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.
Oh look, the assholes who pretend ‘PC’ is a thing have made a second stupid acronym. Because the problem with their ideas is they lacked acronyms, not that htey were dumb.
Vox Day is a fucking Christian, which is why being racist* is a stupid idea.
*The very fact that we’re having this conversation shows what this is. White Christianity says shit just as horrid, we give it a pass because it is primarily practiced by white people compared to the primarily asian and brown practitioners of Islam.
So where are the popular feminist sites calling for acid attacks on men? Killing men?
Nowhere?
Where are the reasonable MRAs condemning this kind of violence?
NOWHERE.
VoxDay is a repelling (and repellant) example of humanity. I think, from reading his various writings (and watching him attempt to argue with other groups… SF fandom, for example), he actually believes what he says.
Then again, it doesn’t matter if he does, because he’s consistent about it, and if you act like a troll, you are a troll.
He is also an example of what happens when one is born into money. His ability to do what he does is based on nepotistic support.
This is going to sound terribly PI, but the minute that dame walked into my office, I knew she was trouble.
you mean he’s making a panicky slippery slope argument? we knew that.
Oooh, thanks for that Ed Brayton link. I don’t think I can handle reading Vox Day in his native environment, but filtered through mockery and critique it is bearable. Found this choice quote:
He drives a red Porsche. Your argument is invalid.
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2005/08/09/the-absurdity-of-vox-day/
Note from the comments it appears that Vox Day has a habit of appearing in the comments, or sending his sycophants to appear in the comments, of blog posts that are about him. We can only hope…
Vox Day. VOX DAY. VOX DAY!!! I summon thee to a blog duel.
Vox Day is a racist, a misogynist, a bully and all around scumbag who only has any prominence because of his father. He has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Funny, none of the commentators on Vox Day’s blog seem to have picked up on the brilliant satire of the piece. They’re pretty big fans of the old acid-throwing.
Next week is International Men’s Health Week
http://www.menshealthmonth.org
I wonder how many MRA blogs will mention it?
Hippie Redneck: I don’t think Vox is honestly endorsing this stuff. I think he’s examining the utilitarian reasoning used by PZ Myers and taking it to its logical conclusion, at least when applied to the opposite sex, and in turn, showing just how disgusting it is. But, of course, the posters here don’t understand the concepts of satire or metaphor because their misogyny detectors are on so high, they think that a man calling a woman in the middle of an afternoon nap constitutes assault.
I’ve been reading Vox Day for years. I think he does believe it, at least insofar as he thinks there are too many black people, and reducing their numbers (in utero natch, so it’s not genocide)
And he didn’t take to its logical conclusion, he attempted to make a reductio ad absurdem. Even that failed because he attempted, absent real support, to limit the reductio to blacks. According to the FBI, in 2009 there were 5,286 whites who committed murder, there were 5,890 blacks, and an unknown 4,339.
So, from an abstract sense the raw numbers are equal. The interesting question is the, “unknown”, which is almost 28 percent of the total.
But he’s not, from previous writings, all that disgusted with the idea of removing people of color from the equation; and this sort of nonsense is perfectly in keeping with other aims he’s expressed. It’s just a new means.
From a Utilitarian POV, the only way you can discount the happiness of the women is if they have no agency. Otherwise you have to ask, “would it increase their happiness to be reduced to nothing more than walking incubators”, which is the positin VD is arguing.
It’s not satire, even if he intended it to be, because on the logical underpinnings it claims to be using, it fails. That makes it a poor foil to the points it pretends to be refuting.
It only works if one accepts that the premises offered are actually what VD is trying to say.
So I do, and they are repulsive.
Seraph: To be clear, what he means here is that there aren’t enough white babies, right?
From the evidence of his writings (and his choice of fora), you have hit the nail on the button.
Reggy: This is going to sound terribly PI, but…is this dude a Muslim?
Not PI, rude, and foolish. Sort of like the Elam is mentaly unstable comment in the other thread.
It’s not as if there aren’t lots of asshole Christians who say shit like this, or Jews, or Hindus, or pick your religion. There are even atheists who say shit like this.
He’s a human being. Lots of human beings have loathesome ideas. Sort of like othering Vox Day by asking if he’s muslim.
starterlifesydney: I wonder how many have noticed the Men’s Centre at Simon Fraser University.
Because men are so oppressed.
@ cloudiah- I was going to mention the red Porche! And the jocko-hawk. And that he thinks being a Mensa member somehow immunizes him from criticism.
But I couldn’t remember for sure if it was a Porche and I was too lazy to check. But yeah, he’s maybe got some issues with narcissism. Which doesn’t make him wrong per se, just more evidence that he’s a colossal asshole.
@speedbudget
Oh! What scent? I have Jasmine here, at the moment.
Thought I had some vanillas around someplace…
His “record contract” was apparently for the band Psykosonik; you can listen to snippets here: http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/window/media/page/0,,231723-3496566,00.html
Sorry, commas broke the link but if you copy and paste it should work (cloudiah says lazily).
The only demographic this fool is worried about is his own penis.
Clearly he’s never read the “Letters” column in even one issue of Mensa’s member magazine, then. Never have I seen the members of a single, voluntarily-joined organization hurl such vitriol at one another in print. Not even on Reddit.
(Not that actually reading the damn thing is a membership requirement or anything, but if you’re paying your dues, they are sending you one every month. And if you’re not paying your dues, you’re not technically a member of Mensa, even if you qualified once upon a time.)
I think he need to do a little more work on that bit about how enslaving half the population somehow sorts out for the “greater good”.
Another Inego Montoya moment brought to you by Vox I’ve got a million of ’em Day.
Maybe I’m being a bit stupid, reasoning in the face of unreason, but if women were only meant to birth and raise children, and care for men, why do women have higher intellectual functions such as creativity, reasoning skills, ability to learn and analyse information etc.? Surely, if women were merely incubators and nannies, women would only have the brainpower to survive and care – seeing as intellect would distract from child- and husband-care.
If one socialises in groups that even slightly value interesting conversation and lively discussion (which is most people, even the most unintellectual of media such as soap operas and ‘look-at-the-freaks’ reality TV can spark lively discussion) you’re going to be socialising with women with higher brain function.
This means that women are supposed to contribute to human social, technological, and cultural development, just as men do.
(I do think that if, in the past, oppressed groups were offered the same access to education and the same opportunities as privileged groups, we’d be living in a very different world. Probably one that looks like those shiny sci-fi futures. More minds means more potential!)
Because having to pay taxes on your immense wealth (I assume that’s what this is referring to? Correct me if I’m wrong) is just like having acid thrown in your face.
Also, as the fifth element, I think it’s only fitting that I point out that Vox Day looks suspiciously like
JEAN-BAPTISTE.
EMMANUEL.
ZORG.
RE: Creativewritingstudent
You realize by asking, you’re just going to get DKM telling you women DON’T have higher brain functions, that they only fake it because of FEMINISM and MANGINAS.
Honestly my first, horrified, thought, was “who the fuck is keeping statistics on numbers of people killed by murderers BY RACE OF THE MURDERER?” Like. To whom is that a vital project?