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.
This seems to be the same Chris Cantwell recently eviscerated as a “douchebag” on Colbert in the “Free Keene Difference Makers” segment.
http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/dvppp6/difference-makers—the-free-keene-squad
Tempest, meet teacup.
The shirt is not sexist, it glorifies independent women who own their sexuality and don’t need any man. Not because it’s too colorful or you don’t like it it is sexy. Also, why is this article not covering the amazing triumph for space exploration, because petty people are the most vocal.
The true outrage is that science doesn’t get the attention it deserves, while still providing for almost everything we call civilization, including the iPhones people use to bitch in the social networks.
Women are welcome in the STEM fields, in fact we almost beg women to come to STEM fields, it’s too full of men. And I know brilliant women. When a girl (or any person) doesn’t study in a STEM, it’s because he or she doesn’t like math. Stereotypes wouldn’t stop an analytic mind to study what it wants.
James:
Ah, I see. A shirt covered in scantily clad cartoon women with unrealistic bodies in highly sexualized poses actually “glorifies independent women who own their sexuality and don’t need any man.” Never mind the actual real-life women who are talking about how this shirt is just a symptom
of a larger problem of a misogynistic culture in the STEM fields that discourages women and girls from entering said fields. They must just be able to math.
Oh, and a blog with the tagline: “The New Misogyny, Tracked and Mocked” should be covering science news and not mocking misogyny.
I see.
Last sentence, first paragraph should read “They must just not be able to math.” Because, of course, women can’t math and that’s why they’re underrepresented in the STEM fields. It has absolutely nothing to do with the widespread cultural belief that women can’t math, or any kind of culture of misogyny that would see wearing a shirt covered in cartoon images of scantily clad women with unrealistic bodies in highly sexualized poses during a press conference to announce major scientific breakthrough as no big deal.
But what the hell do I know? I’m just a petty person on an iPhone.
I am amazed that there are so many men who think a hostile working environment is something women should get used to instead of something men should stop creating.
It’s telling that you think women’s sexuality = women looking sexy for men. That is a sexist attitude, dumbass.
Many of us here are fond of science and follow science news. However, this blog is for mocking misogyny. It’s not a science blog. It’s not a whatever James wants to read blog.
You say women are welcome in STEM, but when a someone speaking for a major space agency wears a sexist shirt objectifying women and nobody notices and suggests that’s a bad idea, that sends the message that we are not in fact welcome. Actions speak louder than words. It’s easy for you, as a man speaking from a place of privilege to say that stereotypes shouldn’t stop women from a career in science. But you’re not a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like. So shut up.
Do you even believe this, or is this just what you think feminists sound like?
C’mon, bewilderness, if they didn’t like girls, they wouldn’t put of naked pictures of us! /s
It’s not stereotypes keeping women out if STEM fields, it’s a combination of non-encouragement and active male hostility.
P.S.: the fact that you’re more upset about people calling the shirt sexist than you are about those people receiving death threats says a lot about you and your attitude towards women.
BULLSHIT. Independent women who own their sexuality and don’t need any man also don’t look like corseted cheesecake pictures on a shirt. In fact, they don’t look “sexy” at all, most of the time. Because they’re not just there to be looked at by men who want to fuck them.
O RLY? Then explain why Rosalind Franklin doesn’t get the credit for unravelling the mystery of DNA, but two men do. She did the real grunt-work. Watson and Crick took the credit. And Watson is a real sexist, racist pig, to boot.
Explain, too, why Emmy Noether doesn’t get the credit that countless male mathematicians do. And don’t tell me she’s not good enough.
Explain why Madame Curie had to work twice as hard as her husband for only half the credit. And why her daughter did the same.
Explain why Hedy Lamarr is more famous for her sexy Hollywood movie roles than for her brilliant mathematical mind, and her central role in creating the same wi-fi and cellphone technology you came here to kvetch about because people aren’t using it for glorifying some dude in a dumb shirt enough for singlehandedly landing a spacecraft on a comet (which, BTW, was the work of a team led by a WOMAN.)
