Here’s an amazing little Twitter exchange:
Yep, that’s right. The weird uncle of the Men’s Rights movement online is criticizing the Anne Frank Center for “whining” about the HOLOCAUST.
Apparently the murder of millions pales in comparison to the truly important issues faced by men today, like the problem of women being a bunch of “c–ts.”
NOTICE TO EXTREMELY LITERAL MINDED READERS: That last sentence contains sarcasm.
Thanks to TakedownMRAs on Twitter for catching this one and grabbing the screenshots.
On the racist uncle thing: I had some racist grandparents (on one side of the family; the grandparents on the other side actually did some civil rights activism back in the day).
But when I was a kid I lived next door to one of the most famous racists in the world! Well, he was mostly famous amongst other racists. The one, the only Revilo Oliver. Yes, his first name is his last name spelled backwards. He was so right-wing that he helped to found the John Birch society then quit it years later because he thought it was a communist front group. He routinely referred to Jewish people as “sheenies,” an old slur I don’t think anyone uses anymore. (I don’t think many people used it back then either.)
He’s been mostly forgotten, but still gets cited occasionally by far-right/alt-right types.
It appears that Revilo Oliver was also something of a proto-brotheist: “Oliver believed that religion was one of the major weaknesses of his nation and civilization. In a 1990 article, he characterized Christianity as ‘a spiritual syphilis’ that ‘has rotted the minds of our race and induced paralysis of our will to live.’ ” (Wikipedia)
Yeah, I believe he thought that Christianity was basically an evil Jewish plot. Did I mention he was really really anti-Semitic?
I’m reminded of the wonderful Philomena Cunk’s comments about Trump:
D’oh. Wrong thread.
Almost every member of my immediate family is or has been part of the (UK) police force – both parents, sister (whose every relationship has been with a copper), aunts and uncles… You can imagine, if you have the stomach for it, the kind of jokes and stories that would be told at family gatherings (or gatherings of my various other ‘uncles’, who were work-colleagues of my dad). The pleasant conversations were the ones about drugs and murder – get onto politics and it was game over for my brain. But the ‘jokes’ were the worst – it was like a Bernard Manning show, every single day of my life.
Just another example of these guys really not wanting to confront ugly truths, be they past or present. It’s the same mechanism that has white people scrambling to find fault with BLM: they don’t like being reminded that there’s still a problem that they haven’t dealt with yet because it doesn’t affect them.
But what gets me about this exchange is that it’s not the fact that Donald Trump was the one who invoked the spectre of Nazi Germany, breaking Godwin’s Law so hard that it became a Twitter trend that same day, that bothered poor Mr. Elam; it was that the Anne Frank Centre condemned Trump for his careless comparison that had Elam taking to Twitter. The AFC didn’t even ask for an apology in that tweet.
I’d like to set him down with whoever came up with the theory–set forth in all seriousness in a book that I was assigned for a graduate-level human sexuality class in all seriousness–that white women and black men are evolutionarily drawn to one another, and let them discuss.
As for the toy preferences, I’m really not sure there’s a way to untangle the social conditioning/natural preference knot on that one. My daughter is four. She likes pink, fairy princesses, and anything cute. She loves trucks, building stuff out of Duplo, and her favorite movie is “The Lego Movie”. Doesn’t care for dolls, unless they are Doc McStuffins, who gives endless shots to Mommy, or superheroes. Is this her? Is this what I made her? Hell if I know.
The thing that continues to blow my mind is this one study about vervet monkeys and toys. The boy vervet monkeys preferred the stuffed animals, and the cars, and the girl vervet monkeys liked the dolls and the cooksets. It got fairly wide press coverage.
Here’s my question: vervet monkeys neither drive nor cook. So…um…WHAAAT? How does an animal that can’t conceive of a cookstove have a preference for a miniature kitchen over a miniature dump truck that it also can’t conceive of, on the basis of sex?
I suspect the study of fucking up, to put it kindly.
@Podkanye, there’s a few things that might be responsible for that. Frankly, the monkeys are highly social animals and are quite aware of our interactions with them; lab animals especially. They could react to the exact same stimuli as infants and parents, for the exact same reasons – suggesting that the approving body language and sounds from the scientists could create the reaction in the monkeys. There’s absolutely zero reason to suspect a genetic predisposition towards dolls, cooksets, or cars. Zero, none.
I haven’t read the paper but that’s my take on it!
@Podkayne Lives @Scildfreja
Ok good, that was the one I was having the most trouble rebuking aside from “animal behavior =/= human behavior”. I didn’t even consider the whole “A monkey has no context to even understand what a truck is” and “there is no evolutionary advantage or rationale in nature for a monkey preferring a human invention” yet even in my design class in college I remember this being cited in our workbook.
@ Moocow – I noticed that none of the links are true academic sources. They’re pop psychology or just trash (the Daily Fail). And the studies are too small or too flawed to count (as Podkayne Lives points out, how would monkeys have any concept of driving or cooking?). I also wonder how the scientists different
“Podkanye, there’s a few things that might be responsible for that. Frankly, the monkeys are highly social animals and are quite aware of our interactions with them; lab animals especially. They could react to the exact same stimuli as infants and parents, for the exact same reasons – suggesting that the approving body language and sounds from the scientists could create the reaction in the monkeys. ”
I’d never considered this before, but it’s an interesting idea. Humans and monkeys are both primates, so it stands to reason that our approving/disapproving sounds and our nonverbal communication would be similar.
