Most women, it is fair to say, don’t want to be deprived of education; they don’t want to be considered little more than baby-making machines; and they don’t want “independent” women to be maimed or murdered.
But according to the influential manosphere blogger Vox Day, women who object to any of this just don’t know what’s good for them. In one of the most repellant manosphere rants I’ve run across yet, Vox attempts to rebut PZ Myers’ critiques of evolutionary psychology with a series of bizarre and hateful assertions about women, offering his own “scientific” rationales for keeping women down. Is this all somehow satire on his part? He certainly seems sincere.
TRIGGER WARNING for all that follows; Vox explicitly defends the maiming and murder of women.
Vox starts out by arguing that depriving women of education makes solid evolutionary sense:
[E]ducating women is strongly correlated with reducing their disposition and ability to reproduce themselves. Educating them tends to make them evolutionary dead ends. … 40% of German women with college degrees are childless. Does PZ seriously wish to claim that not reproducing is intrinsically beneficial to women?
Instead of being educated, Vox goes on to argue, girls should be married off young so they can start popping out babies:
[R]aising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children allows them to pursue marriage at the age of their peak fertility, increase the wage rates of their prospective marital partners, and live in stable, low-crime, homogenous societies that are not demographically dying. It also grants them privileged status, as they alone are able to ensure the continued survival of the society and the species alike. Women are not needed in any profession or occupation except that of child-bearer and child-rearer, and even in the case of the latter, they are only superior, they are not absolutely required.
Next, he defends the practice of throwing acid in the face of “independent” women:
[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.
He moves on to honor killings, arguing that they too are good for women, because
female promiscuity and divorce are strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills, from low birth and marriage rates to high levels of illegitimacy.
He offers a similar rationale for female genital mutilation, before launching into this bizarre racist attack on abortion rights:
[F]ar more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.
Vox wants “girls” – presumably teenagers — to be married off young and start popping out babies. Yet in his mind female fetuses are “unborn women.”
Despite Vox Day’s repellent ideas about women – and his proud racism – he’s an influential figure in the manosphere, mentioned approvingly and regularly cited by others who present themselves as more moderate voices. It may not be a shock that the reactionary antifeminist blogger Dalrock includes Vox in his blogroll, and cites his work with approval (see here and here for examples). But, astoundingly, he’s also regularly cited approvingly by antifeminist “relationship expert” Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart (see here, here, and here). And she has even written at least one guest post on Vox’s “game blog” Alpha Game.
At this point I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of this. But I still am.
creativewritingstudent — that post is disgusting, I don’t even know were to begin, so let’s begin at the end — “The thing is, as anyone who has ever fired a gun knows, it’s a lot easier to hit your target if you stand still and take the time to aim at it. Of course, then you have to take the risk that you’re up against a much better marksman who will blow you away before you can even get a shot off….” — He thinks he’s the better marksman?? (Is that even an analogy or does he just straight up mean it?)
I guess I’m not allowed to say he needs help though. Considering he finds it “ironic” to have someone with Asperger’s saying that, I really don’t care to find out wtf he’d say about it coming from someone who is actually mentally ill. (-1 internet for “don’t take the crazies seriously!” he’s not helping anyone with that!)
It’s not as if this schtick of his is new I’d never understood how the medieval kings found it so easy to get the common people to hate the Jews in their midst. But if those medieval Jewish leaders were anything like the idiots running the ADL, the ACLU and the Council of Jews, one can see where the idea of persecuting them would have held some appeal.
He has a writing gig on WND, of which his father happens to be a member of the board.
He’s been saying women ought to be stripped of the vote since 2004.
It’s pretty clear to me that one of the most destructive forces in our society has been women’s suffrage…. I’m not advocating some sort of sharia here – as far as I’m concerned, women can work wherever and wear whatever they want. But allowing them a voice in government and politics is disastrous, if not suicidal, and has led directly to the loss of more American lives in three decades than in every war since the Revolution.
It’s a simple question, actually. Is the nation better off or worse off as a result of women’s suffrage? If so, how? It’s a tough case to make, unless you want to argue that divorce, illegitimacy, homosexuality and falling real wages are the historical signs of a healthy society.
Voting is not a God-given right as delineated in either the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. Liberty, in fact, denies universal democracy, (or mobocracy as it was known), a fact that anyone who has read the Federalist Papers would know the Founding Fathers understood very well. The dichotomy of a libertarian favoring limited suffrage is only an apparent contradiction to the ideologically and historically ignorant.
