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.
On a more positive note, XKCD has a cool comic about the landing
http://xkcd1446.org/
I’m looking at the picture, and it looks like he’s actually wearing a polo type shirt underneath it. He couldn’t just wear that when he was being interviewed?
I’m imaging him in front of his closet going, “Yeah, the black polo’s okay, but this is MONUMENTAL! I HAVE to wear something to spice it up. Oh, hell, it’s my good luck shirt – I’ll wear that! That’ll be awesome.” Only because that is not a shirt that you accidentally put on or you put on because it’s the cleanest shirt you own, with the exception being that you own hundreds of shirts like that.
I’m not saying it’s right – I’d completely avoid any person wearing such a shirt and at best think that someone is privileged or clueless. At worst, they’re an asshole.
Also, that shirt is what I imagine when I picture some dude pounding out MRA screeds. Especially that telemarketer dude who said that women in high-powered positions never work.
I got it 🙂
And I read her tweet as light-hearted mockery. Nothing to get upset about, in other words. Unless, of course, one is actively invested in keeping STEM free of all female voices, especially those who point out the errors in a light, mocking manner.
Maybe not. Probably not. But that’s a problem in its own right. Even if there’s no explicit malice involved, it’s still unthinkingly privileged nerd-boy behavior that creates a hostile work environment for any girls that enter the clubhouse.
(It’s also unprofessional as all unholy fuck to do an interview in it, but that’s another issue.)
The real question comes when someone points it out. Does he apologize and change it? Or does the explicit malice begin at that point?
I’m utterly convinced that some of these guys are full blown psychopaths…Their self-delusion is unbelievable and their self-estimation is just blown way out of proportion.
Yeah, same as he “didn’t mean anything by” describing the probe as “sexy but not easy.”
That’s evidence enough for me that he’s at best mindlessly sexist, and that not one senior person in that group thought to stop him wearing a horribly inappropriate costume. He’d be reprimanded or possibly fired for creating a hostile workplace in any company that didn’t have its head up its arse. It’s just one more of the endless examples of sexism that drive women away from STEM fields.
Well, that’s certainly one way of looking at it; see also Nietzsche, “Whoever fights monsters…”, etc. Personally, though, I was thinking more along the lines of how much irony is lost on the ironic. Because if these dudes style themselves as Voices of Reason Beating Down Unreason, they need a mirror, and badly.
Aw, you took the words right out of my mouth – or my keyboard I guess.
That’s probably true. Of course that he didn’t even think this shirt might cause offense when millions of people saw it on TV/internet is such an expression of male privilege. I can’t say I find him innocent in this whole thing just because he’s not bad as the people sending out “go kill yourself” tweets. Hopefully he’ll take a look at the kind of people who defending him, decide it’s not company he wants to keep and think about his actions more in the future.
Drat. Ninja’d again!
Um, This cantwell person, is he even in STEM himself? He seems to have claimed the fields as his own because he’s a man.
I’m really not buying the idea that there exists an intelligent adult man who’s never before encountered the idea that women find public displays of gratuitous T&A imagery to be crass and inappropriate in a professional context. This man does have access to the internet, yes? Presumably he has encountered a newspaper at some point in his life?
I don’t think it’s that he didn’t realize that women would find the shirt offensive, it’s more that he’s used to operating in a culture in which women are punished for complaining about overt displays of sexism, and probably assumed that the same sort of teeth-grindingly pissed off but unable to say so response would be forthcoming from women in the culture at large too.
I highly doubt it. His crap reeks of bad science, right down to the characterization of women as “estrogen-based parasites”. Which makes it sound more like leeches who feed off the blood of pregnant women, actually.
QFT.
Just what I was trying and failing to put into letters.
I don’t care if he knew it was appropriate or not – the fact that this is an adult type human male with a real education and career says that a shirt like that should not even be on his radar as part of his real grown-up work costume. What’s even worse is that his co-workers let him do an interview wearing it. Where the Hell is everyone else’s head?
Also, it seems that the ragey Twitter tweetles are making a much bigger deal out of it than the women who are calling Dr. Insensitive on his poor wardrobe choices in the first place. Who tells someone to kill themselves over saying “bad shirt choice, d00d”? Oh, right, I forgot. 🙁
Also, I can’t help noticing how many of them bothered to tell her how “unattractive” she is. Which makes me wonder how many of them need their eyes examined, and also stinks of projection.
And if they’re such rational beings, why the hell do they even care what she looks like?
Oops! Ninja’d while I was toning down my wall of rage.
Same shit as the dude who suggested that women who don’t want to be catcalled carry guns in the other thread, different day. Men wear shit like that as a way of thumbing their noses at the idea that they should give a shit about women’s sensibilities. His coworkers probably thought he was being a brave rebel, because they exist in the same subculture he does, and both he and they probably thought that nobody would dare call him out on it because look, he did a thing! And then of course someone did, so she must be punished, because how fucking dare women remind them of the fact that no, actually, outside of their little subcultural bubble that shit doesn’t fly any more?
Even within their little bubble, that shit is becoming untenable. They’ve probably had pushback from women against that sort of thing before, and this may be just their little way of thumbing their noses at it. Or reclaiming the ground before they lose it again, this time for good.
It reminds me of the research that shows that when women first enter traditionally male professions it’s common for their male coworkers to suddenly plaster porn all over the place as a way of marking their territory and making it clear that the women aren’t welcome, like dogs peeing on a lamppost.
Their essential message to women is “you exist to be fucked” however they express it.
Were there no pre event memos sent out, detailing proper, professional attire? No one on site looked at that hideous shirt and said, ‘Not quite the image we’re looking to project, just wear the polo’? This was a big fucking deal, the kind of event where you want to make yourself, your colleagues and your employer look as good as you possibly can. That shirt made him look like an ass, and probably embarrassed the ESA quite a bit.
The message is “You exist ONLY to be fucked, and I refuse to tolerate you here unless I get to fuck your ass all the way out the door.”
Which is, of course, highly illogical. But, shhhh, only women are ruled by their hormones!
They will say it was a joke. Just like when they humped you in the elevator and put the porn on your computer. Learn to take a joke. Or maybe it was a compliment. Learn to take a compliment.
At some point if enough women are in the workplace they feel safe standing up to this sort of constant harassment. It is hard though. You know that they are still talking about your fuckability quotient behind your back even when they no longer feel secure in their ability to give you daily updates on their boner status.
@Leisha Young Please avoid the ableism, please. Framing these people as “psychopaths” is essentially saying “if someone is a massive, death threat sending, logic defying, utterly incomprehensible douchebag, that must mean they’re crazy!” Many with mental conditions go throughout their day without sending death threats, being misogynists, and being a total jerk. Many who have minds people would consider normal spew a considerable amount of bile. Also, when you call these guys “psychopaths”, it removes any real sense of responsibility for their actions, much in the way some justify male sexual harassers and rapists by saying “they’re not able to control themselves”. I can assure you, if these fellas wanted to not be jerks, they really, really could. But they’re not, because apparently not being a jerk is just too much work.