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.
Only to misogynists. You’re mansplaining feminism to a bunch of feminists. How did you think it would go?
So five years ago, your department was horrifically uninviting to women, and you don’t see why this would still be a deterrent? Even if I believe you that it is 100% fixed (which I don’t, considering you are a dense ass who couldn’t see misogyny if it bit you on your ass), that kind of reputation doesn’t go away that fast, and it certainly doesn’t help that the misogynist asses are still around–just five years older and farther along in the field.
It’s not because of your gender, it’s because you’re being an asshat. I’m sure you made the assumption that we’re all women here just as you made the assumption that we don’t know anything about STEM but there are in fact men do comment and are welcomed here. Kirbywrap and Anarchonist who have commented today on this thread are both men. We like them. We don’t like you. We don’t have to be nice to people who are being ignorant and rude.
That whooshing sound is the point going right over your head. Did you notice that my story was preceded by discussion of a study? You see, neuroscience research indicates that babies as young as 6 months old absorb environmental cues and behave accordingly. We are effected by the environment. Even the most intelligent and scientifically minded people are not exempt from this. I might have had great parents as a child in the 80’s but I still absorbed sexist messages from the culture at large. Even though I’m a lifelong feminist, I still have to work to try and scrub those from my brain. You absorbed sexist messages too. Such as viewing female sexuality as decorative. You however, think you are above cultural messaging and are not trying to combat it. You are evidently still young so maybe you’ll learn. But you have to be open to it. You have to listen to people who are more knowledgeable in the subject than you.
Calling us petty scientific illiterates is nice?
Was script-flipping on the bingo cards? It really should be.
You are filtering your experience through your preconceptions. That’s not very STEM of you.
he’s mansplaining stem to stem people on the grounds of 5 years college experience, of which the first were packed with misogyny, and little to no experience in the field.
unbelievable. “you ladies are totes wrong about the misogyny in stem because 5 years ago, which is practically a lifetime and definitely not within the living memory of any of you, women were openly run out of classes, and that has had zero effect on how many women are in stem right now.”
If we hate men for having opinions, why are we even on this blog?
yeah, I’m kind of mystified as to where trolly thinks those asshole men are right now and how they are treating women in the field, right now.
And, the inner Nice Guy (TM) comes out.
Well, ghostroll already made it clear he doesn’t understand context. Perhaps those asshole men just melt off into the wind, affecting no one and nothing beyond a single school and a single program.
It’s like trying to have a useful conversation with a baby that hasn’t quite grasped the idea of object permenance yet.
If you want to claim that we are emotional and easily offended and that you are coming from a place of pure unclouded logic, you might want to stop with the woe-is-me histrionics.
Also, posting. Stop posting.
Well, I don’t about you, but us opinion-having men are just here to hate ourselves apparently. We don’t take kindly to those who have opinions, such as not taking kindly, about others ’round here.
weirwoodtreehugger – Yes there is sexism in STEM and everywhere else (although undeniably diminishing), but avoiding to do what you love is not the answer. There are also a lot of sexist women and nobody bats an eye about that.
Social context doesn’t change what’s right or wrong. Your example of an aggressive push VS the Heimlich maneuver is not adequate because it is a different action (not even the same movement: the Heimlich maneuver is done from behind, below the ribs): one being an aggression an the other one a rescue move. In my example both are persons are wearing shirts with depictions of the opposite sex in scantly clothing (exactly the same action), both would offend some people (even if I’m sure one would offend more people) and be just colorful clothing to others.
Sexism is wrong, be it against males or females, even if society is more hurt by sexism towards women, you can’t resort to censorship. In the age of Inquisition, social context dictated that sciences and freedom of religion were a bad thing (to say the least), still society was wrong, not the few that were doing science or had a different religion. The shirt is tacky, but it doesn’t matter who it offends, only it’s content. Something is not sexist if it offends you, it is sexist if the content demeans in an objective way one of the sexes.
You can’t stop your hate, and seem actually offended by my opinion. I think assholes exist everywhere and in both genders.
just for argument, let’s assume that this is fact.
that means that 5 years ago women couldn’t do math, but within the past 5 years that has changed and suddenly women are able to do math!
and that’s why trolly thinks that men who are dicks to women are not to blame for making the life choice to be dicks to women.
inability to tell the diff between cpr and the heimlich, even though grumpyoldnurse actually used the term “cpr”: check
mansplaining medical terms to a medical professional: check
OMG… so it isn’t just sexism he’s clueless about.
@ ghostiger – It was my counter example, not WWTH’s, and I was talking about CPR, not the Hemlich manoeuvre. Small point, I admit, but telling, IMHO. And, again, you miss the point.
ninja’d! And, very neatly, too. 🙂
Wow, this really escalated quickly. No one here can have a conversation (not even among yourselves), everyone just stating their opinion. This is soooo constructive. I think I’m wasting my time here, great “conversation”.
he really seems to have this idea that because he knows engineering, that means he knows everything. like when you beat a game on hard, you get the easy and normal difficulty achievements at the same time.
Dropping what he thinks are mind-blowing truth bombs when he actually has yet to say anything new or original: check. You’re in a 201 class and you haven’t even mastered the 101 material.
Ghostiger makes me believe in intellectual osmosis, because I feel like I’m getting dumber every time I slog through ones of his posts.
I’ll just sit back and see if you have anything useful to say among yourselves or the thread dies when there is no one to hate on.
Will he stick to the flounce? So far I award it a 4/10. Mostly for the stunning amounts of projection in accusing of just stating our opinions.
“I am entitled to a debate and you’re the bad guys for not providing it” should also be on the bingo cards.
A bit pedantic and OT, but I have never broken ribs doing the Hemlich. I have, however, frequently, broken ribs doing CPR. The motions are not nearly the same. Also, the only time one uses chest compressions to try to clear a blocked airway is on an unconscious hugely pregnant woman or hugely abdominally obese person of any gender.