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.
Reggy: Christian.
This one’s for Hippie Redneck: http://qkme.me/3plzk1 (QuickMeme appears to be unstable right now, so link may not work for a while.)
“as they alone are able to ensure the continued survival of the society and the species alike.”
Earth’s human population is 7 billion. I think we’ll be alright.
Ok, Hippie, please explain which parts of the statements I quote are serious and which are satirical.
Hippie Redneck, I understand satire. You and Vox Day don’t seem to be too clear on the finer points.
But if this is what you need to excuse evil, backwards-ass thinking like this, you go right ahead. Those of us with an IQ north of room temp can see right through you.
I’ve noticed a lot of MRA-types seem to think menopause hits at 25 and women’s peak fertility is at about 17. (Saw this on the “26-year-old woman” responses too.)
It’s almost as if they wanted it to be that way, because the idea that a woman could get an education and start a career and then have children when she was emotionally and financially ready for them is dreadfully inconvenient.
Another day, another MRA who doesn’t understand basic vocabulary. Let me paraphrase:
PZ: How do any of these six things help women?
Vox: Because then they have less autonomy.
Voxy, you may wish to purchase a dictionary so that you can look up the definition of “benefit.”
I also enjoy this statement from Vox’ post
Um, no. I believe that the questions were intended to be easy to answer; the answer to all 6 is “it doesn’t.” And that’s the “cogent point” he is making by asking them. Crazy shit, no?
there was absolutly nothing even remotely satire about the above piece..he is dead serious and wants women treated like chattle
Reverse the gender time!
NOTE : SARCASM
Men are not strictly needed in any professions, they just tend on average to be superior at some of them, like “professional American football player”. It’s not like we actually need male doctors or lawyers or plumbers, since women can also do those jobs. They are needed in order to help produce children though, so…I guess all men can just go work as donors at the sperm bank?
NOTE : SARCASM
Unlike Vox Day, I’m happy to let men pursue whatever profession they think will make them happy. I’ll even cheer the men in my life on as they do so, and celebrate their success. That right there is a difference between us and him.
Also, people not getting married is correlated with lots of out of wedlock births? Startlingly insightful observation, that, but it would help if you explained why children being born to parents who are married is such an important thing in and of itself that we should enslave half of humanity just to make absolutely sure that it happens.
Hey, I love Vox/Theodore’s Satire(TM)! That time he likened Mexican immigration to Nazi invasion was wicked bad.
It would be easier to accept that Vox Day was satirically arguing against PZ’s ethics in regards to acid attacks if it didn’t seem quite so clear that he thinks the act actually does serve the utilitarian function he describes. Day sounds like one of those people who loves to talk about what a horrible rapist and murderer he’d be… except Jesus!
Ed Brayton from Dispatches from the Culture Wars has been chronicling Vox’s assholery for several years. Here’s a few examples from his old blog spot.
For example, here’s Vox, I mean Theodore Beale, on the slut walk:
Maybe it’s satire, but I kinda doubt it. It’s pretty much right in line with everything else he’s said about women and anyone not white. He writes for the WorldNetDaily, if that’s any clue. (It’s a sleazy creationist/fundamentalist internet rag, basically, for those of you who are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with it.)
@drst, I’m afraid you misremember your philosophy classes. That people’s rights can certainly be set aside in the interests of general happiness is one of the best known and most discussed (and of course controversial) features of utilitarianism.
The biggest issue is ozy’s point; no evidence is given for the thesis that sluts destroy society. It’s a serious problem for utilitarianism that it’s very hard to measure happiness, so any claims about what policies make people happier are going to be controversial (though I’ve encountered some research that seems to contradict Vox Day’s claims, and not much that could possibly support them). But one of the most popular approaches favored by actual utilitarians (e.g. John Stuart Mill) is to say that we should let people decide for themselves what they want as much as possible, since however fallible that method is at producing happiness (and yes, it is incredibly fallible), it seems to usually work better than having other people decide for them. It should go without saying that Vox Day’s argument abandons this approach, insofar as he advocates preventing women from deciding anything for themselves, and that he provides no plausible alternative to replace it.
Here’s what he says about women when he’s not trying to demonstrate the alleged horrors of atheist ethics:
“Women find it sexier for you to rape and kill a woman than putting them on pedestals and being a nice guy. I’m not saying that you should rape and kill anyone, but I would recommend, at the very least, dropping the nice guy routine and pushing over the pedestals.
