Here’s one MGTOW Redditor offering an evo psych explanation as to why, ehrm, “hoes ain’t loyal to the tribe or men in general.”
Weird that these women only passed along their “go ahead and rape me, foreign invader” gene to their daughters and not their sons.
Here’s another lovely story about how evolution makes women recognize when other women look pretty. You may need to read it several times before it makes any sense to you, because apparently evolution didn’t gift this MGTOW dude with the power of unconfusing communication.
Huh. Then why did men decorate themselves with makeup and wigs and all that back in the 18th century? I mean, I may just be a straight man, but I can recognize pretty dudes like these:
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I think my rights are much more likely to be taken by conservatives from the US than radical Muslims. They’re projecting again.
Well, some us are. I find a lot of other women to be good looking, but I’m bisexual so not representative of most women.
Wait, I thought it was all about wrists and facial bones?
I originally read this as saying that he men want to be shiny and pretty. Dudes, if you want to be shiny and pretty, go for it.
Looks like someone just took biology 101 so learned about some basic concepts behind sexual selection but used them in a teleological explanation of his weird beliefs. He has crafted his own explanation of the phenomena of personal adornment. He equated it with sexual selected dimorphism, then put it in terms of the end purpose he believes they serve rather than of the environmental selection as the cause driving how they arise.
I used to try to tutor in college then again when I retired. It is far harder to get people to get away from the disinformation, the lack of training in logic, and away from the Lamarckian teleological concept of evolutionary change in species.
Oh. Oh dear.
Anyhoo… I know Dunning-Kruger gets thrown around a lot these days, but my god if these guys don’t personify it in every single way. I can’t even get annoyed at them, they’re so funny in all their certainty and ignorance.
The other thing that always strikes me on reading comments like these is the complete lack of joy in these men’s lives. Their idea of how society works is just so bleak.
Yes, I yearn to be the shiniest so that I can catch the eye of other women, who will then bed my guy. BlackboxBlackboxBlackbox. And that, MGTOWs, is why you can’t get laid.
Yeah, I can tell when a woman is pretty. I also recognise a beautiful sunrise or a cute kitten when I see one. Human beings can do that. This has nothing to do with selecting a mate.
From women as objects to women as literally man sexual characteristic… So much for the evolution…
Ladies, keep a small spray bottle of cooking oil in your handbag, so that you can spritz up your shininess throughout the day.
“Assess a man’s value”? Ugh. The sexual marketplace idea needs to wither away, plz.
@ Vicky P
I’ve seen a few tables over the years that break down the human body into its component parts; and then try to assign values based on market prices. That idea that there’s enough iron in your body to make a nail sort of thing. The tricky bit of course would be isolating the individual elements.
I come out at about 400 quid!
Form a queue ladies; and Phosphorous dealers!
What burns me about this sort of thing is that evo-psych is always used to excuse men’s actions but further condemn women’s. A man committed rape, harassment, adultery? He’s not evil; evolution made him do it to spread his genes! A woman committed *conspiratorial whisper* hypergamy? Evolution made her EVIL, therefore she cannot change and all women may be presumed equally EVIL and deserving of preemptive punishment!
@Karalora
The ethos of the right wing is to create a system where they can judge and not be judged. Or, as Wilhoit put it, “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
@Alan Robertshaw
One thing to consider is whether we are selling individual elements or compounds. If we are selling individual elements, some of them (like oxygen) are abundant in the body and fairly expensive in pure form because of the cost of purification. If we’re selling compounds, though, most of that oxygen is in the form of water, which is much cheaper, and separating it from the water would require electrolysis.
OTOH, some compounds found in the body, like vitamin B12 (aka cobalamin), are quite expensive in pure form and are worth way more than their constituent elements would be separately due to the difficulty of synthesis. This prompts a new project: a table of compounds sorted by whether a given amount of the compound costs more than the elements contained within. For some, like many organic compounds, it would cost a lot more, but for others (like oxides and ores), the compound would cost less, as the cost is due to extraction of the elements.
