Our dear friend W.F. Price of The Spearhead celebrated Columbus Day yesterday with a post suggesting that “American girls” are too weak-minded to deserve college educations.
Price’s misogyny is nothing new, but what, you may wonder, is the connection to Columbus Day? Well, you see, Price ran across a column in the Daily Nebraskan by a female student named Shelby Fleig that was, well, rather critical of Mr. Columbus, pointing out, among other things, that he kidnapped and enslaved many of those he encountered in the Americas.
Fleig’s piece is a tad simplistic at times — at one point it says that when Columbus arrived in the Americas he encountered a “civilization close to 14,000 years old,” which is just plain wrong; there were people in the Americas around 14,000 years ago, but there were no civilizations anywhere on earth that far back. Still, the piece certainly reflects reality far more closely than anything you’ll find on The Spearhead on any given day.
To Price, though, the column is such an unpatriotic abomination that he considers it evidence that education is wasted on women. No, really.
Little Ms. Fleig certainly has it in for her forefathers, but is it really her fault? Probably not. She, like most other college girls, is simply parroting what’s been fed to her by her profs. Girls are good at that, which is why teachers like them so much — they’re easy.
If you’re the father of an American girl, is this really what you want your daughter to absorb over the course of four years? Does it add any value whatsoever to the family or to the nation?
I’m not sure what specifically Price is objecting to about Fleig’s account — aside from its mild profanity (the word “bullshit”) and its less-than-reverential tone towards an icon of American history. But he offers no rebuttal, perhaps because he really can’t. While Fleig may be a bit ahistorical in her judgment of Columbus, it’s a fact that he kidnapped and enslaved hundreds of natives and committed other atrocities. It’s a fact that he paved the way for conquest and genocide. History isn’t pretty.
But Price is only getting started, telling fathers of “American girls” that
Your money would be much better spent sending her to sewing or baking school. Let’s face it: Ms. Fleig isn’t going to discover the cure for cancer. Despite being an attractive young woman, she isn’t going to colonize Mars, either (at her size, she’d be too expensive to launch out of the Earth’s atmosphere).
Yep, he goes there. No manosphere screed is complete without a bit of gratuitous fat-shaming.
In all likelihood, the best she could hope for is a nonprofit or government job fully funded by her father’s and brother’s tax bills.
Because girls can’t handle real jobs. Because jobs at nonprofits or with the government aren’t real jobs. Because nonprofits are funded entirely by the government. And because only men pay taxes.
And yet she represents 60% of college students. What an enormous, unsustainable waste. It’s impolitic to point it out, but from a cost-benefit point of view, in most cases higher education is entirely wasted on women, and as in Ms. Fleig’s case is often counterproductive.
So that’s Price’s thoughtful and logical rebuttal to Fleig’s article: a post that addresses none of her arguments, posits the natural inferiority of women, and attacks her for her apparent weight.
Let’s see what the highly erudite Spearhead readers have to say about it in the comments.
Gender Foreigner suggests that women, born to obey, are simply obeying the wrong people:
Women don’t know how to think: they know how to obey. So, let’s tell them what to do. What they lack is MEN to obey instead of girls to obey. Barefoot, pregnant in the kitchen, obeying masculine will. As long as they do that they will feign civility.
Dire Badger, for his part, acknowledges that Columbus did a lot of terrible things, but argues that this doesn’t matter because reasons. He also uses profanity, though Price doesn’t step in to rebuke him for that.
[I]n the end, individual racial and cultural atrocities mean NOTHING the moment the last person that witnessed them dies…. but things like achievements in literature, art, science… the true immortality that keeps building as part of a cultural intellectual inheritance. The only meaning that such atrocities have is to teach us NOT TO DO THEM AGAIN. Anything else is beating the dead victim horse for no benefit whatsoever, and merely punishes the people that had NOTHING to do with the original atrocity.
In short, columbus opened up america for expansion. He sailed the ocean blue in a way that hadn’t been achieved for nearly 400 years since the vikings.
As for the rest? FUCK YOU. Get over it already, you pussy.
In a followup comment, he adds:
Columbus rediscovered America by a monumental navigational goofup… funny story… What he did afterwards doesn’t concern me except as an object lesson. I honor the accomplishment but have no reason to diminish it by sorrow over a bunch of people who would still be more than 400 years dead if Columbus had never existed.
