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
@Ohlmann- No, IQ scores aren’t that relevant for actors. It’s just a way of illustrating that high intelligence doesn’t always mean being more interested in things than people. Scoring high on math tests doesn’t mean you’re required to spend your life working with metal machines that blink and bleep and smash particles and move big piles of objects from here to there, as JB seems to think (and also my high school math teacher, who bugged me and bugged me to join Math Team and never understood why I wanted to do sports and play music instead. It wasn’t that I didn’t love math, I just loved those other things more, but he felt I was frivolously wasting my One True Gift on pointless, stupid activities).
It annoys me that certain types of intelligence that are coded “male”, like pattern recognition and mechanical ability, get far more respect and attention than types that are coded “female”, such as social and emotional intelligence. Maybe because they’re easier to quantify and rank, so they feel more legitimate to the sort of person who scores well on that kind of test?
Agreed. The notion of IQ testing has always been dubious to me, as ‘intelligence’ is a difficult concept to define. ‘ Intelligences’ seems more accurate, with a wide variety of intersections and definitions, and makes the idea of a measurable aspect seem ludicrous.
This dude back in 2012 sums it up:
I’m… confused. If having a baby is the true expression of my womanhood or whatever, does the hysterectomy make me…. not a woman? Unable to express my womanhood? Can I be womanly through playing with my nephew?
@ Jenny & Co.
I understood JB’s post to be a drawn-out joke (though IMO it was drawn out past the point where the joke still worked). What I was getting at (seriously) was that I’m not certain all of JB’s confederates would be willing to accept her joke even as a joke. Once again, I point to the example of Anita Sarkeesian playing video games — Sarkeesian was scarcely proposing that society be reconfigured from the ground up, and she wasn’t saying anything which wasn’t true, but the gamergaters reacted as though she’d blown up Mt. Rushmore or assassinated a Pope. Just saying.
I am so loving that photo! She looks so happy and proud. What an absolute cutie.
I think that JB has paraphrased the worlds’ most hypocritical ‘feminist’ Camille Paglia. I remember her saying that if society was run by women we would all still be living in mud huts. I think JB is just taking it to the next level and has decided that we would actually be eating mud.
I think JB is like the kind of women that Andrea Dworkin talked about in ‘Right Wing Women’. Obviously SHE isn’t the kind of woman she is so nasty about. Obviously different ‘rules’ apply to HER!
Clearly what JB is saying is that women are pretty good at being women, but men absolutely suck at being men. I mean, if they really were all super smart science geniuses, we would be neck deep in hadron colliders. I mean, seriously, dudes. Cis women have been having babies since the beginning of our species, and you have managed, what, one, maybe two large hadron colliders in all this time? You’re not pulling your weight!
“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from “Women and Economics”, 1898.
“She tests extraordinarily high, and likes hair and make-up and wants to be a showgirl. Fair enough, Lauren, but I sincerely wonder how many men with IQs over 160 are interested in acting and dancing?”
yeah it’s not like an actress ever invented anything or contributed to modern technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Frequency-hopping_spread-spectrum_invention
@ Cyberwolf
Nor quite the same thing but Barbara Cartland designed the gliders used at Pegasus Bridge.
@Catalpa
Yeah, and those babies women have been having? They’ve done a LOT more to change the world than one measly hadron collider. Beethoven’s 9th, the Taj Mahal, rugby, cars, electrical appliances…literally everything you see around you was invented and discovered and built by former babies.
Women are the ones who should get 100% credit for civilization, since it’s their babies that built it.
@Alan
Ha, I trusted you’d be better informed on the subject 🙂
I don’t think it’s been brought up yet, but does anyone else detect an element of racism in the whole grass hut thing? People tend to associate grass huts with sub Saharan Africa mostly. Although climate controlled buildings made with modern technologies are the most safe and comfortable, that doesn’t mean living in a grass hut is a sign of inferiority. Some pre-industrialized cultures built dwellings out of grass and mud, some out of stone, some out of wood etc. It depended on what made sense for the climate and what was available. What’s so bad about grass huts?
In addition to this being a misogynistic “men built all the things!” rant, she snuck in a little “white people built all the things!” in there too.
Being generous I’m willing to assume she’s chosen grass huts as they’re generally theorised to be the first constructed shelters.
Although a better rhetoric for her argument would have been a reference to caves. If she’s giving women credit for grass huts then she’s saying they innovated the construction industry.
