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.
So, I started reading the comments. Tom Martin’s first comment.
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to read these comments. First page and I already broke everything laughing. And there’s more. Oh, there’s more….
And what exactly would be Tom’s point to this? To tell PUAs not to waste time with women in bars who can’t make then laugh because said women might be gold-diggers?
And considering that there is such a thing as gold-digging men (i.e., attractive or charming men who date/marry wealthy women mostly with the motivation of sharing in their affluent lifestyle), are you going to run an identical experiment to see if gold-digging men are unfunny?
Are you going to provide us with a literature review like most documentaries do, discussing what anthropologists, sociologists, behavioral psychologists, and other scientists have had to say about such a thing, if anything?
Nah, you just want to make a documentary to highlight your paranoid belief that women everywhere are out to steal your 401k, which makes you not only a bigot, but an international “attention whore”. Who’s the “whore” now, dude? xD
Thanks Fox and Dainty!
Hm… wonder how that will affect my level of funny?
Actually, I think it would be possible to test Tom Martin’s hypotheses, but a shitload of money would be needed, and it hardly seems plausible that anyone would fund this.
BUT you could do the following:
1. Find a large sample size of women who have married husbands with much higher income than themselves. Obviously, many of these women will have married for love, but it’s plausible that this group will contain a larger percentage of women for whom money matters than
2. the second group, consisting of women who’s married husbands with about the same income as themselves. If the former group has a higher percentage of “gold-diggers”, as seems plausible, and if TM:s hypothesis is correct, the former group would be less funny on average than the second, even if most women in group 1 married for love.
3. Find corresponding groups for men. Necessary if your hypothesis is that gold-digging women in particular rather than any kind of gold-diggers are less funny.
So now there are four large groups of test subjects. How to test how funny they are? Presumably by finding out how funny other people find them on average, so as to avoid that a particular individual’s particular sense of humour affects the result. So, a fifth large group of people, let’s call them “the audience”, is needed. Their task will be to, say, view recordings of the gold-digging/non-gold-digging men/women trying to tell jokes and be funny, and then rate them on a scale of funny from, say, 1-10. The average rating of a particular test subject will be considered that test subject’s level of funny. (Perhaps, since there are so many test subjects, this will be too enormous a task for just one audience – perhaps you’d need several.)
Eventually, one can calculate the average level of funny in each of the four groups of test subjects. If it were to turn out that the women who have married a man with a higher income than themselves were, on average, less funny than the other groups, TM:s thesis would have some level of support.
@ Dvärghundspossen – congratulations!
On Tom Martin and his experiment–one does wonder how the dearly (dear to Mr SteALe, anyway) departed Mr. Hitchens would weigh in on this subject?
(for those who were not big fans who eventually became massively disappointed, he famously said women were incapable of humor. Any humor, any woman, full stop)
Okay, so let’s pretend this hypothetical situation is true. There is a woman who is always quiet around a rich man so that she can keep him happy and have access to his wealth. There is a problem, though. If she is naturally witty and funny, she should be using those talents to help keep him. Most people enjoy spending time around people who make them laugh. So if she makes him laugh a lot, he would be more likely to enjoy her company and want to keep her around.
And,Tom, I am willing to work on this documentary, but you have to pay me upfront with gold.
@Dvärghundspossen
Congrats!!!!! All the bubbly for you!
Okay, I’ve reached Tom Martin’s SECOND comment.
Pure comedy gold!
Pffffffft
I can’t hold the laughter in
this is killing me
but I can’t stop reading
Very interesting Ted Talk there Ostara321, and vaguely related with my research on gold-digging and humour – maybe more to do with how I’ll best motivate the crew and PMD though.
But if the Ted Talk guy is right, then when women are thinking about gold-digging, or just autopilot gold-digging, we can expect them to become less productive and creative.
A picture tells a thousand words though, so at 25 frames per second, that’s a lot of information for us to enjoy, learning precisely how the creativity falls apart (if it does).
Ally Fogg over on PZ Myers blog post about Laughing with Women, seems to think that gold-digging humour is actually well-developed, and therefore gold-diggers will be able to get laughs using that shtick.
The documentary will also be considering the nature of the humour being created.
I hypothesize that the gold-diggers will use more hostile sexism (easy laughs), whilst non gold-diggers (we still need to think of a positive word for a woman who has renounced prostitution in all its forms) – non gold-diggers… I hope, will make more ephemeral, optimistic, pacifistic, higher-brow, freer-associating jokes. You know, the sort that is second nature to manboobzers, but should be first.
As for Hitchens on women and humour, was right about most things, but Hitchens the man didn’t agree with his women-friends working – he was a chivalrous wet when it came down to it – indicating he was genetically conservative, or strategically conservative.
I’m more egalitarian than the lot of you.
Yes, there will be a literature review, and real professors in checked shirts explaining how women’s brains work for you.
I’ll be lining up some big comedy names for their two cent’s worth as well.
