Ladies! Have you felt your jaw lately? Does it seem a bit … square to you? Maybe a little bit too square?
This could be the result of TOO MUCH FEMINISM, according to some dude who writes for the ongoing internet dumpster fire known as Return of Kings.
In a recent post looking at the allegedly dire results of fifty years of feminism, “Relampago Furioso” warns that one of the most dire “end results of feminism” is the proliferation of “man-jawed women” who look sorta like dudes.
Mr. Furioso quotes, without linking to it, a recent study that looked to see if feminist activist lady women are more “masculinized” than your standard issue lady women.
The study-conductors gave feminist activists a test to see how bossy they are, and measured the length of their ring and index fingers, because apparently fetuses exposed to a more masculine mix of sex hormones at a critical stage of their stay in the womb end up with ring fingers longer than their index fingers.
Turned out the feminist activist lady women were pretty bossy, and they also had “significantly more masculine 2D:4D” finger ratios!
And so, despite the fact that the only physically “masculine” trait discussed in the research is this finger thing — which is determined by sex hormones in the womb, not by anything one does as an adult — Mr. Furioso seems to think that feminist “indoctrination” will cause ladies to develop unsightly “man-jaws.”
If you think women are becoming manlier—they are. In fact, it’s becoming clearer sexual dimorphism (distinct male and female appearance and behavior) is an enemy of social engineers who want to see the sexes blend into one androgynous human pod in the coming generations.
An androgynous human pod? OH NO IT’S ALREADY HAPPENING!
Mr. Furioso quotes from the bossy lady finger study, and then offers this “translation.”
Feminists have a ton of testosterone coursing through their veins, and as more women are taught to act like men instead of being nurturing mothers even more man-jaws will emerge in the years ahead.
Lady from esurance ad, your rebuttal?
Mr. Furioso, your final statement?
It seems social engineers are catering to already existing instincts in women by encouraging them to be copies of men rather than copies of their grandmothers, bringing out the worst in women rather than the best.
Wait, this dude writing for a website run by a pickup artist who fetishizes very young women wants women to be copies of their grandmothers?
Honestly, dudes, do you actually think any of this through before posting it?
@Rhuu
…
Seriously?
I’ve dipped into the study a tad, and while they have found a statistically significant mean difference one has to bear in mind the relatively poor sample size, for example (around 25 female respondents out of 100 attendees were included in the analysis if I’m reading this right).
They have mentioned 3 previous studies which use finger ratio measures in this context to their credit, but as with the field of psychology and also how the pubkic consume science in general people tend to like false positives and explanations hinging on nature.
I, of course, am no statistical genius. Where are all the science people here when you need ’em?
@Pol
I guess I was unclear then. I didn’t say anything about “your science”, I said your “science”. By which I meant your bullshit that you wanna pass as science. So, to be absolutely clear, what I actually meant was that no one really wants to hear your thoughts about gender not being a scientific fact or whatever.
Imitate a grandmother….
Well, the grandmother I was named for grew up squirrel-hunting because that’s how they could eat on a regular basis. She was so good at it, she was nicknamed “One-Shot [firstname].” From humble beginnings she managed to go to college (where she lettered in basketball) and got married, accumulating property as they could.
She had her flaws, which I won’t get into here, but she had gumption. I’m proud to be her namesake.
What “bullshit” that I want to pass as science? It is a scientific fact that men and women don’t really exist. They are just figments of our imagination.
Why does no one want to hear this? Is it because it is common knowledge and passé? Well OK then.
Although, I do find your hubris in attempting to speak for everyone else to be a bit disappointing. Perhaps you would like to walk back on your comment a little bit now, Sinkable?
To add, there is also a 1000-respondent study into finger ratio and dominant behaviour in female participants from 1983. Albeit, using a newspaper survey conducted with the help of the Daily Express… in 1983.
It’s interesting stuff but definitely to take with a grain of salt if trying to build an understanding of human behaviour.