So he’s a libertarian™ who thinks only some people (the right sort) should be allowed to vote. Women, it seems, can’t be, “the right sort”. Neither, perhaps can blacks and Jews (since they will, like those pesky women, keep insisting on being treated as the equals of White Christians… the nerve!).
Everyone who doesn’t agree is just refusing to understand God’s Will, for God’s Voice has spoken.
So yeah, the, “it’s just satire, he doesn’t really believe it,”, I’m not buying it. He’s been saying this sort of thing for years. New verses, same song.
Crap… I forgot the link to the first quotation: Electrolite, March 1, 2005
The others were pulled from the posts on his blog (Dave, do you allow rel=nofollow?) on June 1, 2004… so that makes nine years, at the least, he’s been talking like this.
And I borked it this time too. There is only one link. I think I need breakfast.
Argenti: As anyone who has ever been in a firefight knows, it doesn’t really work that way. There is a modicum of truth to the adage, “get off the first shot fast,” on the theory it will disturb the other person’s sense of well being, and hence their aim.
But yes, he does think he’s the bestest, with the mostest. Look at his screen name… humility ain’t in ‘im.
I’d say that’s an empirical justification.
Observations:
We are sharing the planet with others.
Countless examples of failed ways of living together that resulted in the annihilation of one or both parties.
Hypothesis: There is some methodology by which to ensure people can live together in harmony.
More observations to demonstrate.
The problem is that, strictly speaking, you’ve demonstrated a need for *politics* (in the larger sense of the term, not just electoral politics), not ethics.
You can’t argue rationally about *anything* without empiricism. There is a limit to pure reason, i.e. the atomic axiom problem. Any discussion that does not include any form of observation of facts is mental wankery. It’s interesting, it can sometimes later be brought back into something useful if we later observe that the axioms we arbitrarily chose actually can be demonstrated to be true (see: a lot of purely theoretical math work in number theory, and so forth), but it’s wankery just the same.
Science is just one particular (institutionalized) form of empiricism.
I think it’s an analogy. In this case, if I may extend the analogy, he may be standing still and being a good marksman, but he’s firing with a Super Soaker filled with vomit. When it fires, all that comes out is a stream of disgusting bile.
Oh gods, he seems to completely miss the whole point of ethics, doesn’t he.
(Am I correct in assuming that the “-1 internet” is for Vox, rather than me? I’m socially paranoid and I find it’s better to ask than to spend time worrying. You’re using third person, but the wording is similar to mine… I kinda suck at sarcasm.)
creativewritingstudent: yeah, that’s a trainwreck of a post. The HuffPo piece he links to isn’t much better… it’s Michael Varpole (anti-manboobz) levels of, “I said was like this, let me repeat myself so you will think I’ve got more than one thing to say on the subject”.
The sad thing are that 1: this is nothing new for VD, and 2: he has a bully pulpit, where a non-trivial number of people go to hear him preach.
See for instance all the attempts by right-wing libertarians/Objectivists to argue from ‘first principles’ that inevitably lead to the creation of large abstract models of what capitalism or freedom means without any of it being grounded into historical realities whatsoever.
Naodi: I’m not a Vox Dei scholar. I’m only going by what this thread actually says, and by the spluttering but unobservant fury it seems to have elicited. It’s a good idea to deal accurately with the text under discussion, before “putting it in context” with other texts.
If Vox says nasty things elsewhere, yeah, sure, chances are I’ll disagree with those things. But PZ used this thread as an excuse to retreat into his octo-hole and not come out for debates at all — “See how nasty this lowlife I’m quoting second-hand is?” — which really shows what a sloppy “scholar” PZ is, however good he may be with sea life.
“As anyone who has ever been in a firefight knows, it doesn’t really work that way. There is a modicum of truth to the adage, “get off the first shot fast,” on the theory it will disturb the other person’s sense of well being, and hence their aim.”
Yeah I find it amusing he said “fired a gun” not “in a firefight” — I’ve fired a gun (more than one, and with fairly good aim even) — I’m also not stupid enough to think that would somehow help much in a firefight. He didn’t say to fire before you’ve aimed to unnerve the other guy, he said you run the risk of the other guy “blow[ing] you away”. I’m questioning if he’s ever even held a gun, forget about fired one, and almost certainly has never had anyone shooting back — I’ve put enough holes in enough targets though to know that that’s not remotely the same thing as someone shooting back. I think he might have video games confused with real life, maybe?
