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.
@lensman, I really don’t think you’re stupid, but that you’re being willfully obtuse. You originally said:
Which I called you out on as follows:
You then replied:
You dipshit, I am saying that we are discussing ONE guy in STEM who literally wears his misogyny, you then sneakily broadened the discussion to all scientists – including female ones – and insisted they weren’t nice. The point I was making is that you fucking erased women in your comment while concurrently making an assertion that ‘they’re bitches, amirite?’
Fuck you. Women already have enough sexism to contend with trying to get into, stay in, and progress in, STEM without you then pontificating that the women there aren’t nice.
No one here is interested in your assfax or your puerile generalisations.
The comments about the Hawkeye Project are irrelevant to STEM. The comments about calling out behaviour ignore the effect on priviledge on those less so. A detailed discussion on this has already been had, so you’re fucking commenting either in ignorance of what has already been said, or you don’t think that women making accurate on-point comments is worse listening to.
You really don’t fit in here.
I have this theory that people who believe women are generally inferior to men will, if you let them talk enough at length, eventually invoke IQ to justify their beliefs; and furthermore, if you continue to let them talk, they’ll eventually reveal themselves to be racists and once again use IQ to justify themselves. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t separate IQ from the douchebags on the Internet who praise it as infallible/scientific/objective, etc. It’s motivated me to read up on the subject of psychometric-testing (the history and methods, etc), and I can only conclude that most of these guys have no fucking idea about the status of IQ in academia, particularly in fields like neuroplasticity, which studies, essentially, the brain’s ability to adapt to its environment.
The short version is: this guy is wrong. He’s wrong on so many levels. Ignoring everything else, women actually do better on IQ tests than men (look this up on PZ’s blog). But even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t say anything about the potential of women in science. Why? Because female brains are as equally plastic as male brains.
Everything about this guy’s model of history and society is oversimplified to the extreme; I mean, if IQ functions the way he says, it makes the social-world ridiculously easy to explain: why are there more men than women in STEM? IQ. Why are some people struggling and others thriving? IQ. Why are there more white people in academia? IQ. People are reduced to a single number, and then that number is used to explain everything and, also, to justify long-standing bigoted attitudes. The concept is suspiciously undemanding given the complexity of the phenomena it’s supposed to explain.
The depressing thing is how pointless it is to criticize this view of society; it’s too convenient for too many people. An easy to grasp idea that makes people feel good about themselves tends to spread like wildfire (see belief in God).
Shadethedruid: no error, nothing. I usually copy to clipboard but I didn’t this time; my computer died a gruesome death awhile ago so now all my interneting is done from my phone, which is NOT fun or convenient for commenting or copying. Which has helped me to limit my time spent in comment sections, lol.
The shirt ilinked to was (not going to risk trying html again, even though I’m for sure copying this post before I post) this – http://www.zazzle.com/vintage_gay_men_sailors_kiss_navy_dadt_tshirt-235646593601076072 . I wouldn’t actually wear it, because I have a thing against forcing unwanted sexual stuff on people who are uncomfortable with it, but I admit I would be tempted to when it comes to people who defend wearing shirts like Taylor’s.
What? It’s just a shirt, dude. Calm your testicles.
(I may also snag Lea’s points for other discussions 🙂 )
Ok I’m kinda disappointed that no one has yet pointed out here that this Cantwell is just dead wrong about only men being responsible for the advancement of science and technology, especially when it comes to computing. Female scientists and mathematicians featured heavily in the development of computers. Wonder if anyone has bothered to point this out to him yet? And perhaps why he thinks it is that he’s never heard of these women?
This is what’s so aggravating. So many of these douchegondolas confuse being patronizing with winning a debate. After all, to acknowledge a grievance is to grant the other side some form of legitimacy, even if you disagree with them. They just can’t bring themselves to do that with women. Engaging in honest debate with a woman, or even a woman having an opinion, makes them feel weak, out of control, and conciliatory. Far easier to shut down debate with ragey “shut up and get back in the kitchen/you’re ugly/it’s only a shirt u pc nazi gendered slur gendered slur kill yourself” comments. It’s an interesting window into how thin-skinned and uncomfortable they are outside the MRA echo chamber.
Not only that, they’d be on shaky moral ground if they did try to debate us, and they know it. It’s much safer to take refuge in “it’s just a shirt”. Then they can handwave away the real argument and pretend it’s just made-up irrational lady fee-fees. They can pretend that’s why women don’t belong in STEM: women make too much noise! and complain too much about trivia! and distract the Real Scientists from the Manly Objective of landing on the comet!
