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June 15, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
06:18
Feminist Martyrs
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Nobel laureate and official knight of the British realm Sir Tim Hunt is in the news.
Yep, I do not feel that I have talked about Tim Hunt enough in this week in Stupid and therefore I'm going to talk about him now.
For telling a group of female scientists in Korea that girls in labs are bad news for three reasons.
Because they fall in love with Hunt, because Hunt falls in love with them, and because they cry so much.
Well, Hunt's married, so I think what you actually mean is he said you, as in referring to the people that he was talking to, not referring to himself.
They weren't referring to you either, Rebecca.
Not just because you're not a fucking scientist who's never even seen a laboratory.
It's because you've got the look and demeanor of an old school mom.
It's hard to believe you're only in your 30s.
I have a pretty good idea of why they're crying.
No, you don't.
It's because they can't figure out what they did in life to deserve the horrible magical curse that made them fall in love with a gross ass, scraggly-haired, septogenarian, sexist asshole.
Wow, that's an awful lot of butthurt for one joke.
You better be careful with the insults as well.
He's a knight of the realm.
I'm not really sure what retribution that entitles him to, but basically knock off the judgy looks.
After pretty much everyone who works in science spoke up to say, hey, Tim Hunt, that's a pretty damaging joke you just made.
A damaging joke.
To all of science.
Are you even listening to yourself, you fucking idiot?
Also, yeah, let's just erase the people who spoke up in his defense.
He came forward to apologize.
Not for what he said, which he actually stands behind 100% and even made clearer that it's not a joke.
Even if it wasn't a joke, so fucking what?
Are all scientists now gender segregated?
But because he said it in front of journalists.
He's obviously just angry that now the whole world knows he's a dipshit, so he's much less likely to be able to trick grad students into fucking him using the line, hey, have you ever touched a Nobel Prize?
How about a Nobel Prize winner?
What are you fucking talking about?
He's married.
Have you got any evidence that he has done anything like this?
Or is this just defamation of character?
As for his point about women crying in labs, first of all, it's absolutely a fact that men cry in labs as well.
Why are you taking this so fucking personally?
Have you cried in a lab?
But it's also probably true that women cry more often in labs, since women cry more often in general, thanks to both physiological reasons and social reasons.
Yeah, so women cry more often, and that was the point he was making.
On the physiological side, women's tear ducts are smaller than men's on average, and so it's actually much more difficult to stop from crying.
When your tear duct fills up, the tears have to go somewhere.
Really?
You think it's the size of the tear duct that's the problem, do you?
And not that women are generally more emotional and more prone to crying.
You think men would cry as often as women if only they had smaller tear ducts, do you?
If you have larger tear ducts, you're more likely to be able to hold in your tears.
Yeah, but the issue isn't whether we can hold in our tears more.
It's whether we're prone to need to hold in our tears.
And then there are the social reasons.
We raise boys to think of crying as a shameful thing, and we reward them for not crying.
Crazy.
Why don't we just reward them for crying?
In the same way that Hunt is currently punishing women for crying.
Hunt isn't doing anything of the sort, you fucking halfwit.
He merely made the observation that in mixed-sex labs, men and women are more likely to fall in love with each other, and women are more prone to crying when they are being criticized.
These are facts as he has observed them.
And then there's the simple fact that women just have way more stuff to cry about in the lab.
Uh-oh, did someone wear a shirt with nudie ladies on it?
For instance, like having to work with people like Tim Hunt.
You can rest easy, Rebecca, because you're safe.
A recent study was published by Harvard Business Review in which they found that the majority of women working in STEM fields reported having to prove their competence over and over again much more often than their peers.
You know, the great thing about self-reporting is how reliable it isn't.
And the majority of women also reported being discouraged from displaying masculine behaviors like speaking out about their opinions.
Another thing you don't get with self-reporting is a great deal of confirmation bias by the person doing the reporting.
They don't tell you what they want to hear.
In other news, after 200,000 years of human evolution, women have suddenly become reluctant to give their opinions.
The study found that it was even worse for women of color.
That's interesting because that's exactly what you expected to find.
About half of all African-American and Latino women surveyed reported being mistaken for administrative or custodial staff at some point.
Another great thing about self-reporting is it completely circumvents any stereotypes or bias that the people reported on might have.
And about half of all Asian American women said that they were often expected to take on the feminine role in the office or lab, being the mother hen or the good daughter role.
Wow, that does sound like an attack on the femininity of non-East Asian women.
With all that going against them, women who work in STEM who don't burst into tears on a daily basis should be eligible for some sort of award.
We can call it the Sir Tim Hunt Memorial Prize for putting up with total bullshit.
God damn, we are approaching dead sea levels of salt here.
Don't worry, Rebecca.
The mean, nasty man who said a joke that you don't like and a lot of other feminists took offense to has had his life and career ruined.
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