One of the issues that many Men’s Rights activists profess to be Very Concerned About is prison rape. This alleged concern translates into essentially zero actual activism beyond the occasional indignant reaction to someone making a terrible rape joke about men in prison. But then they’ll turn around and make similar rape jokes themselves.
That’s right: MRAs don’t only joke about rapes in which women are the victims. Like many Americans, sadly, quite a few MRAs seem to think that rape is an appropriate — and even sort of hilarious — punishment for men they don’t like.
For evidence of this, one needs look no further than a recent discussion on The Spearhead, in which WF Price’s followers fantasize about disgraced “feminist” and confessed almost-murderer Hugo Schwyzer being raped in prison.
In his post, Price notes that Schwyzer, if convicted on felony DUI charges for a recent incident that left a woman seriously injured, will be facing time in prison. He takes the opportunity to speculate, with evident relish, on the possibility of Schwyzer being beaten by other prisoners for being, well, less than a real man, in Price’s eyes.
Noting that prisons have “sensitive needs yards” for those who might be at risk for being attacked by other prisoners, Price writes:
These special prisoners include gang snitches, celebrities, physically frail prisoners, child molesters and homosexuals. …
Although I’m not an expert on this, I’d assume Hugo Schwyzer would fit the sensitive needs profile. As a feminist, liberal white male with bisexual tendencies, I can imagine that many of the general population inmates would quite enjoy giving Hugo a beating, for the entertainment value if nothing else. There’s nothing that screams “hit me!” quite like a snarky, passive-aggressive white nerd in prison. If he is effeminate on top of that some form of violence is a near certainty.
Price’s remarks are merely the opening salvo. In the comments, various Spearhead regulars are much less circumspect about expressing their desire to see Schwyzer physically harmed — and, specificaly, raped — in prison. They don’t even seem to care much about his actual, confessed crimes; they want him to be raped for being a feminist. (Note: The comments quoted below may possibly be triggering, so proceed with caution.)
Dannyfrom504, who apparently has served time, starts it off by writing that
he’ll be happy to know there are in fact feminists in prison, but they dono’t call them feminists. they call them, “my bitch”.
Geographybeefinalisthimself hopes that Schwyzer gets raped so as to “set an example” for people like, well, me:
As for me, I hope that Hugo does NOT get special treatment when being incarcerated to set an example for all other male feminists (and I stand by my position that all male feminists are like Hugo, including Futrelle). …
I’d give anything to know Hugo dropped the soap in prison and got sodomized so often that he contracted HIV or an incurable STD and lost bowel control because of how many times he had been repeatedly sodomized. After all, why should his not being raped be more valuable than that of any ordinary inmate who doesn’t denigrate almost all other men for not being feminist enough?
Rotten jokes that
Maybe Hugo Schwytzer will come out of prison with a real understanding of Rape Culture.
And a commenter with the ironic name Ethical praises Price for writing such a fair and balanced post. No, really:
Despite Schwyzer’s habit of ridiculing issues affecting men who’ve suffered cruelly at the hands of misandrist laws, this article very admirably took the high road, refraining from wishing evil on the man. Incredibly magnanimous, given Schwyzer seemed to entertain himself heaping scorn and ridicule on men in the meat meat grinder of false accusations, paternity fraud, or alimony or child support slavery, even at the same time that more than a few of those men were being driven to commit suicide.
And then takes an even lower road himself:
While I admire the high mindedness of this article, I also believe that if Schwyzer does find his way behind bars there would be some justice in him being surrounded by at least some of those unfairly jailed for child support, false rape, or other causes he might have implicitly or explicitly ridiculed. As high minded as it is … articles like this can only help identify the man to a demographic that could not easily be more hostile to his contemptuous liberal self. And his identification can only increase the likelihood that one way or another, his sins will be very harshly addressed.
Once again I present to you: The greatest human rights movement of the twenty-first century.
Schwyzer, who has confessed to the DUI as he earlier confessed to almost killing an ex-girlfriend, deserves to spend time in prison. He does not deserve to be raped. No one does.
Anyone concerned about the appalling epidemic of rape in American prisons should visit the website of Just Detention International, an organization devoted to ending this barbarism.
@Lady Mondegreen, whiteknight might have been referring to the Spearheaders…
That’s what I thought, too.
Belated hugs for Weeboy! Sorry I missed you last night.
canuck: The first thing that springs to my mind is that when MRAs talk about prison rape, they fail to realise that the main perpetrators of prison rape ARE OTHER MEN. (At least in the popular narrative. Certainly in their own narrative, what with their references to “dropping the soap”).
