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.
“”my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if [woman] be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all” (Wollstonecraft, 1792)
:-p
As Ozy pointed out earlier, you would be hard pressed to find a utilitarian rationale for throwing acid into people’s faces.
Besides, is Vox really arguing against a utilitarian in the first place? He just seems to assume that because the guy he’s arguing against is an atheist, he’s probably a utilitarian. Well, maybe there’s a correlation between being atheist and utilitarian in the USA… I don’t really know anything about US atheist culture so I don’t know. But there’s no REASON for an atheist to be a utilitarian as opposed to, say, a deontologist or a virtue ethicist. You can favour empirical science over the Bible all you like, but empirical science has NOTHING TO SAY on which moral philosophy is the correct one. Empirical science might prove that this or that policy increases general happiness, but empirical science can’t possibly prove whether it’s RIGHT or WRONG to, for instance, violate one individual in a situation where that slightly increases the happiness level of a million other people. That’s simply a philosophical question, not an empirical one.
Even leaving aside the question of whether it’s right or not, I’m not convinced that even in an abstract, Omelas-style situation where one person getting splashed with acid made a lot of people a little bit happier somehow that there would be a total increase in happiness. Surely having the knowledge that you were liable to get splashed with acid would decrease a person’s happiness by enough that any gain would be wiped out?
Ah yes, WND, the site that taught me a valuable lesson about the dangers of soy sauce
http://www.wnd.com/2006/12/39253/
The philosophical term for this is “utility monster”. There are entire books worth of writing on this topic (that’s an fyi for Leeloo, in case she’s interested).
Still, whether ethics is the subject of empirical science is a disputed question. There are people that hold it is a proper subject. There certainly do exist studies in regards to brain behavior, decision making, thought processes, etc. around this stuff.
Are you trying to get at the problem of induction or something like that? Normative vs. descriptive ethics? Or are you saying that utility can’t be proven? Because most utilitarians would dispute that you can’t per se measure and analyze utility results using empirical methods (the claim that, for example, throwing acid in women’s faces increases children’s wellbeing is one for which empirical evidence can be gathered to help analyze it).
Presumably, you could do empirical tests around certain other ethical theories too, like cultural relativism, you could sample and study views of the culture, for example.
You know, when I think about it, this whole, “women who have sex with alphas are sluts, they should be having more sex with betas” notion, it kind of undercuts everything that the MRM claims to be about. Considering they’re against affirmative action and attempts to artificially level the playing field for those who have systematically been positioned to underperform due to centuries of oppression, yadda yadda yadda, I’m surprised they consider charity fucks for betas to be acceptable. Aren’t they all about “the best man for the job” and getting what you earned regardless of how much easier your privilege made it to get there? So, in their “fair” world, don’t these alphas deserve the attention over them for making themselves more attractive to the opposite sex? Isn’t having sex with betas a form of sexual socialism? Aren’t I doing my part in keeping things just by only sleeping with the men who have proved their worth?
No, doesn’t work like that betas? Funny how it’s only acceptable when it benefits you.
No, see, it’s all ideals until the moment you’re born, then they couldn’t give a single fuck what happens to you so long as you obey them. Put the fetus in front of the mother, save the fetus! Once that fetus is born though? Yeahhh, mom, you’re gonna have to figure that out on your own. I don’t want MY tax dollars supporting YOUR irresponsibility whore!
Darksidecat: You’re mixing things up. The utility monster is a hypothetical being who becomes extremely happy when you give him any kind of resource; much happier than any human being would be if given the same resource. Utilitarianism would then dictate that you ought to give all resources to the utility monster, rather than divide them equally between people, since that would maximize happiness. This is a counter-intuitive implication of utilitarianism. On the other hand, a utilitarian could simply argue that in the real world where there are no utility monsters that’s not a problem. (I teach philosophy at the university of Stockholm, so trust me, I know these things. ;-))
And well, there are philosophers who try to argue that (prescriptive) ethical facts are a species of empirical facts, but that’s terribly controversial. I don’t think it’s plausible that this is the case while millions of philosophers have simply failed to see this. When it comes to the sciences usually labelled “the empirical sciences”, there’s not like there’s any dispute whatsoever that their subject matters are empirical in nature; why would it be so difficult to see the empirical nature of (prescriptive) ethics if ethics really were empirical?
