So this morning I got tweeted a belly laugh.
Frost @FreedomTwenty5
Excellent atheist/rationalist critique of evolutionary denialist @pzmyers – http://www.thumotic.com/2013/10/28/spot-price-forward-contracts-and-maturity-transformation-in-the-sexual-marketplace/ … #science
“Evolutionary denialist”? What, me? So I followed the link.
I can only assume that Myers, with whom I am otherwise unfamiliar, is some sort of evolution-denying Young Earth Creationist, or perhaps a Scientologist. The concept of human sexual choice has been well-established by David Buss and more recently, Geoffrey Miller. To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised, in this day and age, that we still have people such as Myers, who deny the evolutionary origins of human behaviour.
It would be crass to mock Mr. Myers’ religious beliefs, even while they prohibit him from acknowledging the role that evolution and biomechanics play in human behaviour. I will just say, Mr. Myers, that there are many Christians groups which have done a far better job than the YECs, or whatever sky-fairy-worshiping sect you belong to, of reconciling The Bible and the observable empirical fact of human evolution. I encourage you to broaden your horizons good sir, and I recommend the excellent community over at r/atheism as a good place to start.
Heh. He doesn’t know me at all well, I guess.
We’re already primed for some awesome stupidity with that introduction. Predictably, this tripe is from one of those MRAs — specifically, one of those manly men wallowing in an overdose of masculine machismo.
The typical 21st century western male is not a man. He is a limp-wristed mangina, a coward, a collaborator and a fool. He is an embarrassment to the thousands of generations of his ancestors who lived lives of struggle and sacrifice, just so that he can sit on his arse and wait out death in a perpetual state of quiet desperation.
The modern man lives a life that his ancestors would consider sad, pathetic, and deeply unnatural. The excuses he offers would make them laugh. His fatalistic, self-pitiful posturing would make them cringe.
Thumotic is a place for men who reject this path. our society’s flight from traditional manly virtue. It is a home for men who are unashamed of their masculinity, their pride in themselves, and their lust for excellence in all facets of their lives.
Reminds me of Kronar (NSFW!).
What’s caused all this outrage, and an unpleasant ugly bolus in my email traffic, is my criticism of that ridiculous sexual market value graph, the one with no data behind it, but that tried to cloak its sexist bigotry behind a false veneer of quantitative, empirical assessment. It was all just a lie, of course, propped up by rigged surveys and purely subjective curve fitting.
Here’s how the manly man rebuts my complaints about the evidence: by ignoring my central issues, and vomiting up a cloud of self-referential assertions about the truth of the graph, despite the absence of any data for it. Every sentence, practically every clause, is garbage — not because I’m ideologically committed to equality, but because the premises are bogus and the evidence that they airily claim is backing it isn’t there.
One can easily dismiss the arguments of PZ Myers, Demand Curve Denialist, because the graph at which he ignorantly scoffs is not meant to represent [Wrong. It’s supposed to represent something. What?] a perfectly defined quantitative [That’s a good part of my complaint. It’s intended to give the illusion of quantitative measurement, but no measurements were made. It is a lie.] relationship between price [And that’s another complaint! You can’t relate human relationships to “price”. That’s not how they work.] and demand [Again, the chart is a failure. You’re trying to make an argument for what people look for in a partner, are stupidly equating that to demand for sexual satisfaction, and further, are reducing it to a single parameter, age. It’s pure nonsense.]. Rather, it is an analytical [With no legitimate analysis!] and pedagogical [I’ll agree with that part. It taught me that MRAs are ignorant assholes] tool which we use to convey a basic truth: People buy more of a good when the price goes down [Stop digging a hole. You are pretending that relationships are bought and sold. Except maybe in the kinds of superficial, transient exchanges MRAs engage in, that simply isn’t true.]. If the Manosphere were to start building complex mathematical labyrinths [Grr. You can’t, because you don’t have the data. You certainly can’t make more complex models when even your simplistic model is built on air.] purporting to explain every intricacy of the sexual marketplace, and hold faith in those models despite a long history of predictive failure… well then, we would be frauds and fools and worse [Yep. You’re already there.]. Fortunately we are all Austrian sexual marketplace economists, here at Thumotic.
