There’s a post on the AgainstMensRights subreddit today highlighting a comment from a Men’s Rights Redditor that offers some, well, interesting theories about why feminists are “obsessed” with rape and abortion, even though he thinks they are very ugly.
Actually, in his mind, it’s because they are very ugly, and secretly wish someone would be attracted enough to them to rape them.
I’m sure there are MRAs out there who would like to dismiss his posting as the ravings of a random Redditor. Sadly, it’s not. Despite the terribleness of his “explanation,” or perhaps because of it, it seems to be a common one amongst Manosphereians and Men’s Rightsers.
Indeed, in one notorious post a couple of years ago, A Voice for Men founder and all-around garbage human Paul Elam — probably the most important person in the Men’s Rights movement today — offered a much cruder version of this argument. [TRIGGER WARNING for some primo rape apologism. I have bolded the worst bits, and archived the post here in case Elam decides to take it down, as he has been doing with some of his more repellant posts].
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Isn’t it more than just a little fascinating that underneath all this hoopla about rape is a whole lot of women who, when thinking about some guy pinning them down in a kitchen and forcing a hand up their blouse, generally tend to do so with their own hand or a vibrator between their legs? …
And isn’t it also interesting that the most rape obsessive morons on the planet also happen to be some of the ugliest morons on the planet?
Consider this. If rape awareness was a religion, Andrea Dworkin was The Fucking Pope. The 300+ lb. basilisk of man-hate had a face big enough and pockmarked enough to be used to fake a lunar landing. Her body was roughly the size and shape of a small sperm whale.
And she thought of little else in her life other than rape. The subject drove almost everything she said and did.
She even claimed to have been drugged and raped in 1999 in Paris, an accusation that was never proven and which came under a great deal of scrutiny, apparently for damned good reason.
C’mon people, Dworkin’s problem wasn’t that she was raped. Her problem, and I mean all along, was that she wasn’t.
Oh, it gets worse:
Like a corrupt televangelist who only shuts up about sexual purity and morality long enough to secure the services of a five dollar hooker, Dworkin was the poster child for “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Or, in other words, she was obsessed with rape, quite possibly even creating the illusion it happened to her, precisely because her worth on the sexual market was measured in pesos.
Dworkin wanted to be raped, which in her mind meant being sexually desired, but didn’t have the goods to make that happen so she made a career of hating both the source of her rejection, men, and the source of her competition, attractive women.
In the end, the most narcissistic of all Men’s Rightsers concludes that rape is all about female narcissism:
The concept of rape has a lot of utility for women. One, it feeds their narcissistic need to feel irresistible. Two, if feeds their narcissistic need to feel irresistible. That level of irresistibility is the pinnacle of a woman’s sexual viability and worth. And for a whole lot of women, sexual worth is the only self-worth they know.
A Voice for Men’s domestic violence mascot Erin Pizzey seconded Elam’s argument during an appearance of hers last year on Reddit.
If you’re referring to Paul’s statement that many or most women fantasize about being taken, I’m sorry but that’s the truth. That doesn’t mean they want to be raped, but it’s a fantasy I think almost all women have. And I think he went on to say that feminists like Andrea Dworkin who were and are so obsessed with rape are really projecting their own unconscious sexual frustration because men don’t give them enough attention. Andrea was a very sad lonely woman like this
This is an “insight” that many other manosphereians keep reinventing and announcing to the world. In a 2013 post, for example, the “Red Pill” blogger and sometime Return of Kings contributor who calls himself TheMaskAndRose offered a very similar take on the subject.
Feminists are ugly women. They are fat, old, masculine, aggressive, hateful, sociopathic, unattractive, or any combination of those things. Attractive women tend not to be Feminists, so I encourage you to think about why that’s the case. So keeping in mind that they’re not the type of women who normal men desire or pay any attention to, here’s my theory:
Rape culture is the ugly woman’s rape fantasy. …
I think the true heart of a rape fantasy is narcissism.
I think it’s about the idea of saying NO to a man, over and over, but he throws caution to the wind and gives into the animal instinct to just overtake you–because you’re so attractive, so beautiful, so alluring, so irresistible that he just can’t help himself.
It’s about being wanted, more than anything else. Wanted so badly that a man would risk throwing his whole life away just for the chance to put his penis in you.
So, since Feminists and unattractive women generally don’t have men paying any attention to them at all–at least not the sexual kind of attention they crave but won’t admit to … they instead cast themselves in the role of heroine in a cultural narrative whereby men think they’re just so fucking deliciously hot that they can’t wait for the chance to rape them.