I don’t think they fail to realise it at all. I think it’s the core element of the idea. They a man being raped as demeaning of his essential maleness. They see it as, “unmanning” him*. They want that rape to be performed by another man (at one level the don’t really see how a woman can rape a man, rape is power, and women can’t really have any. Even if they are in positions of authority it’s structural, and they were given it by men. It really ought to have gone to a man anyway, etc.).
So they want their enemies to be turned into what they see as the lowest form of humanity… women.
*this is, to drift a bit, the core problem with the idea that, “Greece and Rome thought homosexuality was fine; they did, sort of. To penetrate another was no big deal, it’s what men did. To be penetrated was happened to women and slaves. To be known to have allowed, no matter the circumstance, oneself to be penetrated was to stop being a “man”, and so to have one’s social,and political, status reduced, even destroyed.
Oh. Oh, yuck. This is…UGH:
Does this sound like a veiled call for “corrective” rape to anyone besides me?
These fuckers are even more vile than I thought.
Manboobz – come for the MRAs crashing C4-rigged tanker trucks into their own credibility, stay for the heartwarming hugs towards Weeboy. 🙂
@Bina: Yes, I thought it sounded like a wish for rape; what’s more, it’s a wish that those who are unjustly held actually commit crimes like assault and/or rape, thus justifying their incarceration and destroying their injustice.
Way to go, unknown commenter. Way to go.
Those who wish for prison rape as justice must think one of two things about the inmates they wish would do it: 1) they’re justified because the rape is the actual punishment; or 2) they’re already lost and doing more harm won’t affect them at all.
Just Detention has a great program where they solicit Xmas cards for incarcerated rape survivors. The testimonials from recipients are both heartwarming and heartbreaking – for some, it’s the only Xmas card they receive.
Another great organization is Black And Pink, which supports LGBT (and yet, they do mean the “T”) people in prison (who are, as you might expect, at higher risk of abuse and rape than cis-het folks in prison). They have a penpal program, which is a lifeline for so many incarcerated people.
This is pretty consistent with their position on the rape of women, and a fundamental disconnect between them and decent human beings: they believe that some people actually do deserve to be raped.
I have actually never seen MRAs talk about prison rape beyond gloating that feminists don’t care about it (which isn’t true). David, have you actually seen them address prison rape in and of itself?
@Redcap,
I’m offended on behalf of yogurt. 😛
@Weeboy, word. Wishing AIDS on someone is basically wishing for them to die horribly, with bonus shades of homophobia. A family friend recently recovered from his second bout of leukemia secondary to AIDS, and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
@Lady M, I think whiteknight was responding to the Spearheaders.
Whoops, I left out a transitional phrase between paragraphs 2 and 3. Sorry, it’s early.
Bina: Yeah, or at the very least, retributive violence.
Falconer: As someone who, as I’ve said, once did fall into that trap, it really is a case of not even considering the person doing the rape as part of the process–as if there were some sort of rape-bot wandering the halls of our prisons, dispensing retribution only on the deserving. It doesn’t hold up well to actually thinking about it, obviously, but the trick is to let yourself get blinded by the (justifiable) anger so you aren’t thinking about it at all.
Some of my fellow oldsters might remember, during the 70s and 80s, when the wave of ‘revenge vigilante’ films came out. The Dirty Harry series was part of this; so were Charles Bronson’s Death Wish movies. These were based on eye-for-an-eye justice, with one (typically white) man doing “what needs to be done” to pull back civilization from the brink. Initially, the films’ protagonists were simply fond of using lethal force to bypass the justice system; the core conceit was that the system was incapable of containing the savages (and yes, the films were often as racist as that word might lead you to suspect), so it was necessary to kill. But as time wore on, the violence became more retributive than deterrent in nature; it was just the audience getting a vicarious rush off of venting anger at perceived travesties of justice. The problem was that this invariably led to escalation of the sadism and cruelty involved in administering what had started out as ‘rough justice’.
But as the punishments meted out got more and more brutal, we eventually did hit the wall, with Charles Bronson starring in a film called Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. This… was not a good movie, even by the standards of the day, and it pretty much was forgotten immediately, and I think I know why.
In one early scene, Bronson’s cop sexually assaults a human trafficker. It’s ‘rape for rapists’, in undistilled form, and it’s UGLY. It’s almost impossible to watch the scene and not be left utterly unable to sympathize with Bronson’s character–the hero. There’s no justice here, merely punishment for punishment’s sake. No intent to stop the trafficker from abusing women when he gets out of jail, or making the world less safe for scum. Just the venting of violent rage.
I like to think that that image is what finally broke the bank on the revenge movies.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR RAPE AND MURDER
On Freemage’s topic, I wonder if anyone else here has read the comic book “the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”? In the book, Mina is, at one point, beaten and humiliated by Griffin. Hyde, who’s a real monster but has something of a soft spot for Mina, rapes Griffin to death to avenge her. It’s really disturbing, but I think it was meant to be disturbing, and show that Hyde is completely fucked in the head and not just a big softie with a heart of gold behind a rough exterior.
