feminism Archives • Richard Carrier Blogs

If Even Hobbits Could Build Advanced Civilizations, So Could Women: How Being Bad at Reasoning Sustains Antifeminist Mythologies

Richard Carrier — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:31:02 +0000

I dare the manosphere to mock Tolkien! “Hobbits are stupid and should be erased from Lord of the Rings because they’re too weak to build things, so obviously they’d have actually all starved to death or something.” Hobbits are way too woke to keep. Sad face. If you think that’s silly, just try this actual […]

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A Continuing List of Examples of Alt-Righters Escaping Their Delusions

Richard Carrier — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:30:58 +0000

I am collecting stories of people who escaped secular delusions, like sexism, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, transphobia, or even, just more generally, alt-right, anti-feminist or “anti-SJW’ worldviews. These are the kinds of delusions that trap atheists. And even when their victims are religious, the stories are still often the same, or similar enough that you will […]

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Is Gynocentrism a Thing?

Richard Carrier — Thu, 01 May 2025 01:02:41 +0000

I was hired to critique a popular video in the manosphere, Traditionalism and Feminism, the Great Gynocentrisms of Our Time. It’s 12-years old but still being commented on and at 60,000 views and counting. Its host, Barbarossa (or Barbar), is no longer active online—because, as a black (“Afro-Latino”) man, he was getting uncomfortable with the […]

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A Barely Thinking Ape Hoses Cultural Anthropology and Comes Up with the Manospheric Hooker Theory of History: Part 2

Richard Carrier — Mon, 20 May 2024 22:20:59 +0000

This continues my discussion from Part 1, reviewing Thinking-Ape’s half-hour video Protectors, Providers, Nazis and Prostitutes. You’ll need to read that to understand what’s going on here. Because there I surveyed important background facts about human biology and culture and the problems with biological determinism as a hypothesis, particularly in the hands of the delusional […]

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A Barely Thinking Ape Hoses Cultural Anthropology and Comes Up with the Manospheric Hooker Theory of History: Part 1

Richard Carrier — Mon, 20 May 2024 22:09:14 +0000

There are thousands of crappy videos in aid of dubious projects. So I generally have to be paid to care about any of them. And lo, my latest hire: to examine what’s going on with Stardusk’s half-hour video Protectors, Providers, Nazis and Prostitutes on his channel Thinking-Ape. Considered one of the founding members of the […]

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The Methodological Application of My Theory of Humor

Richard Carrier — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 14:44:32 +0000

In interviews and hangouts I’ve often discussed my theory of humor and its importance to how we interpret humor, from how we use comedy to understand things about history, to how we decide whether a joke is actually racist or offensive rather than simply funny (or deserved: see The Art of the Insult & The […]

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Bayesian Analysis of Shelley Park’s Uncanniness Thesis

Richard Carrier — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:31:14 +0000

Last month I launched my three-part series on analyzing peer-reviewed philosophy papers with my Bayesian Analysis of Faria Costa’s Theory of Group Agency, where I explain my process and how I selected the articles for review. Second up is “Uncomfortably Close to Human: Robots and the Neocolonial Politics of Care” by Shelley M. Park, in […]

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A Bayesian Analysis of Kate Loveman’s Pepys Diary Thesis

Richard Carrier — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 23:49:58 +0000

Last week I began a three-part series with A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis. Today I will continue with the second random selection from my test set, Kate Loveman’s “Women and the History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary” in The Historical Journal (2022): 1-23. Yes, another random selection in feminist history, but another good one (though […]

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A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis

Richard Carrier — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 19:12:13 +0000

As an ongoing project I’ve selected three articles at random from among credible open-source journals in order to analyze their arguments in a way that makes clear their Bayesian structure, and what grasping this about them can tell us about sound historical methods. My only criteria were articles in English, in credible journals, that are […]

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The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up and the Function of Peer Review in History

Richard Carrier — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 01:57:29 +0000

It’s not common that major, respected academic journals exhibit a catastrophic failure in their peer review process. But it happens. Everything from creationist dribble to just about anything in any field has “slipped past” peer review protocols in legitimate journals—usually leading to retractions when caught (since the epistemic reliability of a journal literally hinges on […]

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