“Am I correct in assuming that the “-1 internet” is for Vox, rather than me?” — yep, that’s correct, sorry to have worried you!
I’m pretty sure he’s fired a gun. I’ll even posit he’s a decent shot. He might even have played paintball.
I will wager (with odds) that he’s never been where, “love and need are one, and the work is play for mortal stakes“.
If Vox says nasty things elsewhere, yeah, sure, chances are I’ll disagree with those things. But PZ used this thread as an excuse to retreat into his octo-hole and not come out for debates at all — “See how nasty this lowlife I’m quoting second-hand is?” — which really shows what a sloppy “scholar” PZ is, however good he may be with sea life.
Does this look like pharyngula to you? Why do you assholes come here to whine about PZ?
David Marshall: Ah, another person of the,”there is no context” school of reading.
My questions to you still stand.
1: What is VD’s point?
1a: How is it satire.
1b: If none of his other works are to be considered, how can we know it’s satire?
2: How does this batch of over the top points differ from his other writings? (see 1a-1b above as to why this matters, your attempt to dismiss it as irrelevant notwithstanding)
3: What about his “mocking” makes the logical failures, intellectual errors (e.g. the mis-statement of utilitarianism), etc. worth ignoring?
@Argenti Aertheri
Not a problem 🙂 . It’s my social skills – they’re just good enough to let me know that I may have done something wrong, they’re not good enough to stop me from doing the wrong thing in the first place, and they’re prone to misfiring. I’ve learnt to check when I’m uncertain.
David Marshall: Is this about PZ Myers, or about VD? Your defense of VD seems to be based on the idea that PZ is wrong. PZ isn’t the subject.
Why, I wonder, since you say you don’t read VD, have you suddenly come here to defend him? Why not go there to tell him what a stellar fellow he is, and how insightful his satire is?
Why not go to Pharyngula and tell PZ how he needs to break a habit (perhaps even personal rule) and raise VD to super special status and engage in an “internet debate” (which is almost always never a “debate” but an exchange of broadsides plastered to streetlamps)?
Why not actually talk about VD’s post here?
They probably know their bullshit won’t go over very well at the pharyngula website. It would be funny to see them try, though.
Aside from which, I challenged PZ to a debate on this very subject, a few weeks ago. He offered no response. I don’t have a problem with women. I’m a respectable opponent. So while I have no problem with anyone calling Vox Dei out on whatever sins he may commit — but please don’t overlook the satire! — PZ’s retreat strikes me as more than a little disengenuous.
RE: David Marshall
Please tell me you’re not the one I know. You don’t make comics, do you?
They know Andie of the SCENTED FUCKING CANDLES, and she says some women are infertile by 26, so therefore Cliff Pervocracy will never have children.
And that is apparently good enough for some people, though I doubt Vox Day knows who Andie is.
I know people have already asked you but since I can only assume you missed that since you haven’t answered, what parts of what Vox Day has written are satire? Could you quote them and maybe explain how they’re satire and not actually what he believes?
Dude, you’re a no-name lackwit. If he debated every tom, dick, and harry who was just so sure he was the smarterest genius of them all, to their own satisfaction, he’d have no time to do anything else. If this is the level you’re operating on, the commentariat probably ran circles around your arguments to begin with.
Go fuck yourself. He says this shit all the time. He is trying to claim a true utilitarian would agree with him. He has revelatory knowledge from his gods (YHVH and the Founding Fathers), he doesn’t need a coherent code of ethics.
First part of the post is directed at David “PAY ATTENTION TO ME” Marshall, if that isn’t clear from content.
Vox Day said one time that fear of God/Hell was what kept him from going on a murder spree. He really need professional help, and some ECT.
RE: Rutee and Pecunium
Yeah, I’m kinda baffled by the “You MUST engage with my argument!” claim. I mean, I went and debated with the lady who claimed I didn’t exist, but that’s because I’m an intellectual masochist who wanted to see her logic laid out. (You gotta say this about people on the Internet, they are usually MORE THAN HAPPY to go into huge detail about what they think and why.) And if she had said, “No thanks, I don’t want to talk,” I would see that as totally reasonable. What the hell, she wasn’t OBLIGATED to talk to me.
Who is this PZ Myers guy, anyway?