So there’s a hilariously alarmist post in the Men’s Rights subreddit at the moment in which one concerned MRA called aegorrivers offers his ideas on How to avoid paternity fraud and toxic relationships in general while still reproducing.
The post starts off with a lot of nonsense about allegedly rampant paternity fraud – indeed, it’s such clear nonsense that even a few MRAs feel obliged to correct him in the comments – and then moves on to describe just how terrible life is for men who (horror of horrors!) find themselves in relationships with women:
On top of this, relationships in general seem to be a problem for men, as men are routinely arrested over false domestic violence and rape claims, even when they are the ones being beaten and raped. Divorce courts are heavily biased in favor of women, and men usually lose custody, end up paying alimony and child support, are thrown in jail with serial killers and rapists and are left to be raped by the inmates if they cannot pay.
He concludes that the only reason men are willing to put up with all this is that
women are the gatekeepers to reproduction. This is the key power that women have always had over men, and they will continue to have it as long as we continue to allow ourselves to suffer just to maybe have the chance to reproduce (assuming she doesn’t cuckold you).
Weird. For a bunch of guys whose only interest in women allegedly stems from a desire to make little copies of themselves, (straight, cis) Men’s Rights Redditors sure spend a lot of time trying to figure out how not to pay for or indeed have anything to do with any children that might result from their (ugh) amorous adventures.
Be that as it may, aegorrivers has a solution: Hire a cheap surrogate mom in India!
With this reproductive strategy, you not only avoid all of the hazards of relationships and divorce, but also can guarantee that the child is your own child (put a condition in the contract that says that all payments are on the condition of a positive paternity test), get your pick of the litter in terms of attractiveness and intelligence (just pick an awesome egg donor!), have no problems with mothers trying to alienate your children as the mothers will have no right to them (some states do try to pull shenanigans on this one, but just don’t hire a woman in that state and go to other states to create economic pressure on the states that do this).
But it’s the next part that really got my attention. Emphasis added:
There is even research that is currently attempting to develop an artificial womb. This has succeeded with goats. (http://abcnews.go.com/US/straight-single-men-wanting-kids-turn-surrogacy/story?id=16520916). Perhaps in the future, we won’t even need surrogate mothers.
Goats? That’s right. You heard it here first: MRAs are planning on raising an army of goat children, hideous monsters that are half-MRA, half goat.
And aegorrivers, like some MRA Dr. Moreau, wants to be in the thick of it:
I also will be supporting the artificial womb research by attempting to pursue a PhD in a lab that does this work. I encourage all MRAs to pursue STEM degrees and do this as well. …
This has lifted a great weight off of my shoulders. I no longer feel as much pressure to conform to society and don’t feel as bad about not being able to attract women. I think this might be the key to ripping their power away from them.
Clearly, feminists need to come up with a way to counter the coming MRA man-goat apocalypse.
Might I suggest … Catpeople?
NOTE: Thanks to the AgainstMensRights subreddit for highlighting aegorrivers’ post, though the AMRers don’t seem to have realized the full implications of his argument.
NOTE TO EXTREMELY LITERAL MRAs: I’m aware that aegorrivers is not literally advocating raising an army of goat children. I am pretending that I have misconstrued his already silly argument for comedic effect. Likewise, I am not literally advocating that feminists start breeding an army of human-cat hybrids.
Also, echoing everyone who laughing at the idea that artificial wombs are somehow TEH ULTIMATEZ REVENGE against women. The prospect of pregnancy is a huge barrier for women like me, who like the idea of possibly having a biological kid someday but balk at the idea of:
– Hours and hours of pain. I mean, seriously, l’m a wuss about getting tattoos and my longest session was only four hours. My mother was in labour with me for over 30 hours. I cannot even comprehend.
– Months of puking, back ache, swollen feet, incontinence, whatever other delights my particular genetics have in store for me,
– Irreversible cosmetic changes to my body
– Pain
– Potentially dangerous health complications
– Also the pain, did I mention the pain?
If someone told me I could make a little tinyorc (a tinytinyorc?) without any of those things, I would sign up as soon as the time was right!
That’s about four times longer than mine, you’re no wuss in my book!
