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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.
http://41.media.tumblr.com/578bbc7bda78a13137e43efe36e8d820/tumblr_mtv3n6wCoA1qznva0o1_1280.png
http://www.okmoviequotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/204-Life-of-Brian-quotes.png
Oh, this search pulled up a GIF for Walter:
I’ll just leave this here:
Nothing showed up, Richard.
FYI: Things with HTML tagging seem to simply disappear on this new site.
Direct links work best.
(Now, anyway. Yay, funny GIFs and random pictures!)
The very first quote gets two things wrong right off the bat. In both nomadic cultures and other primates it is females who are the gatherers and provide the bulk of the nutrition while males hunt occasionally to provide supplementary protein. It is also mostly false that men have a better sense of self preservation. One of the reasons boys and young men tend to seriously injure themselves more often with reckless stunts is because their amygdala is not fully developed until they are adults, impairing their cognitive ability to assess risks. Watch any “fail compilation” and note gender ratio.
My observations on kitty behavior concur with other findings. The females are the ones hunting and bringing home the bacon (and lizards, birds, etc) while the male cat doesn’t pull his weight except to challenge territory with the neighboring male cat. It’s literally a pissing contest.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9141
I should say that link is to an article which argues (quite cogently in my opinion) that nearly all evo psych is unproven and unreliable.
I gotta say, I do not normally associate chasing megafauna with pointed sticks with a strong sense of self preservation; that shit’s dangerous.
@GenJones
[CitationNeeded] on the amygdala explanation of why men do dumb things. The alternate hypothesis, that it’s due to socialisation of men to be reckless in order to gain status, strikes me as far more likely.
I mean, I agree with you that young men in our society do do dumb things a lot in order to impress one another and women; I just think I disagree about it being biological in nature, and therefore about it being true in all societies.
In other news (which isn’t really news to actual anthropologists or even people who took a few anthropology classes as undergrads):
http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/early-men-and-women-were-equal-says-new-study?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook
@richard – That post looks interesting, though it’s a bit long for me to get into just now (on an uncharacteristically lovely day).
But, yeah, EvoPsych can lead to some terribly interesting thought experiments and probably does have some legitimate applications, especially where health and nutrition are concerned, but it does usually simply result in a web of just-so stories that holds up only as long as you believe its central conclusions from the get-go.