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The National Review is punking us, right?

Jill

Right? …right?

Well, if you needed any more evidence that the GOP legitimately cannot stand women, there you have it.

Also, white guy writing for a conservative rag trying to use the hippity-hop lingo that the kids like? Fantastic.

I didn’t think anything could make me dislike Mitt Romney more, but this did the trick.

50 thoughts on The National Review is punking us, right?

  1. As someone who regularly reads National Review (I prefer the Weekly Standard), I thought the article was silly.

    Women are not a single bloc nor are we constricted by some evolutionary psycho-babble. We don’t all hold the same view on foreign policy, economics, health care, education or anything else a bunch of political strategists in Washington like to say we do.

    I’d really like it if both parties stop pretending they have my vote “wrapped up” and actually explain how they would address various issues, like entitlements, unemployment or Afghanistan.

  2. I can’t believe you just made me read all of that.

    I can’t believe I know people who work for the National Review…

  6. I couldn’t get further than the first page. This… please tell me that this is some poorly written satire. Right? I really can’t believe ANYONE would take this article seriously. The only thing mentioned that has a hint of truth to it is about having more male children, BUT it failed to mention that that’s from sex selective procedures. A good example that comes to mind is China with their one child policy, and since there’s more value place on boys than girls (which is sick) you get people making sure their kid is more valued *gag*. This article makes me sick.

  7. From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote.

    Well, I guess we can forget about looking at anyone’s positions on actual issues or policy, then. Seriously… WHAT?

  8. Why would thinking a guy is hot translate to wanting to vote for him?

    I mean, I can’t imagine anyone thinking Romney is hot, but let’s say this bullshit was true, and that women think guys who are rich are hot just because they’re rich. Why would that mean you want to vote for him? If people voted on the basis of what they want to fuck, the world would have been ruled by 22-year-old women a long, long time ago.

    These asshats are not only massively misinterpreting how biology works, the fact that they managed to conflate “sexually attractive” with “wants to give power to” without ever noticing that that’s actually not how it works at all when it’s the male vote we’re talking about indicates that they have literally no idea how women think.

    (BTW, from a biological perspective, the theory they’re citing makes no sense. Let’s say we go into evolutionary psych land. A woman has even more interest than a man does in making sure her mate is healthy, fertile and has good genes, because she has a limited number of children she can have, and a man has an even stronger interest than a woman does is making sure that the person he has a child with is smart and resourceful, since she’s going to be the one doing most of the work of raising it. If evo psych theorists were correct that humans behave in a way that maximize their fitness, then men would select women on the basis of whether they’d be good mothers who can teach their children well, and women would select men for attractiveness even more heavily than men do for women. The fact that shit ain’t like that ought to have tipped them off years ago that they are just making up just so stories to explain why a behavior caused by culture is caused by biology.)

  10. Can someone explain to me the connection between cardigans and fallopian tubes? I mean, if you get someone a cardigan are you expected to get them fallopian tubes as well? Or are the two things just nice to have together?

  11. Can someone explain to me the connection between cardigans and fallopian tubes? I mean, if you get someone a cardigan are you expected to get them fallopian tubes as well? Or are the two things just nice to have together?

    Jimmy Carter wore a cardigan (to look more approachable). Republicans love to mock Jimmy Carter, because he won the Nobel Peace prize and lost the US Embassy in Iran, and because REAGAN. If you want to insult a Democratic politician, compare him (if it’s a him) to Jimmy Carter. Or to Dukakis, but that has a slightly different flavor.

  12. Can someone explain to me the connection between cardigans and fallopian tubes? I mean, if you get someone a cardigan are you expected to get them fallopian tubes as well? Or are the two things just nice to have together?

    I think it’s more the other way around. You wouldn’t want your brand new tubes to freeze up on a cold winter night.

  13. I loved that article, well the first page, that I actually read. It’s exactly why R-MONEY won’t get elected. Cause he has all of “our money” and is so out of touch with regular Americans. You can look at all the elections – people vote for culturally normal (e.g. who is most like me) whatever that is. The same is true during job interviews, people hire people like themselves, this bias is well known and HR trainers caution hiring managers not to fall for it “don’t just pick people who are like you.” That’s why people voted for Regan, Clinton, Bush II and Obama. They talk like most of us, they grew up like most of us (or appeared to), and act like most of us. If they owned a horse it’s the same kind of horse that the farm kids upstate had, not a “dressage” horse whatever that is. The drink the same beer we do. I know Bubba Clinton pounded Natty Lights in college, I just know it w/o asking. I can’t say I’d assume the same for Romney – it was probably a rare belgian import. (I’m not saying this is how we should pick candidates, I’m saying this is how people do pick candidates)

    Most evo psych fails miserably because it ignores a fundamental tenet of evolutionary theory – it’s not the best design that wins, it’s the design that gets genes into the next generation in sufficient numbers. In fact there are biology theories that a too perfect theoretical design is a waste of resources and this explains why certain things we humans might consider “design flaws” persist. For example that’s why cats don’t have opposable thumbs. They would be better hunters with them, but they are good enough hunters as it is, so good in fact that mine are not let outside ever. See, e.g. the cheetah, a rather shitty design for a predator when you look at other predators, but until masses of people wanted to wear cat prints, a very effective survivor. Men and women don’t need a Ferrari as a mate, when anything from a station wagon on up works just fine to get the biology part of the job done.