Would a little tinyorc be a teenytinyorc?
Microorc, maybe.
@cassandrakitty: Hahaha, a micro orc! I love it! Especially because I’ve been dredging up obscure papers on microfinance all morning and I like the idea of having a micro orc minion to help me.
@kittehserf: Ah, but after those four hours, I was a twitching, gasping, sweating, shaking mess and had to be physically escorted to the nearest coffee shop by friends, who fed me chocolate and tea until I was recovered enough to be gingerly transferred to home, where I sat on the couch and demanded wine for the rest of the day. I used to have some notion that I had a high pain threshold, but I think I am grown softer in my old age (I’m 26, so officially over the hag mark in MRA terms!)
Perhaps you could also have a nano-orc to help out with any potential medical issues.
Hahaha, to quote Flight of the Conchords: “it’s just going to get into this ridiculous Russian doll situation.”
Where ridiculous means AWESOME.
It’s obvious satyr.
Ninjaed by opium4themasses.
Dvärg, the “daddy bag” was my idea originally. Although I haven’t patented it.
As opposed to ambiguous satyr! “Would you characterize these hooves as cloven? Are these horns sufficiently pronounced? Is this enough lower body hair to qualify as half-goat?”
Oh Arctic Ape, so it was you! Hard to keep track, sometimes, on who said what on this site.
TW for vaginal damage after giving birth:
Regarding giving birth, there’s recently been a bit of feminist debate on the Swedish part of da Internetz about this. A woman who’s a nurse and also a mother of two wrote a blog post about how terribly common it is to get some permanent vagina problems after giving birth vaginally. Hospitals, doctors, gynecologists, midwives and so on, however, usually just handwave all such problems as “that’s natural, so it’s nothing to worry about”. This nurse/blogger suffered no problems after her first child, but after her second, she ended up having a sort of “pocket” in her rectum where shit would gather up. In order to completely empty her rectum of shit when going to the toilet, she had to insert fingers into her vagina and manually press it empty (because the pocket was sort of hanging into her vagina; I find this a bit hard to explain, but hopefully you get the right picture). My sister, who’s a medical secretary at the birth department of a hospital, knew the medical term for this phenomenon, but I’ve forgotten, and besides, I wouldn’t know what it’s called in English anyway. But yeah, apparently a fairly common chronic problem among women who’s given birth vaginally. There’s all kinds of other vagina problems you can end up with as well, but everything that’s common and therefore considered natural is also considered not much of a problem by most medical staff.
After this nurse and mother posted this blog post and it started making its rounds on Facebook, stories were pouring in from women who had experiences with gynecologists and midwives who kept evading all questions about risks associated with giving birth, and even told them not to Google this because Googling might make them nervous about giving birth.
Omg, eggs are harvested with a needle
People seem to forget that there are all kinds of things that happen to the body naturally that aren’t much fun for the person whose body they’re happening to. Cancer is natural. Heart attacks are natural, as are strokes. When unpleasant side effects of childbirth are dismissed as natural that always reads to me as a. the person saying this doesn’t give a shit about women, b. they’re incredibly sexist and c. they’ve completely bought into the idea that to be female is to suffer, and just stoically dealing with it is how you prove that you’re a “good” woman.
Pregnancy and childbirth are a recurring theme in my nightmares. I find it genuinely terrifying and have nothing but wide-eyed admiration for women who can actually manage to do this.
They’re warriors. They’re fucking warriors, man. Epidural or no epidural.
Yup. It’s all natural. When I was in hospital for the last few weeks with daughterno2, I wasn’t the only one with crook joints from too much relaxin too early in pregnancy. There were a couple of others with problems as serious as mine. The physios and obstetricians had told all of us that it was “all natural” and “everything will go back to normal afterwards” with our previous pregnancies. Well, me. I knew I was pregnant before it was possible to test because my pubic/hip/lower back joints had already started to hurt. One other woman had been On Crutches! from four months on because her hip joints wouldn’t hold her up.
And they were still telling us that we’d be OK after this pregnancy while we were telling each other jokes about how we’d never be able to shift anything on the floor with a foot ever again. (Imagine using your foot to shove a box or a brick out of your way and someone stabs you in the groin with a hot knitting needle. That’s approximately what it feels like. And I’m still like that 30 years later.)
