Jessica at Feministing finds another example of my favorite genre: Douchebag On Feminism. In this chapter in our infinite series, feminism has gone too far (dum dum dummmmmmm!)
I happen to speak fluent Douche, so let me translate for you. Blockquotes are Douchy McIssues, italics are translation, regular text is commentary.
So, in this wonderful age of liberty, women are free to do whatever they want, without social pressure to conform to certain roles, right?
I have no idea what I’m talking about, but that’s not going to stop me.
This is a common blowhard technique, used often by Intelligent Design proponents and discussed, I believe, by PZ Meyers, of starting off with a statement so mind-bogglingly incorrect that a reasonable individual doesn’t even know where to begin refuting it. Just unpacking the wrong to defuse it point by point is such a chore that you lose the listener and Mr McIssues wins the soundbite war.
So let’s be brief: Anyone who claims that there is no social pressure for women to conform to certain roles is talking out of his ass. Feel free to change the word “women” in that statement to any other group without affecting its validity.
In this day and age feminism has gone too far. I have several female friends whose greatest ambition is to be a wife and mother, but feel social and cultural pressure to go to college and get a prestigious job simply because it is expected.
I’m not above making up friends in order to project my issues onto them.
Douchy McIssues goes to Michigan Tech, which is a bit heavy on the math & science. Even their Arts & Humanities lists the physical sciences individually and lumps the not-physical sciences together under “social sciences.” Don’t even look at their Humanities page. Something tells me that women who really want their MRS but are being forced by their parents to get a degree are not flocking to this particular school.
Anyway, this is a fake dilemma. While your parents can force you to get that marketing degree, they can’t force a prestigious job to take you. We’d all like to have prestigious jobs and spend our Saturdays swimming in our money pools, most of us won’t be living that particular dream even if we try. If you don’t want a prestigious job, you will not be able to compete with those that do. So to Douchy’s poor, pitiable friends: don’t worry your pretty little heads off, just enjoy the four-to-five year meat market that is college, keep flirting with those engineers, and hope for the best.
Now, Michigan Tech’s female population is exceptional in many ways.
Please don’t take my balls from me; they’re all I have.
Some of his best friends are girls, I’m sure.
Thus, most of the generalities of this article do not apply in anywhere near as high a degree to the female population at Tech.
Really, you’re the exception, baby. Now, please, stop twisting my nads around each other like that. It hurts.
Like all this wishy-washy backtracking is going to help. He wasn’t getting laid before this article was published, and if he’s lucky, he will simply continue to not get laid afterwards. If he’s unlucky, gaggles of giggling female tech students will make jokes about how insecure he is about the size of his penis while he’s in earshot.
For an opening example, many would consider it sexist for me to say the aforementioned about math and science studies, yet it is true. You simply do not find as many women interested in studying theoretical physics as you do interested in studying, say, nursing.
For my next trick, I will display a staggering lack of cultural and historical awareness and reinforce all the arguments in favor of a liberal education.
This leads into the key point of my article: men and women are different in more ways than simple physiology. Men have a couple of basic desires regarding the world around them; at one level they can see as two basic opposing desires, to build, and to destroy. Women, have a desire to nurture something that already exists in to full form.
You see, women don’t have the creativity or drive necessary to create, they can only take care of what men already made, be it a house designed by our keen minds and built by our steady hands or a child sprung from our mighty seed. If this seems like the rantings of a lunatic, that’s because your estrogen soaked brains can’t handle logical things, like circuits or evolutionary psychology. Look, toots, you can keep digging your nails into my scrotum all you like, I lost feeling somewhere around “nursing.” Ow! My eyes!
Right, more women are in nursing than physics because women just naturally want to nurture. This has nothing to do with nursing being an historically female profession, or that the boys club in sciences and engineering is just starting to be chipped away. Nothing to do with our educational system’s systemic discouraging of girls from math and science, or even that in most schools, math and science teaching to all genders is inadequate leaving only the privileged few and the super determined to fill the vanishingly few, highly competitive top jobs.
Seriously, what a dumbass. Have you ever tried to get a job with just an undergraduate physics degree? You will be moving to where the jobs are. A nursing degree? Every fuck place needs a nurse. Which of these two is more compatible for a person who figures that when it comes to her job or his job, whose needs are going to come first? And that’s only item one on a terribly long list of Everything That Is Wrong With This Argument. Feel free to add more in the comments.
Even a materialist, who does not believe in spirit and body, but only body, must admit that the female and male bodies are wired for different behaviors like this.
I ejaculate models for suspension bridges and circuit diagrams. It’s because I’m wired to create. Then I build these things with my hands, and finally I smack them to bits with my penis, and the circle is thus complete. Women, unable to cream their jeans productively, try to steal my creations before I can destroy them and guard them jealously because they know they can not make their own. Why are you looking at me like that?
