In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

We Hunted The Mammoth to Feed You

David Futrelle

Note: Portions of this post appeared, in a rather different and far more crudely sarcastic form, on Man Boobz.

One of the recurring complaints on Men’s Rights and MGTOW (“Men Going Their Own Way”) websites is that the women of today are insufficiently grateful for all the wonderful things men have done for them over the centuries: men, the argument goes, created civilization while women were sitting on their asses at home, desultorily watching the kids and eating bon bons — or whatever the equivalent of bon bons were in 400 B.C. (Never mind all the stuff men did TO women as well, denying them education and the right to own property, and so on and so on and so on. Or that agriculture, pretty much the bedrock of civilization, was almost certainly invented by women.) The “men did everything good that you now take for granted” argument is invariably greeted with “huzzahs” of assent from the assembled dudes whenever it’s set forth on many MRA and MGTOW message boards.

My favorite example of this loopy argument comes from a fellow calling himself TheGrendler, who garnered dozens of upvotes in the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit for a barely coherent stream-of-consciousness rant suggesting that women are ungrateful wretches because, well, they don’t mine coal, and didn’t invent air conditioning or hunt mammoths. Of course, no one posting in the Men’s Rights subreddit has done any of those things either, but apparently everyone with a penis gets automatic credit for them. (The post has since been deleted, probably by the author himself, but if you click here you can see that the comments that most bluntly criticized its vapid illogic garnered mucho downvotes.)

Without further ado, here it is, in all of its typo-filled, punctuation-challenged glory:

We men built a nice safe world for you all the the coal-mines of death, roads, railroads, bridges and tall office buildings. Its $1,000,000 spent per death of a man on a large dangerous project on average now you can just 9-5 it and call it a day in air-conditioned and heated safety. Forget about the wars we died in and the sacrifices made just ignore history or is it now hersorty? You are accruing the benefits without ever having to pay the price you still don’t have to sign up for the draft and who will protect you? The Sex and the City girls will fight off the North Koreans with their Manolo Blahniks?

Men gave you this modern world now you take it for granted we hunted the mammoth to feed you we died in burning buildings and were gassed in the trenches but that was just for fun right?

How quick and conveniently you forget who made this possible.

We gave you Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy not to mention countless others, Jonas Salk saved half the world from death and you just piss on it all.

Shame on you,

You hedonistic, narcissistic, sociopath metastasizing cancer.

Quite a performance there, big fella!

You might be interested to hear that one of TheGrendler’s remarks – “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” – has become such a popular catchphrase amongst readers of my blog that we turned it into a t-shirt. Which you can buy. For reals.

82 thoughts on We Hunted The Mammoth to Feed You

  3. My first thought was Ada Lovelace, mathematician and the mother of computer programming using Charles’ Babbage’s ideas for hardware, and based on the looms used to weave textiles. Because, well, no computer programming, no computers and no internet. And the world would look quite different. Not to mention that these assholes wouldn’t be able to post on message boards ranting about women.

    Watson and Crick got the DNA helical structure from Franklin’s X-ray crystallography, and Meitner did the theory side of the discovery of nuclear fission (from several countries away, thanks to the Holocaust) while Hahn did the experimentation.

    (Computers and DNA and nuclear power are a team effort so women shouldn’t take credit for them? Well, then, same to you. Hard to show that only men built modern civilization unless you are willfully blind to how much gets overlooked as ‘woman’s work’.)

  4. Not to piss on his parade, but women can be coal miners, construction workers, military officers, and firefighters, too…

  6. There is a long and depressingly well written screed on this in Stephen King’s The Stand. It convinced me that I should feel vaguely grateful/indebted to men for many a year.

    In any case–the fact that the system has forced men into terrible, often lethal, hard labor as well doesn’t mea that women were sitting at home knitting meanwhiles. Nonetheless, this irks me all the more for the fact that we *should* recognize some of these issues (war, coal mining) for their violent effect on certain classes and kinds of human bodies.

  7. Not to mention, that Lynn Conway designed VLSI (very large scale integration) chips and developed the technology needed to manufacture them. So when do the mammoth men show some appreciation to the woman that allowed them to join the 101st Manly-Man Keyboard Brigade in the first place?

    Owate. They’re too busy swinging their tusks pricks around to take any time out for that.

  8. Men didn’t completely build Civilazation though…..Women did contribute through hunting and gathering and in societys that weren’t completely misogynistic like ancient Egypt and even Sparta women did a lot of contributions whether it was thorugh defending the land, writing, agriculture, through raising the next generation and teaching….There were even female Shamens…Anyone that says men did EVERTHING is absolutly ignorant….now in ancient Athens men did most of everything that would be considered worthwhile…they were also very misogynistic and only let certain women have freedom….

