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In a blog post, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams reveals himself as a male-basher who thinks all men need to be castrated to ensure a smoothly running society because all they want to do is rape and tweet pictures of their junk to co-eds:

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.

…Long term, I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond.  Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.


Let me just say that I disagree strongly with Adams. I feel that men have a valuable part to play in society, and I have met many men who act out of noble, brave and even loving impulses. I think their contributions can make for a better, stronger society, and I’m all for men having a say in running things despite their handicaps.

It’s a surprising turn for Adams, who has gotten a lot of much-craved attention for saying idiotic things on the internet and then supporting himself with sock puppets. The upside of Adams continuing attention-getting punditry for his legacy is that now no one talks about what a shit artist he is.

1 COMMENT

  1. We have found Dave Sim’s bizarro, ladies and gentlemen. I smell a sexist cartoonist death match on the horizon.

  2. Your comment about “what a shit artist” Scott Adams is reminds me of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “[T]he rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxy-wide success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”

  3. That’s a great quote, Gene. And agonizingly true. . .

    And I never noticed it before, but Dilbert’s shirt looks a helluva lot like a scrotum, eh?

  4. This guy is like John Byrne. It’s best not to give him any attention and let him go on his sad, little way.

  5. Hey Matt,

    Back in the early 90s Scott Adams was one of the first comic strip creators with an online presence. I remember he wrote that after Dilbert had a date, if he’d gotten laid his tie would no longer be erect.

  6. Sometimes what someone says is not what they are saying. I know some of you won’t get that. Much of what Adams says on his board is very tongue in cheek, often sarcastic and rarely what it seems. If you want to get a sense of where he’s going with statements like this you need to read a few more of his posts. Or not.

  7. Sometimes what someone says is not what they are saying.

    Adams might have been responding to the coverage of the Weinergate crisis.

    SRS

  8. If Adams bothers you, just remember that old adage “Don’t feed the troll”. If no one reacts, he’ll go away.

  9. I’ll side with Ken and Synsidar on this that Adams might be far more diverse on the subject; if a few more layers are peeled away, but I admit on the surface it looks kinda wild. That wouldn’t be the first time that has happened, but on the flip side even if true, he is entitled to his views (akin to Dave Sim, et.).

    The question is why should we care so much? I guess it’s just a matter of trying to understand a public figure and how it may or may not influence their work. Personally, I try to separate the creator from the creation (much as I would Stephen King, et.). Dilbert is still fun enough (it’s like The Office cartoon strip version)…. though lately it can get pretty out there on the comedy… but I digress.

  10. Adams seems to me to be purposely provocative and occasionally plays the Devil’s advocate in his posts. But he has made a significant point that judging what people write based on out-of-context quotes completely obliterates the possibility of satire (has anyone seen the tumblr of facebook posts that think an Onion article is ‘real’?).

    FWIW here’s his own description of the sock-puppetry episode
    http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/planned_chaos/
    and the original controversy
    http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/im_a_what/
    or, you can just re-tweet this with a “can you believe this guy?” hashtag or whatever.

  11. Adams wasn’t making use of straw men. He might have been thinking of Weiner; he explicitly referred to Hefner and his failed attempt to marry again in the course of musing about how some men are controlled by their sex drives. What’s a poor hedonist like Hefner to do? He’s still randy, but too old to attract anyone that’s sensible.

    If women were as hormone-driven as men to dominate in the sexual arena, there’d be no sexual inequality. Or the race might have killed itself off thousands of years ago.

    SRS

  12. I’m starting to get the idea that Scott Adams gets off on being yelled at by women. I guess internet trolling is cheaper than hiring a professional?

  13. This is an odd argument; on the surface, it’s misandrist, but it also resembles certain arguments against particular feminist positions — mostly having to do with responsibility for harrassment and rape — in that the premise is that men are beasts who inherently lack control of their sexual impulses.

    Note that Adams says, not that men must be blamed for ethical or moral reasons, but rather that “the way society is organized […] leaves us no choice but to blame men.” Men are not responsible, but are *made* responsible; a chemical solution would save men from their inherent, unchosen, natures for which which cruel society forces us to blame them.

