Over on Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder has posted the excerpt below from A Love That Multiplies: An Up-Close View of How They Make It Work by Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar — yes, those Duggars — explaining how women “defraud” men when they dress in a way that men find exciting (in their pants).
This, sadly, is not exactly an original or even unusual notion in reactionary religious circles.
Indeed, a couple of years back, I found a rather scary post on a radically pro-patriarchal site called the CoAlpha Brotherhood in which one young man calling himself Drealm lamented that, as a man living “in a university town that’s overrun with young girls” he was literally “forced to stare at hundreds if not thousands of women a day, all of whom bring sluttiness to all new pinnacle”
Like the Duggars, Drealm thought that “a woman dressing provocatively and leaving a man in an unfinished state of excitement … is an assault on men’s sexuality.”
When women dress like this, he argued, he and other men couldn’t help but want to rape them.
[T]he only thing I want to do to a slut is rape them. … dressing like sluts brings out murders, rapists and sadists in men. … A society based on sluts, might as well be a pro-rapist society.
Reading back over this now, it’s all a bit too reminiscent of the thinking of Elliot Rodger. Indeed, after Rodger went on his misogyny-driven murder spree, one CoAlpha Forum member wrote that Rodger “would have been a true hero” had he only killed more sorority women; the site now adorns its front page with an homage to Rodger.
But it isn’t just those on the margins of the manosphere who think this way. In The Myth of Male Power, the 1993 book that essentially provided the ideological blueprint for the Men’s Rights movement today, Warren Farrell famously wrote of the “miniskirt power” secretaries allegedly had over their male bosses.
Farrell is a couple of decades older now, and apparently it takes more than a miniskirt to render him powerless these days. And by “more than a miniskirt” I mean less. As in no clothing at all. When Farrell put out a new eBook edition of The Myth of Male Power last year, he had his publisher put a rear-view shot of a nude woman on the cover, “to illustrate,” as he explained in an appearance on Reddit,
that the heterosexual man’s attraction to the naked body of a beautiful woman takes the power out of our upper brain and transports it into our lower brain
This sort of logic, like that of the Duggars and of “Drealm” from the CoAlpha Brotherhood, also conveniently takes the blame for (heterosexual) male behavior and transports it into the bodies of women. With the Duggars, we’ve seen exactly where this sort of logic can lead.
Farrell, much like the Duggars and the excerable “Drealm,” also seems to think that women commit a kind of fraud against men when they “stir up sensual desires” that they don’t intend to fulfill. As Farrell wrote in The Myth of Male Power, when a man pays good money to take a woman out, and she doesn’t repay him, as it were, with sex, she is in his estimation committing a kind of “date fraud” or “date robbery.”
Or even a sort of date rape. Farrell wrote that
dating can feel to a man like robbery by social custom – the social custom of him taking money out of his pocket, giving it to her, and calling it a date. … Evenings of paying to be rejected can feel like a male version of date rape.
Emphasis mine, because holy fuck.
This is what happens when your ideology makes women responsible for (heterosexual) men’s desires. Hell, it’s what happens when you make anyone responsible for the desires of someone else, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
Your pants feelings are your responsibility. Not anyone else’s. Full stop.
I suppose this should have occurred to me long ago, but it’s pretty doggone hypocritical for Warren Farrell to be like, “Women’s butts are oppressive and make men not think straight anymore” and then go put one on his book cover.
Which is totes not a marketing ploy.
And don’t forget how people like the Duggars enforce their Bizarro-world version of forgiveness on the victims of sexual abuse, rather than allowing them to heal on their own. So not only are you at fault for your own abuse, you also have a religious responsibility to forgive your attacker, regardless of contrition or whether they were actually punished.
Can you imagine how different this coverup would have been if it had been one of their daughters having consensual sex with someone their own age? My god, if they had been a person of color? You can’t possibly have your priorities in the right order when you send someone who molested 5 children to go work for a friend’s construction company for a little while and call it a day.
