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In a discussion of my “Ladies! Stop assaulting us by dressing like slutty sluts” post, regular commenter DarkSideCat left a comment that really got to the heart of what is so troubling about the CoAlpha Brotherhood and others of their ilk. I thought everyone deserved to see it, so here it is. (I’ve edited it down slightly, broken it into paragraphs and put especially pertinent points in bold; you can see the original comment in context here.)
To set it up: In a previous comment Eoghan had referred casually to the “aggressive flashing of fertility and mating symbols by females.” DarkSideCat replied:
You mean their fucking bodies? Have you so objectified women that you can’t think of their very BODIES as anything other than ‘fertility and mating symbols’? You are thinking of women’s skin as some sort of sexual object for you, rather than their own flesh. … You are assuming that women’s bodies are sex objects or sex acts, they aren’t, they are people’s fucking bodies.
Men show their skin all of the damned time. They even routinely go topless in public places. Because a man taking off his shirt in the heat, or putting on a nice pair of jeans to try and look nice is a person doing stuff, whereas a woman going topless in [the] heat or putting on a pair of jeans to look nice is a filthy slut who deserves to be raped?
Women’s bodies and skin are no more public property than men’s, and, if you can’t manage to see someone in public and find them attractive without thinking they are evil and are asking for you to rape them, you are the problem, not them.
Shit like this is also pretty damned insulting to men. You know, I think more highly of men than this, perhaps that is the difference between me and CoAlpha. I think that men can (and some in fact do) behave like decent human beings, and see women as human beings as well. I do not see male sexuality as so innately out of control and violent that if they see someone sexy, they will feel a burning need to violently attack and rape them.
You want to know why rad fems see all men as rapists? Because they believe the same stereotypes about men as anti-feminists like CoAlpha. If you spend so much fucking time pushing the notion that men can’t help being assholes or rapists, you are going to get some people to believe it, but disagree about the solution.
The quotes here contain direct threats of rape and murder and say that people dressed in certain types of clothes are asking to be raped. Yet, somehow you can’t see how fucked up that is?
Amen.
>I think you are confused David, men do not aggressively flash fertility symbols and the ones that do are considered sex criminals.Male fertility symbol = phallus.Men being topless doesn't involve flashing a fertility symbol… and the rest is just you putting words in my mouth.
>You've used feminist magical thinking to turn what I said into a pro rape statement.I'd rather that you didnt insinuate that Im a rapist here on your blog, thats me in the picture.
>She didn't insinuate that you were a rapist; she's talking about what Drealm, the CoAlpha guy, said in the comments I was quoting, and saying generally that if a particular guy can't look at women in public without thinking they're evil and wanting to rape them, that guy is the problem.
>DarksiteCat: You want to know why rad fems see all men as rapists? …No, I do not want to know.To claim 'ALL men are rapists' is truly man-hating idiotism.
>"You want to know why rad fems see all men as rapists?"No more than I want to know why X group thinks "god hates fags".Same bigoted shit, different package.
>What a hostile, bitter-sounding rant that was.It is not unreasonable to acknowledge the reality that women commonly use their sexuality to obtain non-sexual benefits for themselves, and have done so throughout history. It's called beauty power or sexual power. Men (and unattractive women) do not usually reap non-sexual benefits because of their looks, and therefore they're at a disadvantage compared to women who have sexual power.You feminists sure are adept at selling female power and privilege as female victimization. It's a sales tactic that doesn't work on MRAs, but you still have a substantial portion of the public that buy into the feminist myth that female beauty power is somehow identical with the sexual objectification of women. This myth actually perpetuates the advantage that attractive women have utilized for eons.
>It's funny how feminists call it female liberation when women can freely think about sex how they want without being restricted with slut shaming. Yet these same idiotic feminists attempt to regiment male sexuality.
