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.
Pardon me, is this the membership office for the Dresden Files Shame Club?
(Yeah…me too. So, so problematic but so, so entertaining…)
Dresden Files Corner of Shame: Does it have room for one more?
Got sucked in by a TV show that lasted a mere one season, then found the books. They get a bit predictable after a while, and oi the problematical stuff, but I still kind of like them.
I read them all sorts of out of order, though.
Another confession: I really, really like RA Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt, particularly the earliest published ones. I know, I have terrible taste. But Guenhwyvar!
I want an astral kitty. So bad.
The newest set, not so much. I loved through the Orc King because it was like “Fantasy is going to let Orcs turn themselves into really interesting, developed characters because they found cooperation and they totally won this war and ermagurd!”
And the most recent trio is ruining it. ‘Orcs are born evil, like totally evil no matter what, because nature god says so. Sentient? No, they don’t really have any free will! That one city building king was just a practical joke by the chaos gods!’
*raises hand*
<– Reads The Dresden Files.
Also has them all the audiobooks.
*shuffles to corner*
contra – Did you catch Legends of Drizzt when the audiobook was a free download?
http://imgur.com/EHiq79p
*reads*
“Also has them all the audiobooks”…?
*Also has them all AS audiobooks.
re: Dresden being formulaic: *Terribly*.
I especially noticed it when I listened to all of the audiobooks in order over last Winter and Spring (that’s what I do while doing solitary chores…alas, I am *not* one of those people who can find joy solely in the act of cleaning, etc).
But, eh – sometimes I just want to be told a good story. It’s not quite so glaring when they’re not taken together.
The Dresden files are like literary crack – lacking substance and problematic, but oh, so thrilling and addictive. ::goes to check this Drizzt thing because secretly a horrible person::
Besides the two theories already offered as to why many women like rape fantasies (and stalking and so on), e.g.,
a) sex without guilt, since the sex is not the woman’s “fault”, and
b) horrible things are generally thrilling to merely fantasize about, like horror movies,
here’s a third one:
Women are constantly objectified in our culture. It’s always the man trying to win over the woman, who’s like some kind of fucking prize that he eventually earns. Since women, too, are always fed this crap, we tend to internalize it. And then lots of women end up fantasizing, not about being this amazing hero, but about being this amazing prize that the hero wins.
Now, the greatest prize of all is a prize whom the man will do anything to win. Nothing will stop him. Not even if the “prize” objects and tries to drive him away. His persistence in the face of “no” really just goes to show what kind of amazing prize the woman is!
And if the setting of a story is such that few external obstacles present themselves (as in FoSoG), then the reluctance of the woman/price becomes that much more important to show how incredibly persistent the man is in winning her/it.
I really like Wuthering Heights, but I don’t believe it’s romantic, no. It’s a story about people being treated horribly, ending up being horrible persons, treating others horribly and so on.
GrumpyOldNurse: I strongly recommend starting with the Icewind Dale trilogy. It isn’t that hard to go back and pick up the Menzobernazan ones, after.
The under dark ones are pretty mild by some standards, but I found them a bit dark.
I liked them, especially the dragon scene in sojourn (which is hilarious), but they’re not quite as fun. 🙂
I said just a couple of posts ago that finding no new posts is sort of relieving as it means nothing really awful has happened, but can we push that bearded bastard off the top of the page? D:
When was that interview from, anyway? I don’t feel quite brave enough to go looking.
@GrumpyOldMan: When you were speaking about rape fantasies, it got me thinking about some people I had talked to in one of my fandoms. They all had rape fantasies and wrote fanfiction about them, and since I’ve never had a rape fantasy myself, I was curious about them. One of the most cited reasons, sadly, was that these women HAD been raped, and the fantasy was not only utilizing some of the only experience they had ever had on how sex worked, but it was also a kind of catharsis for them. They were taking back the control that their rapists had denied them by controling all the details of the story. Kind of similar to what you were saying, but it does give another perspective to the thing.
In any case, there are women that definitely have rape fantasies, and I think there are a lot of reasons for those fantasies existing. It’s just so flawed to for these guys to think that a majority of women have them. Hell, most of the things MRAs seem to think are “rape” fantasies have nothing to do with rape because even in the context of the fantasy, the women having them have complete control over what’s happening.
Thanks for the pointer, contrapangloss! I have to admit, I mostly use reading as an escape, so my tastes tend to the farcical/fantastic and escapist rather than to serious literature that will improve one’s mind and character.
As for the rape fantasy question – I think you’ve nailed it, sorceressensorcelled! Also, IME, rape fantasy is about “she’s so hawt no man could resist” whereas real rape is about “learn your place, b*tch”. They’re worlds apart! The original article is just the manosphere conflating sex and rape, again. It gets dull from all the repetitiveness!
On the general topic… Sometimes in these discussions there’s this dichotomy popping up, like, either fantasies have nothing to do with what a person really wants, what someone fantasizes about it pretty much completely random, or else the person wants precisely what the fantasy is about. Likewise, either a person is zero affected by the literature zie reads, or else zie’s clueless enough to think that the real world works exactly as the book says it does.
I think the latter comes up particularly often when Twilight is discussed…
But obviously a person can be influenced by, say, general notions about what kind of behaviour is “romantic” (as opposed to “abusive”) even though zie fully realizes that the book zie reads is pure fantasy, and also fully realizes that most relationships won’t be anything like the one described in the book.
I think this thread is refreshingly free from the above false dichotomy, but it really is something that tends to pop up a lot in media discussions of books, movies etc with problematic messages.