The other issue here, besides the stupidity of the idea that men can’t control themselves around “immodestly dressed’ women, is that dress standards change over time.
Reminds me of a line from Lenny Bruce: “You’re getting it up, you’re not getting it off—you’re creating a clear and present danger…”
Translation: “I hate women. I hate their freedom. I’m a rapist pig who fantasizes about murdering women I cannot control or own. I’m a typical abuser that blames the victim for my actions. I dehimanize women in order to excuse my hatred and repulsive nature. I have no self awareness and should be locked up for public safety. I think all men are like me and that makes my hate and desire to harm “normal” in my eyes. I am why rape jokes are dangerous. Keep me away from your kids at all times.”
There is no lower brain unless your head is up your ass.
On the subject of incestuous paedophiles, is it true that Aurini admitted to being one too? I can’t listen to his videos for more than five seconds before wanting to bite the computer in half.
Isn’t it even more of a fraud for Farrell to use naked buttocks to sell his book? I mean, presumably, some poor bloke sees the cover, thinking it’s an attractive lady and is totally mind-controlled by his boner to buy it, and then he realises that it’s not a pretty lady he can put his boner into, but a book full of MRA garbage. How disappointing, no?
What is that man supposed to do with his boner, and no way to satisfy it? Just let it go floppy again? MISANDRY!!
Are we meant to wear potato sacks to never cause a man to have a boner in public ever, or is it ok to dress however we want, as long as we stop to sexually gratify every man we encounter along the street?
It’s just so goddamned impractical to think of any solution other than “think about baseball or something until it subsides”, and yet Manurespherians obsess over this “plight” of theirs as if it’s the greatest injustice known to mankind.
It’s creepy as anything.
It’s strange how men in life drawing classes do not rape their models in every class, how male nudists don’t all rape their friends and family, how men and women swim in little or no clothing and manage not to rape anyone all the time. Most men do not find the idea of raping women and girls alluring. The only men who do find it so because they are misogynist scum who want to use sex to torture women. It’s like men are human beings capable of empathy and basic respect for other people. It’s like they can control themselves just as well as women can. It’s like no man with self respect would want to be rapist scum. It’s like rapists choose to rape and who they rape has nothing to do with the victim’s actions or the inherent nature of their gender.
Sorry (not sorry) rapists. There is no excuse for you being a horrible person. You made yourself that way. You’re the only ones responsible for the crimes you commit. Deal with it. You are neither better nor worse for having been born a man.
SFHC,
I had not heard that, but it would hardly surprise me.
I guess that’s why women in burkas never get raped. Oh wait…
Aren’t sexy enough? They want to kill you.
Turn them down and they want to kill you.
Fuck ’em and they want to kill you.
They just want an excuse to be murderers of women.
If women’s bodies really were so powerful, you’d expect to see more MRAs complaining about how they lost all their money to spam-email scams with women’s pictures in them.
Nitram,
And why men never raped women until the advent of the miniskirt.
Oh…that’s wrong too.
I guess Male Rape Advocates just want an excuse to rape, abuse and ultimately enslave women.
I got ninja’d by Kootiepatra.
@SFHC, I hadn’t heard that, but he has apparently made videos on how conflict in the Middle East is to do with the wrong kind of incest creating different family lines, or some weird bullshit. Like, marrying cousins on the maternal or paternal side somehow affects the quality of the race or some other racist pseudo-intellectual shite. I felt sullied just by watching a short clip, but he basically doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to have any problem marrying a close relative if it would preserve his superior White genes.
Oh, jeez, I truly hope he never has any kids, whether he turns out to be a sex offender or not.
Well, that’s not disturbing at all, she said sarcastically.
Seriously though… all of this is a no win situation for us. Like stated above, they’re just looking for an EXCUSE.
