So our old friend Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield has written a rather silly post on how men are a bunch of STEM geniuses while women are basically designed to make babies. (On average.)
You’ve heard all this nonsense before, I am sure:
Human achievement depends on the tenacity and ingenuity of men, and their willingness to shoot for the moon (or a comet). Our mastery of the human condition, an end to suffering and poverty and disease and destitution requires technology. Water doesn’t magically clean itself, food doesn’t spring forth from the Earth without coaxing (at least not in sufficient amounts to feed all of us), the oceans do not replenish, diseases do not cure themselves and our ability to communicate and connect with each other, from one side of the planet to the other, all depends on technology.
Technology is designed, built, installed, maintained, repaired and operated almost exclusively by men. Without men, we would be living in grass huts, eating mud.
I’ll give her credit for at least suggesting a slightly novel “solution” to women (allegedly) being a bunch of stupid-heads compared to men. And by “novel” I mean “novel” only to MRAs.
Here is what I propose: we socialize girls to be more like men, and more like exceptionally intelligent men, in particular.
As she sees it, that means (among other things) making girls play with legos instead of Barbies (or any other traditionally girly toys), forcing them all to play Dungeons & Dragons (no, really), and requiring that they
study logic and rhetoric and traditional game theory, to sharpen their ability to work through a problem using reason and the empirical method.
Huh. I’m thinking that most of the dudes in the Men’s Rights movement must have slept through that part of their male socialization.
JB’s proposals are weirdly totalitarian, envisioning a mandatory one-size-fits-all approach to education for girls. And the misogyny underlying her glorification of “male” ways of thinking is fairly obvious. Her attempts to challenge traditionally gendered ways of raising girls fall more than a few steps short of feminism.
Sure, feminists have long fought against the pervasive gendering of toys. But they’re also into, you know, kids making choices for themselves. Encouraging girls to play with legos? Great! Forcing all girls to play exclusively with Legos, because you want them to become STEM geniuses? Not so great. Some girls want to play with legos; others prefer dolls. As do some boys.
For what it’s worth, JB describes her proposal as, yes, a “modest proposal,” so it’s not clear if she actually thinks that raising girls the same way as boys is a good idea, or if it’s one akin to eating babies.
Speaking of babies, here’s my favorite line in her post:
[T]he ultimate expression of femininity is a baby, and the ultimate expression of masculinity is the Large Hadron Collider.
Assuming this is true — and Janet Boomfield said it, so it must be! — just imagine what humans could accomplish if men and women worked together.
Yes, I’m talking about the ultimate in technology: the Large Baby Collider.
Oh, wait, we already have one of those; it’s called the Men’s Rights Movement.
But that’s a pretty primitive model. Here’s a prototype for an improved Large Baby Collider. It’s still a long way away from perfect — you may notice that half of the babies have been replaced by dogs — but it’s still a wobbly step in the right direction.
H/T — @TakedownMRAs
I LOL’ed at the Large Baby Collider…. thank you.
Ugh, women are considered to have developed prehistoric agriculture (which makes sense given their role in subsistence hunting/gathering societies as the “gatherers”… they would have had a lot more time and familiarity with the plants themselves).
So I dunno why we would have been stuck eating mud. Read a fucking book, Judgy.
I realize this is like 1% of the stupidity in her post but it stuck out to me.
I don’t understand why so many people think kids need to play with either “girl” toys or “boy” toys. Left to their own devices, I think most kids will play with both. My parents weren’t particularly concerned with what toys went with what gender. I liked Barbies and I liked to build robots out of Legos. My brother liked trucks and My Little Ponies.
Shame there aren’t any women working on the Large Hadron Collider.
Oh wait! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
Yeah, what would silly ladybrained women ever know about atomic physics?
(Whoops, didn’t realise the picture would be that big, sorry.)
(Sitenote: Why is Curie not mentioned at all on Wiki’s atomic physics or atomic theory pages? That’s like leaving Einstein off the relativity page.)
OR, OR, and just here me out here, Janet: We could just stop enforcing gender roles altogether, and encourage people do go do what they want to do as long as they don’t want to hurt anyone else or somehow keep anyone else down.
I mean, look at My Little Pony (Specifically, Friendship is Magic): Every pony has a special talent, and they use that talent to help others.
Some ponies like to bake, some ponies like to science, and both of them do great things for the world in their own special ways. We don’t need to force girls to grow up to be “masculine”, we need to allow kids to grow up however the fuck they want instead of forcing them into rigid gender roles one way or the other.
On another note: Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, and a few other women of science would like a word with you about this “men are science and men did all the things” bullshit.
Yeah, well, all those men who had a beer to relax after inventing shit have women to thank.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7538264/Men-owe-women-for-creating-beer.html
Actually, the more we understand about primitive humans the more it appears that the women hunted as much as the men did. Also that female leadership was more common than it is today.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists
I feel like now is the right time to mention that my mom helped build the Large Hadron Collider, SO THERE
I mean honestly, lots of women were/are involved with the LHC
I also don’t understand why making bodies and building society have to be mutually exclusive. My grandma was a welder during WWII and she had six kids and also raised her niece.
Lots of female scientists have kids. Lots of male scientists have kids and don’t just leave it to the wife to do all the baby raising and housework.
I’m sure Rosalind Franklin, Grace Hopper, Sally Ride, Marie Curie, to name a few, would agree with JudgyBitch.