I read the Dresden Files, and I hold my head up proudly. I’m not defending the problematic stuff, but every couple of books there’s something mindblowingly awesome.
But dear lord in heaven, Harry needs to jerk it every now and again.
Drizzt Fuckin’ Do’Urden! There’s an old friend. I haven’t read one of his books in nigh on 20 years. In the meantime, he seems to have gotten a whistle that summons unicorns. He’s also a misunderstood, lonely elf with purple eyes. If he was a woman, the Internet would call him a Sue. As it is, they’ve turned him into a punchline.
@contrapangloss: The Icewind Dale books are the first to be written, the story of how he came to the surface came later.
The Crystal Shard was Salvatore’s first book, and man does it ever read like one. So many sentence fragments.
When most women of my age and before were coming up the only porn girls could get their hands on were cheap romance novels and every one of those started with a virgin woman being raped but liking it, her rapist falling in love with her and eventually fathering her child and marrying her. Oh, he was also always big and brawny and had oodles of money. The “It’s bigger than the both of us, Baby” trope was everywhere. Movie had the “hero” forcibly kidding a woman who only resisted for silly reasons that he (in his manly wisdom and worldliness) overcame for her own good. The slap/kiss and even over the lap spankings were supposed to be funny and hot. The message those things sent girls about their own sexuality and what it meant to be loved was rapey and horrible. But if you wanted something to get off that was all you had. Even if you could find porn (raiding the older boys’ secret tree house always worked for me) women were objects of men’s lust, not full humans with desires. Their outfits were also clearly the choice of some man. They were frequently ridiculous.
My grandmother used to write “romance” novels (because ladies don’ t like smutty, dirty, explicit porn. Oh no. We’re only in it for the romance.) and there was a very specific template you had to stick to in order to get published. Those novels were also often written by men who assumed women’s names.
It infuriates me that the prevalence of rape in erotica aimed at women is blamed on women’s inherent sexual desires. Women were not in control of the narrative or able to express liberated sexual ideas. Blaming that on women is like blaming black people for the step and fetch its on the silver screen. The sexuality of women was not being depicted by women. It was depicted by men and showed their projection of sexuality on to women. It was men’s rape fantasies that were presented just like it was white superiority fantasies that cast whites in the role of protagonist and blacks as their happy-to-be-of-service help.
The blonde bombshell was a thing while the black bombshell was not, not because black women lack beauty or sexuality, but because white people wanted those things erased. If black women could be desirable then white men might desire them and white women might not feel superior to them. If any woman was sexually assertive, sure and horny then men’s he-man, take control fantasy was ruined. He was not assured to satisfy her merely by wanting to put his boner in her. He might find himself the one with the lesser sexual appetite and prowess. Women who were sexual and confident usually died or were punished in some way in literature and film. That’s not a woman’s fantasy. That is an insecure man’s fantasy.
Eons of rape depicted as an act of passion has had an effect on the sexual fantasies of some women. Why wouldn’t it? It’s clearly had a similar effect on men. Self-reporting shows many of them can’t even see forcing sex on women as rape.
Oh…and the groups of women most vulnerable to rape are the elderly, the disabled, trans women and girls.
That does not fit MRAsshole’s depiction of a rape victim as conventionally attractive and foolishly flaunting her sexuality.
*kissing* not kidding.
I’m going to dispute the claim that feminist women don’t read Twilight–I’ve got at least one friend in my circle who does so, and enjoys it. That said, she very much dislikes Bella–there’s some other woman in the series whom she regards as more of a role-model due to the ability to snark and think and so forth–all the things the MRAs would hate in a woman, basically.
As for Dresden… Okay, yes, I like the books, even if I do occasionally consider doing a running “Notes from Harry’s Boner” count in the margins.
The ‘magic in the real world’ thing gets tricky, because if you’re not doing the Masquerade and/or Magic and Science Don’t Mix, you end up with something that really doesn’t resemble the real world at all. If healing magic were real, for instance, and could be done as it is often displayed in more typical, faux-historical fantasy, then we probably wouldn’t even have hospitals and doctors–just a few local ‘clinics’ that were mostly for patching up injuries, while disease and the like were dealt with quickly and efficiently by the potion-makers.
Lea: excellent analysis. Speaking of sexist tropes, I was watching a Cracked video where a bunch of people discuss the wedding-crasher trope in films. The one where the male protagonist barges in on a wedding where the woman-he-loves is about to exchange rings with another man, and proceeds to march up to the altar and give a big cheesy speech about how much he loves her and how they’re meant to be together. And instead of calling him crazy and stalkerish and ordering he gets lost, she has a sudden change of mind about a decision she made very carefully (as you do when you consider marriage)! So off they run and happily ever after. Allegedly. You rarely see what happens a few years down the road.
The problem with this trope is that it presumes women to be flitty minded romantics that will throw themselves at whichever man proposes love the hardest. Like she doesn’t have a mind of her own. Like she doesn’t judge personality, chemistry or common ground in her choice of man, it’s always dictated by…well, whoever wrote the script.
One exception kind of would be Shrek, where Fiona didn’t really want to marry Farquad, she was only doing it because she wanted to break her spell (and she was pissed off at Shrek, thinking he hated her).
Another one for the Dresden Hall of Problematically Readable Benign Sexism Shame. Own every single one and yearn for the day a human woman who is not supernaturally gorgeous moves to Chicago and destroys Harry’s boner. Like Andi who turned way hot did ohneverfuckingmind.
Crap. Take two.
You’re spot on otherwise, but I’d contest that last one in the list… If there’s an MRA that isn’t a paedophilia apologist, I haven’t met them. And now I need a shower.