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’m going to be contacting the police tomorrow and I have also finally decided to talk to his employer. I’ll let you know how it all goes!
Thanks all for your advice and listening!!
@Yutolia
We just want you and everyone to be safe.
You did nothing to bring this on yourself and you have every right to say what you did and absolutely to protect yourself.
I really admire you for taking a stand.
@Lainy Congratulations!!
@Yutolia Good luck and I hope all works out well for you.
I wish Stefan could just go get Saudi citizenship and never speak English again! He would stop complaining about modern society if he himself were around people that reject it or are trapped in a system that forbids it!
I think the West or the world should stop their bullshit with trying to defend free speech (since people are taking that to mean “I can say whatever the fuck I want, even if it’s repressive as fuck”) and get to defending only leftist values already! These people don’t deserve a platform!
Adding to what I’ve said, there’s a saying “America is the land of the free. Don’t like it? Leave!” That saying should go to Stefan and people like him only, since he doesn’t want anyone but cis white men like himself to be free.
America should be free for everyone who isn’t his demographic too, because unfortunately, much of the world seems to be free only for heterosexual cisgender men of the majority or a favored ethnicity, of the majority faith and whatever other privilieged position(s) they may be in.
@Yutolia : good luck for the ordeal, because you will need a bit of luck for it to go well 😡
I don’t know what I would do in such a situation. I guess I would change phone number and consider change house too.
“Where I live you can actually get locally-produced eggs from people you know, who take care of their chickens. The eggs aren’t as “perfect” looking as store bought eggs, but you can see where the chickens live and what they eat and how on the small family farms.”
This. I too am lucky enough to live in an area with lots of small farms that take great care of their hens.
Yutolia: Seconding/thirding everyone here. We support you.
Re: backyard chickens
Whilst such birds may have a marginally better life than commercial hens; there are still animal rights issues.
Firstly, there’s just the sheer artificiality of the situation. The Red Jungle Fowl (which hens are descended from) lays around a dozen eggs a year. Egg laying hens have been selectively bred to produce eggs daily.
That obviously takes a toll on their bodies. Left to their own devices hens will try to recoup lost calcium by eating their own eggs; but of course that’s not possible if you deprive them of them. But the calcium deficiency is why you get ‘wonky’ eggs.
Commercial egg production needs things to look ok for customers; so they use chemical supplements
https://www.farmchem.co.uk/liquid-calcium-poultry-supplement-1173-p.asp
There’s also the issue of what happens to hens when they reach the end of productive egg laying. Do they get a happy retirement; or are they just killed and disposed of once they have no value?
Animal welfare is of course desirable; but it’s no substitute for animal rights.
@Alan Robertshaw : to be honest, I litteraly cannot read that kind of post without rolling my eyes, because plants have the exact same set of problems, and I don’t empathize any less with a tree or an herb than with an hen.
Until humans do the photosynthesis themselves, I feel like that animal and plant welfare is as far as someone should go. Trying to go too far into that lead both to strange, arbitrary distinction (like you do here between hens and soja plants) and overreach (the current domestic hen cannot live in the wild, and it’s at best conjectural to say that wild animals are happier than farm one)
@Yutolia, I am glad you’re taking action to protect yourself. I second everything everyone has said. This is NOT your fault. You did nothing wrong. This dude escalated horribly fast and was already immersed in his own fantasy before anything you did or said to him outside of the store.
Captain Awkward has answered lots of questions from people dealing with stalkers. Go to her site and search for stalker or stalking. The most recent one: https://captainawkward.com/2019/11/19/1236-my-ex-keeps-gnawing-at-the-edges-of-my-work-and-social-life/
It’s pretty different from your situation, but some of the advice will still be potentially useful. Also, please know that stalking is depressingly, terrifyingly common, so you are not alone in dealing with this. Again, not your fault.
In addition to the freeze on your credit, you might consider contacting your credit card company and requesting that you be issued a new card because you are concerned that your current one has been compromised by a dodgy store employee.
Good luck talking to the police. And good on you for documenting. Reach out to friends for support. His goal is to isolate and terrorize you, so this is the time to surround yourself with loving kindness.
Consider calling a domestic violence hotline to help you figure out what other safety precautions you can take to deal with this situation. It’s not fair and it’s not right, but you got this.
@Yutolia
I hope you are doing ok. We are with you.
I really agree with Solecism here. If you call that means someone will know you called and you aren’t alone. It means so much.
Aye. No worry, you’ve got enough stress on your plate, but let us know how its going when you can please.
