It’s a proud day for the dudes over at A Voice for Men, which is celebrating the landing of the Curiousity rover on Mars by giving dudes everywhere serious dude credit for the event, which apparently involved no women at all. Well, maybe a few. But it certainly didn’t involve any of the women in the women’s studies department at Columbia University!
Actually it would be rather difficult for that to be the case. Impossible, really, as there is no women’s studies department at Columbia. Instead, Columbia has an Institute for Research on Women and Gender, an interdisciplinary center that works in cooperation with the Barnard College Women’s Studies department.
In any case, that once sentence is the entire text of the post, which linked to a live feed of the landing.
But to make sure everyone understands the MAN-significance of this MAN-vent, the AVFM dudes promoted it with this MAN-tastic blurb on the front page. (I mean the blurb on the right, of course, celebrating MEN and their UTTER MASTERYof technology. Just ignore that bit on the left about the technical glitches that AVFM has itself been having lately.)
The comments are more or less what we’ve come to expect from the AVFM crowd. I especially liked these two, from a manly fellow calling himself ActaNonVerba.
His followup is a bit Anthony Zarat-esque in its utopian grandeur:
So what your commenters are saying is, is Men are Weak? Yeah. Makes sense.
Wait, what? That didn’t even make any grammatical sense to me. Could you re-phrase, please?
Not inherently violent means “weak”.
Yeah. Whatever that means.
Karalora: It’s a small world, and only about 500,000 people lived in that part of it.
I went to Monroe, and Pierce. My folks owned a used bookstore. I know North Hollywood. I spent a lot of time at the LASFS, which was (I think it’s moved) on Burbank, between Lankershim and the Freeway.
red_locker: I knew what you meant. Thanks.
@Micheal
Because feminists don’t wear lingerie? Oh yeah, right, we only wear itchy burlap sacks and birckenstocks.
@pecunium
It was worth a shot. You never know.
fembot: My burlap is old,and soft. I can’t wear birks, so I have tevas.
A burlap thong — now there’s an idea for an instant bestseller.
OMFG Pecunium
You lived in San Luis Obispo from 2004-2006? I probably know you 🙂
And I love how everything bad that happens in this world is blamed on Men. As if women had nothing to do with it. Remember the bitch of Buchenwald? Or Erzsebet Bathory? In the case of the Nazi’s, women were as much to blame as men.
And yes, it’s true: If it weren’t for the dreams and dedication of MEN, there would be no robotic probes on Mars. Twas another great accomplishment by mankind. Score one for the Y chromosome. 🙂
Nameless: And the computers to run… well, pretty much everything, including Curiosity, wouldn’t exist if not for Ada Lovelace and Admiral Grace Hopper.
Oh, but I forgot. Inventing computer programming only counts as a big deal if a man does it, right?
@Monsieur
Don’t you dare take credit for the moon landing because you have a Y chromosome. You are still a worthless crybaby piece of shit, like all other MRAs.
Men = other people who are not you. So shut up.
@KathleenB: Now, to be fair, Babbage would have contributed more if the street buskers had just upped stakes and left London entirely. /silly
Okay, three examples. Two of them are from Nazi Germany, one from 17th Century Hungary. Is that the best you can do?
From Wikipedia:
Let’s just erase the men from your examples, hmmm? A lampshade made of human skin is the epitome of the Holocaust, and let’s forget that plenty of male Nazis kept interesting tattoos from their victims as memorabilia.
Bathory may have been the most prolific female serial killer in history. But of course, her being a woman erases all of the male serial killers in history.
And we’ll end up by blaming WWII on Eva Braun. Classy.
But your argument is countered by this: No one here is saying that women are all angels, or can’t do anything wrong or evil. There are plenty of wrong or evil women. I’ll happily concede that Koch, Bathory and $NAZI_WIFE were all wrong and evil (saving the debate over the whole concept of evil for another day).
Now you have worn yourself out (poor dear) by saying we all say women can do no wrong. That is a straw man (as we are sick to death of telling you by now).
We don’t deny that men had plenty of hands in the creation of the space program. What we are doing, is demanding that people recognize the contributions of women, and that people realize that the space program is the dream of many people, not just men.
But you’d rather sit in your corner and be bitter that women won’t give you the time of day, and it can’t possibly be because you spit venom at any who happen to venture near, can it?
fembot: We were in Grover Beach. My Partner was at CalPoly. I did aikido (very good dojo there) and we attended the local Friends Meeting. I get back there whenever I can. The Hostel San Luis Obispo is wonderful.
But, yes, it’s a small town, so we’ve probably passed each other, at the very least.
Here are some photos of the best part of California
@Pecunium
Those are some awesome pics. Thanks for sharing. I lived mostly in the North County, but I did go to Poly between 01-05.
@Pecunium
OMG those pictures took me back! I grew up on Ft. Hunter Liggett. I live in Marin County, now (*gasp* we moved because my mom got a job, and my dad is such a mangina, obviously–despite being a cop, which is why I grew up on Liggett, where he worked–that he moved when she landed a church up here), and I feel lucky to have lived in what I think are the two most beautiful places in CA. And if I manage to make it up to Humbolt State for school, I think I’ll have sampled all the best spots.
I just finished watching a documentary, on the National Geographic Channel, about the Mars rover Curiosity. Women most certainly worked on it. One of the scientists commenting was Jen Eigenbrode, an astrobiologist with a Bachelor’s in Geology, a Masters in Geologic Sciences, and a Ph.D.
http://women.nasa.gov/jennifer-eigenbrode/
She’s definitely qualified for her job.
EEB: Ah.. Ft. Hunter Ligget: I’ve been there a few times (more time at Cp. Bob). I love the Coast, from SB to SF (N too, but the Golden Gate marks a real change in the structure, the same way the turn to the E does at Pt. Concepcion).
If I had the money, I’d want to keep two house, one on the Central Coast (probably more like Santa Cruz), and one near New York.
The smell of sagebrush in the morning, and the whiff of dust in the afternoon, and the sprawling oaks, with the small, sharply edged, leaves. Poppies and wind, and the salt air, and the ocean being where the sun sets.
Well, actually, they certainly would not exist if hadn’t been for Al-Khwarezmi, Charles Babbage, and John von Neumann.To be fair, Grace Hopper certainly did help a lot as she was the first to write the first compiler. And unlike Lovelace(who has been shewn to be a fraud), she was not a breeder. 😉
Rockets, on the other hand, are products of the genius of MEN.
Men are from Mars…
Women are from Venus…
MRAs are from Uranus!
Babbage was brilliant, but a dead end; since his machine wasn’t practical. The women who labored, unsung, in the classified departments of the Dept. of War, doing the computational work for Oak Ridge are the women who made a huge amount of modern computing possible. But no one talks about them; because they were hidden from view.
No women, no Bomb. But it’s Oppenheimer, and the other theorists; as well as the engineers who worked on the larger physical problems, who get the glory. Not the women who were doing the computing; and shaping the first computers.
The point being, it was a joint effort of men and women. Neither gets to claim all the glory, but the men are given pretty much all the credit, see above.
@pecunium
Interesting you mention Babbage, because he did invent an impractical machine, but it was lady Ada who made it work.
And Lise Meitner was in on the Manhattan Project.