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.
In this case I even gave him a resource! Seriously, if you’re a kid who needs good information about sex and your local teen programs are crap, go to Scarleteen, they’ll at least get you started.
@wewereemergencies
Yeah, I get that now. Sorry for the getting carried away.
*tries to quietly squeak back into commenting like she wasn’t just gone for months* **
**my computer broke. It’s still broke, but I’m on my moms iPad and wanted to stop lurking for a sec.
@angelica
” I feel all of you could have been a tad less bitchy about the whole thing. In my own entirely personal opinion, I believe you should do yourselves a favour and get over this discussion already, and @Rilian, that includes you.”
stop calling ppl bitchy.
“Please. I’d call a man’s overly snarky behaviour equally bitchy. But apologies. I’m not a native English speaker, that word possibly doesn’t carry the same weight for me because it’s simply not in my everyday vocabulary.”
So, you’d call a mans overly snarky behavior a slur used against women too! That makes it okay,then /sarcasm
Neway. Hi everyone
Hi, Marie!
Are you and Fade OK?
I think it’s fine, this is just a place for catharsis, not education. We’re here to mock misogynists, not change their worldview. You can try, but that is strictly on an “if you feel like it” basis. And we get so much crap here that the chance of people being genuine is like 1/20. There are people, like you, simply expressing concern! But it’s really hard to tell, and it’s far more likely that they’re trolling.
And just to make it clear – “bitch” is a misogynistic slur. Even when YOU don’t use it as one, that is how it’s seen in the wider culture. We could reclaim it, but it essentially means “woman who is more assertive than I think she should be,” so why would we?
@hellkell
Hi:D
@cassandra
Yeah we’re okay. Fades just super busy with college and I’m still bla with mental health issues. I got diagnosed with anxiety and panic attacks, by my new doctor who is so far cool, and got some pills. Also, personal ick with the stepmom. Maybe I’ll try to find the personal thread to vent later.
The whole “don’t feed the trolls” line is interesting because it’s a direct descendant of the old “ignore the bullies and they’ll leave you alone” line, and like its predecessor, you hear it repeated everywhere even though it demonstrably doesn’t work.
Both bullies and trolls do not, as a rule, get bored if you leave them alone. They love finding places where no one gives them any pushback so that they can do whatever they want. That’s why I prefer our “feed the trolls until they burst” strategy.
@wewereemergencies
“And just to make it clear – “bitch” is a misogynistic slur. Even when YOU don’t use it as one, that is how it’s seen in the wider culture. We could reclaim it, but it essentially means “woman who is more assertive than I think she should be,” so why would we?”
Um…because everyone has a different attitude about reclaiming slurs? Cuz I still can call myself a bitch (which I do) and it’s different the me calling other women a bitch. One is meant to make yourself feel better and the other is meant to put ppl, usually other women, down. Idk if that made sense? I’m having a hard time articulating this…
@ katz
It’s a sound strategy! And is also often very amusing! And even if it only makes them mad, it can tell the people watching that this isn’t ok! And it’s very cathartic! It’s made up of all good things! Why they don’t teach this in schools, rather than telling you to yell MEATBALL! at bullies, I’ll never know
@Marie
Sorry! Didn’t mean to imply that people who were trying to reclaim it had it wrong! I was talking more about around here, and specifically about, as you said, not using it on other women (who you don’t know very well). That wasn’t very clear, I’m very sorry!
Also, as in this particular situation, the whole “everyone stop and tend to the man’s confused hurty feelings” things is a really old sexist expectation, and it’s messed up. Never going to let that one slide no matter how many people call me bitchy as a result, because the idea that women are supposed to take care of men emotionally even if it’s at our own expense and that men are within their rights to expect us to do so is one of the foundational building blocks of the whole damn misogynistic edifice.
@wewereemergencies
That’s cool :3 because yeah you shouldn’t be using it on other women without knowing how they feel before but I just couldnt tell if u were talking about using it on yourself. Anyway now I know so whoops :p
In elementary school, I took the novel approach of immediately telling a school employee every.single.time I was bullied, teased or taunted. They also knew that my parents had been in the PTA for over a decade, and had sent four previous siblings to that school. It dealt with the bully problem, and gave me a playground rep that lasted until high school.
I wish every adult who ever told a child, “ignore them and they’ll stop” all the Legos there ever were, right underfoot. Ignore the pain in your foot, maybe THAT will go away.
:: waves at Marie ::
@ally
Hi! 😀
I took the novel approach of punching the kid who was bullying me in the face in the middle of the playground. Wouldn’t necessarily recommend that approach to everyone, but during my time at that particular school nobody every messed with me again.
[CN: abuse]
I’m the kind of kid who never fights back any bully. I take the bullying passively instead and just hope that they’ll be nice to me eventually. It’s because I’m very, very easy to manipulate. Anyone who knows me well sees that I’m vulnerable to manipulation. When I realize that someone is an abuser who will have their way with me no matter what I do, I just comply with their wishes and don’t bother fighting back.