  9. Also women have achieved greatness despite the adage that the reason there are no female geniuses for the same reason there are no female Jack the Ripper…There are many women Geniuses in supposed male fields…From MArie Curie and her daughter Isabelle to Elizabeth Blackwell and Ada Lovelace…….Just because thier achivements are pushed aside or that they are considered honorary men or some shit like that(yes I have heard this) Doesn’t mean they weren’t remarkable women…and there are thousands more too

  10. Coincidentally @Deb Sens, I’ve recently seen Marie Curie as the example of ‘why women shouldn’t rule’. My Alma Mater, University of Waterloo, is currently dealing with a person or people distributing hate speech against women. It started during the federation of students’ election campaign. The perpetrator(s) covered the female candidates’ posters with a poster “titled, ‘The truth,’ and read, ‘The brightest woman this Earth ever created was Marie Curie, the mother of the nuclear bomb. You tell me if the plan of women leading men is still a good idea.'” They’ve also been getting racist in nature. Full details: http://cupwire.ca/articles/44508

    There’s more, but that’s the stuff that jumped out at me. Especially the Marie Curie thing; I’ve admired her for as long as I can remember since I grew up with a story book about here from a series about historic greats (Value Tales – http://www.amazon.com/Value-Learning-Story-Marie-Curie/dp/091639218X )

  11. Actually, in traditional foraging cultures (excluding cultures like the Inuit and others that live in extreme climates) 80% of the food is attributed to the gathering done by women, while the other 20% came from the hunting done by men. So, the saying should be “we picked the berries to feed you.”

  12. First – I totally think you used the word “wretch” because that loser MRA did it in your comments the other day. I wanted to laugh about it, but something like 60 comments had transpired and the moment had past. Thus, lol @ wretch. It makes me happy.

    Second – my father actually worked in a coal mine. He doesn’t have a giant chip on his shoulder. (…Mangina, perhaps? Oh, daddy). My grandparents were deeply entrenched in WWII Poland – but the most badass person in my family from that generation? A great aunt who told a Nazi to fuck off. (He apparently reached for his gun and realized he left it in the truck – she ran out the back because, again, she’s a fucking badass). True story – I believe she was a woman.

    @David, I’m assuming right now but can you clarify for me as I don’t want to investigate myself? Do MRAs have shockingly narrow ideas of gender? I don’t think I’ve seen anything quoted on your site that acknowledges things outside of the binary.

  13. Women invented beer. That levels the scales a lot for me.

    And I’m not being flip about this. All this mammoth-hunting is pointless unless someone is avaliable to process the carcass, and that would probably not be the exhausted and perhaps injured hunters. The relationship was symbiotic.

    Helen: Thing is, women did mine, http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/coalMine.html

    …and as your source says: “Women and children at first worked alongside men in the coal mines, although there were differences in jobs they did.” So we’re back to the same old “same industry, different jobs/work” again.

    And that source goes on to say ” Illustrations like these were used to solicit outrage against the use of women and children in mine work. ” No mention of any other outrage. Plus ca change………

    But your point stands – there were women involved in some way in all that kind of work, although not in the physically heaviest end of it. the real difenrence was who was not at all involved in it; the real difference was class and not gender.

  14. ((suggesting that women are ungrateful wretches because, well, they don’t mine coal, and didn’t invent air conditioning or hunt mammoths. ))

    Let’s look at those objectively, shall we? Coal pollutes the air and causes respiratory diseases, while coal mining destroys the natural environment. Air conditioning is nice but environmentally harmful. And mammoths were hunted to extinction. Yes, I really am a little ungrateful for those things. With good reason.

    And I’ll have a lot more patience with a site being called ManBoobz when men start getting backaches from them. 🙂

  15. <blockquote cite="@chava
    There is a long and depressingly well written screed on this in Stephen King’s The Stand. It convinced me that I should feel vaguely grateful/indebted to men for many a year.>

    What?! Whereabouts? This makes me sad – loved that book the first time I read it, clearly not carefully enough!

    And on topic… Beyond the ‘but you’re factually inaccurate or at least selective to the point of false’ already explored in other comments, I’m really struggling to find a response that isn’t bafflement.

  16. OrangeBlossom…I heard about that…did they ever catch the person or people that were posting those awful posters? That really is slander…..Marie Curie saved many lived by developing her radiation research…she never atteneded for her work to be weaponized….She in fact died 10 years before the Manhatten Project even existed……
    And yes beer and wine were most likely invented by women, and women did do most of the gathering which was the food resources for most people…..yet a lot of people celabrate the hunting part and that only*sigh*

  17. Kali: Actually, in traditional foraging cultures (excluding cultures like the Inuit and others that live in extreme climates) 80% of the food is attributed to the gathering done by women, while the other 20% came from the hunting done by men. So, the saying should be “we picked the berries to feed you.”

