By David Futrelle
I found this lovely example of sex miseducation in the BadWomensAnatomy subreddit, a repository of amazing anatomical nonsense collected from around the web. I couldn’t figure out where this came from (it may have originated from a now-deleted tweet from this Twitter account, but I’m not sure). But whatever its origin it’s pretty … original.
On top of the whole death and sadness thing, there’s the unexpected revelation that testes are eggs. Who knew? Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that the runny stuff that comes out of the penis is not egg white, and should not be used to make omelettes.
@Katamount:
A few months back while wandering around downtown I do remember seeing a plaque referencing the fire. In particular, referencing the fact that the alley was named after the one person to have lost their life in the fire. (An explosives expert who was helping clear out debris afterward.)
But yeah, Toronto… well, let’s be honest, most of Toronto is actually an incredibly young city, even compared with the rest of Canada. (An old friend of mine who was born in English used to joke that Canadians have no concept of age: we think something a hundred years old is really old. I responded that the English have no concept of distance: they think something a hundred kilometres away is really far. His response: ‘That’s fair.’) But you could make a good case that Toronto didn’t really become the city it is today until after the construction of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s allowed shipping to get in directly. I once saw a pair of aerial photographs of the city at Metro Hall, I think one from the 1940s and one from the 1980s, and the difference was pretty striking.
Though for memorializing disasters, the place I’ll remember was when I visited Warsaw. One of the museums in the old part of town has a line painted up along the wall, going up and down along the brick, passing by and along floors and ceilings. That line showed how much of the building was still intact after WWII.
I think “eggs” refer to each testicle- they DO have an egg-like shape. Maybe these idiots think they are -actual- eggs.
I’m not going to bother getting too mad about this post because we all know the womb is a home. Hopefully, never home to incel’s loser sperm.
That article about the myth of sperm racing to the egg was awesome.
Oh, also, how can the uterus have death if there is nothing living in it?
@Rabid Rabbit
Heh, those poor things don’t have anything to work with in St. John’s! It’s so rocky, even the trees are stunted!
Although I did come across a poor three-legged fox on the road to Cape Race. 🙁 Given it was so near to the road, I can only imagine that it just begs people for scraps of food; no way it can hunt missing a leg.
Another fun fact about Newfoundland was just how geographically and geologically unique it is as an island. Gros Morne on the western side of the island all but single-handedly demonstrated the theory of plate tectonics. Mistaken Point (so named because sailors often mistook it for Cape Race and ran aground) is the largest source of Precambrian fossils in the world, and with the aid of Memorial University was cast in its entirety in 2009 to preserve the fossils in light of ongoing erosion and vandalism. Both Gros Morne and Mistaken Point are listed as Natural UNESCO World Heritage Sites as a result of their uniqueness. Seriously, you won’t find dinosaur fossils in Newfoundland because the rocks are too old to contain them!
There are guided tours of Mistaken Point out of nearby Portugal Cove, but I was sadly too late for it the day I was there and it was made clear that only guided tours are permitted out on the fossil cliffs. I still took photos of the site from the road, but some jackass was there walking on the fossil cliffs in street shoes! Despite numerous signs along the road reminding people that it is a protected provincial Ecological Reserve and the general public are not permitted there!
Grrrr, nice things, can’t have!
(I realize travel is expensive–this trip sure was–but if you get a chance, definitely check out Newfoundland, at least the Avalon Peninsula. It’s a remarkable province that retains a lot of its independent spirit even 70 years after joining Confederation.)
@laserqueen
Okay, I just straight up forgot about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s me being stupid.
@Katamount; @laserqueen:
What’s betting that the Brazil National Museum neighborhood is about to become one such site?
@Katamount:
There are places both on the south side of Vancouver Island and nearby in Puget Sound in Washington State called ‘Point No Point’. In both cases because it looked like a promontory from a distance, but turned out to be rather less of one once the ship got closer.
CRINGE CRINGE CRINGE
I once heard that.
But back in the 1980s, roughly around age 7 give or take, from a neighbor kid only about a year older and, looking back, clearly did not understand the basic birds and bees stuff his parents must have told him. Unless they really told him wrong.
He should be about 40 now, so hopefully he figured it out and that meme wasn’t made by him. lol
Off-topic: Holy shit. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/05/donald-trump-oped-white-house-resistance
How many people do you think the trumpster’s going to fire overnight?
Goddammit, it looks like my original comment got eaten by the Comment Mammoth, and I forget what I said. Alas, my immortal wit is as cold and dead as my (voluntarily) barren womb and its long-tied tubes. So I guess I’ll have to improvise…
If ever there was a meme designed to make unprepossessing dudes think they were God’s gift to sad dead uteri, this one is undoubtedly it. It even usurps the function of the ovaries (you know, those dingly-dangly little white things at the ends of the pink trumpet-things sticking off the sides of the uterus?) by turning testicles into eggs. Unfortunately, the old homunculus theory is long since disproven. It definitively bit the dust right around the time Lennart Nilsson photographed eggs and sperm getting it on under a microscope.
