So over in the Men’s Rights subreddit, some of the regulars have declared war on the meme above, attempting to “rebut” it by pointing out the many ways in which men’s bodies are regulated by the state.
Trouble is, they don’t seem to quite grasp what it means to have one’s body regulated by the state.
Their examples of laws regulating men’s bodies include conscription (which does not actually exist in the United States), sodomy laws (which, where they still exist, are no longer enforced), men not having their condoms paid for by insurance, and assorted laws that apply to both men and women, including “every time a man is precluded from smoking marijuana, taking ecstasy, or injecting himself with anabolic steroids for bodybuilding purposes.”
My favorite example, cited by numerous commenters, is alimony.
How exactly is alimony a restriction on men’s bodies? Well, according to the Men’s Rightsers, it’s a restriction on
![ghebert001 6 points 18 hours ago (?|?) The body which produces the labor that earns the money. permalink save parent report give gold reply [–]S31556926 4 points 18 hours ago (?|?) "You would've worked anyway." as if that makes forced labor without compensation somehow acceptable. Or that the coercive effects are somehow dismissible. permalink save parent report give gold reply [–]ghebert001 1 point 7 hours ago (?|?) Exactly, maybe the guy wants to work a low effort job because he just wants to earn enough money to live a simple life but now he's forced to work 2 or more grueling, high-stress jobs because apparently Muffin is entitled to "the lifestyle that has become accustomed to".](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/alimony.png?ssl=1)
One commenter spelled out the, er, “logic” in more detail:
Never mind that alimony, which is rarely awarded, can also go to men. And never mind that by this logic, every single law that’s ever been passed, including laws against embezzlement and jaywalking, could be considered a restriction on someone’s body. Hell, by this standard, parking tickets are an assault on your body because you have to earn the money to pay them.
Then there’s one dude who contends that women’s
“reproductive rights…” have never been limited. They can fuck out an endless supply of babies without a single hindrance. Hell, men are obligated to pay for each and every one of them.
Huh. So women “fuck out babies” with no help from anyone else?
I’m thinking that this fellow might need a refresher course in basic human biology
Also, I’m pretty sure that women as well as men are obligated to shell out money to provide for their own children. I don’t see a lot of young mothers getting showered with free food and diapers when they go to the grocery store.
To their credit, the regulars in Men’s Rights didn’t reward this last fellow with any upvotes.
Interestingly, none of the commenters bothered to track down the source of the claim in the meme. It’s not hard to find. It came from a report by the Guttmacher Institute documenting the number of bills regulating “reproductive health and rights” that were introduced in state legislatures in the first quarter of 2013. That’s right: there were 694 — not 624 — bills introduced in the first quarter of 2013 alone; 93 of them passed.
By the end of the year, as the Guttmacher Institute noted in a later report:
39 states enacted 141 provisions related to reproductive health and rights. Half of these new provisions, 70 in 22 states, sought to restrict access to abortion services. …
This makes 2013 second only to 2011 in the number of new abortion restrictions enacted in a single year. To put recent trends in even sharper relief, 205 abortion restrictions were enacted over the past three years (2011–2013), but just 189 were enacted during the entire previous decade (2001–2010).
This legislative onslaught has dramatically changed the landscape for women needing abortion. … In 2000, 13 states had at least four types of major abortion restrictions and so were considered hostile to abortion rights … 27 states fell into this category by 2013. … The proportion of women living in restrictive states went from 31% to 56% … .
While the overwhelming majority of these new laws restricted reproductive health and rights, there were a few states that bucked the trends:
In sharp contrast to this barrage of abortion restrictions, a handful of states adopted measures designed to expand access to reproductive health services. Most notably, California enacted the first new state law in more than seven years designed to expand access to abortion, and five states adopted measures to expand access to comprehensive sex education, facilitate access to emergency contraception for women who have been sexually assaulted and enable patients’ partners to obtain STI treatment.
You can read the details here. Somehow I doubt that any Men’s Rights Redditors ever will.
Misters always find a way to make sure men are the biggest victims.
When the government imposes onerous restrictions on vasectomies forcing men to travel hundreds of miles, walk through a gauntlet of protestors screaming at them about the sanctity of life, and getting a probe shoved up there to show them pictures of the soon-to-be departed sperm, then they’ll have something to complain about.