WeeBoy and emilygoddess: I’m so sorry to hear about your friends. :(((
That virus sucks so bad.
Anyone who would use it as a rhetorical device, or would wish it on another person, is a prime-a asshole.
sparky – Exactly. I recall a news story in which a rapist had to get HIV testing after raping an HIV positive woman. So many people were laughing and proclaiming “lololkarma” and “you deserved it”, and it was infuriating, no less because a friend of mine is HIV positive and a sexual violence survivor. Why are people such assholes?
To drift a bit, re Dirty Harry: The first one is a very different film from the rest of the Genre.
Callahan is outside the law. He knows it. The law, for whatever reason, is incapable of dealing with it (and there was a lot of horrific stuff going on), and he decides he has to abandon the law.
At the end of the film he is standing by San Francisco bay, and he skips his badge across the water like a stone.
Roll credits.
The scene implies that he’s lost his job, that by stepping outside the law, even if he was after the right person, he lost his claim to be able represent valid justice; that all he managed was retribution; and even if the target was guilty, it wasn’t something a civilised society could allow to go unchecked.
@Dvärghundspossen
I’ve read that. And I forgot about that scene.
They are all such hypocrites. Its hard to take them seriously.
Lookit:
http://prospect.org/article/good-mens-rights-movement-hard-find
Pecunium: I’d forgotten that. That said, it fits my hypothesis pretty well–the first movie still had some degree of comprehension of where the line was. But the genre then grew beyond that, to sado-vigilantism, capping with Kinjite–note that there were no more Dirty Harry movies after Bronson did that, and that Eastwood (who, it’s worth noting, is still a die-hard ultraconservative) spent a good deal of time deconstructing his own creation.
Or 3) they think that since the Real Man has such a monstrously huge sex drive (can’t walk right for massive balls getting in the way), anything that satisfies it is meet and right. Including violence and assault, even on another man (who is of course not a Real Man, seeing as he’s the one getting buggered and all). And of course, those who not BMOC of the prison yard are fair game.
Shitty Spearhead misandry. QED.
*are* not…
Alice: :(. Good vibes for your friend.
I’ve taken care of a couple people who were HIV positive. It just makes people so miserably sick. And there’s still such a stigma against it.
Oh, I’m so sorry, whiteknight. I was confused and thought you were a troll.
“He never was a feminist. He was a guy looking to lead a movement and benefit from it in some way.”
Warren Farrell started out the same way, when feminists caught on he got the boot.
“They hate that and think it’s some feminist thing even though chivalry is sexist as hell.”
Well, technically it WAS a feminist thing. It was endorsed by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to ween men off of worse treatment of women as practiced during the medieval period. But I have no clue what they’re talking about…..what feminist goes around saying men should open doors for women today? Chivalry had its place, but what century are they living in, where do they see only men holding doors open for women or tossing their jackets over puddles? Not to mention but these things aren’t exactly oppressive to men, these were done before women even had the right to vote.
After thinking it over, you’re right pecunium. Cor, I’ve never seen so little cognitive dissonance in so much BS.
In my second year of Uni, I did a paper that argued that the torture methods of the past had never gone away, they had changed and been made more secretive–i.e. prison violence, and how the public condones it, without seeing/understanding the effects and implications. (When they’re not bitching about “free tv”). [that may not have been the exact thesis, but it was something along those lines] I remember reading about this one case, where this 17-year old boy had been sentenced to prison for vandalism. Vandalism! I mean, I’m not condoning it, but I think he got 3 years or something, for pete’s sake. (If he had been white, it would have been a slap on the wrist, argh!). He hadn’t even been there a week before he was raped. Three weeks later he hung himself. I’ve never EVER forgotten that story.
Pecunium — you can add that to the list of reasons I think vandalism, of the sort that doesn’t (and couldn’t have by any reasonable logic) injure someone should be a fine, not prison time.
Cuz that’s fucking horrible.
“where do they see only men holding doors open for women”
They don’t, they see women spitting the their faces for trying to hold the door (or was that just Al who got spit on? Either way, feminists teach women to insult door holding men)
I think it was just Al who claimed to be spat on (not sure if that was a one-off or a general thing in his rage-wanks). Other MRAs go more for the line about being shouted at and abused by ebil wimmen when the poor menz hold doors open for them.
Of course they might get abused occasionally if they trot out the “And now you owe me sex” rider that goes with everything they ever do where women are involved.
So I guess a simple “thank you” is out, then? What strange manners these Menz Rightzers have…