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.
Why do these people always act as if the human race is made up of 600 people and we’re on the verge of extinction? o_O (also even if we were that’s not an excuse for taking away anybody’s liberty, but I find it funny they act as if every single person who can have kids better damn well have them, and as many as possible otherwise the human race is gone!) xD
why the fuck would anyone take vox day as an authority on what is or is not ‘scientific’
FTFY
BUT we’re not allowed to have kids with alphas. Basically the whole “you must have kids” thing is really just an excuse for “I want women to have sex with me when I want them to” but they know the kid thing is more easily argued as being some sort of biological imperative (and good for human society since we’re almost extinct!) so they can say “you SHOULD do this” rather than “I WANT you to sleep with me”
The funny thing is that blah blah we don’t want women to be educated, but they also mock and hate women they consider to be low class and uneducated too >_>
why the fuck would anyone take vox day as an authority on what is or is not ‘scientific’
Be nice. He’s the only scientist who recognizes the plight humanity is in if we don’t have even more kids.
“Demographically dying”
To be clear, what he means here is that there aren’t enough white babies, right?
Ooh! Ooh! Call on me, teacher, call on me!
Men are not needed in any profession or occupation except that of child-sirer and professional weight-lifter, and even in the case of the latter, they are only superior, they are not absolutely required.
@Karalora
Not if they’re built like me they aren’t 🙁
@Seraph
Considering his idea of intellectual consistency is “abort all black fetuses”, I’m gonna say yeah
“People not getting married is strongly correlated with children being born outside of marriage” seems to come up a lot. That’s… at least true, I guess? I don’t know where the other correlations with “social ills” he mentions exist though.
The focus on level of marriage as a measure of how fucking fantastic a society is annoys me. Does this guy realise that women who get divorced probably would not be better off married, nor would their families?
Was PZ ever a utilitarian anyway, or did Vox just pull that out of his bottom, too?
But Vox Day… doesn’t even believe in evolution.
And even if we can prove that being a woman some people don’t like is harmful to society (spoiler: you can’t), why argue for acid burnings as the punishment, rather than, say, fines or imprisonment, like we do with other crimes? Wouldn’t a more sensible position if you accepted that ridiculous premise be “well, we need to stop the acid burnings and get these women to court for Being Someone I Don’t Like”?
@Ozy
Evolution is strongly correlated with demographic dying! Stop being antiscientific!
You know, there were issues with the Donohue-Levitt abortion reduces crime argument however the two of them had a pretty good point. And the thing is that the spikes in crime started as the first baby boomers were hitting the peak crime years of 18-24. Plenty of baby boomers had the stable home life Vox is talking about but they were still perfectly willing to go commit crimes.
Plus, why is a low birth or marriage rate all that bad? Because it means women are not chattel? Pardon me if I find it difficult to care.
LoveIRS is awesome for point this out!
Clearly a white supermacist. Also, in many areas of the world where women are little more than incubators….how wealthy are these nations? What are the crime rates? How many of them are devastated by war and or famine? I know that history in terms of colonization by white nations also factor in here, but surely, the work to educated women in reading, writing and small business skills and the significant improvements in their communities says something.
Gee guys, how could we ever think the MRM is a hate movement? /sarcasm
MRAs are endangered because they’re a bunch of wild asses.
WTF. I wonder how MRAs will rationalize this as not being pure misogyny. They’ll probably just deflect like they always do.
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.
Hippie: But that’s… not how utilitarianism works. Like, at all.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we sluts destroy society to the point that it is a moral imperative to discourage sluthood. (Citation fucking needed, though.) However, throwing acid on girls’ faces causes a lot of pain. Pain is bad and ought to be minimized. Therefore, one ought to choose a non-painful method of discouraging sluts, such as social disapproval, pointing out the negative consequences of sluthood to oneself or others, fines for sex before marriage, etc. Even secluding women from men causes less pain than fucking throwing acid in their faces, and is probably far more effective at preventing sluthood. (After all, it is rather hard to have sex with men other than your husband if you never see a man other than your husband.)
Now, of course, it is a principle of utilitarianism that, in theory, it is possible that there is a circumstance in which throwing acid in someone’s face is the correct thing to do. For instance, Galactus has shown up and decided to eat the planet, and he can only be prevented from doing so by torturing women with acid. However, as you can see by how extreme an example I had to go to, this is REALLY REALLY FUCKING UNLIKELY.
Given the multiple references to “homogenous” societies, that’s what I got too.
He’s also wrong about utilitarianism, which posits “the greatest good for the greatest number” but forbids the violation of the rights of any individual in pursuit of that goal (according to my memories of philosophy classes). An MRA tossing around words he doesn’t understand, what a shock!
Hippie Redneck: Do you live in Duvall? Because I dated a hippie redneck once and he was just as obnoxious as you.
omg Hippie Redneck you and your manly wisdom are so right!! Here me and my stoooooopid ladybrain was stewing thinking this man is saying that women need to be treated as chattle and be punished by violence….but all along this is just a nice sweet guy using satire…The fuck…the MRA is nothing but a hate movement full of assholes who want nothing more then to abuse not only women but anyone that doesn’t fit in their cisgender straight white male paradim
This is going to sound terribly PI, but…is this dude a Muslim?