Obviously you can study empirically how people IN FACT think about ethics. You can descriptively study ethics if you’re a psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist etc. I was probably unclear in my former post, but I didn’t want to object against this claim. But studying how people in fact think about ethics, studying what people BELIEVE about right and wrong, isn’t the same thing as studying what IS right and wrong. For instance, an anthropologist might find that in a certain country people tend to believe that it is right to throw acid in a misbehaving woman’s face, but that isn’t the same thing as proving that it IS right, or even that it is “right for them” and they ought not to change their ways.
I wasn’t discussing induction when I said that science can’t determine whether something is right or wrong. What I’m talking about are situations like these: Suppose we’ve come up with excellent methods for measuring the amounts of suffering vs happiness in both people and other animals and compare them between individuals. Now suppose it’s proven that when you have a bull-fight in Spain, the bull suffers 100 suffering points, but a thousand people will gain one happiness point each. That means a bull fight results in a net increase of 900 happiness points. Suppose also that it’s been proven by sociologists who specialize in Spanish culture that no other activity could replace the bull fight and give as much happiness points as the bull fight would. Utilitarianism then dictates that we ought to have bull fights in Spain.
Now a deontologist who also believe in animal rights could agree with all the happiness measurements and still hold that a slight happiness gain for a thousand people cannot MORALLY OUTWEIGH the suffering of the bull. This deontologist would argue that it’s still morally wrong to have the bullfight. Now empirical science has already done all it can do in this situation. The disagreement between the utilitarian and the deontologist here is a purely ethical one. So whether we ought to have the bullfight or not must (if there’s any way to answer this question at all) be determined through philosophical arguments rather than empirical investigations.
“Even leaving aside the question of whether it’s right or not, I’m not convinced that even in an abstract, Omelas-style situation where one person getting splashed with acid made a lot of people a little bit happier somehow that there would be a total increase in happiness. Surely having the knowledge that you were liable to get splashed with acid would decrease a person’s happiness by enough that any gain would be wiped out?”
Could be, but not necessarily. It might be the case that lots of people feel that “justice has been done” when the woman has been splashed by acid, while feeling completely secure in their belief that nothing like that will ever happen to them, since they haven’t done and will never do anything to deserve it.
I’m not saying that this is very probable, I do think people are probably less happy in cultures where this kind of punishment is administered to family members who “misbehave”. But it’s not impossible.
Its kind of amazing how a manosphere blogger will write about the moral value and justification behind throwing acid in women’s faces and have it excused as satire or philosophising, yet if a feminist blogger wrote about the moral value behind cutting men’s penises off then try to pass it off as satire or not really meaning it the register her mob would be out for blood. I mean isnt there also a book by a dead ‘feminist’ that came out in the 60s which is also probably satire that still has MRAs all pissy in 2012? And fuck, I know everyone is just having philosophy talk right now but acid throwing and happiness is technically still the topic…imagine if it were penis cutting…hooo boy
I’m in bed right now on my phone so hopefully that made sense. Basically what I’m saying is its quite common to have women’s basic human rights questioned when it comes to ‘ the good of society’ men’s rights though? Not so much. No woman reverend goes on fox news and says men voting is destroying society for example…and no feminist says throwing acid in mens faces is a small price to pay for insured fidelity. Because men are people unlike women doncha know.
Oh, WND.
“A baby’s endocrine system just can’t cope with that kind of massive assault, so some damage is inevitable. At the extreme, the damage can be fatal.”
And this is why there are so few people in China – tofu and soy sauce killed all the babies.
Just gonna comment on one thing because, y’know, I think it deserves a reply.
Quoth Hippie Redneck:
I’d call those people Shit Feminists Who Do Not Get It and call them on it if I saw that happening. I think most people around here would.
I just didn’t want that comment to look totally ignored, ’cause the existence of People Who Say Shitty Things That Clash With My Type Of Feminism And Appear To Be Shit and claim to be feminists (and I won’t be getting into arguments about whether they are feminists or not, please don’t expect me to comment on that…) isn’t something we should sweep under the carpet.
