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.
Re Twilight & FSoG: they are hardly feminist works! Not written by or for feminists. I doubt that many women who read them define as feminist. Just because something is aimed at a female market does not make it automatically feminist. IMO they are anti feminist works and are an exemplar of the New Misogyny – embrace your oppression Ladeez – as long as he is stunningly handsome you can let him abuse you and it is lurve!
Those videos were so cool, wordsp1nner! I loved listening to the weaver describing the process (and I heard the kitty, though I didn’t see it).
Even better – when I was watching the tapestry one, I got the feeling Mr K would love to try this out. He hasn’t in all his long time, surprisingly. This could be great – there’s plenty of space for a loom in his house!
Absolutely. I remember being shocked to my core in a conversation with a friend. Her daughter was a bit older than my younger one, 10-11 at the time, and she suggested that now that her daughter was growing up she’d change over to reading her some romance novels. I can’t remember the author names she mentioned, I was just horrified. She’d previously expressed some odd ideas — like being afraid of the white slave trade — and it turned out that she seriously believed every single one of those trashy novel memes. Masterful men. Swooning women. Leering slave traders. The whole she-bang. I’d always laughed off such hints in conversations. It had never once occurred to me that she might be serious about this shit so we never went into these things. But she was.
And she was intelligent, educated and what most people would think of as well off middle class. She had adopted the romance novel worldview, wholeheartedly, unquestioningly. Dog save us from what she might have done if this FSoG and Twilight stuff had been around then. She can’t be the only one.
I’m pretty sure all this is just a form of projection on the part of MRAs. They all ascribe to that idea that men would never turn down sex from a woman, and from this and their staunch defence of female child-molesters I believe that their concept of female-on-male rape is of nothing more than the woman being the more aggressive partner in bed.
They all assume the convicted teachers in these cases to be attractive (hence the ‘who wouldn’t want to sleep with her’ attitude), and they seem to be unable to conceive of anything else. I’d almost say they are in some way secretly jealous of rape victims, as they are unable to conceive of rape as anything other than an attractive stranger coming onto you, and they think that women who are raped are just getting the sex they themselves aren’t getting, and see them as ungrateful for complaining.
I’m sure the Van Halen song, and accompanying video, hasn’t helped here.
It’s pretty amazing that the conversation about rape and dominance can loop so far back on itself.
“It’s my thesis that many women feel threatened at times by the possibility of rape”
“So, like, a culture of rape they stew in?”
“That is indeed my idea”
“Ah, and you then claim at least some of this is because men are raised to think of dominance and conquest as erotic, and submission aa inherently a female trait? That would feed a cycle of rape and the possibility of rape, indeed”
“Exactly! Not that all men are literally rapists, rather that they might incidentally benefit from a system wherein rape is a possibility hanging over the heads of anyone” ( to paraphrase Susan Brownmiller)
“You know what? The claim that men are taught to see aggression as eroticism and dominance as foreplay, leading to a prelediction towards treating women as receptacles for sexual attention, causing the social fallout of having women live sometimes in feae of bodily harm leads me inescapably to one conclusion”
“Yes?”
“That clearly you, as a women, just haven’t been getting the sexual attention you desire”
“What”
“It’s obvious! You are clearly just sexually frustrated without a proper man to be the bedrock of your flighty life, since you are so unfeminine that no one can break through your shell to find the actually submissive women inside”
“… What”
“Ah, the lady does protest too much! You getting off on imagining all these things, because as a women you are obviously always searching for an alpha man to control you”
“See this is exactly what I was talking about!”
“I know”
“Arrrrrgh”
“Aww, is missy a little frustrated?”
“Goddammit.”
I did some diving into YouTube comments onto The Amazing Atheists channel (wtf was I thinking) and I found a female anti feminist MGTOW supporter. I mean, I’m a MGTOW supporter too but not because I think more highly of men than women, but because the type of dude the cause attracts is one that very much needs to go his own way ad leave womenfolk alone. Why would she support the cause if it isn’t for that reason? (And it isnt).
I know that they’re just engaging in garden variety projection, but it reminds me of nothing more than when in the last season of The Wire McNulty constructs a fake serial killer, complete with victims and press communications. When “his” actions are profiled by the FBI, they come back with a spot-on description of…McNulty.
(Finishing up a rewatch of the series since it’s now on Amazon Prime.)
kittehserf
Hold the phone. You’ve actually read the books?
http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/231/3/4/sparkly_rin_gif_by_thatawkwardmeister-d6ix8f9.gif
You’d literally be the first person I’ve spoken to who has!
Ironic that someone should raise crappy One Direction lyrics and the sexual abuse of young boys in the same thread. Did anyone else read that Guardian article about One Direction? The (male) writer very casually referred to the fact that the youngest of the boys was having a “relationship” with the adult host of the show the band was on when they first started out. At which time he would have been 15 years old. Apparently this proves that he’s the “sexy” one. I just about lost my lunch at that point. Being sexually abused proves that someone is sexy? That’s rape culture, right there, and the Guardian comments section is full of MRAs who make it their business to call out every perceived slight against men as a group, but none of them had anything to say about the sexual abuse of a 15 year old boy being framed as proof of how “sexy” he is. I kept scrolling through the comments thinking “surely someone is going to say something about this”, but nope, apparently none of the people who read that article at the time it was published and commented on it saw any problem with the way that situation was framed. This actually IS an issue that MRAs should be trying to do something about, but apparently they don’t care.
