I didn’t bother to watch the VMAs last night, but something in the air has led me to want to give out some awards of my own. So: the coveted Man Boobz “We Hunted the Mammoth” Award this month goes to some comments from MRA oddball Uncle Elmer on women in the workplace that were recently highlighted on the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog. They are, of course, magnificently stupid.
Without further ado, here are some of the choicer bits of Elmer’s rant.
Women are competing for jobs but are not creating them. Other than providing a mass market for their vanity products, they are not forging new industries or technologies. …
Though men shank me and insult me, only men provide me with opportunity. … Only men, and only a small fraction of them, take the risks that create industry and opportunity. Women can only serve as mere functionaries in man-created structures. When an organization becomes feminized, priority shifts from efficient and profitable production of goods and services to development of labarynthine rules for the comfort and security of women. …
No woman can or will provide me or any man employment, yet all western women feel entitled to help and opportunities from men, even as they drive men out of the workplace.
[W]orkplace women are your enemy. They cannot help you but can and will hurt you. Do not look at them, do not talk to them.
And now the “we hunted the mammoth” moment:
Females want to inhabit man-created business structures as if those structures existed before man appeared on the veldt. … When you have pushed the last man out of the corporation it will collapse under its own dead weight.
And while I’m handing out awards, I’d like to give the Man Boobz Whaaaa?! Award for the strangest, dumbest and least true thing said about me in the past week to Wytchfinde (presumably the same guy who used to comment here as Wytchfinde555), who posted this strange and not-altogether-grammatical comment on my latest YouTube video (which you should all go watch if you haven’t already).
David Futrelle is an opportunist that pretends to worship white women (which is true to a certain extent) helps just fuel more fire for hating men.
Whaaaa?!
Re: women and innovation: Lise Meitner co-discovered nuclear fission with Otto Hahn and others in WWII-era Europe. Guess whose name is on the Nobel, and whose isn’t? (This was not entirely sexism– Meitner was a German scientist-in-exile at the time of the discovery, and it was considered politically untenable, etc.)
Re: women and innovation: Marie Curie and her husband describing the theory of radioactivity wasn’t significant? She remains the only person to be awarded two Nobels in separate sciences. Irene Joliot-Curie didn’t do anything significant? (It’s neat that she and her husband both hyphenated their names, btw). Barbara McClintock? Emmy Noether? Gerty Cori? I could go on, and these are just scientists of the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries…
@Amused
“I think when MRA’s think “gathering”, they think “nuts and berries” — which is to say that women provided the midday snack, whereas men obtained real food. But in fact, “gathering” was actually focused on wild cereals — forruners of today’s wheat, barley and flax. They — not mammoth meat — were the staple both for food and clothing. Grains — that’s what “women” gathered all day, for the most part.”
Well if that’s the case you just hustle on out into the closest forest and gather up all those abundant “wild cereals” and grains and just gorge yourself. Grains and such can’t come close to supplying the nourishment you get from meat.
From what I can tell from the comments, women have invented all science, every innovation, fed everyone, single handedly raised every child, created all works of art, literature and music, built society into what it is today, all while being oppressed to this day. It also appears on the off chance if history shows a man inventing anything, it was stolen from a woman.
Since I consider myself a man of honor I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong when I said women aren’t held accountable. Women seem to account for everything of value.
You know what NWO, I think I’ve figured out your deal with history. Or at least one part of your deal with history.
When you were in history class, was the teacher a small, talking dog with a “way-back” machine and a little boy side kick with a nasally voice?
I’d like to point out that we have a very skewed idea of hunting/gathering.
The examples we have are all of people who have been pushed to the margins; and made to live on marginal lands. Even at that the Kung and the San (on the Kalahari) only spend about 15 hours per week collecting food.
We can assume that, when the predominant lifestyle was hunting/gathering, that no more time than that was needed to get food.
Agriculture is hard, and labor intensive. Agriculturalists were smaller, and more prone to dearth, and malnutrition than hunter/gatherers, or pastoralists. What they had going for them was sedentary natures, and the ability (in good times) to store up for bad times. That let them develop a surplus, which let them develop tech, which (though far from immediately) put the first the hunter-gatherer (because the farmers weren’t going to let them come through) and then the pasoralist (because the farmers came too outnumber them) ways of life out of business.
So it wasn’t that one needed to spend all one’s waking hours in a frantic search for food. It was quite the opposite. The farmer had more rigid roles because the work of farming is far more dependent on muscle mass (even with more modern manual tools, like a scythe, harvest is back-breaking labor. I don’t want to imagine doing it by stook and sickle… Oh, my back), and the building of fortifications/standing to the defense, were things women (esp. the less nourished ones of the agricultural societies) weren’t as good at.
