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’ve been watching The Nanny on Netflix lately, and boy, most MRAs seem to mistake it for their sociology class.
After all you have the Rich Dude, the Beta Butler, the super sluttily slutty slut Fran, and the post-wall Spinster, ta-da!
Is Fran Fine, or even Sylvia Fine, the Ultimate Feminist in their minds?
Yeah, fancy that. In a culture which places absolute focus on women’s appearances at the expense of acknowledging their minds, a very bright woman is interested in careers that would emphasize her beauty.
I know what I want judgybitch’s relationship with LEGOs to be, and it ain’t forcing girls to play with them.
Niiiiiice zing with the LBC = MRM. If JB called this a modest proposal, she’s almost certainly referencing the infanticidal original, ago probably she is suggesting that having women socialized as men is unthinkable, which is probably why she summed up the post by asserting that men make SCIENCE while women make bebes, i.e. boys rule and girls drool, or some equally sophomorish (rhymes with borish!) quip.
@James Haynes,
No no no, didn’t you know that babies spring fully formed as hommonculi from the make and that woman is just an empty shell where the little rascals grow? Honestly, suggesting that women contribute anything of value at all to child bearing; you’re liable to offend masculine sensibility. We all know how delicate and fragile make egos are; it’s the hormones from making all those hommonculi! So please, be gentle on men, we suffer enough as it is making all the babies and also having to make all of the scientific progress OH WAIT, Rosalind Franklin. Gasp! Marie Curie. Zounds! Heloise. Nooooo! The purity of testosterone-fueled science, all rendered meaningless by filthy menstruation and estrogen. *hissssss* It burns us, Precious! Make it stop!!!
Note: in case it’s not obvious I’m being extremely sarcastic here. There have been HUNDREDS of women in science for hundreds of years. The lead researcher in developing an anti-cancer vaccine prophylaxis at University of Pittsburgh is a woman. Most of the researchers working there are women though there are some men too (notably me for a while back in 2007-2008!).
I am worried Fabiola Gianotti, distinguished in her work on the CERN LHC (one of the only large hadron colliders in the world), is now worried her tenure as CERN Council’s next Director-General scheduled to being 1 January is at risk.
Aside from the obvious problems, most women have babies whereas most men do not create large hadron colliders. Or even contribute to the creation. I don’t have stats to back it up but I’d guess most people, including men, don’t even work in STEM. So.
So did the empirical method lead her to conclude without error that we’d all be living in grass huts if women had their way? Or is that just her asinine opinion?
What.the.Does.not.compute.
This post contradicts everything JB and her crew have ever said.
I thought my being a STEM Lordette was a problem, what with my clearly being a masculinised femanizi and bretraying my gender by not pursuing a more womanly appropriate career. I now feel vaguely dirty that JB approves of me and think I need to go and have a bath…
@Fnoicby: There were almost 7000 physicists who had input into the design of the LHC, plus uncounted engineers and technicians. Let us assume that the engineers and technicians made up another 7000.
There are 3.5 billion men on the planet. This means that, if I can do maths, 0.0002% of men (one in 500,000) were involved in the building of the LHC. This is a small number, and judging every group by the actions of the most significant 0.0002% is a little unfair. That’s like saying that everyone in Atlanta is the mayor.
(And that’s assuming that every single one of those people was male, which they obviously weren’t. Depending on the ratio of male to female engineers and scientists, the odds shift even further.)
I feel like some of JB’s core assumptions need to be questioned here, specifically “Technology = good!” and “Technology = the only thing that matters!”
Technology is only one piece of human advancement. “Mastery of the human condition” also requires aesthetic awareness, spiritual development, empathy, self-sacrifice, negotiation skills, and emotional competence. None of these are the exclusive province of men.
Beyond that, technology isn’t a magical rainbow cure-all. For every problem technology solves, it creates several additional problems, which the “MEN INVENTED IT ALL!” crowd conveniently ignores. For example:
It does without the presence of humans. How did that water get dirty in the first place? Technology!
Apparently pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, etc. don’t get counted as specfiically male achievements, even though they’re the direct result of these (alleged) XY empire-building impulses. Men get to take all the credit for the good results of technology, but not the blame for the bad side effects?
Again, a lot of downsides of technology are hidden in that verb “coaxing”…pesticides, antibiotics, GMOs, soil depletion, erosion, diminishing biodiversity, effects on human health from industrial agriculture. Yay for temporarily being able to support seven billion people on the planet, but maybe we shouldn’t be mindlessly cheerleading unchecked growth?
Are we talking fish here? How did the fish stocks get depleted in the first place? Who depleted them? According to JB’s logic, it’s not women out there overfishing and manufacturing a mountain of throwaway plastics that kill marine life. Seems a little disingenuous to take credit for “solving” a problem you created in the first place.
