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One of the standard critiques of Evo Psych is that it’s a collection of “just-so” stories.
That is, the practitioner of Evo Psych takes a look at the admittedly fragmentary data we have about human existence in the long ago and far away Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation, makes up a story that seems like it might explain what was going on, and — ta da! — we have a brave new truth about human nature that carries the imprimatur of Science.
Well, the aspiring Evo Psychologists of the manosphere take this ingenious strategy one step further: instead of making up a story that seems to fit the data, they just make up the data as well.
Take, for example, the wall-of-text disquisition on “female nature” that one Redditor recently posted on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit. LonelyDalek starts off by noting that human beings are in fact a kind of animal, driven at a basic level by our biological instincts to survive and reproduce.
As Mr. Dalek sees it, men sort of specialized in surviving, while women concentrated on the reproducing.
Males’ role in the ancient nomadic life-style was that of hunters and gatherers – so men’s biology leans towards self-preservation a little more.
Yes, that’s right, ladies: WE HUNTED THE MAMMOTH TO FEED YOU, and the thoughtful cave men even brought back some tasty berries for dessert, while their lazy cave wives sat around all day nibbling on prehistoric bon bons and occasionally checking to make sure their babies hadn’t been eaten by a dinosaur or something.
Or so goes the theory. In fact, as far as we can tell, women in hunter-gatherer societies probably did most of the gathering, and possibly a lot of the hunting as well. Whatever the distribution of labor, hunting-and-gathering-wise, women were certainly bringing home their share of the food.
But Mr. Dalek is has already moved on to his conclusion: that men, as hunters and protectors of women, tended to be a lot more willing to resort to violence than their female counterparts. And so, as he sees it, “the primary victims of male nature, thus, are not the other gender,” but other men who are cruising for a bruising.
Apparently Mr. Dalek has forgotten about that whole caveman-dragging-a-woman-by-her-hair meme, which used to be all the rage amongst hack cartoonists.
But it’s when Mr. Dalek gets to women that his just-so-storytelling goes completely into fantasyland.
The primary victims of female nature ARE men. Women’s nature is procreation oriented, because it is their bodies that carry the wombs to gestate and deliver the next generation. It seeks to secure a stable inflow of resources while being incapacitated in the process of child-rearing.
“It?”
This makes men,the resource-procurers, the primary targets of female nature.
Yep, women “target” men by expecting them to contribute something to the upbringing of the children they’ve fathered.
In this paradigm of things, there is no incentive for the women to actually give a damn about the well-being of the man/men providing for her; in fact, it is in her best interest to not be attached to a single man in particular, but keep monkey-branching to a stronger, better provider.
Uh, that is not actually how the world works. Or how it ever worked. These stories you guys tell each other again and again and again are based on NOTHING. They AREN’T TRUE.
But let’s forget that for a moment, because at this juncture Mr. Dalek does the unthinkable: HE SLANDERS KITTIES.
Specifically, the very large kitties known as lionesses.
Lionesses don’t particularly care when the male of the pride is killed by a new, younger male and then kills the cubs. They go on about like nothing’s changed.
DUDE.
Do you not watch Animal Planet? Lionesses are some of the baddest bitches of the animal kingdom and they will seriously fuck you up if you even get near their cubs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djbLLQNWdis
Now, despite the fact that human women aren’t lionesses, and that lionesses don’t actually act the way he thinks they do, Mr. Dalek decides to go ahead and draw this conclusion anyway:
[M]ost women are not evil, they are un-empathetic to men’s plight, and heartlessly oblivious to our suffering.
Oh, and if you thought the poor, harried caveman had it bad, well, dudes today have it like a zillion times worse.
[W]e have the odds against us, but the gynocentric westerns society turns it up several notches. Every harmful aspect of male nature are restrained and kept well-checked by the law. That’s why most men are not murderers, though many men are perfectly capable of murder. …
But no such social or legal protection exists against harmful aspects of female nature- women’s tendency to take advantage of men, their actions that drive men to harm themselves and others, and the systems built over men’s corpses for the exclusive benefit of women.