  16. From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote.

    I am experiencing a need to actually count the ways in which this is wrong. Because how is it even possible to fit so much wrongness into so few words?

    1. I’m betting the number of women who find Romney more attractive than Obama is vanishingly small.
    1a. I would bet everything I own that Michelle Obama is not one of them. The Obamas seem like they’re into each other.
    2. Contrary to the underlying evopsych assumptions, Obama’s relative youth is part of why he’s hotter
    3. Contrary to the underlying evopsych assumptions, Obama’s appealing personality is part of why he’s hotter.
    4. Contrary to the underlying evopsych assumptions, Obama’s looks are part of why he’s hotter.
    5. Women don’t actually vote on the basis of who’s hottest (at least, not any more than men– there’s some evidence that more physically attractive candidates have an advantage in elections)
    6. Romney is, in actual reality, performing exceptionally badly among female voters. Uh-oh, I guess evolution isn’t true?
    7. Or is the thesis that female voters would love him if they just knew he was rich? THEY KNOW. IT’S LIKE THE ONLY THING ANYONE IS SURE OF ABOUT ROMNEY. HE’S A RICH GUY.
    8. In hunter-gatherer days, our ancestors didn’t, in fact, vote. Why would “evolution” dictate our voting?
    9. In hunter-gatherer days, extreme wealth disparities like that between Romney and normal people didn’t exist. Why would “evolution” lead us to find that attractive, or to be the mark of a good leader, or whatever?
    10. He’s confusing “could afford to buy female company” (these evopsych guys always seem to assume Hugh Hefner’s blonde companions are actually into him) with “could afford to buy female votes” (there are mechanisms in place to prevent vote buying.)

    From a common sense and “best interests of humanity” point of view, no woman should vote for Romney, and fortunately it looks like very few of them will. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ann sneakily votes against him in the privacy of the voting booth.

  18. I will vote for Romney only if he has sex with me. Otherwise I’m not getting maximum evolutionary usage out of my vote. On second thought, if we vote for him anyway, he’ll be so busy running the country he won’t be able to lure our mates away for the harem he deserves. That’s about all I got out of it.

  19. Men and women don’t need a Ferrari as a mate, when anything from a station wagon on up works just fine to get the biology part of the job done.

    I didn’t realize that I needed a station wagon for the biology part of the job. I was hoping to use my vagina, uterus, and ovaries. I’m glad I found out in time.

  20. Alara pretty much nailed it, but I noodled around online to see what was up with that “Romney has sons Obama has daughters nyah nyah Romney is bettah” bit. The first item that came up:

    Researchers studied 50 million people and found that mothers in ‘good condition’ – those who were married, better educated and younger – bore more sons than mothers in ‘poor condition’.
    The reason, simply put, is that women are tougher than men so according to evolutionary theory women living in poorer communities are predisposed to have daughters to ensure survival of the family line because the men are more at risk of dying younger.

    So then, even if we believe ev-psych, a person’s percentage of male children has nothing to do with a couple of prosperous American politicians and nothing to do with the superiority of the rich. More like superiority of daughters. Thanks for failing, National Review.

  21. Also…Obama is rich, too. And daughters are as evolutionarily successful as sons. You can tell, because the human race hasn’t died out. Yet. Although articles like this make me worry.

    None of this makes any sense.

  22. I couldn’t get further than the first page. This… please tell me that this is some poorly written satire. Right? I really can’t believe ANYONE would take this article seriously.

    If you want to feel even more sick to your stomach, read the comments on that article.

  23. Also…Obama is rich, too.

    If we’re going all in on the “women are only attracted to power!” bit, I have to say, the president of the United States is a damn sight more powerful than the man who has been unsuccessfully campaigning for president for the last 5 years. Even if that man does have $200 million kicking around.

    Also, in my experience, men who have daughters are more likely to view women as actual people as opposed to random objects.

  24. Hey, he made an empirical claim. He said that Romney should get all the female vote because sexual strategies theory. So the observed phenomenon that Romney trails badly among women refutes SST, right?

    Right?

  25. I can’t believe, I TRULY can’t believe this guy’s medieval language about absolute male dominance and the value placed on SONS is acceptble language in a Western nation in 2012. Is this guy Mormon, because he absutely sounds like it.

