By David Futrelle
He said the thing! I always enjoy it when I run across an example of the exact very thing I’m mocking in the title of the blog: some dude claiming that men today deserve a grateful “thank you” from the women of the world because, in the old old old old old days cave men (allegedly) hunted mammoths to feed their lazy cave wives sitting idly at home eating prehistoric bon bons and dreaming of cave Chad.
Never mind that this is, anthropologically speaking, nonsense; in hunter-gatherer societies everyone works and it’s the gathering, not the hunting, that provides most of the calories. And never mind that there’s no clear evidence that men were the only ones who hunted. Or that whoever hunted back then (everybody?) probably mostly hunted much smaller game that was less likely to gore them to death with their mighty tusks.
Anyhoo, today’s Dude Who Said the Thing is ranting YouTube misogynist Warcorpse666 — real name Dave Nordahl — who presumably earned the right to that internet nickname by besting Warcorpses 1 through 665 in hand-to-hand combat. His recent rant on the subject was brought to my attention by the guy who does the Angry White Men blog, which is incidentally very good. Take it away, you big woolly beardo:
I swear I didn’t hire him to say that as some sort of sneaky guerilla marketing scheme for the blog.
Warcorpse666 is not the first person to SAY THE THING. In addition to the anonymous internet rando who provided me with the name for the blog, there have been many others over the years, some of whom I’ve covered here. Enjoy these MAMMOTH CLASSICS featuring ACTUAL MAMMOTHS.
You Nagged Us to Hunt the Mammoth to Feed You: A new variation on an old misogynist tall tale
This one deals with a slightly more novel thesis:
We Extincted the Mammoth to Male-Genocide You
Enjoy! I’m going to go eat some meat that I did not personally hunt.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
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@Lainy
Here you go:
Regarding your project and sources, it’s just another reminder that incels and their crap are nothing new. Misogynistic entitlement is ancient.
@Weasel-Rah
In addition to being totally false, Warcorpse666’s assertions, like many of those in the manosphere, have this strange premise that “men a long time ago did x, therefore I deserve y.” Which doesn’t make much sense, and they’re not consistent at all. If they were, they would be vying to serve time for crimes their ancestors committed, as probably most people have some ancestor that committed an awful crime.
@tim gueguen
I was actually just thinking about Head-Smashed-In the other day. Didn’t realize it was a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s on my list of “things to visit and photograph” when I get back out west someday.
Also, I’m still rather amazed that Warcorpse is still a thing. I mean, on some level he must know that he’s a walking joke of a human being. The beard is not helping matters.
@Katamount
What was his spiel before? This is the first I’ve heard of him.
In the words of our prophet Janet Jackson, “What have you done for me lately?”
@Naglfar
Oh, he was one of the lesser YouTube ranters back when Gamergate was a thing. Hard to believe it’s been five-and-a-half years since that all went down. He was such low-hanging fruit that Dick Coughlan made him a recurring character in his YouTube rants. I think Coughlan described him thus: “His mother was a baboon and his father was a human unfortunately stricken with ‘Baboon-looking Syndrome.'”
@naglfar
I know that misogynist spews are ancient I just found it really funny that they complain about the exact same stuff in almost the exact same way for thousands of years.
@alan
Thanks for the tip. I’m hiding out at friends place right now and his internet is less the stellar but I will try to look at some sources at the library later.
@Lainy
My BA thesis ages ago was about Aspasia. Talk about biased sources 😉
I think my conclusion went something like
“So we can say with near absolute certainty that there was an Aspasia born at a certain time in Milet and living at a certain time in Athens where she was somehow in a relationship with Pericles.
Beyond that we have all these men using her name to make their points and get to their political opponents and project their issues onto her. And sadly that buries any truth about her life – which would actually interest me – in mountains of stuff we can’t trust because of male gaze/male issues…which don’t really interest me, but I’m now going to have to talk about them anyway. Again.”
Although she has to have been remarkable for a woman in some way or those men wouldn’t have chosen her as a target the way they did. So she might still have been badass. 🙂
Have fun with your project. 🙂
What things undone has said here seems to be very popular beware. Yes it is the manosphere in a nutshell, but also a premise we want to debunk, not that it hasn’t be done many times.
The keywords “Women by being selective of their mates” “best hunters” got the most “are men who don’t measure up” and yes Men who are resentful they
don’t measure up this might be the “*first generation* though where a large number of men seemed to have given up”
Might be a dog whistle for feminism? Just a doubt/s
Why would selection and specifically female selection of males should be more cunning now and more men left outside?