    Two things – “foraging cultures” vary/ied so widely, particularly depending on the biome they lived in, that it’s useless to generalize very much. For that matter the same goes for “food”. A diet consists of a balance of protein and all the other things we need, so 80% / 20% is reductionist to the point of uselessness.

    The other thing is very often food gathering was not strictly gendered. Take the Pacific Northwest Coast for example. slamon was the basis of the diet, with plant foods filling out the rest to balance it. The men caught the salmon during the runs. But a salmon on the beach is not food yet. It has to be cleaned and filleted. Guess who did that work. And for all the fish you aren’t going to eat right then, and that was most of it, it had to be hung up. Guess who did that work. On wooden racks. Guess who built the racks. And the stored in wooden containers. Guess who felled the trees for the wood. Etc. So while specific tasks were gendered, the whole food production cycle was not.

    California is another example. Woemn gathered grass seed and that was a major compnent of the diet. But it would all go to waste unless it was stored, in granaries the men built. But it was all carried in baskets that women made, and cooked in baskets women made.

    And this is not peculiar to foraging economies. Slaughtering a pig involves a lot of time-sensitive jobs that demanded every available hand, male and female, including the job of winching the carcass up in the first place. And it implies the man’s work of fencing to keep the pig around and building the smokehouse, and the woman’s work of feeding the thing for however long. It’s pretty hard to do the percentages on a slab of bacon after all that.

  18. Even if we look at the greek society, in which women were confined to their houses while the men went to politics and statue making and “democracy” inventing and all that stuff, we cannot forget that the notion of economy – taking care of the property, handling servants, knowin when to pland, how to plant, etc. – it was all decided by women, as it was considered to be domestic work.

    So hey, women were the pioneer economists – but as it was not valued at that time, there was no “economic science” that we study. (Because, seriously – how do you think all those men ate, and had money to buy their togas or mantain their estate if they were philosophing the whole day?)

    So yeah, the problem with women is not that they didn`t do anything – is just that our story wasn`t told.

  19. “My first thought was Ada Lovelace, mathematician and the mother of computer programming using Charles’ Babbage’s ideas for hardware, and based on the looms used to weave textiles. Because, well, no computer programming, no computers and no internet. And the world would look quite different. Not to mention that these assholes wouldn’t be able to post on message boards ranting about women.”

    Ada is one of those rewrites of history from womens studies isnt it? Here is an article from Salon debunking it….
    http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/03/16feature.html

  20. Sorry, but you don’t get to complain about having to do all the work *when you wouldn’t let women help you get it done.*

    Also, this: ” Of course, no one posting in the Men’s Rights subreddit has done any of those things either, but apparently everyone with a penis gets automatic credit for them.”

  21. Eoghan, you’re attacking a straw man. The article you just cited as a “debunking” merely casts doubt on whether Ada Lovelace deserves the mantle of “first computer programmer,” not whether she made huge intellectual contributions to a major precursor to the modern computer.

    The Salon article shows Becca was right. Lovelace wrote eloquently about the parallels between weaving and programming:

    Furthermore, Toole says, Ada’s contributions went beyond the merely quantifiable, into the metaphorical. Ada had as keen a flair for turning a phrase as she had a talent for mathematics. In the “Notes” she speaks of the Analytical Engine weaving “algebraic patterns just as a Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” Her “Notes” also predict that, given the right algorithms, calculating engines might compose music and create graphics. She even presaged Alan Turing and the “garbage-in, garbage out” effect, saying, “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform — it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”

    If Charles Babbage is the father of the computer, Ada Lovelace is indeed its mother.

  22. Hmm, that “hard work” he talks about were done by men that were oppressed by other men. Nothing really to be proud of, actually.

    That and he fails to realize that men don’t want women fighting in their Manolos because that would threaten their own identities as men. That’s the whole problem.

  23. Wait…so we’re supposed to be grateful to the men today because of…work they didn’t do? Work that some other guy did? Quoth Janet Jackson, what have you done for me lately, Grendler, while I was off finding a cure for cancer?

  25. To quote my mother whenever she needs to jokingly nag me into doing something: “I gave birth to you and fed you and clothed you, you know. It wasn’t easy. The least you could do is [bring home mammothburgers]”

  26. Well that was a bit of a fail, I was trying to quote the bit about polio in your original blog… *sigh*

  27. Until recently (and still today in some countries) women were poorly educated and banned from many jobs, as well as married off young and often dying in childbirth, which is why they had a lower chance of being great inventors, mathematicians, etc. Google “what if shakespeare had had a sister” sometime.

  28. Sounds like he’s clueless about history. Throughout history and in different cultures women had worked along side men, hunting and gathering is one example.

    Also let’s not forget the women who worked in the textile factories during the Industrial Revolution, and let’s not forget how women made enormous contributions during WW2 where women built the weapons, tanks, jets etc.

