Rocket Scientist Matt Taylor Shot Down Over His Impossible, 'Big Lebowski'-Style Bowling Shirt
Feminists across the globe condemned Taylor for his "offensive," "appalling" garment. They slammed his insensitivity to women. Using the hashtags #ShirtStorm and #ShirtGate, Twitter activists expressed their horror at the offending piece of cloth, which was, somewhat ironically, designed and crafted by a woman and gifted to Taylor for his birthday. "This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields," huffed Chris Plante and Arielle Duhaime-Ross at The Verge. "They see a guy like that on TV and they don't feel welcome."
By Friday, Taylor was so browbeaten that he offered a tearful apology, broadcast to the world. "I made a big mistake," he said, choking up. "I offended many people and I am very sorry about this."
Taylor's colleague, embarrassed and stiff, patted his back. The Internet, coiled taut like a cobra, slowly began to unspool. Rose Eveleth, a technology writer for The Atlantic and enthusiastic participant in previous Taylor-bashing, responded accordingly: Now that Taylor had "recognized his mistake and apologized," she wrote on Twitter, "we can both move along with our lives."
Yes, she really wrote that...It's Time To Push Back Against Feminist Bullies
In the last week alone, we saw the social media outrage machine (with assists from friendly journalists, of course) force TIME to apologize for including "feminist" in a cheeky poll of which words should be "banned" from overuse or misuse. (It had won the poll by a wide margin before the thought police cracked down and forced its removal.) Bloggers and writers at The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books all called on Time to renounce the inclusion of "feminist" in the poll.
We witnessed a mob of online feminists harass a male scientist to the point of tears because of his sartorial choices. Dr. Matt Taylor helped land a spaceship on a comet hurtling through space at the clip of 135,000 kilometers an hour, the first time humans had come even close to accomplishing such a tremendous feat.
The outrage couldn’t have been more over-the-top. "I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing," read a real headline that humans with no sense of reality actually wrote and published. Shrill outrage site Jezebel claimed that Atlantic reporter Rose Eveleth, who started the "#shirtstorm," had been subject to death threats. Their headline "Woman Gets Death Threats for Tweeting About Disliking A Dude's Shirt" led to a story of a few people being mean to her and saying stuff like "jump off a cliff." As one Jezebel commenter noted, "they're death threats in the same way that saying 'go f— yourself' is a rape threat." Trigger warning: A review of Eveleth's outrage-tweets over a shirt someone wore might make you embarrassed to be human.
When University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds simply wrote an op-ed for USA Today criticizing the feminist bullying, he was accused by feminists of egregious behavior, including "doxxing" — the practice of revealing a person's private information for the purpose of intimidation. When people pointed out that there was literally not one shred of evidence to support the claim that Reynolds had done any such thing, claims were revised to (falsely) say he'd encouraged "his flying monkeys" to misbehave. Feminists tried to suggest that Reynolds' employer should be upset about what he wrote...How Obsessing About Bad Men Reinforces Their Behavior
My second-grade daughter's class recently wrote and read aloud their "autobiographies." It was an opportunity for them not only to capture some of the highlights from their young lives, but also to forecast their plans for the future. Unsurprising was the number of girls who wanted to be fashion designers and of boys who wanted to be soccer stars. More striking was that almost every boy in the class described how he would eventually get married and have a family.
What prompted so many boys to mention this? It perhaps seems surprising that having a weekly "Friday night movie night" would be as important a goal as winning the Stanley Cup, as one boy announced he wants. But for this group, that was no surprise at all. All of these children come from homes where marriage - and siblings - is seen as a good thing, even as a foundation for a happy life. The room was packed with caring and attentive parents. A family that makes them feel "loved and safe," as one little boy put it, is (thankfully) the norm for this group of students.
In recent months, there has been a crescendo of anti-male rhetoric that is deeply worrisome. From the hysteria over a "rape culture" on college campuses, to the #YesAllWomen social media campaign that took off after the horrific Elliott Rodgers shooting spree, to the more recent uproar over "street harassment," the narrative is that men are perpetual abusers of women. They badger, sexually assault, and sometimes even kill.
Looking at my three-year old son, I wonder what will happen if he hears this narrative enough. Will he and his peers expect misogyny and violence against women to, in fact, be the norm for boys and men? If people expect boys and men not to be fathers and providers, but instead predators and abusers, will that soon actually become the norm?For more useful insight I encourage you to watch the videos here and here as well as the one below!
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