A lot of MRAs maintain that they’re not anti-woman, just antifeminist. Heck, one new contributor to Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit has put that claim in the name he chooses to identify himself by: ProWomanAntiFeminist.
Alas, his comments don’t quite live up his moniker. PRAF (for short) launched his Reddit career a couple of days ago with a series of comments, all of them upvoted by the regulars, arguing that prostitution should be legalized — because he thinks that would be bad for women. “[L]egal prostitution reduces women’s economic advantage over men,” he argued in his second comment. Why? According to PRAF, because prostitutes offer men a better deal on sex:
[P]rostitutes give men no strings attached sexual satisfaction reasonably and anonymously for a set price. Without the man having to jump through arbitrary hoops to “impress” the girl, risking an “oops” pregnancy, or (god forbid) getting married.
When sex and female companionship is a man’s objective, prostitution is an efficient and cost-effective option that many women don’t want to have to compete with.
In other words, prostitutes break the back of the dreaded Pussy Cartel — or, as PWAF would call it, the “sexual trade union.” Not only are wives and girlfriends more costly in the long run for men, but they’re also not actually obligated to have sex:
Married women get unfettered access and control over male resources, and they don’t even have to put out. Girlfriends get some access to male resources, dependent on how attractive she is and how desperate he is.
Simply paying up front for sex is so much more convenient:
Prostitutes offer a dependable, no strings attached experience for men.
And so we come to what PWAF sees as the big payoff here:
Legal prostitution reduces the desperation of men, mandating that non-prostitute women have to bring more to the table to secure male resources.
I suggest you read that last sentence over again, because it’s a doozy.
Even by his own daffy logic, PWAF is advocating something that he clearly sees as anti-woman — or at least anti “non-prostitute women,” as he so charmingly puts it.
Might want to rethink that name.
Of course, given PWAF’s familiarity with MR lingo and logic, I suspect that this “new” commenter is actually a very old commenter under a new name.
I’d suggest he go back to his old one.
Last night I wanted to have sex but my boyfriend didn’t.
So we made chocolate-coated almonds together (using lightly salted almonds=YUM), watched a documentary about prison overcrowding, and fell asleep cuddling.
I suppose he could have hired a prostitute to do all that, but it might have taken some shopping around to get one with confectionery skills. And it would have cost him a whole lot more, unless you consider “showing affection” to be a huge horrible cost to a man.
I always hope it doesn’t come off as gloating or TMI, but I feel like telling little vignettes from Earth–always more complex and usually far more fun than MRAland–is the best way to show how absurd the “men trade money and affection-charades for women’s pussies, other than that they can’t stand each other” paradigm is.
I don’t feel threatened in the least by prostitutes, because their clients and the guys I would be interested in do not overlap. Why do MRA types like to constantly tell me that all guys only want sex, when my romantic history says that isn’t true? If I’m allowed to have old-fashioned values (and rather than allowed, some MRA would prefer the values be forced), why aren’t men allowed to have compatible values? I would hate to be a MRA because their movement is just so bossy and inconsistant in what it’s trying to boss you to be!
Given how disgusting and ‘used-up’ these guys find women who’ve had multiple sex partners, I have a hard time believing that they would be lining up to take advantage of legal prostitution. Or, at the very least, that they wouldn’t hate and loathe themselves afterwards and direct that all back on womankind (“If the price of pussy weren’t so high, I wouldn’t have to degrade myself by sleeping with filthy whores!” or some such nonsense.)
Although I think the whole sex economics thing is bullshit, I’m actually in favor of legalized prostitution. (Though not for the same reasons as this guy.)
I think it’s better for a person of whatever gender to be able to pay for sex with another person of whatever gender instead of letting their repression build up until they go crazy.
He says women have control over “male resources.” He’s suggesting that money is a male resource. It’s not.
Both partners have control over shared resources. Sometimes women contribute more. Often they contribute more unpaid labor, most often childbearing and child care and housework. Not to mention the unpaid labor from getting paid less for the same work in the paid workforce, though that is not taken home.