The SMV graph is a visualization of the fundamental truth that a woman’s desirability tends to peak in her teens and early twenties, while a man’s peaks in his thirties. This will be true, on average, whichever scale we use, whatever quibbles we might have about the precise shape of the curve, and whatever exceptions might exist to the broad trends. [How do you know this is true? Because you invented a graph that fits your preconceptions. That’s it.]
How do these people fail to recognize that they have no legitimate objective evidence backing up their claims…that they can’t even imagine how to test their arguments? It’s hopeless when this is their big argument:
95% of modern American women will angrily reject the wisdom in this post. Even a majority of men will feel that it is somehow wrong to acknowledge the reality of rapidly declining female sexual value with age. And yet, nothing I’ve written would be controversial in any traditional society that has ever existed, or currently exists. Take this article to the Middle East, Russia, China, Japan, or any European or American city before 1960, and you will find few who disagree with this analysis. Either they are all deluded, dear twenty-first century American liberals, or you are.
So if you go to a sufficiently sexist, patriarchal society, and take a vote of the guys in charge, they’ll all agree that they like nubile young women to service them sexually. Well, la-de-da, who knew that this is a matter settled by popular vote among the characters portrayed on Mad Men?
I’ve ran across this problem a few times recently… and I just cannot decide what is more annoying: the people who post stupid crap like this graph, or the people who applaud and defend the stupid crap.
That’s amazing. Completely astonishing.
I mean, I think this is the first time that we’ve seen this kind of spittle-flecked response without your name being constantly mis-spelled, PZed. If your e-mail box is being bombed, but you’re not being called “Meyers”, does that mean you’re just sixteen* times more awesome than Goering?
* Citation: “Transrectal Instantiation of Evidence”: CaitieCat, My Pants, 2013.
So now they are economists? Hmmm…
.. and fail, no this is not true at all, some goods are bought more when the price goes down, some are bought in equal quantities, and some are bought less when the price goes down (negative price elasticity).
Really people, this is economics 101 stuff.
Oh, please tell me it is a real place. You know, in meat space. PLEASE tell me all the MRA will gather there to be real men. And leave the rest of us the hell alone.
Oh, please…….
Do theses guys sit around fires drumming?
Where’s Iron John?
I think he knows who you are, PZ. Calling you a creationist is just his way of insulting you. Like the atheist misogynists who call feminism a religion, or the Christian apologists who say that atheism is a faith. He’s pretending that the MRA position is an obvious conclusion if one accepts evolution as true, the fact that you don’t must mean that you’re a creationist since they’re the ones who deny evolution–all the while knowing that you are a scientist who’s made a name tearing down creationist nonsense.
Austrian economists???? LOL. That made this 3/2 as funny. This is a quantitative value that is perfectly legitimate, by the way.
Here’s my impression of Austrian economists:
“DOOOOOM IS COMING!!! WATCH OUT FOR ALL THE DOOOOMM! HYPERINFLATION ANY DAY NOW!! BUY GOLD! DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooommmmm….”
That’s just it, though. To these clowns, those are the only legitimate societies. Their beliefs are true; “limp-wristed manginas, cowards, collaborators and fools” in league with teh wimminz have conspired to corrupt public opinion so that what should be just obvious to everyone becomes un-PC and taboo. They genuinely believe that they’ve demonstrated some kind of edgy truth and the likes of you know it but you can’t admit it. Pathetic really, but we see similar perversions of reason used to insulate bad ideas from examination across the right-wing’s current crop of lies.
Typed while chopping down a tree to build a log cabin, one presumes, and not at all while sitting on an arse in front of a computer screen.
Say what you will about furries and similar folks, at least they are aware that they’re role-playing.
It’s RATIONAL REASON for RATIONAL (SOMETIMES SKEPTIC) MEN!
Wholly crap, that is awfuck.
There are lots of goods that are purchased more, simply because the price is high. Diamonds and certain whiskies are probably some things that guy buys, and are not the only examples.