Quick question dude: if you build civilization on a foundation of male corpses, won’t it start to smell a bit? I mean, I had a squirrel or something die in my wall once, and that was pretty much the nastiest smell I’ve ever met.
Well, the second nastiest. One time a roommate of mine left a potato in a plastic bag in the summer heat, and it sort of liquified. You’d think that the resulting stench might have a hard time making it through an apparently airtight plastic bag. Nope. I hope that I never have to smell anything that horrific ever again.
But I digress. Back to Mr. Dalek. Where were we? Oh, yeah, the part where he said ridiculous shit about women.
Combine this with the fact that women are unsympathetic towards men, and we have the perfect recipe for disaster.
Dude, I really don’t think that most women are unsympathetic to men. They might be unsympathetic to you, but that probably has something to do with the fact that you post long screeds on the internet about how women are a bunch of heartless monsters who don’t even care about their lion cubs, or whatever.
Women are oblivious to the harms they cause, and any voice trying to educate them are muffled and marginalized, and women are encouraged to engage in their careless ways by the society, of course, at the expense of men.
My deepest sympathies go out to any woman who’s had to listen to this dude trying to “educate” her on the alleged deficiencies of her “female nature.”
So, no, I don’t hate women…. they are just completely, and irredeemably unlovable.
If that’s what you say about people you don’t hate, what on earth do you say to those you do?
The only logical thing for men to do is to educate themselves and each other, and stay away from women as much as possible. Find ways to discipline one’s sexual neediness- through practices like martial arts, meditation or things like working out that’ll leave you too tired to be horny. But what ever you do- do not touch a female with a (your) ten-foot pole.
I guess I have to give him a few extra points for managing to work in a jokey reference to his apparently gigantic penis at the end there.
Does every dude in the manosphere have penis on the brain these days?
Looking through Mr. Dalek’s comment history on Reddit, I see that he’s really looking forward to a world in which these nasty female things lose their monopoly in the reproduction business and are thus no longer necessary in order for our species to survive.
If all the women disappeared from the world, I’m certain that the Men of the world will pool together all the resources, to create artificial wombs, and genetically engineer babies. It might take a few years, but I’m sure if all of humanity (minus women) strive for this one goal of rescuing the species, it will happen. Since men carry X chromosomes, we will be able to bring women back if we choose to…
This is the stuff that MGTOW dreams are made of.
Now what do you think will happen if all the men disappear one day?
Uh, Hooters goes out of business? Hillary Clinton defeats Carly Fiorina in a landslide? I won’t have any more material for my blog?
NOTE: Yes, I am aware that gibbons are not technically monkeys but apes.
Evo psych is a legitimate field of study if you’re talking about how evolution has shaped human behavior. But people doing that research can use different terms like “social ecology.” The people who call themselves evolutionary psychologists tend to believe that the brain is a collection of modules that more or less haven’t changed for the past 10,000 years. That assumption makes it irresistible for some people to come up with etiologies about everything.
But the MRA’s are just making assertions without doing any research at all. It seems like the older ones were abusive and don’t want to pay alimony and child support and the younger ones are (at least potential) date rapists or pedophiles.
@nparker:
They hadn’t changed since, like, 1964. They needed something new if they were going to appear in the new series.
@ Falconer
Friendly Daleks with the “human factor” did make an appearance in Troughton’s run. Before Terry Nation started to recycle the same story every time Daleks could be positively chatty.
Not at all to take anything away from the rest of this awesome takedown, but “it” is the appropriate pronoun, there. It’s a very poorly written paragraph, but it was clear to me at first reading that he was referring back to “women’s nature.’
@ Alan Robershaw
Daleks twirling around, making the Doctor dizzy, chanting ‘Dizzy Doctor!’ gleefully and singing their names. Only in Doctor Who!
Yes, women are strangely lacking in that instinct. I keep walking out in front of traffic all the time, and would probably drown in the bathtub without a man reminding me to keep my nose above water.
Dude, you’re talking about people, not stereo components. Stop writing like a dense technical manual. A lot of women work while pregnant and while raising kids, and have done so throughout history. People have babies and care for their kids because they love them, not as a scheme to suck some unsuspecting beta provider dry. Not everything is a Machiavellian sexual strategy.
