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.
The cynical part of me thinks that some doctors have a vested interest in keeping their patients in the dark. It’s probably a lot easier doing your job if your patient only knows what you want them to know.
The optimistic side thinks that a lot of doctors probably do want to save their patients a lot of grief. There are horrible things that can wrong during a pregnancy and a delivery, and you can really freak yourself out if you go on a Google image search self-diagnosis binge (know this one from experience).
I don’t know that it is fair to attribute malice to a number of different medical professionals. I think it is wrong, but they likely want to avoid increasing stress.
Still the patronizing way they deal with people is infuriating.
I think it’s less “soft and delicate” and more “mindless bodies to be acted upon by the thinking people with the penises”, with strong overtones of “this is women’s purpose anyway so anything that discourages them from doing it is unacceptable”.
I was ninja’d. Ahh well
It’s not “malice”, it’s misogyny. One would think this wouldn’t need to be explained on an ostensibly feminist-friendly site.
You know, the more I hear about pregnancy, the more I am so, SO glad I never got pregnant. I really, really don’t think I would ever want to. (Which works out fine, since me and hubby would need to either adopt or have headbabies anyway… if our brain can even do that, which I’m dubious about.)
WWTH, that article…ugh. The only person who should decide to continue a pregnancy or not is the pregnant person. That’s who is running any health risks associated w/pregnancy and delivery. If the pregnant person wants input from anyone else, that’s fine, but it should still be the decision of whomever is pregnant.
I was being generous to the doctors and assuming that the advice not to google was for a) woman who are already pregnant and definite they want to have the baby b) complications that are not-preventable, can’t be mitigated by preparation and don’t always happen. In which case, yeah, why worry about them.
But, if you aren’t pregnant and/or you don’t know if you want to have a baby, then ALL of it is useful info. Plus, there are loads of things it’s worth being prepared for (or so tv tells me).
And, are there really any complications that fit that “not-preventable, can’t be mitigated by preparation” criteria? I can see how it could easily be a “don’t worry your pretty head about it” situation too.
One of the most chilling, yet reassuring things my mother ever told me:
after learning in high school about just what childbirth entails, I asked my mother how much difficulty she had had. She assured me that she’d had no particular problems, then added, “If I’d have had to go through what some of my friends went through, I’d have stopped at two.”
As number six of seven, this was disconcerting. My younger sister decided at an early age not to have children, and has never regretted it. Conversely, my husband and I have two, but then, neither of us had to be pregnant.
huh, Now I get IT MRAs meant satyrist not satirist. Not that being a goat man changes the fact they’re still assholes.
@booburry
possible. But I would tend to think it’s more like the internet as made everybody think their “expert”, and doctor’s are just sick of it in general. So the default line to anyone is now don’t Google it. Also given the amount of bad information on the web. any other response is risky.
@DJD:
The 30% figure, as I indicated in my earlier comment, is based on a factually incorrect interpretation of a laboratory summary. That means that the 70% figure (100-30=70) you have used just now is an incorrect deduction. We don’t know the percentage because
– not all suspicion cases go to genetic paternity testing
– not all genetic testing cases reported in the lab summaries are due to suspicions about the identity of the father.
Did you read what I wrote about how paternity is not the be all and end all of deciding custody/child support payments? Your ratio example is completely meaningless as we will never have all the information to know. I don’t know where you’re trying to go, but you’re pulling figures out of your arse. Repeatedly.
Pulling figures out of your arse and then running with assumptions from those numbers is not being a maths geek. It’s being an idiot.
@Ken L.
I totally hear ya about doctors maybe wanting to prevent people from getting wild ideas on the internet. My Mom has thoroughly convinced herself that she is allergic to every medication on the planet if it is not “natural”. She never had any issues like this until she started googling natural BS.
On the other hand, if I were a doctor I would want to inform my patient pretty damn well so they won’t feel the need to turn to the internet. I have read that a very high number of people in the states feel like their doctor is not listening to them and in a rush in general. That probably feeds into people’s trying to find information elsewhere.
I dunno. I didn’t mean to open a can of worms or anything, just thought about my coworker when you lovely folks were talking about the *joys* of pregnancy. 🙂
Flying Mouse:
I regard any doctor who withholds information about medical procedures from their patients with extreme suspicion. I don’t care if it’s brain surgery or a cheek swab, as a patient, you have the right to know exactly what is going to happen to your body and any and all risks you might be running in the process. Especially when childbirth is involved, because there’s so much patriarchal fuckery tied up in the whole thing: “a woman’s primary purpose is childbearing, women don’t know what’s best for their own bodies, scary medical stuff is too complicated for tiny female brains anyway, they’d only have an attack of the vapours if we treated them like adults…”
Extreme case in point, in Ireland, within the last 70 years or so, 1500 women underwent symphysiotomies during child birth, unknowingly and without their consent. The survivors are still lobbying for a full and impartial investigation into what was done to them, for the right to bring their cases to court and adequate compensation for what they went through. That’s 1500 cases of a doctor going ,”Yo, it’ll be easier for this woman to give birth if we just crack her pelvis open a bit. Or you know, a lot. No need to ask her. No need to explain to her what happened. It’ll only upset the poor dear.” Seriously, if you have the stomach for it, wikipedia “symphysiotomy” and read the long section on Ireland.
