Men’s Rights Activists tend to be fairly blunt; when they express a noxious opinion – and oh so many of their opinions are noxious – they do it in the most obnoxious possible way. It isn’t enough for Paul Elam of A Voice for Men to blame victims of rape; he also has to call them “STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH[es]” wearing the equivalent of PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign[s] glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.”
Warren Farrell is different. He takes a softer approach. He would never call a woman a bitch or a whore or a cunt. When he speaks, he manages to sound gentle and caring. He talks about the importance of listening to others. He sometimes even manages to give the impression that he cares as much about women as he does about men.
And yet his ideas are as noxious as Elam’s. He is as much of a victim blamer as any slur-spouting MGTOWer complaining about “stuck-up cunts” on an internet message board.
It’s just that he does his victim blaming with such carefully evasive language that he’s able to hide the noxiousness of his ideas – and to avoid taking responsibility for them when he’s challenged on them.
So it wasn’t surprising that a lot of the questions directed at him during his Reddit Ask Me Anything session the other day were attempts to pin down the real meaning of some of his more troubling pronouncements over the years.
A Redditor by the name of fiskitall asked Farrell about a quote from his Myth of Male Power that I also had hoped to see him clarify:
It is important that a woman’s “noes” be respected and her “yeses” be respected. And it is also important when her nonverbal “yeses” (tongues still touching) conflict with those verbal “noes” that the man not be put in jail for choosing the “yes” over the “no.” He might just be trying to become her fantasy.
Though worded with characteristic evasiveness, Farrell seems to be suggesting that men should not be prosecuted for raping women who explicitly tell them “no” if they think that these women are somehow giving them a “nonverbal” go-ahead. His “tongues still touching line” suggests specifically that he thinks a woman who kisses a man is essentially consenting to sex.
So how does he explain this quote? He starts off by trying to explain the bit at the end about fantasy:
the quote comes from the politics of sex chapter of The Myth of Male Power. The point that “He might just be trying to become her fantasy” comes after a discussion of how romance novels and, in my 2014 edition, books like 50 Shades of Grey–books that are the female fantasy–are rarely titled, “He Stopped When I Said ‘No.'” The point is that women’s romance novels are still fantasizing the male-female dichotomy of attract/resist versus pursue/persist, and the law is increasingly punishing that as sexual harassment or date rape.
Beneath the weirdly academic verbiage – all that crap about “the male-female dichotomy of attract/resist” and so on – Farrell is advancing an idea that is really quite insidious: the notion that the popularity of rape fantasies in romance novels and in books like 50 Shades of Grey means that women actually want men to disregard their “noes.” Not only that: he seems to suggest that it’s unfair to prosecute men who rape women because, heck, for all they knew the woman is into that sort of thing.
As I pointed out in a followup question that he ignored,
I’m not sure how the fact that women read romance novels means that they don’t really mean no when they say no. That’s fantasy, not reality. I play video games in which people shoot at me; it doesn’t mean I want people to shoot me in real life.
He continues, his language growing more confusing and evasive:
the law is about dichotomy: guilty vs. innocent. male-female sexual attraction is about nuance. the court can’t begin to address the nuances of the male-female tango. the male role is punishable by law. women have not been resocialized to share the risks of rejection by expectation, only by option. the male role is being criminalized; the female increasingly has the option of calling his role courtship when she likes it, and taking him to court when she doesn’t.
The only real “tango” going on here is in Farrell’s language, in his attempts to so muddy the issue of consent that he manages to suggest that rapists are the victims of women’s “poor socialization” and caprice. In real life, the “male role” is not criminalized; men aren’t jailed for asking women out on dates, or going for a kiss at the end of the night; they’re being jailed for overriding a woman’s “noes” and raping them, though in actuality it is rare for a rapist to see the inside of a jail cell.
And that last bit – his complaint that women have “the option of calling his role courtship when she likes it, and taking him to court when she doesn’t” – seems to be little more than a deliberately confounding way of expressing his frustration that women are allowed to say no at all.
the answer is education about each sex’s fears and feelings–and that education being from early junior high school. we need to focus on making adolescence a better preparation for real love within the framework of respect for the differences in our hormones.
