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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Shhh, the secret is that the car has actual chickens in its suspension.
To engage them, of course, you use the cluck pedal.
katz, you may be pleased to know I am now making decidedly chook-like noises ‘cos I’m laughing so hard.
Agh. Kinda twiddling my thumbs, trying to get in touch with Argenti and/or pecunium to find out when and where we’re meeting up. I have to be in bed in an hour, and I’ll be in NYC around 10 AM, and suddenly, bam! No email!
I mean, not like I can’t find ways to occupy myself in freakin’ NEW YORK CITY but still. Come on, guys, where are you?
I’m glad, because that may be the only automotive engineering/chicken pun I can think of. (Not that I won’t now try.)
In his living room, what’s up?
katz, it caused hilarity when I read it out at work, too!
RE: Argenti
Just trying to get a meet-up time and place going. I sent y’all email this afternoon; if I’m going into the city, I’d be hitching a ride at like 9 AM and want to plan around that.
This behavior has always confused me. There are some words that I use, say, when talking to Mr C that I don’t use here because I know they’re likely to annoy people. Every online community has certain words or phrases that just aren’t welcome, and if you know what they are, why would you use them? It’s not that hard to figure out a different way to communicate what you want to say, unless what you want to say actually is something that the community will find offensive (ie it’s not just a word choice issue, the problem is the ideas/beliefs/worldview behind the word). If it’s the first problem, find a different word that’s less loaded. If it’s the second problem, maybe reconsider why you want to say that and why, if the idea itself is so offensive to a bunch of people who you like/respect, you’re so attached to it?
For instance, “mango.”
But I use mango in a neutral way! I don’t mean it as a bad thing!
Unless it’s used in the phrase “mango salsa”, which is impossible to use in a neutral, doesn’t make me feel vaguely nauseous way.
Curry!
(Since we’re talking unacceptable words.)
Or, to use a more practical example, I’ve stopped using the word “vanilla” here to talk about anything other than the actual spice. I know it bugs people, so why use it?
I mean, it’s not as if any of the regulars here are going to track people down irl to see if they’re using words that people here don’t like. All that’s being asked is that we avoid words that we know are going to cause an issue in this particular space, and even then it’s not like the words will get you sent to moderation, it’s just that other people may react negatively.
Tristan Gareth-Grey really got under my skin because I felt like he came here to start shit. Why else would he use a word that he obviously knew would make people mad? People he was pretending to be standing with?
Instead of “mango,” we recommend using a less biased term, such as “hellspawn demon-fruit.”
What bothered me was the way the whole thing was framed. Hey everyone, I know that this word will probably offend you, but you don’t get to be offended, because I say so! Preemptively instructing people as to what their emotional reaction to something should be is an asshole move in any context.
Lol, mangos! If he wasn’t in bed I’d totally show him that! (I am, as always, the last one up)
LBT, as you know, my email was being weird, sorry about that!
And now it’s my turn to call it a night, I will mention mangos in the morning 🙂
Oh, LBT, I’m Argenti around here btw, don’t bother trying to remember my legal name, no one else here uses it anyways. (I totally approve of this!)
As an alternative to “mango salsa” I recommend the term “misbegotten culinary abomination”.
I love
mangoesculinary abominations! And I don’t care who knows it! I like turning them into porcupines.Instead of curry, I recommend “nausea inducing sinus destroyer”.
Tristan’s posted here in good faith before (and is, IIRC, a woman) but yeah, using the word with a pre-emptive doubling down – not good.
Oops. My bad for assuming.
Part of the reason I’m wryly shaking my head is that I used to think my group of friends was using the word “bitchy” in a neutral way too. And then I started to notice that it was applied to women a lot, and to gay men almost as often, but not so much to straight men, unless they were a bit feminine in some way. I still use the word sometimes to mean basically “snarky with extra bite”, but I’m not going to pretend that I don’t know how gendered it is, or get defensive when someone points out that very obvious fact, and I try not to use it in spaces where I know it’s going to annoy people or make them uncomfortable.
I am so relieved to find out I am not the only person in the world who thinks mango salsa is an abomination.
I like mangos.
I like salsa.
I also like toothpaste.
Not everything I like needs to be assembled into a combo.
Thoughts upon first exposure to mango salsa…why is this so sweet? Wait, is it meant to be a sauce for the dessert? But it has cilantro in it and that would be kind of weird…ugh, soaking the mango in liquid like this makes it all mushy. Can I not just have normal salsa now and some mango later?
I had a very decent piece of wild salmon, perfectly cooked, spoiled by mango salsa once. Even after I scraped it off, its sweetness was all over.
I will never forgive that abomination.
Never.
(I had asked for it on the side.)
Also, random – my brother in law thinks cilantro is an abomination. Says it smells like sweaty socks to him. Which is weird, because I make a soba salad that has cilantro in it and he’ll quite happily eat that. Maybe something else in the dish cancels out the cilantro smell for him?