I don’t suppose this home-skooled preacher-dude even knows what any of those are. But I guess he figures he doesn’t need them. All he needs is some “dirt” (a uterus) to plant his “seeds” in, and presto! Another not-so-immaculate conception.
(Meanwhile, actual immaculate conception, aided by technology, is on the horizon. Shhhhh, don’t anyone tell him that cis-women are actually capable of parthenogenesis. He might end up losing the will to plant his “seeds”!)
So this guy is getting riled up because one ovum dies in a woman every month.
Meanwhile, inside men: up to 3 million sperm cells die per day.
@Rabid Rabbit, ugh, that op-ed! To summarise: a bunch of unelected right-wingers know that Trump is incapable, but they decided against invoking the 25th, choosing instead to exploit his weakness in order to keep their jobs and make policy on their own, unaccountable. And they want you to know that they are heroes for doing this! Alternatively, it’s made up, and intended to convince Trump supporters that, yes, the “deep state” really is conspiring against him. Either way, it’s a disgusting situation, not something to celebrate.
Although I am no Catholic, properly speaking Immaculate Conception is not what you think it is: it refers to Mary’s conception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception
@Moggie
Not celebrating, but it did make my jaw drop. The timing’s interesting, since it reads as confirmation of Woodward’s claims about people saving the world by stealing papers off Drumpf’s desk.
Speaking of sperm:
The homunuculus idea makes me giggle because I had a similar idea when I was very young and my understanding of biology/reproduction was limited.
I thought that every woman was born with a tiny person inside her, and it stayed there until she was an adult. I also thought every man and every woman got married, and the act of marriage magically told that tiny human to grow and be born. I hadn’t worked out why some people had one kid and others had 4, but it was a work in progress, OK? When you’re five, you can’t know it all. ?
Now, I also knew from a really, really young age I didn’t want to be a mom, so I can’t tell you how relieved I was as I grew up and learned that pregnancy was not some unavoidable destiny for every woman. But it is funny that my “understanding” of reproduction was on par with medieval scientists.
@Rabid Rabbit:
The timing is interesting in another way too: it could serve as distraction from Kavanaugh.
Here’s one thing I don’t understand: if the writer is telling the truth, haven’t they just put their project in jeopardy by going public? Unless they believe that Trump’s time is drawing to a close, and they might as well hasten the process.
This meme is positively Aristotelian
You know, I was idly trying to imagine the plot for a dystopian, feminist novel where women were being exterminated after artificial wombs are perfected.
As part of my research I learned about scientists who are a) trying to get endometrial tissue to grow on a matrix and b) an experimental support system for extreme preemies that is trying to give a liquid support environment in what looks like a gigantic ziplock baggy with nutrient support – neither ready for use yet.
I then started casually asking men how they would feel about a world without women. A few I got the impression they might be secretly all right with it but weren’t going to tell me about it, but more than I expected told me no way. One friend put it like this: “AuntieMame, I’ve been in prison and in the service to avoid more prison. I know what nothing but men is like. Why do you think I’d rather hang with you and the other women most of the time?”
My son told me that he would fight if somebody came to take me away. Which made me imagine different problems in my dystopia.
As for the opening post, I thought “eggs” was slang for testicles, not a literal interpretation. All of you are right of course, this is what bad or absent sex education gets you. If people would only stop persisting in thinking that sex education is sexy. It really isn’t. A character on The Magicians quipped that sex education was pretty much guaranteed to make people NOT want to have sex. At least in immediate effect.
Why people think that not understanding how the body works in such an important area is some kind of virtue just floors me.
PS Batgirl- Don’t feel bad. When I was five, I thought the penis curled up like a snake on the outside. I was a little shaky on a few details even though Mom had given me some age appropriate basics. I live the idea of the homunculous waiting for the magic to grow.
I thought that op-ed was a steaming pile of self-serving drivel.
@Moggie
My friend told me about this today and asked why these people weren’t working to get him out of office instead. I told him I thought they didn’t want to lose their own access to power. So agreed. Or maybe Pence scares them even more. I know he scares me. I can’t quite decide who scares me more.
I shudder to think of a Pence presidency for everyone but especially for the LGBTQ community and women and people of color just to list the obvious. And people who differ from him religiously. Added together this is a lot of people.
@hippielady
I was homeschooled until junior high. At age 12 I didn’t know what a gay person was, only that they wanted to recruit me for nefarious purposes (funny how I turned out a bisexual nonbinary, ah well)
and my only understanding of sex ed was that if I used a condom I would get a girl pregnant, catch AIDS and die (my mother started 3 “pregnancy care centers” those places that scare women out of having abortions).
The only reason i wasn’t a father at age 15 was that my girlfriend was on birth control.
I had an inquisitive mind and educated myself, but it was a long, slow, difficult process. I had to drag myself out of my sexist, homophobic, and racist upbringing. If I wasn’t as smart as I am, or as lucky as I am with the people I met, I’d likely be one of the goobers who came into these comments screeching about “feeemales”.
@Rabid Rabbit: The current odds in Las Vegas have it at 8-10 minimum.
Looks like someone has been playing The Binding of Isaac a little too much recently…