Citation needed. Lionesses who don’t care when their cubs are killed would get quickly weeded out of the gene pool (according to your beloved Evo Psych Omni-Explainer).
When the suffering is self-inflicted due to a bunch of made-up misogynist fairy tales and entitlement rules that only exist inside your head, then yes, I am heartlessly unsympathetic. The rest of us struggle with the same slights and rejections and heartache throughout life, and manage not to be colossal whiny assyachts about it. Welcome to adulthood.
Caretaker professions attract a lot of women (nursing, home health aides, therapy, teaching, etc.), so the idea that women are cold and heartless is nonsense.
Or, most men have a developed sense of morality and know murder is wrong even without needing to be “restrained” by laws and jails and fines. It’s pretty misandrist to claim that all men are a bunch of slavering criminals barely held in check by the police. Speak for yourself, fella.
Even if you accept the overly glib description of civilization as sitting atop a bunch of stacked corpses, a) men benefit as much (if not more) from civilization’s comforts b) nobody fucking asked you to do those things. Women certainly didn’t ask you to pile up bodies for their benefit. Nobody ever consults women when embarking on war and slavery, they just do it. In fact, women are just as victimized by those things as men. Look a little closer at those corpses, buddy. A large percentage of them are women.
Yes, it must be because there’s a conspiracy, and not because no one is really interested in being “educated” by an ignorant, rambling bigot.
See, the thing is, gestating a baby takes more than just a uterus and an exchange of nutrients. There’s a lot we don’t know about the effects of diet, posture, movement, sleep, breastfeeding, the placenta, the sound of the mother’s voice and heartbeat, the physical bond between the child and its gestational environment. Nobody knows what the effects might be of severing that bond. Babies that are decanted from a machine rather than born of a human are likely to suffer in ways we can’t even anticipate.
I can see artificial wombs being useful for, say, women who are unable to gestate a child, or gay male couples who want a genetic child, but I can’t imagine why you’d want to completely abandon the real thing. It’s pretty hubristic of this guy to think that men (collectively), in the space of a few decades, could design something superior to what millions of years of natural selection have arrived at.
(As an added irony bonus, one of the foremost world leaders in artificial womb research is a woman: Helen Liu).
+10 points to Slytherin for including women in humanity.
“It might take a few years…” If all women disappeared, you’d have at most 70 years to develop this technology and “rescue the species”, then it’s game over. Good luck. And without women, who’ll be making all the sammiches for the scientists?
OK, apart from being completely absurd doesn’t using Lions to illustrate human gender relations kind of undermine the whole “men do the hunting while the lazy women sit at home” myth? Given that it’s the female Lions which do all the hunting…
@ A Hermit
You can’t expect men to actually know anything about what they’re using as part of an analogy! (or have any self-awareness, or sense of irony!) That’s misandry!
(/sarcasm)
hush hush @ahermit…they’re manly manly hunting menz…they can’t be bothered with your “logic” and “internal consistency”
“Women are not capable of love like us men who murder each other and abandon women and children when we want-”
Wait huh?
Anyway about lionesses, I watched a documentary about a lioness who lost her cub or Cubs and she was so traumatized that she would adopt other baby animals but sadly they don’t live for very long because they starve or get attack by other animals further tramatizing her. That is one of the most saddest things I have ever heard in my life.
Also women have always built and fought throughout history. Look up Native American women, Amazonian women, Mongolian women, heck go to google and look up “women who built and fought” anything.
@ nparker
Indeed, and playing trains!
Neat. So grateful for the MGTOW letting me know that everything I do and say is all because my UTERUS commands it! My brain is actually *not* what controls things, it’s my uterus running the show, powering the brain and all the other systems/parts of my body, so much sciencing! Unsurprisingly my uterus has been quite busy, what with the joining the Uteri collective to push through laws designed to take everything men are intended to do away from them, forcing them to abandon their manly natures and stop that murderous bullshit, along with learning to cook, clean, and siphon men’s financial resources in order to feather the nest – so to speak – properly, before filling it to the rafters with babies born of my uterus and supported entirely by hapless men. Ahhh….what a wonderful world my uterus lives in, all its hopes and dreams, it’s biological evolutionary journey finally achieved what uteri wish for most – babies, babies to the rafters and all paid for by men! (laughs evilly, like a uterus could laugh any other way!)