I confess I don’t quite know what he’s talking about here; as far as I can figure it, based on some of the things he’s written in the Myth of Male Power, the reference to “the differences in our hormones” is his way of suggesting that we should be more forgiving of boys when they make sexual “mistakes.” Boys will be boys!
the most dangerous thing that’s going on in some colleges is saying that a woman who says “yes” but is drunk can say in the morning that she was raped, because she was drunk and wasn’t responsible. this is like saying someone who drinks and gets in the car and has an accident is not responsible and shouldn’t get a DUI because she or he is drunk. we would never say the guy isn’t responsible for raping her because he’s drunk. these rules infantalize women and the female role, and criminalize men and the male role.
Well, no. They criminalize people who rape drunk people. A woman who is raped when she is drunk is not the equivalent of a drunk driver; she’s not the one doing the driving.
In his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell described how political writers turned to evasive euphemism, and degraded language generally, in an attempt to disguise the sheer terribleness of the things they were trying to express.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
It’s easy enough to see that this is exactly Farrell’s game. He can’t say “men shouldn’t be jailed for raping women who say no, because a lot of women have rape fantasies, and so maybe they’re into it” even though this seems to be the most straightforward translation of his basic message.
So instead he talks about how “romance novels are still fantasizing the male-female dichotomy of attract/resist versus pursue/persist”; he complains that “ the male role is being criminalized”; he talks vaguely about creating “the framework of respect for the differences in our hormones.”
But in the end, what he’s saying is worse than Elam’s rant about “conniving bitches” with neon signs over their heads. He just knows how to make the indefensible more palatable to a general audience.
People keep pointing out that the kink scene has bad elements in it and that it can be unsafe and even rapey. How is that different from straight, vanilla scenes? There is some abusive, non-consensual, missionary position, lights off, man on top, married, monogamous sexing going on all over. Abuse happens in those kinds of relationships all the time, but nobody is calling that sort of relationship intrinsically dangerous, unhealthy or a sign of a damaged person.
Well, some rare radfems in the 70s did, but I don’t think their are many of them still around.
RE: pecunium
The only substantive difference between me the athlete and the kinkters you bemean, insult and degrade, is that I am doing it for sport, and they are doing it for sexual pleasure.
EXACTLY. My husband used to box for sport. He eventually quit, but is he supporting patriarchy because he enjoyed boxing? Because obviously that’s SO VIOLENT and he must enjoy assaulting other people! *eyeroll*
Seriously, I guess women’s rugby is the most patriarchal sport of all, all those women beating each other up for male spectatos and all. Christ.
RE: Lea
Abuse happens in those kinds of relationships all the time, but nobody is calling that sort of relationship intrinsically dangerous, unhealthy or a sign of a damaged person.
Yeah, that was also what really honked me off. My rapist was all about the hearts and flowers. And yet that’s supposed to be the kind of sex I ONLY will have, because it’s so obviously “better”? HAHAHAHAHA fuck that shit.
“HAHAHAHAHA fuck that shit.”
Seconded
Correction: “…*there are many…”
That’s a good point about sports. I used to be a diver and would get literally bruised and battered by it. Sometimes you hit the board. Sometimes you land horizontally and smack the water hard. One time I didn’t properly kick out of a back 1 1/2 and smashed my knee into my nose. I was lucky it didn’t break.
I guess I’m really emotionally damaged to have put myself through all that all for the sake of ‘somersaults wee!!!!’
This unstuck flounce particularly irritated me because of why zie came back. Zie wanted to make sure we knew how much zie cars about rape victims.
Because I’m getting a strong vibe that she doesn’t actually care about the people, but that she cares very much about being perceived to care about them, and specifically about caring more than anyone else.
RE: WWTH
Damn, I had no idea diving could be so harsh on the body. You learn something new every day. (Though I DID know about the whole back-splat phenomenon.)
Yeah, I’m really side-eyeing the Rs for bringing up how everything that looks at all violent MUST be violent… but only if WOMEN are doing it in bed. If men are boxing or playing hockey, well, apparently that doesn’t say anything about them at all! Because that’s not DEVIANT or some such shit.