And the purpose of the graph was not to show that people get more relationships with less-valued people (a bizarre concept). It had no purpose, which was PZ’s point.
It was a useless, valueless thing to be tossed aside. Kinda like a too-old person, in their minds.
Again, what’s with the sexual value of pre-teens girls with these creeps?
You really needn’t have read any further than “Austrian sexual marketplace economist” (does he have that title printed on his business cards?). People like that are convinced that they have already deducted the most fundamental truths about human behavior from some hogwash theory, and that no empirical investigation is necessary to validate them. No wonder the MRA clowns are eagerly buying into pseudoscience from other fields as well.
The very instant you use the word “mangina” in any context other than to mock the utter risible stupidity of it, you lose the right to have anything you say on any subject taken seriously ever again, for the rest of your natural life.
I love how they think a man’s sexual appeal peaks in his 30s.
Let us imagine, just for shits and grins, a female equivalent of an MRA: a woman who just wants a man to fuck, and she wants him to be really, really sexy (by the modern standard of sexy, because what did those historical people know, anyway).
By that standard, “my gut says” that a man’s sexual appeal peaks at age 23.
Why 23? Because he’s done with growing, and all filled out with his muscles. He’s still young enough that his metabolism makes it easier for him to keep lean. He’s still young enough that he actively participates in sports–probably football, because what man wouldn’t, right? Also, he’s young enough to still have full head of hair (even if his genetic legacy says he’ll lose it all to male pattern baldness), and none of it is gray. And his skin is still smooth and healthy.
There you go. All men age 24 and up are obviously too ugly to fuck. Because I have thought this through and come to the obvious conclusion.
[/sarcasm]
Maybe they figure that young, inexperienced girls won’t have any basis for comparison and realize how shitty these guys are in the sack.
And I thought that it was some kind of parody. One wouldn’t cite Geoffrey Miller as a serious scientist non-ironically, would one now?
Also, this:
Which should be telling him something about the presumed “wisdom” of the assertions he’s making, and not the women laughing at it.
I suspect this is a guy who makes miserable attempts at hitting on women that get him rejected repeatedly, and thinks the women must simply be stupid for not responding with wanton sexual abandon as the PUA websites he reads tells him they will.
If he’s thinking with his testicles, the poor quality of his thinking doesn’t speak well to the size and functionality of his testicles.
The SMV graph is a visualization of the fundamental truth
Oh…IOW, a cartoon.
The fetish (and yes, I’m going to call it a fetish) these guys have for young women is so obviously about how older women are more likely to (1) see through their shit and (2) call their partners out on their failures in bed.
There are men out there doing backfips on motorcycles, jumping out of airplanes and surfing 100-foot waves. I suppose that’s just in reaction to our boring lives. By the way, women are doing those things, too, and most of us are driving powerful cars very fast, and taking that absolutely for granted.
The homoeroticism is strong in these manly men, and we’d all be a lot happier if they would just be honest.
If they strive for excellence, what’s with the shitty graph?
(I used to have sex with a woman back in what that graph would call her sexual best, and it was very good. I met her again a few decades later, when they’d say she’d flatlined, and oh, my lord, they are wrong.)
I was wondering if the dudebros were going to say/do something stupid enough for PZ to invoke this week’s Oglaf.
That allusion makes perfect sense. I’ve never seen a minute of Mad Men, but I did try to read David Olgivy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man. I stopped somewhere in the middle of the first 10 pages after reading paragraphs of him explaining why an ad agency should never hire a woman for an important position, and anyway, women should just stay home with their babies. It’s probably easy to underestimate the impact of a perspective like his on shaping modern cultural perspectives.
here is a song. it is sung by the fugs and it sounds just like this duebro’s reasoning.about “smv”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPVgKoruWdA
uncle frogy
Oh … that … is … so … funny. (Sorry, I was laughing so hard I had trouble speaking.)
Yes, yes, of course the denizens of Thumotic are Austrian economists! (Back to laughing.)
The guy’s favorite drink – Myer’s Rum.
Someone who assumes without research cannot be otherwise explained.
