By David Futrelle
I sometimes get accused of being unfair to Men Going Their Own Way, accusing them of hating women (which they do) without taking into account the incredible hatred directed their way by women. MGTOWs aren’t born; they’re made, I’m told, and it’s women who made them the way they are today.
So today I will present the origin story of one particular MGTOW — a fellow calling himself Wubba Gubba who tried to post a comment on We Hunted the Mammoth the other day, in which he offered an explanation of the terrible things women had done that had caused him to go MGTOW in the first place. I didn’t let his comment through moderation, but I’d like to share it with you today.
“What makes a MGTOW?” he began, before offering up a numbered list.
1) 1984, she-devil asks, what do you do, I say, engineer, she says, engineers are dull boring conservative and therefore completely undesirable.
So … 36 years ago a woman told him that engineers were boring and undesirable. And he’s still holding a grudge over that.
2) Trump says one particular woman is a pig, lunatic misandrists, by the millions, claim that Trump calls all women pigs.
That’s … not how that happened. There’s a truckload of evidence that Trump is a misogynist; his calling Rosie O’Donnell a pig is only one small data point.
Yes I can continue.
All women angels?
On what planet?The MGTOW men were not born that way, the lunatic skanks they met all too often in their lives made them that way.
He then returns to his numbered list, adding one last assertion:
3) Trump says he will build a wall, with doors in it, to control immigration, lunatic women scream louder than anyone that he is trying to stop immigration.
No one says that Trump is trying to stop immigration altogether, because he isn’t; he’s trying to stop or at least drastically reduce immigration by Latinos — to the estent that he’s sending refugees back to certain death and kidnapping the children of border crossers. Women aren’t literally screaming about this, though a scream would hardly be an unreasonable response to his policies.
Conclusion, more than one flew over the cookies nest.
The “cookies” nest, you say?
Anyway, there’s your explanation for this guy’s turn to MGTOW: one solitary woman told him he was boring more than three and a half decades ago. And woman overall tend to dislike Trump.
I guess that justifies a lifetime of calling women “lunatic skanks.”
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Comment 1 was hurtful.
Imagine if he could have taken that hurt and used it to empathise with women and femmefolk in engineering, who are routinely subjected to hurtful behaviour, usually from their male colleagues!
Instead, he became the person he is.
Apparently there are no conservative women?
…I kinda wish this guy had gotten through moderation, he sounds like a fun time. I especially enjoy the random poetry part in the middle of his screed.
Not sure I’m a big fan of this Dilbert origin story.
One thing I never quite figured out was the “engineers are conservative” thing. Granted, it could be that I studied engineering at a major Canadian university rather than an American one, but despite a handful of obnoxious dude-bro friends of mine, our diverse group meant that there was very little room for bigotry, particularly with respect to women given there were so many in our program and they hung out with us. Furthermore, the engineers at the University of Toronto had their own humanities programs; so when we studied literature, we did it with other engineers rather than the Arts students, which I’d say gave us not only a greater challenge, but also let us explore works from our own perhaps more scientifically-centered perspective. I actually found those humanities courses to be the most rewarding; they’ve stuck with me over the years where a lot of the unused equations have fallen away. Sometimes I crack my old textbooks open to refresh myself on the basics, but I still find myself thinking back to some of those old Alice Munro stories.
I suspect that where a lot of the dude-bro dipshittery originates is in the computer science programs, particularly in the white-bread American schools. When I was in school (about 15 years back), chemical engineering alone was 50% women. Certainly in the 1980s, it was far less.
Either way, 35 years is a loooong time to hold on to a grievance. And these are the same jackwads that claim that women are too emotional.
@Moggie
One assumes the malebag in question could find one of the 53% of white women who voted for Drumpf, and live happily ever after… or at least until the revolution happens.
@Katamount
I’m not an engineer, but this part didn’t compute for me either. Most of the engineers I know personally (and have discussed politics with) are left-leaning. Granted, there could be selection bias because where I live is predominantly left-leaning, but even then I’d imagine most engineers are probably more likely to know the science regarding climate change etc and wouldn’t be fans of conservative science denialism (unless they work for oil companies and their bottom line depends on it). Then again, my great-uncle was a satellite engineer for decades and he is a hard right evangelical, so it’s definitely possible to be an engineer and be conservative.
Concerning engineers, I do feel like there is a tendency towards convervatism and other Right wing movements with them and techies. Though this has nothing to do with the profession and more to do with the tendency for these fields to be male dominated and, more often than not, overtly hostile towards women. Thus engineers and the like are less likely to be challenged on the world views they grew up with.
This is especially notorious with the top two engineering schools in my country, which are almost entirely male and which seem to churn out bigots of unparalleled quality.
