The Stangroom Experience
So this odd tweet flies by me:
Ed Rybicki speaks out about the consequences of the vile bullying he received at FtB: http://bit.ly/TT9CWz #FTBullies
“Vile bullying” here at FtB? “Consequences”? Really? And who the heck is Ed Rybicki? I don’t remember him. So I did a little digging.
Oh, yeah. Ed Rybicki — he’s the guy that wrote that “Womanspace” short story that parroted goofy evopsych myths.
At this point I must digress, and mention, for those who are not aware, the profound differences in strategy between Men Going Shopping and Women Going Shopping. In any general shopping situation, men hunt: that is, they go into a complex environment with a few clear objectives, achieve those, and leave. Women, on the other hand, gather: such that any mission to buy just bread and milk could turn into an extended foraging expedition that also snares a to-die-for pair of discounted shoes; a useful new mop; three sorts of new cook-in sauces; and possibly a selection of frozen fish.
It was a not-very-good piece that relied on sexist stereotypes for a crutch. It gets a very thorough going over in the comments section there — a great many people were appalled that such a “tongue-in-cheek” exercise in perpetuating falsehoods about women could get published, even as fiction, in a science journal. It also got slapped down by Jacquelyn Gill, who compiled a huge list of negative responses, such as this one by Anne Jefferson. This wasn’t an FtB-led rejection — it was a massive, science-internet-wide gag reflex that puked all over poor Ed Rybicki’s story. Dana Hunter was our local huntress spearing the wild Rybicki, with follow-ups that included Ophelia Benson.
But to claim it was “bullying” or that FtB was responsible…well, that’s typical Jeremy Stangroom, not letting the evidence cloud his hatred of everything on this network.
But I’m happy to join in now, because I read Rybicki’s awful whine. He doubled down on some truly egregiously bad research in an attempt to salvage his story and credibility.
Oh, by the way, nowhere in his excuse-making does Rybicki mention anything about consequences to himself or his career. That’s another Stangroomism, I’m afraid, and should be completely discounted. Along with everything else he claims. It’s also a year old; I guess Stangroom just wanted to revive an old argument that he saw as damaging to FtB (alas, he’s wrong on all counts.)
But oh, gob, the excuses. They’re embarrassingly bad. Rybicki has to settle on one strategy, first of all. He tries to claim that it was just a fictional story, a little exercise in what-if, and that no one should be offended. But he also tries to cite a whole bunch of articles to show that his hypothetical sex difference in shopping vs. hunting is actually reasonable and true, and therefore no one should be offended because he’s just using the facts.
Look, guy: you could possibly try to make a case for either of those, but you can’t do both: they’re mutually incompatible arguments. Especially when you announce your intent to pursue the evidence like this:
Being a scientist, however, I have been trained to demand evidence, to either support or disprove a hypothesis.
And then what he proceeds to do is cite a series of papers with complete credulity. About a paper titled “Evolved foraging psychology underlies sex differences in shopping experiences and behaviors” he writes:
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