They project that insanity onto the world around them, and voila–“rape culture.” A world full of scary men so overtaken with lust and desire for these fat, ugly, manly cow-beasts that you never know when one of them is going to risk his career, family, money, and life outside of prison just to have sex with you.
There is, of course, a much simpler explanation for why feminists tend to be “obsessed” with rape: because it happens all the fucking time.
I’m neither dominant nor submissive (seriously, why do people so often talk like those are the only choices?) and that whole drunk-conversation idea creeps me out.
Cassandrakitty: I totally understand your discomfort. I’m uncomfortable admitting this stuff to myself. Since BDSM is my primary sexual orientation, I’ve often questioned in the past whether I’m a terrible person, or even a serial killer in training. Consent is my shield against the nastiest bits of myself, which I suspect I’ve had cause to examine more than most. I know I have the capacity to think and do absolutely terrible things, and because of this self awareness, I make damn sure not to. Chatting this stuff with the girls, after work and a few drinks is not right or respectful, but after providing sexual services for men with way more power and money than we’ll ever see, letting off steam can sometimes feel really good.
I actually feel like a lot of the time in our cultural discourse “not submissive” ends up getting framed as “dominant” in women just because “neither” isn’t something that people seem to think of as an available option. Whereas what really should be framed as dominant behavior in men gets framed as average or inevitable, and anything not confirming to that model either gets framed as submissive or just confuses people.
The funny thing about all those “women do it to men too!” complaints I’ve ever heard from guys is that the examples they provide seem to always be culled from pop culture (tv shows, movies, or those idiotic Diet Coke commercials) and not from real experience. Even now, when there may be more women working as writers and producers for movies/tv/advertising, chances are still better than 95% that those examples of women being just as horrible as men were written, directed, and paid for by men.
Seconding deniseeliza’s point that not only is it a particular subset of hetero guys doing the worst of the objectifying and commenting, but there’s a toxic echo chamber effect that happens where those guys drive each other to be more and more extreme, while guys who might snap the others into place in smaller, less aggressive groups shut up or start to participate. I’ve seen it happen more than once with guys that I otherwise thought were better than average decent and ended up hearing things that made me change completely how I thought about them and how much time I wanted to spend around them.
Put it this way, K Winter: if a man said here that he and his mates were drunkenly joking about what they’d like to do to a woman, and that gosh, they didn’t even get the chance to ask if she’d consent to it, how do you think people here would react? Blowing off steam? What, like a drunk man saying what he’d like to do to a random woman because he resents his female boss or customers who have more money and power than him?
Even with the overall male-female power dynamic in society, I’m finding this quite skin-crawling.
Two things. First, not all women who would be considered dominant are pro-dommes. Second, not all dominant women have an interest in, um, let’s call it the more extreme stuff? I’m basically just really uncomfortable about the fact that that comment about kidnapping some poor dude for a night of hardcore caning or whatever implicitly included me as a dominant woman, when in fact I read it and physically recoiled.
I may peace out of this conversation soon, starting to feel really uncomfortable.
On the echo chamber effect, basically what I think is happening is that those guys are performing masculinity for each other. It has pretty much nothing to do with women, except in that we’re serving as the thing they define themselves in opposition to.
Submissive to me has such a specific meaning – basically shutting up and doing what you’re told whether you like it or not – that it’s got fuckall to do with me or anything I’d consider sexually pleasurable. Dominant is its mirror image, and ditto. Has this idea stained thinking about sex (and I’m not saying it’s a new phenomenon) that the idea of two people enjoying each other’s company and having sexy funtimes equally is too hard to comprehend?
Kittehserf: I’m a switch in my personal life, and have trouble partnering up with anyone who isn’t also switchable. I present publicly as a Domme, mostly as a protective measure against the men who believe that all women are “secret subs” just waiting for the right man to “take us down”. Yes, I have many sadistic fantasies, but I think that I forgot to point out that my fantasy “victim” is enjoying the hell out of themselves through the entire time, or it wouldn’t be a turn on.
As for the subby/switchy side of things, I’m still struggling with what to do about it. Maybe it wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t know how too many “Dominant” men really view women, or if I was just less attracted to men.
Seconding what cassandra just said.