The worst ofenders I often run across in facebook, and more likely to embrace reactionary and neo-nazi movements, seem to come from these two schools (especially the top 1).
Then again this is Peru we are talking about, a fairly conservative country, not sure how this holds up everywhere else.
@Katamount, @Naglfar
I went to a big left-leaning university in a left-leaning state for my software engineering degree. My classmates were at least 80% white male, and were mostly from rich families. They also let plenty of conservative viewpoints slip: they thought the women and PoC got in because of diversity quotas, and that women weren’t as good at the coursework as them,* that it was a pointless waste of their time to have to take humanities courses, that it would be harder for them to pass interviews because companies are looking for diversity hires, etc.
*an email was even sent by the program head blasting them for this rumor and setting the record straight that women were earning higher GPAs
@kupo
I’m sorry your classmates were misogynistic assholes. I hadn’t quite anticipated the amount of bigotry amongst engineers, but in light of what you said it makes more sense. Any space with a high percentage of privileged people and no real checks on it tends to slide into bigotry.
Regarding humanities courses, I personally would support engineers taking humanities courses, though plenty of humanities courses have their own issues that need to be resolved separately. I recall a literature course I took my first year of college where all the authors discussed were white, and most were men.
Tell me more about this cookie nest. What kind of cookies are they? Are they Girl Scout cookies? If so, I am in. Thin mints are life.
Also, this guy is a useless chud.
@Demonhype:
Scarily enough, I can think of a way this would make sense from his perspective. What do you want to bet this ties back in with the ‘white genocide’ idea in this guy’s mind, that the only reason feminists support immigration is that they want to wipe out the white race by having sex with immigrants instead of good ol’ boys?
@Kupo
Concerning bigotry from engineers during school, I would also like to add some of my experiences to the mix:
I went to the top school for law in my country (PUCP), which also has good programs for art, humanities and STEM. Every year the school would hold the interfaculty games, where faculties would compete with each other in a series of sporting events.
When I was still studying, the Engineering faculty had won the title 9 years in a row (it was also mostly male dominated). There was a particular incident (2014) when these dude-bros decided to celebrate their victory by visiting each faculty and directing misogynist and derogatory chants towards women. This took place especially against faculties which were known to have a majority of female students, such as the law faculty.
The chants in and by themselves were made up of not only sexual harassment but the implication that they had gotten into an “easy” career, that they were all looks and no intelligence and that they weren’t competent.
Obviously this shit was reported to campus authorities and facebook groups and these shitstains took to victimizing themselves, despite the witness accounts and video evidence.
As a bonus I should add that some of these people founded the “Make PUCP Great Again” (and you can guess what it’s about).
@Jenora Feuer
Well, since there seems to be extremely high crossover between MGTOWs and white supremacists I’ll bet he does think that way. I find it interesting how he tries to defend his wall by saying it would have doors. I haven’t seen anyone mention physical doors in relation to the wall, but I can see how it would be a tactic to try to defend himself against accusations of racism (spoiler alert: his support of the wall in the first place leaves little doubt that he’s a racist).
As for engineers (and speaking as one from U. of Waterloo)… there’s always the Salem Hypothesis, which is that if you have someone who claims to be a scientist but supports creationism, they’re probably an engineer. In fact, I know one of the (Civil?) Engineering professors at Waterloo while I was there was a creationist, because I ran into some letters to the editor from him during a literature search at one point. For some reason, Engineers can be somewhat woo-prone; best guess is that it’s a combination of knowing that they’re smart and a mindset that focuses on known simple solutions rather than trying to figure out why.
Here in Ontario, at least, having at least a half year’s worth of Humanities courses over a four year program is a requirement for any accredited engineering program. I took economics, psychology, an SF literature course, and the law and ethics courses for engineers. (Where else are you going to find a course that’s cross-listed between Engineering and Philosphy.)
Wow. If I let my experiences from way back when guide my worldview the same way that lummox let this single one (that we’ve heard of; if it’s really the only one he can think of I’m calling shenanigans on it being the root cause of his miggyism), I’d be a serial killer at minimum (I was very bullied in grade and middle school; some of these bullies happened to be girls, which to my knowledge was rather unusual, as bullying was for the most part gender-segregated in my neck of the woods back then).
Instead I post here and mock misogynists and their weird, fragile egos. Go figure.
Also, RE: engineers, I’ve met quite a few with moderate-to-strong right-wing tendencies, and they seem to make a rather high proportion of the profession; haven’t met enough to get anywhere near a decent-sized sample group by scientific standards. Incidentally, those engineers with right-of-center tendencies tend to have know-it-all/prideful/conspiracy and woo-inclined/Dunning-Krueger attitudes and opinions in direct proportion to just how right-wing they are.
