By David Futrelle
I regret to inform you that the bad tweeters are at it again. Here, an assortment of very bad takes, from some familiar names and a few up-and-comers.
Our old friend fiend Stefan Molyneux is railing against women going to college and getting jobs instead of pumping out babies.
He almost goes full “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” in this one:
Meanwhile, Aaron “Captain Capitalism” Clarey lets us know why porn is so popular today.
This promising bad tweet newcomer has the solution to pretty much all (hetero) relationship problems: women being completely submissive to men.
This dude, by contrast, doesn’t really see a problem with women saying “no.” Because women’s “no’s” can be fixed, at least to his satisfaction, with more alcohol.
Over on “the left,” good old Aimee Terese continues her ongoing transformation into a generic alt-right troll.
Not that she has much further to go. I mean, she’s already at the stage where she’s quoting fucking Phillis Schlafly as a font of wisdom.
If this is Marxism, I’m a freaking jerboa.
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Well, most women I know around my age that have degrees aren’t married… But that’s because they’re “living in sin”, as it were.
And funnily enough given divorce rates unmarried couples among my friends and acquaintances tend to last pretty long (i.e. apart from my sister, and a friend who took longer than the others to get in a stable relationship, they’re pretty much all looking at over a decade together, with few signs of serious trouble currently), most have children or are expecting, and all are pretty damn satisfied with having two incomes. Meanwhile it’s the married ones who tend to have more problems overall (both couple- and income-wise).
And here in Quebec “paid family leave” is really flexible; when my friend had his first child, his girlfriend transferred most of her leave to him, since she was studying at the time (and thus it was pretty useless for her due to no income). So she continued her studies full-time without pause (meaning faster return to the job market and therefore income) and he took care of the housework and baby while still being paid 80%+ of his salary (so not that big a hit on pre-existing lifestyle). Oh, and did I mention that due to greater government subsidies student debt is usually a lot less crushing in La Belle Province than in The Land of The Free? Betcha Mollyknots didn’t take that into account, and would likely grumble “something something RadFem Marxism” if told.
About wars being the building block of our civilization: Unfortunately, he’s kinda right on that one. And it’s one of the biggest sources of how fucked-up we are as a society. What he maybe-conveniently forgets is that this isn’t exclusive to Western civilization. All the major surviving civilizations (and many of the non-surviving ones; looking at you, Mesoamericans and pre-Islamic Persians) were majorly influenced, for better or worse (but mostly worse), by how they prosecuted and weathered wars. Of course he forgets that for the most part it was men who forced other men to fight in wars, often with promises of women as loot for compensation. Also, he strangely does not seem to want any part of the cuddling of babies himself… Maybe because what he wants is to pressure/force women to have/cuddle said babies? Maybe that’s why they say he’s a monster, instead of due to their supposed “selfishness” and “narcissism” (projection much?). Just a thought.
As for that Aaron Clarey dude: The obesity problem affects both men and women you nincompoop. I should know, I crossed the 250 lbs threshold during the holidays (not proud of myself). Is female consumption of porn also a problem caused by the opposite sex being fat? Oh who am I kidding, you never even thought about it beforehand because you only ever think in terms of you, personally.
And saying “yes” to everything as a way to improve your life seems… iffy. At best. Probably because that means effectively becoming a slave with zero agency. Gender and sexuality have no bearing on this.
As for the other guy… No. Just NO. No means no, period. Someone changing their mind down the line and saying yes when they said no previously does not magically retroactively turn every previous no into a yes, nor does it prevent no from returning as a valid option later. Also, your taste in t-shirts is shit.
Aimee Therese – Pretty much anyone who positively quotes Phyllis Schafly’s internalized, entitled, hypocritical misogyny unironically loses the right to even call themselves in the same galaxy as feminism until they make amends by admitting they were wrong and that doing it was stupid. So guess what? Not only was she not a feminist, you’re not one either. Oh, and I responded with a tweet myself. Yay me. Oh, and why would you change your profile to justify doing these things? You obviously think you’re entitled to doing it with your profile as-is.
War is indeed counter to building a civilization. All those turns of production wasted on military buildings and units that could have gone towards something grand. The five hundred years that my city spent training five swordsmen could have produced a museum, which would have generated both Culture to help me buy Social Policies, and have slots for Great Works which would lead to a Cultural Victory!
…we were talking about Civilization V, right?
Anyone who would look at the trenches of Verdun and think “ah, the great work of civilization!” is wrong in ways I can’t even reach.
@Paireon
MRAs and their ilk either assume that women don’t watch porn, or they push a strange theory that women watch porn to learn (nevermind that most porn is not a good way to learn about sex for a variety of reasons). So, you are correct that they only ever think in terms of themselves and their preferences.
Which is what they want women to be.
I’m pretty sure that Aimee Terese does not consider herself a feminist. She constantly criticizes feminism for a million idiotic and untrue reasons, and this is just a part of that. If she ever calls herself a feminist she’s using a very different definition than any of us.
The sad thing is that apparently “MyPlayboysBunny” is a woman. The patriarchy can’t be maintained without the quislings.
Marriage is not the end-all, be-all of human existence, and I believe people should be free to choose whether or not they want to make a commitment like marriage and to whom and to be free to end that commitment if and when they don’t want it anymore. I don’t think complete freedom to make these choices exists anywhere, but we’re a lot closer than in Stefan’s half-remembered, half-invented dream past that he wishes to recapture, and I think that is a good thing.