The best explanation I have encountered of rape fantasies in women (assuming they actually exist) is that she gets to choose her rapist and dictate what he does to her — she is in fact the “director” of the fantasy, in total control — but since it is ostensibly against her will she cannot be slut-shamed (or, more precisely, slut-shame herself). It would seem to be a product of a “nice girls don’t do that” mentality — a way of imagining wild sex without guilt. You might expect to see it mostly in traditionalist women who have not come to terms with their sexuality, and therefore much less often in feminists — who would probably be much more likely to feel guilty about a rape fantasy than about the wild sex itself. To some extent, the same sort of logic — wild sex without guilt — might apply to traditional romances, where the man takes all the responsibility for the sex but magically knows exactly how to please the woman.
Obviously if this is a correct theory about rape fantasy, said fantasy does not resemble real-life rape in any significant way. In real-life rape the woman has no control at all: she neither chooses her rapist or his actions in any way. As feminists have been saying almost forever (at least since Brownmiller’s ****** book– what’s a synonym for “seminal” that doesn’t create an atrocious pun?), rape is about power and domination, not sex. (You see this most clearly in prison rapes, where the aspect of dominance of one man over another is almost everything.) Obviously the possibility that a woman might fantasize a rape scenario in which she was actually totally in charge does not mean she desires a real-life rape in which she has no power at all.
I have tended to regard rape as to some extent a more or less desperate attempt to maintain male domination over women — to “keep them in their place”. Rape screams out, “You may think you’re a person with full agency, but to me you’re just a life-support system for a c*nt.” It would stand to reason that MRAs, who are obviously desperate to keep women in submission, would be strong rape apologists. In following the Gamergate stinkfest, I have become convinced that not only is it not about ethics in gamer journalism, it is not even about gaming at all. It is about asserting that men have a right to claim an activity as male space, to define who gets to be called a gamer. Women who argue that they were gaming when the dudes were still in diapers (assuming they have in fact been successfully potty-trained, which does not seem certain, considering how much they love to fling their poo around) are missing the point — it’s not about facts, it’s about power, in much the same way that rape is not about sex. It’s about the white-cis-het-male entitlement to determine who gets to play in the community tree-house and kick out the ones they — in their masculine super-wisdom — decide do not belong. They can put up the “No Grils Allowed” sign whenever it suits their pleasure. In a sense rape threats were a very appropriate tool for Gamergaters, because of the common theme of attempting to assert male control over women.
Women have been pointing out that gamergate is about “no girls allowed in the treehouse” since the very beginning. You just realized this now?
Paragraphs, man. Paragraphs.
Actually hasn’t David been pointing this out too? You’d think that even if dudes weren’t willing to listen to women they’d at least be willing to listen to the man on whose blog they are posting comments.
wordsp1nner
It’s very much urban fantasy. Or at least it’s fantasy that takes place in the real world, if that makes sense?
Tantalize (which I didn’t know was the first book in the series because Eternal and Tantalize are interchangeable, since they’re two different stories that come together in the third book) is about a girl who runs her family’s restaurant since they passed away, and there’s a strong “will they/won’t they-but-they-totally-will” kind of thing going on with her best friend (who is a werewolf).
I’m trying to restrain myself (because spoilers are bad), but it does take place in a large town, and there’s lots of mention of technology and hiding from humans stuff.
I did read an interesting idea somewhere on the net where someone said they’d like to see some really urban fantasy like wizards finding dragon eggs and live-tweeting the process of hatching it with no prior knowledge of how to hatch dragon eggs, people selling enchanted swords on Craigslist, tattoo artists who do spell runes for summoning your keys or binding demonic pens you can conjure, summoning demons on Vine, selfies with mermaids, and prank calling wizards.
I know a few Artemis Fowl fans were like “We already did that!”, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but it’s not exactly that, you know?
I’m all for this idea though, really I am.
(And I agree. Especially if it makes Paulie’s boxers bunch up and he gets pissy that we’re paying him no mind.)
Has nobody written anything like that yet? If not, why not? Seems like kind of an obvious direction to go if you’re going to do urban fantasy.
For the lack of social-media/social-internet* focused urban fantasy, I would blame three thing:
1) Standard genre setups. Often in urban fantasy, there is at least one of two things going on: magic is in hiding, or magic disrupting technology. The first makes putting magical business up on the internet… doable, so long as everyone else thinks it is a joke, but most authors don’t go there. Second might mean that magic users/beings have trouble with technology, or that technology is unreliable in the first place. In the Kate Daniels series, the internet is completely down. Kaput. The witches have a partial archive, but that is it.
People do sell random magic crap on street markets, though.
2) It is kind of hard to write about computer use and make it interesting. It is doable, especially for really good writers who are adept at technology, but still. It is people typing on keyboards. I’ll admit, I outsource all of that in my novels to one of the secondary characters.
