Cross-posted from
here.
I didn't even get a chance to
read this article by
Satoshi Kanazawa (who is conveniently male) before my WTF? flag went up. Observe:
See what's wrong with this image? They've replaced the word "people" with "men" in the
Feminist Mantra. Already they've set up a subliminal Straw Man (or is it Straw Woman?) of Feminism to topple over.
Ok, so maybe it gets better from there? Nope. Following the mentality that "in a Patriarchy, everyone wins!", we have this juicy quote in the third paragraph:
"the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women." "Oh, those poor men! They may control the business world, but of what good is it to them if they cannot shoe their bare feet?" What tripe.
And what does our esteemed blogger have to say about women being the physically weaker sex?
"The greater susceptibility of boys and men to diseases explains why more boys die in childhood and fail to reach sexual maturity and why men’s average life expectancy is shorter than women’s." According to the
US Dept of Justice, "Annually, compared to males, females experienced over 10 times as many incidents of violence by an intimate. On average each year, women experienced 572,032 violent victimizations at the hands of an intimate, compared to 48,983 incidents committed against men." But that senseless violence at the hands of those who are supposed to love and protect each other is in no way more tragic to him than the brutal treatment of the male lifespan at the hands of that bitch Mother Nature.
Women, lest you begin to complain about the imbalance of power in society, he'll remind you of this:
"Among mammals, the female always has more power than the male, and humans are no exception." We may lack economic and political power, but don't fret:
"Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to. What do women control? Men." Let him ask any woman in a Middle Eastern theocracy, where it is legal for her husband to beat her if she refuses to have sex with him, why she isn't content with holding the True Power.
So assuming we women can accept that we are already powerful and equal to men, what's the harm in pursuing individual goals?
"In a forthcoming article in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania show that American women over the last 35 years have steadily become less and less happy, as they have made more and more money relative to men." What is that we were all taught in high school statistics? "Correlation always implies causation"? Right...
In the end, he fails to give any hard evidence for why feminism causes more harm than good. The general message seems to be that all we have to do to be happy is to give up our individual desires and maintain the status quo, that we should try to see things from the lowest biological perspective of physical longevity and reproductive success. Upset that you get paid less than the men do at your workplace? The logic of Satoshi Kanazawa's musings flow to an excellent solution: Seduce a rich man and wait till his inevitably shorter life span leaves his wealth in your hands. Who's with me? ;)
Comments (8)
I think in American society these days, women have far more power than men in the court. Beyond that, women usually aren't treated as equals in most other aspects of life.
There's an abundance of idiotic perspectives on women's lib out there.
Let's just perfect parthenogenesis and get on with the species.
@methodElevated - My sentiments exactly.
What a fucktard! He doesn't quite understand what feminism actually is. Like many willfully ignorant people, the author assumes feminism means the sexes are the same. There's a difference between sameness and equality. Because we are not (typically) as strong physically, it does not mean we should expect to be be treated as lesser than. And some man have almost as many shoes as the stereotypical woman. If you're in business and seriously networking at parties (etc), then you are expected to look good.
Besides, he got it wrong. It's"Feminism: The radical notion that women are people." PEOPLE, not men.
As seen here:
http://www.zazzle.com/captainjoekickass/feminism+gifts
After reading lots of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, I understand that feminism is just a way to recruit women to practice paganism, become lesbians, destroy the American family and worship Satan.
My brain hurts from the utter stupidity of that garbage.
There is also the underlying theme that natural=happy. If everyone did what they are naturally supposed to do through thousands of years of human evolution, they would be happy, and unhappiness is an indicator of people behaving unnaturally. Of course, a nuclear patriarchal family is the epitome of people doing what nature intended. If that is the case, why isn't he living in an Igloo and shitting in a pit? There is a good parody of his argument about cows on the page:
"Cows are not enslaved, because slavery rests on the assumption that cows and humans are the same, exact, identical and cows are different than humans. An insurmountable body of evidence now shows that cows are in fact -not humans-. It is difficult to dispute that cows have it better off than humans. The cow does not have to do anything. It just sits and eats while the man toils and creates and labors for the cow. If it weren't for steak, there, in fact, would be no beautiful civilization, which is built around agriculture and the cow.
So we cannot measure man and cow with the same happiness stick, though men are distinctly less happy than cows. The man may have choice, power, more control over his life, and more money, but look at what cows have:
-more grass than the man.-
But no cow looks at this and says the man has it worse off!
Cows like grass. This has been proven with observation of cows in grass fields. When cows have access to grass; they eat the grass.
Men in nations go to war over the cow.
Finally, perhaps the best and most consistent measure of welfare is reproductive and life success. A normal cow has a lifespan of about 10 years. But a cow that is not eaten, and grazes freely to reproduce more cows that get eaten, truly the majority, can expect to live nearly twice its natural lifespan. Meanwhile a man may make it only to 70, when he could live to 110. Clearly on all accounts, happiness stick, lifespan stick, and grass stick, the cow is superior to men."
as a sequel to the argument that cows are more powerful than men, because men like steak. What do men like more than sex? Eating, as evidenced by eating a lot more than they have sex, because that reasoning process is just brilliant. Katoshi argues men have sex more than women therefore men like sex more than women. Right. So men like steak therefore cows control men and hold all the power.
So if longevity and reproductive life and the not-having-to-do-anything factor are what really matters, why don't we stick Katoshi in a cubicle attach him to a mechanical umbilical cord that has only the correct amount of nutrients a human body needs, and siphen out his sperm for whoever wants it.
That's the life.
Eh. Satoshi Kanazawa claims he's an "evolutionary psychologist" but brags in one of his post that he hasn't had a biology class since high school. He subtitled one of his posts on patriarchal naming patterns "Are Russian women more likely to be [coarse euphemism for prostitutes]?" He's just plain fundamentally wrong. And not just wrong in the sense that I disagree with him, but wrong in the sense that he can't get to the end of a short sentence about feminism without misunderstanding it.
For the record, Regina Barreca, also of Psychology Today, had an answer for Kanazawa: Why Anti-Feminism is Illogical, Unnecessary, Evil, and Incredibly Unsexy.
figleaf