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.
Cat gif!
http://33.media.tumblr.com/9ed379fa594672b0017ea50ad6b09b0c/tumblr_ndyxuiXleB1qdlh1io1_r1_400.gif
1. The shirt in question is fucking ugly. I mean, damn. How did no one go ‘Dude, people are going to be watching this, go put on a button down’, that thing is hideous.
2. Right, so we can’t complain about someone wearing an offensive shirt (to an event it is inappropriate to wear a bowling shirt to in the first place, but whatever) but hey it’s totally logical to tell someone to kill themselves for a smart ass remark.
3. You see boys, telling the woman you disagree with she’s ugly just reinforces the feminist point that you think women are only worth something if you find them attractive. Just shot yourself in the foot.
4. …I am just so over this crap. They’re like little boys not wanting to share their sandbox.
What a piece of garbage.
I wonder if his place of work enforces a dress code after this.
The tackiness of his shirt is amazing — the graphics belong on the side of a van, circa 1976.
Peek-a-boo kitty!
sparky –
“And aren’t these the same folks who got all up in arms when Jessica Valenti posted a picture of herself in a “I bathe in male tears” shirt on Twitter?”
If by “up in arms” you mean photoshopping her picture onto bloody infant surgery pics, dead & burned bodies, and hanged men over a picture of Robin Williams (to name some examples) and spam-tweeting them. to her and her workplace 1000’s of times..and still sometimes do it like 3-4 months later?
Yes, thats the same folks. A real classy bunch.
Idiotic MRA claim of the day: Misogyny doesn’t exist because their spellchecker doesn’t recognise it, but misandry is a terrible problem because their spellchecker does recognise it.
Doubly idiotic: They weren’t be sarcastic.
Triply idiotic: Not the first time I’ve heard this.
*Weren’t being sarcastic.
I’m getting more and more irritated with Family Guy these days, but one of the jokes reminds me of every MRA ever. It’s when Peter rides up on and elephant and says “Hey look, I’m the two symbols of the Republican party: an elephant and a fat, middle aged white guy afraid of change.” Because seriously you can’t fight that hard against change without being utterly stricken silly with terror by the very thought.
Big, strong, brave, MANLY MAN MEN pissing in their pants because a woman didn’t dig the message an ugly ass softcore porn shirt sent. Fucking A. These guys are parodies of themselves.
Good news: Julien Blanc has been refused entry to Brazil!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-14/brazil-will-deny-visa-to-woman-choking-pick-up-artist/5891556
I have coined a new name for him, well it keeps his surname: Ordures Blanc
Just translate from the French, or ask Mr Kitteh 🙂
No need to ask with that one!
Sad news: Warren Clarke has died. (Dalziel and Pascoe, Clockwork Orange, In the Red, lots of other things … he was one of those actors you think will always be here.)
@kittenserf
From your link: “In Canada, about 50,000 have signed the petition ‘Keep Julien Blanc and Real Social Dynamics out of Canada’.”
IIRC, when I signed it, there were under 1,000 signatures. That escalated quickly.
Part of me hopes some country lets him in and then arrests him.
Let’s hope Canada keeps him out, then, C. S. Strowbridge! Good to see it moving so fast.
I rather like the image of him as a latter-day Flying Dutchman, unable to stop anywhere.
Pretending that he didn’t mean anything by wearing that shirt…. it is still more garrish than a house with dozens of inflatable Christmas decorations filling their yard mid November. Considering the magnitude of the event, unprofessional is an understated description. Seriously, every time I see his picture, “Tacky” by Weird Al pops in my head.
Am I the only one getting tired of “Socially awkward” and “nerd” as being reasons to hand wave certain people’s abundance of dickish shittery.
“Don’t worry about him being a flagrant asshole, he’s just socially awkward.”
“Oh, he didn’t mean to wear the swimsuit issue shirt, as a nerd, he doesn’t think….about such things.”
And while searching for who Warren Clarke was, I found this. Stop the planet, I want to get off.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30011166
Come on guys it’s just a shirt. I have been known to put topless pics of sexy men as my ask background and facebook cover photo.
Threatening her over a shirt was stupid as well.
That is one baaad shirt to wear on camera. I seriously don’t get why a) he thought it was a good idea to wear it (and to buy such an awful, awful thing in the first place) and b) no colleague, no superior, and no one of the camera crew told him that this might not be the image to project on TV.
Concerning Blanc: this is not just about Blanc anymore. RSD is sending some other asshole to Germany, a guy named “Ozzie”. Luckily, mainstream media and politicians have picked up the campaign against RSD. Authorities ask hotels and other venues to not give them room (as of now, only the cities are known, no venues), but as US citizens don’t need a visa to travel to Germany, it’s going to be more difficult to refuse him entry.
Does anyone by chance know of any deeper research into RSD, its members and history? Google only gets me to a lot of articles about Blanc and what’s happening now, but I’d be interested in the history of RSD, also this Ozzie and the guy who allegedly runs the website and co-owns the company, Nick Kho. And all I can find about him are PUA sites and this classy article from the Daily Mail about his marriage:
“In fact, she says when Mr Kho invited her to go to the Playboy Mansion in the first month of their courtship, that was when she realised he was serious about her.”
Or like one of the poor little ships in Pandemic 2, when all the countries have closed its ports and it goes around from one port to the next looking for one that’s open.
Thanks for your deeply insightful views, and the “two wrongs make a right” argument. You have a clearly superior intellect and the fact that you think that threatening someone is “stupid” rather than harrassment and bullying shows that you are totes capable of contributing to the conversation here.
Or not.
For the avoidance of doubt, that was to creepy cupcake. For both comments.
Fuck off, creepy cupcake. Your low-effort trolling is not welcome.
@pallygirl
Any country with a Ministry of Ethics is a country I don’t want to be a part of.
Well, I can’t help but show some grudging respect for a person who is so beyond caring that he can make a scientific announcement in THAT shirt. All else is incredibly sad, as it usually is as soon as MRAs get involved.
That shirt will haunt my nightmares.