The best part about these evo-psych guys is how they have to go to such lengths to make themselves sound like deep, philosophical thinkers. Why, even the materialists must admit he is correct! Q E Fucking D! High fives all around!
In this day and age, however, feminism has created the expectation for women to do everything that men do just as well and just as often. Now, for the exceptions to the generality, this is great for those women, such as most of Tech’s female student population.
Oh, Jesus, God, my eyes, stop, why are you hurting me? I clearly said that when I said that the bitches ain’t shit, I wasn’t talking about you, oh, ow, ow! Why are you getting so angry with me? All I said was that women are designed to care for what man hath wrought and perhaps I’ve implied that this whole feminism thing was ok for a few but is bad for the rest and how much did we really need the few anyway? OW!
Actually, men created the expectation that a woman has to work twice as hard to be considered half as good. I believe it’s called protecting one’s turf. Feminists want women to have the same opportunities as men, and for men to pick up the slack at home. We feel that these policies are good for men as well. Ask us how, as we never tire of explaining why Feminism Is Good For Men, Too!
However, for a number of young women I have known, who have no interest in competing with men for roles in business, engineering, law or medical practice, they feel a tremendous pressure to go to college and earn the degree anyways.
Who are these women who don’t actually want engineering, law or medical degrees who actually make it into and out of these programs? Is this really a problem? Once again, we have plenty of schools with plenty of fluff majors for these poor dears to get their MRS. There’s plenty of people, men and women both, who wouldn’t have degrees if they hadn’t been able to find a sufficiently easy program on which to spend their parent’s money. I hardly think we have to dismantle 30+ years of modern feminist progress for this subset of women smart enough to slog through a pre-law program they don’t want but too stupid to switch to communications and focus on landing a man while telling everyone “I’m going to be an anchorwoman.” Yeah, right.
Beyond this, it has come to the point in some social circles, where suggesting that such predispositions as I’ve laid out in this article even exist, is considered sexist.
If I seem twisty and disproportioned, it’s because I stuck my head so far up my ass it actually came out the top again. That was my second trick, by the way. Anyway, like I was saying, when I tell all the girls in my PDE class that women just suck at math because they menstruate out the hormone that produces manly brilliance, they get hysterical all woman-like, ya know? Women, who can figure?
Yes, I would imagine that many women at the tech school don’t like to spend their time rehashing their defense of being there, taking up a seat that could be filled by a man.
Now, I have known a number of women who consider themselves not simply equal to men, but superior.
To men in general, or just you? Because the latter may have an argument there.
Why? Because they are more “sophisticated,” because they are more “rational,” and less prone to violence.
Do you get punched in the face a lot? No? Then you are in fact surrounded by a superior race of superwomen, notable for their legendary self-control.
When did feminism stop being about “we are worth just as much as you are,” and start being about “we can do everything you can do, and then some”?
First of all, thank you for summing up classical and modern feminism in two sentences. Truly, there’s no one more qualified. Secondly, the ‘then some’ is pretty much limited to gestating and lactating. As for the “everything you can do” I’m afraid that centuries of second-class citizenship has made us wary of compromise; also, we tend to learn from the lessons of other oppressed groups. The African American community already gave that ‘separate but equal’ thing you are implying with your first statement as much as a chance as it’s ever gonna get, and they found it lacking. Some so-called Christian feminists have tried the argument that men and women are equal in the eyes of the lord, we just have different jobs, and even the rest of the Christian feminists are not swallowing that because accepting such a fucked up premise just puts us back on the path of getting the shaft. If there are both men and women in your engineering class, then you have to accept what your lying eyes tell you: women can in fact do math and science. I’m sorry baby, that’s just how it is.
“I ejaculate models for suspension bridges and circuit diagrams. It’s because I’m wired to create. Then I build these things with my hands, and finally I smack them to bits with my penis, and the circle is thus complete.”
Beautiful smackdown. I almost inhaled my hot cocoa after reading the above quote.
My reply to this kind of BS is to refer to Lisa Randall, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in the world, and the head of her department at Harvard. Beautiful, smart, eloquent, and refused to let the piss-headed comments made by a certain former president of the university get to her (as well as probably years of institutionalized sexism in a still very “boys’ club” field of science).
I am very fortunate and grateful to women like her that I never, ever experienced any sort of suggestion from any of my male classmates or professors that I “didn’t belong” nor did I ever encounter any form of condescension or patronizing attitudes from dudes in my field of study. I miss the camaraderie that all us crazy microbiology students had, regardless of what organs happened to be between our legs.
