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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You know, one would think that anyone actually concerned about men’s issues would support paid family leave…
Regarding Aimee Terese, I’m not surprised she’s such a fan of Schlafly. Schlafly was a bit more “Kinder, Küche, Kirche,” but I can see where they’d have common ground. And pretending to be trans* or queer to troll is old hat in alt-right circles. Anna Khachiyan said something to that effect in an interview months ago. It’s the new variant of the attack helicopter joke, which apparently is the only joke the alt right knows.
Speaking of bad takes on Twitter… I did really bad thing and commented on some tankies post about how US and England were pretty much Fascist, and Soviet Union was only “pure” nation to stand against Fascism. Suffice to say, I regretted that.
As an added bonus, they tried to school me on Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, and how it didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Except – as a Pole – it… kinda does, since they invade my freakin’ country
Also, daily reminder that Stalin was an imperialist bastard.
Just finished reading the Handmaid’s Tale sequel a few days ago. The dining hall in the Aunt’s residence is the Schafly Cafe.
@Specialffrog:
That’s a nice touch.
I’ve never had a twitter account. I honestly don’t think I’m missing much.
There are lots of men with “useless degrees” and student debt, but somehow that doesn’t make them unmarriable?
He’s trying to scare women out of academia by presenting it as a stark either-or choice: “you can go to college, ladies, but men will run screaming from you and you’ll die alone and unloved”. Too bad the statistics don’t back him up. About 65% of people with bachelor’s degrees are married, compared to 50% of those with no education beyond high school.
It’s easy to see why he’s on this crusade, though. Educated women are less likely to put up with the sort of bullshit marital advice he’s peddling, and they also take up college admissions spots that might otherwise go to the entitled and the mediocre. As with everything white supremacists advocate for, from voter suppression to taking away health care and food stamps, it’s all about tilting the playing field for themselves.
@Snowberry
I briefly had one. I guess I still do, but I’ve forgotten the password and haven’t tweeted or checked the timeline in years. I feel like if I still used Twitter, I’d probably keep falling down rabbit holes and have to look through old tweets of people I follow.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
They’re also more likely to be feminists and to oppose his reactionary idiocy.
I’m not a man, but I’d imagine that most men are not instantly turned off by educated women the way Stefan claims that they are. At least, I’d hope not.
“unmarryable”
I always find it both incredibly annoying and satisfying when ol Stef presents evidence that despite being a self-proclaimed modem philosopher-king, he hasn’t mastered basic English.
I really want to know why these guys think one income can get you a house, support a dependent spouse and a babies. Maybe young people aren’t having children because we can barely afford to shelter and feed ourselves.
Buttercup: women being in university doesn’t take any spots away from men. More students means more profs, and thus more spots!
But that’s way too advanced logic for an MRA.
Here’s another one from ol’ Molymeme, or Steppy the Vent Goblin* as we call him in my chat:
He really doesn’t live in the same world as us; there’s just no logic at all to his posts.
*from his old habit of yelling through the vents at people being treated by his therapist wife
Can someone translate Aimee Terese’s tweet for me? I can’t figure out what she’s even trying to say.
In particular, when she says “ostensibly embodying”, who does she think was doing the ostending?
And were those quotes she included supposed to prove or contradict some position? If so, what?
@Amtep, please oh please don’t try to understand Aimee’s tweets, it’s very bad for you.
As always, as a fellow Australian, I apologise sincerely for her.
“useles degree”
The top five degrees for women in the U.S. are 1)Nursing 2)Psychology 3)Business 4)Biological Science 5) Accounting
Stefan is such a manly man, he’ll never need a nurse (he’d make an interesting psychological case), doesn’t need nothing impractical like business or accounting, and is so tough he doesn’t need to know anything about germs.
I’d check the employment level and financial compensation for those, too.
Yeah, that’s some profoundly ahistorical bullshit right there.
We need to do more against sexist scum. Too many people are “redpilled”. I almost feel like “freedom” of religion is contributing to this, but without it in America, only fundamentalist Christianity will prevail, and evo psych BS could prevail if not religion.