I’d be proud to be like my Nana (mom’s mom). She left home when she was 21 to pursue a nursing career even after her father told she was “supposed” to stay home for the rest of her life to take care of her parents (a grand old Irish tradition, apparently). She went on to have a great career in which she was well loved and respected, wrapping up her career as a floor supervisor in a major hospital in Staten Island.
I still can’t tell whether Pol’s idiocy is a failed gotcha attempt or a painfully unfunny “Parody,” but either way, can we ban them for transphobia and just generally being a leaky bag of decomposing wildebeest anuses yet?
I am pro trans, SFHC. Just because I think that gender is a construct, and even more than that, that biological sex is on shaky ground too, does not mean that I am somehow anti-transexual. And I most certainly am not that.
@Pol, I don’t want to hear your views on the science surrounding gender because 1) you’ve been trolling here for about a zillion years, so I’m not really interested in what you have to say about anything and 2) your depiction of social constructs as “not real” is reductive in the extreme.
I don’t at all mind Sinkable John speaking for me.
OK Viscaria. You can go with “reductive” as a flawed approach. And I don’t disagree that it can be so actually… But I will say one thing: I am not a troll. And I have not been commenting here for a zillion years. I like David’s post and I like the commentators here, as have been doing since long before I started posting to this fine blog.
The finger ratio thing is supposedly a good predictor of how well you’ll do in the 100 metre sprint.
Now if only scientists could come up with a similar indicator for racehorses.
And also, it is well late for me to be still awake, even though I am on my holidays.
Goodnight, good people.
Actually, nah. I felt pretty comfortable “speaking for everyone” since I was, like, y’know, just echoing things that have been said countless times by everyone else already. Just ’cause you try very hard not to notice how everyone’s been calling you out on your bullshit, doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.
So nah, not walking back.
By the way, “Sinkable” is an adjective. Using it as a short-hand makes no sense at all. For the extra exposition, here goes : Sinkable John is an anagram of my real name, which is super convenient since “John” is also the english equivalent to my first name. Long story short, don’t call me that.
Ha, these guys! My grandmother was a smokin’, hard-drinkin’, workin’, divorcin’ and marryin’ much-younger-men “harlot”.
These guys aren’t happy with me and certainly wouldn’t be happy with my grandmother, either.
Not strictly relevant but under my administration peapod headwear for babies would be mandatory.
My grandmothers (three of them, since my mom was adopted) all died quite young. One died from complications of pregnancy. I guess this doofus would approve of that?
wwth said
Mine are, too. Maybe it means we’re juuuust about there in terms of being masculinized feminists? I’m gonna do ring finger workouts just to be extra sure!
I’m pretty confident that anything Pol might have to say is not worth hearing, so, yeah, John can speak for me there, too. Under other circumstances I might be interested in a good discussion about sex/gender, but I don’t think Pol is going to provide it.
Trolling is as trolling does. You don’t troll 100% of the time, but you troll often enough that I am comfortable characterizing you as a troll.
And the only way to fight the social engineers is by social engineering!
Sweet fancy moses these people make my head hurt.
? ? ?beeee-boooo beeee-boooo? ? ?
? ? ?Science Emergency! Coming through!? ? ?
Oh man. Evolutionary Psychology. Well, this’ll be fun.
First of all – apologies to any actual evolutionary psychologists in the audience. Please speak up and correct me if you’re reading! I’m not in EP at all, I’m just familiar with reading the white paper train and critiquing papers, and am familiar with the loosey-goosey state of new fields of research.
EP is interesting, but it’s a field without a central theory. They have some lovely concepts and ideas and thoughts, but they aren’t concrete and they aren’t – well, they aren’t really science yet. I say that as someone who works in educational analytics, which is a field that is also sorta loosey-goosey in a similar way.
