Sometimes posts by Men’s Rights Activists seem like transmissions from some alternate universe, a Bizarro world that bears a superficial resemblance to our own but where everything is backwards and upside down.
Take a recent post on A Voice for Men by FeMRA Diana Davison with the seemingly innocuous title “Women don’t own sex.” Ostensibly a response to a piece about rape in the Irish Times, the piece contains a series of bizarre assertions about relations between men and women that Davison apparently thinks she can use as proof that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s really women, not men, who run the world. And that men only commit crimes in order to make women happy.
Let’s go through her, um, argument:
Though men appear to rule the world, that is because women treat them like gophers: Go get me stuff.
Really? Perhaps on Real Housewives, but I’m pretty sure most women in the world don’t actually live like the Real Housewives do. Nor do they particularly want to.
A man’s worth in our world is not assessed on how much wealth he possesses, it is based on the level of happiness of his woman.
Really? Here’s Forbes’ list of the 71 most powerful people in the world — most of them, of course, men. You will notice that “the level of happiness of his woman” is not one of the criteria used to determine who gets on the list or not. Barack Obama is the top name on the list; his “woman” outearned him for years until his books took off. The Pope is #5. He doesn’t have a woman, at least as far as I know. Going down the list you will see powerful man after powerful man, none of whom are judged at all by how much stuff they buy their “women.”
But no: in MRA-world men are helpless creatures who exist only to give stuff to women– and who are sometimes even forced into a life of crime to fulfill the feminine need for more and more stuff!
Why do men commit crimes? I’ll posit this: because they need more stuff to make a woman happy or because they have been rejected by a woman shaming them for not being good enough and feel they have nothing left to lose. Committing a crime has a penalty. They need a reason to risk that penalty. It’s going to be primal. Think… think… are you with me?
Uh, no?
MRAs complain endlessly about how women need to “take responsibility” for this and that — which mainly seems to mean that they should sit still while men call them sluts for having sex like men do — but in MRA world men are never, ever, ever responsible for anything they do. There’s always a woman to blame.
Hell, even if a dude rapes a woman who’s sleeping in a bed beside him, he’s not to blame, because in Diana Davison’s bizarro universe lying in a man’s bed automatically overrides the necessity for him to obtain consent before having sex with you.
Men have every right to believe that a woman sleeping in the bed next to them is going to be happily awoken [by sex]. If you don’t want sex, don’t sleep in their fucking bed.
So if you’re a married woman, or you live with a guy, and you share the same bed, apparently he has the right to have sex with you any time you’re asleep in that bed. No matter what. In Diana Davison’s world, no means no, but sleeping in bed means yes. And if you don’t like it, ladies — that’s your own damn fault! Go sleep on the couch. (Or does that make you fair game too?)
Davison then turns to the power of metaphor to clinch her case that women are to blame for everything:
The man is the head of the house but the woman is the neck and she can turn the head any way she wants.
This may be the strangest metaphor I’ve run across in weeks, and as a regular reader of manosphere blogs I’m used to some pretty strange metaphors.
Speaking of which:
Feminists claim that men objectify women but it’s women who think that men are just walking, magical penises and that the penis has the mystical quality of getting them stuff.
I don’t really have anything to say to this stupidity, but I would like to share with you some of what I found when I searched YouTube for the phrase “walking penis.” As you might imagine, a lot of what follows is probably sort of NSFW, unless you work in a sex-toy recycling facility, so view with appropriate care.
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I’m a total weirdo for winter now, I think it’s because the summers here are like living on the face of the sun.
NOW Mysterics is starting to reek of socks.
Argenti, I promise I am not trying to get rid of you, but I think your time is far better spent hanging out IRL with your cool friends in New York than talking to this wanker.
Katz — no worries, I mostly am being social!
I dunno about socks, but there’s certainly an element of wanting to fight because some keywords came up, rather than because there’s anything to fight about. It’s like those guys who’ll argue about how “deconvert” isn’t really a word.
auggz: See, zie was saying that it’s good karma to say “merry christmas” to someone in a burqa.
Wait…that doesn’t sound right at all.
I bought riding boots last week! I can’t wait!
CassandraSays, we’re not weird, we’re Texan. At least in Houston, Austin and San Antonio, we don’t really get a winter. Fall just sort of turns into spring sometime in February. Maybe we get 3 weeks or so of winter around New Year’s – just enough to be a novelty.
