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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Oh strewth, dumbass indeed. I’d forgotten that thread.
Still, I’ll say this much: it led to A Voice for Marmots.
I’m mostly baffled by people who use karma without identifying the relevant dharma involved..
Cloudiah: sorry about your friends. I think it’s just been a rough few months for a lot of people.
Found a new MRA word:
mysandronist!
Oh, like this bit of pro-life schlock?
Eurgh. That pic just makes me think GET THAT ALIEN THING OUT OF MY BODY.
Also her spine is weird, and she appears to have scars from getting breast implants the old-fashioned way. And her tummy is awfully small considering that, going by how well developed the fetus is, she’s due within the next few weeks.
*lol* I’m laughing so hard at the “bud David likes femdom porn”,”that’s an ad hominem”, “no it isn’t, because David admits to liking femdom porn somewhere on the internet” exchange.
Okay, THIS is what “ad hominem” MEANS: you make a reply which is about the person making a claim rather than the claim itself. There’s an acceptable kind where you point out that the person is being inconsistent (so you claim that P? But you earlier argued for Q, and Q implies not-P!), and an unacceptable kind where you just insult the person (so you claim that P? BUT YOU LIKE FEMDOM PORN AND THAT’S WEIRD!). But it doesn’t suddenly cease to be an ad hominem just because what you say about the person is TRUE.
So much logic fail.
Ops, posted in the wrong thread!
Just read through this article, since I was failing in my lurking duties at that time, and I have to ask: Seriously, wtf is it with MRAs and Andy Warhol?
I keep seeing this topic being brought up by them. “Andy Warhol was shot by a feminist! Therefore feminism is wrong!” or something. I mean, even if her feminism was in any way related to her trying to kill him (if, for example, she thought he was patriarchy incarnate) it wouldn’t mean that feminism was wrong, only that a feminist did a bad thing. But it was because she felt she’d been tricked into a contract that gave ownership of all artistic works to a guy called Maurice Girodias, who she thought was conspiring with Warhol to steal her work. If there’s any link to feminism, it’s minimal, relating only to the nature of the work she thought was being stolen. Warhol wasn’t killed by feminist assassins, he was injured by an individual who thought their livelihood was being stolen from them. How can you discover this hidden truth? 30 seconds in google and wikipedia.
The MRM is skeptical and rational like Fox news is fair and balanced.
Um.. that pro-life picture…. that baby is *way* past the point of abortion… just want to point that out. Prolly closer to 28 weeks than term but still, well past the point of abortion.
Dvärghundspossen, I always like to point out that ad hominem usually means dismissing your argument by positing something about the person arguing that isn’t at all related to the argument and that’s why their argument is wrong. It’s actually not an ad hominem to dismiss a person’s argument (with legitimate explanation) and then call them an asshole and insult them because their argument was so shitty.
About the transparent woman… in transparent-world, do pregnant women just NOT WEAR CLOTHES?! Seriously.
So, wouldn’t the baby be transparent too? Wouldn’t you see just a collection of organs floating around? And what about the digestive system, would you see food getting digested and turned into feces? These are important questions, people!
And she has a spine, but no other bones. Also no muscles. Or fatty tissue.
On the bright side, every single comment except the mod is saying “This is really stupid.”
In my experience it comes from being surrounded by messages all your life that tell you that male acceptance trumps female acceptance. I know a lot of younger women who can watch drunk men literally piss on their kitchen floor and shrug it off like, “Oh, that’s just Joe, he’s drunk, you don’t know him like I do,” whereas if a woman dares even say, “Hey Joe, don’t piss on her floor, that’s not cool,” that woman is a drama queen and a problem. Many of us are taught from a young age to seek men as our protectors and to seek their validation by throwing other women under the bus (note: we’re seeking protection from being victimized by the men who are protecting us). We cosign their behavior because if we don’t we’re going to get threatened, harassed, outcasted. They’re not hurting us the way they hurt other women, and so long as we stay perfect, docile, and agreeable, we’ll only have to deal with microaggressons as opposed to straight up harassment and assault. For a lot of us who weren’t taught to see our own worth as women at a young age, we tolerate abuse from men who take advantage of that void we’re trying to fill until we eventually suffer a serious backlash over making the most minor of “mistakes” and are no longer one of the protected “cool girls.”
That’s at least my interpretation of my personal experience as a former “guy’s girl.” I also see this behavior in younger female friends of mine who I see my former self in. I see them let toxic male behavior slide while dropping female friends as often as they change their underwear. I’m certainly not saying all women are like this, by no means. Just specifically talking about the type of woman I can see getting sucked into the MRA.
Maybe it’s projection, maybe it’s just stereotypes. She probably has never taken the time to really get to know any women to figure out that they’re not the one-dimensional caricatures she sees on tv. Elevating herself above these women by claiming she’s “not like other girls” is really typical behavior of the specific type of troubled woman I described above. It’s telling men exactly what they want to hear to confirm their suspicions about the motives of women so that she can gain their trust by insisting she’s one of the good ones. But the exact same behavior she chastises in women, she praises, or at the very least overlooks, when her male friends do it.
Speaking on the word “bitch” it’s been one of the hardest habits for me to break because I loved starting an angry sentence off with, “Bitch, blah blah blah,” and still feel compelled to do it. It commands attention. But I understand it’s dehumanizing and catch myself before I do it. On the other hand, I do enjoy the reclamation of the word to describe a woman who doesn’t take other people’s shit. I notice I’m normally called a bitch when I’m standing up for myself or what is right, so when someone calls me it in that context I thank them for it and it pisses them off. But yeah, if someone told me they didn’t see it as a way to endearingly address women they admired for their strength of conviction I wouldn’t use it on them (I generally don’t put that term upon people I don’t know are cool with it already anyways).
When it comes to British people using the word “cunt,” it seems like an American romanticization of the the accent. It sounds different, more classy, because British accents sound more classy. Something like that. It doesn’t sound very elegant when a Masshole says it haha. It’s used on a lot of the tv shows that gain cult followings over here so it seems like it’s taken less seriously to those of us who aren’t part of the culture and would never hear that word on tv here. But yeah, my British ex never uttered the word to me once, nor did my British coworkers at the summer camp I worked at (at least not often enough for me to notice). So IDK. Those of you who live there are obviously more of an authority than any of us Americans.
@lionicle: Really interesting analysis! Reading that has actually put my finger on a thing that’s been bugging me for a while.
A high proportion of my closest friends are guys, not out of any preference for the company of one gender over the other on my part – it just shook out that way. I’m not a ‘guy’s girl’. But my conversational style, and many of my characteristics, are quite stereotypically ‘masculine’. Sometimes I get the feeling that I’m seen as a bit of a…dog walking on its hind legs?
Last night we were drinking and my friend said I was the only girl who he could make fun of as hard as he mocks his male friends and I’d take it well, banter back with him and not get mad/upset. I didn’t really know what to say, I don’t want to feel like some kind of exception to a rule. Does anyone else have any responses to that kind of thing? Or even know what kind of thing I’m talking about?
This is really disturbing to me and full of contradictions. On one hand this Diana claims that all women should be responsible when they drink, this seems to absolve all males of equal and shared responsibility, they say of equal proportions but this primarily women focused, this is an inherent contradiction on her part.
If women should be responsible than a man should be as well, they are just as much at fault, and really knowing that anything else is just pure manipulation and them absolving them of any wrong doing what so ever.