Sitting near the top of the front page of the Men’s Rights Reddit at the moment, with more than 300 upvotes: A post, based on a three and a half year old comment on a Fat Acceptance blog, with the title “Woman gains 65 pounds after getting married, forces husband to get Viagra after he is no longer attracted to her.”
Brace yourself for the HORROR of a wife who put on weight in blatant disregard of the rights of her husband’s boner.
Naturally, the Men’s Rights Redditors are OUTRAGED at this insidious assault on a man’s right to tell his wife that she’s too fat and ugly to fuck.
Here’s the top comment, with more than 100 upvotes:
The charming blueoak9 set the “ignorant sow” straight on a question of Boner Science:
Others concluded, from the fact that he agreed to try Viagra, that she was essentially drugging and raping him. No, really.
![Surprentis 50 points 4 hours ago Might as well be rape at that point. permalink embed save report give gold reply [–]ManRAh 31 points 3 hours ago She's literally drugging him so he'll have sex with her. By definition, it absolutely is.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/drugrape.png?resize=526%2C209&ssl=1)
Carchamp1 expanded on this, er, logic:
So never let it be said that Men’s Rights activists don’t take rape seriously. They take it very seriously when a man is raped by a woman by agreeing to try Viagra and then having consensual sex with her even though she’s a fatty.
“As the novelty wears off, intimacy is supposed to take over, but the sad fact is that no person will trust someone who criticizes, or worse, explodes on them.”
Yes, her exploding at him when he told her she was too fat for sex retroactively caused him not to want to have sex with her in the first place.
Hey, cyberwulf?
…I think I’m the one who started the tangent that upset you. I’m sorry for that, and I definitely didn’t intend to either pass myself off as a saint or imply that all anger with a partner is wrong.
Being angry that your partner didn’t tell you what was going on and did the cruddy “I’m just going to withdraw from you and see how long it takes you to notice/fake obliviousness when you do notice” thing would be more than valid, because that’s breaking trust.
I was trying to specifically respond to the idea that it’s okay to get angry with a partner specifically for not wanting to have sex with you (which was how I read the post I was responding to): I found that particular idea troublesome and problematic to the extreme…
But, feel free to take everything I say with a grain of salt in this field. I don’t really do sexual attraction at all, so my mental model for how stuff works in this area is pretty much all hypothetical. For folks who actually do experience this kind of stuff… um… you’re guesses are probably way better than mine.
On to the Agreement Section!
I’m strong seconding the whole “can we stop guesssing about her weight?” and the “can we stop trying to guess if she’s a troll” vibe of your comment.
It’s the internet. We don’t know enough about this lady to know if she writes hyperbolically, if she understates things chronically, if she uses explodes like I use ‘minions’ (all the time! when not discussing actual henchbeings), or anything. Frankly, unless we actually know her and are a part of her confidence network, it’s none of our business.
The more important thing is really… mammotheers? Does it strike you that MRA’s tend to yell rape about more things than I’ve ever heard a feminist do?
Like, for example, “neglect rape” in the last thread post with the sexbot… Where does that even come from?
Well…I’m sure that they’d be just as furious if they heard that a woman decided to go to couple’s counseling with her husband and got a prescription for female libido pills (not a specific pill, though WebMD recommends several remedies for decreasing sex drive in women: http://www.webmd.com/women/features/is-there-a-pill-for-womens-libido) because she’d lost her attraction to him after his weight gain. They’d be so pissed and call the man a rapist because his wife still loved him and wanted to work on bringing back their sex life, right? Right?
Hey, is there going to be an April Fool post this year? I loved the Paul Elam themed one last year.
Pardon me for going OT.
I’m going to second Cyberwulf and a few others to say that I’m really not comfortable with some of what is going down in this thread.
First of all, the speculation about this woman’s weight is pretty disgusting. People gain and lose weight for lots of different reasons. It sounds like this woman encountering HAES was a positive life change (as it is for basically every person who stops trying to manipulate their body size). Some stranger’s health, which you absolutely cannot tell from their body size, is none of your business. Not everyone chooses to prioritize health, not everyone can achieve “health” or a supposed “healthy weight”, and you can’t diagnose this stuff over the internet anyway.
Second, the pressure on women to look attractive for/to men is lifelong and intense. This woman was able to move away from treating body size as a barometer for worth (which is no small feat in this society) only to find that her partner had not joined her on the journey. That is absolutely worthy of anger and for many of us, real fucking depressing. A few years ago I lost weight due to a medication change. I may have to change again and gain back that weight. Will my partner still be enthusiastic in his affection for me? I hope so! But he has the full force of culture telling him I look good the way I am now and that I would look worse if I gained weight.
It’s not like Mr Husband in this story just snatched his preferences out of thin air. He is influenced by relentless advertising, movies, etc showing very thin women as they only type of attractive woman. It’s not just on her to change this dynamic. For their relationship to succeed he needs to fight his ingrained biases himself. It’s hard. It’s really hard. It’s also not impossible and if the relationship is this important, he can at least try.