They can pretend all they want, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’ve forfeited the debate.
Also, a guy who thinks the zenith of attractiveness is airbrushed, anatomically deformed outtakes from a Meatloaf album cover screen-printed on purple Dacron really shouldn’t be taken seriously as an arbiter of beauty.
Emilygoddess: Yes I did see the Huffington post. I read it and commented, and have managed to make a bunch of them agree with a feminist ideal. HA!
I mean, I managed to make them agree with a feminist ideal without them realising (because we all know just how much they know about feminism). There are a couple edits I wish I was able to make to my posts though, but for some reason the option isn’t available.
I also have some concerns about the fact that the lady on dude’s arm appears to be shitting a supernova, and what this may indicate about his/the people who think it’s a cool shirt’s ideas about how women’s bodies work.
Cassandrakitty: women shit supernovas and fart solar storms, didn’t you know that? The potential for our butts to destroy the world is astronomical.
Maybe it’s supposed to be a social commentary on the dangers of eating spicey food while wearing a tight latex outfit?
This is why they don’t want us to be astronauts, they’re worried that a stray fart might blow up the space station.
It is fascinating (in a sad way,) to see the same rhetoric trotted out about women in tech science as was also trotted out about women in medical science and teaching, and, well everything else really, at one time or another, from chefs to lawyers to CEO’s (and also apparently the “rational, critical thinking” of atheists, SFF writers, comedians, etc.) Women weren’t there in medical science, weren’t doctors, because they weren’t good at it, their brains are different, they have children, lah lah lah, etc. And then of course women were everywhere in it eventually, once they got past the boulders rolled into their path (well, some of them; others are still pending.) So, what, women’s brains went through some miraculous evolution in only thirty years time? Or could it be that these theories (or really one theory played on a loop,) based on no actual real science, were wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong, and are the desperate wishes of insecure folk whose scientific abilities seem woefully lacking, since they can’t seem to read actual data?
Anyway, this site is very cheering.
A few years ago on Pharyngula there was a “starfart” meme, IIRC because some yahoo’s rambly letter to PZ tried to use the word “stalwart”, but mistyping and possibly autocorrect turned it into “starfart”.
Well, good for him for apologizing.
Meanwhile, here’s a female scientist who’s really, really excited about the landing.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30022765
Weirwoodtreehugger wrote:
“This is only tangentially related, but I really hate when people call The Big Bang Theory “nerd blackface” or “nerd minstrelry.” Ugh. Just no.”
Yeah, it’s pretty loathsome. You wanna get really mad, of course, check out the excitement the manosphere’s showing at the proposed “#WaronNerds” in the next post. I think we’re gonna be hearing a lot more of that shit in the coming weeks.
QFT, emilygoddess.
a public execution preceded by a gala where everyone throws rotten tomatoes at him.
well, I’ve got the tomatoes.
High IQs? Really? These morons do realize that IQ tests have never really been an accurate predictor of intelligence, yes? Take Richard Feynman as an example. Compared to his collegues, his IQ was less than stellar; in the 120s, IIRC, so gifted but by no means genius. Yet he won a Nobel prize and is considered an eminence in his field. Imagine that.
Face. Fucking. PALM.
Yeah, going to jail really means you did a no-no, eh? Someone please tell that fool that there are innocent people in jail right now, and guilty ones walking free. And that often, the difference is down to who could afford a good lawyer, and who could not. Or, in the case of Julien the Blahhhh, simply managing to avoid the cops while scaring the shit out of women who are already very timid, thanks to a machista culture where girls are routinely and severely chastised for making even the tiniest fuss. It’s not hard to see how he got away with what he did. And there’s really no excuse for letting him go any further with it, either.
Well, it seems they hit on a piece of unintentional honesty, as we can easily deduce the War on Nerds is as legit and effective as the War on Terror, the War on Drugs and the War on Christmas.
On the plus side, the dude who actually wore the shirt gave a really genuine apology today. He sounded actually cut up that he’d made so many people feel bad. So yeah, a bit of good news.
BTW, here’s an update on the petition to keep those RSD fuckers out of Canada. No word on whether anyone’s been formally barred yet, but the minister of immigration at least has had a heads-up and made some supportive noises over the tweeter, so there is hope.
Meanwhile, at the Indian Space Agency
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-24/indian-space-research-organisation-mars-orbiter-mission/5766642
I fail to see how this was feminist hysteria. The tweets in response on the other hand…
The counter point from AVfM
http://www.avoiceformen.com/allbulletins/david-futrelle-please-kill-yourself/