Pamela Haag begins a post with the following tidbit:

Like other local and state governments, Topeka, Kansas is in the grips of a dismal budget crisis. So this week, Topeka’s City Council did something desperate. They debated decriminalizing domestic violence--because the cost of prosecuting these cases, and other misdemeanors, is just too high. The county has already turned back 30 domestic violence cases since they stopped prosecuting them on September 8.

One of the problems with these stories is that it’s hard to believe that we’re actually hearing what we’re hearing. Sometimes I think the 20th century was all a dream, and we’ve awakened back in the 19th. Could civilization unravel so much that we rip up paved roads to save money—or revive wife-beating to save a buck? It sounds like a satirical Onion headline.

Source: Big Think Proxy

My first inclination post this with the title "Oh for heaven's sakes, part 3,776" or something like that. But the rest of Haag's post is too important to miss. It's an essay on the extremely narrow definitions of marriage extreme right-wing "traditionalists" like, naturally, Kansas governor Sam Brownback emphasize is their "marriage encouragement" policies.

It’s not heterosexual marriage generically that’s promoted in Kansas and elsewhere. It’s marriage of a particular (patriarchal) brand and a particular (gender-typed) sort.

...

Ironically, in the classes and states today that have the very lowest divorces rates—the educated, affluent middle class, that is, and uber-liberal Massachusetts—it’s precisely this sort of gender role flexibility that you’re likely to see. The community welcomes stay-at-home dads as well as stay-at-home moms. Dads and moms are likely to perform a variety of roles in marriage, from breadwinning to breadbaking and childrearing and nurturing. These precisely aren’t marriages of interdependence, but of overlapping, multi-tasking competencies. Still, the defense of marriage tends to trash career moms for ruining the family, and privilege distinct husband and wife roles

...

If a view doesn’t punch our own life in the face, then we think it can’t hurt us.

But marriage politics today aren’t just about opposition to same-sex marriage and homosexuality. No, they’re interested in your big, fat, straight wedding, too. Campaigns for traditional marriage support particular versions of heterosexual marriage. To paraphrase from Animal Farm, some marriages are more equal than others.

Yes, the initial snippet about effectively legalized wife (and husband) battering is shocking but Haag reminds us that it's just one tiny foray in a very long, quiet, and persistent campaign to and to re-enact Biblical, capital-P Patriarchy.

Having rather enjoyed I can't imagine why anyone would want to effectively repeal the second half of the 20th Century as well as the first tenth of the 21st, let alone why they'd want to force everyone else to go back. But they do.

David Futrelle found a seriously complicated expression of the bogus Two Rules of Desire. What's unusual about it is that it's driven so thickly by Rule #2 (It's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.)  Basically he found a seemingly-sincere post from a highly... conflicted young man on the website Is It Normal.  Here's Futrelle

[T]his guy hates female sexuality in part because, well, he thinks the male body is ugly and so assumes – or at least feels on a gut level —  that any woman having sex with a man is being coerced, bamboozled, or raped. Yep, we’re talking about a rich and toxic stew of misogyny and misandry here. Let’s let him explain:

What little mysogyny I have in me is directed at female sexuality. I can’t stand it that females are attracted to males, ever. I hate them a little for it, just feel it in my gut. I thought for a long time when I was younger that females were basically asexual, not interested in sex, and that romance for them was something far removed from physical love. It didn’t occur to me that anyone might find the male form attractive, and I always suspected males were using some form of deception or raping women in some way when they were with them. I don’t understand this hate and distrust for my own sex. It really bothers me.

I hate that I feel there’s something wrong with a female having an active sexuality when I know intellectually there’s not.

...

Source: Man Boobz

Ouch!

The Two Rules of Desire are driven heavily by the mainstream and therefore heterosexual male impression that sex is driven entirely by men's desire and that women only agree to sex in exchange for something... anything else.  The hope of pregnancy, for safety and security, maybe just dinner and a movie, or even cold hard cash are all ok.  But just "I'm horny and I'm hoping you'll help me do something about it?"  Not so much.

It would just be funny or sad if the young man didn't appear to feel angry at women who "violate" his image of what women's sexuality really ought to be.  Even if there was no misandry in his position (there's lots) and even his position wasn't misogynistic (it is) it would still be bloody fucking oppressive.  Because it would still be an almost pure expression of the dominant paradigm's view of men as the "sex class" (obliged eternally to demand sex) and women as the "no-sex class," (completely disinterested in sex per se which must always be reluctantly "earned" or "taken" but never freely offered.)

Ugg!