Women have plenty of positive attributes. But they’re not angels, and when it comes to what sexually attracts them, even the nice, well-bred ones are more insanely twisted, from the male perspective, than the average serial killer.”
I enjoy the rich use of metaphor, apostrophe, simile, end rhyme and iambic pentameter in this piece. He’s the great satirist of our time, apparently.
40% of german women are childless? I suppose that’s entirely on them, not the german dudes they married. The country couldn’t in general have reduced birth rates, could it? It’s all on education, never you fucking mind that Indian women get educated frequently and still have high birth rates atm.
Further, it’s not like we aren’t drastically overpopulated as it is. Only a fool who doesn’t understand population survival thinks endless increases in birth is a good thing.
None of which is really true, as people tend to marry into their own class (hence little ‘increase the wage rates of their prospective partners’), and two incomes will almost always trump 1 anyway (Which is why women have basically always worked for pay, it just was usually handed directly to the dudes). If ‘high marriage societies’ are so low crime, why is the US one of the leaders in crime rates while the countries he’s pretending are demographically dying (RACISM HO) have much lower ones?
Women = Fetus? That’s surprisingly high placement for misogynist scum, usually we count as people less worthy of consideration than a fetus.
Like longer life expectancy, higher wages, lower crime, and generally better quality of life… All of which are terrible to asshole right wingers.
Women are people, you fucking assholes, our happiness counts substantially to a utilitarian that is not a fucking misogynist.
I am hardly surprised.
That’s blatantly untrue. Utilitarianism ultimately has to have a given end point to be utilitarian to, which you would fucking know if you knew a damn thing about what you were talking about. That end point is usually ‘happiness’, and none of this serves that. At all. It isn’t a ‘logical conclusion’, it’s more like an insane strawman meandering about on fire, even if it were true that this were an attempt to examine PZ’s reasoning.
Also, women are people, their happiness is important to a utilitarian that isn’t a fucking misogynist.
It’s Vox Fucking Day, you charlatan. Even if you were being completely accurate before, he doesn’t exactly have a track record of not being misogynistic, and further, using horrendous things happening to women to prove a point about white dudes’ rightness is misogynistic, as it minimizes the very real things that happen to women (and for that matter, are argued about them).
You would fucking know a thing or two about constructing metaphor or satire if your writing faculties were not sad, withered things, abandoned years ago.
No, that one’s actually true.
Discordia: Wrong. I’m not heterosexual. I’ve been called a “faggot” by no fewer than five feminists, simply for disagreeing with them. And by the way, it’s spelled “paradigm”.
@Tulgey
Was that the post about women being attracted to men when they portray a sense of being a hair’s breadth away from snapping? I seem to remember David doing a post about that, though I can’t remember if it was Vox Day
Remember that time PZ was totally advocating throwing acid in men’s faces? Good thing we have satire to explain to him why that was wrong.
Yes, Shadow, just search Vox Day in the sidebar to find it. Day is the kind of scientific, literary, and satirical master who can deduce the deep psychosis of female sexuality from the fact that a few women set up a fan club for an alleged murderer.
It’s telling that Vox Day’s attitude towards false rape accusations is “Oh no! What if a man’s life is ruined?” but his attitude towards untried vigilante justice that involves throwing acid in the faces of women perceived to be sexually wrong in some way is “well, that’s sad, but it has to happen”.
“a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for…”
All social prices tend to be seen as worth paying by selfish people, as long as they know they’re never going to be the one paying them.
This article upset me so much I need to go light a bunch of scented fucking candles to help me relax.
Acid attacks against women are most common in Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. These countries are all, of course, known for their “lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability.”
…Vox Day does realize that his “acid attacks lead to greater utility” theory can be tested empirically, right?
To be fair, anyone who criticizes someone for not “thinking scientifically” and then crafts an epic example of confusing correlation with causation in response should claim to be engaged in satire, because otherwise they’d come across like a complete moron or something.
That’s an MRA urban legend. Feminists do not believe that it is assault for a man to call a woman and wake her up from a nap. You’re just saying that because you want people to assume that when women talk about being victims of domestic violence, that they’re actually just overreacting to something mildly annoying, like getting woken up from a nap. Keep fighting those straw feminists.