Wait, shouldn’t that mean that “post peak” women are actually more sought after than those near their “peak” because their value and price is going down?
See, that 40something woman, you don’t need to buy roses AND chocolate AND dinner, it’s OK if you stand every other round!
Not dying of the flu, measles, polio, scarlet fever or those damn inflamed wisdom teeth, deeply unnatural that is!
Yes, the reason MRAs–and rapists too!–prefer teen girls to women is because they’re easier to manipulate. That’s it.
“Fortunately we are all Austrian sexual marketplace economists, here at Thumotic. ”
Poe’s Law? I can’t believe anyone could type that with a straight face.
@28 – After glancing through the site and reading some of the responses, I think it is just a run-of-the-mill MRA site. I kept hearing Tim Allen grunting in the back of the mind while reading the site…
Soooo much fail.
Any one of my ancestors would give his left arm to live my life. I have easy access to foods from all over the world, even things like pepper and nutmeg that people used to fight wars over. I’m almost never too cold or too hot, except by my own choice. I can get entertainment and information that would be unimaginable to my ancestors, and I can visit virtually any spot on the globe.
I went to the linked article, clicked a pingback, and browsed around a bit… Holy fucking shit this rabbit hole is deep and filled with repulsive odors. Here’s one, for example:
Left as a comment to the risible sack who says that a woman wasn’t raped because she had a boyfriend, and she was meeting the man for drinks, therefore the only interpretation is she is trying to cover her ass, because WOMEN amirite?!
moarscienceplz #30
Indeed. I get the feeling he’s extrapolating from a few hundred years’s worth of ancestors infected by the Protestant work ethic.
Esteleth
I think that is one part of the fetish. The other part is the reducing women to a commodity/sex dispenser in exactly the same manner as a car.
A new product is most desireable, followed by a gently used product.
The more owners a product has had, the less likely it is to be in good condition.
The same idea is expressed in the taliban propaganda about virgins in heaven being the reward for selflessly sacrificing your life.
Even among idiotic appeals to authority, this is a real doozy. The same argument could be applied to justify almost any historical bigotry or discriminatory practice;
I wonder if he would be so quick to endorse such a pro-slavery argument on the exact same – and I use the term extremely loosely here – ‘logical basis’ as his rationale for misogyny? If the notional ‘wisdom’ of bygone cultures is so wonderful, on what basis could he oppose it? Or does the infallibility of past societies, for some unfathomable reason, abruptly evaporate once we get beyond reasons to chain women to sinks and/or beds?
Or maybe I am underestimating his capacity for bigoted arsehattery. Maybe he possesses racism to match his misogyny, and would be all too eager to sign up to such a monstrous notion…
Does this imply that they deduced their graph from a-priori principles and don’t need any empirical evidence for it?
And that’s why I only sleep with women made of gold.
This is the second funniest part of the whole stupid post (the first being the comparison of PZ to a YEC).
I’m a middle-income American who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in the suburbs, and I’m fairly sure my lifestyle is more posh and less needy than any of my ancestors, going all the way back (and I do mean alllll the way back). I am never fearful of hunger, never wanting for warmth, and have more entertainment at my disposal than I know what to do with. The vast majority of all men who lived and died in human history could only dream of my comforts. Having some misogynist loser call me some sort of failure-as-a-man is downright hysterical.
Truly, these clowns have no perspective.
The MRA argument is that women do not like sex, they only use it to get what they really want, which is money. So older men are have a higher “worth” because they are better able to provide those material things.
PZ, perhaps you brought the “creationist” tag on yourself. In the post about the SMV graph, you wrote: “The circularity is so perfect, it’s practically Biblical. It seems your critic didn’t recognize sarcasm, and thought you were stating, as your point, that the bible is perfect.
But on Home Improvement, his character’s wife was an educated and successful psychologist. Not exactly the type of relationship these MRAs would be into.
What a sex starved bunch of wankers. The idea that you get to enjoy consensual sex by earning it never enters their silly heads. Too hard by far. They should stick to fucking beef rissoles and jelly donuts.
.