3) Strong influence of noir in the genre, which emphasizes hitting the streets over hitting the internet.
*By this I mean things like craigslist and blogs, which aren’t technically social media but involve regular people connecting over the net.
But I have read at several series that involve magical tattoos. The one that comes to mind is Cassie Palmer, but I’m sure there are others that come up. And in Burn for Me, the protagonist and her family track down the guy who is laundering the villain’s money using social media. Because the villain is a total fucking glory hound.
I’d also guess that a lot of the writers who are really fascinated by the power of the internet are more likely to write science fiction (esp. near future science fiction–I’m thinking Charles Stross here).
But that is all me bullshitting. I just like this topic more than the OP.
Oh, yeah. Another UF series with magical tattoos is Wilk’s World of the Lupi series. Cynna is absolutely covered in them.
@M: Should have been “indent, man, indent.” I had paragraphs, but I didn’t indent, and the paragraphs just happened … oh, well, one of the minor frustrations of non-WYSIWYG formatting with no editing capability. (And I just realized that you can’t use the tab key to indent in WP, you have to use spaces.)
Obviously, the tree-house syndrome has been mentioned frequently on WHTM. I don’t play video games and I have no interest in the tantrums of gamers who suffer from arrested development, but I was interested in some of the WHTM commenters, many of whom were women explaining how they were not invading the tree house, they’d been there all along. I didn’t pay all that much attention to the controversy itself. Then the other day I was reading some of the attempts to understand Vox Day’s tantrum about how feminists are the spawn of Satan etc. etc. — ho hum, haven’t we all heard that crap ten million times — and Mammotheers trying to make sense of the D00dLojik (TM) behind it (after all, they do claim to be the logical ones). And I realized that none of it — MRAs, PUAs, Heartiste, Roosh, Gamergaters , you-name it — makes any sense, and what’s more, never was intended to make any sense. It’s just a bunch of butthurt overgrown children whose emotional development got stuck at the tantrum-throwing stage flinging their poo at women.
They seem to believe that life is a constant zero-sum gender war where they are personally harmed by anything good that happens to a woman. I was reading the thread about how women who wear their hair in a bun were accused of oppressing men — I believe a few weeks ago it was women who dyed their hair [any color the men don’t like] — and people were talking about conflicting standards of beauty. I have always felt that conventional standards of beauty were designed to make women feel insecure and inadequate, but in the past I chalked that up mostly to the machinations of the “beauty” industry for the sake of profit. Now I see that it is also (some, many?) men who are terrified by women who are not totally insecure and dependent on male approval, who are hoping to make them that way by negging everything they do. (Aside to the men: It isn’t going to work.)
The irony is that those men are themselves victims of traditional masculine gender roles that make them feel insecure because they can never measure up, and force them to deny the craving for female approval that they do in fact feel. It seems to me that hatred is generally the child of fear — when you encounter hatred it is usually helpful to look for the underlying fear. And fear is usually irrational, and leads to irrational responses.
I think the first thing we have to remember at all times is that we were all born into a world where gender roles, intergender relations, and indeed sexuality itself, were/are profoundly fouled up, and it should be no surprise that many people end up developing dysfunctional coping mechanisms. After all, the person who probably had the most influence on traditional Western views on sexuality by way of his influence on early Christianity was St. Paul — a celibate misogynist. You could almost define feminism as an organized effort to get society on the right track regarding gender and sexuality.
http://40.media.tumblr.com/130d304950ecf9fd8457d34528370ee8/tumblr_n4plwbEoBy1r5s08ho1_500.jpg
Again, none of this is new, it’s all been said before right here on this blog.
William Gibson managed to write about computer stuff without putting readers to sleep, so clearly it can be done. I can see why writers would shy away from writing multiple scenes of their main protagonist sitting staring at a screen and typing, though.
(Also, I really liked Gibson’s books for a while, but movie adaptations have tended to struggle with the issue of how to make people using computers not look boring far more than novels have, imo. Plus I love Keanu Reeves but the suspension of disbelief required to see him as a genius hacker is a bridge too far for me.)
LOL. Like I said, definitely do-able, but tricky. Most writers are not William Gibson, and he wrote near-future science fiction. I think you have to both have writerly talent and a deep appreciation of computers to make it work.
Also might knowing your audience have something to do with it? Even with Gibson’s obvious talent not everyone enjoyed his books, because if you find the subject matter inherently boring, well…
Hi, David. I’ve been checking by lately, hoping you would chime in on the whole Scott Aronson nerd-shaming thing. It ties in with a lot of the work you do here on this blog, although from a different angle. I’d like to hear your thoughts on what Aronson wrote.
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664
Yep!
Also, I have tried to read Neuromancer, but I was young and it didn’t work, but IIRC, there was some kind of thing going on where Gibson could write about things is cyberspace like the character was physically there and experiencing it? Like I said, I could be wrong. I know Stross and a couple of other writers have used similar devices when writing science fiction with the internet, because images on screens are kind of… boring.
Meanwhile, fantasy writers have pocket universes and mental manipulations.