“But they don’t seem to be doing anything constructive about it.”
Plausible concession to appear feminist saying it’s just frustrated men who hate women because they don’t accept their inevitable destiny, if only the accept it in peace.
Let’s remember the reactionary narrative is almost always about creating a scarcity anxiogenous mindset and a zero sum frame. In the case in point, such “sum” is not even arithmetically correct :D.
It would assume that less than 20% of men basically got with about 5 women on average and unless most of such “chads” are still virtually with a harem of at least 2 or 3 gravitating around them (beta female orbiters?) the remaining 4 now single women which stayed with them somehow don’t desire and aren’t seeking any more sex and/or relationships. But as we are talking apparently about kids and reproducing, this would mean all these Chads have had kids with 5 different women as well.
Was it Aspasia or someone else who was accused of blasphemy, and supposedly her defense was to strip naked and say “We all know beauty represents the favor of the gods, and if I had pissed them off, would I be this hot?” and got acquitted on that basis?
I’m sure the MRAs LOVE this story as “proof” of how women really control everything Because Boobs.
I spent most of my teenage years hunting the you-know-what, but I never got any.
@ Lainy (yes, I’m bored…)
Brought to you by my nostalgia and the library’s online catalogue:
Portrait of a priestess : women and ritual in ancient Greece. Princeton, N.J. [u.a.] 2007. -> My old prof was very into the role of women in Ancient religion and the indirect power they derived from that.
Slave-wives, single women and “bastards” in the ancient Greek world : law and economics perspectives. Oxford 2018 -> I think this is the one with lots of stuff about marriage… Looked like a dissertation, though, so probably pretty specialised.
Women at war in the classical world. Barnsley, South Yorkshire [2017]. -> This has Sparta.
Envy, poison, and death : women on trial in classical Athens
Oxford [2016]. -> I’d fear this to be a bit case-study heavy, but sure sounds like a change from the usual.
Daughters of Hecate : women and magic in the ancient world
Oxford [u.a.] 2014. -> This I will put on my to-read list…
Immigrant women in Athens : gender, ethnicity, and citizenship in the
classical city. New York, NY [u.a.] 2014 -> Aspasia’s problem. Also their role in the citizenship rules in Athens gave women some greater importance, too. (For a certain value of “greater”… the citizenship laws were an important development, in a way.)
Voices at work : women, performance, and labor in ancient Greece
Baltimore 2014 -> Another of my old Prof’s favourite topics. Female working “collectives”.
Sex and difference in ancient Greece and Rome
Edinburgh 2008. -> This should have Foucault…
Hippocrates’ woman : reading the female body in ancient Greece
London [u.a.] 2007. -> If you somehow want more of what you described in your post…
Damn it, I just noticed that the database left out the authors when I had it spit out my results in this handy copy/paste format. Ah well.
I’ll just slink back to lurkdom, now, shall I? 😉
@ lainy
Don’t know if these sources are of any help; but just in case…
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/research/outreach/warwickclassicsnetwork/stoa/classciv/gcse/women/
You may also be able to make something of Pahinomerides. That’s an early example perhaps of slut-shaming. It was a contemporary nickname for Spartan women and means “thigh flashers” in relation to the short skirts they wore.
Subsistence hunters make very carefully considered profit/loss calculations when deciding what kind of food to go after. A lot goes in to those calculations. The potential amount of food, the amount of energy needed to kill or collect something, the likelihood of success in any given attempt, the degree of danger, the amount and “expense” (in time and resources) of processing needed to make the food edible (processing costs for most meat is very low, compared to many types of vegetation, which is one of the reasons meat is so valued) how much of the food can be carried back to camp, etc. The list is long.
For example, rabbits, or similar animals, are generally not dangerous, but don’t provide an enormous amount of meat, so going out specifically to hunt them doesn’t make much sense. People out gathering can bring along a “rabbit stick” (the most well known of which is the boomerang) and can use it to knock over a rabbit (or similar animal) thus not expending a great deal of energy, and with minimum danger, but with not much food recovered.
Hunting bigger animals is far more dangerous, but worth it if you can make the kill. If. Bigger animals aren’t as easy to kill as a rabbit and they can run away, and they might just kill you back if you get too close. So any animal bigger than a deer would usually be targets of opportunity. See that bison limping? We’ll spook the herd and it will be a relatively easy kill.