Seriously, I’m STILL pissed at that double-standard.
RE: katz
This unstuck flounce particularly irritated me because of why zie came back.
I can’t believe I’m having to utilize this comic AGAIN, but yeah. To apologize PROPERLY, you have to be sincere (the R’s have claimed we verbally abused them, and have said outright they’re trying to pacify us), acknowledge what you did wrong (never did), and change behavior (NEVER FUCKING DID).
That’s why I expressed my disappointment early and said “you’ve learned nothing.” Seriously, I guess us little crazypants survivors are just being overly sensitive to our allies or some such shit.
Someone fetch me a barf bucket.
I mean, who the hell says something like this?
What kind of person measures other people’s levels of sympathy using their own as a benchmark? Someone who doesn’t give a toss about the friend and just wants to be seen as a pious, sympathetic person.
Shorter R: “I’m ever so sensitive to rape survivors, as long as they have the sort of sex I approve of. Having been victimized in the past makes it impossible for a person to know what’s good for them. So, I tell them (saint that I am). I’m an authority on which sex is the correct kind of sex. The rest of you are twisted, sick and probably a danger to yourselves and others. If only everyone were as kind and thoughtful as I. I have the right kind of turns on’s and that makes me an all around better person than you. When you tell me I’m a condescending asshole who is wrong, that’s abuse.”
Can you feel the looooove tonight……
Back to the drunken sex discussion just for a moment (I’ve been away for the weekend), This
is more or less my pov too. I do not mean to take away the agency of drunk people or anything like that at all. I know people who are buzzed can safely and happily enjoy sexytimes without any raping going on.
I just think that in a discussion like this, when you leave even the slightest wriggling room, someone like Rilian will come and try to bulldoze it into a “but what if she just regrets it in the morning” or “but what if both the man and woman are drunk” or “but what if she only had one beer” or whatever other “but what if” they can come up with.
That’s why in discussions like these, I tend to take the hardline approach, because then there can be no doubt and no “confusion” (Lourde, how I hate the whole “but I’m just sooo confused! You need to drop everything right now and explain these basic concepts to me over and over again so that I can think up ways to try to invalidate what you say”).
Maybe I should modify it to “if you are the kind of person who worry that she’ll regret it in the morning or feel confused about the difference between drunken sex and rape, don’t sex when anyone’s been drinking”.
***
As for retha, that quip about Shrodinger’s Rapist just completely made me lose all faith that she’s arguing in good faith. To me it sounds like an extension of WTF’s “argument”: engaging in consensual play about rape/pain/whatever means that the person who engages in this play can not then actually be raped/hurt/whatevered.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it.
I also have no time for the “how drunk is too drunk?” question when it comes to discussions about rape. Because the question should never be “was there alcohol involved?”, it should always be “was there consent?” Two people can be drunk as skunks had still have completely consensual mutually fulfilling sex. Equally, someone can be raped after two glasses of wine. The levels of alcohol consumed have nothing to do with anything.
The reason I argue against the “never have sex with anyone who has been drinking” is not just because I believe drunk people have agency. I also believe that it’s actually actively harmful to consent culture and perpetuates dangerous myths about how and why rape happens.
The idea that you should have been sex with anyone whose been drinking just in case you rape them gives a lot of credence to the idea that “accidental” rape is a common occurrence: that it’s very easy for a well-intentioned person to rape someone because of the mixed signals and blurred lines caused by alcohol, which is the same myth that predators love to use as cover for their very deliberate predatory activities. It also lends to credence to the myth that there are women who don’t know the difference between drunken sex and rape, which is not only infantilizing, but plays right into the stereotype that all women are fickle bitches who will cry rape at the drop of a hat because they’re embarrassed about having a one-night stand.
Alcohol is the weapon of choice for most sexual predators. This is well-documented fact. Others don’t actively use it, but believe that the presence of alcohol means they don’t have to obtain consent. But that doesn’t mean alcohol magically transforms some people into predators, and others into prey. This actually dovetails nicely with the conversation going on about kink in this thread. Just because some people use kink as a cover for abuse and rape, doesn’t mean everyone should stop practicing BDSM just in case.
