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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@ Valentin
Oh I’m happy to; I think a self examination is really useful. We’re all flawed, we all have our inconsistencies and double standards. We’re all capable of justifying our own actions and rationalising behaviour in ourselves that we would call out in others.
But fundamentally, the issue here is that sentient beings are suffering unnecessarily; and that’s before you get onto things like climate, eradication of humans for land use etc.
If you’re saying we shouldn’t comment on that, or criticise when we contribute to that then fine; but you would also have to exercise that restraint on issues you feel need addressing, and allow the same indulgence to people who make choices you feel are questionable.
But I guess that’s a part of the bigger debate about call out culture generally.
Which is what you should be focusing on instead of on people’s individual diets.
We’re getting into no ethical consumption under capitalism territory here. People “choose” to use plastic products. They “choose” to use carbon by turning on the air or heat or driving instead of walking or biking. They “choose” to buy from companies that treat its workers like shit. Which by the way includes a whole lot of farms – including organic farms – that grow vegetables, fruits, and grains so veganism is not a free from harm choice either. Almost every consumption choice that we make causes some sort of harm.
The best we can all really do on an individual level is pick our battles and do what harm reduction we can. But slavery wasn’t abolished because individuals stopped buying people, falcon populations didn’t make a comeback because individuals stopped using DDT, the 40 hour work week and minimum wage didn’t come about because individual businesses cared about worker welfare. Etc.
Given that there’s no such thing as ethical consumption, shaming people for what they buy or eat is never going to be an effective way of changing things. There’s no morally pure way to live under capitalism, and it’s the system that needs to be changed, not the powerless people that have to live in it. It’s absolutely fine if you want to discuss animal rights on this site, just as we all talk about our political views, but just don’t care after people for eating an animal product please. Because arguably, consuming an animal product is unethical, but so it using the electronics we need to comment on the internet, given that they’re made with minerals mined by workers in appalling conditions.
@Alan Robertshaw
“Still, for many humans, avoiding animal derived products would not be a luxury; at worst it would be an inconvenience.”
And thus you’d take away their only viable source of protein. Think about this from the viewpoint of someone other than a rich American who has the privilege of having a choice about what to eat and what to expose themselves to. If it makes me uncomfortable, it’s because you refuse to confront your own hypocrisy in the matter.
As weirwoodtreehugger pointed out, the only way to be perfectly ethical here is to renounce virtually all technology and live as a hermit in some remote place far away from civilization.
@ anonymous
I do; hence my use of ‘many’ not ‘all’.
Of course the irony is, for many of the poorest people in the world animal protein is an unobtainable luxury.
And for all too many people, food generally is in short supply. But as mentioned before, 85% of starving and malnourished children live in countries that export food as animal fodder.
So, it’s all connected.
And to take the point about individual versus systemic change; it’s not a one or other situation I would suggest.
We comment on individual choices all the time here if we think that choice contributes to a wider issue; and I don’t think we would accept in any other context the argument that because systemic change is required individuals are absolved of personal responsibility. To use the example above; we would criticise the purchase of people even if it was legal.
I appreciate this is a controversial topic, and I don’t want to tread on any toes; but if one sees (what one at least perceives as) injustice or wrongdoing then I think there is a compulsion, if not a duty, to speak out.
It’s not a wrongdoing to make a joke about how eggs taste delicious, for fuck’s sake.
@Alan
Just gonna point out, again, that being more concerned with the welfare of livestock than that of agricultural (or indeed any other) workers still isn’t a good look, that comparing battery feedlots to yard-raising hens is an indication of staggering ignorance on your part, and that any vegan activism not aimed first and foremost at abolishing capitalism is utter bullshit.
@ kupo
The wrongdoing is the suffering inherent in egg production.
@ dalillama
We can be concerned with both; although obviously when you see footage of what agricultural workers do to the animals under their charge they do lose some sympathy. But slaughterhouse workers do have very high incidences of PTSD so it’s an issue for humans too.
And I do think we can, and must, work on the issue in the society we have, not the one we might want. We call out Berniebros who think all problems will be eliminated though reforming the economy so no need for feminism etc.
And I did differentiate between backyard and industrial farming; they’re obviously on a spectrum. But we don’t generally excuse examples of harm just because there are far more serious ones.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Whatever we eat costs something. When I die, my flesh will nourish that which nourishes the plants and animals. Everything eats of everything else.
@Alan Robertshaw
It is also a duty to learn the full nuances of what it is you denounce and avoid vilifying people whose only “crime” is making a lifestyle choice that might not even be under their control or desiring foods whose taste cannot be replicated faithfully with other means (not yet at least). What you call speaking of personal responsibility, I call sanctimony and acting as if the welfare of livestock is more important than the welfare of people.
Livestock which in the wild would be just as subject to suffering and death as any other organism on Earth, which you seem to forget. While it is true that many of our current practices are repugnant or at least in dire need of improvement, said livestock is at least guaranteed shelter from other predators/the environment and a stable (if not always sufficient, but again that is not impossible to change) supply of food. Besides, it’s not like we can just undo five millenia of selective breeding (in the case of chickens- for other livestock it can be even more than that).
@AsAboveSoBelow
Exactly. No matter how hard you try, no matter which system is in power, human life has no choice but to cause other life to suffer in order to sustain itself. We can mitigate it to a degree, but at the end of the day something is going to hurt and die so we may live. As organisms that can’t photosynthesize, there simply isn’t a way to get around that.
This is not excusing harm. It is merely an acknowledgement that harm cannot be fully prevented and that it is better to minimize it than to search for impossible ways of preventing it outright.
And a lot of ag workers don’t work with animals at all, but pick fruits and vegetables. Many being migrant workers who can be exploited with little to no legal consequences. A lot of suffering goes into your salad. Just a few links found with a couple minutes of Googling.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/12/04/more-us-child-workers-die-agriculture-any-other-industry
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2017/12/drifting-pesticides-keep-making-california-farm-workers-sick/
https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.14/agriculture-californias-farmworkers-face-illness-and-death-in-the-fields
Alan, this has gotten to be as tedious as the person early in the year who had to interrupt every thread with a rant about how much she hated the remake of “Das Boat.” Trust me, we all know how you feel. You remind us at every opportunity.
Offering apologies for being so awesome isn’t helping, either. Lately it feels like you’re less interested in participating in the conversation than you are in delivering a jeremiad every time someone mentions food.
Surprised that no-one has posted this clip from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy yet:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bAF35dekiAY
Though this bit does raise an interesting question: how many people really would eat something like the Dish of the Day if it could speak to them like this? Would they consider Dish as nothing more than a food animal, or as something as sentient as themselves?
Alan, you made your point. It’s time to move on.
Understood. Moving on.