Russian Newspaper Tells Domestic Violence Victims to Cheer Up, Because Abused Women Have More Sons

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Russia has passed an amendment effectively decriminalizing domestic violence, and in an astounding feat of idiocy, a popular Russian newspaper attempted to cheer up the victims of domestic violence by asserting that abused women have more sons.

Violence against women is an extreme problem across the world. According to The Guardian, it’s estimated that a woman in Russia dies of domestic abuse every 40 minutes. But last week the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper wrote that wife-beating had its advantages, because it leads to more sons: ”Recent scientific studies show the wives of angry men have a reason to be proud of their bruises. Biologists say that beaten-up women have a valuable advantage: they more often give birth to boys!”

The assertion is so awful that the idea that boy children are more desirable than girl children barely registers as a blip on the horror meter.

According to The Moscow Times, this “science” comes from two articles about violence and male offspring by evolutionary psychologist and proud asshole Satoshi Kanazawa, who claims that “violent men have more sons.” His data seems questionable, however, given the degree to wich the scientific community has criticized his methodology and data usage and accused him of “pseudoscience-based shock jockery” when preparing articles like the one where he said black women are “objectively less attractive” than women of other races and that “women may have been [evolutionarily] selected to tolerate a certain level of nonlethal violence in their mates.”

I’m not normally a violent person, but I wonder if Kanazawa has been evolutionarily selected to tolerate a certain level of my punching him. Why else would he have evolved such a punchable face?

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