So please believe that I was not accepting Stefan’s shitty premises when I did a very quick google to see if women in NA actually are less likely to be married if they receive university degrees and, low and behold, found the opposite appears to be true, at least according to this Atlantic article.
According to the article, people with more education are likelier to get married and remain married, but the relationship isn’t direct. Class is the relevant factor. More money means more time to spend working on your marriage and less stressors, and of course more money means better access to education (which often means more money, and on and on the class system perpetuates itself).
The world Stefan wants is wrong, but also his ideas as to how to build that world are wrong. He’s just a big plate of wrong covered in wrong sauce.
Allandrel – you reminded me. Back when I was playing Civilization, I always turned War off so I wouldn’t have to waste time and resources on it.
On a Civ discussion board, someone commented to me that that would have been unbearably boring for him. Same planet, different worlds.
I have degrees in Russian and Linguistics. Do you speak Russian, Steffy? Because that is actually pretty fucking useful.
@Yutolia
I highly doubt Steffy speaks it, but I can almost guarantee that he‘s a fan of Putin and his interference in America.
O/T: were you able to resolve the situation a few weeks ago?
Blegh. I don’t think anyone who says “you don’t need consent anymore” would be a “suitable partner,” so that falls apart pretty quickly.
@Viscaria –
This made me laugh, thanks.
Also, nice to see @Mish here again!
about Civ5: I still play it every once in a while, and I don’t turn off war… but except a couple of times when I was trying to finish certain feats/accomplishments I never started wars either.
I defended myself as necessary by holding on to both a large tech advantage and a huge stash of gold. Most of the time I used it for hurrying buildings as I established new cities, but I’d also use it to rush-buy military units when attacked. I’d look weak, then they’d attack, and whammo! I’d kick their attackers back.
Then I’d send in my workers to repair the damage done by pillaging and go on with building a civilized civ.
But mostly it’s about preventing war by gaining allies early and often. The allies don’t attack you – so that’s less war right there – and once you research defensive pacts, your allies’ armies do the deterrence work for you.
I don’t ever have to fight much.
@epitome of incomprehensibility:
It’s your nym, I’m not saying what you should do, but the first time I saw you name I thought,
I just thought you might be amused by the thought.
This Indian (?) pickup artist at least acknowledges that using “persuasion” to get around an initial “no” is not consensual. Usually, pickup artists seem to rather frame it as “not rape”, implying there’s a broad spectrum from fully consensual sex to strong “persuasion” that doesn’t qualify as real rape and is therefore acceptable.
I was wondering how being “charming, witty and a suitable partner” factors into this. Something may be lost in translation, but possibly he means to assert that boorish slobs can’t succeed in the art of “persuasion”, which I highly doubt. Maybe it’s a coded way of saying that you need tactical and manipulation skills to reliably get away with your date rapes.
@Lumipuna –
I suspect so – maybe the idea is if you can be pushy in a suave enough way it won’t seem like you’re being pushy. Again, ugh.
@Crip Dyke – 😀 I like your logic! Shortening might make things easier too. Weirdly, I feel like “the epitome” would come off as pretentious, but just “epitome” wouldn’t 🙂
(I came up with this for an Internet name when I was 16. I don’t know why exactly…a preemptive defense against “I don’t get that”? Or I just liked the rhythm/rhyme.)
@Naglfar:
I got the credit card frozen and nothing out of the ordinary has happened with that since then, and I haven’t been back to that store, so I don’t know if he’s been fired or not. I haven’t had any contact with him but I don’t know what he’s been doing and if he’s given up and moved on to harassing someone else or if he’s still trying to get my info. I’ve blocked him so he can’t contact me or anything and I haven’t heard from him but I don’t know what that means I guess?
I love that Stefan both decides to pretend that he would be eager to sign up to push out a screaming human being from his body if the tables were turned (given his libertarian narcissism) and that childrearing is just “cuddling babies”. Stefan: You suck at parenting advice and yet you are trying to propose how society should parent.
We can now just say “I wish I had the confidence of Stefan Molyneux” rather than the generic “mediocre white man”.
@Naglfar:
Insofar as Terese can be said to present a coherent argument (as opposed to being, say, a particularly badly-written bot running a Markov chain algorithm over the Marxist corpus), she seems to belong to that hard-core subset of Marxists who believe that any form of struggle besides the class struggle is, at best, a distraction, and at worst, a manifestation of false consciousness. In other words, forget about racism, sexism and every other form of inequality, comrades: once the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, all these will magically melt away! ?
@Cat Mara
I‘ve considered trying to train an AI on her tweets to see what happens, maybe later I’ll do that.
That’s what I figured. I know a few people like that, and they’re quite frustrating. They’re almost always privileged people who refuse to acknowledge any privilege other than class, and it’s quite tiring to argue when they ignore most of the facts. Class is definitely a factor in oppression, but it’s definitely not the only axis.
Blydhen Nowydh Da!!! (as absolutely no-one in Cornwall every actually says).
May 2020 bring everyone everything they want and need personally; and be the start of the decade when things finally get back on track generally.
And I’ve just realised I posted this in the wrong thread. Ah well, still applies!
As if Aimmee Terese isn’t already doing that
@epitome, hello, it’s good to be back! 🙂
Molyneux is a charlatan. If he told me the sky was blue, I would have to verify it for myself. He preys on hurting people.