Just like everything else, these chumps don’t understand biology. I am CONVINCED that if men* had the wombs and periods there would have been artificial wombs years ago.
Last night I got in an anxiety circle about how annoying it is that virtually anything to do with womens health is called ‘reproductive health’ or ‘contraceptive health’. No. It just shuts things down immediately because idiots start talking about condoms and sluts. WOMENS BODIES ARE COMPLICATED YO. It isn’t women reducing ourselves to birthing mares fyi.
Also circling my brain was their “30% paternity fraud” crapola. So that 30% figure was taken from actual clinics when people already had suspicions, so that means that 60% of men who think the child isn’t theirs are wrong! I think thats a more interesting statistic!
*Throughout this tirade I mainly mean cis men and women.
Can I even maths? No. No I cannot. 70% of suspected paternity fraud are not paternity fraud.
From their own well dodge statistics! Amazing.
I’ve done it both ways. I vastly preferred the epidural.
I’ve got some hip problems, too, but nothing like that. I tip my hat to mildlymagnificent.
The pro-artificial womb misters never seem to consider how many of women of all stripes would be right on board with outsourcing gestation and birth (if we could do it effectively and without exploiting another person, that is). I wonder if once they figure it out, they’ll start trying to write hypothetical rules that basically boil down to “This is a useful tool for cis men only! You’re supposed to be disenfranchised and disempowered by this! No girls allowed!”
“This technology can only exist if we can figure out a way to make it hurt you”
The MRA approach to technology (and everything else) in a nutshell.
The first MRAss to quote the “30%’ bullshit to me worded it, “30% of fathers are not raising their biological children”. He was trying to suggest that meant men were being tricked into raising other men’s kids by teh ebil wimminz, but it sounds like the stat is referencing stepdads and adoptive dads if it isn’t made up whole cloth.
This brings to mind another group of men these guys like to chuck under the bus. MRAs hate stepfathers. They talk about them as if they are dangerous and at the same time dupes. What they really hate is that the women who have escaped a living hell with an abusive MRA can move on with their lives and enjoy long term relationships with supportive partners.
I thought someone dumped a bunch of links in the comments (can’t remember which thread) which boiled down to the 30% thing but it was from clinics. Well. I’m sure we can all agree it’s bullshit. And don’t you know men abusing children is the fault of women. 1) from being terrible mothers and creating monsters in the first place, and 2) For allowing these abusive men access to their children. So very much science.
Dvarg, that condition sounds like obstetric fistula – might not be the same thing but that’s what it puts me in mind of.
I’m inclined to say that any het man hand-waving away vaginal damage or pain should be disbarred from access, forever.
I see the bio-ignorance and logic fails have already been addressed, so I’m gonna focus on this bit:
While it is true that a mass exodus from one state to another will cause economic pressure on the state being left behind, the notion that so many men are going to be hiring Indian surrogate moms that they can form an economic boycott of a state that doesn’t adhere to their view of how the law should treat surrogacy is, um, optimistic at best.
Rape: terribad when it happens to men, probably a false accusation when it happens to women.
In other news, that article about surrogacy is making me really uncomfortable. I’m not sure I believe that adoption agencies just outright reject single fathers – even if they do, there’s still all those thousands of kids in the foster care system. I really hate the idea of being able to essentially rent someone else’s uterus, because it’s going to be mostly poor women doing it. That poverty makes some people desperate enough to risk their health – whether by selling blood or doing medical trials or serving as a surrogate – doesn’t make it ethical to ask it of them.
This is what I’ve always thought bonbons were:
Yeah, artificial wombs always make me think of Ethan of Athos, which is the only book of hers I’ve read (for those who aren’t familiar, Athos is an all-male society which is able to perpetuate itself through artificial wombs. The story is about one of these men venturing into the wider universe and encountering, among other things, women).
My cat does something like this. There’s a “rug” in the kitchen (actually a fugly carpet square that came with the apartment) and she prefers it to her scratching post (of course), but she likes to get a running start and make the rug slide before pouncing to a stop and scratching. I’m just glad to see her still playing at her age 🙂