Explain why no man in STEM seems to remember that the very first computer programmer was Ada Lovelace, and why a hundred years later, female programmers were still a fact…until men came back from the war and shoved them out of the computer room and told them to go back to their “natural habitat”, the fucking KITCHEN.
And explain why men in STEM think it’s “glorifying independent women who own their sexuality” to wear stupid images of them on a shirt, and think that’s NOT a part of what’s driving women away from STEM.
If that’s “almost begging” them to come in, I’d hate to see what begging them to leave looks like.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it because I haven’t had my coffee yet, but is this uncomfortably close to the racist “Strong black woman who don’t need no man” non-joke to anybody else?
Oh, and James? Explain, too, why the Montréal Massacre happened. To refresh your memory, it was only 25 years ago. And it involved a dumb dude who blamed women for his own inability to get into engineering school. So he came in there with a rifle, separated the class by sex, and killed 14 women. No men.
Gee, that couldn’t have anything to do with women deciding STEM’s not worth the effort, could it?
@Bina
Don’t forget Mary Anning, one of the first and greatest palaeontologists, who had all of her work claimed by men, was ignored by the scientific community until her death and is still basically unheard of outside of palaeontological circles.
Uhg. Someone farted in here.
Let’s think about these women. They’re the ones who are intelligent, educated and have mathematical ability.
Another way to put that is that these women are the ones with options. They have a pretty free choice about what they’d like to study and where they’d like to work. Funnily enough, when you give women choices about what they work on and who they work with, they tend to avoid places where they are trivialised or mocked or ignored or turned into sexual jokes/targets rather than respected for the work they do.
If STEM workplaces really want more/any women, they have to lift their game. Telling women to put up with what they’re offering hasn’t worked wonderfully well so far. It’s time for a different approach.
When I chose not to work in STEM despite my education, it’s because of the bullshit.
This is your idea of a joke, right?
Congrats, you’re part of the problem.
Ah, yet another non-STEM man coming in and mansplaining the STEM environment for women.
Mary Sommerville who was self taught and whose work was used to teach young men at a university she was not allowed to attend. They did name a building after her though.
James and other dudes might honestly think they are being welcoming to women in STEM, but it’s like the old truth in advertising thing – it’s not about what you think you’re saying, it’s how it’s read. The message that the shirt sends is “women are not welcome or respected here” to any reasonable person. James can talk til the cows come home about how women *should* read the message, or that the shirt isn’t even sending a message, but that doesn’t change the way the message is read.
James, if “you are unwelcome” isn’t the message you want to send, then change your message! Matt did that – he didn’t realise that was his message, he was informed, he apologised and explicitly changed his message.
You on the other hand, seem to be doubling down on the message, while denying that women are even capable of reading. The only thing you’re really doing is proving yourself incapable of reading cultural messages even when they are spelt out to you.
Women have been telling men that their “compliments” are read as hostile for well over 100 years.
And men have been mansplaining that hostility away for just as long. Because without men like James here, women couldn’t possibly tell for ourselves what’s sexist or empowering or important.
James, your post was dishonest, come on. You remind of those dudes from the ’60s who were always shaming women for not wanting to fuck them and their friends under the pretense of “free love.” One of the women on that knob’s shirt was squatting and spread-eagle at the same time. Could the shirt owner cherish womens’ minds? Perhaps, but wearing that shirt isn’t a good way to prove it. Also, you may be porn sick if you think being objectified 24/7 is healthy and normal and an honor — and the core of feminism. Objectification isn’t empowerment, ass. Have a good Thanksgiving Day.
Taking credit for the work women in STEM (or anywhere else too) do never stop. Those highly logical STEM pron men feel free to use and twist anything women accomplished.
Here’s a recent example:
http://www.themarysue.com/vagina-peach-tech/