Problem with EP is that it isn’t science. Sorry, @epronovost. It’s phrenology. Like, in one of the papers I discuss below, there’s actually a discussion of modern skull shapes. EP finds correlations, hypothesizes that those correlations are present due to evolutionary pressures, and then … that’s it. There’s no actual evidence. The hypothesis is in the discussion. Methodology is about discovering the correlation, and that’s it. Exactly like phrenology – methodology is about measuring the skull, hypothesis is the discussion.
EP needs to harden up its central premise, that psychological traits are evolved. It’s going to need a lot of molecular biology and a lot of neuroscience to even approach that. Until then it’s sky-castles built by assholes.
Now for the fun. I dug into the paper that David linked, the subject of the article. It’s fucking evocative.
Four authors on this paper. Guy Madison, Ulrika Aasa, John Wallert, and Michael A. Woodley. The first two, Madison and Aasa, are medical researchers with 45 and 20 papers, respectively. Their papers are about muscle fatigue, exercise, and musical rhythm – an eclectic mix, but there’s a theme of motor neurons and movement going on here. These two are the head and assistant head of the lab, almost certainly.
Wallert has two publications, both 2014. This one and one on the effect of rhythmic sound on aerobic activity recovery rates. Wallert is the undergraduate lab assistant. Probably did the grunt work. No publications since 2014, so likely just worked for a summer and then moved on. Sorry that you had to work on such a shitty paper, Wallert. You deserved better.
Woodley, though. Interesting. Woodley has 10 publications, spanning back to 1990. Works at a different university than the other three – visiting researcher? Where the others don’t really have a theme of evopsych, Woodley does. First paper, in 1990? Functional analysis of cryopreserved veins. I.e. if we supercool this vein, then warm it back up, is it still useful? I.e. i.e. immortality through cryo-preservation guyse its really real the singularity is coming! (Okay, that’s a bit of snark, but still. Weird thing for the first paper!)
Then a long gap until 2007, at which point he’s publishing things about “human taxonomic diversity,” with articles like:
Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications
Quite literally, he’s saying that there are five distinct human sub-species. He points to the fact that the genetic differences between a sub-Saharan African and a Caucasian are greater than the differences between two recognized subspecies of gorilla. (Here’s where a discussion of skulls comes in, too. He says “skull shakes isn’t adequate for determining subspecies”, but only because it disproves his thesis.)
Heterosis doesn’t cause the Flynn effect: a critical examination of Mingroni
The Flynn effect is the fact that IQ scores have been rising over time. Author is saying that inbreeding isn’t the cause.
Ability differentials between nations are unlikely to disappear.
This paper is a comment on another paper which claimed that the Flynn effect would eventually wipe out the educational gap between poor and rich nations. Author is arguing against this, saying that other factors are at work which will prevent this.
So, someone trying to justify his racism with science. In the first article he literally talks about the “social constructionists” that are trying to challenge his pure science with their dirty, dirty, SJW ethics.
Those papers are poorly cited – the second one is the only one that has more than a couple citations, and even then they’re mostly from authors who were just talking about the Flynn effect in general, it seems. So he’s a racist, shouting into the wind. Same as all the other HBD nonsense, really.
Then there’s a gap of related papers until 2016, when he’s writing for a new university in Germany instead of at Oxford, talking about the paradox saying that there’s a genetic pressure in the US to have less education (poorer education == more children) but yet people are spending longer periods of their lives in education. He claims to have a solution to that paradox, but I unfortunately don’t have access to that paper – I don’t get PNAS.
(This isn’t a paradox, of course, because human beings are not driven by genetic concerns on such an abstract topic as whether you go to university or not)
That paper’s cited by one other paper – also written by Woodley. Nothing too notable there, just fun, really.
Then there’s the paper that David and the Manosphere cites:
Feminist activist women are masculinized in terms of digit-ratio and social dominance: a possible explanation for the feminist paradox.
