Well, this is my angry blog, so I guess I should start off with an angry post. I'd been thinking for a while what I should bitch about first, and I finally had it decided for me today. We're going to start off talking about ketchup. Yes, ketchup.
No doubt, if you've somehow stumbled across my blog, you either know me personally and have already read this rant elsewhere or are familiar with the slightly-more-popular sites "quickmeme" and/or "Google+". Which means you've probably seen the "Wendy's Ketchup cup" thing going around right now. I'll assume, however, that you somehow have not been exposed to this and explain. The Wendy's hamburger chain has neat little waxed paper cups that you can use to hold condiments. These cups are fabricated by taking a round piece of paper stock and pleating them into a conical shape with a flat bottom, then rolling the top edge to hold the form. This results in a very simple one-piece nesting cup that dispenses rapidly from a tube, like drinking cups. Now, if you're a weirdo like me, you may have noticed that a Wendy's ketchup dispenser (or dispensers at other chain restaurants that use the same type of cup) will fill the cup neatly in one pump. Kind of a nifty little bit of calibration there, wouldn't you say? Instead, what's currently going around is an image of one of those cups with its pleating partially undone and a greater volume of ketchup inside. That's a neat trick, and I'd never thought of doing that before, in part because it destabilizes the cup and makes it easier for the whole thing to collapse into a big mess on the tray. But hey, nifty trick. That's not the point of the picture, though, no, or else I wouldn't be bitching about it! No, the point of the picture is that it's being touted as the "right" way to use the cup. A "secret", if you will, "discovered" by someone. And that we've all been doing it "wrong".
First off, this might come as a surprise given that I'm very openly pagan to everyone but my mother, but I despise magical thinking. There is not always a secret to be found, and simply thinking something is true does not make it true. Things like these fall into the category of "Just So" stories, like all those old folk tales about how the leopard got its spots, or why a rock formation looks like a sleeping woman, or why women like pink (more on THAT one in a bit). "Just So" stories are interesting tidbits of folklore, but it is purely asinine to treat them as a "real" worldview. You see, "Just So" stories and their ilk aren't just limited to quaint folktales about animal features and mountain ranges. The same kind of story has popped up as an unwelcome guest within scientific fields. For example, you might know that IQ tests in the US often show that white, middle-class children score better than minority or poor children. There are scientific ways of evaluating that data, and there are "Just So" methods. I'll come back to those in a tick.
Well, I guess it's time to explain why women like the color pink, then. You see, there's a subclass of "Just So" stories, sometimes referred to as "biotruths" (which apparently stems from the wonderfully-misogynistic Gor series). These are an extension of the worst kind of evolutionary pop-psychology, in which all modern constructs are justified by some nebulous trick of evolution. For example, why is the "traditional" family one in which the man works and the woman stays home? According to the "biotruth", it's because women are the only members of the species that can have babies, so men are made (yes, biotruth borders on Intelligent Design at times) to be the workers so that the species doesn't have to risk annihilation by having the breeding stock do the dangerous work of hunting and defense. It's not like we have female hunters like lions or matriarchal packs like hyenas anymore, you know - they all died off. Wait...so anyway, back to the pink thing. Here we go. I'm warning you, it's complicated. OK, here it is:
Berries.
What, you thought it needed more words than that? OK, the full explanation is that women like the color pink because they had to collect berries for the tribe, and so evolution has caused them to be innately attracted to bright, berry-like colors in order to facilitate their role as gatherers. What do you mean, "societal pressure" and "forced gender roles"? No, no, women like pink because of berries. Everywhere. Always. It's biotruth! OK, I'm about to vomit, so I'll come back to this in brief later, when I get to that last thing I mentioned in the title.
Let's tick back to the IQ tests for a minute, why don't we? See, people look at a disparity in the results and start wondering "why?". The scientific mind starts trying to weed out the biases, like the education disparity between socioeconomic strata and the socioeconomic disparity between racial and ethnic groups. You'd then start looking at the underlying causes of those disparities, and the causes of those, et cetera, turtles the whole way down, until you sussed out the fundamental issues. Or you could just decide that those IQ tests prove that whites are smarter than non-whites, and are richer because of it, and say "Just So". Then you go on to say that we need to make the whole species smarter and wealthier, so those lowly minorities need to stop breeding. Or breathing. Whichever is more expedient. A "Just So" mindset leads to fucking eugenics. How can it get any worse? Eh, I think I'll let that sit a minute.
