Peter Boghossian is demonstrating that he’s a fool and an ignoramus again.

You just have to love that extra fillip of the term “habitus” — it adds an extra level of pomposity to a statement that basically, feminists men are weak and have ugly physiques. It’s the male counterpart to the old anti-suffragette cartoons that portrayed them all as hideous crones and spinsters. That attitude is alive and well among regressive assholes today.

But then he goes further and invokes his poorly understood version of biology to justify it, and claims the authority of Science behind his opinion of those ugly feminists.

I have to correct HJ Hornbeck; the “sneaky fucker” theory was not invented by MRAs, but is a legitimate evolutionary idea that’s been around for quite a while. The thing is that you don’t publish a term with an obscenity in it — editors tend to chop those out. It’s more often called “sneaks and guards”, and if you want to find it in the scientific literature, better search terms are “alternative mating strategies” or “dimorphic males”. One of the clearest examples is found in Onthophagus beetles, where there is an allocation trade-off in development between investing in giant horns for use in direct battles with other males, vs. giant testes for better sperm competition. That’s also an experimental model where you can manipulate the tissues in the larva. Cauterize the developing testis, the horns grow bigger; cauterize the primordium of the thoracic cuticle that forms the horn, the testes grow larger.

But MRAs do love this theory, because they think it justifies condemning those wimpy feminist males (“betas” and “cucks”; by the way, that whole nonsense of “alphas” and “betas” is misappropriation of ethological descriptions used in wolves and some other species, which have more complex life history strategies than the MRAs can imagine). They’re just “white knights”, “sneaky fuckers” who sidle up to women and pretend to be on their side in order to have sex with them! They’re just as bad as the noble, straight-forward Alphas, but they’re devious about it!

However, I have to mention another, more useful term to Boghossian: the naturalistic fallacy. I hear that he teaches philosophy, so he might have heard of it, but he clearly doesn’t understand it. Spend less time on Reddit and YouTube where it is dreadfully abused by internet atheists to rationalize all kinds of bad behavior — if chimps throw feces, then obviously YouTube commenters have evolved to be shitlords. They take a grain of truth from animal studies and extrapolate it into all kinds of nonsense about people.

But sure, you can find animal models that fit an extreme pattern.

Beetles demonstrate a pattern of disruptive selection to produce large bodied “guard” morphs and smaller “sneak” morphs. But I am not a beetle, and humans do not show such a pattern.

Cuttlefish also have large aggressive males that zealously guard their harem of females with threat displays, and also smaller males that turn off the threat displays and instead camouflage themselves as females to join the harem. But I am not a cuttlefish, and humans show a wide range of courtship behaviors.

Orangutans have large flanged adult males who also guard harems of females, and smaller, unflanged young males skirt the outside of his territory, looking to mate opportunistically. But I am not an orangutan, and humans change their courtship behaviors to suit the circumstances, so you don’t get to claim a dichotomous suite of mating practices within our species.

Gorillas have a high degree of sexual dimorphism allowing one large male to control a group of smaller females. I am not a gorilla. Humans have evolved to reduce sexual dimorphism and increase cooperation, making the “guard” strategy impractical and counter-productive.

So please, do not shoehorn human behavior into your simplified model of how sex works. It’s reductive and also fails to appreciate the importance of female mating choice. Think about it: “sneaky fuckers” would be a total flop if females of the species didn’t go along with the opportunity and mate happily with the sneaky guys. Females have reproductive strategies, too, and they would rarely favor having their mate choice removed because the big thug corrals them and controls when and with whom they can mate. Unfortunately, we still live with a Victorian influence on science that tends to downplay female participation and initiative, leaving us with many theories that treat females of the species as objects collected and used by the males.

I am a human being. I am a member of a species with complex life histories and prolonged child-rearing requirements that require extensive social behaviors for survival. We have reduced sexual dimorphism, and rarely does our survival hinge on brute force muscular development. We form communities with intense social interactions. We choose mates based on long-term compatibilities — we form partnerships between individuals. One sex does not do all the choosing, and further, choices are based on fairly sophisticated intellectual and emotional properties. Does he or she have a sense of humor, do they have shared interests, are they willing to cooperate in necessary chores, are they fun to be with, are they sexually compatible, do they share the same religious beliefs, do they enjoy the same movies, do they have complementary skills, etc.? Rarely do women wonder whether he would be able to lock them in in the basement and successfully fight off all other human beings who come to visit, and if they do, it’s an argument to reject further association with the man.

Physical appearance does play a role, and we’d be foolish to pretend it doesn’t, but if you look around you at the world of human relationships you might notice that there a lot of stable, long-term couples where neither individual looks like they’re going to be featured on the cover of People magazine. Why? Because all the social and intellectual connections trump all the ephemeral details of looking like a 20 year old model. Appearances matter more in casual hookups (which rarely produce offspring, especially nowadays when birth control is cheap and easy), but the evolutionary outcomes are going to be more dependent on successful family construction and integration into communities.

We need terms more appropriate to the human condition. I suggest that we call superficially handsome, virile, young people like Peter Boghossian “shallow fuckers” while us old homely (or otherwise) guys who can recognize the autonomy of women and form relationships on the basis of long term cooperativity “decent human beings”. At least, that’s a good idea if you’re one of those shallow fuckers who also demand that the world be divided into no more than two classes of people.

Matthew Facciani also gets the science wrong:

“Sneaky f*cker” theory refers to the evolutionary psychology idea that beta males will “sneak in” and have sex with a female while the alpha males are busy. This theory was coined by John Maynard Smith and doesn’t have much (if any) scientific support.

This is not evolutionary psychology. It’s standard, ordinary old ethology, and it’s an idea that’s been around for a long time (I don’t think Maynard Smith coined it, either, he just gets credit for it because he’s a prominent authority), and there is plenty of scientific support — in specific species. But at least his criticism of Boghossian is spot on.

Both Tweets by Dr. Boghossian here are embarrassingly ignorant and illustrate his own bias against feminism. It’s like Pete can’t imagine why any man would embrace feminism so obviously they must be doing it to do get laid. It’s also just sloppy reasoning based on supposed anecdotes. Did he actually measure the body fat of a sample of male feminists and compare it to the average population? Until he shows the study he did, it’s just a childish attack on people he doesn’t like. But interestingly, he attempts to use pseudoscientific jargon to justify his biases.

This is interesting in another way, though: it reminds me of some old debates where pro-evolutionary people would argue against creationists that the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution was made up by creationists, and that the terms weren’t used by real evolutionary biologists…so I’d have to cite lists of books and papers that explicitly used those entirely legitimate terms and help out the wrong side of the debate. It was kind of annoying.