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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Hey, Dave, this is off-topic, but, if you’re not already aware of it, you have to write a post about the following screed from Matt Forney, it’s disgusting: http://mattforney.com/2013/09/16/the-case-against-female-self-esteem/ Choice quote: “In order for America to right itself, there needs to be a massive and concerted war on female self-esteem” Says it all.
Yes, yes, you all talk about my babies when I’m not even here. Soon this website will have to say “Falconbabies. I d’awwwwww them.”
@CassandraSays: When my babies were tiny (so, like,
a week agosix months ago) and one would throw a tantrum because zie was hungry, we started calling them “drama llamas.”And eeeeeee! LBT started their trip! Have fun! Good luck!
I believe that it’s possible to correct someone’s language without them announcing that they’re leaving the internet forever and storming off in a flurry of sock puppets. Truly I do.
Did anyone else find that flounce a wee bit familiar?
In theory it’s possible, but it’s a behavior not observed in the wild any time recently.
“In order for America to right itself, there needs to be a massive and concerted war on female self-esteem”
That sounds a lot like Roosh “sure the social safety net helps me, but if it’s good for female self-esteem then burn society to the ground.”
Basically they just hate women.
That Forney post is on my “to do” list.
Katz: I don’t think TGG was a sock, it’s just a familiar whine at this point.
But I’m sure you say a lot of things that are right. This is probably the only major disagreement you’ve dealt with on here, to my knowledge. And I hope I didn’t sound like I was saying that everything you say is wrong; I just said that some things you say can be wrong since everyone is prone to making mistakes. It’s a human thing.
I, for instance, genuinely used to believe that the c-word was always gender-neutral because I was misinformed about its actual usage, and so I used it from time to time. But once I found out about its misogynistic connotation, I simply stopped using it and never looked back. It was a mistake of mine; I never intended to be sexist at all when I used that word, and in fact I thought I was totally fine because I mostly used it for men I found extremely reprehensible. Nevertheless, once I learned that the word is regularly used to demean men and women via misogyny, I stopped using it.
I don’t know what else to say to you other than that I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings unintentionally; I was just trying to explain my aversion to that word you used (which others here share as well). While I can only speak for myself, I do believe that you’re not trying to be some horrible bigoted person who has no respect for anyone. I don’t know what you mean precisely by leaving your online life completely, and you’re of course not obligated to clarify, but whatever happens I hope things work out for you and you can get a chance to avoid all of the hatred that has been wearing you down.
Yeah, the I AM ALWAYS WRONG I HATE YOU FOREVER sounded like a miffed 13 year old, although Tristan is probably a lot older than that, and if she is she should feel kind of ashamed.
One of the gimmicks that TSR gave its Planescape setting in order to set it apart from its, gee, at least seven other settings (Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Al-Qadim, Ravenloft, Dark Sun) is that they set up a dialect for it, similar to rhyming slang, which helped give Sigil at least the feel of 19th-Century London.
One of the slang words for “a person” was “berk.” If someone wasn’t called “cutter,” xie was called “berk.”
For those who don’t know, “berk” is actual slang; it’s short for “Berkely hunt,” which is historical rhyming slang for guess what.
It’s probably moot right now; TSR is defunct, Planescape is no longer supported beyond a few articles in Dragon Magazine, and I don’t know if anyone actually called TSR out for it at the time.
But it kind of killed the setting for me. It’s all over, in every published book.
I think it’s kind of hilarious that the world’s most entitled man-children think women’s self esteem is the problem.
Someone said the other day that Forney provides proof that “the patriarchy” is just a protection racket. (I think I’ve got that right.) I thought that sounded right.
… How is “the patriarchy” a protection racket?
“Noice cultcha ye got ‘ere, be a shame if annyfing ‘appened to it.”
I think the word you’re looking for there is “manipulative” rather than “miffed”. Or possibly in addition to.
Oh, wow, I didn’t see the part where they made up a new name to drama llama all over the place.
Manipulative in the extreme.
Ok… so I feel bad for jumping on someone who’s already been piled on, and who has already flounced, but wtf is with this whole “you criticised me, so I must leave!” thing?
I meant to comment about this earlier, but I needed to find the article that sprang immediately to mind, and I did a really good job of not remember where it was. I put it in a safe place so I wouldn’t lose it, but then I forgot where the safe place was.
So, here’s the thing, if you’re a part of a community, and you do or say something that is frowned upon by that community, you’re going to get criticised for it. It’s not because you’re suddenly public enemy #1 or the devil incarnate, it’s because you did a thing that’s frowned on and people want you to address that. You’re not being demonised or ostracised, you’re just being asked to look at how they way you choose to act and speak can effect others around you. Maybe those behaviours are fine in other situations, but that doesn’t mean that they’re ok in this situation.
I mean, imagine I have a really traditionalist relationship with my girlfriend who I just made up – she cooks and cleans and gives me all the sex; I go out and hunt the mammoth for her and then sit back, put my muddy boots on the furniture, watch tv and ignore her. Somehow, we’re both happy with this arrangement. Does this behaviour being ok in my own home with my imaginary girlfriend make it acceptable when I come over to yours, demand that you make me a sammich, make a mess of your living room, and ignore you while watching your tv?
You don’t have to leave society entirely, and you certainly don’t have to act like it’s our fault you’re leaving society for our complicated and impossible rules. You just have to think about it a little and make some small adjustments.
I’ve had to make a few adjustments since I first commented here, and I feel like I’ve improved a little overall because of it. I’ve only slipped up around five times since then, and three of them were here – two were late last night in a single comment. (I said “crazy dream” referring to a bad dream, and “world of utter madness” referring to a terrible, terrible world. I’m actually a little surprised nobody called me on it at the time, anyway, sorry about that.)
The article I linked to shows exactly how not to react to criticism, and I’m sorry Tristian, if you’re still watching the comments, but that’s exactly how you’ve reacted to it. You’ve taken a valid criticism of your word choice and turned it into an attack on you personally. Criticisms are not personal attacks, they are tools to point out things that you might want to work on, nothing more.
@hellkell:
I can’t tell you how big my grin is right now.
Drama llama is a classic, Falconer.
I can even
This is an extremely frustrating attitude.
Viscaria: that always get my hackles up, because you just know the person who says it is a craving a, “no, you’re fine, it’s OK, all is forgiven,” no matter what assy thing they’ve just said or done. It’s a shitty thing to do.
Are the Drama Llamas friends of the Karma Rama Farmers?
RE that link
Ugh, high school drama. Why can people not learn that if you need to blow off steam about something that pissed you off on a blog or forum in terms of interpersonal dynamics then you do it privately, not in public?
Thank you, hellkell!
Athywren: Oh, the drama. That post really sounds like one of our marginal characters, Boggi or that sort, if he wrote a whole post about how he was mistreated here. I don’t know the context, but it screams “There’s another side to this story and that side is probably right.”
Want to hear a funny story? I was given that link in response to a request for an argument against atheism+ with a little more depth and thought to it than, “IT’S LIKE A RELIGION!!!!!” It was presented to me as a rational refutation of feminism. I was quite amused.