[0596] 97 Points
└ posted on Monday, 7 July 2014, by Novil
On Sunday, 6 June 2014, I posted the submissions between place 13 and 25 of the Sandra and Woo and Gaia fanart contest 2014. Go check them out!
- Title: The Human Brain: IQ (3)
- Footnote: Ian J. Deary et al. [2007]
- Biology teacher: This graph shows that the distribution of IQ in men has a larger variance than in women. This means that there are significantly more very intelligent men than women.
- Biology teacher: On the other hand this also means… Oh no, it’s the moral police!
- Dorothy Cambridge: GET HIM!
- Teacher: Tell my wife and children that I love them!
- Male activist: 97 points on the privilege-o-meter!
- Female activist: High time to cull him from the herd!
- Principal: Please welcome your new biology teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Um… Cambridge!
- Dorothy Cambridge: Margaret Cavendish! Laura Bassi! Caroline Herschel! Elizabeth Báthory! Ada Lovelace! Marie Curie! Lise Meitner! Emmy Noether! Dorothy Hodgkin! Rosalind Franklin! Ada Yonath!
- Sandra: This will not end well.
![[0596] 97 Points](/comics/2014-07-07-0596-97-points.png "[0596] 97 Points")
Oh my god… please no one tell Tumblr, please no one tell Tumblr, please.
I love Sandra & Woo.
Is her name a Harry Potter reference or am I stretching it?
I don’t know, I’ve always though feminism was quite silly. I don’t understand how you can solve the issue of genre inequality by focusing solely on the issues faced by one gender. Can’t there just be one big group comprised of both men and women that fight for gender equality for both sexes together? In an ideal world…
In the real world we call them the immoral police or political correctness police. Mostly we just call them idiots.
Irrational hatred is irrational hatred. Normally S&W isn’t so… politically cutting, but it really hits the nail on the head here. Just because irrational hatred is not condemned by any given authority, does not mean it is wrong or will lead to any true improvement.
Hopefully this is just an odd prank, and the teacher will make a triumphant return to talk about various cellular functions.
@ Luke:
That’s actually what feminism refers to – equality of the sexes. Unfortunately, there’s a very vocal, radical minority that creates the misconception of all feminists as misandrists, which is completely untrue.
IQ does not equal common sense.
Guess which one is going to keep you alive in the world longer?
but on the flip side there are significantly more male retards!
SmartAlec105 wrote:
Yeah it has to be…
But the hell… half of those mentioned women were either philospohers (which scarcely has anything relevant to IQ, that never measuered at the time) astronomers which simply observed some stuff – and never really made any conclusion about how things worked…
mathematicians and physicist… no problem… but well I had my promotion last monday… physics and math school… guess how many women were there in the whole ration? 5 out of 40.
our brains do work differently.
But “ministry of truth” won´t like that.
This is hopefully the start of a very entertaining story arc.
@ ekimmak:
IQ is part common sense, also common sense is flawed and has been shown to fail on mutiple occasions, however logic will rarely ever steer you wrong(logic is not common sense, as logic is an invention, a rather effective one)
@ ekimmak:
Depends on the world… I doubt common sense will be able to help you against a rock flying through space on collision course with this planet…
a nuke (a product of intelligence) can do something about it.
Okay, I’m an equal rights guy, I believe women should have every right to be just as incompetent as men. Because as a species, we can be dumb as bricks. But when you have us fighting among ourselves over something as frequently shifting as science as if it were religious law, it’s terrifying to see JUST how stupid we can become without realizing it. I.e. Tumblr.
@ doombybbr: my last comment had a mistake, I meant to say “IQ is part philosophy” the first “common sense” was a typo
@ SmartAlec105:
I thought the exact same thing… I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
S&W has been coming into contact with a lot of uncomfortable, real issues lately… in a humorous way, of course, but it was quite recently that we saw Harriet threatening her own child with a beating for seeking his happiness away from her own narrow world views. And now… forget it, I’m not touching this one. Got burned one too many times.
Mokunen wrote:
Everytime one of you says S&W I read SJW. I’ve seen too many wars…
This is what happens when you don’t check your privilege daily.
It doesn’t matter which sex has the most proportion of intelligent people. After all, it will always be the retarded ones who reach the positions of power and influence.
@ ekimmak:
If common sense was common it would deserve the name. I call it ‘rare sense’.
