Men’s Rights activists are constantly posting links to stories of women committing horrible crimes – what some have taken to calling “women behaving badly” (WBB) stories – and almost reveling in the fact that, yes, some women do indeed do horrible shit.
MRAs are particularly obsessed with stories of female high school teachers preying on their underage students. While this partly reflects the general MRA obsession with badly behaving women, MRAs do actually make a legitimate point here: while most people understand that female victims of predatory male teachers are indeed victims, quite a few people regard male victims of attractive female teachers as “lucky” boys who get to live out the schoolboy fantasy of having sex with a “hot teacher.”
So when I saw that The Spearhead was featuring a guest post titled “The Hot Teacher Myth, and How it Hurts Men,” I expected to see some version of this argument being made. What I found was one of the strangest and creepiest things I’ve ever read: Walt Forest seems to think that the real problem is that so few guys get the opportunity to have sex with “hot teachers.”
Forest points out (correctly) that cases or female teachers sexually abusing their male students are actually fairly rare. He goes on to argue that all the attention paid to predatory “hot teachers” in the media promotes the “myth” that male and female sexuality is fundamentally the same. This, he suggests, is bad for men:
How does this myth hurt men?
Set aside for a moment the image of the hot teacher and her underage male victim which the media force on us with such insistence. Instead imagine a far more common scenario: a young man (or for that matter, a not-so-young man) who does NOT have sex with his teacher, but desperately wants to.
I’m not quite sure in what world lots of young and not-so-young men – not teenage boys — are being taught by “hot” high school teachers. Perhaps the “hot teachers” here are actually “hot” college professors or grad students and the men in question are college students? Or is Forest simply trying to avoid the question of sexual abuse by pretending that underage boys are “men?”
Forest continues to explore the plight of this poor fellow:
In fact this man would like to have sex with many of the women around him, but — with very few exceptions — he cannot.
Well, yeah. There are 3.5 billion girls and women on planet earth; even the most advanced Lothario is only going to be having sex with a very small fraction of a percentage of them.
But alas, the media tortures this hapless undersexed fellow by suggesting that women like sex as much as men, even though the overwhelming majority of women won’t actually have sex with him personally.
[O]ur media and increasingly ordinary people assure this man that women he hardly knows (even his teachers) will suddenly lead him by the hand to their beds for no other reason than the pleasure of having sex with him, “no strings attached.” This kind of thing is ordinary, we tell him. It “happens all the time.”
Well, in porn it does. Most people are aware that porn isn’t reality.
When it does not happen—of course it never does—he is left to think that he must be something less than an ordinary man. If he dares to voice his disappointment, we tell him that he places excessive importance on sex, views women as “objects,” and the rest of the standard pop feminist rhetoric designed to put the blame back on the man himself. We blame the man because we MUST if we are to avoid blaming ourselves for all the lies we are telling him.
I’m pretty sure that most men – or even most teenage boys — don’t spend their days wondering why their lives aren’t exactly like Penthouse Letters.
These lies hurt men. It is difficult for anyone who has not suffered this hurt first hand to understand just how bad it can be, but from my own experience I believe these lies are helping to create the ongoing male suicide epidemic (which our society, tellingly, also refuses to acknowledge).
Men kill themselves because “hot teachers” don’t seduce them on a regular basis? Really?
These lies certainly make countless men miserable. For this reason I believe exposing the myth that male and female sexualities are the same should be the men’s movement’s first priority. Hot teacher stories obviously make up only a tiny part of this myth, but because they are such a blatant distortion of reality, they are a good place to start.
Quite a few of The Spearhead’s regulars were put off by the, well, weirdness of Forest’s post. But others chimed in to agree. Indeed, Arpagus actually took Forest’s strange argument a step further, earning himself some actual Spearhead downvotes in the process:
[T]he female sex offender charade has been the most frustrating aspect of feminism for me personally, not least because I have experienced a great deal of sexual frustration in the past, and nothing can be more offensive to celibate men than pretending there is an epidemic of female rapists. …
It is a most distinctive sign of cultural decline that we have forgotten that pussy is good. This ancient wisdom has been brainwashed out of our culture by feminism. Now pussy is rape and abuse just like male sexuality is. Traditional society might have punished an adulteress for a student-teacher type of relationship, but they certainly did not indulge in any charade about the boy being a “victim,” because they knew he got lucky if you consider the sex itself. There are reasons why a society might want to proscribe those kinds of relationships, but the boy being a “victim” of “abuse” is most assuredly not one of them.