They don’t have the foggiest idea about how to enjoy a spirited interaction with a mixed gender bunch of intelligent people. Their loss, not mine.
These dudes endorsing this graph keep yelling about “Sexual Market Value”, but this graph doesn’t have shit to do with real sexual relationships, which are as messy and impossible to quantify as ANY human relationship.
The vague understandings that these dudes have confused with data are obviously pulled from popular media.
The pink curve is “women whose images we like to view while masturbating”, and is a crude graph of the expression of physical secondary sex characteristics among actresses, which obviously drops hard after the twenties, because entertainment for men refuses to cast older women. The blue graph is “how proud we feel about our own masculinity”, so it peaks in the fictional mid-thirties balance of physical virility and career success. Both “data” curves are expressions of pure self-interest, pulled from the fiction of TV and movies.
So these real manly men clearly don’t know shit about what real-life good sex is like because their sex lives are nothing but self-centered masturbation and jackhammer sauce-busting in/on bored women.
Yup, according to MRAs, the “hapless Dad” comedic trope is PROOF that our culture is misandrist.
@36 gijoel
lol. That is pure snap!!!
When I saw Austrian economics, I immediately thought these guys are arrogant self-centered clueless libertarian reality-denying sociopaths who think their shits dont stink. And that was just for starters!
I’m waiting for someone in the sexual marketplace camp to come up with buying and trading sexual marketplace value futures. Seriously, if it is a marketplace with actual quantitative values, they are missing the boat.
==========
And I am gobsmacked. 45th comment and no MRAsshole has shown up to defend the Menz!
@ Lofty
“The idea that you get to enjoy consensual sex by earning it never enters their silly heads. Too hard by far.”
Earning it? Really?
Great! Now I have to listen to Dark Side of the Moon again. (It’s the English way.)
Daz #32
I surmise he’s longing for the days when a Viking raiding party would rape and pillage entire villages. However, it’s hard to enjoy your spoils if the defending villagers managed to shove a pitchfork into your abdomen. I have a feeling that even the most bloodthirsty Viking would gladly give up his raids if he could be assured of a regular paycheck and a home with central heating. After all, the number of Viking raids in the third millennium are down markedly compared to the second.
Is it weird that I looked at their quiz, thought about all those parameters, and wondered… did they check for interactions?
For example, do they consider a pleasant plumpness, in BMI terms, positive or neutral in a fifteen-year-old underage girl they consider to be part of their “sexual market”, while considering it strictly a negative in the devalued women who are of legal and ethical age for sexual partnership?
Chie Satonaka @ #38: It’s pretty clear how these guys would have the idea that women don’t actually enjoy sex or the company of men, I mean they’re basing this on the experiences they have of being horrendous in the sack and roughly as good of company outside of it as a uncleaned litter box.
There’s a deep irony in this group’s choice of moniker. “thumos” is a term straight out of Homeric Greek, denoting a deep, passionate, heroic outpouring of emotion. Usually anger. I’m guessing these guys wish to style themselves after the theme-park version of Greek heroes – often a go-to choice for Europeans and Americans wishing to conjure an image of the glorious golden age of uncomplicated masculine manly manhood.
Except the Greek heroic tradition was never about that. It was about pointing out the problems with that. It was about exploring how that ideal of manly endeavour was inadequate in real life. Achilles’ thumos was what nearly lost the Greeks their war and got both Patroclus and himself killed. A hero filled with unbounded rage and temper was not someone who could live in civil society – he was glorious, yes, but he was hollow. He was mighty, but he was flawed and ultimately alone. He had no place in the world of men. As Aristotle put it, such a man was not a man at all – he was a beast, or a god. Homer’s Iliad shows us swaggering, thumos-filled Achilles as a warning, not as someone to emulate. Noble, family-minded, civic-minded Hector is the real hero of the Iliad, in modern terms. And Achilles himself is painfully aware of this – he knows that his path is a lonely and futile one, and that his immortal glories will ring false, but it’s the life he chose and he couldn’t back out even if he wanted to. In Odyssey 11, when Odysseus visits the shade of Achilles in Hades, it tells Odysseus straight up that such a life was not worth it in the slightest.
