Category Archives: it’s science!
Are feminists conspiring to make all women as ugly as they are? Misogynistic douchebags say “yes.”
Back in the day – way, way back in the day – dudes opposed to women’s suffrage loved to depict suffragettes as ugly spinsters (that is, when they weren’t depicting them as sexy young women using their feminine wiles to manipulate men into supporting suffrage). We looked at some examples of this yesterday and noted that, when it comes to dismissing feminists as uggos, some things never change.
But why, oh why, are feminists so (allegedly) ugly? Or, to turn the question around, why are so many (allegedly) ugly women (allegedly) drawn to feminism?
Well, we’re in luck, because some manosphere dickwads have stepped forward to provide us with possible explanations.
Matt Forney: When we call women fat sluts, it’s because we care!

Matt Forney, your argument sounds dubious at best.
Hey, ladies! You know how the dudes of the so-called manosphere are always saying horrible shit about you? They’re not doing it out of hate. No, no, they’re doing it for your own good! In a guest post on the blog Freedom Twenty-Five, Matt Forney offers women his own brand of tough (alleged) love:
Why aren’t more women world leaders? Some Reddit dude has a theory. (SPOILER ALERT: It’s really dopey.)
NOTE: It’s the final day of the Man Boobz Pledge Week! It’s gone quite well. Once again, serious thanks to everyone who has donated! I appreciate it a great deal.
If you haven’t yet donated, and want to, here’s the button you’re looking for:
Men’s Rights activists spend more time discussing women than most women’s studies majors. Heck, they might even qualify for honorary degrees in women’s studies, if we expand the term “study” to mean “make shit up.”
Here a couple of dudes on the Men’s Rights subreddit offer their new but not-exactly-improved version of “difference feminism.”
Seems legit.
Heartiste: Women athletes are mannish uggos because “women’s natural bodies are not evolutionarily designed to run, throw, fight or lift optimally.”
So over on Chateau Heartiste, the Dude Who Used to Call Himself Roissy seems personally affronted that the female athletes in the Olympics, by and large, didn’t live up to his wet dreams of Perfect Womanhood. In one post, he hails a Turkish newspaper columnist (yes, the same one we talked about here) who complained about the allegedly unwomanly bosoms of female Olympians, and offers his own less-than-complimentary assessment of their looks:
Who with the eyes to see hasn’t noticed the narrow hips, the grotesque six-pack abs (never a good look on women), the chest “stubs”, the linebacker shoulders, and the manjaws of an inordinate number of the female Olympians?
So why does it matter that Roissy/Heartiste couldn’t get a boner watching the Olympics? Apparently because these women are violating the PRIME DIRECTIVE, which forbids representatives of the United Federation of Planets from “intervene[ing] in matters which are essentially the domestic jurisdiction of any planetary social system.”
GOP congressman and Senate nominee Todd Akin: Rape is an effective form of birth control
Our completely incorrect biology lesson today comes not from Chateau Heartiste or The Spearhead or EvoPsychBullshitBeliever997 on Reddit but from an actual elected official with influence in the real world: Republican Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri, currently his party’s nominee for Senate.
In a recent interview with KTVI-TV, the Fox affiliate in St. Louis, he explained that the ladies just don’t get pregnant from rape — well, “legitimate rape” anyway. As he put it:
From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.
As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes, this whole “rape as birth control” thing is not actually, you know, true:
Akin’s claim is one that pops up occasionally in social conservative circles. A federal judge nominated by President Bush in the early 2000s had said similar things, as have state lawmakers in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. …
According to a 1996 study, approximately 32,000 pregnancies result from rape annually in the United States, and about 5 percent of rape victims are impregnated.
Talking Points Memo notes that this isn’t the first time Akin has suggested that
some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to … the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Akin: making up shit to deny rape victims their rights since 1991!
Currently, Akin has a big lead in the polls over his Democratic rival, sitting Sen. Claire McCaskill.
Here’s the relevant portion of Akin’s interview; you can find the whole thing at the Talking Points Memo link above.
Science proves the Men’s Rights subreddit to be totally not (completely) misogynistic
So apparently I’m way off base with this “misogyny” thing. For example, I have been under the impression that I have been finding misogynistic stuff in the Men’s Rights subreddit, like, all the time. With upvotes, and everything. But evidently I’m wrong.
