Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Why I Critique the Weirder Kind of Evolutionary Psychology



(This post is about misogyny, contempt toward women. sexual violence and Evolutionary Psychology.  It may not be what you need to read today.)


If you have read this blog for some time you know that I often write about the pseudoscience of the weirder type of evolutionary psychology, the kind I mark with capital letters EP, the kind which is personified by one Satoshi Kanazawa* and his sexist brethren and a few sistren.

There are times when I ask myself if I'm spending too much time wading in those marshes.

But today is not one of those times, because I recently found two references to the kind of EP stuff I so often critique, and both of them came from pretty nasty people.

The first example is Mike Cernovich who has recently been given a White House press pass:

Mike Cernovich is an internet troll, conspiracy theorist, and leading figure in the “alt-right’s” assemblage of modern-day white nationalists and misogynists who has drawn praise and support from President Donald Trump’s closest confidantes. Today, he used a White House press pass to berate reporters at the daily briefing for not sufficiently covering “the violence against Trump supporters.”
Cernovich used to write a sex blog which gave advice to would-be alpha males.  One post advocates choking women, in the bedroom and outside it,  because women really really want to be choked**, and this is because women really really want to be raped, but not just by any guy:

Of course no girl wants to be wolf packed on the D.C. Metro or beaten up. Yet nearly ever romance novels consider healthy dose of a woman being taken against her will. The key is that she is taken against her will by a high value, dominant man who could satisfy her genetic desire for healthy and fit offspring.

Bolds are mine.  Typos are his.

Can you see the slimy footprints of EP in Cernovich's tiny brain?  I can.

The second example concerns a white supremacist who wants white men to harass and ridicule white women in public.  When someone in the comments to the original filth asked if showering ridicule and contempt on women would make it harder for a man to get a girlfriend or wife, the white supremacists stated:

Men who engage in the type of behavior I have outlined here are the kind of men that women desire more than anything. In fact, they are the only type of men they desire. This is evolutionary biology, it is a scientific fact …
Women have exactly zero desire to be “respected” by men who view them as “equals” – women desire to be dominated by men who view them as property.


Bolds are mine.

These examples are vile, but the point they make is important:

If you Google any recently popularized EP article on the perfidy of women or similar topics, the first two pages Google gives you are full of links to misogynistic sites.  EP feeds misogyny, in other words.

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*  I have written so much on Kanazawa that it's not possible to link to everything in this footnote.  You might begin with this summary post.   Or this one.  Or the most recent impact Kanazawa has had on making wife beating acceptable in Russia.

** Yes, this is the man who now has a White House press pass. 

As an aside, see more about erotic asphyxiation, an extremely dangerous practice:

Various methods are used to achieve the level of oxygen depletion needed, such as a hanging, suffocation with a plastic bag over the head, self-strangulation such as with a ligature, gas or volatile solvents, chest compression, or some combination of these.[6] Sometimes, complicated devices are used to produce the desired effects.[7] The practice can be dangerous even if performed with care and has resulted in a significant number of accidental deaths. Uva (1995) writes “Estimates of the mortality rate of autoerotic asphyxia range from 250 to 1000 deaths per year in the United States.”[8] Cases have also been reported in Scandinavia[9] and Germany.[10][11] Autoerotic asphyxiation may often be mistaken for suicide, which is a major cause of death in teenagers.[12] 

And, if anything, it appears to be more common among men than women:

The great majority of known erotic asphyxial deaths are male; among all known cases in Ontario and Alberta from 1974 to 1987, only one out of 117 cases was female.[6] Some individual cases of women with erotic asphyxia have been reported.[16][17][18][19] The main age of accidental death is mid-20s,[6][20] but deaths have been reported in adolescents[21][22][23] and in men in their 70s.[10][20]