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.
Quituus,
Nice!
How accurate? Very. I’m a woman, born in the 70’s in Texas. Almost everything I wanted to be growing up involved STEM, and I got so much crap for it. Mostly it was people saying, “I don’t know. You’d have to be good at math, and girls aren’t good at math.” type of thing. How many times did I get “Well, you could teach science. Why don’t you become a teacher?” (implying at a grade-school level). Not that there’s anything wrong with that, there isn’t, but this was in response to me saying I wanted to be a geologist, astronomer, and marine biologist.
I ended up doing my undergrad in music, and now I’m doing graduate work in STEM (Computers). I do have to constantly fight the feeling that I’m not smart enough, even though I make straight A’s. Any time I don’t get a concept right away I feel like it might be because I’m a woman and this is “NOT FOR GIRLS”. I keep repeating to myself that I just haven’t gotten it yet, and that this is a very normal part of the process for anyone learning anything.
Geez, these men. All they think about is Stonehenge.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbyzgeee2mg&w=560&h=315%5D
Also, @Catalpa:
I salute you. ~all hail the mighty glow peen~
@Quietuus: Brilliant! I especially love the astronaut with his, uh, civilization-builder hanging out on the moon. Gotta make sure it gets full credit for having made the trip possible.
@ EJ (the other one)
I read this initially as “thesaurussausage”, and then had a vision of manosphere morans feeding words into a meat grinder. It’s perfect.
@Falconer – When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in half of a hobby period outfit and carrying a misspelled sign.
I wish ROK fans wore some sort of badge which would be visible at all times so that you know you should avoid them before even engaging in a conversation. That article might be parody, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen something like that in the manosphere. Very often it seems that MRAs don’t really want to make things better for men, but instead make them worse for women.
@Buttercup Q Skullpants:
It is one of the inherent traits of fascism that it is always, *always* LARPing its own highly-mythologised history. Shoddily.
Actually, in the game Civilization: Call To Power, building the Stonehenge ‘Wonder’ gives you an automatic +25% food production, presumably under the assumption that it was primarily a calendar for tracking seasonal shifts. It’s a pretty useful early-game Wonder for early growth.
Interestingly, in that game, while most of the military units have male voice actors for the three or so different lines the unit uses, some of the highest-tech units have female voice actors instead; this includes the War Walker (all-terrain mobile artillery unit) and the Plasmatica (powered-suit infantry unit).
For those of you ALSO freaking out about Fallout…
OMMMMMGGGGGG
Interestingly, gender inequality at least in terms of labor might be a result of the agricultural age, with gender equality an evolutionary advantage of homo sapiens: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists
That is magnificent, Quietuus!
@Falconer
It might be political statement, now that I think about it. Only a lazy taker who refuses to work would do something like finish a costume or spell check a sign. Real Americans are too busy leading the free world to pay attention to that kind of trivia.
And then there is this:
“At the 1966 “Man the Hunter” conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population. Therefore, no surplus of resources can be accumulated by any single member.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Modern_and_revisionist_perspectives
XCOM 2? Sounds like good motivation to finish XCOM 1 to me. Hopefully This sequel will not be as brutally hard as X-Com:Terror from the deep
FALLOUT 4
OMIGODOMIGODPMIGODOSDFHJADFJGASDJFGASJF
I need to buy a PS4.
Which next gen console has the best games?
maybe i should just get a new rigs
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=][LNOLZBNXHKCdfx
Hey, guys! I thought you all, including David, would “enjoy” this. Ernest Belfort Bax, considered by many in the Men’s Rights Movement to be their Proud Papa, was a barrister in England in the late 19th century. He died in the 1920’s.
He was a Marxist, a philosopher, and a true-blue patriarch of impressive credentials. I present, for your reading “pleasure” and “edification” the following url, where you can read all about him.
Let’s do, and then we can all schmooze, laugh and have serious and intellectual discussion about it. Well, as intellectual and serious as our poor estrogen-fogged major ganglia will allow.
http://ernestbelfortbax.com/
Woo!
Hmn, I’m not so sure it’s that they want to make things worse for women, as a goal, per se. It’s more like they want to threaten women in order to force them back into the (imaginary) role that women occupied in the good old days, where they only existed for sex and to uncomplainingly raise their owners children without government assistance or any kind of money from the dad other than what he deigns to bestow her with.
Basically they’re saying “Yeah, you want all these rights, fine, but only if you let us murder a ridiculous number of women to even the scales of you getting the unbelievable privilege of being treated almost like a sentient human being.
Or, you know, if that deal doesn’t work for you, you could always go back to being chattel. Then we promise not to murder you, except when your owners feel like it. That sounds like a totally fair deal to me.”
What makes these guys loose their shit is when women (and other uppity non white hetero cis Christian males) don’t submit and chose the obvious option that the MRAs present to them.
Hm, maybe I should have put Christian or atheist in there, there’s a fair amount of atheists in that pool too. Eh.
Jackie’s saying what we’re all thinking. She’s just more concise about it.
@Fabe:
Heh, funny story. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. So there was this bug in the original UFO Defense that made every game play on Beginner, even if you selected Demigod (or whatever it was called). So the fans complained that the game was too easy.
So Microprose made the sequel harder, just in general. Hate Chryssalids? Have Lobstermen instead. I haven’t heard if there’s a mirroring bug that makes every game of Terror from the Deep as hard as it can be, but there doesn’t need to be if your starting longarm only has half of the ammo as in UFO Defense.
My very first blockquote mammoth.
*sheds tear*
Wii U. It’s not even close. Literally every game worth playing on the other two is available on the PC as well (including Fallout 4, when it’s out).
I think that makes you an official regular, EJ 2. =P
@Catalpa
That’s pretty much it. Reading through the comments on that ROK piece (I am going to need SO MUCH WINE after this) there are a disturbing amount of MRAs that seem to want the satire to be true, particularly the Department for Women’s Misery. Couple that with the obvious few that go “well women can’t DO anything other than make babies, soo…”
Aaaand I’ve just got engaged with an idiot troll who sincerely believes that the law states businesses MUST hire women over men, or the employers will be arrested and then beaten or shot by cops. He almost said word for word that equality for women means taking the same things away from men.
@rugbyyogi @PolicyofMadness @ej @Laura
Thank you for sharing! That’s interesting, and kudos to all of you who have overcome these pressures! I’m a part-time teacher, so it’s interesting to hear about the difference that a teacher can make.
@Pandapool
Yup! Higher IQ does mean better at super manly man logics. By two points! That proves everything, because naturally had the average been higher for men by EVEN A SINGLE point, you just know that some asshat will be all “checkmate feminists! this is the ultimate proof that men are more logical than women!!”
@SFHC
I know, but I’ll have to get a whole new computer because there’s no way my current rig will be good enough.
And as much as I’d like a Wii U, it’s expensive, and I’d rather get a PS4 so I can get PS3 games (because, stupid me, I went Xbox 360 the last generation and missed The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls and shit). If it was as expensive as a Wii was, I’d snatch it up too, but it’s not.
But if there’s any awesome exclusive Xbox games or any awesome exclusive PS4, I’d like to know so I’d get them along with Fallout 4.