  29. Perhaps male people hunted the mammoth to feed their familial group. Then again, perhaps women cultivated the first strains of rice. In the long run which was more critical to the development of civilization?

  31. That paragraph in Stephen King’s The Stand (spoken by Frannie, as I recall) which he has the character say should be hung “in needlepoint” (isn’t he cute?) in the offices of Ms. Magazine, is what he calls –or I suppose Frannie, really, calls — the “Woman’s Credo” : it says we should thank “man” for railroads, and for inventing the automobile, and for killing the “red Indian” and for hospitals, police, and schools, and for freeing women from slavery. Now that women aren’t slaves anymore, thanks to “man,” she would like to vote and control her own destiny, if “man” would just kindly step aside.

    Frannie, of course, sees how silly this feminist pov is.

    This is when I began to see what a tool Stephen King was.

  32. When I read those MRA paragraphs that basically amount to “IlovemenIlovemenIlovemenIlovemenIlovemenIlovemen” I wonder how it is that some straight men love other men WAY more than any gay man every has.

  33. Sure, men brought home mammoths, but when I look at traditional Western gendered female roles, they’re the ones that allow the men to go out and do anything: women cook, clean, make clothes, and look after the next generation. It’s work that kept them so busy that even when women had the theoretical ability to get jobs or educations, they often couldn’t; and if men had not had a giant underclass of non-persons to do all the menial work for them, they could not have made the advancements they did. And yet MRAs call women leeches, because clearly the work expected of women for centuries was entirely worthless, and contributed nothing to society.

  34. oh boy. i would really love to see that post a la rice pirate’s dot dot dot. it would be epic.

    also, the final sentence rather makes it sound as though the ‘You’, which i assume is women, somehow metastasises sociopaths. or metastasies in sociopaths? hard to tell.

    MRAs, commas are your friends! they only want to love you!

    (meanwhile, can we really do that? because no one told me. COOL.)

  35. This is a really crazy argument. Way to wipe away all individualism and morph humanity into a simplistic binary of “man” and “woman”, such that each one is a singular entity stretching all the way back in time, standing independently, with every good and bad thing ever committed by any man or woman attributed to this singular, timeless and unitary entity. The Garden is Eden is much more plausible than that.

    When in reality, men and womens’ codependence is so basic and essential to the continuation of the human species that to say that men have done things for women by building civilization and women have not contributed is like the color green saying to the color red that the existence of the color yellow is solely due to itself and that red has contributed nothing. Without women, there would be no such thing as homo sapiens, let alone mammoth hunting, Tolstoy or railroads, or, heaven’s sake, MRA’s. Just as without men there would be no women. This is why I cannot take seriously talk about the “battle of the sexes”. There is no “battle of the sexes”, there is only culture and social justice, and what you want society to look like.

  36. First of all, welcome Eoghan, a regular MRA practitioner on ManBoobz. We wondered when your lot would start filtering in!

    I am not sure you’ve actually read the article you’re using to try to belittle Ada’s involvement in creating computers. In fact, reading the article paints her in quite a good light for being a key contributor in the field of computing, even if Hollywood decided to dramatize her story and turn her into the inventor of computers. To quote the end of the article:

    Yes, it is always a fun exercise to nitpick and cast doubt that one person invented the internet, you fail to realize that it doesn’t invalidate the point that women have made significant contributions to this world.

    It’s like saying “this one chicken is brown instead of white therefore saying that MANY CHICKENS ARE WHITE is wrong.” Hate to tell you, there are white and brown chickens out there, just like there are many significant contributions that have been made to being human both by men and women.

    Following Eoghan’s logic: Albert Einstein collaborated with people far more than culture seems to think. I guess that must mean that no german physicists ever made revolutionary contributions to the field of physics. See how silly that argument is? All you’ve done is replace Albert Einstein with Ada Lovelace, and german physicists with women.

  37. Tony, though I am repeating something that has been said on this blog many times before, “crazy” is not a legitimate critique of someone’s argument. People with mental illnesses are entirely capable of making sound arguments informed by our experiences of madness. “Incoherent” or “nonsensical” would be substantially more appropriate words to use in this context.

  38. Sorry for the double post… on the point about war, first let me preface by stating that it is asserted by academics that more girls have disproportionately died because of the traditional undervaluation of females in Asia in the past 50 years alone than in all the wars of the 20th century combined.

    However, if you’re against war, I am with you 100%. I’ll use this space to plug one of my favorite artistic critiques of trench warfare and the politics behind it, Paths of Glory (there is only 1 woman in that movie, but it is a significant appearance. I’ll leave it to the viewer to guess what it says Kubrick thought about what women meant to those soldiers). Let’s remember though, while men died in wars, the people who started those wars were also men who happened to be extremely steeped in the sacred values of the patriarchy/kyriarchy, including the part about oppressing other men.

