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!
I find it both funny and sad how much time these PUA and MRA types devote to getting angry about the fact that People They Don’t Find Attractive exist and have the audacity to uhm, do things in public. Shouldn’t they be out banging the ones they think are attractive, rather than raging about people they don’t like? What an appalling misuse of their time!
Obviously Heartiste has never seen women volleyball players!
🙂
Could we not try to fight misogyny with sexually framed pictures of sportswomen’s bottoms with objectifying commentary? It doesn’t work, for a start.
Ok ok, I hate those motivational parodies too but that was the best picture I could find of sportwomens bodacious backsides. FYI: It does work. Athletes are proud of their bodies and don’t seem to get butthurt over being admired for them. Unlike some feminists!
Takin’ a wild stab here but, MSN, is that you?
All you really need to know to debunk their stupid arguments is “is =/= ought”. If we, for the sake of argument, assume that a woman’s evolutionary fitness in the past was solely determined by her fertility and her hotness, it doesn’t follow that it’s wrong for women to do other things than being hot and having babies.
And as been pointed out already, it’s not like men’s bodies are designed by nature to perform olympic feats. Both female and male olympics need to train like crazy to perform as they do.
Men do have an advantage over women in many sports due to more testosteron, more muscle mass, being overall bigger etc. But it’s still terribly weird to say that female athletes are “like men”. A female olympic sprinter, for instance, is WAY way faster than a “normal” man.
We could write his comments for him at this point.
“I like butts. Also robots. Butts, robots, and trolling – these are my only interests.”
@Uminganiative: I don’t think Mech was the one who coined the term “alpha male”. I’ve read older studies about wolves where the term is used. Mech, however, started to study wolves in the wild, and discovered that wild wolves have a different pack structure from zoo wolves. Older researchers had simply assumed that wolves in the wild behave just like the one’s in zoos do.
Basically, if you take a bunch of unrelated wolves and through them into an enclosure, there will be lots of fights. Males will fight males, and females will fight females. Eventually an alpha male AND an alpha female will emerge, being the best fighters of their respective sex. They will pair up and have babies, and the rest of the wolves will be celibate.
In nature, however, wolves (males as well as females) will usually leave their parents when they’re about two years old. They then wander around alone for a while, until they find somebody of the opposite sex. They will then pair up and start breeding. So everybody who survives long enough gets to reproduce, it’s about being able to survive in nature (hunting and stuff), not fighting skills.
Sometimes the local fauna favours really big wolf packs rather than nuclear families. Packs will then consist of the original parents, some stay-at-home daughters, the “boyfriends” of the daughters, and younger offspring that hasn’t mated yet.
So this whole “alpha male” thing comes from zoo wolves. Although zoo wolves don’t function as PUA:s imagine people do either, since the females compete through fighting and not looks, and there’s only one monogamous couple and the rest are celibate.
I always wonder if people with views like this have never looked at pictures of (working class) women back when laundry and bread were made by hand. I know in the photos of my great-great grandma, a cook, her arms were sure as hell not delicate looking
It’s gotta be him. The female athlete ass obsession, the obnoxiously cutesy-poo brand of creepiness, the erroneous belief in his own cleverness, it all adds up.
Oh, good, it’s not just me who finds the attempts at cutesiness extra creepy.
@Unimaginative: Sorry, checked your link again and Mech himself does write that he’s at least one of the people responsible for the term “alpha” becoming popular.
Prehistoric women had to be fit. And yes, they had to be able to fight, throw, run and lift. they had to be able to take care of themselves and their kids and the idea that men did all the hunting is also false. (Humans scavenged a lot of corpses left behind by other predators – if the choice was to hunt vs drag home an all ready dead body, the latter was safer and more energy efficient.) [If the men were out hunting all day, then how the fuck were the ladies supposed to care for themselves and the kids if not by defending themselves ? Just wondering xD ]
Women hunted as well, usually small game, but they had to because big game hunting is not enough to feed everyone, concidering it had a bigger failure rate. Not to mention women / children / other men who were also gathering food had to be able to fight of and flee predators and other possible threats. They didn’t always have “their man” watching their backs.
Lifting, running, throwing things and fighting were abilities everyone needed.
I’d also like to point out, that large breasts and the body ideal of modern woman in general has only been possible very recently. It’s not just that living conditions allow maintaing such an “ideal” physique, but biologically, for example, large breasts were a rarity back then – for obvious reasons. After all, breast size gives absolutely no indication on how good child bearer / feeder she is going to be.
The current “ideal” is actually biologically as messed up as can be.
That is why I find these eco-psych ideas so stupid – they try to derive explanations for modern conditions from past ones.
The more “legit” evo-psych thing is mostly speculation and doesn’t always even, biologically speaking, make any sense.
Evolutionary biology is one of my favorite subjects. (I’m a biologist ! yay ! Well, scholar – will be graduating soon. And I’m also a martial artist (armed / unarmed / armed vs unarmed etc) and my hobbies also includes weaponry of all kinds.)
The problem with these sexist ideas spouting douchemongrels, is that they have absolutely no idea how humans work. Or how they worked thousands of years ago. Or even a hunderd, let alone fifty years ago. Damnit.
@Dvarghundspossen: Reading about this alpha stuff makes me think about my parents and their dogs. It seems like they do have a dominance hierarchy set up there, where one dog is the lowest, then another dog, and my mom is “alpha”. But it’s also true that no one got their dominance by fighting. My parents say that the dogs just seemed to know who was dominant.
I’ll usually try to crowbar a comic-book quote into any subject, but I have a very salient one for this thread – not least because the character who utters it is called She-Beast, neatly reappropriating the phrase many years before it oozed out of Roissy’s festering word-hole.