Hey, I’m confused here. I thought JudgyBitch was an advocate of ‘men’s rights’? Just wondering how calling women stupid helps lower the rate of rape in the military and in prison, or helps men who are victims of violence, or helps tackle the appallingly high suicide rates etc etc
@EJ, thanks for crunching the numbers. And catalpa, it does seem there is room for improvement if they’ve only produced one LHC in all this time, doesn’t it? Women seem to be womaning much more efficiently.
@Robert: Great quote!
Of all the crap that MRAs say, I think the claim that women don’t accomplish anything… that one bothers me the most.
I recall Roosh making some blog post (he’s not the only one) about how an over-educated woman wilts his boner. Most MRAs definitely hate educated, accomplished women.
Starting in the school years, a girl will be “rewarded” with male attention and validation, based only on how hot she is and by how nicely she decorates his arm. She may or may not have other ambitions or accomplishments, but a lot of guys have no idea because that’s not the least bit interesting to them.
Some guys don’t *want* a girl with ambitions. But they’ll turn around and criticize her anyway for her lack of accomplishments. Make up your minds, guys!
Perhaps they thought this was a real public information film?
https://youtu.be/LS37SNYjg8w
Almost right on the wording here, but not quite (note; given the rest of your post, I actually suspect that you were shooting for something closer than what follows). This phrasing makes it sound like feminists want to start teaching girls just like we currently do boys–ie, ‘boy socialization’ is the standard, and girls should be moved to it. That’s the straw-feminist position that JB is trying to satirize, actually.
Feminism wants to take the entire notion of gendered socialization out behind the woodshed with a shotgun. Boys and girls should receive the same sort of socialization, and that really should only have some elements of what we currently do, in either case. The rest can be discarded from the chaff.
In short, ‘snakes and snails and puppy dog tails’ needs to get pitched along with ‘sugar and spice and everything nice’.
General thing — I am beginning to get slightly squicked by the amount of “women make babies” in this thread. I can’t pinpoint it, and please nobody read this as attacking you, I totally get that JB started it, but the association of women make babies, women are good at making babies, etc is edging a bit close to my comfort level. I guess I’m just generally grumbling about the idea that all women have, or had, a uterus, which isn’t really fair since I’ve seen it here as specifically cis women. Blarg, it’s probably just me having a generally gender grumbly day, carry on as you were 🙂
WWTH — yeah, I’m feeling you on the racism, for bonus dumb mud is actually a pretty good building material, and grass huts? Ummm, hay has been picking up some support in the Midwest where it is abundant — insulates well, isn’t prone to being eaten by bugs of any sort, coated in stucco (a thing that is rather like mud) it’s weather resistant, in short, grass and mud are actually fairly good for making a home. But hey, “those people” do it, so it must be rubbish right?
Um, I work at a major aerospace firm that gets into the news a lot, and I hate to tell her that those whiz-bang achievements are almost entirely team efforts. Big teams. And on those teams are a LOT of women engineers, scientists, and high-level managers (of both projects and people). Oh, and did I mention that I was a sole breadwinner for 4 kids for over 20 years in a STEM career? I must not have been too bad.
Really, they make science and engineering sound like it’s some upper body strength, Indiana Jones thing, but it’s not like that at all.
Hey everyone – I just found you guys and I’m so glad. This is my first post. When I read this piece of gibberish, the first thing I thought was that she was quoting Camille Paglia (“mud huts”) but neglected to attribute. Does she do that a lot? Plagiarize, I mean?
@bodycrimes
Hey! I (we) missed you!
It’s another way you can’t win with MRAs. “Masculinity is the best thing ever! I wish I was gay! I wish women were more masculine! Wait, I want femininity and softness and all that good stuff! Women shouldn’t be masculine! BAWWWWWWWW”
Well, I suppose that at least her sons will have a healthy ego and an attitude of entitlement, which are totally characteristics that *never* steer a kid wrong or make them think that the world owes them everything because they are there.
Wait….they should be old enough to no longer need their mother, because at a certain age it’s all about the manly things and the process of raising boys into men can *only* be successful if they are allowed to go live with a pack of wolves in the vast (and undisclosed specific gps coordinates) wilderness! All that needs to be done is to open the gate to the backyard while JB is distracted with whatever she does all day and night….Run with the wolves boys, quick, while you still can!
@Cyberwulf – I was just thinking about Hedy Lamarr when I was reading the other comments.
Also the phrase “Large Baby Collider” in David’s article made me guffaw. Guffaw! Or chortle. Maybe both.