  29. I always figured that the reason why the upper-classes (and also certain parts of the most middle parts of the middle class) would tend to have more sons is one of when the kids are had.

    From what I remember reading about this, kids born to women at the younger or older end of their fertile range are more likely to be daughters while kids born in the middle of the range are more likely to be sons. Poor people tend to have children younger and busy professional types tend to delay child-bearing, so girls are more likely (for example, in my daughters’ school, populated by the kids of professional types, there are many more girls than boys). OTOH, the sorts of middle-middle class people who get married and have kids right out of college as well as the rich who can afford to have kids whenever (and hence may have them during their 20s) are more likely to have boys.

    Can anyone confirm that?

    As far as the strategy of whether a boy or girl is better for your reproductive fitness, doesn’t that depend very much on culture as we humans are such social animals? If you live in a patrilocal society dependent on hard labor and in which brides are expected to come with dowries, but without much in terms of inheritance/property rights, you want boys because they can stick around and do hard work while you have to invest in raising girls and then pay for them to get married and then they don’t even stick around to work to pay back your investment.

    OTOH, if you live in a society (again patrilocal) where girls are given a bride-price and you have inheritance rights (for men only, though), you would want girls because you get money from them while boys mean that what resources your family has get divided among those boys.

    One of the things about sexism is that it can play out in any number of ways …

  30. I remember all the not-so-subtle attacks on Obama’s masculinity from 2008 — and during the last four years, as with the “Obama = First Woman President” nonsense — and am so overjoyed (not) to see them again. Fallopian tubes?

  31. DAS, I have never heard such theories about maternal age and the likelihood of one sex versus another. If it were true, we would start to see a gradual shift in the sex ratio at the national level as average age of first child increases, but I don’t think that’s been the case.

    The fact that the Romneys have 5 boys is unlikely, but not totally unheard of. Same as if you flip a coin 5 times and it comes up heads. In the maternal side of my family, my grandmother had 4 girls and one boy. Of 12 grandchildren, there are 8 girls. Statistically a less likely outcome, but not implausible at all.

  32. You can look at all the elections – people vote for culturally normal (e.g. who is most like me) whatever that is.

    Um, I see your point about Romney, but I don’t think a fellow who is half Kenyan, lived in Indonesia, went to High School at an exclusive prep school in Hawaii and whose first and middle names are Barack and Hussein would qualify as “culturally normal” and “most like me” to the vast a American middle. I don’t think anyone can say that he has the down-home, folksy “touch” of a Bill Clinton or Bush II. His appeal is more aspirational than “gee, he like pretzels and football just like me.”

    At best it’s a wash, and at worst, without the unique energy and momentum of 2008 I’m concerned that this might actually wind up hurting Obama – particularly in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. I hope for our sake that you are wrong.

  33. Very unbelievable. I enjoy this take down from Salon:

    “Reading the piece in its entirety, however, it becomes clear that when Williamson claims that Romney’s out-of-touch bully arouses “women,” he means “Kevin Williamson.”

  34. I think back on the whole Biology 101 teachings of males producing equal numbers of sperm with X and Y chromosomes, but it is interesting to read all these different studies that are looking into how a numerous amount of factors may equate to inutero environments bringing male or female fetuses to full term or even permitting the embroyo to attach. Anyway, I remembered a talk on NPR on environmental factors causing higher ratio of female to male babies, a quote from one of their interviewees/contributers to the discussion:

    PETE MYERS (Environmental Health Sciences): But you’re left with a very large challenge. We live in a multi-causal world. There are many things operating simultaneously, and it’s almost impossible to tease out the individual effect of different factors.

  36. It is interesting to me that the assumption of the babies sex will equate the babies gender. There are instances of males actually having two X chromosomes for example (genetically female but appear to be male). Not to say that the assigned sex at birth is even what the child identifies their gender to be.

  37. The boobs in the comment section were as scary as the article. I didn’t read them all because I was on the verge of throwing up. No one called the guy on his sexism. Why is this OK? Why does he still have a job? WTF?

    1. Because most of the public still has trouble seeing women as sentient beings, therefore, ‘hey ladees, why the frowns?’ Also, as someone else above noted, early humans weren’t hording cash in the caves, so the readers know this is a celebration as well of the patriarchal nature of capitalism.

      The basis of the article? (Aside from Salon’s excellent points), “men who have money have big balls and teh womenz want to fuck us all the time” Done. Which is why capitalism is barbaric, oh wait, did I just repeat myself?

  38. National Review should team up with the RNC to offer free Romney sperm for every American.

    Per Dr. Cameron’s comprehensive work in this area, timing of conception is the most important factor found in the instances of disparity of male versus female births. If you conceive early or late during the window you are slightly more likely to have a boy.

