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.
A woman criticized a man. They think that is hysteria.
It certainly frightens them into some wild fits of irrational tantruming.
I suspect projection is a component in their perception of “hysteria”.
Here’s the donotlink from BarnBurner’s comment: http://www.donotlink.com/chst
A woman calmly and humorously points out a sexist, unprofessional shirt. They call that hysteria.
A woman gets righteously indignant about some unrighteous indignity men dealt her. She explains it very rationally and in depth to them. They call that hysteria.
A woman gains water weight in the week or so before her period, then complains of feeling bloated and uncomfortable. They call that hysteria.
It doesn’t really matter what a woman does. Because a woman does it, it’s just automatically hysteria. All the fucking way down.
Hey Noah, you probably didn’t mean anything by it, but your last line was awfully close to that obnoxious and far too common suggestion that religious people are less intelligent/thoughtful, and that is a debate that ALL Mammotheers, atheist and theist alike, are sick to death of having. Sorry if that’s not how you meant it – I just really want to avoid having that particular wanksplosion again.
Question: If one no longer (or never did) possess a uterus, can one truly be described as hysterical?
If one identifies as female and is read as such by others…yes. Because feeeeemales = hysterical.
Kat Goodwin, hi, good to see you here! I enjoy reading your comments on Scalzi’s blog. 🙂
::puts mod hat on::
Noah, yeah, seconding what emilygoddess said. Swipes at belief or unbelief really don’t fly here.
I appreciate you all gathering this stuff up for us to marvel at without having to actually get anywhere near these people. Which is terribly selfish of me, letting you all dive into the muckfield there.
In this particular case, the scientist himself is not really a muck-dweller, but the idea that we can’t talk about his shirt that ripples through the frothy guys is a load of muck gas.
But wait, I thought FTB was a communist censorship empire. Those vile censors of free speech can’t possibly allow dissident opinions!? /sarcasm
MRAs are the most hysteric group of people I’ve ever come across, offline or online. You can’t accuse them of being either rational nor logical though, I’ll give them that.
Bogdan, it’s so true, innit? PZ is teh ultimate evil of CENSORING FREEZE PEACH!
One of the women he also harassed, @atrokatie, is an astrophysicist. Just in case his inane theories are wrong, he’s hoping to get women researchers in STEM to stop talking. Otherwise, somebody might notice Katie is a lot smarter than he is.
KathleenB
Bina
…I think you’re missing the joke about the etymology of ‘hysteria’…
I think that’s seriously fucked up. At no point will his lost job help the culture change. Isn’t it the reasonable voice explaining how he made a mistake?
We can’t just throw everyone off the planet for every mistake. People make mistakes. Hopefully, they apologize for their mistakes and learn from them. And hopefully others learn as well.
Nobody said to throw him off the planet. I’m not sure why you think consequences and accountability won’t help culture change though.
And, of course, Dick Dawkins has seized the chance to puke up another hairball on the rug
http://www.donotlink.com/cijs
Because only the brilliant Dick truly understands feminism and sexism, and is so kind as to condescend to explain it to the all we idiot people who aren’t him.
Apologising for his mistake means nothing if the underlying privilege and misogyny remain. Or do you think it would be okay for him to keep making “mistakes” so long as he “apologises” for them afterwards?
The “reasonable voice” is not explaining how he made a mistake – because for fucks sake, really? We’ve covered this already. He decided to wear that damn shirt on a day where he should have realised it was highly likely he was going to be interviewed. He decided to wear that shirt. How on earth was it a mistake? Did he get dressed in the dark, accidentally grabbed the wrong shirt, and was simultaneously blinded for the duration of the day until after the interview when the blindness was lifted and oh hell not this shirt?
Mistake? Really? I don’t think you know what a mistake is.
I decide to eat another pancake and later horribly regret it. It was a mistake to eat that last pancake. Intentional decisions can be mistakes too.
“But he didn’t mean to do something misogynistic” on a site that’s for mocking misogyny, paired with ridiculous hyperbole suggesting that feminists want to punt misogynists into orbit? The eyes, they roll for you.
The key difference in your scenario is that the pancake mistake did not impact on anyone else, and it was not appropriate or necessary to take other people’s perceptions into account when you ate that pancake. The two things are not equivalent.
Oh, give me strength. That wasn’t an excuse for the man’s conduct or anything approximating the notion, because he didn’t mean to, it’s OK or he didn’t owe anyone an apology. It was a demonstration of the word “mistake” being appropriate given the varying circumstances it applies to.
The fact “mistake” is an accurate description doesn’t make this mistake any less unacceptable nor has anything I’ve said suggested it does. That’s an assumption and a wrong one.
Oh, they’re totally not equivalent. They’re both mistakes though. Mistake is an appropriate word. Mistakes can be terribly harmful to others and the fact they aren’t intended to be doesn’t make them any less unacceptable. They’re still mistakes so schooling the dude for referring to his wardrobe choice as such isn’t accurate. His word choice on the matter is fine.
In what way was his wearing that shirt a “mistake”?
@ marinerachel?
Huh? I was addressing Chrissa, and her apparent belief that “people point out problem, dude apologizes, hopefully someone learns from this” isn’t what’s happening right now.
(And also that getting fired is like being throw up into space in a capsule like Dr Evil.)
I am terrible and didn’t actually read/listen to his apology. Did he just apologise for offending people or did he apologise for alienating and demeaning women?
Because if he thinks his mistake is that he offended people, he hasn’t learnt anything and his tears were probably for himself.