So for me, “never have sex with a drunk person” isn’t a useful message. The only people who will actually take it on board are people who already have a working knowledge of consent and who are conscientious enough about it that they would worry about accidentally raping someone. Meanwhile, it promotes the “alcohol makes consent so haaaaaard” narrative, which allows predators to maintain their cover and also allows them flip the tables and say “Well I was drunk too, so how do you know I wasn’t the one was raped?” So my hard and fast rule is “I don’t care how drunk the other person it, you must obtain consent.” That’s not giving predators any wiggle room, but it makes it much clearer that line between sex and rape is CONSENT, not one beer too many.
OK, excuse my incoherence, it’s quite late here and I am (lol) hungover. This sentence should read “The idea that you should not have sex with anyone who has been drinking…”
RE: katz
I mean, who the hell says something like this?
Yeah, they really don’t seem to realize how pissed they got me by implying my husband DIDN’T FUCKING CARE. He was the one who held me when I went to the cops! He was the one who supported me through all that! He was the ONLY FUCKING PERSON in my fucking life at that time (asides from the rest of my system and someone I was paying for brain-health) who actually helped me during that time. My family were too busy pretending it never happened. My online friends helped as best they could, but were far, far away. And my offline friends… I had one. They were busy keelhauling me the night before for some perceived slight.
But my husband was there.
So yes, I CAN safely say he cared more about a rape survivor than they did. Because he treated me a bajillion times better than they did, even if he likes tying my hands sometimes.
Also, regarding drinking and sex, I never understood why this was such a big deal.
Say me and hubby are drinking. Having a drink or two might lower our inhibitions and make it easier to say, “I WANNA,” but it won’t magically turn our “I don’t wanna,” into “I WANNA.” (And also, we’ve been with each other a long time. We can recognize if the other is maybe trying to initiate sex for less-than-healthy reasons, and are well-equipped to say, “Sorry, I’d rather not tonight.”) I have had awesome fun pouncing hubby when we’ve had a drink or two, because with him, I feel totally comfortable and safe saying, “I WANNA.”
But if you’re feeding people drinks in the interest of turning an “I don’t wanna,” into “I WANNA,” then you’re a creep and a predator, regardless of how many drinks you’ve had.
If you’re feeding people drinks in the interest of making them physically incapable of even SAYING, “I don’t wanna,” or shoving you off, then you’re a creep and a predator, regardless of how many drinks you’ve had.
If you’re specifically seeking out really drunk people with the hopes of taking advantage of their boozed state, regardless of how many drinks they’ve had, then you’re a creep and a predator, regardless of how many drinks you’ve had.
If you become a predatory person when you drink, then for the love of god, DON’T DRINK WITH OTHER PEOPLE. Preferably don’t drink at all. If you keep finding yourself in situations where you HAVE to drink, then I side-eye you and your fucking rationalizations.
If you’re not comfortable having sex with drunk people, for whatever reason, then DON’T HAVE SEX WITH DRUNK PEOPLE. This is a totally acceptable thing! For a while, me and hubby had an arrangement where no sex should ever happen before we were fully awake and alert. This doesn’t mean that other couples can’t have consensual sleepy sex, it just wasn’t in our comfort zone at the time.
It’s not the alcohol itself, most of the time. It’s how predators use it. They like to kick up all this dust with, “But what if we’re both drunk, we’re raping each other!” and “but how will I KNOW?” and “I had a drink and roofied her, so she must have raped me!” But it’s not really that hard, guys.
Did any of you follow the avatar links to Retha’s blogs? It makes a bit more sense when you do. Doesn’t excuse the whole “I guess you horrible people would probably want to your friends’ rapes” thing, or the not-pology, but it does make it a bit clearer that what’s going on here is an ick disguised as a political concern.
Wank, not want, though it wouldn’t surprise me if she came back with an argument that we want our friends to be raped at some point.
RE: cassandrakitty
Don’t care. If she had a bad experience and she’s coped with it by being douchey to me, she can still fuck off with her bad self.