  39. Li:
    Tony, though I am repeating something that has been said on this blog many times before, “crazy” is not a legitimate critique of someone’s argument. People with mental illnesses are entirely capable of making sound arguments informed by our experiences of madness. “Incoherent” or “nonsensical” would be substantially more appropriate words to use in this context.

    Good point, thank you.

  40. When I read this whole “Men did everything, so Bow Down™!” horseshit, I’m strongly reminded of this comic:

    http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif

    How exactly would men even have the time to create the universe in order to have apple pie, if it weren’t for women doing all the slog work?  Today’s mental image: Einstein changing a diaper whilst doing research.

  41. So. Um. Those wars that were started by women that women needed men to protect them from. When did they happen?

    Is there somebody women need men to protect them from, other than other men?

  42. That dot dot dot thing is great.

    Also, that Atlas Shrugged cartoon. MRAs and MGTOWers, well, a lot of them, are obsessed with that whole shrugging idea — forgetting, evidently, that it was thought up by a woman — and have convinced themselves that if they take their ball and go home the whole world will collapse and THEN those evil ladies will see what’s what!

  43. Kali:
    So, the saying should be “we picked the berries to feed you.”

    How about: “We gave birth to you, you ungrateful pricks!”

  44. Lindsay Beyerstein:
    Eoghan, you’re attacking a straw man. The article you just cited as a “debunking” merely casts doubt on whether Ada Lovelace deserves the mantle of “first computer programmer,” not whether she made huge intellectual contributions to a major precursor to the modern computer.

    The Salon article shows Becca was right. Lovelace wrote eloquently about the parallels between weaving and programming:

    If Charles Babbage is the father of the computer, Ada Lovelace is indeed its mother.

    Lindsay

    There have been so many hoaxes, falsehoods and canards… Einsteins wife, Goddess Pseudo History, domestic violence, rape and wage gap myths, ancient matriarchy pseudo history, rule of thumb, super bowl hoax, suppression of evidence of differences…

    Based on the track record and source, the doubt thats cast in that article and another debunking that I’ve seen but cant find I would put Ada into the same category. Political propaganda masquerading as scholarship and more parable for “women can anything that men can do” than a historical record thats to be taken literally.

  45. PrettyAmiable:
    First – I totally think you used the word “wretch” because that loser MRA did it in your comments the other day. I wanted to laugh about it, but something like 60 comments had transpired and the moment had past. Thus, lol @ wretch. It makes me happy.

    Second – my father actually worked in a coal mine. He doesn’t have a giant chip on his shoulder. (…Mangina, perhaps? Oh, daddy). My grandparents were deeply entrenched in WWII Poland – but the most badass person in my family from that generation? A great aunt who told a Nazi to fuck off. (He apparently reached for his gun and realized he left it in the truck – she ran out the back because, again, she’s a fucking badass). True story – I believe she was a woman.

    @David, I’m assuming right now but can you clarify for me as I don’t want to investigate myself? Do MRAs have shockingly narrow ideas of gender? I don’t think I’ve seen anything quoted on your site that acknowledges things outside of the binary.

    The OP is the wrong person to ask about the MRM, he quote mines the comments of the most simple minded and damaged members and presents their words in a vacuum.

  46. Eoghan: Lindsay

    There have been so many hoaxes, falsehoods and canards… Einsteins wife, Goddess Pseudo History, domestic violence, rape and wage gap myths, ancient matriarchy pseudo history, rule of thumb, super bowl hoax, suppression of evidence of differences…

    There is a gender wage gap, even after controlling for all the non-discriminatory variables that affect earnings. The gap is smaller than the gross gap, but it still exists. Its size varies by country, in general being larger in countries were women have fewer rights. You may be basing your belief on the IWF study which looked at only young highly educated people in their first jobs and found that the women made almost the same as the men. But starting salaries are often like that, for institutional reasons and because Title VII makes it illegal to discriminate in hiring by gender and also because the Equal Pay Act of 1963 makes it illegal to pay women and men different amounts.

    The differences appear later, whether they are caused by discrimination or women’s household responsibilities or both. So such a narrow study cannot disprove the gender gap.

  47. I’d like to recomend reading the article “why have there been no great women artists” by Linda Nochlin.

    http://www.miracosta.edu/home/gfloren/nochlin.htm

    It was written in 1971 and some of it might not be true anymore, but it is still a great one for illuminating what a dead end it can be talking about what was in order to justify what should be. Not to mention fabricating or distorting what was for the same end.

  48. On the topic of the post, it really is important to note that women had very few legal rights of their own until in the last two centuries, and that universities didn’t accept them until about a century ago. Most women were not educated for any kind of paid work. (That’s why we have so few early woman painters: The studios didn’t accept female students, and the exceptions tended to be the daughters of the painters themselves.) They may have worked on the farm or in the family shop but legally they didn’t own the farm and guilds tended to exclude women with few exceptions. The earnings of married women were the property of their husbands in England until the 19th century.