I think this is more a caricature of the sort of hyper-feminism/misandry that one may encounter on the internet, e.g. in YouTube comments or on Tumblr. Of course, on the internet, it’s rather easy to encounter extreme views on many topics. But it’s important to note that although this sort of view is not as common in real life as MRA’s would have you believe, it is unfortunately not as uncommon as many feminists would like to claim.
As far as the IQ bell curve, I have heard that the variance difference between genders is actually a myth, and that men have very slightly higher average IQ than women (by about 3 points, IIRC, so this only becomes noticeable at extremes of the IQ scale). Of course, remember that IQ was designed to quantify those subtypes of human intelligence that were deemed most important by the men who came up with the measure. Women tend to excel men (on average) on other measures of intelligence, such as EQ, so I think it all balances out. Which sort of intelligence is “better” than the others depends entirely on which sector of society you’re talking about. It takes all kinds to build a healthy, functioning society (division of labor, comparative advantage, and all that), and I for one think we need to celebrate our gender differences and stop acting like one set of roles is somehow “superior” to another.
Ooooh! I sense Another heated topic coming on! *brings popcorn and DR.pepper* ALRIGHTY! GO WITH GOD SPEED S&W FORUM!! *o*
exterminator wrote:
I think you misspelled “short-sighted charismatic sociopaths”.
@ exterminator,
@ Scrutinizer:
Yeah, higher variance means there’s more male idiots out there too. Many happen to also be charismatic and get political jobs….
You know, I really hope this comic doesn’t continue with something like this. This one was bad enough. I really like reading this comic, but this is just too soon after Isla Vista and #YesAllWomen. I know it’s too much to hope for, but I really hope Sandra and Woo turns around and stops what it did here. When you misconstrue feminism as a unified men-hating, anti-science, Nazi-style platform for violent women getting upset over nothing, you reinforce the uninformed stereotypical image of feminism that far-right misogynists and MRA extremists have managed to perpetuate in the mind of the general public. Feminists are not fascists who viciously attack science and “misandry” is not a feminist thing. When feminists call out misogyny, sexist language, and rape culture, it’s because they’re tired of it and they want to create both a safe culture and safe spaces for those who were born in a lower position in the societal gender hierarchy. Patriarchy and institutional sexism are far more violent and harrass women and the feminist movement continually, but for some reason the general public only thinks it’s violent when those women and the feminist movement ask for the violence to stop. Privilege is not a joke, and nor is it something that’s lightly tossed around. The context it’s used in here is very inappropriate, and (I’m sorry this will sound offensive, but I need to get across why this page can be a problem) the way this page of the comic plays out really just makes it sound like a bad, politically-charged joke in the end. Privilege is a problem that’s systematically ingrained in our culture and manifests itself both in the fact that cisgender males are favored by society and have a great deal more opportunity than women and when cisgender males speak in feminist circles with the assumption that they are more knowledgeable about women’s issues than the women who personally deal with them. It’s ironic also that the feminist raised fist symbol is used on one of the feminist straw men in this page. The raised fist is a symbol of empowerment and solidarity often linked to social and political movements like socialism and anarchism. It means an end to violence, hierarchy, and blind bigotry and the beginning of a new egalitarian world with free communication, community brotherhood, and plurality and where opinions are not forced on other people who disagree with you. I don’t mean to attack the comic or the writer or the artist, but I hope they realize how harmful this can be and that their future work will be more positive.
So they did that to the biology teacher just for that interpretation of statistical data? I almost dread to think what is going to happen to Dave Sim and Harlan Ellison… Perhaps they will be bricked up like Elizabeth Báthory was, in windowless rooms with only a narrow slit for ventilation and food. And only the Paris Hilton channel, piped into their rooms non-stop, for entertainment. (Note: if this had been available to Countess Báthory’s jailers, I’m sure they would have.)
>:=)>
@ Luke:
Yes, there is a group that struggles against gender inequality as a whole, and that group is feminists. I know, makes the name a little weird, but the movement formed out of the issues faced by women, who used to have a much worse time of it than they do now (and still get a worse time of it then men). Believe it or not, misandrists aren’t feminists.
@ Lightbulb: What you want is emancipation.