Note: Satoshi Kanazawa used the generic catchphrase "black" in the post I'm about to discuss.  Since it's not clear from his context whether his racism was directed at people of African, or African-American origin, or even just anyone with skin he determines to be darkly pigmented, in this particular I'm just going to use his terminology and say "black."

Usually when anybody types the words "Satoshi Kanazawa" my eyes start to glaze over. For obvious reasons. When I see him he's cited approvingly my blood also boils, but that's been happening less and less, so mostly when I see him referenced I just move on.

But last he became so extreme that even Psychology Today (the Cosmopolitan Magazine of science journalism) woke up enough to yank one of his posts. (After altering the title from Kanazawa's original "Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" to "Why Black Women Are Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" because that made it better.)

And now it sounds like (finally!) his employers at the London School of Economics might have been moved to action -- if not for his overt racism, sexism, and homophobia then at least for his really capricious methodology.

So anyway, there having been such an awesome uproar this time I had to take a look. And... yeah, he's pretty special that guy.

You sort of have to admire his serenely confident but argumentatively gratuitous shot that while “black women are on average much heavier than non-black women” that’s not why black women are uglier. Oh no, he's scientifically controlled for that so they're still just ugly even when you take into account that they're fat.

Next he blithly asserts that blacks on average are stupider (have lower intelligence) than all non-blacks… but that’s not why, quoth he, black women are uglier. Oh no, because, see, even though black men are just as stupid as black women they’re still significantly more attractive than non-black men. (Or, one supposes from his amended version, black men are rated more attractive. Which I guess is supposed to be less racist.)

But wait! Maybe they’re not gratuitous structural arguments: he may have brought them up by way of eliminating the factors most favored by his superficial racist stereotypes to get to his more fundamental ones: “well, you’d think black women were uglier because blacks are fatter and stupider but no, even filtering out their fatness and stupidity black women are still ugly.

Oh, and then there's this lovely bit!

[B]ecause they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

He says that black male attractiveness eliminates as a reason the “fact” that since blacks “have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, blacks have more mutations in their genomes than other races.” And, you see, purer races prefer lower “mutation loads.” But once again, despite those preferences (and, don’t forget, men’s seed-spreading willingness to screw anything that moves… er… to make lower genetic “investments”) and all those icky mutations make black men “if anything, more attractive.”

(Speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that were Kanazawa of black heritage he'd instead have have concluded not that rather than having more “mutations” blacks have robust genetic diversity, which instead would be superior to those icky “inbred” races with their “evolved” aversion to replenishing their degenerate gene pools. He could even use same "objective" statistics to back back up that claim! But I digress.)

(Also speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that black people have more “mutations” because, as you say Rob, “black” is only a race in the sense that “black” people have darker skin, with the result that while “black” people descended from populations recently indigenous to north Africa, south Africa, central, east, and west Frica, south Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, parts of India, and so on are, yeah, a $@^%@ of a lot “older” and racially “mutated” since some of them are likely more genetically similar to what ever relatively genetic monoculture Mr. Kanazawa calls homeland than they are to each other. But I digress again...)

But nope, nope. Instead he says he's factored that out too: “mutations” don’t make black women uglier either. In fact, says he,

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently.

Yup, that’s probably the only other thing that could possibly explain the difference. (If he'd said they had less oxytocin we could all go home.)

It’s also the point at which he stops being a racist asshole using raw statistics and becomes a… free-wheeling racist homophobe "evolutionary psychologist" of the sort that gives evolutionary psychology a really bad name.*

See testosterone, Kanazawa believes, makes everybody look more manly. And black women have more testosterone. Which makes them look more manly. And it's looking manly that makes them ugly.

And so by inference that makes anyone who’s attracted to black women Teh Gay Takei. And, as we all know, Teh Takei is an evolutionary dead end. So all right-minded, offspring-maximizing men recognize that black women are ugly: QED.

And does he present any graphs or charts to back up these assertions? No. Does he bring up any counterarguments? Not at all. Does he cite any prior research? Nope. Does he cite anyone else's research? Not that either.  And does he bring up any other possible reasons why black women might be singled out as less attractive?  Not a bit.  Did he even stop check his arithmetic to make sure that, you know, the data he was using says what he wanted it to?  Evidently not(!)

Nope, nearly all the preceding crap is just Kanazawa being an unencumbered racist doing what racists are really good at doing -- selectively using the tools of a still-emerging field of science to advance his foregone conclusions. He happens to use evolutionary psychology much the way early 20th-Century racists and classists used Darwin to advance "social Darwinism," the way Dick Army, Paul Ryan, and Brian Caplan use economics to advance their defense of the status quo, the same way Dinesh D'Souza and Charles Murray use statistics to defend segregation, and just the same way Donna M. Hughes uses feminism as sheeps clothing for her neoconservatism.