Schlomo, meanwhile, is mad at Fleig for not blaming Columbus’ mom for the whole thing:
What irks me is that feminists constantly blame only men– and then mostly white men– for all evil in the world. They don’t look at women’s roles in raising boys to be exploiters; or in bedding “bad boys” (thus rewarding their brutality); or in serving as Nazi prison guards, etc.
White females helped run plantations in the Old South and ran them alone during the Civil War. Ergo, it’s a lie that gals are innately “better” than guys. After all, they became queens of men feminists now demonize… and sometimes were the evil-incarnate leaders of countries themselves.
Nowhere, of course, do feminists praise men for the creating the Magna Carta or washing machines or hi-fi systems. No kudos, either, for males who wiped out polio and provided potable water. Also, no credit for inventing penicillin or making cars safer. Always and everywhere feminists blame-blame-blame. You never hear them collectively apologize for THEIR shite, like their hysterical historical foresisters’ White Feather campaigns… or sleeping with the enemy.
Where is the condemnation of Sacagawea for helping Whitey conquer her “people”?
It’s like domestic violence: fembots never talk about the equal evil women do.
Wilson, meanwhile, decides that Fleig is the truly evil one, not Columbus, based on a bunch of TRUE FACTS about her he’s pulled from his own posterior:
Conquest through genocide is not actually immoral, since there is no “social contract” being violated, though the greed of it may be questionable. Fleig would support a genocide against whites, so she is in no position to judge anyway, and her motivations–spite, malice, nihilism, betrayal–are much more evil than Columbus’s straightforward and productive ambition
But Fleig does have one defender amongst the Spearhead regulars, a fella named Dragnet, who happily declares that “corn-fed” gals like her please his penis. No, really, that’s his argument.
Being from the Midwest myself, I find her buxom, corn-fed heft absolutely delightful. I have had more than a few liaisons with her similarly endowed Midwestern sisters–to this day my manhood rises in salute.
What I wouldn’t give for more women on the east coast to be built like Miss Fleig. There’s a well-built, fulsome hardiness to the women of the Midwest that you really don’t find out East. God bless them all.
Well, I’m glad these superior-brained, independent-minded men have put us all straight on these important historical issues.
Dvarg, Argenti isn’t tiny – I’m the size of an average *11* year old :/ (152 cm)
OK, back to The Spearhead; ol’ Pricey just blew a gasket when somebody had the gall to point out that his misogynist shit wouldn’t actually help him with family court and whatever else he’s ostensibly concerned about: http://www.the-spearhead.com/2013/10/14/why-you-might-want-to-think-twice-about-sending-your-daughter-to-college/#comment-198356
Treating women as inferiors is humanitarian, you’ve heard it here first, folks.
It’s amazing how logic and reality just won’t get in the way of deeply held prejudice, isn’t it?
@Bob Dole: I’m a bit more baffled at why he thinks ” I understand why you think the way you do, but blogging on a reactionary blog like this one isn’t going to make things better for you, your daughter, or humanity in general.” means “You need to force your daughter into the Marines whether she likes it or not and also castrate your son.”
One of these is a respectful, though opposing, comment and the other is the paranoid howl of a man whose reality is not the same one the rest of us inhabit.
He was trying to say his daughter was content without feminism, which given the case, seems to go well beyond the Marines. Or at least that was the closest thing to a response I could get out of it.
He (most likely) intends to educate his daughter less than his son, the hypothetical Marine training parent isn’t the sick bastard here.
I didn’t even know medical procedures and gender presentation could be righteous in the first place. The more you learn!
What I find mind-boggling is the fact that these idiots are so ignorant of history that they missed a golden opportunity to bash the actual woman who actually had a hand in Columbus’s misdeeds, Queen Isabella who funded the damn thing.
Bob Dole, Price’s response to altogether reasonable criticism: Priceless!
Wait, that doesn’t work, does it?
Ah damn, should have read all the comments first. Nevermind.
Oh FSM, there’s some real /r/badhistory on that Spearhead comment thread:
I am yoyo, the commenter who told him that his anger wouldn’t help his cause.