Greenwood Goat wrote:
Her or Jiang Qing, it just doesn’t have the sound of “Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler, Leonardo da Vinci, …”
The only problem with the teacher’s statement is his use of the word “significant.” That graph is FAR from showing a “significant” difference between men and women, plus you would need to know the standard deviation in order to see if there are outliers, which there aren’t cause outliers skew graphs and those are perfectly symmetrical bell curves. Angry statisticians should have hauled him away, not feminists.
Talk about a fanbase splitter. This should be a fun arc, both in the comic and below it.
@ Lightbulb:
Think your taking this a tad too serious, people who can’t see the joke are really not people you should worry too much about as they have already been brainwashed into a dark hole.
Take S&W as the comic it is, comics generally use archetypes to reinforce its points all the time.
Judging by the posts on this message board, I don’t imagine this post will be very popular. However, I think it’s important to note that caricature presented here is a rather inaccurate portrayal of feminism. I know that’s inherent to any piece of comedic or satirical work, but when so many people are confused about the meaning of feminism it’s important to make a distinction. “Feminism” refers to the movement desiring equal treatment and opportunities for men and women, not a group which shuts down scientific data and values only the achievement and perspectives of women. The group portrayed in the comic (whether they claim to be feminists or not) should not be confused with feminism. This written by a proud, male, feminist.
@ Byrrn:
That’s right, it is unfortunate that in many cases, an otherwise fair group is represented by the radical minority which yells loudest
Novil wrote:
“One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong…”
@ ekimmak:
I used to ask (quite often, in fact) what was so common about ‘common sense’. Nobody seemed to be able to give me a good answer.
A visitor from Great Britain gave me an answer and I had to agree it made sense.
I don’t ask any more.
@ Novil:
Novil wrote:
What I wanted was respect. I know revolution isn’t happening, but I think that I and a lot of people would like just a little bit of a break. I didn’t think it was too much to ask that negative and misinformed images like these not be reinforced and spread in the future when they’re already so prevalent. I’m sorry if you felt offended; it’s just that I see these things so much all the time and I felt that open communication might help move forward. I really don’t want to fight you; I think we can put this in the past and work toward more positive things if we are open about this.
@ Mikkel:
I don’t think it’s bad to call out when jokes start to reinforce very non-funny problems. I can see the joke, just like I can see (and these might be on a different scale, but) rape jokes and black jokes. It’s generally fine for comics to use humor with stereotypes and such stuff, but there are unfortunately times when it’s not so fine. When it’s gotten boring for the same misinformed ideas about feminists to be spread and taken basically as truth, even if it’s presented in humor, and when knowledge about what feminism is is so little in the public and to the media, I think it’s reasonable to try to talk our way forward. Brainwashing isn’t when you learn independently about making safer spaces and about greatly misunderstood ideas that are often demonized by the people and institutions who affect how and what you think; it’s when your culture and society gives you a misinformed image of the things that don’t fit the status quo or when you’re taught to see calling out certain negative stereotypes in humor as having poor taste.
Whenever he says S & W, I read Smith and Wesson.
Sarusig wrote:
@ Lightbulb:
Lightbulb, you are right (correct) as well as wrong.
The problem with civil rights movements OF ALL SORTS is the fact the a select group of people see (correctly) in injustice that should be fixed and uses that as a starting point of their own rise to abusive power.
These groups always find people to the movement’s figureheads (and should be the true leaders of the movement). After the group starts getting the power the ‘kingmakers’ want, they overtly take control of the group that they had already in secret.
As for the differense between male and female thought… we do think alike. to take a BIG chance at generalizations…
men tend to focus on one subject at a time to a degree that absolutely baffles women when we don’t notice something they think is obvious. This enables us to stay focused on a problem and solve that problem despite extreme difficulties.
women somehow manage to keep track of multiple things at one times, keeping all of them straight and knowing what is needed for all of them at once.
This means women find the problems, men fix them. This is a very general idea, but it seems to be the norm. There will always be exceptions to this rule, but those exceptions prove the rule.
His strengths cover her weaknesses and her strengths cover his weaknesses.
I think it’s best to say…
HE completes HER. SHE completes HIM.
He is not complete without her. She is not complete without him.
@ SmartAlec105:
No, I’m pretty sure her name is a very clear reference to Dolores Umbridge.
@ Valkeiper2012:
I meant we do NOT think alike.
That’s the one reason why I hate Ishida’s Sinfest.