If you count one 14lb dog as a baby, and believe said dog is capable of spontaneously morphing exponentially into perfect copies of itself to reach the numerical total required to fill the house up to the rafters with dog/baby. Not sure how to explain the s/o, but I’m sure the MGTOW sciencer division will figure out something soon….ish.
This is your once-every-twenty-posts reminder that an “all men disappear” scenario does not necessarily include everyone with a penis. Since not everyone seems to grasp that yet.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said “grasp.” >_>
“No uterus, no problem!” – Hey MGTOWs, wouldn’t this be just the best slogan to use with your ads announcing your super great and totally likely to work as planned way of propagating the human species without real live actual women, which is only a mere couple of decades worth of work?
If we only see men as providers, wouldn’t it be more to our advantage to have a population of healthy men rather than sending them all to war to die? What advantage would there be in cackling over the corpses of the poor menz.
WWTH
If we teach men to be violent then “men are victims” but if we teach men to be loving and not be violent then the men are “not men anymore and are victims to the Gynocracy” no matter what, men are “victims”
It seems the complaint is that men can’t do whatever they want without consequences. Poor men, they can’t do whatever they want to women. /s
*leave comment reminding people that man != penis, and by extension woman != uterus*
*next commenter basically says woman = uterus*
*brain asplode*
…
…
*probably shouldn’t have said “extension”*
Who watches Dr. Who and thinks “yea, Daleks, that’s who I should emulate”?
Edit: Also:
– that line about how women are to blame for male violence
– Are there legit evo psych professional scientists? should we be calling this MRA version “psuedo”?
– lionesses are better hunters because they didnt evolve manes that make lion’s heads bulky and obvious and are basically there so they can intimidate other males and dominate females
– if you problem with women is women not working enough (false premise obv), you should support feminism right?
Jewelfox,
It’s definitely always worth mentioning that. The problem is, manosphere pseudoscience is so gender essentialist that it’s kind of hard to discuss their little biotruth theories without winding up using cis – centric language. Just as it’s hard to discuss their heteronormative views on dating, sex, and marriage without using heteronormative language.
I hear you though.
Imagine if the Dalek Sec Hybrid from the Manhattan episodes played trains and sung his name…
(I liked those episodes, but they would have been obviously better with these essential additions…)
PS: Once when I was a kid my parents left a forgotten bag of potatoes in a little-used cupboard so long the whole kitchen gradually took on a nasty smell. After doing the dishes, taking out the trash, and so on I finally searched high and low for the source of the smell and when I found the bag of slop nearly puked. It will forever haunt my dreams. However if you plant an old potatoe it will grow. There’s a poem in there somewhere.
lol @nparker. David if you update again a like or lol button could be fun…
Others have already mentioned it, but the ‘it’ annoyed the hell out of me. How can they claim women don’t sympathise with men, when they refer to women like that?
(I thought they meant female nature for a minute, but that bit about incapacitation I believe shows they didn’t mean that.)
If MRAs EXTERMINATE! women, trans men are done for; nonbinary ppl assigned female too;
but what about trans women? gay men? Some would def want to EXTERMINATE! them too and add all PoC, Jewish people etc to their list.
….i know it isnt a choice but do MGTOWs ever consider trying to be gay as an option?
Assuming, arguendo that their premise has some tenuous connection to reality, this still doesn’t work – if the man/men are providing then it’s definitely in her best interests to care about their well-being because if something terrible happens to the man/men then they’re out a provider.
This thing is apparently a series of massive failures of critical thinking.
If we’re talking about eliminating one sex via genetic manipulation, wouldn’t it make way more sense to get rid of the y chromosome altogether?
To be more precise, the researchers who call themselves “evolutionary psychologists” tend to lean towards the position that fixed brain modules pre-program your reactions to environmental influences. They give less weight to stuff like cultural conditioning and brain plasticity.