I seriously, seriously wonder how this core principle of theirs would be rationalized away if anyone simply hauled off and decked them. Afterall, if they didn’t want anyone to do violence to them, they wouldn’t be so stupid as to provoke it. How, in any minute way whatsoever, is this “reasoning” any different?
This whole lie that men become uncontrollable rape machines when confronted with sexual arousal needs to die a quick and painful death.
It’s like it was a joke that started with men sitting around joking that their property (wives) really pulled the strings so that they didn’t have to think of the power imbalance between them. But they kept repeating the joke and spreading it until it became a meme that people actually believed.
Dudes, listen. You know the marshmallow test? The one where you put a small child in front of a marshmallow, telling them that they can have two if they are just able to wait for an unknown amount of time? You know how “success” involves the kid having self-control and resisting the temptation to eat the marshmallow?
Losing your self control when you get aroused is not the failure of the world for tempting you. It’s your failure; you failed the marshmallow test.
Dude. You’re a MAN. A GROWN-ASS FUCKING MAN. Can you not control your own eyes? You know, AVERT THEM? Because if you can’t, then maybe it’s better you tore them out, like the good book says…
Dude. You’re a MAN. A GROWN-ASS FUCKING MAN. Can you not see that what you are saying there is the product of pure patriarchy, not a “society based on sluts”? Because it’s not sluts making you want to rape, it’s your own unchecked privilege.
Oh wait. I guess you CAN’T see, because you can’t even control your own damn eyes.
Trying to appeal to these guys’ adulthood and autonomy is like pushing a friggin’ rope.
“forced to stare at hundreds if not thousands of women a day” Well no, actually. Unless those women are going all Clockwork Orange on you, you are not being “forced” to stare at them. You can look at literally anything else instead.
I believe the Goddard’s “Counseling Sexual Abuse” chart suggests that defrauding is why God lets sexual abuse happen, as far as I can tell. The logic is both muddled and appalling, so I’m not exactly sure what it means.
While searching out that hideous chart, I found this graphic vaguely cheered me up with it’s not surprising information.
http://freakoutnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/FoxNews.jpg
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/05/27/fox-news-devoted-less-than-two-minutes-to-the-d/203778
I wear three part cup bras just like the one in the OP. They really do push up and in!
Dressing modestly didn’t prevent Josh Duggar from molesting some of those girls. So much for that technique.
Please David put this guy on blast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq3nstS_hHR8Xa4JgZ96pLQ/videos
“People make me lustful thus I’m forced to rape them” is about as sensible as “People make me angry thus I’m forced to kill them”.
In that it makes no sense at all.
Oh dears. Looks like nobody ever explained to young Warren, back when he was a wee twig of a preadolescent, that DATING doesn’t mean paying for sex. It means going out with someone in order to have a good time together, to get to know one another better, and maybe even make plans to see each other again! It needn’t cost a bundle to do THAT, surely. And if you’re forking out a bundle with the expectation of having sex, that’s not dating, that’s prostitution. A vital distinction that one shouldn’t have to live to a ripe old age in order to grasp.
Jeebus. That’s right up there with the homunculus theory of human reproduction.
As for “miniskirt power”, which secretaries allegedly wield over their bosses, I’d like to remind ol’ Warren that it’s MEN who hire these miniskirted sexpots, and MEN who have the power to fire them and hire someone else, e.g. a competent, pantsuit-clad grandmother who’s happily married and not interested in strangling any man’s “lower brain” with her miniskirt. Or maybe, even, a bright young man with a pleasant telephone voice! Ever consider that?
“I suppose this should have occurred to me long ago, but it’s pretty doggone hypocritical for Warren Farrell to be like, “Women’s butts are oppressive and make men not think straight anymore” and then go put one on his book cover.”
Maybe he thinks he’s reclaiming the mystical, mind-controlling power of the arse for men? Also is anyone else wondering how long it’ll be until someone covered here turns out to be a serial killer?