From me, definitely not. Like I said, who’d take their chances? Not me…in the first place, I’m not into that (either giving OR receiving). And in the second, I’m extremely skittish, so the moment the first creep-vibe came oozing off him, I’d be out of there as fast as I could politely and unobtrusively get.
I don’t know if it’s a universal, but I can say that I’d received my fair amount of criticism back in my dating days for being the kind of girl to ask guys out.
[Note: I didn’t ask guys out in high school because they we’re supposed to be the ones asking…and so I pretty much never dated. In my early 20s, I found out that multiple guys had tried to ask me out *through* a good guy friend of mine who then never passed along the queries. Grr.]
By a surprising number of people, it’s considered “mannish” and “too aggressive” – even if all you do is ask them out and drop it if they demure.
Even my husband didn’t realize that I’d asked him out until we were on (what I considered to be) our second date. He said, “Yeah, I was interested, but I thought that you wanted to hang out as coworkers. It didn’t occur to me that you meant it as a date.”
-_-
By the end of that evening, he’d been disabused of his misconceptions.
QFT.
I just realized that I left a sentence out of my first post:
So, I started asking guys out because it was the only way that I actually got to date.
Moving back to fiction, I see something similar: female love interests in fiction aimed at male audiences are treated as disposable in ways I just do not see much with male love interests in female-centered fiction. Even if there is more than one love interest, I don’t see the spares getting killed off often, nor do I see the protagonist running through an endless stream of male love interests that only get one story. But think of Captain Kirk or James Bond and all their disposable love interests.
It seems like male characters have to have a woman to validate their masculinity, but it doesn’t have to be any particular woman, whereas female characters are more likely to have–at most–a rotating stable of different guys (I’m thinking Sookie Stackhouse here), and even that is rarer than the one love interest.
Also boobs: I’ve seen some Gators claim that “SJWs” are oppressing women with big boobs by objecting to female character design. As a big-breasted lady, I just wanted to tell them to stop using me as a shield, but frankly they scare me. But big-breasted comics and videogame characters are more likely to make me feel excluded rather than aroused or included (and I am bi).
I think it is because they are used as a way to titillate* presumably straight male viewers without any consideration about what it is like to exist with big boobs. The clothes don’t fit realistically, none of the women seem to have any kind of support, and I know from personal experience that jiggling can hurt. So I am distracted by the practicalities, and it works as a very effective sign-post: this is not for you.
*Pun intended.
K Winter, it’s when the fantasies are about a real person that I’m side-eyeing rapey stuff.
I have huge boobs and if I’m going to fight in some sort of battle I’d like actual armor rather than a metal bikini, please.
wordsp1nner – Until I see a big breasted woman character sporting a 5-barbell bra from Title Nine, it alllllll rings hollow.
Sorry for causing discomfort here; I suppose that this might not be the place to wrestle with my less savoury demons pertaining to S&M and gender roles. My original point was that is possible to have horrifying sexual fantasies, but not act them out because a person knows right from wrong. As I’ve said, consent is my shield against my nastiest bits, and conscience is my saving grace. I didn’t mean to imply that all dominant women were Pro’s, or that all Pro’s get into the really scary, hardcore stuff. I merely stated my experience from within a social millieu very different from mainstream culture. I am not a mentally pure creature who never has a bad thought in their head; I have the courage to admit that, and to admit that I’m ashamed of that.
That said, I also didn’t expect to be shamed here, of all places, for admitting that a woman can think terrible things, just like a man can, but restrain herself from ever acting on them. I’d like to think that men are capable of the same.
The only one I know (which is more about my reading than whether they exist or not) is the Phryne Fisher series. She has a different lover in each of the early books, then meets Lin Chung, who becomes her long-term lover (and stays as such after he marries – she’s his concubine, much to the relief of his family, who were afraid she wanted to marry him), but has the occasional lover when he’s away any length of time. But this isn’t reflective of a genre or culture, just the opposite: Phryne was written as the female version of male noir detectives, so it’s a deliberate turnaround.
I’d also like superhero outfits not to hug each boob individually like they’re made of flesh because fabric does not work that way and as a pedantic fucker that annoys the hell out of me. What is this outfit meant to be made of, and why isn’t it obeying the laws of physics?
With a sports bra and plenty of padding underneath, please.
::raises eyebrows:: What, is approval of the horrible things people can think of – yes, I have vile fantasies too – expected now?
Yes, how dare another woman say that she’s uncomfortable with being included in your blanket statement about what women like her are supposedly into when it doesn’t actually apply to her at all?