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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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.
Why is it automatically assumed that the woman is sleeping in the man’s bed? So, if the man is sleeping in the woman’s bed is it still assumed that she’s given consent?
That just irks me. Almost more than the idea that consent is assumed (maybe because I expect such nonsense). But to assume that the man owns everything is just so… Gah, it’s 2013 and women can own things now. Get with the program.
I tried to put that in blockquotes. Doh.
From the original article:
“Saying a man can stop rape is like telling a driver they can stop all car accidents or an investor they can stop all frauds.”
Don’t we tell drivers things like “don’t drink and drive” and “obey the speed limit,” etc., in an effort to reduce accidents? I mean, we pretty much do exactly that. And with investment fraud, we don’t tell the person being swindled that they asked for it.
And also, because, y’know, rape is exactly like a car accident or a Ponzi scheme.
…or the boys telling the other boys not to do that and taking the tacks off the chairs. Seems pretty doggone simple to me.
So, I’m confused. Is it the case that ALL men are rapists and therefore will rape any woman they find themselves in bed with if the boner rises, or are only SOME men rapists and therefore it’s unfair to call on all men to stop rape?
So proximity = consent? Who knew?
Not only are women not allowed to have preferences or moods, we’re not allowed to have illnesses either. Food poisoning? Too bad, dude wants to fuck. Hangover so bad you feel like you’ll puke if you move? Again, dude is horny so who cares how you feel?
(I’m guessing that the idiot who wrote the original comment would say “but I didn’t mean that!”, to which I say, too bad, because it is in fact what you said, since you failed to include an “unless”. Also, “don’t want to” is just as valid an “unless” as “feels like puking”.)
Anyone who sticks anything inside me while I am sleeping is liable to lose said thing. I keep sharp objects in the drawer of my nightstand. Just saying.
There’s too much dumbassery quoted in this post, it’s overwhelming. This woman has rationalized everything so backwards.
Sometimes I want to start my own blog mocking these insane mra posts, but then I remember how I’d have to quit my job and find a way to stop sleeping to find enough time to cover it all.
Actually that was pretty much the gist of sex ed at my high school. I remember the phrase “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am,” featuring very prominently. But that’s not how it should be, because separating everyone by sex and telling the boys that if they have sex they will get every STD ever and their penis will fall off, and telling the girls that if they have sex they will definitely for sure get pregnant and Mr. Dad will 100% definitely take off and leave her to raise the kid alone… well that’s both shit teaching and full of lies. And also hella ineffective.
(I am maybe still a little bitter about the disgustingly useless and blatantly false nature of the sex ed I got in high school…)
>.>
If a fetus grabbed the surgeon’s hand during an abortion I’d be concerned that the poor woman having the procedure might somehow have conceived the anti-Christ. Were there any suspicious-looking dogs lurking around? Anyone in the office fall down the stairs and swear they felt like they were pushed?
(Yes, this is all very silly, but not nearly as silly as the idea of a cute hand-holding fetus.)
The best thing about that story of the hand-gripping foetus is how it apparently punched through the wall of the uterus to do so.
Auggziliary – Yeah, I just… There was so much helpful stuff they could have taught us, and they went with the most useless things they could think of. I maintain that having NO sex ed at all would have been more helpful than what we got.
One of my biggest regrets from college is that I graduated before I could finish organizing a big pro-sex sex ed event on campus. The secular group I was a part of was drawing up plans to partner with the women’s center, the medical clinic, the res halls, Planned Parenthood, and a bunch of other people to put on a beginning-of-the-year, aimed-at-freshman, fun-but-informative series of lectures and presentations on stuff like consent, non-het sexuality, forms of birth control, and sexual health, since our state’s high schools pretty much all teach abstinence-only sex-ed.
It never got off the ground, though; I think the administration didn’t like it, between the “OMG this is too librul and scandelous!” and the “Umm, aren’t you the people who are all atheists and stirring up trouble all the time?!” things. Which sucks, because it would have been awesome for the student population.
I am 110% sure that we could convince MRAs of exactly that. (Changing parents to men, of course.)
Seventy-ONE most powerful? That seems a very odd number to choose. And oh, how I WISH the Pope weren’t on it at all.
RE: Iris Vander Pluym
It’s from My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
People still QUOTE that?
RE: CassandraSays
Totient’s quote rather neatly illustrates the way that all MRA arguments about sex basically boil down to “women are allowed to say no if they want and that’s not fair”.
I weep little gay tears for them. (They’re rainbows.)
RE: dustydeste
(I am maybe still a little bitter about the disgustingly useless and blatantly false nature of the sex ed I got in high school…)
You too? I was raised in Texas; I have a whole canned rant about the nature of the sex ed I was given, particular the high school part that happened either the year of or year after the Raping Year.
And I’m with cloudiah on being woken up with sex. I would completely freak out. My husband is okay with it, and has given me express permission, but it’s still something I am really not comfortable doing. Obviously I’m a self-hating misandrist.
Please tell me they played the entire song. Because that would immediately make it one of the awesomer sex ed classes.
The fetus-hand photo is actually real; it’s one of those common internet images that gets spread without context and so people make up stories to go with it. According to Snopes, it’s actually a photo from a prenatal spina bifida surgery. Isn’t that a way cooler story anyway?
RE: katz
But children with spina bifida aren’t good for fighting abortion with!
They did not! We were so deprived. It was just trotted out as the little catchphrase for “He’ll fuck you, and since all he wanted was to get his dick wet, he’ll leave you right after you put out!”
So, MRA logic:
Men are biologically destined to be the leaders and rulers of the world. This is scientific fact. They are logical while women are emotional. They are physically strong while women are physically weak.
but
Everything men do is due to the manipulations of women. Men do not make any decisions on their own, they merely react to women.
Cognitive dissonance FTW!
RE: LBT
Yeah, I mean, personally I feel I would really have benefited from some going over what consent is, especially down the road when I got raped in college and the whole “But you went to sleep in his bed! What did you think would happen?!” bit got trotted out. I mean, I worked at a crisis hotline at the time and had had training on how to talk to rape survivors, and I still blamed myself for months.
RE: dustydeste
Yeah, my formative sex ed experience was having a girl in the class given a paper heart and having chunks torn off to symbolize every sexual relationship she ever had, till she met the love of her life and only had a little scrap left.
At the time, I didn’t find anything wrong with it, because suddenly, I understood why I felt so used and torn up and worthless: it was because I was.
Thanks, sex ed! 😀
Man, I’m so glad I went to school in the early to mid-90’s, when we still had comprehensive sex education.
Know how many girls in my class got pregnant in the whole four years I went to high school? One.