MRA elder “Zed” gently corrected Arpagus in a comment that was nearly as strange, suggesting that predatory “hot teachers”
are not being punished for “harming the boys”, that is just a convenient excuse. What they are actually being punished for is giving away free pussy.
If you take a close look at the outrage among men these days for having to pay full price for used pussy, their anger is divided between the guys who got it at a price far lower than they paid for it, and the women who gave it away to another man for less than they charged him for it.
It would be like a rich man buying an entire wine cellar of Dom Pérignon at the going price of $200+/bottle – savoring what indulgence his wealth could buy him – only to find his kitchen wench had been pouring free flutes for the pool boy.
Or, like it a member of the Medellín Cartel discovering that their US connection to whom they shipped 2 metric tons of high quality cocaine, was laying out lines for her friends.
She is not being punished for “harming the boys” (HA!) but for black marketing the product that the pussy cartel owns.
The women are being punished FOR allowing the boys to get lucky, and get some without having to lay out 3 months salary for an engagement ring and $35,000 on a Bridezilla party for cupcake.
Now that’s the kind of comment that gets upvotes on The Spearhead, and makes Zed a revered figure in the Men’s Rights movement.
EDITED TO ADD: Not sure how I missed this, but Arpagus is apparently the truly creepy Norwegian blogger Eivind Berge, whom we’ve met before.
@Katelisa: Yeah, in most freshman classes there’s gonna be a lot of twenty-year-olds, but also some thirty-year-olds, the occasional fifty-year-old etc.
But I also think that in general, there are no explicit rules in Swedish companies prohibiting, say, a boss having a romance with an employé, while in the USA such rules are common… right?
@Dvärghundspossen: I don’t think so, no. Generally, it’s hard to fire someone in Sweden, even for something work-related, so as long as no actual professional misconduct can be proven I think the only backlash one would face would be interpersonal. I suspect that Swedes have been very reluctant to muddle the work/private life borders in that way, but I’m not sure why.
After having discussed religion a few threads back I started noticing that we really are big on our privacy here, aren’t we?
@Katelisa: Yeah, it’s interesting the cultural differences you notice, even between two western countries where one is so heavily culturally influenced by the other as in the case of the US and Sweden.
Cripes. He’s not even Senator Claiborne Pell, who should be someone that all undergraduates revere (yay for the Pell Grant!)
And I’ve been an adjunct instructor and the rules most certainly do apply to them. And when we talk about “rules” at universities, we aren’t talking about law; we’re talking about employer policy and “at will” employees (like most of us) have to follow them or lose our jobs. There is no “civil right” to sleep with whoever you want to, much as MRAs might like there to be (women’s freedom to consent or not just pisses them off no end).
Pell is prolly Cardinal Field Marshal Pell, MD, Ph D, QC, etc, etc …
It is not always free even if you aren’t a sex worker. Sex is often used as a form of currency by certain people; particularly in the context of a relationship. I once new a man who mentioned that one evening his wife said to him: “honey I’ll suck you off if you do the dishes tonight!” The fact that there isn’t money involved does not make automatically make something ‘free’.
That being said I don’t see why MRAs are making such a big deal out of hawt teachers who bang underage male HS students. I honestly think that this practice isn’t such a big deal and I don’t buy that bullshit that because this particular law uses the language of feminism by describing as statutory rape that it is automatically about power. Teenage boys often seek out adult women as first time sexual partners so they can brag to their buddies about what a “stud” they are.
So? Adults still have a responsibility not to have sex with teenagers.
Dipshitzu: what an accurate name.
So…. it’s not a big deal because those kids are “lucky”, or is it that they were, “looking for it”.
And rape; who cares? Exploitation of a power differential, no big deal. The Law…? Pish-tosh, it’s not as if the law actually matters.
What a dipshit tzu are.
Hey now, hellkell and pecunium, that’s not fair. Shitzus can be cute sometimes.
Exquisitzu dipshitzu.
Dipshit by name, dipshit by nature, it seems. And woefully ignorant (or is that willfully ignorant?) of what statutory rape, or meaningful consent, or power imbalances, or duty of care, are about.