Bill Burr is the best on gold-digging, people!
Following Tom Martin’s logic, if 97% of women are whores, could it be argued that evolution determined whoring a biological advantage? He might as well be telling people not to use their legs in that case.
Amnesia said: Following Tom Martin’s logic, if 97% of women are whores, could it be argued that evolution determined whoring a biological advantage? He might as well be telling people not to use their legs in that case.
Whorishness may have been an advantage (not sure) – but the bottom line is, according to a study I saw recently, these days, girls who state that they want to live off a man actually end up being the poorest, gold-digging the least effective strategy to amass resources.
@thebionicmommy
I had the same thought. It seems to me that Tom Martin’s real underlying hypothesis is that high-status men feel threatened by funny (i.e. witty, intelligent) women.
What I don’t understand is why the joke making must be accessed by a random panel and the viewing public. If we’re meant to be assessing women’s humorous talents, it should be the women who must access such skills?
On the topic of funny women, though, I’ve been re-listening to the Godless Bitches podcast recently, and some of them are side-splittingly hilarious… and this is atheist feminists we’re talking about – the most gold-diggy and humourless of all possible human females!! (So, long story short, methinks the boy be full of shit.)
Good way to exclude any potential comedians, or comedy critics, from the statistics – they’ll be in Edinburgh.
So I usually try to not respond to first page comments after multiple pages but…
SWEET JESUS MOTHER MARY!
How are such contradictory numbers possible? 95% of the people who’ve commented to his knowledge have done so negatively? And yet, a whole 378 people think he’s not utterly full of shit? Why… how is such math to be beheld!? Surely less than four hundred people is at least half of the population of the world?!
Seriously dude, small numbers mean shit. Though I do have to wonder why so few people have shown an interest in this venture of yours. There are probably thousands of MRA’s bumping around on the internets in one form or another, and most of them would leap at the chance to make dumb ol’ wimminz look stupid… so why have only 378 people applied? That’s not even 1% of 1% of the people online. It’s kind of pathetic, really.
@Dvarg, congrats! The currency converter I found by Googling says right now 440 000 SKr is about US$68,200. That’d keep me comfy over two years (I have no idea what the cost of living is in Sweden).
Good on yer.
And obviously right now you don’t have to depend on Men for your handouts, so you’re free to be funny … for two years. 😛
@Dvärghundspossen That’s great! But, now you must live with constant vigilance. Beware the unfunny, they are after your gold.
@eselbosustow
Don’t forget TM thinks 97% of women are of the gold-digging kind. The equivalent male gold digger requirement is to have any social interactions at all.
Still a mystery who that 3% is…
@thekidwiththereplaceablehead
But the funny are after hir Lucky Charms.
So you want a “proper feminist” like you, and a “stubborn victim-feminst”… why not just look for a real feminist? 1 pseudo-feminist + 1 straw-feminist = 1 honest-to-god real feminist (trumath) so why not cut costs and just get a real feminist involved?
(After all, you know the victim-feminist will only gold-dig all your monies away!)
I don’t know, but I always get my guy friends to laugh and I’m not “gold digging” as it were. They’re rather poor anyway (one is rich, but I think he’s shy of women and I don’t want to make him uncomfortable).
I think his response was meant to say ‘once I have some of my dailies done the money will come rolling in because this concept is utter gold and they can’t NOT pay me.’
Which is to say, he definitely doesn’t have that money in hand.
Which is to say, about the level of preparation we’d expect from a Tom Martin project.
Well, that evil Sarkeesian woman got loads of money just through being a vile feminist, therefore this ACTUALLY REAL IMPORTANT PROJECT about things that are actually real is bound to make millions. There’s quite literally no way it could fail.
I wonder if mr Martin is interested in purchasing my emu farm. Profit guaranteed!
Workers will be paid minimum wage (years later, after fame and success), but they will gain high quality chairs in the workplace.
Really, Tom is paying them the equivalent of 25 pounds an hour, it’s just that he’s invested most of it on soft ball-hugging silk and fur chairs for everyone.
One concern is that he’ll only attract chair-digging whores, who cannot be objective in determining levels of humour due to chair interests. Moreover, the gold-diggo-meter might catch the chair-digging interference, skewing the results.
You’re highlighting an interesting contradiction between Tom and the rest of the MRM: Tom says women have to not be funny in order to get and keep a man (also implying that it’s difficult for women to get men), whereas the general misogynist belief is that men have to be funny to get and keep a woman, but women don’t because it’s easy for women to get men.
@bionicmommy, right, his premise only works if you buy into the idea that women are naturally unfunny by default to begin with. From that angle, of course women are even less funny when they think they can get something out of keeping their mouth shut, because, duh, who ever heard of a man wanting to hear anything a woman has to say, amirite?
It assumes too that men naturally don’t want to listen to women and/or that the only thing women have to offer men is sex/good looks.
So basically just your average, run of the mill, Tom Martin “97% of women are whores” ideology.