Have you been following the Scott “rape is a natural instinct” Adams story? If not, hold on to your hat barf bag. Adams, creator of the cartoon Dilbert and noted mega-douche wrote on his blog recently that, among other things, men are naturally prone to raping women (and “tweeting their meat,” which he lumps into the same sentence as rape) and society is to blame. An excerpt:

No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control. The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that Adams is involved in the Men’s Rights Movement, since you’ve likely seen this kind of hey-don’t-blame-men-we’re-just-walking-boners argument used to justify sexist remarks and behavior before. Adams, though, is taking his shit to the next level. Not only did he blog about this totally unfair “zero-sum game” where men can’t be happy because they’re made to conform to the non-rape-y ways of society, he’s defending his argument like nobody’s business.

Just to give you a bit of douche history, Adams has been taken to task for blogging while sexist a few times before this. He memorably compared women to children and people with disabilities in a post so confusing it’s not even really worth summarizing, but here’s an excerpt to give you a taste:

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

He also weirdly defended Gwyneth Paltrow when HuffPo blogger Kelli Goff rightly pointed out that Paltrow benefits from privileges not afforded to most people (WTF, right?). According to Adams, because Goff herself is “smoking hot” (his words) and has a master’s degree, she has no right to call out Paltrow.



Hey, we’re all just a bunch of smoking-hot writers here enjoying the finer things in life, amirite?

But enough about Adams’ privilege-denying, ableist, women-children-comparing, douche-riddled past, let’s focus on his douche-riddled present. After Adams’ post about being wrongfully imprisoned in a society which “has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness,” some people understandably got upset. Bloggers responded around the Internet with a resounding cry of Wait, he said WHAT? and Adams responded back.

Adams’ favorite rebuttal to those who find him to be a douchefaced rape apologist appears to be borrowed from my seventh-grade diary: “You guys just don’t get it.” Repeatedly, he’s been telling bloggers/writers/commenters who disagree with him that they’re suffering from “low reading comprehension” and even goes so far as to refer to Jezebel, Salon, Mediaite, Huffington Post, and other so-called haters as the LRC (low reading comprehension) Community. Douchesayswhat?



Yeah, it looks like Alice is fed up with Dilbert’s misogyny too.

In his open letter to this LRC Community, Adams offers to grant email interviews to any writers who wish to further their dialogue with him. Behold:

I’d like to offer an opportunity to one of the writers at Salon, Huffington Post, Jezebel, Mediate, or Mediabistro. Allow me to interview you, by email, for this blog, on the topic of why you so vehemently disagree with your hallucination of my opinion. (Fair warning: It won’t work out well for you.)

So far, brave souls Irin Carmon of Jezebel and Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon have taken him up on his offer of things not working out well for them, and are in the process of emailing back and forth with Adams about biological determinism, the history of sexism, and other topics that he doesn’t seem actually interested in discussing civilly or rationally. (What did we expect from the guy who LOLed at those Obama chimp photos?)

Carmon and Williams are both doing excellent jobs taking Adams to task for his remarks, and he is continuing to make statements with his head firmly up his ass.

On his high opinion of women, to Irin Carmon:

I have a higher opinion of women than you do, in the sense that I think men are genetically more prone to bad behavior. If your point is that women suck just as much as men, I’ll take your word for it. But you’ll need to explain why our jails have so many more men than women.

On horniness, to Mary Elizabeth Williams:

I will grant you that when rape is used as a weapon of war, horniness is not the inspiration for the act. And I will grant you that if an erect penis is not used in the crime, horniness is probably not involved. And I will grant you that if someone who is seriously insane commits rape, it might not involve any horniness. And I will grant you that there are probably dozens of other twisted motivations that don’t start with horniness.

I won’t recap all of what’s being said in the interviews because this post can only handle so much douche, but I will add that Adams is continuing to throw out “low reading comprehension” insults (example: “That’s a simple case of bad reading comprehension, or maybe it is because the post was carved up by bottom-feeding websites until the meaning was distorted to fit an agenda.”) and obscure the issues. Ironically, in both interview series, he tells Carmon and Williams that they and their readers can’t or won’t comprehend his arguments, yet he repeatedly asks them to shorten their responses for his benefit. (This coming from the guy whose main argument is that other people don’t have the reading comprehension skills to understand him! An argument he’s been making for ages!) A few examples:

Adams to Carmon, after she tells him what she found objectionable about his first article: “Phew! Wordy… I don’t understand most of what you wrote in response to my question. Can you try it again without the history lessons?”

Adams to Williams, asking for a response to his assertion that horniness begets rape: “Can you tell me what view you think I hold that is different from your own? And please put your answer in bullet point form if you can.”

Adams to Carmon: “I’m still confused why my blog is more offensive than what you just wrote. Can you try again, in simpler terms, and without the history lesson, to explain your objection to my post?”

Newsflash, Adams: You don’t really have an LRC leg to stand on when you’re asking people to summarize all of their responses to you with bullet points and skip “the history lesson.”

These interviews are ongoing, so we’ll have to tune in to see what else transpires. Who knows? Maybe Adams will cut out the douche behavior and see that not all men are oppressed by horniness and not all women are out to get him. Given this guy’s history though, my money’s on him continuing to go douche. At least now he’s got this Decree to make it official.

Previous Douchebag Decree Recipients: Forty Beads, The DC Comics “Reboot”