Even after all the time I’ve spent on this blog, I can still be astounded by the appalling hatefulness of the manosphere. The latest example? This post from the influential far-right manospherian who calls himself Vox Day, in which he argues, seriously, that encouraging rape is better for society than encouraging (white) women to work.
No, really.
Vox, you see, is racist as fuck, and he’s worried about the evil brown people outbreeding the good white people. He figures that
two-thirds of [women] have to stay home and breed in order to prevent society from either collapsing into demographic and economic ruin or being transformed by the imported replacement workers into a third world society.
Now, you might think that some men could stay home and take care of these kids, but that’s clearly not an option since, you know, dudes don’t like changing diapers.
[T]here are a number of reasons that a man cannot stay home and provide childcare. The three most important are that a) most men don’t want to provide childcare, b) most women don’t want to work to support a man, and c) doing so significantly increases the probability that his wife will stop being attracted to him and his marriage will fail.
And all this leads to his jaw-dropping conclusion:
The fact that women may wish to work and are very capable of working no more implies that they should always be encouraged to do so anymore than the fact that men may wish to rape and are very capable of raping means that they should always be encouraged to do so. The ironic, but logically inescapable fact is that encouraging men to rape would be considerably less damaging to a society than encouraging women to enter the workforce en masse. Widespread rape makes a society uncivilized. Widespread female employment makes a society demographically unsustainable. History demonstrates that incivility can be survived and surmounted. Unsustainability, on the other hand, cannot.
Skimming through the comments to this piece on his site, I saw mostly rape jokes. I didn’t have the stomach to read further.
Thanks for picking up on this, I posted this stuff here a few days ago. I find vox and his ilk just jaw dropping.
[EDITED BY DF: Yoyo, I removed that last sentence. I understand your frustration, but I don’t want that sort of thing on the blog.]
No after thinking on this, jaw dropping isn’t quite right, it’s more like a combination of unbelieving horror and the sort of weird laughter you sometimes have after a disaster.
Why 2/3? There is a lot of fail, but I am hung up on that.
I have to laugh, because only someone incredibly naive and douchey could think these ideas would actually be practical. (Economic ruin? Sure, dude, just try removing HALF THE WORK FORCE. I’m sure our economy will do FABULOUSLY.)
Also, dude. WHITE PEOPLE AREN’T ENDANGERED. Deal with it.
Because there are ‘woman’ jobs that men shouldn’t have to do (doing woman’s work would make him less attractive to his wife and put a damper on his own breeding), and he’s used his special man-math to work out how many women can be spared from breeding to do those jobs?
Some Gal Not Bored at All, I expect it’s to do with the magical numbers for when the birthrate equals or exceeds the death rate, because if women birth enough babies to replace the dead, then there will be no need for immigration. I don’t know if Teddy’s numbers are right, but I’m sure he’ll argue that his genius means that they couldn’t possibly be wrong.
The human resource production angle has pretty much been done to death over the years.
Also that word “sustainable” does not mean what he thinks it means.
Wonder why I get the feeling Pox Day has never been attractive to anyone? He sure as hell doesn’t know* that men doing housework are regularly cited as being very attractive to their spouses.
Damn, watching Mr K cooking breakfast stirs all sorts of appetites in me! 😛
*Minor point compared to all the other things he doesn’t know, of course.
Hiya, tigtog, nice to see you here! 🙂
@Kim
I forgot I can’t do man-math. 🙁 Silly lady-brain.
@tigtog
Wouldn’t the number of babies per couple matter more than the number of couples engaging in this “save the race” breeding program? Surely we could make do with 1/3 of women stay-at-home mothering if they’d agree to have 2-3 more kids each.
@Some Gal Not Bored at All, I have absolutely no doubt that buried under Teddy’s manly maths are some premises regarding how many women are adequately feminine enough to be breeding at all, but I refuse to go digging for it.
*waves at Kitteh*
I wish “vile” hadn’t been beaten to death around here, because that’s what Vox Day is. If I found something like him on the bottom of my shoe, I’d burn the shoe.
I’m really confused how can anyone write those words and not realize they are just a big turd in a human suit?
Oh, and Yoyo, thanks for posting the link to Vox’s piece on the blog the other day, I hadn’t seen it.
@Kim
You are probably right, but I can’t imagine 2/3 of women meet his standards. I’d be very surprised if any women were appropriately misogynistic, racist, non-human…
A couple years ago I saw some books in a store I was browsing called “Porn for Women” or something similar. They were all just photos of men cleaning, cooking, and taking care of babies. Just saying, I doubt these books (as stereotypical as they are) would be deemed a profitable idea if there wasn’t a somewhat large enough population who would enjoy them. (Pointing to myself here. Show me a man taking care of his kids and being all sweet and goofy, and my clothes magically disappear.)
::waves back at tigtog::
Dammit, that’s two coffees in one day!
I really just don’t have any words for this. I’m gonna Google image pictures of Tom Hiddelston until I’ve bleached my brain enough.
Steele ruined vile, but there’s still evil and that fits this dude. And his commentariat.
And contemptible, despicable, disgraceful, shitstain … or if you want to go Shakespearian, clotpole, maggot-pie, ratsbane …
*sees picture*
*screams*
Sorry, not reading the text. I already have a good enough idea of who Vox Day is to know what it will contain.
Voxday is suspiciously obsessed with rape. I’m pretty sure he originated the idea that being a victim of rape to a woman is just like being the victim of infidelity to a man. Here.. Or maybe he says that it’s okay to rape a woman if she’s thinking about infidelity. He argues in circles so much I can’t tell exactly what his point is. But it sure is Christian! (according to him.)
And someone’s probably mentioned this here before, but last fall John Scalzi wrote that awesome piece of satire thanking conservative politicians for their views on rape and voxday thought he was serious.
And that bmc comment above was from me. There’s a funny story behind that account, which may or may not involve morphine.
Speaking of John Scalzi, we should perhaps follow his lead in referring to the obnoxious VD/Th. Beale by a more fitting description:
Narcissistic* Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit
That’s NRSHD for short.
* Added by commenters so that the term has the same scansion as ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’
PS Waves to tigtog (it’s a trend)