By David Futrelle
Yesterday afternoon, the Alt-Rightish YouTube “philosopher” Stefan Molyneux decided that the world needed to hear his thoughts on Taylor Swift’s eggs. Not her egg salad recipe (if she has one) or her favorite way to prepare an omelette. Her eggs eggs. The ones inside her body.
So he tweeted this:
And with this tweet, Stefan managed to squick out roughly half of the internet. The tweet is like some sort of icky onion: every layer is icky right down to its core. There’s the spectacle of a fiftysomething man offering his unasked-for thoughts on the reproductive anatomy of a woman young enough to be his daughter. There’s his attempt to use biology to push his agenda of pushing young women out of the workforce and back into the home. There’s that bit at the end about her potentially being a “fun mom.” There’s the smiley at the end. There’s the weird stench of horniness that permeates the whole tweet.
I could go on. But — as you’ll see if you look at the responses to that tweet — many others already have, sometimes hilariously so. And while Taylor Swift herself hasn’t responded to Stefan and his admittedly strange concerns, the Daily Beast notes, she has addressed the topic more broadly, telling People magazine that
people who ask the questions at parties like ‘When are you going to start a family’ to someone as soon as they turn 25 are a little bit rude.
It’s good that we’re allowed to say, ‘Hey, just so you know, we’re more than incubators.’ You don’t have to ask that of someone just because they’re in their mid-20s and they’re a female.
Upon discovering this, Stefan’s “concern” for her turned into anger.
This isn’t Stefan’s first Egg Rodeo. Indeed, he’s posted about women’s eggs many times in the past — sometimes accusingly, sometimes gloatingly, and sometimes with false concern — in an attempt to chide the egg-havers into retreating from the workplace and devoting their twenties to babies, babies and more babies.
Here he cites selective facts in an attempt to scare women into making babies before it’s “too late.”
In the interest of fairness, I should note that Stefan has also pointed out that sperm quality declines with age as well — though his preferred solution for men is to freeze their sperm for later use, not to give up the idea of a career in their twenties. (He would also prefer that young men not smoke pot lest it make their sperm lazy.)
But Stefan’s alleged “concerns” about women are skin-deep; he’s just as likely to mock older women without children for having “old” eggs as he is to express his weird “sympathy” for younger women whom he fears will end up “wasting” their young eggs.
Here he mocks women with the temerity to take on debt in order to get an education:
Here he suggests that women who don’t have kids young will end up getting eaten by their cats:
He just seems to hate older women in general:
It seems highly unlikely that Stefan will manage to avoid posting equally cringeworthy and terrible thoughts about women’s eggs in the future. No amount of criticism on this front seems to faze him. He doesn’t even bother to respond to most of it .
But there’s one egg-related topic that seems to genuinely bother him: the degree to which his own head resembles an egg.
Perhaps more “modern Oscar Wildes” offering similar insights into Stafan’s big eggy head could deter him from making quite so many egg-related tweets in the future.
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Excuse you sir, my eggs started depleting at age 12 I’ll have you know. Because that’s when I began menstruating.
This man really deserves what’s coming to him.
And I’ll leave that up to your imagination. But let’s just say it isn’t very nice.
As someone who doesn’t have eggs, I’m not really an expert, but that statistic of 90% of eggs depleting by 30 sounds like BS. Most of the women I know who have children had those children after 30 (my mother was 31 when I was born, for example) and their children seem fine. If 90% of eggs were depleted by 30, we wouldn’t be seeing that.
Anyway, it’s a day ending in Y so Stefan Molyneux is creepy. So predictable.
When did his brain cells start dying? (Not like he had that many to start with.)
I’ll just leave that right there, regarding women being useless after 30, for both boner-hardening and reproduction.
A dream of mine is that these fascist doofuses wind up isolating themselves in a closed-loop mini-internet, with bots designed to react to them so they don’t realise it. And then the rest of us can get on with our actual lives, undisturbed by their creepy bullshit.
@Hippodameia
I don’t know about his brain cells (if he had any to begin with), but mine are dying just looking at his idiocy.
@Amy E
So, the Matrix? They like that movie (or at least that one scene with the pills), but I doubt they’d like the practice.
Of course, there’s another video up there by some “Dr Mom” figure insisting that it’s all lies and women really are useless after 30.
True, and yet meaningless. Hey, Stefan! You’re only as old as your toes! Wow, rly makes u think.
@Demonhype
Thank you for linking to that video. I’ve seen it before, but I have some related feelings going on in my own life, and I needed that dose of comfort. Actually made me tear up a little bit, which I’m sure is exactly the response that the comedy writers were hoping for.
Mother Nature gave us botflies, guinea worms, and cholera. She made ants who keep slaves, parasitic wasps, and mind controlling fungi. She sends us hurricanes and tsunamis, rivers of boiling mud and tornadoes made of fire.
Sure, Mother Nature is responsible for cute fuzzy little bear cubs, but when that bear grows up, tears us limb from limb, and starts eating us while we’re still alive, well, that’s nature too. Maybe she loves her children, but she’ll still rip your guts out to make a feast for a writhing clot of hagfish.
Mind you, the hagfish would be better company than Stefan Molyneux.
@Vucodlak
Something in the style of your comment makes it sound like the narration for a very depressed nature documentary.
The bear can rip out guts, but I’m not sure where hagfish enter the equation. Bears live on land and hagfish live in the deep ocean, so I doubt they’ll be scavenging leftovers from any bears.
That it would be. Until it evolves limbs and learns to use Twitter. That’s where it all goes wrong.
Gross Stefan Molyneux can mind his own damn business.
