By David Futrelle
In another world, the internet might have functioned as a sort of enlightenment machine, allowing billions of people instant access to vast repositories of insight and knowledge.
Instead, it’s turned into possibly the greatest amplifier of crackpot notions in human history, bringing about, among other things, the revival of flat-earthism and assorted baroque conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon. There are countless people who willingly, and happily, get much of their understanding of the world, such as it is, from fake news sites and conspiracy forums.
The manosphere is, of course, one of the most pernicious disseminators of toxic nonsense on the internet today.
Indeed, I can’t help but fear a little for the future of humankind every time I poke my nose into, say, the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, filled to the brim with extravagantly wrong “insights” into the alleged true nature of women.
Take, for example, this dude, who basically thinks women have evolved to be lazy baby-making machines living off handouts from Big Husband Government,
![GoatKnows[S] 2 points 10 months ago
That's the thing there is no such thing as wife material under a government that can substitute a man's position, all women can marry the government demand it supplies for them without reason, buy them tampons, pay for their abortions well rape I understand, but look the government is a single mothers husband, and even though the quality of life given isn't perfect it allows her nature to consume her. Woman are designed to be a food source for a growing person in their body, that's why day are prone to being lazy, the baby doesn't need activity or stress it needs mom to stand still and be calm and feed.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2019-05-03_17-28-57.png?fit=600%2C690)
The MGTOW subreddit has more than 100,000 subscribers. Boy, I sure do love it that there really are dudes out there getting their, er, “knowledge” of women from anonymous douchebag Redditors who don’t understand what sentences are.
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I guess this dude’s never seen the 19th century photos of pregnant women in sweatshops, working at the mills.
Have these guys ever met anyone with small children? It doesn’t really encourage laziness.
When it comes to mothers at least I suspect this guy is mistaking exhaustion for laziness.
I’m pretty sure that miggies don’t realize that once babies are born, lots of resources go onto raising them. As if once the nursing stage is over, they’re adults and can care for themselves.
That’s why they’re so in love with the artificial womb idea. They think as long as they can bypass the whole persuading a woman to carry their child thing, having kids is a breeze. A fully formed misogyclone will just pop out of the artificial womb ready to carry on the patriarchy.
Once again, the migtoes show that the only thing they’ve actually Gone Their Own Way from…is REALITY.
Go??your??own??way ffs
@WWTH:
Mini-MGTOWs probably don’t need the full 18-25 years of maturity that offspring usually require. In terms of emotional development, it’s not a terribly long journey from womb to ranting about the evils of women on YouTube with swords on the wall.
“Women are lazy”, says the guy who spends 10 hours a day playing video games in mom’s basement.
One of my great-grandmothers was a farmer. She gave birth to 12 children for the sake of getting a son to take over the farm.
10 and 11 were twins, boy and girl. Which my great-grandfather railed about. ‘Even with the heir there has to be a girl accompanying!’
And since twins had pretty low survival rates back then they tried again for a spare. The spare was my grandfather.
And amazingly ALL twelve children made it to adulthood, even though there were little things like two world wars and the great depression to fend with.
You sure as hell can believe that at the time all pregnant women (farmer, farmhands, etc.) would do back breaking labour until active labour started. And once the kid was popped out they’d be back working.
What strikes me about GoatKnow’s comment is the relative mildness of it. He’s not calling us whores or even femoids. He’s not saying we’re evil or that we should be slaves.
No, he’s pointing out that, at least according to him, we are lazy — but with a biological reason.
Also, he understands that a woman actually can be raped.
Compared with other MGTOW comments, GoatKnows’ comment is almost reasonable. Yeah, that’s a very, very low bar.
The whole ‘women didn’t work’ annoys me to no end. It was only ever true in the highest levels of the upper class (but there the men didn’t have to work either) and for the middle class for a few decades. Women have always worked.
They’ve often done a lot of their work in the house, but until washing machines and so on were a thing, just caring for a house was more than a full time job. On a farm everyone works. If the man in the family had a trade, everyone in the family who physically could worked in that trade.
My great grandparents had a grocery store. According to the simplistic history descriptions that erase women, my great grandfather ran a grocery store. In reality, the whole family did. They were well off enough to hire someone to clean and do laundry, so my great grandmother could keep the books and the register. My great grandfather was in charge of managing the stock. And my grandmother and her siblings worked in the store as soon as they were old enough to do so. They would run and fetch things from the storage, and weigh out vegetables, and make deliveries before and after school. And this was normal. The whole family worked.
This whole idea of the man doing all the work and supporting the wife’s bonbon habit is new and so annoying and untrue. Either everyone had to work, or no one had to work.
OT: The new movie Long Shot will make incels so mad for so many reasons.
