For your viewing pleasure – David Futrelle created a brief video excerpted from a very long video by libertarian MRA Stefan Molyneux.
I stopped listening a bit after minute 1, but I may go back to it later. I stopped at the line
All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married assholes.
I stopped there because it’s all I needed for the moment. That’s his claim. All the bad men in all the places? They’re all the fault of women, because they came out of vaginas. Never mind all the bad men; BLAME THEIR MOTHERS.
What made me curious about Stefan Molyneux? The fact that atheoskeptic guy Peter Boghossian has done several collegial videos with him. In the most recent one they talk about the horrible feminists and Social Justice Warriors.
This is some sort of mental block I have. I always assume fellow atheists are at least a little bit on the left, and that they’re at least a little bit clued in to why it’s not really all that cool or helpful to say that “people of category X don’t do atheist writing & arguing and they don’t show up at my talks because it’s more of a white/ straight/ Western / guy thing.” I keep having to re-learn that no, many of them are in fact proudly and thoroughly right-wing.
I could blame the fact that in the US there is a very strong link between conservatism and religiosity…but that’s true everywhere, and anyway I don’t think that’s really the reason. It’s just some kind of entrenched Basic Belief I have, for no particularly coherent reason. I have to learn different one person at a time. “Oh – Boghossian is a colleague of this well-known MRA. Ohhh. These sinister blurts on Twitter aren’t just his id running riot for a few minutes, they’re his considered opinions. Ohhhh.”
H/t Ms Mondegreen aka Stacy
So men never carry any responsibility for their own behaviour or their parenting influence and women are supposed to police male character and behaviour by boycotting arseholes (nevermind that we’re bitches/harpies/feminazis/fill in the blank when we do), effectively running the world and make it a nicer place for men, who we’ve established have no responsibility to do such things.Uh-huh.
#notyourmommy
The thing is… he means guys like him, doesn’t he? He means MRAs. If women picked the guys who expose people’s home addresses, phone numbers, bank details, etc. for the crime of being critical of men, the guys who make death and rape threats as a matter of course, then it would be a glorious and peaceful world.
Yeah. So long as the women never mentioned how appallingly they kept treating them.
And, seriously, how would they go about “holding women accountable” for the people they choose to be attracted to? Go back to arranged marriages and remove all choice from the issue?
Molyneux gets taken seriously by Boghosian? Even FTB’s old “friend” Thunderfoot has blasted Molyneux’s ideas in a series of videos* as fringe and cult-like. I wonder what that says about Boghosian?
*Disclaimer – I am not a regular Thunderfoot viewer but his videos regularly pop up in my YouTube “recommendations” feed – I couldn’t resist clicking on one where he goes after Molyneux because I thought he would have been a fan.
Duh. everything is wimmin’s fault. Collectively, or singly.
Glad I could
clear that upmansplain that to you.Here is another thought I just had: Doesn’t the bible blame the ills of this world on a woman being tempted and committing the first sin and, because of this, all of humanity is cursed?
It sounds like Molyneux is just promoting an supernatural-free version of that same old idea.
The biggest problem with this argument is that all the nice guys came out of vaginas, too, but no one gives women credit for them. if the guys are good, decent guys (like Boghossian and Molyneux, of course, not like PZ or Ed Brayton), then they are responsible, as guys, for being so good. If they are bad guys, then the women who gave birth to them are to blame – and probably also their women teachers and women wives for the way they taught them, and the way they take care of them sexually (or don’t).
Sort of like God. Takes care of all the good, not to blame for all the bad. That’s the problem, then. These guys who don’t believe in God clearly see themselves as God.
So all the trouble in the world comes from women having children with nasty men. The Molyneux of the world must believe everything, political attitudes, intelligence, jerkishness, are all inherited straight from fathers (on the Y chromosome perhaps? since only boys count). Otherwise it wouldn’t matter so much who the fathers were. But if it’s all inherited then women must necessarily, occasionally, by accident?, also have children with Nice Guys™ or NG™ would vanish from the earth. And NG™ are of course superior to everyone else. So why don’t Nice Guys™ run the world? If the jerks come out on top anyway, doesn’t that imply some kind of major rift in the space-time continuum of NGs?
Met Boghossian a little while back; like his book. Today he’s tweeting about “illegitimate pride” and getting lots of nods from people who think being gay just is no kind of accomplishment.
Surviving into adulthood as a bisexual has been a serious effort for me. I guess that’s not the same as “gay pride” but “gay and still alive, fuck you haters pride” doesn’t scan well. I’m really sad to see Boghossian working this ideology.
