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.
Um, that’s exactly how it works in the real world; if you have a both a romantic and a professtional (that is to say, you work with them directly) relationship with someone it creates a conflict of interest which can cause legal problems if it can be shown that the romantic relationship affected behavior in the personal relationship. So, companies institute polices to prevent said legal issues.
Here’s some more magic, non-Pell-begging cures to Meow Mix jingles:
I’ve banned Ian/Pell again, but I will let through any comments from him that provide links to interesting cat toys.
Oh, and that aren’t also filled with his usual nonsense.
The drawback with that plan would be the difficulty of finding people who’d like hanging out with him. If he’s as pathetically delusional, dishonest, ignorant and malicious face to face as he is on internet boards, he’d be friendless.
And don’t you love the way he assumes that him posting a video = everyone actually watching it? 😀
A real doctor/lawyer/professor would know that the correct way to banish the Meow Mix song is via targeted application of Nyan Cat.
How about some smooth jazz? Now with 100% more nyan.
A real doctor or lawyer would know that Meow Mix is not going to override Springsteen earworms.
Aw, I missed Dr.* Pell’s exit via bizarre hypnosis reference.
Your inductions need work, buddy.
* – lol no
“Ian”: I guest thatit’s diferent at Podunk 13th grade aka junior “college
Unh-hunh. One of the best Journalism schools in the US is a “Junior” college.
Students who attend a “junior” college graduate with honors more than people who don’t.
Facts, what pesky little things.
telling someone who they can screw does violate their civil rights.
Which is why sexual harassment is illegal.
Dance faster.
And yes, I have degrees in both law and medicine.
Right…. so explain the practical aspects of Brady; as they apply to malpractice.
But you can’t because… you aren’t really a doctor, or a lawyer, or a counselor, or a dead movie star.
The drawback with that plan would be the difficulty of finding people who’d like hanging out with him. If he’s as pathetically delusional, dishonest, ignorant and malicious face to face as he is on internet boards, he’d be friendless.
If he grows up… that will fade.
It’s a really BIG if.
It’s a huge if.
Say, fellow Aussies – does anyone else do a bit of a double-take when they see “Pell” and think of our own beloved *cough* but not-quite-that-stupid Cardinal Pell?
Rats, I missed the little guy’s temper tantrum. He must of gotten into some pop rocks and chased it with a Pepsi.
Kool-aid + extra sugar, that’s our Pell.
College students and professors being prohibited from having sex with each other would be a violation of their civil rights? What planet does he come from?
The one where “putting your dick into whatever female you fancy” is an absolute civil right, at least for rich white dudes. (Nobody else counts.)
You mean it isn’t Cardinal Pell!?!?!?!
How about cat pictures? 🙂 This is from the Net but that’s what she looks like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scottish_Fold_P1050446e.jpg
“Cardinal” is just about the only high status position he hasn’t claimed, with the possible exception of “Field Marshal”
LOL I can see it now – he’ll post a photo of Cardinal Pell and say that it’s really truly him!
Or his cousin George, maybe.
Magpie – my boss has met Cardinal Pell. He reckons he’s not the brightest spark.
Then maybe they are related.
Geez, I hope not. I mean, the Cardinal’s cringeworthy enough, but PelltheOther? Bleargh … though at least this Pell’s not Australian. One small mercy. 😉
I was searching around on the Stockholm University website and couldn’t find a student-teacher-dating-prohibition anywhere. I actually don’t think we have that kind of rule. (Although, it would OBVIOUSLY be wrong to date someone whom you were gonna grade. I guess people are just supposed to understand that?).
I do know of a case where a professor married a phDstudent. They were in different subjects though, so there was no professional relation between them.
By the troll’s logic in this thread, it’s gotta be the case then that Stockholm University is much better than Harvard, Yale and Princeton, since apparently high-ranking university’s don’t have these kinds of rules.
@Dvärghundspossen: I think it is strongly discouraged, frowned upon and to be avoided if possible, but I am fairly sure that teachers and students at Swedish universities are fully allowed to do whatever they want to with their hearts and genitals in their spare time, unless it can be proven that it affects the student’s results in some way. I looked through the online rules from my alma mater, and couldn’t find anything mentioning it.
This might be time to point out that university-students in Sweden tend to be slightly older, as gap-years for work and travel is very common.