By David Futrelle
Men Going Their Own Way love to talk about science. Too bad they don’t really understand how it works.
Here’s one young MGTOW Redditor’s stab at a biological explanation of the mysterious creature known as the woman.
Kind of a double fail for Mr. AlwaysResist here, in that this is not only not how women work but also not how viruses work either. Viruses don’t attach themselves to host cells like a lamprey and suck life out of them; they inject themselves into host cells and take them over in order to make more viruses like themselves. (Also, they aren’t technically living organisms, more like tiny self-replicating robot monsters.)
To show what would happen if women really were viruses, I’ve taken a basic description of how viruses work from here and replaced the word “virus” with “woman” and “host cell” with “man.”
When she comes into contact with a man, a woman can insert her genetic material into him, literally taking over his functions. … Some women may remain dormant inside men for long periods, causing no obvious change in the men (a stage known as the lysogenic phase). But when a dormant woman is stimulated, she enters the lytic phase: new women are formed, self-assemble, and burst out of the man, killing him and going on to infect other men.
Terrifying, yes, but also pretty fucking cool.
Here’s Laurie Anderson’s classic song “Language is a Virus,” not that’s it’s really relevant, but just because it’s been playing in my head ever since I ran across Mr. AlwaysResist’s post.
H/T to @sbassi (and several others who shall remain nameless) who served as biology consultants for this post but who are not responsible for any wrong stuff I might have said in it.
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Prototype: The Misandering
I guess this guy only learned his biology from some videos on YouTube.
It constantly amazes me how these incredibly stupid people go on in life, without ever getting tripped up.
IOW, any organism that he doesn’t personally reap utility from, or understand the benefit of, is useless and must be stamped out. Moss: stupid. Mosquitoes: annoying. Bacteria: food ruiners. Amoebas: boring. Women: won’t sex him.
That is some A level narcissism and ignorance.
Women have special bendy straws that they carry around for purposes of sucking health out of unsuspecting men. It’s like tapping a sugar maple. You can jar the health and save it for later.
Hypergamy tastes great on pancakes.
Aka, the MGTOW subreddit.
Here’s a song from the German goth metal band Beloved Enemy that seems to use a viral metaphor for the desired/loathed woman (although this was the theme for a zombie apocalypse movie of the same name, so I may not have all the context.) Noteworthy for lead singer Ski-King’s signature crooning bass-baritone delivery–quite unexpected for the genre, although he has no trouble shifting gears to a gravelly metal growl when required:
Wait, is that women, or female mosquitoes?
@ Katamount:
This is the closest I could find…. Though, admittedly, I didn’t look very much 🙂 🙂
@Katamount,
It took me a bit, but I figured out the joke with the Lady Death-Cap in that cartoon. Unfortunately for the humans, Lady Death would’ve done something similar if she was there, methinks.
Definitely women.
Are these all straw feminists?
Then why aren’t men a virus? They indulged in war, even in primitive times.
I’ll wait.
Which means that before men created that environment, women all died out.
And the human race went extinct. The end.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk
@Victorious Parasol
My first thought on reading this nonsense. I suspect you could post “The Screwfly Solution” to a MGTOW forum and all the commenters there would be like, “damn, this ‘James Tiptree Junior’ dude tells it like it is! Not like the SJW-friendly SF you get today!” ?
I love the term “straw feminists”, but now it also makes me sad, because it reminds me that Kate Beaton retired Hark, a vagrant this year. I hope she’s doing ok since her sister died.
@Moggie
I knew her sister had passed from her Twitter feed, but I didn’t realize she had retired Hark. I hope she’s got other projects going.
@tim gueguen:
Philip Wylie actually wrote a novel like that, called The Disappearance where essentially Earth divides into two parallel timelines, one with all the women, and one with all the men. The one with only the men really doesn’t do so well.
(I haven’t actually read the whole thing, so I have no idea if the story touched on non-binary at all; given that it was written in 1951, probably not.)
Wylie’s probably best known these days for having written The Gladiator back in 1930, which is considered one of the inspirations for Superman.
Plot idea: China Miéville’s The City & the City, but for genders.
@kupo: “It is a cellular peptide cake.”
“Wif mint frufting.”
Also brings to mind that 2005 Image comics series Girls, where the giant sperm monster from outer space lands in a cornfield and the townsfolk are overrun by a clone army of flesh eating naked women, and similar to The Screwfly Solution the invasion is aided by misogyny
@ Full Metal Ox:
Ok, I will admit to having once written a love poem containing the
phrase “I want to be your little spirochete,” but in my defence I was twenty.
@Katamount
Funnily enough, Warhammer 40,000 of all things has a few notable examples of aliens with non-standard genders too. You’ve got the Orksl who are asexual and reproduce via spores, the avian Kroot whose sex act is said to resemble a backrub and can influence the course of their own evolution based on what (or who- for reasons that will soon be obvious they have no taboo against cannibalism) they eat, and I’m fairly sure one species was described as a sentient atmospheric layer. No, I have no idea how that would even work.
Not bad for a war game based on everyone blasting the tar out of each other.
@Moon Custafer:
Python fan?
@ dust bunny:
Wow…I’ve periodically used it, but my assumed metaphor was a potluck: I’ll bring the pasta salad to the table, you’ll bring the wine and pop, she’ll bring the takeout bucket of fried chicken. In short: here’s the contribution and perspective I can bring to this shared enterprise. (Since this may be relevant: American native speaker of English, born 1961.)
(This led me to Google the phrase, turning up the variant “bring to the bargaining table”, which does seem to support your interpretation; I have no idea whether it’s the original version, though.)
This isn’t accurate either, but if we are comparing viruses and humans the actions of a virus on a cell are a lot more like pregnancy. Wouldn’t that make men a virus?