Nice guys are born by C Section?
“Good wombs have borne bad sons.”
The Tempest
Hey, wait a sec! Maybe he’s saying the opposite!
See, if it’s true that “All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married assholes,” then it turns out that most women are incapable of giving birth to cold-hearted jerks! I mean, that excludes all single mothers, all cohabitating-but-not-married mothers, all coparenting-but-not-married mothers, all mothers who married someone who wasn’t an asshole until after the point the marriage certificate was signed, and all mothers who married people that weren’t assholes ever.
Apparently it’s marrying assholes that’s the problem (I assume they just threw that vagina comment in there as a helpful hint so as not to embarrass any readers who weren’t already aware of how human reproduction works). Who thought I’d ever agree with these guys on something?
Stefan Molyneux’s brilliant plan boils down to “don’t teach men to be decent human beings, just tell women not to marry assholes.” We have no doubt that Molyneux feels that he alone is qualified to decide who is an asshole and who is not, and that he would therefore be in charge of approving or disapproving all marriages in his new utopia.
From the OP:
Penn Jillette, Sam Harris and Michael Shermer are self-proclaimed libertarians and not of the left libertarian persuasion. I’m now assuming that “name atheists” are right-wingers. There are exceptions, like Greta Christiana and you, but many prominent atheists are more like Pat Condell rather than PZ Myers.
Uh–I don’t know who this David Futrelle is or where he’s coming from, but all he seemed to say was that women GIVE BIRTH to jerks; they are FATHERED by assholes. Sounds to me like he was putting it all on men.
ericcollier
Futrelle runs a blog called We Hunted the Mammoth. His feminist and anti-misogynist credentials are real.
Eh, it’s a worldwide thing. Australian news sites’ comment sections have plenty of evidence of conservative, sexist and racist atheists.
Julia F. #10
+100 points for quoting Shakespeare! And so aptly, too!
ericcollier #14
Nope. You need to see the video. First it’s Stephan Molyneux who said it, David Futrelle just edited his video. Second, Molyneux makes it vary clear that he blames the women exclusively. Apparently he feels men who are assholes have no control over their assholeyness. I gather it’s due to some structure of dominant genes on the Y chromosome, since it is inherited father to son, and can’t be overcome or unlearned.
/snark (in case anyone can’t tell)
Al Dente @ 13, I know, but that’s my point. I know it factually but learning it about another person still always surprises me, so knowing it factually hasn’t yet managed to shift my entrenched belief otherwise. It’s odd. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s not, maybe I’m just thinking something crude like “similar to me in X way so similar to me in other ways.” That’s probably it, just dud thinking. I should look in Thinking Fast and Slow to find the name for it. “The like me heuristic” maybe.
I probably shouldn’t care about this guy’s attitude. For the record I am compelled to state that I have been a very loud and proud feminist since my early teens and I am married to the authentically nicest nice guy in authentic nice town.
He’s not even holding the bad fathers responsible for their birth control choices? Really?
Growing up in a fucked up family, with one or two selfish or under-performing parents can be traumatic and burdensome throughout life. I could have compassion for this dude if his head wasn’t so far up his ass. I can see that even if growing up in a calm, supportive family isn’t literally a ‘privilege’, it does tend to convey substantial advantages. Advantages that some may take for granted.
Just as a pile-on. If you’re not following David Futrelle and “We Hunted The Mammoth”…why the fuck not?
He’s quite awesome.
I dip in from time to time, but it’s just too damn depressing to follow full-time. Sure, the snark and the kitties take the edge off, but still, after half an hour on WHTM, I find myself longing for an asteroid strike.
Who *is* this Boghossian fellow, and why do people seem to care about what he says all of a sudden?
He’s the author of A Manual For Creating Atheists, and a professor of philosophy somewhere in America.
I don’t know… maybe his book is good? I haven’t read it, so I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been impressed by his demonstrations of deep thought so far, but compartmentalisation is a thing, so maybe it’s impressive.
I also used to generally assume an atheist was liberal and thoughtful, but nowadays quite the opposite, depending on how loudly they proclaim their atheism.
All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married assholes.
I suspect I could disprove this easily, had I an authoritative list of cold-hearted jerks who run the world, with details of their mothers’ histories of c-sections and marital status.
Pierce, heh. That’s a plot point in Macbeth, wherein Macduff is “not of woman born”.
John Morales @ # 27 – I s’poze the lamented Thane of Glamis and Cawdor counts as a cold-hearted jerk who ran (his part of) the world – everybody hanging out in those storm-swept stone castles must’ve been seriously chilled.