We’ve heard before from numerous MRAs and MGTOWers and other backwards dudes that women who dress like “sluts” deserve to be raped. You may remember my post about the patriarchy-loving MGTOWer who calls himself Drealm, who thinks that immodest dress is an assault on men, because it excites them without giving them the opportunity to, well, rape the women who so cruelly give them boners. In Drealm’s mind, almost any form of clothing on a woman that in any way shows her shape is suspect – as does uncovered female hair.
Obviously, I think all of us will agree that certain kinds of clothes are inappropriate in certain settings – no one of any gender should be teaching kindergarteners wearing nothing but a thong – but invariably those who complain the most about women wearing “immodest clothing” have a much broader notion of “immodesty,” which includes things that most of us just consider “clothing” – shorts, short skirts, any top that shows even the tiniest amount of cleavage. (Click on the picture above to see more about Liberty University’s dress code for women.)
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is not confined to religious fundamentalists and weird dudes lurking in the dark corners of internet. Recently, Laura Wood, the self-identified Thinking Housewife behind the blog of the same name, has declared that “immodest dress is a form of aggression.” The heart of her post is a reposted comment from a reader posting under the name of Arete, arguing that immodest dress is a form of violence towards men similar to and in some ways even worse than actual violence from men towards women.
Immodest dress is analogous to male violence. Men who flaunt their muscles and crush beer can’s with their fists (not that I have seen much of that lately) are telling the weaker world around them, “I could crush you. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.We’ll see. Depends how much you annoy me.” Women are stronger than men in this one way – the sight of their women’s bodies is overpowering to men. Immodest women are saying to men, “You could have sex with me, if I let you. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. It depends how much you annoy me.”
Both behaviors are flaunting the power that one has over another weaker being and both behaviors used to be considered uncouth.
But as the myth goes: only men have ever been violent towards women not the other way around (women have no power over men whatsoever – don’t you know!) and so now that we have entered the great age of woman – when she will get her revenge for all the injustices against her by men through the ages – both real and imagined — she has decided to take her “pound of flesh.” But instead of a swift cut right above the heart like Shylock she wants to get men where it really hurts– tease and taunt with the sight of her own body, forever reminding men of their weakness before female power.
So apparently a woman giving a man a boner by wearing an outfit less modest than a nun’s is worse than a dude literally punching a woman.
Laura’s comments make clear she agrees with this basic assessment, though (in a moment of generosity towards her own gender) she acknowledges that some women may not be conscious of the enormous power they wield over men every time they put on a tank top.
In the comments, Fitgerald expresses his enthusiasm for Arete’s thesis:
This is sooooo true… as a male I can ABSOLUTELY attest to this. …
As a celibate male I must actively work at constraining sexual response to females flaunting their wares.. “You could have sex with me, if I let you. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”.. yeah right. If I was an alpha male – strong, thin, tall, tanned.. definitely — I’ll also have to be honest and say it does piss me off, but suppressing ordinary human responses is part and parcel of not only being a civilized human being, but a Christian which constrains me further. …
Women are the sexual power brokers. They can and do decide with whom they pair and mate with. Men are essentially powerless save those few well endowed “alphas” (rich, physical specimens, powerful) who are like kryptonite to many women. Any male that is half-aware knows the look: “Yes.. look at me.. I’m sexually desirable. See my power. Feel my power..” Oh, then the look away: “But you aren’t worthy of me.” Happens EVERY day.
Yep, another misogynist furious that women get to choose who they have sex with. Dude, SO DO GUYS. If two people are having sex, both of them have to agree to it. Otherwise it is rape. Everyone is their own “sexual gatekeeper.”
Robin offers a mild dissent, noting that some of the “immodest” dressers may be victims of sexual abuse. But they still deserve “righteous judgement,” at least when this judgement is ostensibly tempered by “love.”
I was once one of these women: a female friend was loving enough to take me bra shopping as a thirty-three year old adult and teach me about covering my body so as not to invite further abuse. Other people waited patiently and said nothing; this was a disservice to me as I could have transformed more quickly if people would have had the confidence to open their mouths and teach me the truth. Others condemned me without knowing my story, and I withdrew in offense.
While it is true that immodest dress is a form of aggression in feminist women, I want to bring to light that sexual abuse of young girls has become so prevalent that many women we see walking around today dressed as prostitutes may still be ensnared and imprisoned by their victim mentality brought about through no fault of their own due to horrendous acts of abuse against their bodies as children. I believe it is important that these women do not experience condemnation, but rather righteous judgment in love so as to bring about repentance from this behavior so that they may be healed and be examples to others.
Laura feels the need to reiterate that some women and girls really have no excuse for being slutty sluts:
I know teenage girls who are sweet and innocent, and have never been abused, who dress like tarts. It’s everywhere. They see it and they imitate it.