Do the misters have any idea how anything actually works in the real world? They seem to have no concept of how alimony, child support, pregnancy or labor & delivery actually works.
It’s kind of infuriating, they have absolutely no concept how these restrictions on reproductive freedoms have real, immediate impact on women’s actual physical bodies.
I continue to enjoy watching MRAs claim that laws that apply to everyone are somehow oppressing men alone. It’s like the earlier claims that “asshole” is somehow a gendered slur.
If they weren’t so insistent that they didn’t hate women, it would almost look like they didn’t consider women to be people.
Wait a minute, it looks like that anyways.
@Auntie, my sweet dear hero:
Exactly. I will have a shred of sympathy for teh menz as soon as, when going to buy condoms or pay alimony, they must cross a picket line of people screaming at them, telling them that they are going to Hell and that they are murderers.
My fiancé got a taste of that recently–I don’t have insurance and had some weird stuff going on with my cycle. I went to Planned Parenthood–which is 40 minutes away–to get checked out, and my fiancé went with me. Just to get checked out, we had to cross a picket line, complete with shaming and graphic posters and a megaphone. Though he is a supporter of feminism and very pro-choice, this was the first time he had seen the opposition on action. He was furious.
@Watermelon: Shit, that’s BAD. Makes me glad to live in Sweden. I mean, it’s not like everything’s super here, far from it, but at least we don’t have that kind of shit.
Some weeks ago the condom broke when Husband and I had sex, so the next morning before work I stepped into the nearest pharmacy to buy a morning-after-pill. The pharmacist asked me if I’d been all over the city to find one, since they had one pill left and knew that lots of pharmacies were all out of them. I said that no, this was the first place I tried. The pharmacist went:
– You’re lucky! They sell out at midsummer’s day, you know, and we haven’t gotten a new batch in.
It struck me then that a) this is precisely the kind of thing that make conservatives start to moralize, “they sell out at midsummer’s day…”, and b) although I bet a substantive percentage of the women and girls who buy morning-after-pills on midsummer’s day had been super drunk and raped, and c) even for those who had consensual but unplanned and unprotected sex, it’s way better that they all take morning-after-pills than have abortions or, worst of all, completely unwanted babies.
I should really start doing clinic defense again. I got tired of all the verbal and physical abuse, though. Anti-choice activists are possibly worse than MRAs in that respect.
Sigh.
Oh, and on condoms not being covered by insurance–
Anyone can get free condoms from public health facilities. It’s not convenient, but it is available.
@cloudiah–
I am looking in to doing that. With the buffer zones removed now, it will be horrible. I also live in Tennessee; stuff is so messed up here when it comes to sexual health that I don’t even know where to begin.
Ah yes, restrictions on men’s bodies that are on men’s bodies alone. Ah, we have dismissed that claim.
http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20131231060357/custombionicle/images/3/34/Reapersairquotes.gif
This is just simply not how alimony/spousal support works. Where do they get this stuff?
@WatermelonSugar, I was lucky enough to be doing it in relatively liberal southern CA; I shudder to think how much worse it could be in other locales.
Seriously, I would love to see these guys dressed in drag and sent to Planned Parenthood alone on a Saturday. I think it would be a major reality check. I don’t see people seeking prostate exams being called murderers or having someone try to talk them out of getting a vasectomy because it is an abomination onto The Lord.
Walking ten feet in the shoes of someone seeking a Pap smear or an abortion would, I am sure, change their tune in a heart beat.
Spousal support is gender blind. I have full custody and am paying spousal support to a man who refuses to work any job. He also refuses to buy our children any clothing for use at his place. I do it all, I wonder if the misters think that is as unfair as when the genders are reversed?
And a refresher course in history. Minority, disabled, and/or poor women have been sterilized against their will right here in the US, and just in the distant past, either.
@WatermelonSugar
They do that at Planned Parenthood?!? Wow! I’m glad you had a supportive partner at your side.
I feel terrible for all of you living in the U.S. It’s mind-boggling to think that these dinosaurs can impose their bullshit values onto half the population in this day and age. Things are actually regressing.
What world do these guys live in that mothers aren’t at all financially responsible for their children? In the US 70 percent of mothers with children under 18 are either working or looking for work. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm
@watermelonSugar Reminds me of when I volunteered at planned parenthood, we’d watch to make sure protestors and counter-protestors didn’t step over the line while having to make sure we didn’t do anything rash ourselves. There were a few moments where resisting the urge to run out there and start cracking heads was more than a little difficult.