With any luck, though, this time next year Kanazawa will be publishing from The Spearhead or National Vanguard and working lecturing at Bob Jones University or Liberty University. Which, his nominal Darwinism notwithstanding, should welcome him with open arms.

* I.e. he starts pulling shit out of his ass and saying "it must be evolved because it gives me such a woodie" and leaving it at that. Evolutionary psychology itself isn't objectionable in principle -- it would be hard to argue that nothing about human behavior has been influenced by natural selection. And most practitioners are actually fairly moderate people and many of them are outright Unitarian, Birkenstock-wearing, old-school liberals. And as far as I know none of them actually like, let alone admire Satoshi Kanazawa. But! Up till now he's been the closest thing to a Carl Sagan EP has had. And... yeah... how's that been working?

Photo by Flickr user vilseskogen. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So yesterday Ozymandias joined several other bloggers in exhaustive farking the canonical list of "feminists are all nazis" quotes that's been forwarded repeatedly and without alteration since at least the early 1990s.  In response an anxious MRA begged

"Name me one well-known feminist spokesperson from the 1970's who wasn't [a "hate-filled" radical feminist], who praised men for their accomplishments instead of blaming them for imaginary crimes, who loved & campaigned for the rights of all, not just women. I don't know of any."

He only wanted one but I'd probably start with

• Wendy Kaminer
• Nancy Friday
• Wendy Wasserstein
• Erica Jong
• bell hooks

Problem is the 1970s were a very long time ago.  So I don't remember everyone by name.  It's so long ago demographics make it unlikely that the commenter was even born yet... and might not even have been born since the list itself was first circulated!

In fact it was so long ago I mostly remember Dworkin, MacKinnon, the other MRA boogey-men women from that list because Rush Limbaugh and all his little dittoheads and dittohead wannabes keep forwarding it around.  Not so much because contemporary feminists tattoo the nearly 50-year-old S.C.U.M. Manifesto on their biceps.

The main thing MRAs and other anti-feminists need to ask themselves, though, isn't where are the "good feminists" who pass their "disregards actual women's issues in deference to men" test.

It's "who were people like Dworkin and MacKinnon standing in opposition to in the 1970s that they went so batshit crazy to begin with?"

Would MRAs like me to start quoting some of the men who sponsored or endorsed the early Men's Rights Movement? Because if women should be embarrassed by their batshit crazy aunts, then men should be so humiliated by our own antecedent uncles we'd have to put bags over our heads.

Fortunately most MRAs aren't held responsible for batshit-crazy assertions by men in the 1970s such as "a woman is most powerful when she's on her knees," or "the place for women in 'the revolution' is on their backs," or "women will never make good corporate executives -- they'll spend all their time picking out wallpaper and flowers for the front office." Oh, or "the best advice I can give a woman who's about to be raped is to lie back and enjoy it." Oh, and "The movie [Deep Throat] says it’s perfectly normal to have a clitoral orgasm and THAT IS WRONG."  Or how about "Women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species?"  "Direct thought is not an attribute of feminity. In this, women are now centuries behind man" anyone?  "Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote?" "Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not yet been able to answer the great question that has never been answered: What does a woman want?"

I think the commenter would have to agree that anyone who tried to hold one of us men responsible for anything that proto-MRAs from the 1970s said would be such a seeping, festering, shit-eating asshole that they'd leave a wet brown trail wherever they walked. I mean, right? Prety much everyone back then was batshit crazy. Plus that was nearly 40 years ago! And only a real pencil-peckered, syphilitic, 3rd-generation inbred-idiot dickwad would hold an MRA responsible for something anyone said two whole fucking generations ago. Right? Only a real rectal tear would claim that all MRA thought today was invalid just because it was derived from some of the real misogynist bullshit some old dead guys spewed out of their asses, right? And I'm sure he'd agree that anyone who compared contemporary MRAs to descendents of the Ku Klux Klan was a jerk, a dick, and a complete fuckup. Right? Of course he would! I sure would! I can still stand up for men's rights even though I'd kick some of those original assholes down the stairs today.

Which is why, of course, I... disagree with the commenter that he can hold, say, Ozymandias responsible for something Mary Fucking Daly really did say, let alone something someone just pulled out of their ass and attributed to Andrea Fucking Dworkin.