You would think they’d want women paid more so they don’t have to depend on men’s irrationally higher pay when the decision is made to reduce to one wage-earner in the family.
Reserving comment on legalized prostitution for now, I love how these guys think every woman cares about cock. And that every man hates romance: I am not often interested in men, but I *promise* you the ones I am care about it as well.
Also, sexual economics is even more voodoo than most forms of economics. Pretty impressive, that is.
I think legalized prostitution would be an okay thing to have in an ideal world, one where people respected sex workers as just another type of service professional and one where it wasn’t a part of a society-wide “men pay money, women pay sex” paradigm.
Unfortunately we do not live in that world. I’m still in favor of legalization because it protects the rights of sex workers and keeps them out of a lot of “something horrible happened but I can’t go to the authorities” situations, but it’s… under protest. I think it’s better than underground sex work, but still not great.
I’d most like to see a world where sex work was an option because sex wasn’t stigmatized and gender-roled, I’d second most like to see no sex work, but my third choice is that sex work at least shouldn’t be unnecessarily dangerous.
(Please note how their “competition” with me as a non-sex-worker is absolutely nowhere on this list, on account of how that makes no sense at all.)
David,
I don’t see how that follows from the quote. The guy really seems to believe that women have a structural advantage. Removing that structural advantage would at first seem to be anti-woman, but it’s not. Just as being against male privilege does not mean being anti-man: getting rid of it would be better for everyone, including men.
Now, you could argue that women don’t have structural advantages. But even then, I’d say claiming women have them is not necessarily being anti-woman, rather ignorance. (My personal opinion would be that there are some advantages, but that they are completely blown out of proportion here.)
I think he’s wrong. I live in a country where prostitution is legal, but it’s not a majority of men who use their services, and I certainly don’t have the impression that women here face a lot competition from sex workers. Men may actually like women as people, and prefer being with them in general as opposed to for sex only, imagine that.
Also, beyond the specifics you are right of course: If that guy is pro-woman, then I am Napoleon Bonaparte.
(More importantly: Holly, these almonds sound fantastic)
Further proof that these guys are vile little creatures who imagine that everyone else is as vile as they.
Regendering this stuff is fun and instructive:
Kilo, it seems pretty clear to me that he thinks men have a structural advantage and are simply restrained from leveraging it fully. What’s a “male resource”? It seems pretty clear he means money, unless he simply means “a male’s resources” in which case he’s writing wrong. So, in his picture, post-legalization, wives now have to up their game in order to get whatever from their husbands. It’s a transactional scheme, money for pussy, in which he is now the demanding consumer. Not only is it anti-woman in the sense that it is based on a dumb view of women as lining up to male ATMs to extract money with their bodies, it is anti-woman in the sense that he thinks “male resources” will command far more power over women after prostitution is legalized. Because they can’t get jobs, amirite?
Imagine someone arguing this:
“Currently, most people go to the pub with their friends, but having friends is shit. They make you buy them birthday presents and tell them jokes and laugh at their jokes and and boring stuff like that. It would be more efficient and cost-effective to hire an actor to go to the pub with you. However, your friends would hate that idea because they fear competition.”
I think in my ideal world sex work would resemble being a hired pub companion, or hired holiday companion. I’m sure there are subsets of people for whom their availability would be a boon, but it would make no sense for most people to hire someone to have mutual fun with, because people like having fun, because that’s what fun is.
Meanwhile, we should do whatever keeps sex workers safe and least likely to be exploited.
PS Holly, how do you make those almonds? They sound amazing.
This guy makes perfect sense to me. Too many almond makes a fellow fat.
http://m.wikihow.com/Make-Chocolate-Coated-Almonds
Use GOOD chocolate–if you use Nestle’s you’ll regret it. We used Ghiardelli and it was very worth it.