She-Beast, a minor character in the frankly vicious superhero satire Marshall Law, is a highly rare example of a female ‘tank’ superhero – a buzz-cut leviathan who essentially looks like Schwarzenegger in a one-piece. At one point she’s asked by Celeste, a superheroine cast firmly in the now-standard vampish, SEXXXY Rob Liefeld mould, how she can stand to look so masculine. To which she replies:
“I’ve never let anyone else’s concept of femininity hold me back.”
I forgot how everything women do is actually just a beauty contest. Remember that Olympic gymnast who kept getting slagged because of her hair? I mean WTF?
The only place I’ve ever seen evolutionary psychology make sense was in explaining why people are scared of harmless little spiders. According to EP, it’s because being scared of the way spiders look and move means we don’t go near potentially venomous or poisonous ones. This instinctual fear is then passed down to children and so on and so forth.
It makes sense. Doesn’t make it correct, but it makes sense.
@Dvarghundspossen: The alpha/beta man and hot women being more fit etc doesn’t even make that much sense. I’ve read far too much of their drivel, and I still can’t see what they think human mating strategy actually is (singular, because ofc ther is no chance of there being more than one possible successful option!).
What I get is:
Males are all biologically driven to mate with *as many* females as possible, and they have to be all strong and flashy and ‘alphas’ to attract all these mates (like peafowl maybe, or deer). If the idea is to just generate as many offspring as possible then a successful male will have more than he can reasonably care for so will not be greatly involved in raising them, if at all. So there is little investment in the individual young, and a great deal in displaying.
Yet, they only want females that look a certain way (despite being compatible sexually/physically otherwise). So they are turning down mating opportunities with other females which could otherwise result in more offspring (and hence increased fitness), based on a set of arbitrary physical traits. This actively goes against the ‘as many as possible’ argument. Sperm is cheap and easy to produce, so why would a male need to be picky? Does it really matter if a successful male shags a few infertile females/those with poor mothering instincts/some hereditary issue? Nope! If ur doin it rite you’ll have mated enough times that you’ll have some offspring that survives to reproduce.
Its like…they are trying to model human behaviour on peafowl. Except not really, because the idea of female choice makes them angry so the males have to be the ones who are REALLY choosing. So they made a kind of wolf-peacock-man-monstrousity because biotruth. I can’t even…I am too tired for this. People are’t wolves! Or peacocks!
This may be badly worded, apologies. I’m just all confused about how they think sex works, but, fuck it, unless they are getting all these women they shag pregnant, then they are failing in evolutionary terms, while all those pitiable frustrated skinny beta men and horrible awful fat/overly athletic women who have children and grandchildren are succeeding.
This sort of thing is one of the most pervasive misconceptions about evolution really. There’s a tendency to anthropomorphize evolution and to talk about what it intends. It’s something that could use an examination in how we teach evolution, if only we weren’t still fighting to teach evolution at all.
And I think I’ve said something like this before, but I think most evopsych is Lamarckian, I don’t think Roissy’s alone there. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for how spectacularly unconcerned evopsych tends to be with the difference between inherited and learned behaviors.
Fuck you. Your answer to the statement, “These bitches are ugly and I don’t want to fuck any of them” is “Here are some I want to fuck.” That is exactly what lowquacks said — fighting misogyny with misogyny. As David makes explicitly clear in this post, IT’S NOT ABOUT YOUR BONER.
I would LOVE to get my hands on a TARDIS and drag guys like Roissy through time to show them what women looked like and did throughout history. I think it would be very educational for them. Especially if they were made to do womens work and realized it takes far more effort than they thought and I think many of them wouldn’t be able to keep up. Even the the guys who work out. Sculpting and defining your muscles actually weakens them overall (in terms of the strength that potentially could have been gained) because you train the muscle to work individually and not function in an intergrated way with all the other muscles (for your typical urban fitness nut). Althetes, on the other hand, do train muscles both individually and as a whole. And they train probably to exhaustion and phenomanally low body fat percentages because its difficult to eat enough to keep up.
The farm lads I know laugh at city men who work out in the gym because they know all that showy muscle can’t do a days work.
You know, it almost makes sense, this ‘feminists are trying to be men’ nonsense. You just have to realize that they’ve defined all the fun things as masculine (sports, video games, etc.) and all the dull and unpleasant things as feminine (being objectified, bearing children).
“Athletes are proud of their bodies and don’t seem to get butthurt over being admired for them. Unlike some feminists!”
Because no athletes are feminists and no feminists are athletes.
Also, Argenti, did you actually encourage Kitteh’s Unpaid Help to tell Miss Bossy Kitteh that she’s an alpha FISH? I would worry about the implications there, being that in my experience kittehs believe that they reign supreme and that fishes are good for nothing but eating. 🙂 I would fear shredding or house-plant destruction ensuing from such a slight!
“Shouldn’t they be out banging the ones they think are attractive, rather than raging about people they don’t like? What an appalling misuse of their time!”
THIS. Ignoring all the evo/psy and pseudo science that they try and pull out of their asses, just look at what they’re dedicating their time too.
Picking up women? Nope.
Going your own way… and then spending the whole way complaining about women.
Compare it to… someone on facebook having 1k+ friends and having no social life in comparison to someone who is too busy to deal with it.
@CassandraSays
“You can’t explain that!”
If the men were out hunting all day, then how the fuck were the ladies supposed to care for themselves and the kids if not by defending themselves ? Just wondering xD
Manginas who have to stay back in the cave, obviously.