So the fellas on the Men’s Rights subreddit have re-re-re-re-rediscovered the existence of fake pregnancy tests that always have positive results.
Happily, some dude calling himself Stripes1974 has what appears to be a foolproof plan to defeat any evil female who comes to him with one of these fake tests:
Many of the women who would do this, are being manipulative and intending to use such a falacy, such a falsehood, in order to try and maintain a sense of power in the relationships they are a part of.
I’d offer this potential “counter” to such a type of women– though I would say that this may not work with every woman of this type- judge carefully if it is something you should do:
Hey, I said it was ALMOST foolproof.
“Oh. Oh.
Oh! Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh! You’re pregnant? You’re really pregnant?”
Dance, make lots of excited and pleased noises. Run around. “Oh my gosh! You’re really pregnant? I mean, really? Wait! I have to call my parents, and tell them the good news!”Yes, make sure to tell as many people as you can think of that she is pregnant. When she later tries to explain how she was dishonest, her manipulations will be exposed, and she won’t come away seeming all that wonderful a person to have lied this way.
You can probably already see how diabolically clever this plan is.
“I can’t believe it! All this time, I didn’t realize it was this easy! Oh! Now we have to start saving our money so we can buy our baby the best! We’ll have to cancel that get-a-way we were planning! We have to save for the baby!”
Having easy access to money/funds taken from her, and then obsessively watched over, in support of her lie, will make her unhappy and uncomfortable.
Wait, you’re supposed to be paying your girlfriend for being your girlfriend? Uh oh. I think I’ve been doing it wrong.
“Oh! And from now on, you have to stay at home! No, you can’t go out to the club for girls’ night- you’re supporting two people now, and you have to sit and save your fragile self so the baby can be healthy!”
Stripping her of her freedom to govern her own movements within and without of the home, will grate on her nerves.
Yeah, it probably would, huh? Too bad that’s the rule. Once you are pregnant, you are not allowed to stand up, much less leave the house, until at least one actual baby comes out of your body. (And it has to be a baby. Extra large poops don’t count.)
What generally will happen, in this sudden and overwhelming blitzkrieg of support towards a pregnancy that doesn’t exist, is that at some point, sooner rather than later, the woman in question will crack, and she will vehemently deny that she is pregnant, and likely will admit that she lied/purchased a positive test, when she is in fact not pregnant. This will provide an opening for an “emotional” display by the male half of this relationship:
“What do you mean, you lied! What do you mean, I don’t really have a son on the way!?” -complete with tears and heart-wrenching warbles in the voice
and will allow him to bring this very fucked-up relationship to its bitter and thankful end.
Huh. Well, far be it from me to question such a brilliant plan from someone who obviously understands women so well, but I’m just wondering: what happens if she’s actually pregnant? I know it might seem a bit unlikely, but I have heard rumors that sometimes women use real pregnancy tests to see if they are really pregnant, and some of the time they really are.
Ah, who am I kidding? Like that ever happens.
@Tessa:
I’m not sure I can get my head around the increasingly convoluted reasoning. I’d accuse you of going over the top but it’s not much different from the logics I’ve seen in genuine MRA rants.
Why is the guy assuming his fake baby would be a boy if the pregnancy were real? Can’t get over that part.
@dhag85 “Why is the guy assuming his fake baby would be a boy if the pregnancy were real? Can’t get over that part.”
Well, obviously alpa men only ever have sons, if it’s a daughter it’s proof she’s been unfaithful. That or he figures a man would only actually be disappointed to hear he wasn’t going to have a son, but relieved to hear he’s not having a daughter, so he shouldn’t bother pretending to be disappointed about any potential daughters. Probably he’d see a daughter as some sort of cruel trick a woman plays on a poor opressed man.
@Spindrift
It all makes sense now.
