Very cool: We humans have landed a space probe on a goddamned comet!
Not cool: when one European Space Agency dude gave an interview about the landing, he was wearing a shirt festooned with cheesecake images of scantily clad women.
Even less cool: when Atlantic magazine science writer Rose Eveleth pointed out that this choice of attire doesn’t exactly broadcast the message that women (other than scantily clad ones) are welcome in STEM, she received a torrent of abuse from angry Twitter dudes, including requests for her to kill herself.
The cherry atop this crap sundae? The nastiest Twitterer of the bunch, who not only went after Eveleth but her defenders as well, is a regular contributor to A Voice for Men.
The whole thing started off with a couple of tweets from Eveleth about the shirt. Here’s one of them:
https://twitter.com/roseveleth/status/532538957490561024
After this, the deluge:
And those are just some of the harassing tweets Eveleth retweeted. (I’ve highlighted the explicit death wishes for your convenience.)
You’ll notice that one of the death wishes (“Please kill yourself”) comes from a fellow named Christopher Cantwell.
If you take a look at his Twitter profile, you’ll see that this self-described “Anarchist, Atheist, Asshole” and Bitcoin fan had similar advice for a number of others who found the shirt troubling.
To wit:
Cantwell has also been sharing some of his charming thoughts about women in STEM.
So how does A Voice for Men respond to this sort of behavior by one of their regular contributors? They repost his blog entry on the, er, controversy, deriding concerns about the shirt as “feminist hysteria” and arguing that the real reason more women aren’t in STEM fields is that, well, they’re just not as smart as he is.
No, really:
The reason you don’t see women in highly technical fields nearly as often as you see men is not because of sexism. It certainly isn’t because of Matt Taylor’s shirt. You can’t even blame this on education anymore, since more women attend college than men. The issue at hand is one of simple aptitude and the choices people make as a result of that aptitude.
You gals remember choices, right? I seem to recall you caring about those things once upon a time.
If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. A society needs leaders and followers. In men, we see very high IQs figuring things out and working out these complex ideas. They document them in easy-to-understand ways for those of lesser intelligence in society and make technology available to all of us. We also see these low IQs, which are more suited to, say, mining the resources that this technology requires and operating the machines the geniuses designed. Women, traditionally carrying the role of raising children and supporting the men who designed and operated the machinery, needed to be somewhere in the middle. They couldn’t well manage the many complex tasks their role in society required of them without being smarter than the worker drones, but there wasn’t any need for them to be super geniuses who could land spacecraft on comets hundreds of millions of miles away either. …
For those of us at the upper end of the IQ spectrum, we are sentenced to a lifetime of watching stupidity like this run rampant. We will watch in horror for all of eternity as idiots dominate the headlines with their hysteria, responsibility avoidance, and demands for state privilege disguised as “equality.” We’ll see brilliant men like Matt Taylor smeared as being the worst type of bigot, simply because he’s smarter than the people who accuse him.
Yeah, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would complain about sexism in STEM.
BTW I think the dumbass maybe isn’t random. I think he’s the Voice for Men contributer this post is about.
contributor
What are we supposed to be voting for him in reference to, exactly? If it’s for biggest scumbag at AVFM, good attempt, but there’s some awfully strong competition over there.
@grumpycatisagirl:
😀 😀 😀
Oh man, that would be awesome. What possible argument could he make? “Why yes, I am in fact extremely smart, and my smarty smartiness justifies my horrific use of death wishes for reasons you dullards couldn’t possibly understand. *scoff scoff*”
Maybe he’ll come down from his ivory tower and play with us plebians in the comment section while he waits for David to remove all the donotlink links. That’d be dandy.
Buwahahaha, so he’s mad David won’t give him clicks? Awwww…
“But I wanted the whole internet to know that I told a bunch of people to kill themselves!”
(Stamps tiny little feet, pouts)
Oh good, I’m glad I’m not the only one that thought this.
@cassandrakitty:
More like “but I wanted to get internet clicks, a measure of blog popularity, from people coming to point and laugh at me.”
… Hang on…
There’s no such thing as bad publicity!
He’s been taking lessons from JB, hasn’t he?
Oh, look everyone! A famous drive by trolling.
And he scolded our ethics! Ain’t he just the cutest widdle ting?
Two comments to say he won’t comment was good. Two comments to say he won’t comment because he won’t support the very bad behavior of using donotlink was even better. I confess I am amused.
Hover over his avatar for much hilarity and proof that it’s misogynist men who are irrational and overdramatic, not us.
Why u no use commas properly, angry man?
Ah, I get it. One of those creepy d00dz who just wants to watch the world burn.
There should be a mandatory minimum number of posts for some trolls… Drive-bys just leave me wanting more.
@weirwoodtreehugger:
Dang, “the end of human society as we know it.” 1,000,000 kittybux says he’s a dark enlightenment weenie.
Ker-rist on a bicycle. Someone hit the timewarp button and took me straight back to 1974.
That’s thinking along the lines of what far too many men who supported “women’s liberation” used to think. That their idea of sexual “freedom” would now be obligatory for women. We weren’t supposed to object to sexual joking in the workplace – otherwise known as rape jokes – nor were we supposed to flinch if we walked into someone’s office only to see posters and calendars that used to be confined to the walls of men-only workshops and factories.
Sorry fellers. That’s not what sex positivity meant for feminists then. And it certainly isn’t now,
Female sexuality being seen as primarily decorative, being about looking sexy for men is not particularly feminist. Objectification is not sex positivity.
“Vote for Cantwell”?
Well, I can’t. You’re intellectually dishonest, you see.
Also, I looooove me some troll telling David he’s “intellectually dishonest” for having moderation, and “committing search engine vandalism” for refusing to up Paulie’s hit count (and, presumably his ad revenues) by employing donotlink.com. This apparently being the same troll as told Rose Eveleth to kill herself over a mildly sarcastic, quite funny tweet about a stupidly sexist shirt.
The irony, it burns.
I’ve long seen the so-called sexual liberation (I wasn’t old enough to have to deal with it personally) as changing “you’re not allowed to say yes” to “you’re not allowed to say no” – a worse prospect, to me.
I did click on his blog link. He’s telling people how to anarchist. 🙁 At least, now you guys know that, and don’t have to go there yourselves.
Isn’t “if you’re really liberated, you’re supposed to put out” kind of an ironic statement? The essence of freedom is supposed to be that you’re able to choose, after all…
grumpyoldnurse – is he saying anarchists is earn?
Bina – yes, totally ironic. But of course it’s always been about liberating men from having to go to too much trouble to fuck who they want, not about liberating women from male control.
@grumpyoldnurse:
Yeah, I clicked over too. Someone needs to tell him how to website, cause that title looks like an html glitch.
Also, amusingly enough, the link in the op that went to his blog now doesn’t. It goes to a page about how to deal with spam comments, which kinda boggled my mind for a sec. His username blog only has three posts to it. I wonder if he scrapped a blog after this was written.
Lensman? Really? There’s a troll from yesteryear. A yestertroll, if you will.