I’m interested how Laura knows that these girls haven’t been abused. Does she know the intimate details of all of these girls’ lives? Or does she just have powerful Abuse-dar?
Mary, meanwhile, argues that the real villains here aren’t women – but evil feministy feminists.
I have too many female friends who have had their hopes dashed/hearts broken/been humiliated at the hands of average-looking, low status guys to buy that women have all the power. These average young women were doing what they thought they were supposed to do, what they were told everyone was doing – having premarital sex, that is. They were told by feminists that it was as fun for them as it was for the men if only they would get into the spirit of it, that it would lead to ultimate happiness, that it would benefit them. Many girls of average attractiveness are giving themselves away, sometimes over and over again, to unworthy men and to their own heartbreak, while the strains of “Your Body is a Wonderland” play in the background. I don’t call that sexual power. That men are more vulnerable to visual cues doesn’t make all men innocent, just as some women’s extreme immodesty doesn’t make all women sexual power brokers. …
That’s what’s so diabolical about today’s extreme immodesty: many of these women are just trying to be relevant.
Apparently the readers of The Thinking Housewife, like many MRAs and other manosphere dudes, seem to have forgotten almost entirely the old stereotype of the hairy-legged, man-hating feminist; these days, they seem to assume that any woman who wears skirts above the knee and doesn’t hate sex is a feminist.
Setting aside the ridiculousness of the “sexy clothes are an assault on men” argument generally, I can’t help but wonder how many men out there – beyond Drealm and Franklin and assorted religious fundamentalists – actually, honestly feel “assaulted” when they see a woman they find attractive wearing something that shows off her figure. Somehow I suspect that most straight guys who are interested in sex – including most of those railing endlessly about evil sluts online — actually find this sort of thing … pleasant. Most of those guys complaining about immodest dress would, I think, feel rather disappointed if women actually decided to cover up – and not just because it would rob them of yet another excuse to demonize the ladies.
Pecumium: do you think some of the definitions of ‘modest’ dress are a bit like that? I mean, trying to get people to dress like well-off people? All that don’t look like a ‘slut’ stuff sounds a bit like ‘don’t look like those lower-class girls’.
And I tried to reread that, and it’s more gibberish than usual. Sorry for misspelling your nym, Pecunium.
Tonight I wore a dress where I had no cleavage, the straps were thick, and the hem went just above my knees. I was still hit on. Was I assaulting that guy with my dress?
Jessay – he says “but Mum, she hit me first!”
“I continue to be in awe at how ego-centric one must be to assume that EVERYTHING total strangers do is all about their boner.”
Duh, for a (traditional) Male Earthling, everything is about M.E.!
“men have been trying to civilize women? It was a joint effort >.<"
Ah, compromise: When someone who doesn't get what they want, makes sure that the other party doesn't either …
"Does he get a free pass for not being “The Enemy”?"
Bro's before Ho's!
"What’s the wierdest part is that heterosexual boys usually stop popping a boner at the sight of the tiniest piece of female skin around age sixteen or so."
Ehhh, how would you know, where you ever a heterosexual boy?
@Pecunium: That’s really interesting. Really puts that command in perspective.
It’s a bit like vegetarianism in Hinduism. Before Gandhi and all that, brahmans were obliged to be vegetarian, but lower castes were SUPPOSED to eat meat. Vegetarianism were for the exalted and pure only. Gandhi claimed it was for everyone.
Nowadays, it’s more like eating meat shows you’re enlightened and cosmopolitan rather than stuck in old traditional Hindu ways. Or so I’ve been told.
@Magpie: I don’t think there’s an analogy here. It’s not like working class girls, or any other group of girls, are SUPPOSED to dress like sluts according to our society’s norm, and are punished if they don’t.
I’m just going to pretend gender roles existed in 5,000 BC for the next 5 min, because it’s easier than arguing with anyone who insists they’re innate.
No, more like while men hunting the wooly mammoth, women ground grain and made clothing and shit — a joint effort.
Also, compromise:
noun
1. a settlement of differences by mutual concessions; an agreement reached by adjustment of conflicting or opposing claims, principles, etc., by reciprocal modification of demands.
2. the result of such a settlement.
3. something intermediate between different things: The split-level is a compromise between a ranch house and a multistoried house.
Calling compromise not getting what you want is definitely the glass half empty approach here.
Hunting wasn’t that big a deal, really. It’s a source of protein, but most of the actual calories in most places came from plants. That’s notwithstanding that women hunted as well, but seriously, hunting’s way overblown. The majority of the food gathering work done – by men and women – was in gathering.
I never cease to be amazed at clueless people who somehow manage to think that boys aren’t understood in society.
Rutee — you’re taking my mammoth’s comment way too seriously, I should’ve perhaps given that a sarcasm tag but I’m really annoyed to be explaining exactly how it is that men have not been fighting women on this whole civilization thing.