I’ll say that I don’t really consider myself feminist, and I’m more of a moderate rather than solid liberal. But I sensed that this person has some anger issues so I just tell him straight up what the deal is. I’m not naive enough to think if will change anything or actually give him some self awareness, but I say what I have to say. This man clearly isn’t a very happy person, and even though you guys like to snark these people, I genuinely feel concern because I can’t stand seeing someone in such a rabbit hole of negativity.
My favorite part was this sentence:
Dude, the answer to your question is contained within your question.
Oh and also, I would love to see Kittehserf caption this picture. Cracks me up every time I look at it. (I’ve been looking at it all day.)
Green blood? Yeah, no.
The first epidemic was smallpox, this is undisputed, the next two are open to debate but smallpox definitely started it.
LOL cloudiah, what is bunneh saying? Looks like NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO to me.
That little pink tongue…
Yeah, my googling says the only known cause of green blood is a condition directly related to sulfa drugs (hey pecunium, at least you didn’t have green blood?)
Well, that or being a lobster, squid, crab, or similar organism (or a skink, idfk on that one) — where we have hemoglobin, they have hemocyanin.
So unless they were squid, or sulfa drugs are a lot older than I thought, it wasn’t green. Now, black blood is a thing, and The Plague wasn’t called the Black Death with out cause (certainly this isn’t the only reason, but plague can cause necrosis with bleeding and black blood is not unheard of)
So yep, you can still blame Europe.
And bunny says “is it morning already? *yawn*”
Bunny says Boring Troll is Boring
That’s no bunny, that’s a viscacha!
FYI, I’m the person that left the comment in which he freaked out on me.
I should perhaps make it clear that I don’t identify as feminist, and I’m a moderate rather than solid liberal. I also don’t really read this site, and I think it’s too much snark and off topic and not enough substance, even if I agree that these people’s behaviors are abhorrent. sorry :/ Nevertheless, I felt concerned seeing this, and I guess, most mainstream people. Fuck, I’m friends with a lot of mainstream conservatives and their mouths fell to the floor reading that stuff(I showed it to them.) I’d probably come here more often if it was less snark and off topic comments and more serious discussion, LOL.
I know you guys here like to snark, but honestly, I genuinely feel compassion. I don’t want to snark. I know it’s strange but I genuinely care about, and am concerned about, WF Price et al. They just struck me as such unhappy people, not to mention somewhat paranoid when people disagree with them. It bothers me to see people like this and I genuinely want to see them happy and not so angry all the time. Maybe it’s because I’ve been there before(though not misogynist) but yeah.
Why don’t you identify as a feminist, Yoyo?
Between you and me, Yoyo, many articles here focus too much on random posters instead of ideological cores for my tastes. As for the feminism thing, because the word shifts meaning and scope substantially in different uses, I think it’s more effective to focus on what people support or oppose: don’t call Price out for being anti-feminist, for example, call him out for supporting what can be clearly seen as male supremacy. That way, you’ll force him to state what he supports/opposes and why, instead of empty bolstering about “unconditional surrender.”
And while it’s not quite the case with most MRA comments, I feel more genuine vexation with Price than usual, because I can put a face to him (can do that with Forney too, mind, but he actively goes out of his way to be edgy). At the risk of being an internet cold-reader, he seems like he’s taken a fall well beyond what family court could do.
Yoyo, Bob Dole – the site is created to mock misogynists. It’s not set up to have in-depth discussions or express compassion for MRAs or dissect their ideology. There are plenty of sites to do that, I’m sure. We’re here to snark at them and generally enjoy ourselves.
For me, the OT stuff is at least as enjoyable as the mockery, and I’d regret it if the site changed. But then it’s not my blog and there’s nothing stopping me, or anyone else, setting up a serious blog about these things if I want to – or reading an existing one.
Example of my point about rhetoric (sorry, I go on tangents): some time back, Price wrote about how the place with the highest ratio of female-to-male earnings was a poor reservation, and he certainly made insinuations that male economic superiority was a good thing, with the inverse causing the aforementioned poverty. From the post itself, of course, the means by which male superiority creates wealth was fucking magic.
Posting under a different name (and adopting some MRA leanings to avoid being yelled out), I asked what point Price was trying to make about gender and income. He came out, saying Stamford was so rich because men shared their superior earnings, while women just hoard stuff. He was no longer hiding behind vague assertions, he was flapping his economically illiterate reasoning out in the open.
In short, argue like in Ace Attorney; press their specific assertions, and the testimony comes tumbling down.