@Quackers: A pretty famous Swedish feminist blogger called Hanna Fridén wrote about locking up all men a while ago. She was responding to racists who argue that because people with non-Swedish parents are statistically more likely to commit crimes than people with two Swedish parents (I’m not certain if the correlation still stands if you were to compare only people from the same economic background, btw – non-Swedes have higher unemployment rates than Swedes, and there’s a correlation between unemployment and crime) we shouldn’t have immigration. Hanna wrote that well, MEN are WAY more likely to commit crimes than women – that correlation is WAY stronger than the correlation between crime and non-Swedish background. So if we’re gonna take preventive measures against entire groups to lower the crime rate, shouldn’t we first of all lock up all men? Women could run society and simply meet up with men in their prison when they wanted to have babies.
OBVIOUSLY she did not actually ADVOCATE locking up all men, she just argued that this makes AS MUCH SENSE as having no immigration because of crime correlations.
And just as obviously she was attacked for being an evil feminist who thinks all men should be locked up.
Apologies for not having read this whole thread, but let me just add that utilitarianism =/= science and atheism =/= science.
Either there is an empirical basis for ethics, or ethics are worthless mental masturbation.
@katz
PLEASE write a novel entirely in this style. I would read the hell out of that.
David Marshall: You both just missed his point.
What was his point†?
How does this batch of over the top points differ from his other writings?
What about his “mocking” makes the logical failures, intellectual errors (e.g. the mis-statement of utilitarianism), etc. worth ignoring?
† I think his point was PZ Myers is a poopyhead. I also think he meant what he said, that he believes women need to be “kept in their place” and that things like honor killings, and disfiguring punishments are a small price to pay for keeping them there. It would make him happy if women were second class citizens. He’s a self-centered twit, and if it makes him happy, he thinks it’s a good thing. If it makes him unhappy, he thinks it a bad thing. I’ve never seen anything from him which didn’t boil down to that basic premise.
Regarding whether Vox Day is being satirical, I don’t think so. He believes every word of his s(p)ewage.
@Blackbloc: We need ethics because there are countless situations where we must make up our minds about what to do, and we must find some way to live together. I’d say that’s enough to justify doing ethics.
And one can argue rationally about ethics even if the arguments don’t look like “X is right because SCIENCE”.
You know what is absolutely fascinating in this, the marry at 22 article and the immodest dress article? I would have liked to be with a guy at 22 and yes even marry him. But hey, none was interested in settling down with me. SAID RESEARCH ON GERMANY THAT HE QUOTES found that it was generally men who in a relationship wanted to postpone both marriage and having children, not the female partner as had been assumed prior to the research (due to women being career-driven bla). The government-funded research found the opposite to be the case. Vox obviously omits this.
Regarding immodest dress: I have no idea where all these men that I could hypothetically have sex with are hiding. Most men I meet are not interested in me or are in a relationship or are gay… and the rest are probably MRAs. 😉
Bleh. I looked on this guy’s blog. Even if his post was satirical (and seeing as there are many people who think women should be baby machines and have acid thrown in their faces if they are not baby machines, it treads too close to truth to be good satire), he’s a wanker. He’s done another post in which he manages to denigrate both people with Asperger’s and people with mental illness.
http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2012/06/still-sniping-still-running.html
1. Asperger’s is not a mental illness. It’s a difference in the brain, and having it raises your risk of some mental illness (e.g. depression), but it is not, in itself, a mental illness.
2. People with mental illness and/or Asperger’s are perfectly capable of seeing that someone who advocates throwing acid in people’s faces as a form of social control definitely has issues. Not necessarily a mental illness, but issues.
3. Nice use of “You shouldn’t listen to my opponent, they’re CRAZY!!!” faux-arguement there.
No, no, you see, actually the betas are the best man for the job. It’s women’s tastes that are defective.
Don’t think about it too hard or your brain might turn inside-out and your cerebellum might leak out your ears onto the carpet.
^ That’s not the only example of wankerdom I found, and I looked through the first two pages. It just seemed pertinent, and as a person with Asperger’s myself, personal.
To all those Valerie Solanas jerks: The Black Panthers are not the same or comparable to the KKK. Women weren’t allowed to own individual bank accounts then, rape in marriage was legal and husbands could end the employments of their wives. Your argument therefore is invalid.
If someone witnessing an acid attack has any empathy, they will probably feel some emotional distress just by seeing so much suffering from the victim. The people who witness the attack and are against acid attacks might also feel guilt for not being able to stop it. Of course the woman being attacked suffers the most. I’m just saying an acid attack would cause suffering for more people than just the victim.