I’m just stuck here almost shaking my fists. I live in a liberal town, but I don’t want to do anything since I live with parents who hold values that may be sympathetic to Stefan’s, and I’m feeling fucked up right now. I doubt I could make an impact in stopping more people from having these problematic beliefs, short of forcing them to not pursue certain religions or intellectual pathways. Social media activism for me is pretty much fruitless.
In my head I hear Captain Capitalism pronounced the same as Captain Caveman. This has lead to giggling fits on my part.
Molyneux has a degree in history, which in his hands is completely useless, considering how bad he is at it.
It’s pretty rich for someone like him to invoke the millions of soldiers who died in wars, and then wonder what it was all for. Yeah, Steffy, I’ve been wondering that too, considering you and your ilk support fascist dictators and are working diligently to bring back Nazis. Tell us, what WAS the point of WWII?
@numerobis: No! It’s a zero sum game! Everything given to women is something taken away from men! (sarcasm, obviously, but they really believe that)
@Lainy
All the boomers seem to think this. Maybe it was true in the 1950s, but we don’t live in the 1950s any more, and the economic conditions that existed then were an isolated phenomenon.
@Amtep
Maybe it’s bad for us, but here’s my best shot at translating the Terese tweets:
Translation: If I, a white cishet woman, lie about being LGBTQIPA+ then maybe I can say bigoted things because I’ll be playing the victim.
Note: This is not, in fact, how this works.
Translation: Everyone says Phyllis Schlafly was a hypocrite because she said women should remain in the home but she was very politically active. Therefore, let’s read and agree with her quotes.
She is “ostensibly embodying” feminism by being a very vocal public figure speaking out in opposition to feminism. I know, it doesn’t make much sense.
Note: Phyllis Schlafly was a hypocrite, and an awful person. It’s mostly her doing that the United States didn’t ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Aimee is praising her for being an antifeminist.
“Men fought all the wars to build civilization” is something you’d come up with if you first concluded that civilization was built on men’s sacrifices, and then tried identify what exactly men have sacrificed that women haven’t.
(Due to a quirk of history, Americans have developed this understandable stereotype that only soldiers’ lives are ruined in wars.)
And who did the men fight AGAINST in those countless wars, Stefan? What’s that you say? Other men? Belligerent, greedy men, of whom The Men of The West were some of the worst? You don’t say!
Oh, Aimee, you are already cruel, unjustified, and disgusting. The power to be a shitty person was with you all along. Of course, you also have the power to stop being a shitty person, but you continue to not exercise it.
It’s telling that Molyneux is not only willing to stand on the graves of war dead merely to justify women remaining out of the workforce (and therefore not contributing to the war effort), but that he conflates destructive conflict with building civilization. Cripes, how many historic works of art and architecture have been lost to warfare over the centuries? Hell, logging onto Windows 10 this morning had a picture of Corfe Castle, which was destroyed by the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War after having stood since Norman times.
War is destructive by its very definition.
As for Aimee Terese… I think (and I could be wrong here) she’s trying to tap into the latent “lol Tumblrinas” resentment. She’s about half a decade late on that score, but she’s probably thinks she’s appealing to those who have been taken to task (rightly or wrongly) by Twitter mobs who have that commonality.
It’s telling that she does it in such a coy way that leaves it open for reactionaries to latch on to rather than just saying what she means outright. Actually, that’s telling with a lot of these vaguely reactionary folk.
@Naglfar
THIS. Seriously, this is the only joke they have, which is itself merely a variant of “snowflake.” It’s “oh, look at you, you think you’re special.”
Wanna hear something freaky? During my Christmas get-together with the fam, mom got it in her head to drag up old VHS tapes we had recorded when my brother and I were kids. One had an episode of Royal Canadian Air Farce where John Morgan claimed “being special is the thing everyone wants to be in the 90s!” John Morgan famously channeled curmudgeons on the show very well, but that’s the reactionary line going back decades now! It’s the same freakin’ joke.
@Katamount
How much do you want to bet it goes back even further? I bet there is some usage of a similar idea centuries ago.
“Thou dost be a flother*, I identify as thy charging-chariot.”
But seriously, that joke is probably even older. And it’s still the only one reactionaries know.
*Flother is an obsolete term for “snowflake”
The trick : it’s not a joke. It’s not destined to create guffaws. It’s both an in-group marker, used to signal their allegiance, and a vindicative insult flung on peoples against which they have no rational answer.