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.
I confess that there are times that I have cause to wonder about my involvement in the mrm. At least the downvotes given to Arpagus’ stupid comments provide some measure of reassurance. I detest this cry-baby element that manages to seep its way into the mrm. Retch. Makes me want to jump on the next space-ship to mars. /vent – back to fighting those diabolical feminists.
Hey creepsters — you know why no one wants to fuck you? Because you genuinely believe that a woman’s body is exactly the same as a bottle of wine, and that with the proper investment, it belongs to you and you get to do whatever you want with it. THIS ATTITUDE MAKES YOU CREEPY.
@ Nepenthe: No fatties and no old ladies over the age of 25.
Wait! I get it! That’s rape. When the woman isn’t hot or is over the age of 25 or doesn’t please their boner. A hot chick forcing herself on someone is totes cool, no matter what.
On a mildly related note, I am off to commit horrible acts of misandry, by going to my job as an adult cabaret waitress. Not only are we all sluts and wearing next to nothing but NONE of us will have sex with them!
These poor guys. Teh Wimmenz just torture them endlessly. By either being sluts, or not being slutty enough. Not sure which…
Chuckeedee’s momentary epiphany reminds me of that time Vaarsuvius cast Owl’s Wisdom on Belkar.
Shorter chuckles: “Most of the people in my movement are fuckwits and kinda scary and the rest I haven’t heard speak, but this hasn’t made me reconsider whether I am also a fuckwit and kinda scary.”
I find this apropos, probably been posted before:
19 year old virgin here, well aware of social anxiety preventing me from getting any, as I’ve said before, many times, stopped caring after high school. Why these guys still do is anyone’s guess.
Actually, I shouldn’t lie, I do have my flashes where I think “It sucks that I’m too socially awkward to have a girlfriend or even an fwb type relationship”, but then I get over it and do practical stuff.
Aworld – that being the difference between people who are adults maturity-wise as well as just chronologically.
How’re you doing, btw? Did that bug turn into flu?
Aworldanon, I thought you were dating a girl a little while ago?
The world view of the abuser is a very creepy thing. Particularly with regard to their view of abusers preying on children.
Kitteh, in case you’re curious the video is called “kitten wrench” because its set to a song called “Monkey Wrench”.
Ah, this is the strip I was referring to. I can never find anything in those archives!
Oh! Thanks, lissla. I’ve no sound on my pc. Not that I’d have known the reference if I had! 😀
Aworld, I was a virgin until I was 19, and even afterward I would go as much as three years at a time without sex (involuntarily). Good things will happen eventually. If they could happen to me, they can happen to you. 🙂
This makes less sense than most MRA weirdness. That last comment confused me a lot. I thought MRA thought women were all *supposed* to hold out for a guy to marry because otherwise they were riding the cock carousel or something? That comment seems to say both that ‘used’ pussy is awful, and that women who insist on marriage with a big wedding etc. are awful. WHAT DO THEY WANT?!?!
@katz
I haven’t dated anyone since High School, I don’t remember if I was a regular commenter here during my last relationship or not actually, but atm I’m not in any kind of relationship, I have a few female friends whom given time MIGHT show an interest in romantic stuff, but that’s about it.
Yeah, god forbid a ‘hot’ teacher not take advantage of her students. How dare she not seduce kids! There should be, like, a law against that kinda shit.
Experience with trying to kill yourself? crushing on your Biology teacher? or just being a sexually frustrated man-child projecting his sorry self all over the place?
Also, have big heaping bowl of FUCK YOU for daring to type that, you horrid little turd.
Women liking sex = MISANDRY
Women not having sex (with me) = MISANDRY
This guy is a master of doublethink.
Nova, have fun at torture… er, work.
Anyone else wondering what TS has to say about this?
Somewhere buried under the 9 layers of garbage there’s a microscopic piece of a kernel of a valid observation. It’s just getting choked to death by the shit on top of it.
(The valid observation being that much of the media and the culture in the US does push the idea that all men will end up dating a supermodel regardless of their own physical attractiveness or situation. And that myth causes some harm to both men and women. The thing is, I’m pretty confident the vast majority of humans figure out that’s bullshit sometime during puberty or just before or after. And then move on with their lives. More evidence MRAs have never matured emotionally past the age of 14. Maybe that’s where the creepy ass obsession with underage girls comes in. Ew.)
Pillowinhell: not really.
@drst
Because where you are in 8th grade obviously determines where/ what you’ll do for your WHOLE LIFE. Back to non-sarcasm, what do you think MRAs would do if they could time warp back to middle school?
Yes, even excluding the major matters of rape, duty of care, etc, it’s that old MRA attitude that a woman is supposed to let some random guy or kid who has the hots for her fuck her.
Ravencita, if MRAs could go back to 8th grade, they’d be totes alpha and have all the ladies.
Sarcasm aside, if they could go back, they’d be right where they are.
I really think MRAs should learn the difference between sexual fantasy and reality. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of students, especially high-school age or older, end up having a crush on one of their teachers and others probably fantasize about a non-existant teacher (this isn’t my thing, but… rule 34). This does not mean that it is okay for teachers to exploit their students the same way that women having rape fantasies doesn’t mean that rape is suddenly okay and not traumatic. People fantasize all the time about things they don’t actually want to happen, and I’d say that young people, who are horny but not necessarily ready for the reality of a relationship, do so especially (what would the average fifteen year-old feel if their celebrity crush actually tried to sleep with them?)