>It's basically the social norm to slam male sexuality.Oh how dare men be different compared to women. It's such a crime.Yet if men constantly slammed women for being different in any shape or form, they would be deemed as misogynistic cave men
>> Same bigoted shit, different package.That's a succinct summary of this particular strain in MRM rhetoric. Take the old, chauvanistic attitude of blaming women for being abused ("she was asking for it") and wrap it up in the language of victimization and human rights activism (men are victims of female "privilege").In the wake of the success of movements like the civil rights movement, reactionary groups have been fighting back (for decades) by co-opting the rhetoric. But it's a cynical ploy, because the underlying prejudices are the same. You cannot fight injustice with prejudice, and to be a real right's movement, the MRM has to reject prejudice against women along with prejudice against men, as part of rejecting prejudice itself.That is the point David makes over and over again, and which remains unanswered. Where are the MRA's who are speaking out against the bigotry in their own movement?[crickets]
>JoeIm not sure that I would call that standard mra rhetoric, David seeks out a minority of the commentary. That said, I think that the mrm is in some ways becoming like feminism and in places is a vegetable drawer of damaged and abused people that project their pain on to all women instead of just the ones that hurt them, or the system.The worst commentary is coming from america, which is also where the largest civil and human rights roll backs and extreme man hating is coming from, so I suspect one is a symptom of the other.
>Eoghan, FWIW, I didn't actually say this was typical MRA rhetoric; I noted that the site was a small one. But it is interesting that in the comment cat was responding to you said of the CoAlpha site that: "I think that these guys have some points" and that "You know, reading through their site, there is a lot of good commentary in there."In other words, you seemed to be explicitly aligning yourself with the rhetoric/ideas you now seem to be disavowing. So which is it?
>Also, Joe didn't say this was standard MRA rhetoric either; he referred to it as a "strain in MRM rhetoric."
>Where are the MRA's who are speaking out against the bigotry in their own movement?Where are the feminists speaking out against the bigotry in their own movement?
>The very definition of "rhetoric" are feminists claiming that men are wrong for simply having male sexuality.Feminists these days feel this entitlement to claim that they are in charge of male sexuality and they are entitled to make the rules of male sexuality.This type of rhetoric has made many women in society (even non feminists) convinced that it's acceptable to have this attitude.
>JoeGoing by memory, that guy didnt blame women for being abused, he said that he didnt enjoy feeling a strong "primal" urge and would rather that there wasn't a deliberately hyper-sexual environment being created that he could not escape from.I dont agree with his views but I suspect that he has as much right to object to women creating a sexual environment and deliberately flashing fertility and mating symbols as a woman would males doing the same, in fact we have feminist installed legislation against men doing that very thing.He is also sexually frustrated… and is sexually oppressed in a number of ways, masturbation carries shame of you are male with no sexual value to women as does paying for sex as does being labelled a "looser who cant get a date" and a "creep" by the women that reject him, so IMO there, you have a recipe for misogyny and sexual dysfunction.
>From what Eogan was expressing; it never ceases to amaze me how women mostly get a pussy pass and/or the sympathy card when they feel frustrated or bitter over men. It's very rare for a woman to be shifted to an social outcast when she feels resentment towards men in general. Such as having overly exaggerated paranoia that all men are potential users or rapists until proven otherwise.Yet no matter how crappy a man is treated by women; there is never ever a justified excuse for him to feel a strong sense of resentment or bitterness to the same level as what I mentioned about the attitudes of women above.With political correctness these days, women are above criticism as the misogyny card gets thrown around so easily. On the other hand, women have an incentive to practically be misandrists with no ramifications.
>"Where are the feminists speaking out against the bigotry in their own movement?"They are all over the place. To start: http://articles.latimes.com/1997-03-16/books/bk-38664_1_andrea-dworkinhttp://susiebright.blogs.com/Old_Static_Site_Files/Prime_Of_Kitty_MacKinnon.pdfhttp://sitemaker.umich.edu/lesbian.history/the_sex_warshttp://kittywampus.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/frankenstein-necrophilia-and-the-final-solution-how-transphobic-was-mary-daly-really/"Feminists these days feel this entitlement to claim that they are in charge of male sexuality and they are entitled to make the rules of male sexuality."[Citation please]Some radical feminists, true, are hostile to male sexuality. But most feminists today have rejected radical feminism.