    It also seems to repeat the old canard that women don’t want or like sex, since Adams thinks their only concern will be having children by noncopulatory means and replacing oxytocin…also by nonsexual means. Nowhere does he seem to consider that women might enjoy sex with men at all, let alone at a level similar to the male enjoyment of sex with women.

    Once, the opposite was believed to be true, and it was women who couldn’t make it without regular sex; part of the comedy of Lysistrata is that women were the last people the ancient Greeks expected to go on a sex strike, and they spend the entire play on the verge of cracking.

    This is the kind of analysis you get when people mistake bad sitcoms for documentaries on gender relations. Alternatively, perhaps it’s Adams’s parody of that sort of blinkered perspective.

  14. To clarify:

    Adams’s apparent — only apparent! — view of male sexuality is identical with the underlying logic behind statements like “Well, she shouldn’t have worn a short skirt; you know what that does to men.” and the “Boys will be boys” excuse for sexual harassment.

    Surely no one thinks those other statements reflect a “female supremacist” position.

  15. Synsidar speaks truth (IMO) :
    “If women were as hormone-driven as men to dominate in the sexual arena, there’d be no sexual inequality. Or the race might have killed itself off thousands of years ago.”

    My first thought was that Adams is responding to the idiotic Weiner move (soon to be known as “pulling a weiner”). It’s sadly true that the “castration” pill would have saved Weiner’s career. Just think: EINSTEIN fucked around during his marriages! His Theory Of Relativity could have gone unbirthed if a sex scandal had derailed his career! What fools even the smartest men be! What greatness has our species missed due to the catastrophies of male “tomcatting”?

    I also agree with you, Omar, but want to expound one one point. I don’t think he is implying simply that “women don’t like sex”. All that is required for there to be a disparity in sexual misbehavior is a difference in the relative-valuing of sex. (How important is sex to you in relation to other things important to you?; men [IMO] will place sex in the top five- women [again IMO] in the top ten. A classic example of this disparity at work is the old-fashioned courtship scenario of the female enforcing “no sex until marriage”. A horrible example is date-rape.)

    from my Department of Cheap Shots:

    “Shawn Hill
    06/17/2011 AT 4:42 PM
    Anyone ever heard of Jonathan Swift?”

    Yeah- Last year The Beat exposed his advocacy of eating children. A scoundrel, for sure.

  16. Shocking secret for those reading this thread:
    Women enjoy sex.

    When it’s done right.

    Hence male anxiety, expressed as institutionalized repression of female sexuality through centuries of religious and legal tradition.

  17. Yeah I agree with Omar — Adams has just found a clever way to encode his actually quite paleolithic view of gender relations.

    P.S. What did shit artists ever do to you? Oh right, the shit art — never mind.

  18. I’m convinced he’s trying to ridicule the (very small number of) feminists who view every penis as a rape-waiting-to-happen by pretending to agree with them. Because he thinks that’s who’s persecuting him for his sexist comments. But like every other time a dork with Asperger tries to get the last laugh by making his tormenter look foolish, but completely misjudges what others’ reaction will be, this is backfiring on him.

  19. Adams is taking the perspective on a given issue that Dilbert, the engineer, would. Technology is the focus and the solution. For a clearer example of a Dilbertesque perspective, see Adams’ post about synthetic vacations.

    SRS

  20. Shocking secret for women:

    Men do sex right. Those of us that aren’t the self-absorbed, brain-dead, pretty boy/manly man azzholes that most women seem to be attracted to do, anyway.

    See: Revenge of the Nerds

  21. Revenge of the Nerds? The one where raping a woman by pretending to be her boyfriend makes her fall in love with you?

  22. >>>Revenge of the Nerds? The one where raping a woman by pretending to be her boyfriend makes her fall in love with you?

    God, lighten the fck up, Francis. Yes, it was horrible horrible horrible the “rape” scene in Revenge of the Nerds. It was just like the one in “The Accused”… or “Casualties of War.”

    And just as horrible as David Letterman making “rape” jokes about Sarah Palin’s daughter. (which you undoubtedly believe is true.

    It’s people like you that make it harder for ACTUAL VICTIMS of rape or molestation to be heard.

  23. And the point was, the line about how nerds think about sex all the time whereas jocks think about sports…. that’s why they’re better at sex. I forgot about the uber-politically sensitive victim mentality pod people around here that look for anything to be used as proof that Man=Evil.