Definite impression here that “I’ll use whatever word/concept from religion I want to, whether I understand it or not, and ‘cos I’m a smartcool atheist, if it offends religious people or those disgusting accommodationists*, so much the better.”
*as in, “people who don’t go round gratuitously offending complete strangers”
Yay for autumn and winter! I’m waiting with no pleasure at ALL for the coming of summer. We’ve had the warmest winter on record and the warmest September in 20 years, and I dread what summer might be like.
Athywren – “I’d really like to find a place where spring transitions straight to autumn and back again. I get so tired of summer and winter with their sweat-sweat-sweat and their freeze-freeze-freeze…” Tell me when you find it, I wanna live there, too.
Though I don’t mind winter across the veil at all. Snow, yeah, but the cold doesn’t bite like here, and anyway, ice skating with Sir!
Seattle 🙂
We got over a foot of snow last night which is not usual for this time of year. Schools were all closed. It’s actually quite bad because all the trees still have leaves and the heavy wet snow has caused most trees to break and lose branches. There are downed power lines, busted cars, fences and houses. It’s ridiculous.
Crumbs, Nynaeve! Are you in the Americas or Europe or where? (I’d guess Ireland from your nym but that could be way off, of course.)
I’m in Wyoming, USA. We got hit by “Winter Storm Atlas” which has mostly moved on to South Dakota now.
My nym is from the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. 🙂
RE: Falconer
And eeeeeee! LBT started their trip! Have fun! Good luck!
Thank you! I am totally pumped and having fun so far, even though I am tiring faster than expected. It was fun meeting up with Argenti and pecunium.
RE: Nynaeve
Oh crap. I’m coming into your area within the next few weeks. I thought the snow would hold off at least until November! D:
Yeah, I heard the snowstorm in Montana is pretty bad as well, and that’s just next door. Someone I know is currently in a Montana neighborhood in which she and her neighbors are unable to even drive around the city.
Oh, and let’s just say I won’t be missing Mysterics, AKA Ms. let me be unapologetic about my cissexism because it’s rational.
LBT: It usually doesn’t snow til Halloween at least. I’m sure by the time you’re here it will have melted, though.
Wait, wut? I missed that, where did it happen?
Nynaeve – Wheel of time, crumbs, no wonder I didn’t recognise it. I read the first book and a chapter or so of the second when they came out. 🙂
Strewth, snowstorms in Wyoming this early.
It’ll be because they’ve put Halloween stuff in the shops already, I bet.
/is pissed off at seeing in the shops here. Damn ‘Murrican imperialism!
Mysterics has been here before, right? Both the name and the rampant dumbassery seem familiar.
She said something about cis people having a superior means of distinguishing womanhood from manhood and that it doesn’t make sense to say that not all women have uteri. I forgot the thread, sorry.
So, like, X-ray vision so we can see through someone’s clothes, and possibly right through their stomach to see if there’s a uterus?
Oh, fuck her. I mean, I’d be more expressive, but I just got back from the ER (continuing the theme of 2013 being terrible for my loved ones, my friend who had the heart attack landed back in there, but he’s going to be fine). Fuck womanhood/manhood-policing asshats. Seriously just fuck them. (I am in a bad mood. But I’m fine. My friends are apparently cursed, but I’m fine.)
Holy unseasonal snowstorm, Batman! Sorry to hear that’s going on, Nynaeve. I hope the damage is repaired relatively quickly.
Ally — I think you mean this — http://manboobz.com/2013/05/28/ever-gullible-mens-rights-redditors-throw-yet-another-tantrum-over-a-phony-feminist-screencap/comment-page-2/#comment-313066
But I found a related one that explains why the nym rung bells for pecunium and I — http://manboobz.com/2013/08/07/mens-rights-manifesto-solve-all-of-our-gender-problems-by-segregating-men-and-women-at-school-and-work/comment-page-5/
Yep, that’s the comment, Argenti. Ugh, it’s even worse than I remembered.
I thought the name seemed familiar, and was associating it with rampant dumbassery, I just couldn’t remember which variety. If she’s a TERF then the tantrum about appropriation makes sense, since a lot of the people in that group have a tendency to be kinda all your goddesses and symbols of female power are belong to us, and in order to do that you have to strip away and/or ignore a lot of cultural context.