Even though I run a blog with the deliberately ironic title “We Hunted the Mammoth,” I’m still regularly amazed by how eager men who’ve accomplished nothing of value in their entire lives are to claim a kind of vicarious credit, by virtue of being men, for everything good that we humans have accomplished here on planet earth.
Consider this astoundingly un-self-aware bit of almost literal we-hunted-the-mammothing from a recent A Voice for Men post, written (very, very badly) by Peter Wright and Paul Elam:
Harnessing men’s utility can be witnessed from the erection of Stonehenge to the Roman Empire to the moon landings. Cures for diseases and vaccines to prevent them happened from the intensely intelligent actions of the human male. Exploring new territories and engineering the transport to send people to new places has changed the world, almost all of it through risk and hardship borne by men. Men have driven civilization forward since we first walked away from the African savannah. Men’s blood, sweat, tears and sacrifices are the fuel rods that have always driven the big machine of our society.
So much passive voice! So many mixed metaphors! Can anyone explain to me how blood, sweat and tears (liquids) can be fuel rods (solids, specifically “long, slender, zirconium metal tube[s] containing pellets of fissionable material”)? Or how “sacrifices” (an abstract concept) fit into the mix?
I will give an official We Hunted the Mammoth Award of Artistry to anyone who can draw me a picture — or make a diagram — of Wright and Elam’s terrible paragraph.
Oh, in case anyone is wondering, the ultimate point of that Wright and Elam post is to try to convince troubled men not to go to therapists unless the therapists are wise to the alleged evils of “gynocentrism.” You know, the evil force that made men do all that hard work for the lazy women of the world, who apparently spent all of human history watching soap operas and complaining about the men who were doing all that exploring and engineering and utility-ing and intensely intelligent actioning for them.
If you are searching for a therapist make sure and ask one question: “Have you heard of gynocentrism?” If they haven’t walk away and don’t hire them. In fact be prepared to do so much walking away that your steps will number enough to walk around the entire planet three times.
Well, that last bit, however cringeworthy the prose, is probably true. Because blaming men’s problems on “gynocentrism” is not just psychological quackery, it’s a highly obscure form of psychological quackery.
What a strange way the folks at AVFM have of demonstrating “compassion for men and boys,” as their old slogan had it.
Also, I’m pretty sure that at some point in the development of human civilization, and possibly even before it, women did some things too.
Kinda puts your average toilet-stall scribbler to shame, dunnit? Someone in the mists of prehistory looked at a perfectly blank hill side and started to really dream.
I may have made an ungodly noise. Nothing I can ever make will top the dog-startling noise I made when I first heard of XCOM (2012), but as ungodly noises go, it was a good one.
Speaking of erections, here’s London’s art deco cock:
http://thebigfatnoodle.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/image-from-originalbuzz-info.jpg
95% of patents are owned by men so men are key to future not women.
@Falconer
This was me when I first saw it. Imagine a high pitch squeal as you look:
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/vhg.gif
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/vha.gif
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/lomg.gif
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/cfph.gif
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/bnc.gif
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/poppin1.gif
Of course, I’m still giddy as fuck. It’s been running for 24 hours and I just learned about it and I am excite.
I hope it’s game footage. X3
Also, you gotta admit, that is one class dong-shaped building.
I know it’s probably going to be a 10 second teaser trailer but stiiiill.
I refuse to be excited until I know what genre it is.
What are they doing to that big yellow earth mover?
And I’m sorry to say that it looks like that class dong-shaped building is striking a blow for intactivists everywhere.
@Talos Argon:
Oh you do not want to get into a statistics war with us, neighbor. We will deploy sarcasm, metaphor, parody, litotes and satire, and then we’ll beat you at your own game.
@katz
Fallout 4 Dance Dance Revolution.
This isn’t writing, it’s a grammatical torture chamber. The amount of nominalizations is staggering, the verb-to-noun ratio is 7 to 200.
This sentence reads like a parody of bad passive voice: “Cures for diseases and vaccines to prevent them happened from the intensely intelligent actions of the human male.” They’ve buried the subject in a prepositional phrase like it was a dead pet.
I can’t get over how badly written this article is, it’s terribleness stands out on a website that exclusively focuses on bad writing.
@brooked
They’ve buried the subject in a prepositional phrase like it was a dead pet.
That’s because that pet — or creature, rather — is very dead indeed. And somewhere in the deep recesses of what passes for Elam’s and Wright’s minds this was acknowledged, ever so reluctantly. Thus the unseemly burial.
We erected Stonehenge to feed you! Or whatever.
But, men are apparently not the key to proper pronunciation.
Also, I’m not sure which country you’re talking about, but in the US, the patent requirements aren’t all that stringent. It doesn’t have to be viable. It certainly doesn’t have to be the key to the future. It does have to be useful, but useful seems to be defined pretty broadly most of the time.
There’s also the absurdity of comparing male and female importance based solely on patent holding status. There are lots of ways to be important, useful, and productive without holding a patent. There’s also the matter of boys being encouraged more than girls to get into pursuits that might lead to patent holding in adulthood.
