By David Futrelle

So over on Tumblr, some people were having a nice little discussion of how amazing it is that our ancient ancestors were able to figure out some rather complicated sciencey things, like the circumference of the earth, without being able to just look them up on Google.

Someone mentioned mammoths, those oft-hunted beasts that not only co-existed with our hairier prehistoric predecessors but managed to survive, at least in some remote areas, for several thousand years after humans first became civilized.

Then someone called Brett Caton showed up. He began innocently enough.

“I find it utterly bizarre that humans saw these megafauna,” he wrote, before linking to a New York Times story about the last known population of mammoths that went extinct. According to one scientific paper quoted in the story, these mammoths, living on isolated Wrangel island in the arctic sea north of eastern Siberia, had “carried so many detrimental mutations [in their genome] that the population had suffered a ‘genomic meltdown.'”

Then Mr. Caton’s comment took a bit of a turn.

“That ‘genomic meltdown’ is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal,” he wrote,

because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about – unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit – with incredibly damaged chromosomes. Sex exists for a reason, and no, “because it’s fun” is not the answer, sorry. It works better than reproduction otherwise. Which is why every complex species uses it. Intelligence requires a lot of things to be working correctly, and if you have an all female species that is over the tipping point of idiocy, then there won’t be enough people to maintain the technology to continue to reproduce. And humans will go the way of the Wrangel beasties. Fortunately, feminists are horribly lazy bastards, so i doubt they’ll continue to get their way, but it does made for a decent plot for a dystopian fiction…

Mr. Caton’s comment raises a number of questions, including:

Huh? What? What the hell? Does this dude think the Wrangel island mammoths were, like, the world’s first hairy legged feminists?

As it turns out, I’m not the only one with questions. Caton’s post has so far garnered 154,000 “notes” on Tumblr, and comes trailing a long and ever-expanding string of comments from other people as confused as I am. “Whaaaaaaaa???” wrote one. “W-what??” asked another.

Still another added:

I got to that point … and was like “wait What.” And then it just kept going and I was like “is this actually happening? Am I seriously reading this right now??”

It is. You are. Apparently we feminists extincted the mammoth to male genocide you.

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