The other thing I thought interesting is that if I recall correctly, the boy and girl monkeys both liked ‘stuffed animals’–I think bears and dogs were mentioned, but the females had a preference over the males for the baby dolls.
It struck me as odd, since to a vervet monkey, a stuffed dog and a baby doll are both representations of another species’ young, same as a stuffed dog and a stuffed monkey are for me. So it struck me as weird that without some sort of socialization the baby doll would stand out as an object for nurture by females, and the toy puppy not.
I think we underestimate the intelligence and awareness of other mammals. We see the young of the apes and see children not so unlike our own; I have no reason to think they don’t do the same when they see our own children. Likewise, when a picture of a wise old ape is circulated, people will often comment at how human they are. When they look at us, I’m sure they think how very apelike we are in return.
The borders of species and sapience are an artificial construct, made out of scientific convenience and human arrogance, in my opinion.
I’m always struck by how babylike infant gorillas are.
Exactly 🙂 I’m sure they’re as struck by how gorilla-like infant gorillas are, too.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/09/28/15/38E180F600000578-3811841-image-a-107_1475073793039.jpg
In order to have an innate preference for cars, boys have to have some kind of genetic or otherwise instinctual preference (WHY – what is the evolutionary value of car recognition?) or the preference needs to be secondary to some other innate trait. If it is secondary, then it becomes impossible to separate a boy’s learning of the context of the concept of a car from the social conditioning that his caretakers expect him to be interested in cars. And that context is needed, because we otherwise might as well say that boys have a preference for xorlagrim, made by the people who orbit the star Regulus. Without knowing what a car is and what it does and what makes it interesting, boys cannot possibly be interested in cars any more than they can be interested in xorlagrim without the same context. But how can they possibly learn these things without picking up that their caretakers expect them to be interested in cars?
I have yet to see even the most dedicated evopsyche explain the genetic basis for a boy to prefer, directly out of the womb, a machine that is only one century old, and the other explanation leaves said preference impossible to detangle from social conditioning. The most parsimonious explanation is that the preference is social conditioning.
Here’s something that might be an interesting study: take implements from some culture that is unfamiliar to Americans, some stereotypically male and some stereotypically female but all of them unfamiliar, and show them to young American boys and girls. See if the toddlers show any gendered preferences for implements that are gendered in their home culture, but for which no preference could have been socially conditioned into the kids.
@PoM, try: Tight, body-conforming leggings. Today: feminine. Medieval-period-Europe: masculine. Complete reversal of modern standards. Same with pink and blue, though I’m sure everyone here knows that. There are certainly others in our own culture over time. I don’t know enough about isolated cultures to comment about modern examples, but I think that applies!
@Scildfreja: High heels are a wonderful example because of its overlapping with tights for men. And hardly the only one in that cluster.
Anybody trying to claim any bio-truth here is so ignorant it’ll hurt your teeth. You know, either that or possessing an agenda transparent like unto a pane of glass.
@ scildfreja & POM
You probably already know that when hose was the vogue for men you could get special padding so guys could give themselves more shapely legs.
High heels also started out as a bloke thing (an adaptation from the practical use of fitting to horse stirrups)
ETA: ninja’d! 🙂
BTW, the book’s theory about why white women and black men pair up with each other was divine, and I need to share it now:
You see, women are lighter-skinned than men. (This is true. Within a population, women will be, on average, very slightly lighter in skin tone than men of the same ethnic makeup etc.)
As a result, fairness in women, the book explains, is associated with female femininity, and fertility, and attractiveness.
Dark skin, in men, is associated with being a good hunter, and virile.
(Evidence was cited for this. It was the use of ‘fair’ as a synonym for attractive, despite the fact that this was used in most of English’s spoken history as word to apply to either gender, and the phrase ‘tall, dark and handsome’, which…oh dear.)
SO, black men look at white women, and think, “She’s pale as paper! My evolutionary gonads tell me that she is a very feminine female with whom to breed!
And white women look at black men, and think, “WOW he’s super dark! He must be a great provider!”
And then they rush into each other’s arms. I think.
You might wonder if there was some attempt made to demonstrate that white women and black men, in fact, hook up with each other a significant lot, or if there was some attempt made to work in a tasteful mention of the fact that it hasn’t been a lot of years in the United States since a black man could be murdered with the law’s cooperation for smiling at a white woman on the street, or if there was some attempt to prove that this small gender distinction is one that people respond to in any way, let alone enough to override multiple other factors in partner selection.
There was not.
It was a doozy.
But I thought that black men were horrible providers because they thugs and that’s why civilization is being destroyed by interracial baby making? I can’t keep the racist theories straight anymore.
Oh God, not that MRAcist-before-it-was-cool quack again. As someone in a related field, trust me when I say that random Twitter eggs with misspelled usernames are more likely to be approvingly cited by serious papers than that ridiculous waste of education.
@Moocow:
Whenever I come up against evopsych people, I’ve always found that the most effective solution is to repeat the following endlessly:
“That’s an interesting hypothesis. How would you go about testing it?”
Empiricism is the lifeblood of science, and it’s worth being a broken record about. If their response is to get angry, then they were never interested in science in the first place, only in trying to advance their pet cause by dressing it up as something more worthy.
@Podkayne Lives:
What does the book have to say about that other common (problematic) mixed-race stereotype, a White man dating an Asian woman? I’m sure there’s a deep and insightful explanation there which also involves melanin.
Any scientist who gets annoyed when you ask “How would you go about testing that” isn’t a scientist, they’re an aspiring cult leader.