The ultimate in phallic buildings and the perfect symbol for who holds the power and privilege in the United States.
http://www.sunipix.com/memorials/WashingtonMonument1.jpg
You know what one man patented?
Animal ear holders so their ears don’t get dirty.
It looks like the cardboard of toilet paper rolls stuck onto the side of the dog’s head.
That is an actual invention that has been patented.
Here it is:
http://www.google.com/patents/US4233942
Obviously, this shows male superiority.
This reminds of the pretty cringe worthy “we hunted the mammoth even though the mammoths weren’t even hunted” * comments on an article called Why the Men’s Rights Movement is Garbage:The Belle Jar
It is really worth reading. The comment section is riddled with MRA trolls, as usual. Here is a quote from a pleasant fellow called Robert :
And another by Michael:
They are doozies aren’t they? To the MRA lurkers out there-you should really hit the history books a bit more before making such ridiculous comments. Also do some anthropology research as well before spouting evo-psych nonsense about ‘hunter gathers’ and ‘sexual dimorphism’ **. You will find two important things-everyone, male and female hunted AND gathered (including children), sexual dimorphism is actually ridiculously small in our species and has decreased by a huge amount during the course of human evolution.
Here are some great places to start:
Heather Pringle| (1998) ‘New Women of the Ice Age’ Discover Magazine
Erin Camp (2005) Sexual Dimorphism in Human Evolution
George Armelagos and Denis Van Gerven (1980) ‘Sexual Dimorphism and Human Evolution: An Overview’ Journal of Human Evolution 9(5) pages 437–446
Book- Linda Own (2005) ‘Distorting the Past. Gender and the Division of Labor in the European Upper Paleolithic’ published by Kerns Verlag: Tübingen
*Seriously, humanity did not hunt the mammoth to extinction, even if we hunted them at all. The whole ‘over kill hypothesis’ is complete garbage.
** I am RREEEEEAAAAALLLYYY sick of this crap. There is a lot of shit spouted regarding the differences between men and women, often in the form of broad sweeping statements from self proclaimed ‘experts’ who don’t even bother to reference ANYTHING!
@WWTH
That and apparently 97 freaking percent of patents fail to make any money.
But MRAs and anti-feminists love to use statistics like a drunk person uses a lampost; for support rather than enlightenment.
(I cannot take credit for that analogy, but I love it too much not to share :D)
That reminds me of this ad
As a peeeeeeeeenis owner (who was very encouraged to do STEM stuff) I’m curious, how accurate is the video at portraying the pressures that girls face when showing interest in STEM?
From one of misseb47’s quotes:
Well, this guy has a very unique view of human evolution. I really can’t fathom what he believes happened. Does he think men and women are different species of animals that met at some point? How did the men reproduce before they found women cowering in the wilderness?
Always liked this New Yorker cartoon
[IMG]http://i60.tinypic.com/spw64m.jpg[/IMG]
Some other of the amazing, obviously showing superiorness of males patents:
A rubber toy stick for dogs.
A chin rest for your putter so you swing well.
An electrified table cloth to keep bugs off the tabel.
An to keep the sun off of your beer which was patented by not one, not two, but THREE men, because such genius cannot be done by just ONE MAN!
“A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.” That’s right, TWO men made this brilliant patent back in 1993 and every time you exercise your cat with an invisible beam of light from a hand-held laser apparatus, you owe them money. Fact.
A patent to attach eye glasses through piercings.
Making toys out of bottle caps and beer cans.
A method to carve artifical pumpkins.
OBVIOUSLY THESE SHOW HOW MEN ARE THE SUPERIOR AND LOGICAL GENDER ALL HAIL THE PEEN!
HAIL IT I SAY! HAIL IT!
I once worked for a company that developed patents into products and this one guy tried to sell them his patent for a bomb shelter made out of an RV.
See, he had this idea to bury an RV and use it as a bomb shelter. But it turned out that was already patented. So he tried to patent the same thing, but with the wheels taken off first. But that was already patented too. So he patented the same thing, but with the wheels taken off and put under the hood instead. And he successfully got a patent for that.
The company declined to buy rights to his patent and then go around digging up buried RVs to see where the wheels were.
Tessa-“Well, this guy has a very unique view of human evolution. I really can’t fathom what he believes happened. Does he think men and women are different species of animals that met at some point? How did the men reproduce before they found women cowering in the wilderness?”
Sounds like it, doesn’t? Maybe they cloned themselves with their cutting edge Stone Age technology!! 😀 They had the best cloning facilities then, really advanced. XD
@katz
SUCH GENIUS.
WE MUST HAIL HIS PEEN! HAIL THE PEEN! HAIL THE PEEN!
So maybe the takeaway message is that men are more socialized to think their useless crap ideas have merit. Also, in 2012, 18% of patents were awarded to women.
I’d love to see a breakdown of the profitability of patents by gender of patent holder.
Even if men were the primary hunters, they’ve actually found that gathering accounted for substantially more of the caloric intake than hunting, so really without women they’d have had no energy to even carry an atlatl.