This won’t be news to a lot of you — I’m a little late getting to it — but our old pal Tom Martin, the repulsive British MRA celebrity, is actually going ahead with the somewhat baffling video “women and comedy” project he was babbling about in the comments here many months ago, when he was still allowed to comment here. Well, “actually going ahead with it” this August if he can get anyone else to agree to work for him for free minimum wage.
The documentary project is called “Laughing with Women” and, Martin explains, it will “investigat[e] if gold-digging impairs women’s joke-making ability, and if, when women reject gold-digging in all its forms, they can become instantly funnier.”
In case that didn’t make sense to you — don’t worry, that’s a completely natural reaction — Tom explains his, er, “logic” a bit further in a jobs listing he’s posted in hopes of finding a crew, which has already gotten a good deal of ridicule over at PZ Myers’ and on at least one comedy website.
Why are women, on average, slightly less funny than men? Does gold-digging in particular impede women’s joke-making ability? When women publicly reject gold-digging, do they become as funny, or even funnier than men?
In his numerous visits to Man Boobz, Martin expounded at length on the topic of gold-digging women, generally referring to them by his preferred term, the shorter and blunter “whores.” Martin has previously estimated that roughly 97% of women fit this description, and has suggested that female penguins are also whores. Frankly, once he gets going on the topic, it’s hard to shut him up, which is partly why he’s no longer welcome in the comments here.
In any case, this odd hypothesis will be tested, Martin says, with a “radical, and revealing street-based social experiment.”
Still puzzled? Mike Booth, the British video comedian behind SomeGreyBloke and Dan Cardamon, has managed to tease out a few more details from Martin (posting here as sexismBusters):
Martin is confident that his proposed video will blow the lid off this whole “women and gold-digging and comedy, no really, they’re connected” thing:
If the radical, and revealing street-based social experiment at the centre of our documentary proves gold-digging does make women less funny (as pre-production research suggests) then our findings will make headlines around the world, our film’s two minute teaser trailer attached to all those news and blog articles (Update: this advert alone has already been blogged and tweeted about by outraged PC types).
The full documentary will be shot to a broadcast-quality standard and format, giving mainstream television companies worldwide the opportunity to purchase broadcasting rights (if they’re feeling brave enough) whilst we maintain a virtually guaranteed revenue stream from our already established hardcore of supporters and fans within the non PC gender equality field around the world, who, along with everyone else, will be able to enjoy Laughing with Women on newly launched pay-per-view channel, Vimeo on Demand (VoD) – where VoD itself takes a very modest 10% cut. The documentary has the potential to be translated into several languages – gold-digging a familiar if hidden story in every country, until now.
In other words, it sounds like some sort of video gold mine.
So I’d recommend that all gold-digging women out there try to get in on the ground floor of this Tom Martin dude.
Oh, and speaking of Dan Cardamon, here’s the faux MRA’s take on the project:
CORRECTION: This post originally stated that Martin wouldnt’ be paying his crew, but he says he will be paying them minimum wage, so I’ve corrected the relevant passage above.
EDITED TO ADD: Tom has shown up in the comments, and I’m letting his comments through (for now at least), so if you have any questions for him, feel free to head to the comments to address him directly.
71 people? We’re at more than 2000% of that (we’re at 1595)
Also! How well do we all think Tom would react to a woman who, in the middle of sex, stopped the proceedings to point out what he was doing that wasn’t working for her and explain what she needed instead?
Not exactly equal to “scientists put couples in brain scans and had them fuck, and they found that all women’s vocalizations bore no correlation with actual sexual arousal in their brains” is it?
My brain keeps trying to interpret the “in brain scans” bit (wtf does that mean anyway?) as a couple fucking in an MRI machine. Which sounds like it would put anyone off their stroke.
That’s exactly what I pictured, Cassandra.
Mind you I suppose they were volunteers, so maybe it was a long-frustrated kink?
…Primates? They’re talking about primate vocalizations?
(Why yes, I am going to respond to everything in animal sounds.)
Usually it means fMRI, so yes, in an MRI machine, pretty much (I assume they use the “open air” type ones, but idk)
At the end the authors talk about non-human primates, yeah.
It’s a wonder they could hear the “female vocalizations” over all the banging.
But to be serious for a moment, that’s such a strange, artificial situation that I’m not convinced that it tells us anything about people have sex other than “how people have sex in an MRI machine”. Even if the participants are trying not to be distracted by the circumstances it’s going to be hard to tell which results were caused by the distracting effect of fucking such odd circumstances.
But there never was an actual MRI/brain-monitoring study, was there? It looks like the only one we’ve found is a survey.
Say, if we’re talking vocalisations, what about a man who’s been known to purr? I’d love to mess with their data that way.
Actually I’d like to mess with their data just generally. Bloody scans and instruments and gods know what on people’s heads, inside vaginas – but oh no, don’t ask people anything (especially don’t ask women), don’t bother with trivia like the difference between arousal and desire, or responsive desire, or anything like that, noooooo.