Also, I think a guy who would avoid dating or marrying because he’d rather go to sex workers is in a whole ‘nother category than a guy who goes to sex workers sometimes.
Yum! Thank you, Holly!
Exactly what I was thinking “oldfeminist.” If “married women get unfettered access and control over male resources, and they don’t even have to put out,” then why isn’t he a feminist?
I get a kick out of how people like PWAF describe prostitution as an alternative to marriage. In reality, for the kind of men that PWAF is sympathizing with, men who have no love or empathy and treat having a conversation with a woman is a fucking imposition, using prostitutes isn’t an alternative to relationships, but a supplement. They have wives for reproduction, maid services, cooking, laundry and all-around logistical support; mistresses for arm candy; and prostitutes for engaging in certain “taboo” acts and indulging their fetish of commodifying women.
I think I know the answer to this question, but do these guys just not care about sharing sexual pleasure with their partners, even a tiny little bit? Isn’t giving pleasure at least half the fucking point, and half the fun? I just don’t relate to these dudes. At all.
I reckon he’s got this one right up until the point he starts blaming women, actually, which seems to be pretty much typical for MRAs. Legalised prostitution weakens the use of sexual access to women as a way of controlling men, but it’s not women that are harmed by this – they’ve got other things to offer, just like men have more to offer women than money. Take a look at how men have historically been convinced to sign up to the military, and in particular the use of the white feather – would that have worked so well if men weren’t dependent on finding a wife for sex? Except that in this case it’s not women that benefitted, it’s the male leaders that wanted to start a war. (Curiously, the English suffragettes were very heavily involved in handing out white feathers and pushing men off to fight in the First World War; it’s probably why they were in no position to object to more men than women being granted the right to vote after it ended.)
By the way, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the opposite of this from feminists – the idea that making prostitution more illegal will harm the women involved in it, and it’s a good thing – and not just from random internet posters but from lobbyists in a position to do so. (We very nearly got a law passed here in the UK that sex workers considered dangerous to their safety thanks to lobbying from major feminist organisations. They eventually managed to somehow avoid the blockades said lobbyists had put up to stop them talking to politicians about it and get the proposed law amended to be less harmful, but not without a lot of complaints in the press from said organisations about how watering it down was permitting sex slavery. Oh, did I mention they had influences in the media too?)
I am ambivalent about prostitution surely the (to be brutal) sex act if one sided in the pleasure department seems pointless to me. That said if a women want to go down that “career path” they should have the right.
Would that be the point where he assumes women go into relationships so they can access “male resources”? Or which one did you have in mind?
I think the underlying concept here is that we’ve forced them into this. Since wives can take money from the “pool” of “male resources” (his money) without permission, then husbands should be able to take sex from the “pool” of “female resources” (her vajayjay).
If you don’t like that idea, then you have to have prostitutes, or men will explode or something, while all the female resources rot from disuse.
MissPrism, I’ve used the renting friends argument on other blogs. The MRAs et al tend to ignore it but it always amuses me so I hope you’ll continue with it.
I have to say, it’s much more economical for me to not be a complete asshole to women in general. And by sharing interests (i.e. being somewhat interesting, actually listening and sharing experiences, etc.) I have a definite economic advantage over these MRAs who just want to pay for sex.
Plus, I meet some wonderful people.
Dracula: Pleasure is, so it seems to a lot of these men, a zero-sum game. They do what they want. If that pleases someone else, ok; but not required. If they have to do anything which isn’t exactly what they want (change a diaper, help someone shop for shoes, grab a pack of tampons at the market, adjust they way they like to get their rocks off; in the least little way), they are losing.
Pleasure shared isn’t magniified; unless it’s someone who wants do what they want to do.
So sex with a prostitute isn’t, fundamentally, different from sex with anyone else. If that prostitute isn’t going to want anything in reciprocation, then it’s guaranteed to be at least as good as any regular bout of sex. It would be better if the prostitute was “really into it”, but better (I think) to avoid the risk of having to be unselfish at all.