Evo-psych is not a science, period. These aren’t hypotheses that can be subject to testing and verification. They are claims that are reverse engineered from a determined result, to arrive at a conclusion that best fits the current hierarchical order in society. I don’t think I’ve ever seen evo-psych used in a way that doesn’t justify misogyny, racism, homophobia or the like.
@Diego
Nor have I. It’s a collection of just-so stories to explain away bigotry and sound edgy.
XKCD gets it pretty succinctly:
The starting point of evo-psych was possible, and similar ideas have yielded somewhat verifiable results, like the one who hypothesize that the story of Orion is one of the oldest story of mankind.
In actual practice, as Nagflar and Diego showed, it’s a pseudo-science that only serve to justify prejudice via just-so stories. Human behavior is apparently too complex to easily distinguish evolutionary patterns that aren’t trivial.
It’s a bit better than cladistic because it started from an idea that could work, instead of starting as a way to justify bullshit. That don’t make it a science.
Humans like to tell stories, but sometimes we really need to stop and apply logic to the stories.
I like that black suit, if I had the figure I’d have me one of them made. My sewing isn’t up to that sort of tailoring.
O/T: JK Rowling has continued her descent by plugging a TERF-run apparel shop that makes various transphobic shirts and buttons. Unsurprising, but still quite damaging.
@Naglfar
I really hope she gets what’s coming to her and she gets disaffiliated from major companies and speaking at public spaces. Unfortunately, not likely to happen whilst the world keeps in this spiraling trend towards fascism.
I’ve posted my arguments against evo-psych in the past and a lot of them boil down to “someone discovered intro-level sociology, but decided it needed a dose of biology-as-destiny to make it Real Science.”
Like, the second poster almost kinda makes sense, in that fashion is a language and being able to decode and perform it is a useful social ability— but it’s a learned skill, not some hereditary instinct that only expresses in women.
The main argument against evo-psyche is that it doesn’t make testable hypotheses. It’s not a science if it’s not testable.
The secondary argument against it is that it is nearly impossible, with humans, to distinguish between instinct and learned culturally-instilled behaviors. Like, we know that infants have an instinct to turn their head toward a touch on the cheek, which assists with nursing, but any human older than the potato stage is steeped in culture. The difference between culturally-instilled behavior and instinctive behavior can’t be sussed out.
Evo-psyche proponents never seem to acknowledge either of those issues or propose any sort of even tenuous solution to them. They just keep spouting stories, starting with the conclusion and working back toward observation, which is the opposite of how science actually functions.
The Atlantic did a piece on the upcoming election.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/
My advice to everyone here would be: Vote. Then arm yourselves and batten down the hatches, or just GTFO where possible …
@Diego
Unfortunately, that’s unlikely seeing as she recently released a new book and there’s a new Harry Potter video game coming out next year, which will give her a renewed boost of popularity. So far the most that’s happened to her seems to be that Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights rescinded her award (which she then tried to return in true “you can’t fire me, I quit” fashion) and a bunch of the actors from the HP films condemned her. She’s also lost around 300,000 Twitter followers, but that’s a drop in the bucket given that she still has 14.3 million.
It’s kind of like someone had a vague memory of the sexy son hypothesis and decided to make it all about how women aren’t people but somehow extensions of men.
@Policy of Madness
It’s pretty strange how some go straight to assuming biological differences will explain all perceived differences between men and women.
I remember reading a Finnish question-and-answer type of column where some guy had recently seen a lot of women who habitually stood with their toes pointing inwards. He wanted to know whether this had something to do with the female pelvis, despite the fact that he had apparently seen a whole lot women not stand with their toes pointing inwards, since otherwise he wouldn’t have just recently started wondering about it.
It’s like they really do think we’re completely different species, which, come to think of it, also seems to be the belief of some transphobes.
@Moon Custafer
I remember at least one TERF claiming that men have more in common with male chimpanzees than women, so they really do believe that.
@Alan
Oh, yeah – I’ve seen that thought experiment before! Of course, you’d get more money per body if you could sell the parts (blood, eggs, sperm, organs) rather than breaking everything down to the elements.
(Personally, I don’t mind the idea of selling blood or gametes, but trafficking in other organs squicks me right out.)