(Why yes, I have been reading the dirty normal, and it makes me even more pissed off with this reductionist attitude to sexual experience.)
The 71-person no-duh questionnaire written by someone who writes evo-psych papers on Shrek was the only study I found on that fit the criteria. Poke around (HAW!! I’m really funny today, must have ingested a lot of semen!) PubMed; there’s nothing there that I can see.
Cassandra – yes, I can’t see it providing any useful information either. Even if it were just in a room with a bed, and the participants had wossnames attached to their heads, or if it were just being recorded somehow, it’s still so artificial that the responses couldn’t be their usual ones. Just the consciousness of being observed/recorded would change one’s behaviour, surely (unless, again, one liked that). I would think plenty of people would be selfconscious, and that alone would make a difference to these precious vocalisations, wouldn’t it? (“Oh god they’re listening and I’m not feeling it I’d better make a noise!”) I can’t see spontaneity getting much of a look-in, at least if they were sober. 😛
HM – evo-psych papers on SHREK??? 0_o
I wanna know how people get grants to do this sort of stuff. It sounds like a wonderful scam if one could only manage it.
Heheh I read “PubMed” as PubeMed. My inner 14 year old is awake.
Unfortunately I don’t see anywhere to read “The evolutionary psychology of Shrek” online.
The idea that there’s some study out there showing that women’s erotic vocalizations don’t in any way correlate to physiological sexual arousal is too funny.
It sounds tailor-made for misogynists, doesn’t it? I don’t see it being used to knock the “orgasm = loud noises” myth (cue When Harry Met Sally).
It looks like the really minor self-reporting study I posted got a lot of play in the news (journalism is so predictable with the lightweight evo-psych stories, and this paper is reaaally lightweight even so) so I’m sure it’s made all the MRA rounds via links to sensationalist news stories about it. But even the most sensational ones don’t have people fucking while hooked up to a bunch of wires.
I’m now wondering if the couples doing this silly “study” were winding the so-called researchers up. That’d be fun.
Wait, women need to “ingest” more semen? Has Tommy Boy Martin been reading the papers of Dr. Pell?
There was an experiment where a couple (maybe a few couples) had sex in an open air MRI. 1: It wasn’t anything like a “study” and 2: there were no results such as Tom posits.
Based on his track record, even if he has a top-notch social scientist design his study, manages to conduct in a valid way, gets a real statistician to analyse it, and finds someone else to write the final paper… it will still say, “women suck at comedy and are Hoooors!”.
So we might as well just treat it as a completed project; no need to actually do the research.
Way to go Tommy, something you didn’t fail at (walked home on balls).
Wow. There are a surprising number of peer-reviewed journal articles mentioning Shrek.
Tom, come back here and post this brain scan study! That other study is so no-big-deal. it really is like a study of how often people laugh voluntarily rather than involuntarily, all for the sake of trying to fit such behavior into a sociobiological evo-psych construct. As is so common with MRAs, the misrepresentation of this study takes some real willful effort, or at least the very least an alarmist “AHA!” reaction to a typically lazy piece of journalism on some new evo-psych “paper.”
Look at that little chart on the bottom left on page 3. That’s the frequency of orgasm these women reported having by various methods. The tallest one is partner clitoral sex, non-oral variety. But that shorter one on the right, well, size doesn’t matter all that much in this case: it tells us that this survey shows these women overall climaxing from penetrative sex 42 percent of the time. And both orgasms and the pre-orgasmic plateau phase are full of involuntary orgasms. Sure you don’t need a study on that, right? Women aren’t a different species no matter how much you want them to be. So the frequency of vaginal orgasm in this study is 42 percent, meaning that it is not 87 percent out of a hundred that always fake it. It’s 87 percent of respondents saying they have used vocalizations to boost their partner’s self esteem, with 66% saying they’ve used them to speed up ejaculation. But within those respondents the frequency of for-real orgasm from penetration is 44 percent! So this isn’t a matter of zero orgasms or zero pleasure from penetration (side note: lots of women get pleasure from penetration without being able to climax from it). It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect if you sought to understand women openmindedly and not within this weird, combative, othering frame. I could have told you all of this stuff without a study…and as a matter of fact I actually did, and you ignored it!
Um plateau and orgasms are full of involuntary vocalizations, not orgasms! Multitasking again.
Well hmmm I wonder why he hasn’t returned with a link to this damning “brain scan” study.
We finished shooting the experiment.
Some self-identifying “feminists” turning out to be massive gold-diggers, and are soon going to be big stars – because virtually all of them signed release forms!
Searching for an editor to put the teaser trailer together.
The number of women applying to participate in the film’s production was pitiful.
Feminism is virtually non-existent on the street.
And non gold-digging feminism, much rarer still.
Good news – victim-feminist excuses for gold-digging are completely absent – except among media studies-trained crew.
It’s basically a story of princesstitution.
RE: Tom Martin
The number of women applying to participate in the film’s production was pitiful.
I can’t IMAGINE why.
It’s basically a story of princesstitution.
You’re another one of those folks who don’t realize how much of the Cleopatra story was myth, aren’t you?