A blustery troll rolls in first crying about how we’re all haters, then proceeds to list off an unsupported opinion (and in most of our experiences here, an unsupportable opinion too).
Then a few of us give sarcastic responses because they’ve yet to contribute anything interesting or of value to the discussion. Short replies, because this person is regurgitating the party line that not being taken seriously is persecution. Stuff that’s been argued a million times.
Then this person comes back with a minor diatribe even further mischaracterizing the discourse here, pretty much slandering us, and telling us that recognizing sexist behavior is itself sexist.
Then a few people here decide that after two pretty much identically boring and obnoxious posts asking us to hate them, decide to dismantle them as irrelevant laughingstock, because they’ve yet to say anything worthwhile in our opinion. It’s frankly pointless to engage, because this person is spending all of their points on rage.
Then you come in pretty much saying this troll’s opinion (badum-pssshhh), needs to be heard out and that we’re being mean and nasty for not taking this person seriously and instead taking potshots at their stupid points. That we should nurture them as if they were a child, instead of an adult with cognitive capacity.
Then we decide that you don’t really have much of a point either, and take a few potshots at you, because you haven’t really given us satisfactory reasons why we should engage with, or be nice to people coming in calling us all hateful people.
We might have spoken with some tones you and the troll don’t like. But it remains true that the troll never said anything that hasn’t already been shot down ad nauseam. Why should we take any more effort to try to engage with them?
That’s what I get from the reading. That they’re ineptly trying to use “Neanderthal” as a metaphor for “early humans” or “human ancestors”.
They have no excuse to use such a term. If they’re evolutionary psychologists, they should at least have a basic grasp of the family tree, and know that using such metaphor in a scientific(ish) paper would only serve to hinder the transmission of their message and introduce completely unnecessary ambiguity.
Or they’re perhaps just morons, because they work in a field of only a few marginally testable hypotheses, and far, far too many just-so stories for the explanation of various traits and behaviors.
Perhaps this topic would have been better if the poster in question had been flagged and suspended, rather than replied to? I kind of agree that someone starting out with “listen up, you assholes” isn’t really there to engage in good faith.
I suppose we should be thankful that the WashPost explanifier resisted the temptation to illustrate these lucubrations with a 1950s cartoon of a caveman carrying a club in one hand and dragging a woman by her hair with the other.
[Note for LDoBe: the Neanderthal comparison does not come from the PLoS paper itself, but from Caitlin Dewey at the WashPost, who had read the authors’ press release and filled in any gaps in her understanding by interviewing the authors themselves]
We’re separated from monkeys by 20 million years of physical development, with an additional 3 million years of complex social development separating us significantly from even our closest related kin. We are vastly different.
You know, to people outside of the PUA community, the bitterness and self-loathing of these evo-psych cliches isn’t impressive.
In all sympathy, I’m sorry you’ve had some difficulties in life but you’re only further harming yourself in the long run by sticking to the just-so stories.
Individual incidents is nice, and all, but the statistics surely show that there are far more risks for women. Considering 90 percent of murders are committed by men in the U.S…
Those are horrible, but the reality is that far more women are killed by their partners then men - about a third of women who are killed are killed by partners, while it’s like 6% of men who are killed by their partners:
Ideally, the person you’re in a relationship with should never be a threat to one’s life, man or woman. The ongoing rhetoric that imagines men and women as alien to one another, unable to understand one another, is part of the problem. As long as many men and women feel as if they are looking at someone who is unable to understand them because they are “fundamentally different”, we’re going to have problems like this. It’s better if we find a different mode of interacting and communicating, that doesn’t include venus/mars stereotypes.
When someone says that women are the overwhelming majority of victims of domestic violence, it doesn’t mean that men aren’t also victimized, just that they are less victimized on a whole then women are…
To echo @codinghorror, for being so much of an engineer, you seem to be resorting to a lot of anecdata that really isn’t all that impressive when compared to the useful statistics, which show unequivocally that women are targeted for domestic violence at least twice as often as men.
In 2000, 1,247 women and 440 men were killed by an intimate partner. In
recent years, an intimate partner killed approximately 33% of female
murder victims and 4% of male murder victims.
Callie Marie Rennison, U.S. Dep’t of Just., NCJ 197838, Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief: Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, at 1 (2003), available at Home
Not the most recent data, but I’m sure you can scrounge up a few more anecdotes to counter it, while I go out and drop… Probably a gigantic metareview, or probably something from the CDC that’s more recent in your lap.
Well yes, but “murdered by intimate partner” and “robbed/murdered in online dating honeytrap” aren’t the same thing.
It’d be interesting to see a study that looked at what percentage of meetings arranged through internet dating ended in one party being the victim of crime by gender. I’d imagine it’s a very low percentage overall for both genders but I’d also imagine that the percentage of men who go to meet someone and get robbed/exploited is significantly higher than the percentage of men murdered by an intimate partner. Bear in mind there’s nothing that prevents a would be robber from pretending to be a woman in order to take advantage of the fact that men are generally less wary of meeting with women than vice versa, so this wouldn’t even need to be woman-on-man violence to represent a risk factor for men looking to meet women online.
For all the data mining they do, I can’t imagine okcupid releasing those kind of figures though…
That is doubtless true. However I did not claim total equality - I claimed that the risk exist and is significant even for males. Your statistics confirms that, and is admittedly better than a handful of haphazardly collected headlines - which themselves should however be enough to disprove that there is no risk, as the poster I reacted to inferred and to which I took objection.
This seems to be saying more about the lower risk that women have of being homicide victims than making a straight comparison between intimate partner homicide rates. In the US at least, about 65-70% of intimate partner homicide victims in 2008 were women, not the > 85% that this statistic might suggest (simple assault and of course rape/sexual assault bring the level of non-fatal violence much closer to the 85% level, although aggravated assault of female partners is more like 1.7 times the level for men). As @shaddack said, this doesn’t support the idea of equivalence as much as countering the idea that violence against male partners is so remote that raising it is irrelevant.
