white is a very general description) in which case, sure let’s divide up our modern world xD I dunno how to take into account intersectionality tho… and who does Edison count? Disabled ppl? White ppl? Men? xD
Ami, I’ll bear that in mind next time I’m following a compass.
Hey, sure, I’d love some coffee!
Ami: Edison counts for insomniacs, and cheats.
If not turning down the Chinese was an actual rule, they would have very good odds of getting laid! Just from the paper use alone…
(I am currently married to a Chinese person, so I have already complied!)
I’ll just say I’m human, and take credit for EVERY invention.
Zombie: You USED to be human.
Yeah, the Chinese have been in the inventing business a lot longer than anyone else. Of course, the Chinese invented gunpowder, but I believe it was the Europeans who first conceived of using it to kill people. So…go Europe?
I agree with Pecunium that saying “there would be no men without women” is a weak argument. Childbirth is just a fact of life, and pitting against technological and scientific progress is really comparing apples to oranges. It’s relevant to bring up when MRA’s spout that women don’t suffer or don’t have a care in the world or don’t understand what real hardship is, but it isn’t really an answer to the whole “men invented everything” nonsense.
That said, I’d like to cautiously point out that barring exceptionally large babies that cause significant injuries to the mother (though these days, a doctor is far more likely to do a c-section than to break the woman’s pelvis to address cephalic disproportion), the size of the baby doesn’t make a whole lot of difference as far as the pain of childbirth is concerned. First of all, probably the worst part of childbirth is the endless hours of increasingly intense contractions after the water breaks. In the experience of many, if not most women, things actually get a bit easier once you begin to push, and once the baby’s head is out, the rest of it kind of just slides out. But even to the extent that pushing the baby through is very-very painful, if the fully dilated cervix is only 10 cm, then a 7-lb baby is still an awfully large object to force through an opening that small. In fact, these days women with average-sized babies are more likely to suffer through vaginal birth than those with abnormally large babies.
I have actually seen people make the argument that women don’t invent things because they can have kids and that invention is the creation of a “brain child” which is men’s attempt to replicate this process. Which, speaking as an engineer who never plans to breed, I think is complete BULLSHIT. I make stuff. Not all of it is brilliant original stuff, but it’s nifty stuff and I enjoy using my brain to do it. I have no interest in passively sitting back while my body grows a thing. Which isn’t to say it’s not difficult or physically taxing but it is just not comparable to USING MY BRAIN. I think building and inventing things is a lot more comparable to RAISING children, where you get to have input into the personalities they develop. And, guess what, men do that too 😛
I agree with Pecunium that saying “there would be no men without women” is a weak argument.
I think that’s the POINT though. It’s just as weak an argument as “there would be no elevators without men”. It’s like, both of these points are equally dumb, can we move on please?
“Mr. Al, I’m sure there are women who have *both* given birth and had kidney stones. Maybe we could find one and ask her?”
I know someone who has 6 kids and also had kidney stones. She said kidney stones were “probably” more painful.
The thing about inventions is that tracking “inventors” is a very modern western notion. With a few rare exceptions, we do not know the “inventor” for anything outside of a specific western history of patents. So, not only are people just pulling it right out of their ass when they say men invented most things (because we don’t fucking know who invented most things), they are ignoring that what inventions we do track are tracked with a specific cultural system designed to keep women out of it. This includes things like not allowing women to own property or profit from patents, as well as women being barred from educational institutions, and men being given credit for women’s discoveries (like how only Otto Hans got the Nobel for his work with Lise Meitner).
Elevator Guy Bingo: http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lo8t1q8dLj1qa4w2so1_500.jpg
from the comments at Pandagon. I think just one of our resident trolls hit all of them, let alone a tag team.