The Summer 2017 WHTM pledge drive is on! Do your bit for civilization by sending along some much-needed cash! Thanks!
By David Futrelle
So over in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, some dude who doesn’t understand the basics of history or much else has declared, in all caps, that “WOMEN WERE NEVER OPPRESSED!”
He gives a slew of unoriginal alleged reasons for this conclusion that will be familiar to most long-time misogynist-watchers. I especially enjoyed this one:
There’s a lot that’s wrong here, but I thought I’d highlight one thing in particular, which is that MEN TODAY DID NOT CREATE CIVILIZATION; THEY INHERITED IT from the men (and women) of the past.
And I feel fairly certain that the sort of dude who posts crap like this on Reddit isn’t going to end up contributing much if anything to civilization over the course of his lifetime, unless Cheeto stains in the carpet count as a civilization-building achievement.
Does he have a mother? Or was he just engineered as someone’s crude first attempt at creating life in their basement?
He was born from an artificial uterus run by male seagulls. Or was that sealions…?
All I can think of is Warren Ellis’ astonishing insult: “You have no mother! A pig coughed and you fell out!”
Even if you concede that women have invented nothing ever and have not participated in society (clearly untrue), you can’t have a civilization without people. Somebody needs to grow them, birth them, feed them, and raise them. Or does he think himself Athena, like he hopped fully formed from his father’s head? If so, I weep for sexual education.
ETA: ninja’d by wittier people than me!
Honestly, they just think raising children is easy and requires a low intellect, which is NOT a new concept, alas.
I could write the longest song to date
On things you didn’t make
Like my dingy old netbook, or a crystal spire
Or a homemade chocolate shake
It would take more research, but I could find
A list of things that you could thank
A woman for, in so many words
Though you’d likely draw a blank
But there’s a little thing called burden of proof
That’s carried by the one
Who makes the statement, hun
And the burden of proof involves no small amount of care
For the source of your statement’s the burden to bear
Nothing like taking credit for things they never even made.
To highly oversimplify, I’ve heard it explained that women “invented” beer and beer drove civilization, so….
A woman invented windshield wipers. Therefore I get to decide who is allowed to use them. I’ll graciously allow most men to use them. MGTOWs however…
Guess you’re going to have to drive to work on rainy days without a clear windshield. Good luck!
This is closely related to my theory of why people believe in conspiracy theories. I have challenged conspiracy believers many times for any first hand experience to justify their beliefs, and as far as I can tell, NOBODY who believes in conspiracies has any first hand experience to justify the belief.
Instead, people who believe in conspiracies are surrounded from the moment they wake up till the moment they go to bed with things created by people who are better than they are by any conceivable measure, given to them at a pittance of their real value. They have no idea how any of it works or how to fix it, and if it were taken away from them, they’d be utterly powerless.
More at https://stevedutch.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-roots-of-our-paranoia.html
Oh no, he’s spamming his blog here now?
OK Steven, how does any of this relate to a theory about conspiracy believers? If you can’t explain that in a short comment not containing a link to your blog, you’re just spamming.
ETA: 5400 words on that blog post, no thanks.
No, it isn’t.
That word theory. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
DrHoviney, yes women did invent beer and were driven out of production when it became lucrative for men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_brewing?wprov=sfla1
Also women invented ways to categorize stars, lifeboats used on the Titanic, discovered radioactivity, helped discover DNA structure, thrived on ranches in Spanish America, where Women legally could own property, I could go on forever.
Women were seriously oppressed, and yet achieved much. What man can claim that?
Have a beer and relax, dummies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_brewing
Once more, with feeling: WOMEN INVENTED AGRICULTURE AND BEER BREWING. Maybe this dude should just give up food and drink, since he did nothing to contribute to THAT, eh?
Also, not quite on topic, but too good not to share:
Kat Blaque hands Laci Green her neo-antifeminist ass. Very sweetly, of course.
It’s my understanding that anthropologists believe that women were the first people to realize that putting seeds in the ground would make them grow into food. So it looks like women invented farming, which led to food surpluses, which made permanent settlements and specialized jobs feasible for humans. So women made civilization possible in the first place.
Wow! ????
Everything about that whole argument was wrong just from ithe opening sentence. It’s starts on a foundation of WRONG, and then just get WRONGER, from that point onward, until there’s so much wrong in it, that you have to stop reading it, long before you’ve finished, for fear that your forehead will collapse in on itself.
In short: Wow!
“Men created civilization and so logically” – no, no, men created civilization illogically. Either that or you need a comma.
Putting this on my resume.
“Member of team that created and implemented civilization.”
@Megalibrarygirl
Careful, now.
Two men, Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds, invented Civilization. You know, the video game.
Since Meier and Reynolds invented Civilization, they get to choose who gets to enjoy it. Given that they’ve been striving for every game to have a more gender-balanced leadership roster and ethnically-representative group of civs than the last one, I think their decision is fairly obvious: they want everyone to enjoy it except for racists and misogynists.
This all seems to be fairly straightforward.
Wait, were we not discussing Civilization? Were we discussing actual real-world civilisation?
Well, that’s just silly.
Boris:
I wouldn’t. It’s riddled with bugs.
They are the same as the Plymouth Brethren men I used to know, who chose young boys to go to their elite Mens meetings then brainwashed then with hogwash like this. They told them that women in the bribe were basically livestock, sure there were a few exceptions like Sarah the prophetess and Lydia the merchant, but for the most part, women are just cows and sheep to be traded in.
Women didn’t write the Bible, but it’s interesting that Harold Bloom ascribes the Book of J to a possible female author, who would have been a highly educated member of King Soloman’s court.