His definition of the “Feminist Paradox” (no one else calls it that) is “The feminist paradox, or the dissociation between feminist self-identification and belief in equality.” He supports this with a study where:
“major contributing factors to feminist self-labeling were (1) positive evaluation of feminists and (2) previous exposure to feminist thought. However, (3) recognition of discrimination and (4) support of feminist goals (which included items about equality) did not make any unique contributions to the probability of identifying as a feminist”
That study seems okay, and is pretty much what one would expect – people are tribal. Notably, though, only 8% of his cohort were people who identified as feminist while not supporting all major feminist concepts (e.g. the wage gap).
From this he basically runs off with the assumption that feminists are purely tribal, and calls people who are not feminist but believe in the concepts of feminism “egalitarians”. Cue eye roll.
It gets more annoying when, later, he says:
“One explanation that has been suggested for why women resent the feminist label is “the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of feminists and feminism by the popular media,” which has depicted “feminists as deviant, man-hating, unrepresentative radicals who were a threat to society” (Zucker, 2004, p. 425)”
And then goes on to provide evidence for this – and then just leaves it on the table to talk about finger length and bossiness! A fun quote is “It has for example been reported that there are self-identified feminists who argue for the abolition of the nuclear family, that all men are potential rapists, and so forth” – a stellar example of trying to use an existential to argue a universal! Also, cue discussions of Gender Feminists vs Equity Feminists. Another eye roll.
His main reason for saying “That stuff up there doesn’t matter, what matters is they’re a bunch of testosterone-fueled man-jaws” is:
“The feminist paradox, or the dissociation between feminist self-identification and belief in equality, and the alleged misrepresentation in the media all suggest an underlying inconsistency or conflict, to which we will now turn our attention”
Elide, elide, elide. He gives a fairly good list of the feminist platform positions (gender as a social construct, power imbalances, etc), and then says “But instead of that, evopsych – women evolved to their role, so they should stay there. (note: hyperbole present)” I.e. here comes the unsubstantiated hypothesis.
Frankly, this is what bad science looks like – loads of citations, sophisticated argument, and enough reality to look convincing to an editor who is working outside of their experience. But this paper’s bullshit and I would have turned it on its ass for being so inadequate on its self-critique. Author has a history of trying to justify racism, and now he’s trying to justify sexism. That sort of directed thinking can’t result in real science.
Sorry for the teal deer! That was longer than I thought it would be. Interesting jaunt down the rabbit hole, though. This author really seems like he’s been trying to prove his racism and sexism with science and is getting slapped for it as he goes. Quite a fall from Oxford to where he is now. Hopefully he ends up self-publishing on a crank website soon.
What is it with all the idealized grandmothers? I hear it in fat shaming too. “Eat like your grandmother!” They obviously never saw either of my grandmas’ fridges, which were filled with teh ebil processed foodz. Because that was in fashion during their heyday.
I swear, every Gen X fedora thinks he personally grew up down on the farm during the Depression, even the ones I know grew up playing Nintendo in the burbs like everybody else.
So, my grandmothers: One landed a glamorous man in her post-wall years and stayed together with him till death did them part. The other ditched an alcoholic husband and lived a contented single life in her later years. Both were fat.
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/answers/3608000/3608329_1417500494151.02res_430_360.jpg
Your teal deer was fantastic, Scildfreja. Very teal but an appealing shade of teal.
http://www.okdani.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/nene-eye-roll-really.gif
> Says they are “pro trans”, insists they’re not a troll.
> Uses a word that many trans folks have said is not okay to use.
Okay Becky. The word you’re looking for is “transgender”, not “transexual”. I dgaf what you think of gender or sex as a concept (mostly because I think your theories are bullshit), but you will use the right words when referring to other people or groups of people.
You don’t get to dictate what you call other people. They get to tell YOU what to call them.
As many a cat owner will tell you, there’s a vast difference between putting a cat in a box, and having the cat get into the box of their own free will. Same shit applies here.
Pol, are you taking a poll? Since you thought to chastise Sinkable John for speaking for a group you are always actively trolling.
My vote is you knock off your passive-aggressive disingenuous bullshit and gtfo.
Is that clear enough?