Which, by her account, he is. I do NOT see her trying to coerce him into having sex with her. What we are told is that his specific reason for not wanting to have sex with her is her body size. They are both trying to change that dynamic, and she is fighting her impulse to resume a lifestyle which caused her pain and which she felt was unhealthy.
What I see in this story is two people who value their marriage trying to salvage a relationship that has been damaged by a cultural influence over what people find attractive.
Sorry for the teal deer.
@Cyberwulf “Yes, her exploding at him when he told her she was too fat for sex retroactively caused him not to want to have sex with her in the first place.”
Yeah, her lack of embarrassment and insight into how others might view her “exploding” on him in her post kinda make it look like “exploding” isn’t an unheard of way for her to deal with her anger.I understand that withholding sex is extremely hurtful, having gone through it in my marriage, but I doubt that it’s the only time that he has made her this angry.
*reads post*
*reads reactions*
*blink*blink*
I think…if this story is true as it is written…then it’s about two people in a relationship perhaps avoiding discussion potential conflict until it came to a head.
I think that perhaps neither reacted in the most helpful or constructive manner – people being people, that’s an easy mistake to make.
And, finally, I hope things worked out for the best for them, both/either seperately and/or together.
@contrapangloss, I agree. The standards in MRA land seem to be:
man inconvenienced/uncomfortable/not fully sexually satisfied in any way = rape
actual rape =/ rape
Sorry, MRAs – words mean things!
^ And this.
Cyberwulf, do you really have to scream and swear at the other regulars every time you disagree with anything? Like, disagreeing is fine – and hey, you have a point behind the rudeness – but you aren’t doing anybody any favours by constantly treating us like trolls. =/
(Gah, sorry all, but she does this all the time and it’s wearing on my nerves.)
Anyway, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek. Even if she’s never, ever “exploded” on him otherwise, NO-ONE’S perfect in marriage. Everyone fucks up. And that doesn’t include all the other possible emotional problems that have nothing to do with her.
David, are you a time traveler from the 1940s with tons of magazine subscriptions? I’m a pro at finding funny cat pics on the internet but you are unequaled in your presentation of spot-on vintage weirdness. I salute you and your rare talent!
I feel like “exploding” is definitely understandable, but it’s not a good way to move the communication forward, if that’s what they want to do. it just leads to more pretending and avoidance and walking on eggshells and ultimately… it really sucks. I have a lot of those stick-head-in-sand tendencies myself, so it’s like, by the time I am so fed up that I can’t stand another minute of pretending everything is fine, it all comes out in a torrent of verbal rage that is pretty hard on my husband, who’s a fairly sensitive guy with some longstanding conflict-avoidance issues of his own, lol. The stuff I was so frustrated about may be reasonable, but the way I go about expressing it isn’t, necessarily.
Is he supposed to have read her mind and *known* that she hated all the work and stress that went into maintaining her previous weight and was instead trying something new? It sounds like the dude didn’t necessarily know how to broach the subject when she started changing or really how to navigate his own feelings about it, but when he finally DID talk about it, he was forthright and loving about it– and she still exploded! how does that set a good tone for future honest discussion? She should apologize for the outburst if she wants to start having real, potentially uncomfortable discussions BEFORE they get to defcon 11 in the future. If not with this dude, then possibly with someone else.
but he may not have known she was on a particular “journey.” Given their combined raw determination not to communicate about difficult topics, I wouldn’t be amazed if he had no idea, or only the vaguest of ideas, what was even going on in her head. There’s no real indication in the post that they’d spent any talking over HAES ideas together. She just decided to get on with it, and that’s very cool but for her to expect that not to change their relationship is pretty unfair, imo.
There are definitely areas where I am on board with the HAES crowd and areas where I kinda cock my head and think “really?!” I mean, geez, what’s so awful about not having dessert more than three times a week?
Suddenly, I feel like having chocolate and putting on some more weight. Anyone else?
That’s what I see. Exploding at him was definitely wrong, but it does sound like they managed to have a productive discussion and come to an agreement about where they should go from there to bring back their sex life. It also sounds like the prescription for a medication that would guarantee arousal (not sure if that’s supposed to be viagra because, as Cyberwulf pointed out, viagra doesn’t guarantee arousal or even make you instantly hard) and the counseling were his ideas, though it’s unclear based on the wording.
That lady in the one-piece suit, in that “Wate-On” ad? I just want to hug her. I don’t know why. And my inclinations don’t lean towards women in the first place.
Hey Heartiste, attraction isn’t a simple science after all!
Suppose a man is in a good but highly intense sales career, makes good money and the man marries a woman. They have children. The wife works in a job that she loves but that doesn’t pay well – about 1/3 what the man makes.
Then gradually the man started earning less and less in commission, until he is making about what the woman makes, and then he finally decides, this job is killing me I’m tired of working I’m finished. He tells the wife she needs to earn the money for the family for a change.
How shitty would it be for the woman not to find him sexually interesting anymore because he is no longer the big strong breadwinner for the house? How shitty would it be if the wife decided, I can’t stay with a man who doesn’t work, and she moves out with the children?