Even the last time my dad physically assaulted me, I just stood there and took it. I was 18 and actually much stronger than him, but I was too afraid to do anything to defend myself. I react similarly to emotional and verbal abuse. One time I did try to defend myself from his physical assaults, but he ended up putting me in a headlock and started to choke me. I wish I wasn’t so damn cowardly in the face of things like this.
@ Ally
Have you ever taken a self defense class? I don’t mean kung fu or whatever, I mean more something like model mugging. Those classes can really help people to get past the tendency to freeze up and the feeling that they shouldn’t fight back or that it’s pointless. Even if you never actually use the physical part of the training, the mental/emotional part might be really good for you.
@ ally
::offers hugs:: and it’s not cowardly to not know what to do when someone is abusing you.
@cassandrakitty:
Yeah. it’s a sad state of affairs to expect emotional soothening in the same turn as being told you’re wrong. To me it kind of reads as a sort of: “Oh, I know I’m incorrect, but being incorrect makes me sad, so I would rather told me in a nicer way. No. No try nicer. Nicer“.
@Marie:
Hi! Luck to you and Fade, glad to know you’re still both alive and more or less in the area of well.
———–
@Retha:
Sorry, I couldn’t get back to you until this point because I was indulging in one of my vices, which is to say playing videogames until my brain started dribbling out my ears to celebrate handing in a final report that’s taken months to finish today.
I hope you find that my overconsumption of digital media at a cost to my own sleeping pattern, perception and general social skills is somehow more rational than people enjoying each other’s company in a non-standard way.
(If it helps with the kink angle, I was playing Dark Souls 2 and kept being dismembered by some kind of floating head thing with… a thing. You’d think the constant agonizing failure to accomplish anything but suffer at the hands of pre-programmed enemies would be boring, but I quite enjoy it. But I digress.
Or do I?)
Sorry, then. Ruby crops up occassionally, usually goes “You’re all bonkers! Deluded! Crazy! And prison rape is fine because it is the just payback of the monstrous on the sinners!”.
It gets a little tiring.
There is a lot of fairly terrible stuff in otherwise enjoyable scenes, books, movies, plays – hell, jokes and conversations. I understand that it can be quite bothersome reading terrible things – and I feel much the same way in some respects. Having thus established this mutual angle of apprecation for each other’s lack of desire to encounter too much gross stuff, I will now proceed to read the next bit of your argument and feel like someone slapped me in the face with an anvil.
It feels as if someone slapped me in the face with an anvil.
The thing here is that this argument works for every instance of someone sobbing. Is the person I am telling this story to dacryphilic? Is the person I am telling this story to sexually attracted to me? Is the person I am telling this story to really into that thing with balloons whose name constantly eludes me, and this tale of birthday preperation is going straight into their spank bank? If you wonder if the person you are trying to talk to is using your emotionally intimitate moment to fuel their sexual desires, may I kindly sugget you stop talking to that person until such a time that they stop, you want them to do so, or you reach an assurance where this is okay?
Because in literally any other instance I echo cassandrakitty. That is a vile, vile, vile thing to say because it cannot be constrainted to “Just those icky bdsm types with their rape fantasies”. It works on everything that someone enjoys that you tell them about, and reduces other people to mere monsters waiting for you to slip up and fuel their magical realms.
I apologize if I mischaracterize anything you say. Just because I do not enjoy it does not mean I will purposefully attempt to twist your words into making it so that you said something you didn’t. However, I find that often the reason I dislike something is exactly because of the way it was said. You refered to…
So for instance, liking pain is not something you specifically called “a mental disorder” – but you hinted that enjoyment from battering was a sign of sociopathy / psycopathy. However, kink entails far more than inflicting and recieving, and unless you wish to specify that only one very specific kind of behaviour is what you find objectionable what is understood with your writing is that it is all a mental disorder.
Especially when you add:
Given that that implies damage to someone’s mind, arising solely from a BDSM relationship, (damage being to mind being the very defintion of a mental disorder),we’re back to square one, and ipso facto; your words mean that being on the recieving end of pain from intense stimulation or intensively stimulating someone are both mental disorders.
If I mischaracterize that, that is my fault, and I apologize. But if so, I would like to know how.
Many academic sources are often incorrect or use the term vaguely because of the cultural surroundings. If you are specifically aware of this, it seems odd to use them so lacklusterly and then only accept the correction once this is pointed out.
That’s because sober people percieve drunk people, and so make guesses as to their inner state, while being awake is a pre-requisite for discussing anything. I think you’ll find that having a nap before two people wake up to discuss their sleeping habits might be the more enlightening approach, just as true understanding might be better reached if two people decide to have a drink in each other’s company.
Your problem with contradictions is that it appears the asumption here is (beyond no one caring about the socio / psyco distinction and sleep being the same as drinking the same as kink the same as drugs ) that logical contradictions have value outside of the framework for logical discourse.
