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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I don’t understand the cats tweet.
Let’s say a woman has two grown-up children, both living in another place, and let’s say she faints at home. What happens? Do her children magically appear next to her and say: “oh no, my spider-senses just told me my mom is in danger, I’m calling an ambulance”?
And does he know that cats don’t eat eyeballs?
And shouldn’t people have kids because they actually love kids, not because they’re afraid of being eaten by a cat?
So, Molyneux still not understanding anything about how biology work, I see. As Buttercup have said, the stat is entirely meaningless, and I would add that the same statistic for a men is probably just as high, if not higher.
The most hilarious part being that if I remember correctly, we are not terribly far from being able to change any cells into an ovule. Because the main use for that are mostly ethically dubious like cloning, and because of the terrible consequence if you do it wrong, it’s not a super hot topic, but it’s also not like science cannot helpt with that.
I am incredibly skeeved out by the assertion that an intelligent woman shouldn’t bother to get an education and develop that intelligence, because it’s better for society if she just has a lot of smart babies instead.
1. The assumption that intelligence is purely genetic.
2. The implication that a woman’s intelligence doesn’t actually belong to her, she’s just holding it in trust for her sons (not her daughters, obviously–they will be subject to the same “Just breed and spread the genes” advice).
3. More generally, the notion that any woman who is in possession of advantageous personal traits should by no means use them to her personal advantage–her genetic makeup belongs to society and she is honor-bound to maximize it for the public good, not her own. (Men, of course, are under no such stricture–they are free and welcome to make the most of themselves and reap the individual rewards, because something something eggs and aging.)
4. The barely disguised thread running through the entire heap of bullshit: all this only applies to white people. All people of color are presumed worthless from the get-go.
I majored in philosophy and concur. If someone calls themselves a philosopher (without mentioning a specialization, and sometimes even then) they’re usually full of shit. Especially asshats like Molyneux.
Espousing an ideology and framing everything in that ideology doesn’t make you a philosopher.
Not to say you need to have studied philosophy. Questioning biases and hidden assumptions (including your own) is more important than a degree in philosophy. But if one is gonna claim that title for themselves I wanna see some credentials.
Last exam guys!
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Well, his mind is definitely not aging well. I wonder if he was this delusional as a younger man.
Well, I doubt he was ever much like me, but I certainly hope I never end up like him.
The delicious irony of calling him an imam…
@WWTH
They’d rather use brute force dehumanization tactics like creating the Republic of Gilead. They don’t see women as people, so they don’t want to help them.
@happy cat
Umm…how do you know this? Experience?
@Ohlmann
The average man produces about half a trillion sperm cells in a lifetime. Probably for most men, less than 10 are used to conceive and most end up in Kleenex and socks (or whatever else men masturbate with). So yes, it’s lower, but since sperm are produced continuously it’s not really a good comparison.
Sperm quality definitely does decrease with age, though, so that seems to be a better analogue.
@Karalora
This is a key part of right wing misogyny: that women do not exist for themselves but for society (in particular, the men of society) and are simply incubators or repositories. They do not see women as human.
My biggest hope is that people like Stefan do not reproduce or spread genes. I would like to see that there are fewer misogynistic asshats in the next generation.
There’s a Finnish feminist slang term I might translate as “Mr. Avuncular”, in reference to mansplainers and other casual sexists. It evokes and image of older man being patronizing at younger women, drawing authority from both his gender and age. I feel like this is the very essence of it.
Now, I understand Molyneux is actually a professional misogynist and rightwing grifter, but he does make a pretty good show of a kind of comically exaggerated version casual sexism, pretentiousness and male confidence.
@Naglfar : the thing is, producing them during your whole life or having a functionaly unlimited fixed amount is more or less the same. In both case you can say people waste 90% of them, and it’s still meaningless.
In addition to that, now that we know that the human body continuously create new neurons and new, well, every kind of cells, I would not be surprised if women could creates new “eggs” too. One of the thing to remember with biology is how a lot of things that are hold as true are proved false or misleading.
Also, I don’t think he was more coherent or less delusional when younger. Young misogynists aren’t smarter than older one, much like younger people tend to not really be smarter than older people.
@Battering Lamb
I’m not a philosophy major, so you would know better than I, but I’m noticing a trend that right wing reactionaries (Molyneux, Ben Shapiro aka “the cool kids philosopher”, etc) are calling themselves philosophers when really they do not fit that definition in any way. IIRC the title “philosopher” comes from Greek roots meaning “love of knowledge,” but these people hate knowledge and only like the bullshit they make up or distort. I’m guessing it just sounds better for them to say they’re philosophers than “bullshitting pseudointellectuals.”
@Lainy
Good luck!
@Ohlmann
With the sperm, the figure is more like 99.9999999995% then, assuming an average of 2 children per man.
You’re right, he probably was not smarter when he was younger. He was probably similarly awful.
I’m pretty sure it was also Mother Nature that gave Molyneux cancer some years back so… make of that what you will.
But I’m having a little trouble squaring something about Molyneux’s worldview (I know, reactionary worldviews are inherently contradictory). Molyneux made his bones with the whole “defoo” thing (his acronym for severing parental ties). If he thinks parents are so terrible, why is he demanding more people become them?
Since I love my cats, I hope they do eat my body if I die at home and it’s taking a few days for anyone to notice. I’m not a Pharaoh and I don’t want to take my cats with me to the afterlife. I expect the police to find some well-fed cats.