How many men with IQs over 160 feel social pressure to hide their abilities in order to feel worthwhile and dateable? Because that’s exactly what happens to young girls who are interested in math and science. Girls who are interested in STEM get an extra layer of bullying (reinforced by media stereotypes) that targets their femininity. It intensifies right as they hit puberty. Why are we surprised that some girls decide the relentless taunting and ostracism isn’t worth it, and why is that being presented as evidence that women are naturally inferior at STEM?
Forget Lego Friends. Lego should release a line of “Lego Steppers”, with rows of bumps on every surface.
Right! Because acting and dancing are obviously only things that stupid people should be interested in doing!!!
Yeah, the regular Large Hadron Collider is fine, but is there any way that I can get one with a tactical grip? Otherwise I fear that my anxiety that my drinking buddies will laugh at me is going to overwhelm me.
“Are we talking fish here?”
Oh, are we?? Please?
Most fish are quite happy to lay 100+ eggs in a go and while LOTS of the newly hatched ones get eaten by other fish the bigger problem is most definitely that we just don’t give the ones that can live decades upon decades time to mature and lay the literally thousands of eggs fish can lay in their lifetimes. Fuck, my cories lay 50~ a go and since I’m not trying to breed them I just leave them be, even after the tetras eat the eggs, the little ones risk the filter and manage to find food (both not exactly a natural problem), I end up with 10~ survivors. Like, I don’t want more (I have tank space but come on, how many catfish can one person need?!) but I’m debating introducing more since I’m looking at 3rd gen inbreeding when this batch matures!
So yes, fish populations restock themselves, most species quite readily, and some we haven’t managed to breed in captivity at all — my loaches are wild caught, Puff too, but loaches rarely reach 10 in captivity and given their sizes probably live at least twice that in the wild where they apparently breed readily since they’re not threatened despite being popular aquarium residents.
Obviously most men didn’t participate in the building of the LHC because one such thing is enough for whatever they’re used for. Women of the world couldn’t collectively build even one, and then humanity would be forever unable to collide hadrons at large.
(/sarcasm)
Ironically JB seems to have made a better case than this, genuine, French attempt.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/07/french-broadcatsers-anti-sexism-advert-pulled-for-being-sexist
I’ve known any number of scary-smart people who were also scary-good at things like singing, dancing, and acting. Lots of them have been men. Christopher Lee comes to mind. (Not that I knew CL; wish I had.)
I don’t know what AL Franken’s IQ is, but he does have a math degree from Harvard. So there’s at least one man who’s very intelligent and good at STEM who chose to pursue a career in the arts. At least until he ran for Senate.
This post just reminded me that Oct. 13 is Ada Lovelace Day.
http://findingada.com
Brian May is also an astrophysicist, and I’m pretty sure he worked in the NASA at some point (maybe before graduating, or immediately after?).
James Woods, Geena Davis, Steve Martin, Madonna, Shakira: all smarties with 140+ IQs. James Woods had near-perfect SAT scores and dropped out of MIT to pursue the footlights.
You have to have a certain level of intelligence, or at least perceptiveness, to be a good actor.
Is their IQs important however ? I mean, it’s a flawed and partial way to measure intelligence. Being an actor is by itself something that need intelligence (you have to be both able to understand how someone else mind work, and be able to guess enough of the expectation of other to fool them), so I would treat them being good actor and great at human relation (another rather task who generally require intelligence) as sufficent proof that they have above average intelligence.
I guess a degree and/or high IQ remind that people don’t have to be utterly inept at everything social to be good at something else, and that in fact most people are skilled in several things, including social skills, because regardless of you being Einstein, Madonna, or Obama, you can’t get far without being at least good with peoples.
I wonder if the stereotype of “real savants” being socially inept isn’t just the consequence of knowledge being seen as masculine, and social behavior being seen as feminine.
Brian May originally did a maths degree. He later started a PHD but put that on hold when he got into music.
He actually completed his PHD a few years ago. It’s about Zodiacal Light, the glow caused by sunlight hitting dust particles.
One of the nicest things about Brian wad that, when he heard his friend Patrick Moore was having money trouble, he bought Patrick’s house for him so he’d always have somewhere to live.
It was Patrick who actually did work for NASA. He chose the spots for the Moon landings. He didn’t charge though, which might explain his financial difficulties.
All the Queen lot were pretty nerdy about science stuff.
wat
http://judgybitch.com/2013/02/18/her-iq-is-higher-than-einsteins-what-does-she-care-about-her-nails-fake-tanning-and-her-hair-lady-genius-in-action/
What about all the women who are interested in/are doing/ a part of all that world shanging stuff though? Does she just cherry pick stuff to say ”haha girls are vapid girlzzzzz” or ”they’re exceptions lawlz’.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-teenager-might-cure-cancer-2012-7
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/1865045/home-herbalist-and-high-school-feverish-interest-nobel-prize
https://www.facebook.com/amightygirl/photos/a.360833590619627.72897.316489315054055/912972278739086/?type=3&theater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes
Women, like other marginalized voices, have been instrumental in all types of developments and movements, but their voice has largely been drowned out from mainstream discourse in movements from environmentalism to peace activism to science