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.
Little Mousling: The thing which interests me is how narrowly the stats are subdivided… black, white, unknown.
But the question of who is incarcerated leads to keeping track of for what they were convicted.
Considering that correlation seems to be the most important thing in this guy’s rhetoric arsenal, the fact that the countries that practice FGM, acid throwing and honour killings are some of the most financially hopeless on the planet makes it a pretty poor argument in their favour. This is ignoring the absolute repugnance of raising it at all, and only judging it on its “merits”.
Yeah, when I took a minute I got there. But ugh, seeing it used like that makes it appear so utterly fucked up.
@LBT
That’s ok, I’ll tell him that to be able to fake anything, one needs higher brain functions. Like creativity (what to fake), learning (how to fake), reason (who to fake on)…
That is one sick disgusting human.
@hippie, women and people of color are full persons who are not less valuable (you don’t seem to be getting that) and the substantial majority of the population.
The utility monsters issue doesn’t even fucking come up at all here, because it’s the (totally fictional) needs of a small privileged minority being seen as overwhelming the needs of the majority.
That’s even setting aside discussions of rule utilitarianism, and VD’s total biology fail.
I’m mensa smart, so I know that the ability to learn information does not mean that the information I’m learning is necessarily true. If my mensa IQ is only reading the inquirer and AVfM, for example….
“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?”
White Conservatives.
Why don’t any of these guys know that women don’t go through menopause at age 26? Do they know any women at all?
What a hateful, ignorant human being. It’s so sad…….for us, not him. I keep thinking of The Handmaid’s Tale. Ahhh, I need a drink.
@ABNOY: White supremacists, actually, though I guess that’s just a synonym of white conservative.
The idealogical gap is way too wide here. It would be impossible to clarify my perspective to someone who honestly thought that “successful reproduction” and “personal happiness” counted equally as “things that benefit women”.
To be super duper clear, I think “personal happiness” is the right metric for “things that benefit women”.
I got ten bucks on “Oh yeah??? Well, what about Valerie Solanas!”
You and PZ are making fools of yourselves. Vox is not always my cup of tea, but what he’s doing here is mocking PZ’s position, therefore:
“Who said anything about supporting the proposition. PZ was asking for an answer to a question, not a personal opinion. In case it has previously escaped you, I’m not a secular atheist utilitarian.”
You both just missed his point.
If you prefer a more straightforward rebuttal of PZ’s errors on this, see my “How Jesus Liberated Women” series.
“Why don’t any of these guys know that women don’t go through menopause at age 26?”
This pisses me off. WTF Price was talking about this in his post last week. Theoretically, a woman can become infertile in her teens if she has a medical condition like PCOS. But other than that a woman can remain fertile until her early forties. It depends on the individual woman. It’s fine for women to be aware that they can’t postpone motherhood indefinitely, and to be fair I think other women are doing a good job of getting the message out, but for Price to be scaremongering that your ovaries are all done at 25 is ridiculous. And of course, there are women who don’t want kids, and they shouldn’t be shamed for it.
My girlfriend has actually been told by her doctor to have children by the time she’s 25 if she wants biological and (at least temporarily) abled kids, because the risk of Down’s Syndrome is very high in her family..
….Somehow I don’t think this applies to everyone though.
@David Marshall: Vox Day has in completely serious posts advocated revoking the right to vote for women among other incredibly misogynistic, racist, and homophobic things. Exactly what in this latest post is clearly satire in view of his previous stated beliefs?
You and Vox’s failure to understand utilitarianism is not my, David’s, or PZ’s problem. Again: Women are people, our happiness fucking matters too.
You can be sure that when an MRA plays the Valerie Solanas card, they’ve absolutely run out of options. I can’t imagine any sane, decent human being supporting her, yet the MRAs want her to be mainstream feminism.
Can you quote a passage where he does that?
Also, inb4 “You’re just cherry-picking!”
Define “support her”. Because I will go to bat for her unpublished manuscript that the world calls “The SCUM Manifesto” (It was named by her publisher, and is a backronym) being satire, it matches her writing style in a lot of previous satires. If you mean “support shooting people because of an allegation of intellectual property theft”, then no, I will not support her.
Straight forward?
Really?
Your’re making fake arguments for Jesus and you call them “straight forward”?
Here’s the thing: Straight forward means simple. Facile. Obvious. Immediately provable..
Your Jesus bs? It’s is none of that.
Vox Day’s thin veneer of a reductio ad absurdem does little to hide that he actually believes this shit. His sick and twisted view of humanity is well established, something no amount of “but let’s NOT throw acid into women’s faces because Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life” will make up for. Protip: he is, in fact, telling us what he actually thinks in his faux-utilitarian answers.
And no, the above should not be read as saying he endorses what he does not. (If confused, try for nuance).
@ Rage
Not even just early forties. My mom had my sibling and myself in her early/mid forties, completely naturally, and didn’t start to hit menopause until after 50. Admittedly, she might just be the unicorn of female fertility, but just goes to show how much time women can have to decide if they want kids.