The only time I have really pissed off a doctor is when they wanted to admit me to hospital, having come through the ED via GP appointment first due to weird neurological signs. There was something wrong, they had ruled out a bunch of really serious stuff, but they couldn’t work out what the problem was. I was postgraduate internal at the time and had a bunch of student assignments to mark at my flat that weekend. I refused to be admitted “for observation” after pointing out that I knew that “for observation” meant I would be lucky to have a nurse check me once an hour. And “for observation” doesn’t include actual, you know, treatment.
The doctor even had the unmitigated gall to suggest that something might go really wrong when I was at home. I promised that, if it did, I would be getting my arse back to the ED via ambulance.
It was freaky – without warning, I would lose all sensation in both legs for about an inch right around just above my kneecaps. I could feel my lower leg and the rest of my upper leg, but no connection between the two. Everytime it happened I would almost fall over. Also, occasionally, the horizon would do a vertical jump on me – unsynced with anything I was doing, like walking or sitting. My eye movements felt normal when this happened. I did some odd reactions to the neurological tests in the hospital, but nothing consistent with any disease or syndrome. In the end they said it was …. “food poisoning”. I laughed. I wasn’t on any meds at the time this all happened and I had no obvious food poisoning signs like diarrhoea or vomiting, or even a sore stomach/abdomin. Food poisoning my arse.
@tinyorc – I remember reading about the symphysiotomy lawsuits a few years ago. I think the U.S. media gave it some coverage in the wake of Savita Halappanavar’s death. I remember being disgusted but not really surprised that such a thing could happen in the twentieth century. It’s in the same club as the forced (sometimes secret) sterilizations that have gone on for years in the United States.
And you’re right, reading about the symphysiotomy procedure in detail is not for the faint of heart or delicate of stomach.
Maybe, but agencies are quick to weed out anyone who’s doing it for the money. It’s not in anyone’s interest to work with surrogates/donors who feel coerced, exploited, resentful, or contemptuous of the process. By the time prospective parents get to this stage, they’ve already been through a ton of shitty bad luck and emotional hell. They’re not trying to take advantage of anybody or breed little designer Aldous Huxley babies. All they want is a family, and believe me, they are incredibly grateful that there are women who are brave and generous enough to help them achieve that dream.
In fact, it’s illegal to pay for body parts, so technically the donor/surrogate is being compensated for their time.
Sorry LBT, nothing personal – it just upset me that you might think infertile couples are being creepy and/or exploitive when turning to assisted reproduction for help. That attitude is all over the media, from sensationalist articles to comment boards, and it’s another way in which people love to punish women for their choices (or lack thereof).
I have a fear of not being believed by doctors. Add to that the ‘crazily hormonal pregnant woman’ trope and the terror gets ramped up to 11. I know some people behave like the world is ending when they so much as stub their toe but not everyone reacts the same. The possibility of your life and your potential childs life being in danger and just being told to shush and getting a pat on the head…(shudder).
I really hope all these mgtow-scientists get on with their artificial wombs. I’d be first in the queue!
RE: Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Sorry LBT, nothing personal – it just upset me that you might think infertile couples are being creepy and/or exploitive when turning to assisted reproduction for help.
Enh, I don’t think it was the PARENTS that were asking for the creepy things. It was the website who would’ve hired me. They wanted blond hair, blue eyes, higher education (preferably from a “respectable” school, including grade records), good health, a certain height and weight… I have all the respect for people who want kids, but it was skeevy as hell, yo. There’s a reason I ended up not doing it there!
Yeah, that does sound a little sketchy, LBT – probably not a place you would have wanted to get involved with. Agencies with any ethics/common sense should be looking for diverse donors. Generally, prospective parents are seeking a physical match for the mother, and not every woman is the WASPiest WASP who ever WASPed. For whatever reason, there’s a perception in the AR world that Aryan looks command a premium. All the recipient parents I know who went that route were frustrated by the ethnic monotony of the donors. If you’re Indian, or Jewish, or Korean, it can be almost impossible to find a match.
The higher education requirement might make some sense from a business perspective – egg donor/surrogacy is so expensive, recipients tend to come from higher socioeconomic classes and want donors with a similar educational background. It does get a little icky when framed as a class issue. College degrees have as much to do with family background and resources as IQ.
Anyway, sounds like you dodged a bullet there!
I don’t object to surrogacy in principle, as long as the surrogate is treated fairly, but there does seem at times a fairly severe element of classism in what you describe, and — in fact — an obvious element of exploitation of poor women that makes me very uncomfortable.
I have a friend who is a Jewish doctor who went to a prestigious college, who told me that when he was in medical school and short on cash he knew he could have made a lot of money by becoming a sperm donor. He didn’t do it because the ethical aspects of this sort of genetic selection made him uncomfortable.
Well, I actually prefer Linkin Park myself :p
>smacks RandomPester upside the head<
You're repeating yourself. Broken record is broken.
Also, boring troll is boring.
Why is it that all the fastest ways to make money involve selling your body in some sense or another? Sex work of any stripe, surrogacy (ok, not fast, but the egg donation part is), sperm donation…and the only one that’s predominated by men is the least invasive, hm, almost like female bodies are seen as a commodity or something…
(To any trolls tempted to call sperm donation invasive — you do a bunch of paperwork and jack off into jars, not as invasive, privacy wise, as any form of sex work)
The stereotype of “stripping her way through college” actually makes a lot of sense practically when you figure she could make more in a night than I did in a month. Which is, uh, fucked up. Granted I had a cushy desk job and my biggest risk was the CD duplicater spitting discs across the room, but I’m failing to articulate how sex work, selling your genetic material or renting out your uterus are tying into objectification in my head.