So over on Chateau Heartiste, the Dude Who Used to Call Himself Roissy seems personally affronted that the female athletes in the Olympics, by and large, didn’t live up to his wet dreams of Perfect Womanhood. In one post, he hails a Turkish newspaper columnist (yes, the same one we talked about here) who complained about the allegedly unwomanly bosoms of female Olympians, and offers his own less-than-complimentary assessment of their looks:
Who with the eyes to see hasn’t noticed the narrow hips, the grotesque six-pack abs (never a good look on women), the chest “stubs”, the linebacker shoulders, and the manjaws of an inordinate number of the female Olympians?
So why does it matter that Roissy/Heartiste couldn’t get a boner watching the Olympics? Apparently because these women are violating the PRIME DIRECTIVE, which forbids representatives of the United Federation of Planets from “intervene[ing] in matters which are essentially the domestic jurisdiction of any planetary social system.”
Sorry, that’s the PRIME DIRECTIVE from Star Trek. These gals are violating what Roissy/Heartiste thinks are mother nature’s PRIME DIRECTIVES (plural) for women, which are to look pretty and make babies. No, really. You see, women aren’t actually supposed to be, or look, athletic. It’s SCIENCE.
[W]omen must conform more to the male physique ideal in order to compete successfully in sports, and particularly elite sports, because women’s natural bodies are not evolutionarily designed to run, throw, fight or lift optimally like men’s bodies are designed to do.
Yeah, there’s no evolutionary advantage in being athletic, if you’re a gal. Evidently female hunter gatherers during humankind’s “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” didn’t ever run or throw or carry or fight anything or anyone, spending most of their time hanging out in cave clubs and texting their friends on their Smart Rocks.
Women’s bodies are — and I know this will get under the skin of the right sort of losers — shaped by the relentless laws of nature to fulfill TWO PRIME DIRECTIVES.
Visually please men.
And bear children.
Everything else women do is commentary.
Apparently Roissy/Heartiste has become an amateur Torah scholar. (And not a very good one, at that.)
You might be wondering: if Roissy/Heartiste really believes in all the evolutionary psych crap he constantly spouts, why on earth would he care that some women aren’t fulfilling their evolutionary duty to give him boners? Won’t they just get bred out of existence? What does it matter to him?
Well, evidently Roissy/Heartiste was feeling so defensive about people asking this very question that he wrote a whole other post explaining, sort of, why he cares. Sorry, why he totally doesn’t care.
The issue being raised was never about how much it personally mattered to me, or affected my own life. That’s the problem with you unthinking liberals — you always want to reframe an argument you find distasteful, or you find yourself on the losing end of, into a personal matter, a position from which it’s easier for you to morally strut and preen and preach fire and brimstone from your tawdry little masturbatoriums.
Yeah, you strutting masturbatoriumizing liberals! How dare you ask him why he spends so much of his life complaining about the bodies of women who don’t give him boners?
He continues:
The morality, or lack thereof, of manned-up women competing in the Olympics is not the point of the Olympic female athlete post. No one’s rights are abridged if some manly swole she-beast hoists 400 lbs above her head, nor is any moral law du jour violated. The point here is to remind the losers and equalists and assorted anti-realists that there is nothing inherently empowering about female sports participation unless one defines empowerment as “becoming more man-like”. It is also to address, honestly and truthfully, the obvious fact that a lot of female athletes are just quasi-men, in appearance, musculature and temperament.
Boy, there’s a brave and original notion.
Therefore, the encouragement of women by the media industrial complex into elite sports mostly rests on a foundation of denying women their feminine essence.
Huh. In his first post on the subject, Roissy/Heartiste complained about the “narrow hips” and “manjaws” of female Olympians. Did the evil “media industrial complex” somehow lure women into developing narrower hips and less-rounded jaws? Is Roissy/Heartiste some kind of Evo Psych Lamarckian?
A nation that wasn’t fucked in the head with an overload of kumbaya horseshit would not shy away from this bald truth of the reality of sex differences, and would realign its cultural incentives so that a proper balance was restored, reflecting innate biological reality, until sports programs and funding return to what they once were: mostly geared toward men.
If “innate biological reality” demands that women remain unathletic (and thus pleasing to Roissy/Heartiste’s eyes and penis), why are there any female athletes in the first place? If athletic women are by definition going against nature, why bother talking about culture at all, much less the urgent need to “realign cultural incentives?”
Evo Psych types like Roissy/Heartiste like to pretend that it’s biology, not culture, that sets up the allegedly innate differences between men and women. But somehow culture matters again when people stubbornly refuse to conform to their supposedly natural roles.
At the very least, the feminist propagandizing of female sports empowerment has to end, and hand-wringing over “equal representation” needs to become a shameful relic from this ugly, god-willing bygone era.