That Movie About Charlize Theron Falling for a Schlubby Seth Rogen Is Actually Pretty Feminist
Long Shot knows you find its pairing unrealistic, but it really presents a model relationship.
https://slate.com/culture/2019/05/long-shot-review-charlize-theron-seth-rogen-romcom-progressive.html
Well even in hunter – gatherer societies, there’s a large workload faced by women. I understand foraging by the women of the band provides most of the food, and that’s often while pregnant/engaging in child care.
Take a look at the posts here, some are absolutely frightening like one a couple of rows down: https://8ch.net/pol/res/13044780.html
@WWTH
I would honestly be entirely unsurprised to learn MGTOWs believe people spring fully formed from the head of Zeus.
Um… okey… so women are biologically created so sit still, especially during pregnancy?
…
If this is true, then I have some questions:
1. Women who get exercise build muscle and stamina, and reasonable levels of exercise has lots of positive effects both mentally and physically, improving the health of these women…
2. … but it also increases both the chances of getting pregnant but also reduces various risks during the pregnancy and childbirth? (Compared to a woman who sits very still and doesn’t get any exercise.)
3. There are Olympic medalists who won their medals while pregnant.
They really just see us as a womb/vagina life support system, don’t they?
It’s something I’ve noticed with these Really Smart™ fellows but the fatuousness of their argument is in direct proportion to their inability to use commas correctly. I mean, given how abhorrent their opinions are, I know that’s like complaining that the ice cream sundae composed of human ordure you were served with didn’t come with sprinkles, but still…
To carry on from Kevin’s point, gathering typically provides about 80% of the food for the entire group as a hunt is incredibly inefficient and the men eat most of the animal (the dogs have a higher priority in getting a share than women and girls).
The babies will often go along, and be fed while mother works.
@Ellesar : 80% by which metrics ?
Human have evolved from vegetarian into omnivores in part because they could not forage enough food. So I express scepticism about hunting being incredibly inefficient. Humans apparently hunted mammoths to extinction ; that’s *probably* not only due to prehistoric men needing trophy for their dorms.
(one of the common pitfall when looking at that kind of metric is that usually, meat is much more nourishing per weight, meaning that maybe foraging is 80% by volume but 50-60% of their need, which make hunting look a lot more reasonable suddenly)
A big part of the protein in gatherer/hunter societies was grubs and insects, as well as carrion.
Human brain development really kicked off when we tamed fire and managed to move a huge chunk of digestion outside the body.
Cooked food is basically partially digested, so you don’t need as much energy to break it down.
The excess energy this made available went mostly to the brain.
And hunting mostly consisted of a group following a herd of prey animals until a few of the dropped dead from exhaustion or driving prey animals off a cliff.
The division of hunting=meat and gathering=plant is flawed. Grubs are meat.
Ohlman: asserting a cause for any evolutionary change is a dubious proposition. Just because a change has a particular effect it does not mean it was selected for that reason.
I’ve always doubted that neolithic communities sharply delineated hunting and gathering by sex.
Imagine, for example, a hungry community looking at a young woman who had the potential to be a talented hunter (great shot, exceptional stamina, whatever) and saying “well, we could have used someone with her skills on the last couple (unsuccessful) hunts. But she’s a girl, guess we’ll keep going hungry b/c girl no hunt mammoth.”
Further, even if these tasks were strictly segregate by sex (which I think is doubtful) it still makes sense to gather while you hunt and hunt while you gather.
Imagine, again, a group of male hunters coming across a quality berry patch. Are these guys actually going to look at that opportunity and say “well, there’s no women with us to pick those berries. Guess we’re going hungry tonight lads”.
Or, imagine female foragers coming across a large tortoise and saying “well, that would have been a lot of easily acquired calories, too bad there’s no men here.”
In reality, I think neolithic communities probably did everything possible to maximize their ability to feed themselves.
Edit: kids had me up early – each reference to neolithic in my above comment should actually say paleolithic.
@Knitting Cat Lady : true, but it don’t address the main issue, which is that humans hunted for a reason, and we know that they hunted enough to help entire species disappear.
@Specialffrog : if we assume humans started hunting not because they needed it for subsistance, then for which reason ? As far as I know, humanoid hunting predate tool making by a lot of time.
A reasonable explanation is that foraging 2 tons of food is a lot more than twice as long as foraging 1 tons of food, since the first ton is made on closest spot and probably made of easiest things to pick up. So hunting become efficient enough at some point.
@doethreetwoone : yeah, sex probably wasn’t a super big factor on who do what. Similar to how the idea that lioness do all the hunting is an exageration. (and there’s male-like lioness to boot !)
That being said, to an extent, it *is* reasonable to suppose that a group of people on the trail of a prey would not take too many hours picking apples along the way, and conversely that a group of people gathering roots who probably take a long hard look at how much stuff they carry and how tired they are before hunting a target of opportunity. At some point it can be worth it to mentally note the spot and go back later equipped for the job. Doubly so since at that time, human had to defend their kills from others animals.