And when an attractive person is near the I.Q. drops significantly. For males and to a lesser extant females.
@ Valkeiper2012:
Well, the feminist movement that I’m talking about has generally done pretty well in that regard. MRAs on 4chan might have taken a stab at infiltrating, but that probably won’t do much in the long run. There’s been a good and I would even say pretty successful struggle to stop TERFs (trans-exclusionary “radical feminists”) from taking over or even getting to be too major a voice in the movement too. There has been a problem with a lot of “whites and middle- or upper-class only” women being the biggest ones in leadership probably since the movement “began,” but these days intersectional and POC-, trans-, and queer-inclusive leaders have begun to come into the spotlight like Janet Mock and such. It’s probably that these days things like feminism have become very easily grassroots through social media and global networking, which makes it hard for there to be real “leaders” or covert “inside groups” to the movement since every person can become a judge, a contributor, and a student. But I do agree there can be problems with tendencies that happen with a negative curve, for example with #YesAllWomen being dominated by exclusive middle-class white women, but even that had at least a few people seeing through it and making #YesAllWhiteWomen as a sarcastic response.
So much disappointment…
I… can’t believe you did this, Novil. Boy are you about to get slammed hard. And I’m afraid most people won’t realize what he was about to say in the second panel. And I might get sucked in because I’m a contrarian and get myself in all sorts of trouble. Oh Lordy.
@ 885ertd:
Normal distribution is often graphed by the standard distribution. Seeing that is was a study in 2007, we can assume that the teacher got the information with the outliers removed. What really irks me is the statement that he assumes from the graph. It doesn’t include the population that the experiment was based on, and it’s generalizability would probably be a much smaller scope then he implies. Making a statement with that large of a scope would requre a meta analysis, so add experimental psychologists to the list.
@ Lightbulb:
He meant that anyone who believes that this is what feminists are like have been brainwashed.
P.S. The only black joke I have ever found funny was:
Q. What do you call a black person flying an aeroplane?
A. The pilot, you racist.
@ T.Chicken:
Same here. Sinfest was supposed to be an over-the-top comic. It was crude, offensive, and sacrilegious. Heck one of the early comics was “Blaxploitation Funk Bible.” But it’s called Sinfest, it’s doesn’t try to imply that it isn’t about those things.
But someday he decided to make it a comic about radical feminism, with characters and story arcs about fighting the patriarchy and such. I honestly think he either got married to a radical feminist or he no longer does the comic anymore.
On topic I’m pretty sure the professor was about to say “But that means there are more dumb men as well” but you know how radical feminists are. So eager to crucify people for the littlest things.
Lightbulb wrote:
But plenty of us have seen exactly that kind of thing happen, time and again. It really exists. Maybe not all feminists are like that, but the loudest ones surely are. Even the name “feminism” itself appears at first glance to imply that the goal is something other than equality. It’s not called “equalism”, and we all know what “masculism” connotes! *shudder*
Of course, every movement thinks their own cause is absolutely righteous and therefore everything they do is justified. Same for wars, really. There’s a problem with that though: the sense of being justified gives us a power trip and we over-estimate what we’re justified in doing. It’s human nature.
In my experience, it seems *very* lightly tossed around. Almost gleefully.
That may or may not be true in some big statistical average, but it’s a very broad generalization. An awful lot of males don’t feel particularly “favored”, and an awful lot of females are. So when these kinds of sentiments are expressed very broadly, like you do here, it’s going to upset people who feel like they or their friends have been affected by exactly the opposite bias in more specific situations.
S&W isn’t saying anything in feminist circles. This is the public sphere here.
I think your comment is the gentlest I’ve ever seen a feminist get in a comment. Usually, the comments I read from those circles are extremely vitriolic, even outrageously over-the-top in their comparisons.
Oh God no… Please do not do Sinfest…. Please do not do Sinfest…. Please do not do Sinfest…. Please do not do Sinfest….
Really meh. That graph (and RL Science) doesn’t show a “significant” difference, just a very slight one. And the thing about feminism (and anti-racism, and gay rights), even today, is that it’s not really that powerful. Every time someone makes a ~satirical comment or story about OH NOES POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, it’s punching down. And punching down is never incisive, only cruel.
But this comic is generally terrible at showing any kind of nuance – look at the last arc. Can’t just write a kind of conservative mother, nope, she’s got to be an OTT caricature.