I hail the scientific advances that have obviously come to the forefront since the last time my husband and I procreated in 2011! At that long ago, benighted time, my husband and I had to collaborate on the act of conception. Then I had to gestate a fetus for nine months of vomiting, fatigue, and five-time-a-day pinpricks along with biweekly doctor’s visits (gestational diabetes mellitus, a scourge that has obviously since been wiped from the earth). The long and painful birthing process has also seemingly been eliminated, perhaps replaced by something more civilized, the said process of “fucking out” of babies. I can only imagine that the babies gained from this new and improved birthing experience are similarly simple and streamlined, and do none of the constant eating, fitful napping, and constant eliminating that had Mr. FM and I fully occupied for months and months. Otherwise how would women be able to produce an endless supply of them, without a single hindrance?
Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
Yes, they do that at PP here. They do it all at PP here, because Tennessee is a really, really conservative and sex-policing state.
They picket–last time I went for my check-up, there were about 20 people there at 9:00 on a Friday morning. They hold signs about gods love and about regretting abortion. The really bad ones hold graphic, bloody signs and hand out “abortion is genocide” DVDs. They verbally harass anyone who enters and tried to reach into my car to hand me a DVD. They are merciless.
I did tell them when I was there that I was just there for family planning, which they were also opposed to. I got called a whore, godless and an abomination just for needing to talk to a nurse practitioner because I was having some weird PMS symptoms.
But alimony is the worst, AM I RITE?!
Seriously. These MRAs have no idea what they are taking about. Cross a picket line one time at a women’s clinic and get back to me about body policing.
@clarkgrrl5:
I’m sure they would call him “Muffin” in a heartbeat. /s
I’m sorry to hear your ex won’t buy your kids any clothes. Poor kidlets deserve better than that.
Here in Chicago I seem to run across massive anti-abortion protests about once a year. Last year somebody (not one of the protestors, to their credit, but obviously ideologically sympathetic) punched me in the back of the head after I crumpled up the flier they handed me.
The actual clinic protests I’ve seen around here have been really minor in comparison to the stories I’ve heard elsewhere. The clinics I pass are all located in strip-mall type areas so the protestors can’t even enter the parking lots. It’s usually just three or four apathetic looking people with signs. I’ve never actually seen counter-protests though.
None of these guys know how child support actually works. It’s based on number of children and how much one actually earns before taxes, at least in Canada. I’m not sure how it works in the United States.
http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/fl-df/child-enfant/look-rech.asp
http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/fl-df/spousal-epoux/ss-pae.html
If you get a new job or lose your job, you have the legal right to have child support payments adjusted. Just because you are too stupid to know your rights or you’re too lazy to rectify your situation does not mean you are oppressed. A few years ago, my then partner’s brother was taken to family court because the mother of his child wanted the child support writ enforced, because he was not paying the full amount. He had recently gotten a new job and was underemployed. He told this to advocate. He was told to fill out the paperwork proving it. He did. His child support payments were reduced. Easy-peasy.
As a Canadian, I am truly baffled with the proliferation of MRA in my country. The family court issue and conscription are practically baseless here. Conscription is so divisive that no politician is his or her right mind would dare broach it again. Of course, its because most MRAs (and really, most people for that matter) don’t really know history, especially the Canadian-brand misters. I feel almost feel embarrassed for them when they bring up stuff like this. It really does seem about having hurt feelings and just being bitter that women aren’t submissive and don’t want to be anymore.
There is a grain of truth in the claim of men going to jail for not working to support their kids. My ex in under what is called a “seek work order”. Every 30 days he is to submit a list of 6 jobs he has applied for. If he doesn’t do that, he is in contempt and the Child Support Enforcement Agency will land his bum in jail. Which will make it harder for him to find a job, so I am not pursuing that. I simply cannot comprehend willfully remaining unemployed with no desire to give anything to your children. The kidlets do deserve better, they know it, and they still love their dad. He’s so darn lucky that way and doesn’t even know it.
My ex-SIL is over $7000 in arrears in child support to my brother. She’s this close to being thrown in jail. She paid him $15 in the past two months, because if they pay sometimes that’s enough to avoid jail time. This does happen the other way around.