Here’s how the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) was founded.

When the Chagres River was dammed in 1913, water rose to engulf 164 square miles of tropical rainforest, creating Gatun Lake and many small islands peeking above the surface. Naturalists were drawn to Barro Colorado Island, but for decades women were barred from staying overnight. David Fairchild, one of the island’s founding figures, advocated for the prohibition of women, writing in a 1924 letter that the island should remain a place “where real research men can find quiet, keen intellectual stimulation, freedom from any outside distraction.”

Right. I’ve been to places like that, where they want you to think it’s all lofty high-minded serious work, but that’s not what you get when you exclude women. You get a frat house. It’s farting, crude jokes, and lots of drinking, which is excused because everyone is “working hard” during the day…which never made sense to me, because when I’ve been working hard, I want to retire to my room, maybe read a book for a while, and get a good night’s sleep. That’s how you recover from hard work. But then, after you’ve built a culture of masculine privilege for a few decades, you might succumb to pressure to allow women to join in the research, but you’ll do it your own way. The established men get to vet all applicants and decide who they’ll let in, and hell no, they aren’t going to change the culture. Instead, these select women will be expected to join in the hard-drinking frat boy culture, and then they get to add rape and sexual harassment to the party.

I could have predicted it. That’s exactly how the STRI evolved, and wow, is it ugly.

Many researchers who set foot on the island consider the opportunity a dream. But 16 women scientists interviewed for this story described a pattern of sexual misconduct by high-ranking men at the institute, one of whom acknowledged his inappropriate behavior to BuzzFeed News. The women said that struggling to fend off the sexual demands of scientists with the power to determine a young researcher’s career trajectory left them feeling traumatized and isolated.

Seven of the scientists said they have stopped visiting the institute or collaborating with its staff on account of the unprofessional behavior they said they experienced or witnessed there, and two have left academia altogether — a #MeToo brain drain that has cost science an incalculable toll of lost research.

“I was spending more and more time figuring out how to navigate the culture there,” said Nina Wurzburger, an associate professor at the University of Georgia who worked at STRI from 2008 to 2012 but said she no longer pursues major research projects there because of the pervasive discrimination and sexual harassment.

Internal emails and complaints reviewed by BuzzFeed News, as well as interviews with 25 scientists, show that STRI leaders for years issued little more than verbal warnings or social restrictions to employees accused of sexual misconduct while allowing them to continue interacting with newly arrived young researchers. The institute eventually took additional disciplinary action against two of the accused scientists in 2019 and 2020. A third scientist, named in this story, continues to work at STRI.

Two scientists were disciplined out of 1200. I’m not exactly razzle-dazzled by their ‘vigorous’ response.

Here’s what needs to be done: presumably, since they’re able to say there are “leaders” at this organization, they have a chart of the hierarchy. Lop off the top of the chart. All those men get sent back to their home institutions, banned from working at STRI, or put back on the job market. They will no doubt claim to be respected, famous scientists who add prestige to the institution…but that just means they should have no trouble landing positions elsewhere. Appoint a woman to run the show. Put in place a new hiring committee that is at least half women. Rebuild the personnel from new applicants.

Yeah, it sounds draconian, but it’s what needs to be done. The worst solution (but probably the one the Smithsonian will implement) is to keep all the same people in charge, let the culture persist, and send them memos that go “tut-tut”, while continuing to bring in a few women, a handful at a time, to be sacrificial lambs to the frat house meat-grinder. This is a case where they need to burn it to the ground, metaphorically, to clear out the sex pests.

Not literally, of course. Look at the place! It’s beautiful!

Think of all the spiders living on that tropical island…

But then you read about how the assholes mismanaged it (ALL the trigger warnings on that article), and you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it. It’s not the spiders, it’s the venomous creeps who work inside it.

Scott Yenor is a professor who gave speech at a National Conservatism conference that said the quiet parts out loud. Women don’t belong in engineering or medical careers, we have to have strong manly leadership to convince them to stay home and have babies. Our independent women are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be, don’t you know — the significant word in there might be our. Also, women are at their peak fertility in their late teens and early 20s, and to be a great nation, they must be quickly impregnated. And here I thought Dr Strangelove was satire!

…a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years.

That’s this guy.

Our independent women are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such women gain their meaning through their seeming participation in the global project. https://t.co/fm97NdmeB1

— Scott Yenor (@scottyenor) November 24, 2021

Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.

Fortunately, Yenor is not a professor of engineering, medicine, or law. He’s a professor of political science, a field that seems to have much lower standards. Or at least, lower standards at schools in Idaho.

One of the worst people on the right is Nick Fuentes, a bizarre 23 year old racist and misogynist who inexplicably has a large following. Here he is in a video with a Blaze TV talking head in which he makes an amazing admission.

…I think any man who is observant enough and honestly, we could go back to great geniuses, we could go back to people who have been in relationships, like a perfect example is the pick-up artists. Have you ever noticed that pick-up artists who have the most relationships with women and the most sex what they say is that with women it’s the same bag of tricks to seduce a woman or whatever. And I think that kind of tells you something about the nature of women, you go from woman to woman and it’s the same kind of like little tricks little things you can say, whatever, to kind of hack them, I think that kind of says it all about their nature. So, you know…

Interviewer: What does it say about our nature, Nick?

Well, it says that they are not fully rational. I don’t believe that, like men, they possess a certain full rationality…a male has a real impersonal sense of rationality and reason. I think that a female sense is far more personal, and that derives from the fact that women are made to bear children.

He’s a horrible little man, and that he thinks pick-up artists are examples of great geniuses who have been in “relationships” (I don’t he knows what the word means) tells me a lot about him. But that’s not the unsurprising admission. That would be this response:

Interviewer: have you ever been in a relationship with a woman?

No.

I guess he’s aspiring to be the king of the incels.