It’s not that, she seems to be a (former?) religious conservative. Which isn’t an excuse for her pissing all over people here, I just found it kind of funny when I went and checked out the links and was all “oh, that’s where the ew ick stuff is coming from”.
RE: cassandrakitty
And yet we got two of them in the same thread. *sigh* Lord save me from my saviors, who strip me of agency for my own good.
Cassandra: I got the “this is a thing I don’t like; so I will find some overarching reason to decry it in all it’s forms” from the get go. I’m actually glad to hear that it’s more overt in other places.
Which, of course, means the real problem is a massive empathy fail on Retha’s part.
She’s seeing off the crocodiles.
I don’t expect you to react positively to this entry. This comment is because I am sorry, not to manipulate anyone’s reactions.
I am sorry for partially agreeing with someone who used the word sociopath to refer to people who like to hurt others. Bad people are usually not mentally ill, and mentally ill people are usually not dangerous, or morally worse than other people.
I apologize for how I agreed with a part of what RubyRubyRuby said. It was done in such a way that people could easily conclude I endorse even more of it than I do.
I called it morally ugly to enjoy giving pain. Of course, taking out a splinter with a needle is not about giving pain, as you are not rejoicing in the pain of the needle, but helping to solve a problem. To anyone who does not like the displeasure or discomfort of a partner, but their pleasure: I have never intended that statement on you, and apologize if I expressed myself so badly that you feel otherwise. I realize that the thought that I find your non-hurtful behavior that ugly is a terrible thought. People are different and have turn-ons and turn-offs. It goes without saying that if neither you not your partner enjoys to hurt the other one, if neither puts their own need ahead of the partner’s, nor forces/ pressures the other into disliked things, the relationship is better than one with force, pressure, delibarate hurt and/ or selfishness. I believe every one of you who say an enthusiastically consensual, rough relationship with someone who do not want to hurt, but to give pleasure in a rough way, is not rape. I am sorry if I worded myself so badly that you thought you even needed to tell me that.
Rape is never okay, and mistreating people – even those who play games where “no” don’t mean “no”, where another safe word is used – is certainly wrong.
Where I reacted without listening, I apologize. (But there are places where I listened and could not understand and were too afraid to ask, noticing what happened to previous questions. In that matter, I cannot respond well.)
I am sorry for saying I will leave the thread, and not leaving it. That was because at one point I thought that staying out will calm angry and hurt people best. And at times after that I incorrectly thought coming back to empathise/ correct wrong perceptions/ agree that I learned from someone will work best. It obviously did not work. Right now, I am not here to make anger subside, but to apologize where I can – There are other things I won’t apologize for because I never said them, and others I won’t apologize for because I still believe them.
I don’t expect a positive reaction to this apology, and assume no amount of apology will help – especially since some things I was accused of are things I never said and thus won’t apologize for. In future I will use another nickname on this blog.
1) Sincere: I know I am. How you judge my sincerity is up to you. Trying to pacify – I said “appease” – I care enough to have wished I could help with your hurt or angry feelings. I now accepted that your feelings is something I can do nothing to change.
2) Acknowledge: This comment will probably be insufficient for that. I did aknowledge and apologize, (in both this comment and some previous ones) but I know some people want me to apologize for even more.
3) Change behavior: a) I won’t ever speak in such a way that it sounds like a confusion between mental health and moral evil again, because the two are different. b) I will take even more care that even when I speak against hurting on purpose, I will do it in such a way that I never give any impression that it is okay to hurt people because they have rape-y fantasies. It is certainly never okay to rape.
(There is one point many of you tried to make towards me that I still have questions about, but the atmosphere is probably to hostile to ask clarification.)
No, Retha. Those games are not wrong. Calling kinksters evil is not changing your behavior.
Please, just go away.
Calling kinksters evil?
Not all kinksters enjoy giving pain. Not all who enjoy giving pain are kinksters.
I call enjoying to give pain, including emotional pain, evil. (An activity, not a people group) Not kinksters.
Not reading the teal deer, but seriously, people, if you say you’re going to exit a conversation then you should actually do so. If you don’t mean it, don’t say it.