And sometimes, if you have a nice trap like a cliff or a swamp handy, you can spook the herd into the trap, carve off as much as you can eat before it goes bad and leave the rest to rot.
Deciding when and what to hunt back in the day was carefully considered. Mammoths would never have been high on the list, because elephants are smart and very dangerous, they were difficult to kill with the available technology, processing them to get at the meat was time consuming and involved fighting off scavengers, etc. Other resources were much more sensible, unless you stumbled upon a sick or injured mammoth, or you found a dead one and managed to fight off the other scavengers long enough to get some of the meat for yourself.
In other words, only crazy people would actually hunt a mammoth.
@Ingmar
Are you reading the same thread I am? The one where people are mocking that jackass? Cos it doesn’t seem like it.
@Ingmar, Dalillama
Things Come Undone has a bit of a history of making rather similar comments to this, then getting taken apart by other commenters. Make of that what you will.
It occurred to me a while ago that men coming back with meat after weeks on the hunt is probably why men can’t see colors. I mean,
“How about that meat I brought back!”
“It’s gray.”
“It’s fine!”
“The parts that aren’t green, that is.”
And here’s me, reading this blog on my lunch break, eating meat that I DID hunt… and I’m a LADY! ?
Deer backstrap steak stuffed pasilla peppers, smoked and wrapped in bacon. There’s cream cheese in there too. I mean, it’s not mammoth, but it’ll do the trick.
@ James:
… oh, the inappropriate things I could say….
@ Things Come Undone:
Actually… (I had a do that…) the “best” hunter today may or may not be best tomorrow (or may be dead tomorrow), and up front it’s very hard to say who is going to bear the “most” children. It’s not a video game, it’s paleoanthropology.
@Fil
You probably won’t respond, but I’ll do this anyway.
Are you addressing David Futrelle, or us commenters? I personally have a job and balance several hobbies, and come here when I get a chance. I know many other commenters also have many other things they do. So yes, we do have other things we do, but we make time to come here.
Interesting ideas of masculine activities. Whatever happened to cleaning the house, raising children, cooking, building, playing instruments, or hiking? Men can also do all those activities. I find most attempts to narrowly define masculinity are harmful to men as well as women, so I try to avoid it.
Also, although David is indeed a man, many of us commenters are not men. I’m not. And those of us who are probably aren’t limiting ourselves to such narrow views of what it means to be a man.
Why? I don’t think we’re directly trying to enact global change here, but if we do so in the process that would be nice.
How do you know we’re not making any? Every little step counts.
I don’t know David’s grandmother, but I don’t think visiting relatives precludes someone from writing a blog.
Well, this blog’s been up for 9 years and some of us have been here for almost that long, so I’m going to go with “no” on that one.
Thank you for playing!
Real men go to client meetings? I thought that men only do manual labor and only women have cushy office jobs.
@WWTH
I thought the men were too busy hunting the mammoth to go to meetings. /s
Sounds kind of like a Jordan Peterson fan to me, though given Peterson’s views weren’t very uncommon to begin with, it could just be a coincidence. Generally I’m not a fan of the mentality of “you can’t make a difference in society so fuck society” in general, regardless of the politics motivating it.
Attempts to discuss the history leading up to today’s injustices are often met with pathetic defenses. I’m sure many of you are familiar with these talking points. “Why are you dragging up the past?” “I never owned slaves/stole anyone’s land/firebombed a gay bar!” “You’re just trying to make me feel guilty for being white/straight/a man.” “You’re alienating potential allies.” And that favorite old chestnut: “It’s you SJWs who are really causing problems. None of this stuff would even be an issue if you just stopped beating a dead horse.”
Yet these same defenders of the status quo are all too happy to beat a dead mammoth. I should bring that up more often in the future. And, while I’m at it, maybe I’ll also bring up all those privileged folks who are still steamed at what the Persians did to the Spartans at Thermopylae or what the Romans did to Jesus. Oh wait, they’ve somehow managed to blame the Jews for a Roman style execution. (Really, if you’re gonna whine about past injustices against your lord and savior, at least get your facts straight.)
Well, this happened:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/world/europe/spain-vox-ortega-smith-violence-women.html
Tl;dr is that today was the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and in Spain a far right party pulled a huge “but what about the menz?”