Huh. So I’m beginning to get the impression that you do care about all this, after all.
In the comments, some dude calling himself Maximin manages to be even more pompous than Roissy/Heartiste himself, declaring that
feminism … aspires, in the name of equality, to make women in to men, but revealing, at the same time, the inherent hatred of women that is feminism. This is not equality—rather this is bigotry against women. By forcing women to act like men—to look like men, to have the musculature of men, to date like men, to have sex like men, to work like men, what they are saying is: the male body and the creations of the male body are superior to the female body and the creations of the female body. Therefore, change the female body into the male body and hence allow the female body to then create male works (and from what we have seen, these masculine women can only, at best, land in mediocrity).
And of course, it’s ugly women who are to blame for it all:
It comes from a hatred of the female—most likely from highly masculine women who are naturally more intelligent and competitive than highly feminine women. They cannot garner the attraction of men because they are ugly, so they scorch of the earth of femininity, and suddenly the scales are tipped in their favor. Beware a masculine woman scorned: she will burn down the world and rebuild it in her favor.
Fellas, be careful! If you don’t watch out, Holley Mangold will sneak into your bedroom at night and LIFT YOU OVER HER HEAD!
@Myoo
I didn’t say women were all that way, just that it was considered the ideal of feminine beauty. On top of that, women weren’t supposed to be active, because “medicine” of the time taught that any energy a woman expended in activity was energy she was robbing from her uterus. It wasn’t until Title IX that girls even had the opportunity to get into sports at school; the health classes for young women focused on pregnancy, being a proper woman, and etiquette and graceful movement as would be suitable for the delicate flower that “proper” women and girls were supposed to strive to be.
Of course there were lots of women who didn’t fit the mold, and women who lived without the necessary wealth and luxury to follow those asinine guidelines of their time. In any overwhelming and demanding social requirement there is always that conceit: those who can’t follow for whatever reasons. They get ignored, or, worse, trotted out as examples of the negative effects of not following the advice of the wise and the wealthy, or othered into being seen as subhumans whose ill-defined inhumanity allows them to skirt the imaginary consequences of existing outside the lines.
I don’t know how old you are, or how old your grandmother is, but even by the time she was likely to be alive and old enough to help, there were social issues holding women back from sports. Your grandmother was needed to help on the farm; that was a necessity and therefore allowed. If she had instead expressed a serious desire to join the school wrestling team, odds are her parents or the community wold have found it inappropriate, possibly even a bit scandalous, and intervened.
As it is, it wasn’t until the 1980s that woman athletes were allowed into the Olympic marathon. Even today, many of the sports events for female Olympic athletes are different than those for men— often in ways that are quite arbitrary.
@OHSHIII
I do agree with you that there were, and still are, a lot of restrictions on women playing sports, and athletic women weren’t really well known or they were considered oddities. I also agree that the increasing participation of women in sports has made it more obvious what a physically strong woman’s body can look like. That wasn’t actually my problem with your post and I should perhaps have been more clear.
What I meant to say, was that, while medicine may have said women weren’t supposed to be active, that only really applied to wealthy women, because less wealthy women tended to do a lot of work, either actual jobs or farming or housework, so they were active and often in good shape, but that was ignored by people.
On a slight aside, it occurred to me now, that perhaps the clothes that were in fashion also contributed to that, because they tended to conceal women’s bodies.
@Myoo.
Oh, well yeah. Historically speaking, when people talk about human “concerns”, unless they say otherwise it tends to be a given that they are talking about the upper class members of society who could afford to be people of note who should have others’ concern.
clairedammit:
Other people seem to be reading this differently than I am, but I’m a little uncomfortable with saying it’s possible for people who are creeped out by someone (or by a particular behavior) to be wrong about this. I’m not even willing to say the feeling is groundless.
I’d go as far as “‘Chris finds Steve creepy’ is a statement about Chris, not a statement about Steve,” I suppose, and that might be what you meant.
Shade:
I know, I was thinking “well, that’s kind of a personal question.”
Whenever I respond to just a long-ago comment, or to a long-ago comment and a very recent one, I always feel like people think I didn’t read any of the ones in between. I did! But you folks are all so much better at troll-identifying than I am.
Face it David, you don’t have half the wit to manage Roissy’s snark, let alone respond to it rationally. He was right on every point. You can’t even address the real arguments. Keep dancing.
Here’s a video of the women’s 60+ Crossfit games final. This thread is the appropriate one to show it.
This would warm Heartiste’s heart. Oh wait, he doesn’t believe women should be competitive athletes at any age.
@ Jessay: I was going to say the same thing but I find that you’ve already said it better.
That said, I freaking *love* how Heartiste
assumes masculine=naturally more intelligent than feminine! *cough* Jackass *cough