70% of eggs are gone by the time a girl hits PUBERTY. ? Losing 90% by age 30 isn’t exactly “running out of eggs”. Sure, fertility decreases with age. But not many women are unaware of that, & it’s also not as extreme as these dudes like to claim.
And it’s not like we can use ’em all, anyway. *shrug*
@Yutolia the Laissez-Fairy Pronoun Boner – Late to the party, but I also wanted to chime in support. This dude is beyond creepy and I’m pretty sure things can be done to neutralize him. Hope your call to the police went well.
And now as for Eggman (sorry, Sonic fans)… Yeah, besides misrepresenting basic biology to be a sanctimonious creep, the arrogance, entitlement and hypocrisy are positively (so to speak) dripping from his tweets. Makes me want to shower. You know it’s bad when he can’t even manage to sound smarmy and unctuous but still feels slimy. Can’t help but pity any women he gets his hands on because as brutally imperious as he is, she’s gonna have a bad time.
Plus, he can’t even take a single joke at his expense because of course he can’t. Ego more fragile than a crystal glass.
Hi all,
I came home and just passed out last night, I was exhausted! Anyway, I called the store and told the management about him. Apparently this has been a problem before. Then I spoke to the police and they are looking into the prank calls and hang ups, plus they know this guy just lost his job and might be extra pissed.
*sigh… this is so tiring
@Alan
Could you please not shame people for the foods they eat? Thanks.
@Yutolia
Thank you for letting us know the update. I am sure it’s tiring but I hope you are moving close to feeling safer.
@ kupo
I don’t think I’m shaming anybody.
I am raising some facts about certain aspects of food production; but I can’t be responsible for people’s reactions to that. If people feel shame after that, then it’s a matter for their own self reflection as to why that might be.
The whole animal rights thing though does illustrate, and raise, some interesting issues around progressive politics.
There’s the whole call out culture thing. Should we refrain from commenting on people’s choices?
There’s how vegans are perceived, and how that may relate to how progressives generally are perceived.
There’s that thing of “It was different back then”. I personally think that there will come a time when our treatment of animals will be regarded on a par with bear baiting or worse. But of course lot of nice people here do eat them and use animals. So that gives us a bit of an insight into history I think; and how we judge people back then by contemporary standards.
And there’s the whole thing about justification. I find it interesting that people will use “It’s natural” or “We’ve always done that” when challenged on using animals; but dismiss such arguments in other contexts.
And I think a key thing to remember when we talk about people’s food ‘choices’ is, it’s not much of a choice for the animals.
Alan, maybe you could stop derailing. It’s geting pretty tiresome.
@Alan Robertshaw
The way I see it, all life survives only at the expense of other life. Even photosynthetic bacteria will inevitably take up space, water, and oxygen that could’ve gone to other bacteria and deprive them as a result. Similarly, no predator animal exactly has an opportunity to not cause pain as a result of their diet. A small handful of us humans have both the opportunity and the inclination to become vegans, but the bulk of the meat-eating animals on Earth (and many humans at that matter)have no such luxury.
It’s the same for the animals we raise for meat as well as the crops we grow, but then you have to remember that at least now we have the potential to mitigate the suffering we must inevitably cause to them. Until we learn how to grow meat from cell cultures alone at a reasonable cost, things like backyard chickens are in fact the best we can do.
What people eat is also often not a choice for them. Not everyone has privilege to chose, or access to chose.
@ hippodemeia
Yeah sorry; I know I bang on about this. It’s just so hard for me when people talk positively about certain foods. “We condone what we stay silent about” and all that. And this is a site where people do call out what they see as problematic issues; so I get a bit carried away. Apologies.
@ anonymous
Indeed, and that is recognised in that it’s about harm reduction rather than elimination. “as far as is practical and possible”. Still, for many humans, avoiding animal derived products would not be a luxury; at worst it would be an inconvenience. And whilst we can’t yet grow ‘meat’ on an industrial scale; there are plenty of alternatives. So again, meat eating is a preference rather than a necessity.
@ valentin
That is true for some people; especially if they live in food deserts and/or have other problems like lack of access to cooking facilities etc. That’s part of a much bigger political picture, involving everything from social policy to the subsidies for the food lobby.
But as above, a lot of people do have a choice; so they’re inflicting unnecessary suffering. And that’s just direct harm to the animals; that’s before you come onto secondary effects like the genocide in the Amazon or the effects on climate.
I do understand why this is a subject that comes across as preachy and makes people uncomfortable; but I think that can often because progressives especially feel a sort of cognitive dissonance. We recognise the inconsistencies and double standards in what we condemn in others but excuse in ourselves.
With all due respect, maybe you should look at yourself first.