  24. Otis is right; my comment that Revenge of the Nerds is an odd example for his dubious thesis was recently used in a court case to throw out charges against an obvious rapist.

    I’d therefore like to apologize to Otis, to the prosecutors’ office, and to that poor woman. We can all celebrate by tarring and feathering David Letterman together after which we’;ll pretend I wrote other things I didn’t come close to writing.

    In conclusion, Man = Evil!!!!!!!111!!!! Castrate them all, especially the fictional ones!!11!!!1

  25. Well thank you Omar. You’ve done the right thing apologizing and acknowledging your intellectual superior…

    …the fact of which is demonstrated by your seeming incomprehension of the very real fact that when someone uses the word “RAPE” to illustrate the fact a JOKE was made (regardless of whether the joke was in poor taste or not), it is an insult to actual VICTIMS of rape. I know you don’t understand what I’m talking about, “omar”… it’s like throwing charges of sexism around when a girl is not allowed on a boys high school football team. Or racism when a white man is turned down for a job because of his skin color…

    … oh wait, that is legal. Scratch that one. Especially since I was using it to illustrate a point by referring to something else entirely. I understand it is beyond your capacity to get that I might use an example that is not EXACTLY WHAT THE SUBJECT WAS IN THE FIRST PLACE. It’s done many different places, but since you can’t pick up on it I understand your confusion.

    Man = Evil. Yes, there are many feminists that think that. See: Andrea Dworkin 101. I don’t think she stoops to your ignorant “castration” line though. Oh, wait, that was an attempt to mock me, wasn’t it? Bwwwahhahahahahaaaa! You’re SO clever, “omar”!

  26. Otis, when your argument is that nerds do sex well, you should probably pick an example that is a) not from a wacky, slapstick comedy; and b) isn’t sort of unwittingly creepy if someone did, as you seemed to suggest, apply it to real-world relationship.

    In your most recent response, you also seem to be arguing that media portrayals or such things aren’t fair game for discussion, that white males are the last *real* victims of evil words and job discrimination, and that Andrea Dworkin is representative of anything other than an extremely small and pretty much marginal segment of self-declared feminists. Our fundamtental perceptions of reality, our basic assumptions about existence itself, couldn’t be father apart.

    Since that stunning gap in base assumptions has led to your missing my initial point as well as my ostensibly missing yours, I suspect there’s little use in either of us continuing to address the other. I’m not seeing a way it doesn’t go on as snarky, outraged yelling in which we merely irritate each other and annoy everyone else who may have the misfortune to read these comments. It’s a pity; I’m a huge Marx Brothers fan.

  27. Well, see Omar, citing “revenge of the nerds” was not meant to be proof of my statement. It was just an over the top example of the premise that women DO meet many, many of the kinds of guys they bemoan do not exists, while instead going with the watching college football all day ignoring the wife alcohol swilling manly men that they insist represent the majority of men in our country. If you doubt the existence of this, well…. you either live in some sort of fantasy and/or perfect world, or you’re just not paying attention to what’s going on around you. If you think I’m the first man to ever notice this behavior in women, then you’ve never once encountered the stigma of the “nice guy.”

    Yes, Andrea Dworkin is the extreme. I don’t argue that. However, extrapolate her views out towards a “normal” center and you have MILLIONS of women with skewed views of men. (This does in NO WAY imply that some men aren’t as bad, nor do some not have their own misogynistic views of women.) Did I say ALL women are like Andrea and her ilk? No. I said there are “many feminists” that think men are evil. There are. There are, what, 160 million women in this country? Do you believe that there aren’t at least a MILLION that are like MISS Dworkin?

    Yes, I get the “oh poor white male poor you” implication, but none the less, white males ARE the only race/sex it is LEGAL to pass over giving a job to SOLEY on the basis of race and/or sex. If this statement is wrong in some way, PLLLEEEASSSSEEE tell me how it is.

    I’m not above a little snark; however, i generally only give snark when it’s given to me first. I wish no one ill. I take no irritation; I have a life. If it annoys others to read the comment, well, they need to get a life as well if this somehow affects their mood or their day.

    Cheers. Hail Freedonia!