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.
“If we work on the principle that most of what these guys fear that women will do is what they would do to us if they could get away with it, ”
Projection is one of the major causes of delusional thinking. It’s very common, especially in people who have no sense of irony.
“blathering about the Rothschilds and how Jewish bankers own everything”
There is a whole elaborate political fantasy in the US about how in the 1880s Congress made a deal to turn the US into a corporation for the benefit of international (i.e., Jewish) bankers, which we know because they changed the name of the Constitution to “THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES” (it says “for” instead of “of” in the preamble, and they attach very high significance to the fact that the title is in all caps — that’s supposed to mean … something important). All the taxes we pay go to these bankers and all the current members of Congress are in on the scam.
And then there are the Birthers, and the 9-11 Truthers, and all manner of other people who believe in all sorts of elaborate conspiracies — many of them have a weaker grasp on reality than the MRAs. They get into these mutually reinforcing echo chambers. When I read this MRA crap I keep wanting to ask them, Do you actually know any actual women, or have learned all you think you know about women from other delusional men?
The problem with artificial uteri is that they would almost certainly be very expensive and therefore available only to highly privileged women.
But, but, the free market! And everyone knows that Manly Dollars carry extra weight in any exchange, so of course that boycott, however small, would have the targeted states howling in pain in short order.
Talking of MRAs and artificial wombs always leads me to Sheri Tepper’s ‘Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’, one of my favourite books.
Speaking of Tepper, this latest round of MRA caterwauling has me wondering if, in theory, the concs from The Companions were to actually exist that would satisfy their urge to control and hurt something, and they’d leave women alone.
Dvärghundspossen:
Seriously though, I think my deep-seated fear of giving birth can be at least partially attributed to a summer job I took many moons ago, doing data entry for the maternity ward in my local hospital. They had a huge backlog of handwritten records that needed to be entered into the fancy new computer database. One of the mandatory fields on this database was “vaginal lacerations”, where I had to input how many centimeters of tearing each woman had gone through. It was very rarely zero. I also had to type up more detailed descriptions of various natural “complications”.
On the plus side, one of my favourite moments of that job was coming across a form where the hours of labour wee listed as “5 minutes”. The computer system wouldn’t let me put in less than one hour, so I flagged it with the nurse. She told me that particular lady was two weeks overdue with her fifth child, so they brought her onto the ward just to be on the safe side. To quote the nurse verbatim, “We’d just gotten her settled in, and she trundles off to use the lavatory, and a few minutes later, she comes back with a fine healthy screaming baby! Practice makes perfect!”
(The problem there being that it’s never going to be possible to distract these guys from their desire to hurt people by offering them a bot or something similarly thinking and emotion free to abuse – they want something that they can hurt, and if it can’t feel pain and fear they won’t be satisfied with it.)
I seem to remember that was, in part, the reason for the concs creation…
Hasn’t it occurred to these guys that artificial wombs would make it easier for older women to have babies? That would be the ultimate misandry because we’re supposed to be useless after 25.
It also hasn’t occurred to them a lot of relationships aren’t solely based on reproduction or the potential of it. Lots of men get into relationships with women because they want to be with her and artificial wombs wouldn’t actually change it. MRAs seem to think every man feels the way they do and no men would ever marry women if men could reproduce alone.
@Cassandra
That reminds me of a Stanislaw Lem story.
http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-18-seventh-sally-or-how-trurls.html
@daintydougal – I take the point of your 30% comment, but would extend the interesting bit by adding that not all suspicions of paternity “fraud” are equal. Some are more wrong than others. Fidelity insures paternity, but infidelity (which covers situations of overlapping activity with multiple partners) doesn’t guarantee the reverse. I’d like to see what the difference in percentage is between cases in which the infidelity is known/admitted and cases in which the infidelity also is only suspected.
India as a source of cheap surrogate mothers, I told that librarian that nothing good could come from putting cyberpunk books in the fertility and pregnancy section!