Which is why the Scythians are probably the source of the Amazon legends (and the centaurs). Since herding from horseback is something which isn’t dependent on marginal advantage to gain large benefit (like pre-animal agriculture), there was no pressure to move women out of the realms of, “man’s work”.
Which bring me to a comment I meant to make, and think I didn’t.
In ancient Greece and Rome, women were chattel. No arguments here– they. were. End of story. In what way is that even remotely viewing women as human beings? They were walking (but not far from the loom/stove/etc, mind you), talking (but never speaking their minds) wombs, important only in that they allowed men to have sons.
Greece yes, Rome, not really. They were the property of their father (and then thier husband) but so was everything. They had the right to divorce, as easily as a man.
They were allowed to own (and control) property, and slaves.
A paterfamilias could kill any of his family, in the law, but was constrained in that the rest of society would react to it, and if his wife’s blood relations were powerful (or better off than he) the odds of his long survival/freedom, were slim.
It was no paradise, but women had much more freedom than they did in Greece (and in Greece it wasn’t quite that cut and dried. Being married put one into a sort of purdah, but being unmarried allowed for a fair bit of freedom; albeit with a lot of uncertainty/bodily risk).
Oh, and following up on Holly’s comment about women being denied “education, publication, political influence, business connections, and in many cases the chance to have any career at all”: Marie Curie was denied a university position in her native Poland on account of her sex (bet they later regretted doing that…), and in the French Academy of Sciences for the same reason (ditto). She nevertheless became the first female professor at the Sorbonne. Emmy Noether worked for years without pay, and wasn’t allowed to lecture under her own name. Lise Meitner was similarly denied a salary for some time. Gerty Cori had trouble finding work at the institutions her husband was at, and wasn’t paid much at all; her husband was discouraged from collaborating with her. And these are the women who managed to get an education despite the prevailing prejudices of the time.
So….Antz says he actively suppressed his own gender during his first forty years? Boy, he was singularly unsuccessful at it, wasn’t he? Maybe oppressing women looked easier.
From what I can tell from the comments, women have invented all science, every innovation, fed everyone, single handedly raised every child, created all works of art, literature and music, built society into what it is today, all while being oppressed to this day. It also appears on the off chance if history shows a man inventing anything, it was stolen from a woman.
I had a chuckle at that because yeah, not disagreeing that women invented things, but to hear some folks around here say it, pretty much every major male inventor or scientist actually had a woman who did most of the work for which he took credit. Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer who single-handedly designed Windows but Bill Gates stole it from her, Shakespeare’s works were actually written by his sister, Da Vinci’s paintings and inventions were done by a couple of aunts, and The Beatles were actually Swedish lesbians in disguise. 😛
“From what I can tell from the comments, women have invented all science, every innovation, fed everyone, single handedly raised every child, created all works of art, literature and music, built society into what it is today, all while being oppressed to this day. It also appears on the off chance if history shows a man inventing anything, it was stolen from a woman. ”
[citation needed]
Seriously. I’d like to know who said those things, because I read the entire thread and didn’t see it.
Also, NWO, I’d still really like you to link us to a picture of a women you think is dressed in a modest/non-slutty manner.
NWO is just endlessly amused by the concept of people “knowing things” and “thinking,” isn’t he? It must all seem so quaint to him, the very idea that someone would… get this… absorb information! Haw!
I am sometimes honestly amazed he speaks a human language, with the attitude he has toward knowledge. I’d picture him as a baby, going (languagelessly) “oh ho, you’re trying to express ideas with sounds, Princess, you must think you’re really special, I’m sure that’ll work out just great for you.”
I thought after the empire happened with Augustus, women’s solely gained rights were curtailed again.
Well if that’s the case you just hustle on out into the closest forest and gather up all those abundant “wild cereals” and grains and just gorge yourself. Grains and such can’t come close to supplying the nourishment you get from meat
NWO, you do know that right now a lot of people are vegetarians and vegans, right? Right?
It isn’t a competition, NWO. Men and women worked together to feed themselves. They worked collectively and their contributions were equally important. I know this shakes the foundations of your ideas about pre-history. But I also know those ideas are probably based as much on the cartoon The Flintstones, then they are on any reading and research on your part.
No one is saying that women did every worthwhile thing, ever in in the history of people. People are using examples (and you might like to note, citations in some cases) to show that both men and women have made significant contributions.
Now about your history lessons…
And NWO and Johnny B both seem to have great difficulty with the concept that women and men have accomplished things. Maybe we could even respect both of them, like, at the same time!
Whoa.