    Thus, the practical hurdles for women to create something for which they would be remembered were immense except for perhaps for a few born into great wealth (such as Ada Lovelace and Florence Nightingale).

    It is not a coincidence that women first “broke through” as novelists. The craft could be learned at home without the need to be accepted into a circle of like-thinkers (as was the case with sciences, for instance).

    But the average woman had no other way to survive except as a wife (or possibly as a prostitute or as a nun if her family could afford the dowry). It is pretty unfair to ignore all the constraints when judging women’s participation rates in the public spheres of the past. They were explicitly kept out.

    I recommend books on women painters, mathematicians and astronomers, just to see how tremendously hard they had to fight. That fight takes a lot of energy which is then not available for the work itself.

  49. Ada Lovelace totally never invented anything!!! Women just want to take credit for men’s work!!!

    This is why feminists all hate Albert Einstein, right?

    Right?

  50. Thank you so much for the work you do, David. It is much appreciated.

    Martine’s reference is a good one on art. I also recommend Margaret Alic’s Hypatia’s Heritage which covers women in science from antiquity to the 19th century.

  51. Eoghan: as someone who isn’t emotionally invested in the idea that there is a wage gap by virtue of it not being my wages that are, you know, lower, let me just say: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

    I don’t really get why, given that you seem to feel feminists are too emotional and invested in their own disempowerment (yeah, see, you got very confusing there) to discuss the issue, you keep bringing the issue up for discussion in feminist spaces. Like, surely it would be more coherent to stop with the lectures and crawl back into whichever primeval cave you initially came from.

    </3, Li.

  52. we died in burning buildings

    Ah hem…who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, big boy?

  53. A couple of weeks agao, I watched a very interesting BBC documentary on Jocelyn Bell Burnell

    and it just brought home to me how very very invested Men are to protect the patriarchy and shut out women are all costs. No matter how capable, educated or intelligent, they just can’t share.

  54. Eoghan:
    “My first thought was Ada Lovelace, mathematician and the mother of computer programming using Charles’ Babbage’s ideas for hardware, and based on the looms used to weave textiles. Because, well, no computer programming, no computers and no internet. And the world would look quite different. Not to mention that these assholes wouldn’t be able to post on message boards ranting about women.”

    Ada is one of those rewrites of history from womens studies isnt it? Here is an article from Salon debunking it….
    http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/03/16feature.html

    You didn’t know who she was, so you googled her name and found the only thing that could even come close to “helping” you? Leave the experts who didn’t just today learn of her historical existence to decide who is or isn’t a rewrite.

  55. And for the record, I was first introduced to LOVELACE (what the fuck are you doing using her first name?) in a computer logic class, not women’s studies.

  56. I used to have a neo-Nazi in my family (well I guess I technically still do, but I don’t associate with him at all anymore) and he used to make the same argument about other races… “Look at all the accomplishments throughout history. What have Black people contributed to culture, medicine, etc.?”

    I always thought then, and still think, that actually they are disproving their own argument, because there have been huge discoveries and cultural contributions by oppressed people (whether that oppression is based on race, gender, class, etc.) and logic would dictate that if the playing field was equal, there would be many more contributions by those people.

    Also, in areas without modern maternity care, the likelihood of a woman dying in childbirth is something like 40%. I think that makes giving birth a hell of a lot riskier than hunting mammoths.

  57. i’m sorry, why are we willing to concede that only men hunted mammoths?

    it takes a nomadic, egalitarian, coordinated hunting village, yo.

  58. Well, let’s see…

    Who was in control of these horrible man-hating systems that forced men to do all this hard labor?

    Why, I do believe it was men.

    Who manufactured constant narratives about “women’s work” that kept women in the house and domestic sphere while the men went off to do other things?

    Gosh, it’s men again.

    Who stamped out womens’ efforts to gain the social and labor equality that would allow them to join men in dangerous hard-labor jobs?

    Yup, still men.

    But somehow, women are meant to feel really bad about how men have been oppressed in the name of creating civilisation. How this was all some kind of favor that we demanded of them and have been ungrateful for, when for most of Western history, women’s power has been completely negated and taken away by men.

    The stupid makes my head hurt.

  59. We’re not conceding that only men hunted mammoths, just showcasing how MRAs tend to use a 1950’s white middle-class American lifestyle template to describe historical (and prehistorical) gender relations in order to chastise women today for not worshipping men as they ought to be doing.