Slightly later, Plato conceived of thumos as a wild black horse, alongside the equally wild white horse eros (desire), both of which needed to be controlled by logos (reason), their charioteer. Thumos was absolutely not something to revel in – it was dangerous, and needed a steady rein. To Plato a group styling themselves as ardent devotees of thumos would be pitifully inadequate as men, because men have a rational faculty and should know better. Throughout archaic, classical and Hellenistic Greek thought, thumos is consistently presented as something to be wary of and keep a lid on – useful only when deployed with care and circumspection.
Which is a rather nice illustration of how cultural constructions of masculinity change over time, as well as how idiots on the internet ought to do a little research into the pretentious-sounding terms they choose to identify themselves with.
theoreticalgrrrl
Yes but not in a monetary sense. There’s compassion, mutual trust, humour, respect, that you need to display before “earning” sex as part of a shared experience between equals. Because trust is not to be given freely.
I know you didn’t mean in the monetary sense.
More like a pat on the head for being a good boy?
‘Earn it’ sounds gross to me, sorry. I don’t give sex as a reward, it’s a mutual pleasure thing.
Take this article to the Middle East, Russia, China, Japan, or any European or American city before 1960, and you will find few who disagree with this analysis. Either they are all deluded, dear twenty-first century American liberals, or you are.
This… argument is underqualified as a naturalistic fallacy. It needs something about evolution and shorter index fingers that were obviously naturally selected for the proper application of pimp slaps. Or a treatise on how small penises have evolved in order to lower the market value of “doing anal”. Men who got anal were more likely to procreate a lot… for some reason. Therefore smaller penises exist in more “evolved” humans.
Perhaps Nature, in her infinitely fictitious wisdom, is engaged in “evolving” the MRAs to like underage girls in order to reduce MRA fecundity.
So to protest the unmasculine manginas they model themselves after publicly sobbing and crying bisexuals?
This is undeniably so. Cat turd purchasing has never been higher!
Chie Satonaka wrote:
I don’t know if you realize how widespread this idea really is. The nonsense that “Good Girls aren’t interested in sex” isn’t something that is absorbed only by women. Boys are also exposed to this message, along with its corollary that “men/boys think about nothing but sex”. Connect these two together, and it’s not hard to come up with the idea that women only have sex to get something else, and that men have to trick women into having sex if they have little of economic value. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that immense harm has come from the propagation of these two ideas.
theoreticalgrrl,
I think you have a stronger sense of the word “earn” as “earn money” than Lofty, who, if I interpret correctly, is using it in the sense “earn trust”.
Either way, I understand Lofty as saying that sex is not an entitlement.
ck @56:
When I was in high school (early 1980s), the working definition of a slut was a girl who actually enjoyed any sexual act beyond kissing. Additionally, any girl who had sexual intercourse was also a de facto slut. Or even if people ‘knew’ she had fucked. So, yeah, very common.
Giliell has already touched on it, but if only our ancestors could have lived not just much freer of sickness, but of pain (just teeth again!), as we do.
So do I. I try to earn sex, just as I try to earn companionship and friendship in general: I make efforts to be a good person, fun to be with, patient, nice, healthy in the case of sex, ready to admit rejection with grace… To use an old-fashioned word, I court my partner(s), and that takes some work (very rewarding in itself, true).
cartomancer @ 51
Yes and thank you Carto. I was trying to formulate the sentiment, the Hellene did not hold the uncontrolled in high regard. “They drank their wine un-watered” was the disdain of those un-civilized, who were not able to meter themselves.
Trivially, superficially true: however, vendors invariably lower the prices on goods which turn out to be faulty, damaged, ineffectual or worthless in order to divest themsevles of potential liabilities. In cases such as these, people will obviously buy less, whether they became of aware of the faulty nature of the goods or because some people simply become less interested in things once their price (and therefore exclusivity and perceived value) decreases.
