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.
Also, chafing!
Ha! The novel I’m currently polishing with hopes of future agent hunting has a large-breasted protagonist. She insists on wearing a sports bra if she thinks running is even a possibility, and when she has to leave with only what she can carry, she grabs her bras first. They are harder to replace than other clothes.
@ wordspinner
Yeah, the idea of metal directly on skin as a form of clothing, well, I just hope that it’s neither very hot nor very cold in the place where this hypothetical battle is happening.
Kittehserf: You may be right particularly regarding hookup culture but I don’t really know, I’m not a part of that at all. The PUAs, dickhead dudebros and boundary pushing assholes tend to operate in that arena (abusive relationships aside) and the first two groups are almost certainly doing what cassandrakitty said, trying to score points with the ladpack instead of women themselves. Women are just a means to an end for them and the more sex acts you can “dominate” them into doing the better.
The same guys have a mental image (imagination would be a better word) of women being the ones that “naturally” accept their dominance or should accept it because…they’re women and it’s “their place”. Something something circular logic.
Mind you its only been a few decades since the sexual revolution, and before then sex for women was generally expected to be “lie back and think of England” submissive (not saying it always was, of course there was mutually satisfying sex among some couples). But that archaic belief isn’t quite dead yet, it seems. Somehow its still not totally frowned upon to think that men are to be the bedroom masters and women are to be the cock receptacles.
I guess superhero outfits are just made of liquid latex poured onto the skin hence the material in between the tits being right up against the tissue and not pulled tight across the front of them.
Also, I approve of this superhero, she has her priorities straight. Tshirts are easy to replace, bras actually have to fit if they’re going to do their job.
Srsly:
http://www.titlenine.com/product/mobile/313801.do
Holy batman there has been a LOT of comments posted in the time it took me to write mine. Kittehserf, my response is at your 7.30pm comment.
I was going to say that the character isn’t really a superhero (the story is secondary-world urban fantasy, if that makes any sense), but then I realized she has unusual magic powers, (tries to) use them to save people, and has a history of going by fake names, so I guess it fits.
Liquid latex strikes me as almost as impractical as bikini armor, but clearly I’m just saying to to oppress boners and not because as a person with boobs I’m thinking about how much it would hurt to do superhero tricks with them unsupported. Maybe if you’re a superhero they have their own gravitational fields, like magic underwires.
Or still, at this late date, used as a cheap means for emotional growth for the male lead. Need to establish a deep and complicated emotional life for your male protagonist? Kill off his wife! Need a reason for a male protagonist to engage in a spree of violence based on justifiable and righteous anger? Have someone rape his daughter!
Ugh. Just ugh.
See, the one superheroine that the ridiculous outfits at least make some sense for is Emma Frost, who would totally wear those clothes and can turn into diamond when it is time to get physical. But when all the women around her–women with vastly different personalities and different powers wear the same type of clothes–it ruins the chance at characterization.
It is kind of like how Disney has painted itself into a corner and now can only seem to do one kind of “cute” female face. They can’t distinguish female characters from each other very well, which means it is difficult to have multiple female characters, etc.
sunnysombrera, no probs, it was a good memory exercise! 😀
Funny how other animation companies manage to draw female characters with different faces without too much trouble.
Actually there’s a question. Can anyone think of a plot in which the heroine’s love interest gets fridged in service of her character development?
Bikini armor is the worst. The point of armor is to protect your internal organs. A metal bikini? Not getting the job done.
Does kind of make it clear which bits of a woman the artist considers worth protecting, though.
Daenerys’ dragon eggs were hatched after she walked with them into her husband’s funeral pyre.
Then there’s The Bride from the Kill Bill movies.
Dark Willow emerged because Tara was killed.
The plot of The Descent hinges on Sarah’s husband and daughter dying in a car accident.
It’s not as common but it does happen.
No, though plenty of parents have been offed for the sake of their children’s independent growth and development.
…
Oh! There’s that one movie where a couple gets robbed in Central Park and he gets killed and then she becomes a vigilante…
…other than that…
Oh, FFS, can we not do this? Just because someone indicates that something (usually, not always but more often than not a sweeping generalization) makes them uncomfortable, that does not mean that they are shaming someone.
So you have fantasies that sometimes shock you but you somehow manage to act like a decent person and do the minimum expected in sexual relations (obtain consent).
So, do you want a cookie? A trophy? An ‘atta girl’ and a statue named in your honor? Because insisting so often on the fact that you are just so horrible but somehow heroically manage not to do anything worse than kick back with the gals and giggle about kidnapping Daniel Craig makes it seem like you want some sort of recognition here, and that not getting it is apparently equivalent with being “shamed.”
In the same vein:
http://www.themarysue.com/its-not-okay-how-women-die-in-comic-book-movies/
At this point I feel like even if the writers don’t care about sexism they should try to avoid the fridged wife/girlfriend trope just because it’s so incredibly common that it’s boring.
A major plot point in the first season of the Battlestar Galactica reboot hinged on Starbuck’s actions resulting in the death of Zac (her fiancee at the time).
It doesn’t happen as often so it’s more noticeable when it does. “The exception that proves the rule” and all that.
I can think of a couple, but they both happened near the end of the novels/series, and the love interests had been major characters up until then. Spoilers:
Trudi Canavan’s Black Magician Trilogy
There was another one that I read in middle school, I think, where the MC’s evil vampiric mother kills her friend/love interest near the end, but I can’t even remember the name of the author. She also wrote this trilogy + prequel about a world where the easiest way to get magic is to kill people, magic mutates people like radiation, and a man who is immune to magic in the prequel whose name I think is something like Vinculous sets up a magic apocalypse. There is also reincarnation.
She also wrote a portal fantasy with blood-sucking orbs.
You know what all her novels had in common? They were really fucking disturbing.
If anyone knows the name of this author, I’d be grateful, just to get it out of my head, because I am having no luck with the google.
And let us not forget the female soldier lady in Wreck It Ralph.