Point was more that everything was done by men and women than any point about what exactly was being done (ergo listing making clothing as a woman task, might as well play to the misogyny in hopes of getting the point across?)
RE: Ozy
I can not imagine a life without shorts. You have my profound sympathies.
RE: ABNOY
I seriously can not tell what you’re going on about. But my husband was a heterosexual man for twenty-seven whole years. I just asked him if he pops boners every time he sees skin.
He asked if it was Bea Arthur, and when I said no, ordinary women, he said no.
RE: NWO
You really don’t know what animals in heat are like, do you? Halter tops != lordosis, man.
I know you weren’t serious, yes.
Whenever guys like that talk about “women” flaunting themselves or having power over men, they clearly mean “hot women who I would like to bone, or who society would look upon me as a real man for boning” — i.e. thin, cis, able-bodied, young, ‘well-groomed’, conventionally attractive women. NO OTHER WOMEN EXIST. Except for those times when they feel like yelling at us for all being disgusting and ugly and hairy and so forth.
If, as a fat woman, I went around in a tank top and mini skirt (which, as it happens, I am doing! right this second! oh no!) would that be
a) as bad as punching someone with my sexy flauntingness?
b) as bad as punching someone with my hideous disgustingness?
c) as bad as punching someone and like vomming all over them at the same time, because, like, eww fat, right?
d) as bad as punching someone twice because of both?
e) not bad at all because women = hot + fat = disgusting would cancel each other out?
Oh wait this is an academic question because as someone who fails to fit into a boner-trauma model of womanhood I actually don’t exist.
As a teenager I had to deal with fundies obsessing over modesty. It’s all about shaming our sexuality in the name of religion. I see it this way: African tribal women who wear next to nothing are no less moral than Amish women.
But my husband was a heterosexual man for twenty-seven whole years.
…how could someone in a gay relationship ever have been straight?
Pterygotus — isn’t that basically what 1 & 2 on the Kinsey scale are?
@ Amnesia: The Eastern Orthodox church requires women to cover their heads in church and men are not allowed to. It’s the only denomination that I know of that does this, though. I still have my collection of “platki” and it’s been coming in very handy lately.
Is it true that the Thinking Housewife is Laurence Auster?
Because sexuality can be complicated? There do exist people who see their sexualities this way, though obviously it’s not the majority of queer people. If someone in a “same sex” (scare quotes because of my dislike of that term, not because I’m dismissing the gender of anyone) relationship says they used to be hetero and now are queer, I would take their word on it. The opposite is less clear, because there’s a ton of social pressure for queer people to pretend to be hetero, whereas in almost every situation, there isn’t pressure for hetero people to be queer (one could argue that pre-transition trans people are pressured to be queer at times, but that’s a sort of distorted way of looking at it, because the people doing the forcing see it as trying to enforce being hetero).
Muddy Road
Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.
Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
“Come on, girl” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”
“I left the girl there,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”
The way these guys describe the physical characteristics of “alphas” so vividly makes me wonder… you can almost hear them drooling as they type…
“thinks that immodest dress is an assault on men, because it excites them without giving them the opportunity to, well, rape the women who so cruelly give them boners. In Drealm’s mind, almost any form of clothing on a woman that in any way shows her shape is suspect – as does uncovered female hair.”
You have just uncannily described most of the Y-chromosome bearers (not “men”) in ISIS, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Saudi religious police, etc.
I couldn’t determine the actual purpose of wehuntedthemammoth. But it seems to be something of debate in which both sides frequently impugn on a personal level, and the same thing is said repeatedly using rearranged words. I wonder why I’ve never encountered characters like I’ve found here.
I date a lot. I’ve never found myself in a situation where I had no choice but to rape a girl. It doesn’t bothed me if a girl wants to wait. I’m not a giant gland or ruled by base urges.
The issue of modesty to me has always been one of protecting one’s dignity and self-respect. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with a girl who didn’t care what other people thought of her.
I looked up MGTOW and incel. In so doing so I was unfortunately exposed to the conflicts created when males who view females in terms of the pleasure they can give with the skill of porn stars; expend zero time, effort or money to appear appealing, and who see the value in being agreeable or charming; endeavor to find and pickup bikini models covered in tanning oil, who will immediately sate their masculine urges in every imaginable way, two girls on one guy, and have their babies.
This must be some sort of socially induced illusion! On the feminist side of things, I find girls to be traditional and sincere. But I treat them as equal to me. I don’t really find much appeal in seduction for expediency’s sake or creepy manipulation for sexual enterprise by calculated methods.
It seems like here people are ignoring their own guilt, and projecting blame on the opposite sex, collectively, because of contrived defects in the gender that cause inherant evil.
But that’s only my opinion.