Of course, the MRA ideology also throws a lot of men under the bus by tying men’s worth directly to their careers. Are disabled men worthless? Retired men? Unemployed men? Men who do menial jobs? Men who do stereotypically feminine work? Stay at home dads? You gotta love how MRAs pretend to abhor traditional gender roles while simultaneously promoting them.
I’ll just leave these here:
http://www.women-inventors.com
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/women.shtml
My brother likes Legos and watches Barbie with me, he was the smartest kid in his classes, he’s a engineer now and has two sons and he has absolutely no problem with them watching my little pony and playing with dolls and we were both raised by a single mother! Suck it JB and other misognists/MRAS!
And JB, STEM isn’t “masculine” they’re for everyone and women and girls can be whatever they want to be (as long they’re not hurting themselves or others of course) that’s part of feminism we don’t force anything down peoples’ throats but we need to show everyone that everything that is traditionally feminine is awesome and there is nothing wrong with it. (And also stop saying “girly” and other phrases like its bad too)
Don’t be whining about feminists/people in general demonizing masculinity when you are doing the same thing to femininity, hypocrites.
And I’m not saying women are superior but we can give life and raise those men; those inventers, builders, etc.
I don’t understand JB or those other female Mras if women are so inferior and don’t use logic why don’t they shut up? I know the answer it’s because they’re liars who think they’re the superior ones and only want attention and money.
Gosh I been real serious these last few posts here are some brain bleach.
http://www-static.weddingbee.com/pics/53947/baby_animals.jpg
http://www.funcage.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/FunCage-cute-baby-animal-7.jpg
http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/2014-01/enhanced/webdr06/8/22/enhanced-buzz-30136-1389237295-0.jpg
“…the oceans do not replenish… all depends on technology.”
So the oceans depend on technology to replenish, do they? That’s some science-y thinking right there.
weirwoodtreehugger
“Of course, the MRA ideology also throws a lot of men under the bus by tying men’s worth directly to their careers. Are disabled men worthless? Retired men? Unemployed men? Men who do menial jobs? Men who do stereotypically feminine work? Stay at home dads? You gotta love how MRAs pretend to abhor traditional gender roles while simultaneously promoting them.”
I just now thought of “11 signs you might be a mra”
http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2013/02/22/11-signs-you-might-be-an-mra/
ALRIGHT, WOMEN, NO SCIENCE FOR YOU. WE CANT HAVE YOUR PERIOD ATTRACTING BEARS TO THE LAB. JUST MAKE A DINNER AND LET MEN THINK ALL OF THE THINGS.
** Years pass **
DID I HEAR SOME DISCOVERING HAPPENING IN HERE? THERE’S NO POSSIBLE WAY A WOMAN COULD HAVE MADE A DISCOVERY. IN FACT, I’M CERTAIN THAT I AM THE ONE WHO DISCOVERED IT. GET BACK TO CLEANING BABIES OR WHATEVER.
** Years pass **
WOMEN, WHY ARE YOU SO BAD AT SCIENCE? IT’S LIKE YOU WEREN’T EVEN TRYING THIS WHOLE TIME. STOP DOING THAT WEDDING AND LEARN SOMETHING USEFUL FOR ONCE
Wait, you mean she is admitting that if treated like men (or boys) in classrooms, women can be just as capible as men in STEM?
but i thought they were not brained correctly to be STEM? Yes, it’s sexist at its core, but isn’t judy pretty much admitting our argument?
There are not enough words in English to describe how fucking ignorant JB’s little rant on how men do ALL THE THINGS and women just squirt out babies, so I am not even going to address that. However, this:
Is sufficiently stupid enough to mock, but not mind-bogglingly ignorant enough to require me to have to come up with new paradigms of mockery just to contain it. So…
I mean, I’m no anthropologist, (I’m actually a lady engineer, despite the crippling handicap of my ladybrain), but I’m pretty damn sure at no point in human history did we ever subsist mainly on mud. Mainly because mud has essentially no nutritional value and humanity as a species would have died off from malnutrition a long-ass time ago, if JB’s little fantasy was true.
Also, why would women EVER eat dirt? I mean, dirt is icky, and something a lady never, ever interacts with willingly, ever. /sarcasm
Apparently the ocean is a confusing thing to right wing reactionaries.
http://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/46289213.jpg
Pander to men much, Judgy Janet?
Oh yes, you do.
The “Judgy” thing? That’s for women. And you always find us guilty.
You have deduced who has more power in this world. Congratulations.
@WWTH
“Left to their own devices, I think most kids will play with both.”
Toddlers and Preschoolers will play with whatever they have in front of them. Grade school kids are obsessed with only playing with the correctly gendered toys thanks to marketing, retail stores, and the media. IMO it’s *way* worse than it was in the 70s and 80s.
I know a lot of feminists criticized Lego Friends, but I love them because they are how I’m introducing my girls to the more “boyish” lines of Legos. And they still get crap from other girls at school that Legos are a “boy’s” toy.
Rampant misogyny in JB’s post aside, all girls should be taught logic and rhetoric and traditional game theory to sharpen their ability to work through a problem using reason and the empirical method. I wish we focused more on math engineering in primary school.
Bleh math & engineering. Why do you hate me phone keyboard?
What? Boys playing with dolls? I told you, mom, those are action figures!