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?