Back to food! You see, there's a "Just So" meme going around the Internet right now known as "Sudden Clarity Clarence". It's a picture of a guy with a dumbfounded/enlightened look on his face, that face you get when you just finally understood the joke someone told three days ago, that moment when you feel so smart for understanding something yet so dumb for not having understood it sooner. For several days, that meme was flooded with the "realization" that the name of the Arby's chain comes from "R.B.", and that comes from "Roast Beef", the primary ingredient in most of their sandwiches. Cool thing to realize, right? I mean, I figured that out when I was eight, and that was...wait, I think I need a Sudden Clarity Clarence moment, because I just realized that was over two decades ago. Very simple explanation, very clean and neat understanding. 'Cept it's fucking wrong. It stands for "Raffel Brothers", the guys who started the chain. But hey, it's just a little misinformation, some stupid shit thrown around on the Internet, nothing major, right? Well...
You see, there's this sub-sect of Reddit (where most of these memes originate) known as "r/mensrights". The "r/" means...no, I'm not explaining Reddit on my blog. I don't read it, anyway. The point here is that the "Men's Rights" (or "MRA" - "Men's Rights Activism") subreddit is a group of misogynists banding together and claiming that men are somehow downtrodden in modern society because they can't treat women like shit anymore. They use terms like "spermjacking", which means that a woman has absorbed your precious bodily fluids to get pregnant without your consent! I'm not saying it has never happened. I'm saying that these people believe this shit happens all the goddamn time. I knew a guy who honestly believed that just being friends with a single mother could put him on the hook for child support. I just realized he's an MRA guy, Reddit or not. Clarence, I have need of you again. Wait, what's that caption you're sporting? Oh, it's the one I found on you just last night, thanks to an MRA guy (or, given their propensity to justify misogyny, abuse, and sexual assault, "MRApist"). It reads, for those of you unable to see my mental tableau through the Internet (thank your god or gods for that, believe me), "Men are paid more because women expect them to buy drinks and dinner". This was some MRApist's "sudden clarity". That's right. Men aren't paid more because of misogyny, societal constructs, or attempts at forcing gender roles. They get paid more because women are just so damn greedy. Where are my fucking Tums, I am going to puke again.
OK, back to the lighter note from before. Shit, I don't have a lighter note, I have eugenics. Fuck. Back to that, then. You see, there's an even worse kind of "Just So" story out there than the ones I've mentioned so far. All of the ones I've been talking about up to this point are intellectually-bankrupt attempts at explaining why something is the way it is, and usually even why it "should" be that way (goddamn anthropocentric fallacy). There's a kind that deals with why things aren't the way they "should" be, too. Let's take, for example, the question of why Germany was not victorious in World War I (yeah, the first one). You could argue it had to do with any number of things, and some of those arguments would be right. However, because I assume you are sane, you would not assume that the Germans must have lost the war because they had been betrayed by the Jews. No one would FUCK FUCK WHY IS THIS HERE
*deep breath*
Okay, not all of the "stab-in-the-back myth" was about Jews. But part of it fucking was, and that's fucking scary.
You see, the core of the "Just So" story is a sort of "banishing" of uncertainty. It's scary to not know why things are the way they are. Some people fill that scary void with religion (see God of the Gaps), some people do it with science (see, well, science), and some people do it with folklore. In the end, though, it comes around to needing to "know" things, even if that "knowledge" is wrong. Sometimes it's innocuous bullshit - when people decide they "know" how a ketchup cup is supposed to be used, or where "Arby's" came from, we get annoying memes. Sometimes it's discriminatory - when people decide that they "know" that women need to be paid less because men buy the drinks, we get a 23% wage disparity by sex. And sometimes, when people decide that they "know" they lost a war because the Jews betrayed them, we get the god damn Holocaust.
"Just So" stories are mind poison. They kill intellectual pursuit, they kill equality, and they kill people. Don't believe it just because it sounds good enough.