Seriously now they’re literally thinking of third world women as walking incubators. And David you’re thinking too small, we’ll need every animal hybrid we can muster! If we can convince Brian Blessed to contribute we can finally have HAWK-MEN!
I don’t know what’s worse. This editorial or the comments section.
http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/07/men_have_a_right_and_a_role_in.html
My mom is in her 50’s, she’s single and she gets men asking her on dates and even had a few to ask her hand for marriage!
I finally found one to call ‘daddy’ though he’s not living with us or married to mom I just like calling him that and I’m happy. And he’s black!!
Let’s see… A woman over 25 that’s 10 misandry points, she’s a single mom that’s 50 points, dating whoever she wants, being happy and has a successful career that’s 100 points and being with a black man and me seeing him as a father that’s 100 points!
The total is… 260 points!
Congraduations!! You are a great example of Misandry! ::claps:: but sorry no one is better at Misandry than MRAs! For their points are over 9000!!!
Right? What happened to entering a relationship because you actually, you know, like the other person for who they are, not for what they can give you*? These heavily projecting assholes are getting on my nerves. MRAs – Manipulating, Raging Abusers is what they are. I sometimes feel like I should just start replying to every MRA pep talk (“more and more men are joining us…” “men are tired of your *gendered slurring*…” “men everywhere are getting fed up with feminist rule…” and on and on, ad nauseam) with the “not all men” meme. For the lulz.
Speaking of children, me and SO recently had one of those serious talks about our relationship – almost nine years and going – and we’re getting closer to the dilemma of kids. I do not want to reproduce ever, nor do I want to be in the role of a father (or father figure of any sort for that matter), so adoption’s out of the question. She’s on the fence, not sure whether she’ll be happier with just the two of us in the future as well, or if motherhood will one day become something for her.
This might present a problem in our relationship, and I’ve made it clear that if she ever changes her mind, she should not hesitate to leave and find a person who shares her sentiment. She doesn’t want to end what we have (nor do I), but I’ve made it clear that I’m not going to change my mind about this. There are many things I second-guess myself about, but this is not one of them. I don’t like the prospect of us breaking up, but I like the idea of her giving up something she might really want for my sake even less. The whole situation is just so crappy, but I suppose we’ll just enjoy the time that we have together and cross that bridge when we come to it.
Okay, end rant.
*Ugggh. I feel disgusted trying to imagine the mind of a person who thinks of children as their property, not as human beings in their own right. Vomit time.
I’m thinking of sloths
http://youtu.be/G-Zfozy7gGI
http://youtu.be/ba7rRfKIHxU
>On the other hand, goat-men are satyrs, who are obsessed with sex and completely unconcerned with consent, so are we sure MRAs didn’t do this a long time ago?
Satyr never got any until Hellenism came around. Before that, the women they assaulted in art easily rebuffed them and sent them running for the hills posthaste. But hellenist art also produced a number of statues of hermaphrodites that were set up in such a way as to deliver surprise penises to people who approached them thinking they would get to see a statue of a naked woman, so attitudes towards sex and art seemed to have shifted significantly by that point.
I left the link debunking the 30% in another thread, using their own reference material against them.
@DJD:
There’s never going to be accurate statistics on this because not every who is having sex with different partners around the same time is going to admit infidelity. Therefore the proportion of suspected infidelity cases which are true positives is going to continue to be unknown. There will be true negatives in there too, where the woman is being truthful about having only slept with one person and the man refuses to believe her.
It’s also a “so what?” question on a number of levels. Just because a woman has slept with someone else, and this is accurately known by the man, the child could still be biologically his if she is still having sex with the partner. As others have said, it ignores the fact that child support has been awarded “against” non-biological fathers because the key fact has been the fathering (i.e. nurturing) and not the biology (e.g. nature). It also assumes, as I said in the other thread, that the woman had intent to deceive and may have assumed biological fatherhood.
Your criticism is odd. NIce how the argument always attacks the women, why not criticise the men who are providing the sperm contribution to these “fake” children.