    And speaking of history, if what has been traditionally accepted as the most factual recording of history (that which was written about, for, and by men), as opposed to those women’s studies rewrites of history, is indeed the most accurate, the relative absence of women throughout history might go a long ways towards explaining yet another well-harped-upon “truism” expounded by MRAs; that being women’s undeniable proclivity towards hypergamy (their definition of hypergamy, not as the word is actually defined). Oft repeating Dr. Roy F. Baumeister’s conclusion, based on DNA research, that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men (maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did), they take this as proof positive of the hypergamous nature of women, failing to see that the most factual recording of history explains that reproduction ratio quite well; there were simply only a handful of women amongst vast scores of men.

  60. What I have noticed is the more unequal the civilization, the more likely it has been that men were in charge.

    And, of course – those men who are belly aching may be on the losing end of inequality – but it’s not because of women, but other men.

  61. David = Atlas Shrugged is by a woman, yes. But a woman who idealised the kind of masculinity that the MRAs idealise too.

    I think we sometimes assume that ‘all women’ are feminist and want ‘equality’ of the genders (all of them? I am not so sure but ‘men’ and ‘women’ anyway). But they are not. In between the dogma of the MRAs and the feminists, there are other people, men, women and people who identify as neither, who have differing views. But how do we get heard in this combative environment?

  63. Yeah, those wars. That were always started and propagated by women and in which no women ever suffered.

    No, wait.

  64. What bothers me most in this type of “Man the Hunter/Provider/Warrior/All-purpose machine” trope is that they grossly underestimate the amount of women’s work. No, make that “totally ignore”. Guys like the TheGrendler don’t actually bother consider gathering, hunting (if done by women), sewing, preparing food, teaching children – hell, making children! – to be work. The stupidity hurts.

    All you MRA [misogynistic slur redacted – Chally], you do know there’s a reason labour is called labour, right? And you know the food hasn’t ever magically prepared itself?

  65. Jim: there were women involved in some way in all that kind of work, although not in the physically heaviest end of it. the real difenrence was who was not at all involved in it; the real difference was class and not gender.

    You ‘Merican, boy? We don’t talk about class here. Class don’t exist here, and ifn it did it don’t matter, and ifn it did matter we wun’t talk about it even more’n we don’t now.

    Now git, commie.

  66. Yeah, that speech in The Stand bothers me, too.

    Still, FWIW, Stephen King wrote The Stand in 1975, and he’s gotten much better since then. Check out Lisey’s Story for some thoroughly badass, bechdelicious ass-kicking.

    Not for a second arguing that he’s perfect, of course, but he’s learned, which puts him head and shoulders above the assholes who believe this in 2011. Hell, he was better in 1975: while he did declare (through Frannie) that it was modern society (built by men) that made feminism possible (and thus at least temporarily put on hold post-plague), that modern society also made women’s inequality as foolish and pointless as crossing the sea in tiny wooden sailing ships instead of airplanes. Kind of a different conclusion than our friend TheGrendler reaches.

    Wonder how it feels to be more than 36 years behind the curve?

  67. Or that agriculture, pretty much the bedrock of civilization, was almost certainly invented by women.

    We don’t know this. There are no *records* to say men did this, women did this. The entire “men were hunters, women were gatherers” paradigm is anachronistic supposition supported by circular evidence. We find a female skeleton with stress fractures in her ankles from crouching, scientists conclude she spent a lot of time crouching around children, therefore prehistoric women looked after the babies. She could just as easily have spent her time crouching because she was hunting mammoths.

    I know it *sounds* really progressive and woman-affirming to say “women invented agriculture!!” but when all you’re doing is propping up the existing patriarchal gender norm it’s not.

  68. The argument about who did what work in early societies is often pointless. When the whole group/tribe is struggling for survival, everyone will have to work hard. And in the general case, i know of no research showing that women had a disproportional part of the available free time.

    As to the later “building civilization”, then this was mainly done by men. But that is a simple consequence of the men being in power (ie due to historical patriarchal structures).

    I am not sure what relevance, if any, this has for life of today. Even though I am a man, I have never hunted a mammoth.

    Lindsay Beyerstein: If Charles Babbage is the father of the computer, Ada Lovelace is indeed its mother.

    I would say that is a very large “if”.

  69. “As to the later “building civilization”, then this was mainly done by men. But that is a simple consequence of the men being in power (ie due to historical patriarchal structures).”

    So, a rich dude inherits a ton of money. He uses that money to pay a bunch of people to build him a factory, while he sits back and reads the Wall Street Journal. Then when the factory is built, he buys some ideas from other people, and pays a bunch of others to manufacture products based on those ideas. Rich Dude spends most of his days sipping mojitos in the Caribbeans.

    Finally, when the factory is successful and he’s prepared to sell it, he reminisces about how he built it “all from the ground up” and is a “self-made man.”

    That’s the kind of “building civilization” you’re talking about, right? The one that doesn’t actually involve any work?

  70. Raoul: You ‘Merican, boy? We don’t talk about class here. Class don’t exist here,

    No shit. That’s one of our problems in life! We susbsitute everything else in the world for it and wonder why our analysis inevitably slides sidewise.