There are about as many absolutes in economics as there are in human relationships – these Austrian Thumotics are compounding two blunders into one and calling it “scientific” – then having the unmitigated gall to compare PZ to a creationist (more or less the ultimate in 21st century scientific denialism).
WRTto cartomancer’s brilliant Homeric post at 51: exactly and spot-on. And this warning to restrain your alpha-manly passion with reason doesn’t end with the Iliad, either: it could be argued Odysseus’ entire ordeal following the sacking of Troy is brought about by him surrending to his hubris and pride and raw emotion, failing to employ his reason, failing to properly acknowledge the favour of Poseidon of the wine-dark sea and bringing upon himself divine wrath. Only through tempering his pride and learning restraint and humility and patience (with the repeated assistance and counsel of wise Athena!) does Odysseus infiltrate his home and free his family from the freeloading creeps therein.
>”How do these people fail to recognize that they have no legitimate objective evidence backing up their claims…”
Dunning-Kruger strikes again!
Aren’t they arguing that women in their 20’s and men in their 30’s are at peak dating value and therefore more desirable? Would this not mean that people are “buying” more of the “good” when the price is at its highest?
Is it not the demand that drives the price increase? They don’t understand science. They don’t understand the basics of data collection. They don’t understand empiricism as a fundamental concept. They clearly don’t understand economics, though it seems a little much to describe something so simple as “supply and demand” as economics, and they’re assholes. I fail to see what they offer the world that isn’t already provided by reruns of Beavis and Butthead.
I re-read what I wrote, and I fear I may have come off as more aggressive than I wanted and a little mansplaininglyish (sorry about that). I was simply trying to make it clear that it’s not only MRAs that come to these ridiculous conclusions about men and women.
… “pride in themselves, and their lust for excellence in all facets of their lives”.
I must say he is most excellent at being wrong. Which makes his pride in being right laughable. Which makes his manhood a very bad joke.
Anyone can be wrong but being so spectacularly and hilariously wrong takes some serious effort and commitment.
this, by the way, is an admission to being deliberately non-empirical. The Austrian School uses deductive logic and a priori assumptions to derive its economic theories; statistics and mathematical models are considered unreliable and testability nearly impossible.
So it’s not so much that they don’t realize that they have no evidence for their BS; it’s that in their worldview, no such thing is necessary, because they believe their ideas about human nature to be axiomatically true.
I just flashed on those old Larry Flynt ads: “What kind of man reads Hustler?”
Reply: “Austrian sexual marketplace economists”
I always thought the answer to that was “The kind of man that doesn’t get a lot of real sex–you know, with another real person.”
Sorry to disappoint you, Sparky. I’m a modern American women, and I’m just pointing and laughing.
@daisydeadhead/68 & otrame/69:
To the extent that I look at porn, I’m much more likely to do so while in a relationship that is sexually active. Dunno. Maybe that’s a gendered thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s more universal to feel more sexual when one is getting more sex.
It must be frustrating when 95% of women refuse to find your middle-aged ass attractive, no matter how angrily you insist that they’re supposed to. It’s like 95% of women have no respect for science.
It’s got to be different in Japan, though. They probably get really hot for horrible old men over there.
@shaenongarrity
just because I’m feeling cynical (thank you chas)
Sigh.
Not just a band name, a heavy-metal hair band name, deffo.
You will be able to tell that the band is Austrian by their fastidiously manicured facial hair. The rest of their costume will be cuirass, spandex, helmet and greaves affixed to hessian boots.
I’ve always liked you, tigtog, and #74 is a good example why.
Note how these entire two paragraphs are simply his opinion, but he confidently states them as if they were undisputed fact. How on Earth could he possibly know what the opinions of his ancestors would be?