Secondly, the ‘then some’ is pretty much limited to gestating and lactating.
Don’t forget multiple orgasms.
Whoops, I’m so accustomed to them I kind of forget they’re considered special. I’d go on, but I don’t want to brag. :p
And men can apparently breastfeed.
“Nurturing” vs “building/destroying”? You can make that mean anything. In this guy’s world, “nurturing” means taking something that’s already there and doing the necessary secreterial and housekeeping work. We get to make the coffee and keep the files.
“Nurturing”, though, is a very wide term. You can become Head of HR at a huge company and nurture people’s careers. Marie Curie nurtured her knowledge of radioactivity. Boadicca nurtured her people’s desire for freedom by leading them into battle against the Romans.
So, those terms? Useless.
Next. True: there IS pressure on women to outperform men. That’s what’s called sexism. (Who said that “feminism will only have won once a stupid woman can make as much money as a stupid man”?)
Now, isn’t this an entirely new insight! Everyone knows that ‘before feminism’ there has been no pressure at all, certainly not on women. Mankind was living in harmonious happiness until feminism reared its ugly head and destroyed this Golden Age. [/iro]
There has always been pressure of some sort on everyone. And there will always be pressure to conform to certain norms and rules. And these norms and rules change constantly as the world we live in keeps changing. This is a constant challenge, and some will cope better than others. This may be good or bad, but life is like that, has always been and will always be. Sad for McIssue’s number of young women I have known, but good for others who do want to compete with men for roles in business, engineering, law or medical practice.
If you take a close look at any change in history you will always find that some did benefit more than others, and there have always been people who ended up worse off. There will always be benefits, and there will always be a price to pay. Crying unfair won’t help. And if unfair privileges are challenged or taken away from a group of people there is no reason for them to complain anyway. But having someone to put the blame on makes it easier, of course. So the McIssues will go on whining for a while yet.
Kyso K said:
“You see, women don’t have the creativity or drive necessary to create, they can only take care of what men already made, be it a house designed by our keen minds and built by our steady hands or a child sprung from our mighty seed. If this seems like the rantings of a lunatic,…”
Sadly, it sounds like the ravings of an invited speaker at the American Psychological Association:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
p.s. Was there ever any significant outrage about the speech in the link above? Cursory googling doesn’t reveal much…
Kyso K said:
“Nothing to do with our educational system’s systemic discouraging of girls from math and science, or even that in most schools, math and science teaching to all genders is inadequate leaving only the privileged few and the super determined to fill the vanishingly few, highly competitive top jobs.”
This is so true, and so rarely pointed out.
God is a nurse.
Doctors didn’t save my Mom’s life. Nurses did.
Doctors didn’t teach us how to care for our sick, chronically ill, or dying loved ones. Nurses did.
Doctors didn’t come to our houses and supervise our care of homeridden but mentally sound and semi-ambulatory loved ones. Nurses did.
And as it happens…nurses are male. With families…and partners.
J, I clicked the link and am beginning to regret it…
Och aye. It’s called the Classics section of any good library.
Common denominator with this thread: guy flatters himself that he’s fully researched his facts. Uses anecdotal evidence as shaky foundations for grandiose theories. Unwittingly explains why Blake said that “to generalize is to be an idiot”.
Nursing was a male profession until the Civil War, and male physicians and nurses put up a tremendous fight to keep women out of the nursing profession even when there was a huge need for nurses. I guess the Civil War made men lose their “desire to nurture something that already exists in to full form.”
Oh dear sweet zombie Jesus, that link!
Okay, I’m not a biologist. But, I know enough about evolution that if men’s “take chances genes” were passed on, they would have been passed on to female babies too. And if women had “play it safe genes” they would have been passed on to male babies too. Incidently, I missed the whole “women are better than men” thing in the world.
FFFTTTt.
I just like the numbers he bandies about. 80% of women reproduce with 40% of the guys? Twwooooo giiirrrrlllllsssss for evvveeerryyyyy guuuuyyyyyyy!
Have a threesome for science, everyone!
Yes, women who just want to get married are made to trudge along in theoretical physics and advanced chemistry classes. In fact, M.I.T. is just full of women who just want to make babies. If thats true, women must be pretty smart to take those kinds of classes just for fun..I guess he’s mad cause its actually work for him:)
I saw this comic and thought of you (and every other feminist blogger).
Nursing was a male profession until the Civil War, and male physicians and nurses put up a tremendous fight to keep women out of the nursing profession even when there was a huge need for nurses
I did not know this, and both of my big sisters are nursing professionals with advanced degrees. Thanks for the headsup, J.
And I wonder what Mich Tech guy makes of the men in nursing?