I love my job and love making people happy.
I’m hot now and will be when I’m 60 just like my amazing beautiful sweet client today.
I define myself.
Baby girls are born with about 2 million eggs, and by puberty it’s down to 400,000. So 80% are gone by the time of menarche. And no, that’s not an argument for middle schoolers to rush out and snag themselves a 35-year-old “provider” before it’s too late and they have to go to prom with their cat.
Over a lifetime, only about 400-500 eggs will ever ripen and make the cut for ovulation. The others don’t “die”, they just fail to respond to follicle stimulating hormones and never progress beyond the antral stage. It’s sheer biological ignorance to try to induce panic in women that they’re !!RUNNING OUT!! when really it’s more of a gradual decline. Eggs don’t literally run out. Quality is what’s important, not quantity.
All it takes is one.
Oh, that’s a swell idea. Have babies in your early 20s on one income, when you can least afford them. Then at 45, sashay down to the company of your choice, snap your fingers, and get an entry level job at (because the workplace is so accepting of older women without a college degree, and will definitely hire you over an energetic go-getter fresh out of school). Then work your way up into a stable career by, oh, 55 or 60, right as retirement looms.
Nope. The way our economy is structured, it’s the career that can’t wait.
A dying industry, killing off the planet for profit. Sounds like a real catch.
Then what’s the deal with postpartum depression?
I’m on the spectrum and highly neurotic and introverted. I don’t have anything against children, I just don’t romanticise the reality of parenting. The noise, mess and everything else that would intrude in my everyday life is so far outside my comfort zone I know I would probably be distressed to the point my mental health would suffer. More importantly, my kid might interpret my lack of energy or shutting down as rejection
My husband is also on the spectrum and OCD. This makes us very compatible and understanding of each other’s quirks, but any product of our combined genes is in for a rough time. Life with these obstacles is a major drag, not gonna lie.
My husband and I couldn’t even afford one baby on two incomes right now. Generation z is gonna be the generation of a lot birthrates decline simply because we can barely afford to feed ourselves.
It always gives me a little pick-me-up when I remember that my childfreedom pisses off white supremacists.
“Oh no 90% of your eggs are gone by the time you’re 30”
That’s too damn low of a number, buddy. Is there any way that I can flush the remaining 10% right down to hell now, instead of having to wait until menopause?
Stefan Molyneux tweeted this 25 minutes ago:
In summation, it’s okay for a man — or maybe it’s just Stefan — to be old. It’s most definitely not okay for a woman to be old.
I’m pretty much exactly Taylor Swift’s age so this feels pretty personal. Get your eyes off my eggs, Stefan.
Down Syndrome risk increases with maternal age because it’s most often a meiosis defect during oogenesis, but the majority of genetic mutations are acquired paternally.
Since sperm are actively generated constantly starting at the onset of puberty, they develop mutations over time. About 5 to 10 times as many mutations (out of ~70-100 per human) are inherited paternally vs. maternally, depending on how you measure. And the mutation number increases linearly with paternal age, but not with maternal age.
So I hardly think an old man without a medical license is any position to talk to women about aging reproductive systems.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
So what you’re saying is that technically he’s right about the number but it doesn’t mean what he thinks it means?
@Lainy
And of course all the baby boomers will complain about how Gen Z isn’t having enough children, and blame it on feminism or LGBT people or some other scapegoat. I always wanted many children, it’s not my fault I can’t afford it.
@Catalpa
Well, you could get an oophorectomy or tubal ligation but I’m not sure if Canadian healthcare covers it.
@Kat
But, if nature knows best, clearly it’s the other way around. Women tend to live longer than men, so it isn’t ok for Stefan and his fellow men to get old. I’m just applying his own logic.
And why are the older (married or unmarried – not specified, but apparently immaterial) men wealthy while the older unmarried women are still paying off loans? Sounds more like a workplace discrimination problem than a biological one to me.
Bit surprised he’s not gone the whole fanservice bit and pointed out that 70% of the million odd eggs a woman is born with are gone by puberty.
Bleh.
Dude’s a dipshit, and sleezy with it. Also rather bad at the basics, but that goes without saying – “philosopher” meant something once, but now it’s code for completely useless.
@Naglfar – Yup. (Though his numbers are a little off, it’s more like 85% by age 30, but 15% of two million is still a lot.) It sounds to me like Stefan isn’t handling aging gracefully, has some unresolved regrets around his lost youth, and is projecting his fears onto women. His tweets have a sepulchral “ladies: as you are now, so once was I” vibe.
If there’s a cautionary tale for the younger generation, it’s that you don’t want to end up as a bitter, puritanical imam struggling to stay relevant and getting dunked on by Gen Zs. (See also: Roosh)
@Prith kDar:
Oh, well, that’s because all men major in STEM, pay their own way through college, and graduate right into six figure incomes, while all women take out half million dollar student loans and major in gender studies and shoe shopping. It’s just science!
It’s the same science that also says all men in their 40s and 50s are brimming with health and vigor, look like George Clooney, and definitely ARE NOT youth vampires obsessed with the egg viability of their celebrity crushes.
Whenever anyone begins a statement with “Ladies”, I immediately stop reading/listening.
Not that Molyneux or his ilk would care.
It’s always been so darkly funny to me that conservatives have so much angst about how not enough white people are reproducing, but refuse to even address, let alone fix the causes of that. Which isn’t that young women want to be irresponsible sluts, as they claim, but that young people have student loan debt, aren’t paid well, and housing and (US edition) health care prices are out of control. But instead of fixing income inequality, they’d rather just outlaw abortion and birth control.