P.S.: NWO, what LaplaceDemon said: you never did tell us how a woman should dress and act to be not a slut. If you know how she shouldn’t, surely a great mind like you has some idea of how she should!
“So….Antz says he actively suppressed his own gender during his first forty years?”
Coincidentally, that’s also when he met and married his wife.
Ah. Guess he found oppressing one person was more entertaining.
@Holly – “And NWO and Johnny B both seem to have great difficulty with the concept that women and men have accomplished things. Maybe we could even respect both of them, like, at the same time!”
At the same time? Whoa there, that might be a little too radical! You crazy feminist, you!
Anyway, everyone knows there is a finite amount of Respect Aether in the universe, and if you give some to one group it automatically takes away from the other group.
“You erase women from history and then after the fact you get to pretend that they were never there, and they never contributed anything.” This, this, this! (And it goes double for Kooris.) So when you look at eg the 1911 census, all the jobs women were doing, women on the lists of publicans, women’s names on parish maps, women mentioned in newspaper stories (hardly ever by name).
Lyn: It is not up to us to establish a stupid stereotype is not true. That gives weight to an idiotic narrative that isn’t grounded in reality. You, and everyone else, may talk about how much you love your boyfriends, husbands, etc, in response. But you don’t have to, and you lend weight to a moronic narrative that can’t actually be substantiated by refuting it. It’s sort of like proving you’re not beating your children. You can do it, but doing so absent evidence of abuse is going to make people think you’re doing it, regardless of its truth.
Whoops, wrong thread. Oh well, mea culpa.
NWO: Vegetarians are generally healthier than non-vegetarians. Please explain this, if meat is so nourishing.
Also, the reason you can’t gather for food now (as much– I do know people who go out and gather food from the woods) is that there are lots of humans, and all the land that used to have wild cereals and grains on it is city, farmland or park.
Also, also, quite a few things have gone extinct.
^I feel obligated to point out that we’ve moved from a culture where the primary danger is starvation to one where the primary danger is overeating; meat’s generally-higher calorie content is unhealthy now but would have been healthy then.
But NWO’s comment doesn’t mean much except “I like meat! Hurr!”
I’d like to point out that talking about early human populations that covered everywhere from Africa to northern Europe to Arctic reasons to Polynesia to North America as though they all resembled each other in culture, foodways, and gender roles is itself pretty questionable; modern hunter-gatherer populations are extremely diverse, depending partly on their local ecology and what works and what doesn’t (i.e. gathering lots of plant food or needing to rely more on hunting) and partly just on sheer cultural differences. There’s no reason earlier humans wouldn’t have been just as diverse; we’ve been anatomically modern for 200,000 years, and likely haven’t gained any raw intelligence or adaptability since then.
We can probably make some fairly uniform assumptions about Neandertals because they lived in a much smaller and more ecologically homogenous area, but early H. sap. sap? Less so. We can shoot down blatantly ridiculous ideas that just aren’t possible for a population living at subsistence level- like idle, provisioned trophy wives- but nailing down “this is how things were” based on one population’s ecology versus a very different one is a much riskier proposition.
Ozy: Citation needed (from an unbiased source). I’ve never met a healthy vegetarian yet. I’m not doubting they exist, but there’s a reason my nutritionist breathed a sigh of relief that I’m a meat-eater.
You can be a health nut regardless of what you’re eating, and eat crap regardless of what you eat. I’ve known meat-eaters who are very picky about what they put on their plate and vegetarians who live off of bread and french fries.
Anyway, I didn’t want to talk about that … just saw that near the comment box. I was going to bring up the darn mammoth thing again.
Bear with me, I have a fever right now:
So … in pre-agricultural societies they survived on meat and stuff they foraged. Those included “nuts and berries” and also wild cereals. People had to move around a lot because they had to go where the food was. After a while you would exhaust the local plant food supply, and meat was highly unreliable (because meat could move around on its own). Until the advent of weapons, people were scavengers who had to wait around and find already dead animals to pick off of (yumyum). In that case, finding alternative sources of food was very important. And you would move on to the next place where there was food once you needed to find new food.
When weapons were invented, at first they were just used to pick the meat off of dead animals, and then to stab animals at close range. Spears and arrows came a lot later and made things a little easier.
Agriculture was what caused people to form permanent settlements because they had to stick around and farm it. But it also caused people to have poorer nutrition. So while they had a more reliable food source, they weren’t as healthy. (We know this from examining the teeth and bones of people in early post-ag societies.) Domestication of livestock came a bit later on.
So in summary: Meat is and was a very important part of the diet, BUT it was highly unreliable until we began domesticating livestock. Supplementing the diet with plant food was very, very important, even though the focus on plant food created a more reliable but less nutritious diet.