>David, the thing is the moderates speaking out against the extreme feminist bigotry are generally bigots themselves, they just dont know it. And they might speak out against Mckinnon, but they support the bigoted legislation she produced. Also, trans people speaking out against trans-phobia is not the same thing as feminists speaking out against hetorophobia, in fact moderate feminists reject the feminists that do, for example hoff sommers, patai and farrel are ostracized by the mainstream movement.
>"the moderates speaking out against the extreme feminist bigotry are generally bigots themselves"Show me an example of bigotry in any of those things I linked to. (You didn't read any of them, did you? You never do, do you?) I'm not a bigot, Susie Bright's not a bigot, the blogger at Kitty Wampus is not a bigot, the sex-positive feminists who critique the radical feminists aren't bigots. I'll say it again: Show me one bigoted thing in any of the examples I cited. There aren't any, because the people writing them aren't bigots.
>Oh, and Hoff Sommers, Patai and Farrell are ostracized by feminists because, regardless of what they call themselves, they've simply rehashed a bunch of antifeminist arguments and called them feminist. (Does Farrell even call himself a feminist? He makes giant deal out of the couple of years he spent on the board of one local chapter of NOW in the 1970s, but nothing he's done since has been feminist.)
>David Futrelle said… I'm not a bigot … Is this a joke? As what else do you consider your own activity with this blog? As heretic or what?For sure, I have not seen anything here, which I would call 'understanding' – even not in severe cases where males are treated really badly by women. Even young boys are not spared as target by feminists, even not old men, even not sick men or handicapped men.I read here only some distorted comments copied from MRA-forums telling everybody the worst about all people who are talking about problems concerning men.
>Nicko81: With political correctness these days, women are above criticism as the misogyny card gets thrown around so easily. On the other hand, women have an incentive to practically be misandrists with no ramifications. Same in Continental Europe, but women are using their rights by far less hateful, and in a less aggressive form than in USA/UK, maybe you can call this behavior derisive, but not hateful.There are limits what is still acceptable and what not. Also legal limits. Many women are still reasonable in their behavior and demands.US/UK and a few other countries however do not have limits in their laws regarding feminism anymore, their government are entirely biased and women are free to do whatever they want, it's a legal system supportive to 'overdemanding' solely out of the female gender. In those feminist countries like USA, men are used somehow like tools. Used and if broken, away with it and replaced with something else.It's not everywhere like that worldwide, therefore MRAs encourage international dating, interracial dating, living abroad, studying about laws in feminist countries to be informed about risks and to avoid mistakes, how to say NO to some certain women etc. etc. …Of course feminists hate the Men's Rights Movement.
>Yohan: Find a single bigoted thing I've said on this blog. Don't say "oh, everything." Find a single specific statement. Quote it. Give the URL. One single thing.
>Yohan asked in an earlier thread:"I ask myself, what is the purpose of this blog?"I'll tell you. This blog is a vehicle for white-knighting by Mr. Futrelle so he can score that all-important whiff of Ketracel-Pink.
>@David Futrelle:"Yohan: Find a single bigoted thing I've said on this blog. Don't say "oh, everything." Find a single specific statement. Quote it. Give the URL. One single thing."You really threw down the gauntlet in the above statement, didn't you? You must have had so much certainty that you could never be challenged on grounds of bigotry, so much that you put your credibility (and that of your detractors) on the line. Well, let's go there.David, have you ever considered the possibility that hatred could be ensconced in a world view? That a bigoted ideology could be embraced by an ostensibly open-minded and tolerant person? When I ask that question, I realize that it could indict me too, as it could anyone on either side of the debate over the merits of feminism vs. non-feminism. But why throw down the gauntlet as you did, proclaiming yourself emphatically innocent, elevating the value of your political views as somehow beyond reproach? Are you better than any one of us? Isn't there one ounce of self-doubt in your mind, some meekness or humility that might cause you to question the foundational value of your feminist ideology? In order to maintain my own integrity, I must put my judgment and my conscience ahead of my political opinions every day. Can you honestly tell me that you do the same?