    Long article but you can you scroll down to read about the work of Dr. Elissa Cameron if you’re actually interest in actual evidence. http://discovermagazine.com/2005/jun/biology-of-sex-ratios

    I wonder if national review will stop politicizing science? I’m sure scientists are super happy their work is being used to define R-MONEY as some sort of super human who should lead all of us semi-fit neanderthals into the promised land.

    At least now I can stop feeling bad that I did not let Romney father my child.

  39. Henry,

    The study showed that majority of the results tested showed no proof that the sex of a mammal was due to the condition of the mother (34% favored, 8.5% not favored, rest is inconclusive). Additionally, conditions at the point of conception were more strongly linked to the theory that mother’s internal environment affected sex over other points during the pregnancy. And then it goes into diet of the mother, etc. I generally am under the consensus that there are a large number of potential factors that influence the sex of the baby and how an egg is fertilized by what gene(s) carrying sperm and the conditions internally that can be more favorable to the growth of a fetus depending on the genetic makeup.

    What sickens me the most about the National Review article is the whole idea of male children equates one to be more successful and more beneficial to society. I wasn’t able to read the extent of the article and made the mistake to read some of the comments.

  40. JC you are so right to point out there are a large number of unknown factors – so scratch “most important” from my post. One thing Cameron was able to deduce empirically was timing of conception, and the increase is only slight, so her work expands on the 1973 Trivers and Willard hypothesis greatly (the one NR misuses). I’m in favor of research and medicine, but given the way most of the planet misuses science I’m scared senseless. There aren’t very many definitives in science, but scientists need to feel free to ask questions without their work being turned into political footballs by conservatives.

    On the normalcy thing, I think Obama did come across as “normal” American, during the elections. His background is not of course, but he seems like a “regular” guy one might meet and hang out with. Ask yourself this: who would you feel more comfortable drinking a beer with Obama or Romney (put the politics aside and just go based on the way they talk and act). Romney creeps me out, I’d feel out of place in his high society world like I’d be talking about my new lawnmower and he’d be talking about his team of groundskeepers who keep the grass at his estate perfect. Romney is basically Judge Smails from Caddyshack. That’s why I suspect a large chunk of voters will not pull the trigger on Romney. That view is backed up by some republican strategists who are scared because people just don’t like the guy on a gut level. That’s just an impression I get, maybe because I define regular relative to my environment e.g. someone I might see down the street. But yeah still worried about Ohio and PA, esp. the areas that are less demographically mixed.

  41. Beyond the obvious offensiveness, I was shocked by just how moronic this was. If this were an internet-only post by an unpaid writer or something, I could just say “whatever.” But this is the goddamned COVER STORY of the NATIONAL REVIEW. Buckley must be spinning in his grave.

  42. There have been some limited studies of IVF outcomes indicating that male embryos may reach the blastocyst stage quicker than female embryos and result in a slighly higher outcome rate of boy babies.

    I have four boys, three of which were IVF babies, and all day 5 blast transfers.

    But this article is disgusting and offensive on pretty much every imaginable level. I was hoping it was satire, but alas it doesn’t appear to be so. And can I just report how often I hear weird and offensive stuff about how I have 4 boys and it either must be because I’m super religious and doing so because Jesus said so (which is so, so far off the mark) or that it’s a special blessing from God/Jesus.

    Yuck

  43. Beyond the obvious offensiveness, I was shocked by just how moronic this was. If this were an internet-only post by an unpaid writer or something, I could just say “whatever.” But this is the goddamned COVER STORY of the NATIONAL REVIEW. Buckley must be spinning in his grave.

    I think this article was supposed to be humorous. Or something. I don’t know. . .sometimes I have trouble telling conservatives’ actual ideas from conservatives’ sarcastic renderings of their own ideas from liberals’ sarcastic renderings of conservative ideas. All of the above just seem ridiculous and absurd to me. . .especially the conservatives’ actual ideas.

  46. From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote.

    Well, I guess we can forget about looking at anyone’s positions on actual issues or policy, then. Seriously… WHAT?

    Well at least whoever wrote this does not seem to believe in creationism and seems to be down with Darwin and Evolution.

  47. Well at least whoever wrote this does not seem to believe in creationism and seems to be down with Darwin and Evolution.

    I’d say he’s more down with evo-psych, at least the ‘pop-science’ side of evo-psych which basically amounts to ‘make up some vaguely sciencey sounding reasons why my bullshit opinions are true’.

    (Important disclaimer: not all evolutionary psychology is bullshit, just most of the stuff that ends up in the media. For a behaviour to be genuinely a product of evolution rather than culture, it has to be pretty much universal among all human cultures. Not many things purported to be due to evo-psych reasons match up to the ‘every culture’ test. Not my research field tho, happy to take corrections!)

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