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.
Sweet dreams, Anarchonist! You’ve certainly earned them! 🙂
Oh, my, yes, PoM! Then, maybe I’ll stop confusing the bed pans with the wash basins!
Apparently directly addressing ghostroll’s argument is just “stating opinions.” The projection is strong with this one.
… but the Heimlich is for blocked airways whle cpr is cardiopulmonary resuscitation, you use it to restart the muscles of the heart in case they cease beating.
How do you even compare the two? If someone tries to Heimlich you while you’re going through heart failure, I’m sorry to tell you this but you’re going to die. Alternatively, I don’t really see much of a call for cpr while someone’s airways are blocked, although I guess if you cause the lungs to expel air forcefully it could maybe clear the blockage? How would you even break ribs during the heimlich? You’re supposed to do it below the ribs.
If I ever am in a situation where I need first aid, I really, really, really, really hope my responder knows the difference between the two, and more so, once I’m done needing the help doesn’t proceed to break my ribs any more. But before that? Break my f*kings, if that’s what it takes to restart my heart.
The social context of CPR really kind of sort of matters! One is either a life saving aid or aggressive result, it does make them right or wrong depending on what’s going on.
Why would you even bring that up, let alone mess up the terms, let alone try to use them to shore up and argument, let alone misunderstand the different context, let alone lecture a professional on the proper implementations of her chosen field?
O.o
mindboggling.
C’mon Grumpyoldnurse, we all know medicine isn’t a real STEM!
duh, because he’s a man studying a stem field, and that means he is qualified to speak authoritatively on any and every topic. You know, the same thing that made him lecture to women in STEM about their experiences.
Seriously, though; if you break ribs doing the Hemlich, you’ve done it wrong. If you break ribs doing CPR, you’ve done it right. That’s how I keep them straight!
@ emilygoddess – I think you broke my brain! Oops, no. That was just mild hypoxia from laughing so much.
I especially like James’ point about how “okay, yes, there has been some sexism in STEM (but more everywhere else!!!), but it’s diminishing now. Naturally. All by itself. It definitely isn’t a product of people getting called out when they do sexist and hostile things! In fact, pointing those things out actually CREATES sexism. It’s quantum sexism, you non-STEM girls wouldn’t understand. Now shut up about anything that might make men uncomfortable. This will solve all the problems (that affect me personally).”
It’s Schrodinger’s sexism!
I know most of you have moved on to more interesting foolish remarks by this trolliolio, however, I am still puzzling over how what men do is exactly equal to what women don’t do.
I keep trying to think what he might have meant that would have made sense and coming up empty.
@ thebewilderness – I have no idea. I was working on the assumption that English might not be his first language, and was thus abandoning little syntax slips to just get the gist of what he was saying.
I may have been overly generous.
I thought that at first too, but then he got all grammatically correct and pedantic so that benefit of the doubt went out the window.
We need to give some thought to the troll of the year nominations. Not these creepers who just showed up to set us straight but the long term stay the distance trolls like Shut up Woody.
I’d be voting for Mikey. Have any other trolls given us in-jokes like DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH?
One more vote for Mikey over here, with an honorable mention for Valerie and “spellchecking Mein Kampf”.
Vote Woody!
Spellchecking directly on the beach!
Spellchecking Paul Elam directly on the beach? If the trolls are going to suck maybe we need to design our own.
If Woody won Troll of the Year, we could send him on a weekend to romantic Charlotte, NC (or is it SC?), rendezvous of all the rich lawyer-farmers of LA.
Are any of these trolls still trying to post? Certainly Shut Up Woody deserves an dishonorable mention for persistence if he is still filling the mod queue with his admiration for Elam.
I haven’t seen Woody there much, lately. He could be off crying in a corner somewhere.
Mikey pretty much quit after he got too creepy (and we found out from his gf just how skeevy he is) and David banned him.
wow. A stupid website for stupid people. I guess the Internet is accessible to every fucking dumb shit on the planet NOW.
so glad we have a website about misogyny when really it’s about a bunch of women needing something to bitch about.
Nope, no misogyny in that sentence. Nosiree bob.
The shirt incident has really struck a nerve with angry dudebros for some reason. They just won’t get over it. I made a snarky comment about it on Jezebel a week or two ago and got deluged with tantrums for days.