Jadehawk wrote:
So that’s how the term became synonymous with glibertarians and randroids…
I find it sad that such men obviously absolutely hate and fear women so much but still want to have sex with them. What sad little lives they must lead. No idea how to even talk to a woman as a human being so your pick-up chances are reduced to her being drunk or underage.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA
Frog @ #15,
They fear agency, experience and adult sexuality. They feel that sex is something they are owed, being sexy is women’s work and pleasing women sexually is impossible. That’s what all the fear of “sluts” who are always looking to trade up is about. They’re two hump chumps with horrible personalities who don’t seem to have their grooming together and they’ve chalked all of that up to how super “manly” they are. The creepiest reason for their obsession with virginal young girls is that their entitlement and misogyny combine to make for someone who’s sexual expression is bound to be abusive. They don’t like women. That’s why consent isn’t sexy to them. They like the power differential to be skewed dramatically to the point that they prefer statutory rape / abuse of a minor to consensual sex with an experienced, enthusiastic lover. As obsessed with machismo as they are, while being terrified of not being “aphla” enough I’d bet they’d feel inadequate in bed with another adult. So, yeah, there are all sorts of reasons these men desire sex with adolescents, none of which have to do with them being normal men with healthy sex lives.
Meanwhile, every time they refer to other men as “manginas”, just remember that they are naming those men for the thing they think everyone has access to but them. They’re bitter. They are angry at women for not liking them and they are angry with men that women do like.
I think the only proper response to this is “My name is Dr PZMyers! I didn’t spend 8 years in Evil Evolutionary Creationist Denial School to be called Mister.”
PS – My manly side wants to drag this guy out into a parking lot and curb stomp him for this line.
“The typical 21st century western male is not a man. He is a limp-wristed mangina, a coward, a collaborator and a fool.”
My 21st century western civilized side wants to record it for youtube, so all of you at home can enjoy the ass whupping he so richly deserves.
loreo @42 and Chie @43
This puts together something for me.
They cling to media depictions and tropes as their “proof” that the world is backwards and patriarchal, because media, especially film and television is more likely to show the type of world they want to cling to (women are man obsessed and secretly hate working, men are sexy as fat old schlubs, women are always visiting supermodels or “ugly” as professional young actress looking people, there are nearly no blacks, there are nearly no gays, everyone is middle class, and the feminist always gets her comeupance).
But at the same time they recognize the fantasy is not reality and can actually be harmful in its inaccuracy when they whine about the dumb fat dad trope that they are simultaneously trying to use to prove that this sort of dynamic is some natural law.
Which basically gets to the core of these fuckers.
They want all the rewards of living in a patriarchal society (women kept down and scared, not having to pay attention to other people), but none of the side effects (not having to strain against toxic masculinity). Unaware that the two stem from the same thing and are even necessary for certain privileges they enjoy to remain unequal in their favor.
@Ingdigo Jump #55:
Are you suggesting that MRAs lack knowledge, understanding and insight? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!
Continuing #80
The fear of inadequacy is also what I think makes these guys long for a world of subservient, frightened women that they don’t have to compete with in the workplace. That’s why they want half the world’s population to be denied education.That’s why these sexists are also often racists. They need to think of themselves as innately special because they aren’t all that special by merit. If the world is not rocked by their awesome ability to be white, straight, men then the world must be conspiring against them. I guess that’s what happens when motivated reasoning and privilege meet.
“This is a fundamental truth about human opinion, as long as we exclude the opinion of most people”. Hey, geniuses, if almost all women and most men disagree with your fucking chart, maybe it’s not accurate at all in assessing what people value.
They keep reminding me more and more of Randroids.
Like Randoids, they are presuppositional idjits without a shred of third party evidence. And their OPINION, like that of their buddies, isn’t and never will be EVIDENCE for rational/evidential arguments..
I was thinking on the lines of that Randroids want the benefits of living in organized society without paying for any of it.
Sure. On the internet, the best place for true barbarian-style hunters & warriors to live their dreams. But then, it really is some kind of jungle.
PZ’s post gave me the impression that we deal with the usual superrational atheist MRA BS here. However, after reading this:
http://www.thumotic.com/2013/09/27/the-coming-suicide-epidemic/
the picture changes drastically.
“He is an embarrassment to the thousands of generations of his ancestors who lived lives of struggle and sacrifice, just so that he can sit on his arse and wait out death in a perpetual state of quiet desperation.”
This could be read as an economic success – modern day men don’t have to toil as much, have greater choice in terms of goods and services that can be consumed…