Spindrift | March 6, 2015 at 7:14 am
See, that kind of rhetoric really stings for me because I was ditched before I was even born by my biological father simply because I was a feeeemale. Apparently, he wanted a first born son to pass on his family name. (I was to be the fourth or fifth in a long line of assholes, apparently.)
He proceeded to deny me, my mom got a DNA test, and forced him to pay child support. He then proceeded to hide behind his father’s money so he wouldn’t have to work, and therefore wouldn’t have to pay. We were lucky if we even got a check one month out of the 972 months he was required to pay some sort of support for me. (I think one time we got a child support check for a whole fucking dollar. Yeah, we were living high off that great child support money! [/sarcasm])
From what I heard (and I heard this from my mom’s side of the family, so I’m taking it with a grain of salt, though a tiny one since the man’s never shown himself to give his side of the story) he had a bunch of kids with other women, and only fought for the one first-born son he got.
The sad thing is, my mom miscarried a boy before she had me.
@Paradoxicalintention
That sounds really aweful, people like that are just the worst. I’ll never understand that obsession with carrying on the family name/genes. And it’s exactly the type of man the MRM seems to care the most about.
How can a stupid name mean so much to someone that they’d hurt so many people over it?
You and your mom deserved so much better than that.
Hugs if you want them
@PI: And if you follow that line of thinking it leads to China where you have almost 20% more boys than girls, so your son can’t find a wife and the name dies there. D00dlogik(TM) has consequences.
@GOM
D00dlogik in China goes further than that, and of course the brunt bearers are women. When a man can’t find a Chinese woman to marry, does he go without? Heaven forbid! No, he pays for a trafficked one instead.
https://uosm2018.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/trafficking-women-for-forced-marriage-in-china/
🙁
#notallchinesemen, just for my own clear conscience.
@GOM
And the MRAs would probably blame women for not dating those excess chinese men.
#notallchinesemen, but, unfortunately, probably most — the position of women in Chinese society has traditionally been more abysmal even than in the West.
I have not read anything about this, but I would not be surprised to hear that young educated Chinese women are choosing not to marry. At least, given the demographics, they have a bit of non-traditional leverage.
Spindrift | March 6, 2015 at 7:53 am
To be fair, it did happen roughly 25 years ago, and I’ve grown up without so much of a whisper of him in my life, so I’m pretty much okay with it. Though, if I ever did meet him in real life, I’m not sure if I’d ask him why I wasn’t good enough for him, or have to hold myself back from socking him square in the nose.
After though, I’d suppose I’d thank him for being a huge reason why I became a feminist. My step-father was the next huge reason.
Bless my mother, but she has terrible taste in men for the most part. : / I can only think of one guy she’s dated in my lifetime out of three that’s been good to her.
Speaking of reasons for becoming a feminist: The last of my major reasons why I’m a feminist is the reaction to feminism. Case in point: Earlier, I was talking about American Apparel with a group of friends on Skype. I mentioned that they’d done some “restructuring” because one of their top officials was a sexist bag of garbage who would sleep with employees (I think he also threatened their jobs if they didn’t comply) and had a hotel room “reserved” in every city they had a store in for that purpose.
I then said they replaced him with someone who’s “feminist-leaning”. That was it. I mentioned that this woman had some feminist ideologies that I liked.
It was like I opened up the floodgates. They thought the company was ruined for men, and they acted like it was the worst thing American Apparel could do. (And then went on to say “I hate the word feminism” and “Feminists are such bitches!”) A good friend and I dropped the chat, after giving the rest of the chat (which was just us two girls who left and some guys) a piece of our minds about it. We then went on to start our own chat, “Feminist group of Feminist-loving Feminists”. Because we were both tired of the anti-feminist bullshit in the other chat. (TL;DR: This wasn’t the first time this happened. We got into an argument with another guy in that chat about how he thought men had it so hard when it comes to custody battles and such.)
One guy gave me an apology, but he kept trying to ‘splain himself and say “I didn’t say anything mean about feminists as a whole! I only specified militant feminists!”, so I just told him to stop because I didn’t want to hear his explanations.