Then again I’ve seen similar patterns in law enforcement-related professions and adjacent people, for what it’s worth.
This is my pet theory for why bitcoin is so damn popular amongst my colleagues despite the fact they should understand the technology behind it well enough to recognize it for the pyramid scheme scam it is.
@Jenora Feuer-
Aaahh, good ol’ RationalWiki. I actually checked that page (and the “engineers and woo” one) when I first began to wonder what was it about engineers that made them have oddly reactionary mindsets at times.
Also, salutations from La Belle Province, fellow Canuckistani!
@kupo
Could it be a bitcoin version of XKCD’s Engineer Syllogism?
I graduated in an engineering class that had a 50-50 split of men and women, but I studied environmental engineering, which is one of the disciplines that seems to draw the most women. The majority of my classmates seemed relatively progressive, though I didn’t really know a lot of them.
In my professional career, I’ve encountered a lot of conservative-leaning people. No one super overt about their bigotry, mostly just the standard “poor people need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps” economic outlook, which is bad enough. Discussions about women and minorities are studiously avoided (mostly due to worries about HR complaints, at least when I’m present), but I’m aware of how often economic conservatism is comorbid with explicit social prejudice. (Not that the people who claim to be “economically conservative but socially liberal” are really any better since conservative economic policy overwhelmingly harms marginalized social groups anyway.)
I’m not sure if the younger generation of engineers is more progressive or if my sample size is just skewed.
@Catalpa
Plus, whenever I’ve run into these kinds of people (mostly self-identified libertarians), they’re almost always economically and socially conservative even if they’re only vocal about the former. And they seem to always vote conservative.
My father, as a first-year architecture student (he later decided he was more interested in the Why of buildings and became a historian-geographer specializing in the regional differences between housing styles) took one or more of those Humanities-for-engineers breadth courses and though he never did get into fiction, still has fond memories of the English professor, a former WWII naval officer, who could not talk about Keats without choking up (I googled said prof’s name last year, and I think he’s now mainly known as a pioneer in the academic study of late-medieval religious drama so yay good for him).
It’s only a single data-point, but didn’t Jack Parsons use to work for JPL?
I think maybe there’s a variant of Dunning-Kruger in which people who are genuinely skilled/knowledgable in one area are at risk of assuming themselves equally expert in all other fields, especially if those fields are commonly perceived as “easier” than theirs. It’s like they view human endeavours as a single pyramid of ranked skills, and if you’ve aquired one of the highly-admired skills you automatically have all the skills ranked beneath it.
Flashback to college, circa 1962: I once took a shortcut through a room where a class was beginning to convene, exchanged brief greetings with a high school classmate without even breaking stride, and heard someone else say “You’re an engineer, John, you’re not allowed to talk to girls”.
In those days (and probably still) engineering tended to be a boys club. Question: did that male environment tend to turn them into misogynists? Or did their aversion to females play a part in their choice of educational environment? Chicken or egg? I don’t know any stats, but it would be interesting to examine the attitudes of those who went to all-male schools or lived among all-male siblings, to see if they are measurably different from those who spent their lives interacting with females.
@Ann K
Maybe a combination of both? I do note a tendency of people who go into engineering where they seem to be more likely to be introverted and socially awkward, and thus less likely to interact with peers of the opposite sex. But then again women are socially awkward as well and yet they do not create toxic environments for men.
I think that many of them are brought up to buy into the conservative worldview that men are more capable than women and the choice of media and entertainment they consume tends to push these traditional views as well. A lot of the fantasy and sci-fi genre seems to be rampant with misogyny.
There’s also the toxic worldview that they are “shunned” for being geeks/nerds and that they are smarter/more capable than everyone else. Therefore their bigotry is both rational and justified and everyone else is wrong.
As for the male environment, it certainly doesn’t help. If I see it in “progressive” groups of men, where all it takes is the absence women for the conversation to devolve into chest-beating and homophobic slurs, I can only imagine what goes on in a mostly conservative/libertarian environment.
I’ve learned quite a bit about the climate of engineering from this thread that I didn’t know, thanks to everyone who shared for educating me. Hopefully the situation improves regarding toxic masculinity and misogyny.
Totally off topic, but need some quick advice. It’s snowing out. By the time I get off work, the roads are going to be crappy, although it is MN so we’re pretty good at handling it.
I don’t have much food in the house and don’t have a car to get more. I would feel bad about making a pizza delivery driver go out in this weather. But if I tip really well, is it okay? I was thinking 10 or 15 dollars.