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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Erm…If you’re using the word incorrectly, then apparently you do.
Not keen to make yet another person huffy about their word use, but even less keen to hear people slinging “bitch” around claiming that it’s nongendered.
I’m not at ALL surprised! 🙂 I’m like that with my sister and BiL. I love ’em dearly, but oy, are they right wing racists. We basically agree not to talk about anything remotely resembling politics. However, furries and renovations make good conversation-fillers.
I’m having flashbacks to Randall in Clerks 2.
Tristan – the word may be ungendered to you but it’s most definitely a gendered insult in its origin and general usage, as Ally described.
Regardless of your usage elsewhere, the point is that it’s not acceptable here, same as ableist insults.
Her theory is strangely absent from the book on homicide I was reading.
Everything is a woman’s fault, first and foremost?
youdontsay.jpeg
The only right way to be a neck.
My school didn’t have sex ed. At all. Ever. Although lots of people used the chapel for sex…
I went to a Catholic school that was close to 50% non-het (you had to apply to get in, back then), and the administrators refused to acknowledge it at all, so the het couples couldn’t hold hands or PDA, but if it was same-sex it was ok! Because non-het didn’t exist! Which always amused me, being pan. We were also super knowledgeable about all that stuff because the administrators were pretty head-in-the-sand about it all; I remember teaching a bunch of people about it, most of the people who had comprehensive sex ed from their parents passed it on. I can’t remember a single teen pregnancy… Although I’m sure there were sexual assaults, like any place on the planet, I don’t really remember hearing about them either.
There is no way to use bitch in a non-gendered way.
FeMRAs are a lot like Uncle Rukus from The Boondocks, willing to hate themselves and their kind for a hopeful pat on the head. Not realizing they’re trying too hard and will never really be accepted.
As for sex-ed, the kind I had focused a lot of STD (which graphic pictures and descriptions) and how miserable the people (almost always female) were that had sex because it left them heartbroken or pregnant.
Tomorrow, I’m going to wake up and the MRM will have been a crazy dream. It’s still 2011, and this is a bad dream before I find out that that whole elevator thing was just a misunderstanding, and everyone understands exactly what was said and recognises the value of showing respect for a person’s expressed wishes.
I know this to be true, because there’s no way that I read that while awake. If I’d read such a nonsensical thing while awake, then I’d be living in a world of utter madness, and I know that I do not, therefore this is a dream.
Oh sweet cheeses, what is this world that I have dreamt? Why do I not wake!?
My sex ed was very much of the technical side of things (“This is a vagina *points to cross section of vagina* This is a penis *points to cross section of penis*. When you want to make a baby you put this *points* into this *points* NO QUESTIONS”), as is the way in single sex* Catholic schools. They also gave us little gold pins in the shape of footprints that they told us were the footprints of an aborted foetus and encouraged us to wear them to show our support of foetuses.
Ever since I got out of school and had a job I’ve donated money every month to help people from Ireland come over to the UK to have abortions if they need them.
(*bleeeeurgh so binary)
My mother had one of those little plastic fetuses and when I asked her why she had it, she said it was what I looked like before I was born, so for years I thought it was just a sentimental parent thing, like having your baby’s footprints in plaster.
(Things I love about the plastic fetus: The unironic fact that it only comes in white male and they sculpted little baby junk to make it unambiguous; the fact that it’s in the “novelty” part of the store.)
Sex ed: Our sex ed was weird. We didn’t get much on “how to not get babby”, and we didn’t get anything about consent. However, it was scientifically accurate, although they really focused on scaring us away from sex with a slideshow of nasty STDs.
I’ve never actually read How to Win Friends and Influence People, but somehow I suspect it does not advise walking into a new space and deliberately using a term that you know the community there will find offensive, despite the existence of many other terms that would work just as well. I also doubt that it recommends correcting this extremely obnoxious mistake by immediately demanding that no one be offended, because you have decided (all evidence to the contrary) that the word is neutral, and anyone who disagrees is wrong.
But I’ve never read it.
Neither have I, but that sounds like a rather good summary of what is very likely not in the book.
Viscaria wins the thread.
Some nuns once gave one of those to me and my oldest male friend while we were on a church trip in Germany, assuming we were planning on marrying* and sexing each other up. I think they realised their mistake when we started acting out a Springer-esque divorce and custody hearing over the placcy foetus.
(*We have the standing ‘if we’re both 40 and haven’t got married…’ promise but only because both our families are Irish so we figure it’d be a hell of a free bar)
Pretty sure the only actual misinformation I ever got was that the openings between the fibers in condom material were too big to block HIV viruses (pardon the redundancy). It was years later before someone pointed out that condoms are watertight and water molecules are a lot smaller than HIV!
Then again, I also remember being taught that Marco Polo invented ravioli and “fuck” was an acronym…did my teachers just get all their material from email forwards?
Sex ed was pretty biological at my school, and it was pre-AIDS (mid 70s) so that never got a mention. I don’t really remember much about it, except opting out of later sessions because they were going over old ground. It wasn’t about relationships at all, and I doubt I’d have been interested if it had, at that age.
Bleeuuurrrgh, I remember those; they gave them to us in our catechism classes at church. There was this weird little remembrance monument in front of the church for all the poor unborn babies, too. With footprints there too, I think. It was all granite and bronze and expensive; I remember the fundraising shenanigans that went down to raise money for it.
Awkward admission: I was really, REALLY “pro-life” as a kid. Like, to the level of writing awful morbid poetry about the poor babies that were getting killed and would talk about it to anyone who would listen. Granted, it was because I never heard any contradicting view and everything was always phrased in terms of babies, rather than fetuses, but still. Hella embarrassing to think about, these days.
I was ‘pro-life’ in a weirdly pro-choice sense. I was of the opinion that *I* would never have an abortion but it was up to other people to decide if they were comfortable with it. And then I had a pregnancy scare when I was fourteen, three weeks before my baby sister was born and I had to act like a second mother to her as her father wasn’t around. Best. Advert. For. Birth. Control. Ever.
Sorry, that was a bit TMI. Still, I’ve often found *actually* looking after babies makes a person a lot more pro-choice.
I doubt I ever thought about abortion as a kid or teen, though if the question of what I’d do if I were pregnant came up, I’d have wanted one. It’s probably because I’m just not generally a baby-person at all (the mini-Falconers are an exception!). I’m sorrier thinking how we had to get Abbey’s kittens aborted when she came to us, because we had two cats and a dog already and couldn’t take them all on.
Mini-Falconers are the only babies that make me squee (especially that pic of young lady Falconer in the swing!). My friend just had a baby and it looks like Churchill on a bad day.
Davidson starts with a reasonable point. Elaine O’Hara is assumed to have been strangled and dumped in the mountains, possibly by a serial killer. It’s understandable that the police would warn women to calm the public. But Davidson goes of the rails after the first three paragraphs.
Mullally argues that women won’t be kept safe by hyper-vigilance alone and suggests that both men and women should be educated about DV and rape to decrease violence against women. Per MRA by-laws, these suggestions are immediately identified and dismissed as the female lunacy that underlines the key principles of the Feminist Subjugation of Men.
Then it gets really weird. “The problem is not men. Men just want to be loved and respected. What women make them do for respect is what drives some of them crazy.” That’s right ladies, stop being so hard to please and men will cut down on the strangling to death and body dumping. **The More You Know. Rainbow**
Translation: Men are always in charge, except when we do something bad, because women actually control us. It’s all their fault!