Plus thanks to chimerism it is theoretically possible for someone to have a biological child that a DNA test would think was someone else’s. Happened to at least one woman, caused her quite a bit of legal misery.
# notallsatyrs
RE: emilygoddess
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.
Not gonna lie, when I first moved to Boston and I was looking for work, I looked into being a surrogate. At the time, I hadn’t been on hormones or had top surgery, so I could still meet their creepy breeding requirements. Fortunately, I found a job before it came to that.
I looked again when I was homeless, because $8000 would’ve been enough to keep me alive for a year, which seemed totally worth carrying a fucking child to term. Unfortunately, by that point I was on hormones, brain meds, and was labeled mentally ill, so I was no longer prime breeding stock.
RE: zoom echon logon
Brrr. That story gave me the creeps.
Regarding artificial wombs, uterus transplants are looking promising, but getting a child to term in one is still not a thing that has occurred. Four Swedish women were given IVF the beginning of the year, into transplanted uteruses, but I can’t find any news if they’re still pregnant — the attempt before them ended in an early miscarriage (last I saw she intended to try again). The big question seems to be blood supply as it isn’t just a matter of enough blood to sustain the uterus (that seems to be mostly solved) but to sustain pregnancy. I somehow doubt external wombs will be happening soon if we can’t yet manage to transplant one and get it enough blood to sustain a baby.
But yes, should we work out how to carry a baby to term outside someone’s body, I can’t see feminists, or women in general really, complaining!
TW: Medical grossness.
In English, it’s called a rectocele.
It’s a fairly common development after child birth, which puts strain on the pelvic floor muscles. Wort case scenario is it develops into a vaginal-rectal fistula, which is bad news.
A woman I work with had a baby not too long ago and was telling me in detail about *all the things they don’t tell you*. She also said her doctor told her not to google too much because it would just stress her out. I know its hard to hear but I find it pretty ridiculous that women are walking into medical situations with a blindfold in some cases. I don’t think I’ve heard someone who had bipass surgery say “Yeah, the doctor wouldn’t tell me about a lot of the complications because it might scare me”.
Is this a case of thinking women are too soft and delicate to hear the truth?
Possibly this, and possibly also a fear that we won’t fulfill our duties as baby machines if we know what we’re signing up for.
@pallygirl – [Just because a woman has slept with someone else, and this is accurately known by the man, the child could still be biologically his if she is still having sex with the partner.]
That was exactly what I meant. To take a well-known case, the fiance of the woman who slept with Dr Schwyzer days before becoming engaged could well have been the sperm provider for her pregnancy even if she lied to him about the degree of certainty. (I agree there’s no way to get accurate statistics, but was just thinking that it would be interesting to know which half of the double accusation is more often wrong than the other.) Part of the silliness of the MRA position is that they attribute deliberation to what is at best a matter of chance – one would have to risk unprotected sex with the non-desired father at least once. The odds could be altered a bit, but, within my ken at least, not made foolproof. (As I have no experience whatsoever of mixed-sex conjunctions, I am naturally prepared to accept that I could have made a huge bloomer here.)
I was mainly just being a bit of a math geek, but any criticism from me was directed at men who wrongly suspect adultery, the weightier (in my view) of the two parts of the suspicion. I have no more to say about the practical application or there being any point to the test at all than the poster who found it interesting that 70% of suspicion cases are wrong.
There are two parts to the question settled by a paternity test, which does not settle how many suspicious possible fathers are right about adultery but wrong on parentage. Although we can’t really get accurate statistics, I’m just suggesting that a split of, say, 60/10/30 (40% right about adultery, 75% of those right about adultery right about parentage) would have different implications than a split of, say, 10/60/30 (90% right about adultery, 1/3 of those right about adultery right about parentage).
As far as practical applications go, I am acquainted with a woman who advocates for a system in which a mother upon birth could designate any willing adult as the child’s co-parent. I forget what the stipulation was for cases without a willing co-parent, but would probably back such a system, with the emphasis on raising the child instead of who provided the original sperm.