@Katamount
I’m a bit confused myself, but here’s my attempt at parsing:
1. The defoo thing seems to be advocated primarily for people with liberal family who are concerned about them listening to Stefan. He wants these people to cut ties with their families and take him as a sort of father figure by reading his books and listening to his podcast FreeDomain Radio. It’s all rather cult like, and cutting people off from their families is a classic cult tactic. He probably doesn’t want his follower’s children to defoo, as he sees those parents as being right. Sort of like how other cults want people from outside to abandon their original beliefs and join, but don’t want the followers to leave.
2. He probably wants more of his followers to be parents, not people in general. His followers are almost all white and therefore if his followers have more children he thinks he can evade “white genocide” or “the great replacement” or insert other conservative dogwhistle here. He doesn’t care about the welfare of those children, as is usually the case with conservatives, just that they exist as a number. It’s eerily reminiscent of the inverse of Stalin’s famous quote “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”
3. His advice is only for white Christian conservatives, as someone else in this thread (Karalora?) pointed out. He obviously does not want PoC, Jews, Muslims, liberals, or other groups reproducing.
I think that’s what he means. Sorry if that’s too long winded.
I think it went well. Now all i have is two papers and then I’m official done with the semester.
Men who die alone are also subject to being eaten by their pets. Given that elderly men tend to have less of a social network than elderly women, it’s probably even more likely for this to happen to them. And as happy cat pointed out, having kids and a spouse doesn’t protect against it. Spouses die, kids move away and visit only on holidays, daughters figure out that fathers have terrible opinions about women and stop contacting them (or “defoo”).
And why aren’t 50 year old men being subjected to this same pressure and judgmental bullshit? Shouldn’t men have their children while they’re young and energetic and their sperm is in peak condition? Why are they wasting their twenties on frivolous office jobs?
Do dogs usually eat their owners after the death of the latter? I’m not old, but I live alone with my dog (see avatar) and I’m wondering if she’ll eat me if I die at home for whatever reason.
@Naglfar
Depends on the dog, it also depends on the cat. Kind of like in disaster situations there are people who eat other people, and there are people who just die instead of doing that. Some dogs will just lie down and die next to their owners, some will eat them. For example my cat joes? would never eat me. She’s never even onces hissed at me, swipped at me, anything. And when I was a little girl I used to put her in my toy baby stroller, put a bonnet on her head and push her around. She would let me tuck her into a crib with blankets and rock her. She was the most gentle, loving and lay back cat I’ve ever seen. She was in a lot of pain towards the end because she had cancer and we had no idea until she stopped eating and was sleeping all the time. She would have been in pain for months but she never showed it.
Now by cat phoebe who is like 5 now? yes would definitely eat me. She’ tried to eat me while I’m just sleeping on a couch. This cat hisses at me if she’s mildly annoyed. Jose was a “you’re dead I’m joining you” kind of pet. Phoebe is more of “you’re dead? I’m gonna eat your face even though my bowl downstairs is still full”
I wonder what kind of people are receiving his tweets positively.
@Naglfar
Nah, that all makes sense. His “defoo” audience and those he demand be obedient “reproducers” are distinct enough that he can hold both of these views simultaneously.
@Katamount
Exactly. When you divide humanity into 2 castes, it’s easy to have separate instructions for each. It’s how conservatives roll.
Thanks you, Steve, none of us on the female side would know anything about our bodies without you to mansplain for us. Now would you like to have us explain sperm to you?
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
I did wonder about this, because his claims seemed rather off biologically (my GSCE science days are long behind me so I wasn’t entirely sure). I wonder how many of their hundreds of thousands of eggs Stefan wants 30 year old (white) women to dedicate to reproduction. Perhaps we can all find nearby ponds to spawn in to maximise that sweet eggy potential.
BRB, putting “Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?” on my Amazon wishlist…
I would love to have children as well. But I refuse to raise them through poverty. I want to give them the best life I possibly can. And if I can only give myself a good life with barely scraping by, that’s not good enough for them. I want to bring them into a world they can thrive in, not have to struggle to survive.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Well if gross Steve is going to talk like he is then the answer is yes.
I am really against body shaming (and struggle a lot with that issue because I work in the beauty industry and struggle with the fact that it sometimes supports standards that hurt women even though I just want to make people feel good about looking their best) It’s taken me a long time to get comfortable saying this but when it comes to guys I’m going to sleep with or even date they have to be in peak physical shape and be really handsome. I mean guys like what incels call Chad. I used to not admit that so much because I didn’t want people to think I was mean or body shaming anyone else but then I realized it was ok because I’m only talking about who I date and not people in general. I don’t know if I want to have kids honestly but if I do, yes, it’s only going to be with a young really fit really handsome guy. And in the meantime for friends just be a good person you know but for dating tall, handsome and ripped is all I will take. It took me a while to get comfortable saying that but since I’ve been with my BDSM social group I’ve grown a lot. I like it because they will only let a single guy by himself come to socials if we (the women) think he’s handsome and really ripped. Sorry to ramble but yes it’s true these assholes never apply to their gross creepy selves what they try to apply to women.
There’s also this weird sense of genetic determinism to it? As in, if you have a woman who is both willing and able to be an engineer (that’s the favored go-to example of a socially beneficial career that requires brains), then her children will automatically follow suit, so instead of being an engineer herself, she should just have more children, thus maximizing the total number of engineers.
But…like…what if her children aren’t as smart as she is? Or don’t care about engineering? Or aren’t boys? Shouldn’t society take the bird in the hand–the engineering-ready woman–rather than hold out for the few in the bush?
The only way Molyneux’s advice makes sense at all is if you assume that no woman can actually be a competent engineer, so the only way society benefits from her leaning that direction is if she passes it on to a number of sons who can actually fulfill that potential. I have no doubt that Molyneux actually does assume this, he just veils it with layers of creepy weirdness about eggs.