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.
Lol, and he thinks we’re what, hating on each other. Reading comprehention: fail.
Also, I think I haz bingo! That ‘I’m just trying to have a conversation’ filled the last spot.
And he failed to stick to the flounce so quickly that he ninja’d my post. I’m deducting 3 points for that. 1/10
Ok, I have to admit, “if this thread I necroed dies in my absence it proves you hate me” is a new one.
@emilygoddess
for values of “debate” which mean “engineering student says stuff and all the feminists on the board ooh and ahh like they’ve never heard that before”
Here it is guys, if we fail to keep talking on a necro’d thread, IT’S ALL OUR FAULT.
lol, ninja’d
I’ll have to stop posting soon because of thanksgiving festivities. In no way should this be interpreted as conceding defeat.
Yes, let’s all ignore all of David’s future posts to keep talking on this one arbitrary post forever and ever and ever and ever.
Chances of troll getting the last word in a thread: fairly slim. I’m sure it’s very frustrating for them, the poor deers*.
*usually teal in colour.
@ WWTH – but, if you stop arguing with some random stranger on the internet so that you can go enjoy a meal with your friends and family, you are totes admitting defeat!!!!!11!!!!!1!!!
I’m sure we, your Canadian allies, can keep on snarking.
Plus, actually, the rest of the internationals. (I didn’t mean to snub anyone, ‘cept the troll!)
Indeed, we can, Puddleglum! (at least until the little grumps get home from school, or I have to shovel the walk again)
Happy Thanksgiving, USian Mammotheers!
I hereby declare all of you victors of this noble battle! You have defeated me, oh chosen ones. May you enjoy your festivities! (°0°)
I can offer another anecdote of sexism in High School physics. Just to point out it starts earlier than University/college, and that quite a few of us have experienced it.
In my O grade physics class (2 year class with exam taken normally at 16) and Higher physics class (1 year with exam generally taken at 17) There were 3 girls.
We were treated as irrelevant.
We always were given last choice of equipment for experiments, so we never got to use the better equipment.
If the equipment left was broken, he’d figuratively pat us on the head and tell us it didn’t matter. (figuratively pat on head, literally say that).
When homework was handed back graded, boys who got 8 or 9 out of 10 got congratulated. Girls who got 10 out of 10 were congratulated on neat handwriting.
It gets very dispiriting, day after week after month after year.
In our HS it was accepted that Physics was hard and for boys. Biology was easy and for girls, and Chemistry was neutral, but more for boys.
Now I do not agree with the ‘Biology is easy’ view, but you can see the assumptions behind them.
Maybe they should have been phrased ‘Mostly boys take physics so it is a hard science. Mostly girls take biology, so it must be easy’.
Oops..took too long typing.
M. the Social Justice Ranger, you called it. James is an idiot.
James, you poor child, you do understand that you have to back up your arguments with actual facts and reality and data, not just your own uninformed opinion, right? You do know that just asserting something is true doesn’t make it true, right?
Spoken like someone who has never faced any kind of hostility or discrimination in the workplace at all!
Are you for real? The idea that women can’t do math isn’t part of the STEM fields? No seriously, you think the people who work in the STEM fields exist in some kind of magical seperate world that isn’t touched by the broader culture at all?
Yes, James, you’ve told many women here that you, personally, don’t find the shirt sexist and that your opinion supersedes the opinions of all women everywhere who have told you that they find that shirt very sexist. Yes, you’ve proven that you believe your opinion is more valid than any woman’s opinion, and that your experiences are more valid the experiences of women. That is part of the fucking problem.
So? Completely irrelevant.
Because saying, “Hey, wearing a shirt with scantily clad cartoon women in sexualized poses during a televised press conference is part of a bigger issue of misogyny in the STEM fields” is a biased, extremist reaction; whereas making death and rape threats against a woman who criticized the shirt is not.
Yep, James, you are an idiot.
I liked the part where it is the women talking about a scientist wearing a sexist shirts that give girls the impression that STEM fields are hostile. If we would just stop talking about it the problem would go away. Dunning Kruger logic.
So James reads a room as well as he logics. James, we’re not hating you. We’re mocking you. If only you hadn’t made it so easy …
I was six when I was informed that it did not matter how smart I was or how easy I found the maths. Certain fields were closed to be because I was a girl and my mere presence would distract the boys from their important work. That was over sixty years ago and yet misogynists make that same exclusionary argument to this day.
Here in the US they punish girls with public humiliation for wearing clothing that they claim is distracting to boys. I find this significant in light of the efforts to claim “the shirt” should not be viewed as a distraction.
I just wish mr. True Feminist here had spent as much time yelling at the misogynists highlighted above as he spent yelling at us.
Policy of Madness said:
LOL! This is priceless. Absolutely priceless.
Mansplaining things he has no clue about to a woman who does. James in a nutshell.
Well, to be fair, my feeble lady brain does get stuff like CPR and the Hemilch manoeuvre mixed up all the D*mn time. NG tubes and Foley catheters, for example. I can never remember what holes they go in. Also, IV’s and art lines. X-rays and mammograms. I mean, how can anyone expect a poor little farm girl to keep it all straight?
I’m actually glad! Glad I tell you! that he set me straight.
Oh my fucking God. He’s still here?
Listen, ghostiger. You can stop with the sad attempts at being sarcastic, since you fail at sarcasm as much as you fail at understanding social issues. This is not a victory, because there was never a battle. Much mocking of your ridiculously naive worldview, yes, but no battle. If there was, it was pathetically one-sided, since you came utterly unarmed.
Nothing you’ve said on this thread has been new or revolutionary in any way. It takes a very bloated ego to believe that you are an expert at social sciences without any knowledge of them, or on how people who are not you experience the world without listening to them. Your reasoning was flawed as all heck, and your goalposts were walzing all over the place. “The shirt is not sexist, it’s anti-sexist!” “Well, okay, but it’s not sexist!” “Okay, it’s sexist, but so what?” All this on a post about angry men wishing death on a woman for criticizing the shirt, and you see no problem with continuing being an ignorant ass?
You had no coherent argument to make, just knee-jerk reactions and concern trolling. Your extremely ignorant and privileged worldview (of there being no sexism in STEM) was hacked to pieces, so you quickly devolved to “why are you so meeeeeeaaaan?” Did you really believe that you can march into the comment section of a blog devoted to mocking misogyny and expect people to be polite and nice after you’ve expressed some very sexist views? You’re the one who made it clear that you have no idea what you’re on about, but still insisted on arguing that everybody else was wrong, and felt entitled enough to expect the people here (all of whom you took for women, fancy that) to be gentle with your widdly widdle feelings. Fuck that noise.
You’ve been nothing but condescending and mansplainy all the time, not polite. Are you aware that saying awful things while being polite doesn’t make the things you say any less awful? And that maybe, just maybe, being polite to sexist assholes has never worked out in the history of ever?
This is not about your opinions being attacked because you’re a man. This has everything to do with you thinking that your opinions are automatically worth more because you’re a man, and this might have something to do with you thinking that the sexism and misogyny that most women experience every single day of their lives are a matter of opinion in the first place.
Take a note, ghostiger: When the world around you doesn’t conform to your expectations, you reconsider your expectations. As stated upthread, you don’t pretend the evidence is wrong just so you don’t need to challenge your worldview. That’s what conservatives and reactionaries do, and they’re the most anti-science and anti-progressive people there are.
Now I’m really off to bed.
what grumpyoldnurse has needed all this time is for an engineering student to come tell her how to do her job.