Does your opinion about what the man did here, leaving the working world, have to do with societal expectations you have about what a man owes his wife? Do you see a parallel between the expectations which are place upon women to stay thin and the expectations which are placed upon men to be the breadwinner?
Ceebarks, I get the point that she didn’t behave perfectly here. But your spouse becoming entirely uninterested in having sex with you based on changes to your body over which you don’t and can’t have full control is not an easy position to be in. Are you in any relationships that you assume are only fully intact because of how your body looks? If you were would that be okay with you? “I have to maintain my current weight or my marriage will suffer, possibly irreparably” – doesn’t that sound like a little too much pressure?
To your second point, sure, having dessert only 3 times a week is easy for some people. Also, I’m sure she wasn’t putting up an exhaustive list of the behaviors that allowed her to maintain a smaller body. Regardless of the intricacies of her behavior, it made her miserable. Does she have to continue that forever because her body size might be one of the main supports in her marriage? The price of their marriage is a misery-making diet plan?
A big part of HAES is learning your own hunger signals and full signals, as well as understanding what foods make you feel good and bad. Many, many people exhibit disordered eating at least in part because of the ever changing list of shoulds and shouldn’ts around food and diet. (Low fat! Only good fat! No bread, as much fat as you want! Etc.) HAES is a tool to help you listen to your body’s needs and enjoy eating instead of trying to obey a list of rules.
Another thing to keep in mind is that for some people who have experienced disordered eating, setting up rules like “only 3 desserts per week” can lead them back down a path into a full blown eating disorder. Rather than putting together a particular diet, HAES is a way to allow a person who struggles with food choices to dispel the idea of good and bad foods, and just eat according to their body’s hunger/satiation signals.
@Emmy Rae
“setting up rules like ‘only 3 desserts per week’ can lead them back down a path into a full blown eating disorder”
You totally nailed it here. I’ve suffered from ED’s for over a decade, and I ended up having to reeducate myself on when I feel hungry or not, because it was all about numbers and control, but not even remotely close to enjoying food or feeling hungry or anything.
I have no idea of what HAES is (maybe it has another name in Spanish?), but it sounds like it’s an effective method that goes for the core issue (those concepts of “good”/”bad” food).
Elektra –
Health at Every Size. There is a book by Linda Bacon by the same name and a lot of other resources scattered around ye olde internet if you want more info.
You’ll have to excuse me, I’m off to eat some chocolate just in case it’s misandry 🙂
I guess I do basically assume that my marriage works in part because of physical attraction– my husband’s a good guy but not a monk/saint/whatever, and if he no longer found me physically attractive I imagine the relationship would be significantly more difficult to sustain. And vice versa, obviously. I’ve had a previous LTR founder over physical attraction issues (on both sides) and it sucked, but I learned not to get into relationships based on rationality and friendship alone. It’s exasperating and depressing when you’re trying to deny/rationalize your own sexual feelings away, while simultaneously trying to be sexual with someone and pretend everything’s fine so they don’t get mad at you. ugh, never again
I read someone once on reddit who was like, “being in a relationship with someone who’s decided being with you is a triumph of rationality over their baser urges is the WORST” and I have to agree with that.
To me physical attraction is a pretty big deal in sexual relationships and I’m not able to get there on pure admiration of character. When it comes to physical attraction, I’m a visual critter, at least in part. I can appreciate guys with a range of physical characteristics but WRT bodyfat– among other things– alas, there does come a point where too much is, for me, just too much.
that all being said, I agree with the HAES folks that the cultural definition of what constitutes “attractive” is so impossibly narrow, esp. for women, that it really fucks a lot of people up. And the fact that people judge attractiveness so much in non-sexual contexts is super fucked up. More conventionally-attractive people get paid more to crunch numbers or write policy or sell pharmaceutical supplies? WHY?!
So I really do respect the idea of totally trying to scrap it for yourself and just listen to your own inner cues.
but just because something’s “cultural” doesn’t mean it’s not real to people, and if you’re in a committed sexual partnership I think you really need to talk this stuff through as nondefensively as possible, and not just assume your partner’s automatically on board with this journey of self-discovery, just because they’re your partner, basically.
@contrapangloss, you weren’t the only one I was rolling my eyes at. I do see what you’re saying now, and I think we’re mostly in agreement.
@mrex: you’re extrapolating a woman’s entire personality based on her verb choice. Do you not think that’s messed up?
@M., would you mind linking to the last post where I “screamed and swore” at a regular? And maybe post the number of comments I made between this post and that post where I did no such thing? Or would you prefer to admit you just don’t like me, and leave it at that?
Ceebarks, I’m trying to see your POV here, but my issue with a sentiment like this:
is the idea that this is self discovery and not healing. Here’s another thing that can cause weight loss: cancer treatment. If my partner finds me more attractive when chemo induced nausea causes me to lose weight, should I strive to continue to have cancer? Eating disorders are life threatening. People literally die from anorexia and other EDs. It’s not self discovery that accidentally leads to weight gain – it’s fighting a chronic disease that for many sufferers is life long. It may not have been this serious for the woman who wrote the piece above, but it certainly is for others.
I’m really grateful that we’re able to have a respectful and reasonable conversation about this, thank you!