This is important, because I want to re-iterate that it does not. When people talk about their emotional states they are trying to use a language meant to communicate in specific absolutes to infer information about their feelings, feelings which are often muddlied and confused. Would you argue that those who enjoy horror movies (“I like feeling fear in a safe space”), those who enjoy paintball (“I enjoy the sensation of danger while being safe”), those who enjoy contact martial arts (“I enjoy fighting for my life with no chance of death”) as like-wise contradictionary?
The root problem is that language doesn’t parse well to feelings between people, because the vocabulary involved is not easily graspable. If there was a word for “Only enjoys the inflicting of pain upon mutually consenting parties and would otherwise refuse to a hurt a fly” we might call it skibbobbing, and we’d be further along, but once we do that, we see that your argument isn’t against people skibbobbing, it’s against people doing something you percieve as filthy and wrong and leading to mental disorders.
If I am mischaracterizing your argument, please specify how.
Likewise, you said nothing true. There’s also that thing with balloons. Or the goo. Or the bit where they… well nevermind. Your arguments all applied solely to beating, were related to beating, and were focused upon rape (Going so far as to say that what one person enjoys with happy partners is also something that willl make them a lurking predator leeching sexual fever dreams off the words of their suffering, distraught friends).
Only within a framework of logical discourse with distinctly different premises and assumptions. When discussing emotional values and variances, mere either or and no yes won’t work because there is a scale and a grading curve. .
It is better to model it on a fuzzy logic system than a true-false network, but even then, I’m going to think you’ll have a problem with a statement like “I enjoy the rush of adrenaline I get knowing someone is trying to hack me to pieces with a live metal weapon, despite knowing he is not actually trying to hack me to pieces”. Or, if you will, “I enjoy feeling safe to experience fear”.
Sorry, I was making a joke. You mentioned the response as being “How dare you????!”, so I wanted to make a joke. I realize the smiley is hard to read and the intent doesn’t carry. My apologies.
I don’t like implying things that are not jokes. For instance, your statement implies I was implying things – this is a joke. What I was acually saying was to do some basic reading, preferably from sources that do not use words like “mental disorder” or “Psycopathy”. You could consider dream journals? You know, the journals people write after they have been sleeping? Or possibly any of the thousand internet posts that people write while drunk.
Those two above are implications, relating to the earlier statements about drink and sleep.
I do think you’re wrong, but I believe I said so without implications. I don’t need or want to take potshots at you, like so. I think you’re a little misguided and letting your personal discomfort with a subject overrule your otherwise well functioning ability to be fantastic. The reason I think that reading some more (I personally like the Pervocracy, who is linked in the sidebar, and has interesting perspectives) would help is that
Very few people who have taken the time to study something in-depth refer to others as “Unable to be rational about BDSM” or “Unable to be rational about XXXXX”, because with more reading comes the apprecation for other perspectives, including the idea that those you disagree with aren’t some group of mentally disordered sexual predators unable to be trusted with emotional fragility because they’ll just turn it into wank material, the sexual vampires.
Likewise, very few people write a very long reply and then finish it with “But this conversation is done, so goodbye”.
@cassandrakitty
I joined a karate class when I was 13. It worked out really nicely, and it actually boosted my self-esteem. Although I obviously had unrealistic expectations, I felt that knowing some form of self-defense meant that I was of use to the family for once. Even my teacher was kind (and principled, as well – one time I made an ableist joke in the class and he made me do 20 push-ups). If I had stayed, I would have benefited greatly.
But then I had to move, and after getting a yellow belt I joined a new martial arts place. It taught a mixture of TKD and karate. The teacher in that class was horribly abusive towards me, and I felt awful because I was 4 years older than the rest of the kids (14 at the time) in the course, and yet I was the worst student in the class. The teacher touched my legs very inappropriately and fat-shamed me constantly in the class in order to “motivate” me. And then he made me attend extra sessions because, as he said, I was pathetically weak and way behind the rest of the class. That was the start of a painful trend of self-loathing, and the end of my comfort with martial arts or anything similar.
Maybe if I feel less afraid one of these days, though, I’ll join a class like the kind you’ve described.
Does the anvil have “Acme” written on it? For some reason I’m getting Roadrunner mental images here.
@ally
It’s not cowardly. The important thing to do when someone is abusing you is *survive it* and any way that happens is a success isn’t it?
Second the suggestion for practical self defense classes. If it’s any help and you’re interested, look around for things that aren’t strictly tournament inspired (Taekwondo gets that a lot, for instance) because it’ll be more applicable to your daily life and less about the specifics of form in relation to winning in a tournament where everyone follows the same rules.
I also second the notion of punching bullies, if there’s no other solution at all and the local adminstration is just no help and you’ve tried the “Reach out to parents”. It never did completely stop the bullying, but at least they kept their distance for a while.