Manspeak translation: He didn’t object to feminists unless they stand up for their rights.
By the way, do they not understand that if a boss threatens a worker’s job unless she sleeps with him, that is RAPE full stop.
And the boss need not just to get fired, but be put in prison.
@GOM There’s a number of traditionally patriarchal countries that have a growing number of women choosing not to marry. Seeing as the mantra in places such as Japan, Russia and yes, rural China is “husband in charge wife submit” such women are choosing not to get shackled to that. In Japan women are expected to both work AND do 100% of childcare/housework, and Russia…well the men there are infamous for being drunken chauvinists (the politicians are shockingly so). Some Russian women are choosing not to date at all or to date foreign men who are more likely to treat them better.
I’m not sure how those countries are dealing with those growing numbers of women apart from panicking about the declining birth rate. I think in Russia there are some (male) ministers speaking about about how happy women are when barefoot and pregnant or something. [insert Soviet propaganda joke here]
But don’t get me started about the Indian MRM. Yes. India. They believe anti dowry laws are oppression and naturally, there is a piece in AVFM supporting them.
When we were in Japan 20 years ago, women who wanted careers were choosing not to marry because of the pressure on women to quit their careers when they marry. I think we discussed the demographic problems Japan faces in an earlier thread. Unless you plan to enforce virtual slavery on women, making life hard on them is not a winning strategy.
Good news, kind of: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-31765086 A would-be Eliot Rodger in the UK has been jailed for 21 years due to attacks on three women, in which nobody died. I particularly like how the headline specifically names him as “Virgin”, which he was so irrationally angry at being. (You’re 17! Go to university!)
This is how damaging virgin-shaming is to someone’s ego, and yet another of the men’s issues that I don’t see AVFM etc answering.
To clarify the above, I’m not laughing at him being a virgin. I’m laughing at how his actions due to anger at being a virgin led to him having a giant picture of his face with “VIRGIN” above it on an international news site.
@ParadoxicalIntention – Oh my word, I had totally missed that American Apparel had ditched their sleazy CEO. I might have to give them another look now. That was always such a conflict for me: Fair labor practices! Yay! …Sexist, objectifying ads, and a literal rapist at the helm, um…
@Kootiepatra: I understand you’re being polite, but I would say that calling him merely “sleazy” amounts to a totally undeserved compliment.
Kootiepatra | March 6, 2015 at 10:04 am
Honestly? I’m not going to go near them for quite some time. They’re doing better with their advertisements, and I’m glad they got someone who’s not completely self-absorbed at the helm, but they need to work harder to gain back any faith I might have had in them.
Admittedly, I’ve put off buying things from a lot of really cool places because they print on American Apparel stuff. : / Mostly Words Brand. They have a lot of really awesome typography/design related stuff that really makes me happy, but the fact that they print on AA stuff makes me sad. : (
Virgin-shaming of young men is both pervasive and destructive. At 17 — almost precisely 50 years ago this month — I pressured a very vulnerable (fat, unpopular) girl into agreeing to have sex with me although I had no interest in her, just to get rid of that scarlet V to get the dudes to shut up. I still regard it as the worst thing I have done in my life.
The rest of the story: I ended up dumping her fairly cruelly. About two years later, out of the blue, she called me up. She had gotten pregnant and married a guy who was not her child’s father. He beat her fairly regularly. The worst part was the offhanded way she mentioned that he would unquestionably give her another beating when he saw the long-distance call to me on their telephone bill. I had treated her very badly, and she was still willing to accept a beating just to talk to me. That’s when I began to realize what I had done.
@Paradoxicalintention
The reaction you get when saying you’re a feminist can be really depressing, yeah. I’m really sick of the “I believe in equality…but I think feminism is just a dirty word” argument. Often feels like people either can’t be bothered to do the least bit of reading or just don’t understand sociology well enough to understand feminism and it’s methods/goals.