  71. TheGrendler, quoted in OP:

    Its $1,000,000 spent per death of a man on a large dangerous project on average now you can just 9-5 it and call it a day in air-conditioned and heated safety.

    It’s funny because what with all the union stuff going on and this being Women’s History Month I was just reading about the garment industry strikes that kicked off the labor unions and brought us the 8 hour workday and workplace safety standards. I doubt anybody was compensated a million dollars for each woman killed in the Triangle fire.

    It also occurs who was taking care of the kids and the farms and whatnot while men were off scribbling the Bible and Hercules on Oeta?

  72. Two comments just from reading the first two paragraphs:

    1. “Men Going Their Own Way” is a FABULOUS idea. Bye, bye, guys. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass etc.

    2. The thing a woman has done for every single man on the planet? Given them life. Top that, fellas.

    Okay, now off to read the whole post.

  73. Holy crap. I didn’t know my male gender had made me such a fantastic person. I wrote War and Peace? Mined coal? Built skyscrapers? Cured polio? What the fuck got put in my drink to make me forget doing all of that awesome stuff?

    I thought it was some other person, all this time, but no. Apparently by virtue of being a dude, it was really all me. Damn, I’m good.

    You know what though? If I did all of that awesome stuff that I can’t remember doing, I’m pretty sure my superhuman self will be ok. I’ll manage, somehow, in my superior awesomeness of rugged laborer/legendary novelist/groundbreaking scientist being, to fend for myself. I don’t need women to worship me. I could do that just fine on my own, if only I could remember doing all those awesome things to praise myself for. I don’t need to keep somebody else down – obviously, if I can do all the cool shit I’m supposed to have done, I can lift myself up instead.

    So if women are treated like people? I can live with that. If they get paid the same as men? Fine by me. Seriously, if I’m so massively productive as to have all these awesome and apparently some not-so-awesome jobs, I’ll be fine financially. Even if I get paid the same as other people doing the same jobs. If I don’t get laid by every woman I lust after? Yeah, I can live with that too. If I’m so very awesome (I wish I could remember all the things I’ve done that make me so apparently awesome) I’m sure I’ll eventually meet someone that actually wants to fuck me. So why stress about the ones who don’t?

  74. libdevil: What the fuck got put in my drink to make me forget doing all of that awesome stuff?

    It was us feminists. We drugged you. Did you know you used to shit rainbows? Sorry.

  75. I knew it! Just never thought you’d admit it. But thanks for apologizing. It’s too bad about the rainbows. I love rainbows. Think I’m gonna go start an MRA group now. Or, maybe I already did that too, and forgot about it. This is so confusing.

  76. maribelle1963 – lol right on.

    And, since the whiney d00d in the post is taking credit for everything he claims other men have done, do we get to take credit for all the birthing other women have done?

    If so, can we declare ourselves the mothers of these worthess flaccid little bigots and send them to their rooms so the adults can move forward?

  77. Sei: So, a rich dude inherits a ton of money. He uses that money to pay a bunch of people to build him a factory, while he sits back and reads the Wall Street Journal. Then when the factory is built, he buys some ideas from other people, and pays a bunch of others to manufacture products based on those ideas. Rich Dude spends most of his days sipping mojitos in the Caribbeans.

    Not really – the industrial revolution was pretty late in the game. But sure there is an element of truth there. We see the leaders and do not focus on the actual workers.
    Who is most responsible for “building civilisation”: The Roman emperor or the farmers and “common people”?
    I guess it depends on how you view history.

  78. @Sei: To clarify what I was trying to say
    As I read history, to say that group X is the main actor is simply the same as saying that they were in power. Thus I see the statement that men (as a group) built civilisation is the same thing as saying that men (as a group) was in power. This reading makes this a rather trivial truth.
    If you have different reading of what “building civilisation” means then perhaps we disagree, but this seems like a question of semantics more than anything else.

  79. Yeah, whatever, Grendler. FYI, you DIDN’T give us Leonardo Da Vinci, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, or Jonas Salk. Because first of all, you were born way after any of those dudes died. If anyone “gave” us those guys, it was their mothers. That’s right. Women.

  80. I read a lot of the mansophere blogs you’re implicating, and I think you’ve chosen a straw man to knock down. The quoted post was pretty stupid.

  81. Person most likely to give birth/life to another human being: woman.

    Person most likely to kill/take life away from another human being: man.

    All those accomplishments in between? Who cares? They would have happened anyway. We’re damn curious beasts, we humans, regardless of what swings, dings, or pings between our legs.

  82. I know it is funny to poke fun at the MRA argument, but I feel like there’s a perfect rebuttal. Men cannot exist without women, neither can women exist without men. We could quibble over the short term, but the whole debate seems really surreal to me…

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