Because now ignatiusloyola, one of the subreddit mods, has done a very scientific study that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that, well, whatever misogyny is there is officially not a big damn deal.
Spearheader: Feminist men are “nerds, socially awkward, sissy-gay, annoying or just plain weird.”
So WF Price and the rest of the fellas over on The Spearhead are doing a little bit of armchair psychoanalysis of the dreaded “male feminist” in general, and me in particular. It is fairly amusing stuff.
Price sets forth his highly original thesis:
If you observe genuinely feminist men, there’s something a bit off about them, and it’s tempting to chalk their feminism up to a result of some flaw or aberration in their character. Normal men (aside from those whose paycheck depends on it such as politicians and men who work for feminist-dominated institutions) simply don’t go in for feminism unless it gets them sexual gratification, but those days are pretty much over, so the remnants tend to be an assortment of freaks and guys who have a chip on their shoulder.
“But those days are pretty much over?” Evidently, Price thinks there was a time during which women were obligated to reward feminist men with “sexual gratification,” but that this is no longer the case. So “normal men” have stopped being feminists, or at least stopped pretending to be feminists.
So what are these freakish feminist men of today really getting out of it?
Does Manosphere Blogger Vox Day Really Support the Murder and Mutilation of Women?
Most women, it is fair to say, don’t want to be deprived of education; they don’t want to be considered little more than baby-making machines; and they don’t want “independent” women to be maimed or murdered.
But according to the influential manosphere blogger Vox Day, women who object to any of this just don’t know what’s good for them. In one of the most repellant manosphere rants I’ve run across yet, Vox attempts to rebut PZ Myers’ critiques of evolutionary psychology with a series of bizarre and hateful assertions about women, offering his own “scientific” rationales for keeping women down. Is this all somehow satire on his part? He certainly seems sincere.
TRIGGER WARNING for all that follows; Vox explicitly defends the maiming and murder of women.
Vox starts out by arguing that depriving women of education makes solid evolutionary sense:
[E]ducating women is strongly correlated with reducing their disposition and ability to reproduce themselves. Educating them tends to make them evolutionary dead ends. … 40% of German women with college degrees are childless. Does PZ seriously wish to claim that not reproducing is intrinsically beneficial to women?
Instead of being educated, Vox goes on to argue, girls should be married off young so they can start popping out babies:
[R]aising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children allows them to pursue marriage at the age of their peak fertility, increase the wage rates of their prospective marital partners, and live in stable, low-crime, homogenous societies that are not demographically dying. It also grants them privileged status, as they alone are able to ensure the continued survival of the society and the species alike. Women are not needed in any profession or occupation except that of child-bearer and child-rearer, and even in the case of the latter, they are only superior, they are not absolutely required.
Next, he defends the practice of throwing acid in the face of “independent” women:
[F]emale independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.
He moves on to honor killings, arguing that they too are good for women, because
female promiscuity and divorce are strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills, from low birth and marriage rates to high levels of illegitimacy.
He offers a similar rationale for female genital mutilation, before launching into this bizarre racist attack on abortion rights:
[F]ar more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.
Vox wants “girls” – presumably teenagers — to be married off young and start popping out babies. Yet in his mind female fetuses are “unborn women.”
Despite Vox Day’s repellent ideas about women – and his proud racism – he’s an influential figure in the manosphere, mentioned approvingly and regularly cited by others who present themselves as more moderate voices. It may not be a shock that the reactionary antifeminist blogger Dalrock includes Vox in his blogroll, and cites his work with approval (see here and here for examples). But, astoundingly, he’s also regularly cited approvingly by antifeminist “relationship expert” Susan Walsh of Hooking Up Smart (see here, here, and here). And she has even written at least one guest post on Vox’s “game blog” Alpha Game.
At this point I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of this. But I still am.
The cold hard truth about loose vaginas
Over on Reddit, an MRA named AryoBarzan sets the feminist slut ladies straight on the BIOTRUTH about their ever-growing and FAR less pleasurable vaginas. (Ignore the rude person replying to his message; clearly Aryo is the real penis and vagina expert here.)
Wait, you say to yourself, how is it that this bold truth-teller is being downvoted, on Reddit? He posted in the antimensrights subreddit, that’s why. In the Men’s Rights subreddit he normally gets the upvotes he so richly deserves.
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Note: Post contains, like, a lot of