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.
It makes them uncomfortable because they want to have sex with the woman but they can’t just rape her because that’s illegal.
These dudes are so fucking privileged that they think being temporarily reminded of something they can’t immediately just TAKE whenever they want is a grievious assault on their mental wellbeing.
@Pandapool
Painted metal bowl. “Microwave safe” my arse. =P
@katz:
Really explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Mark: X.
Commenters: No, because Y and Z.
Mark: … X.
Commenters: No, Y and Z. Also A.
Mark: But… X?
Commenters: Y! Z! A B C!
Mark: I don’t think you understand… X.
Commenters: O_O No, Mark, no X.
Mark: But Q! And X!
Commenters: Y and Z. A B and C. D!
Mark: I, but… X?
Commenters: Oh my god, Y and Z. Fuck off.
Mark: Harumph, you all are being so rude.
Commenters: Well maybe because Y, Z, A, B, and C.
Mark: But X!
Commenters: No Mark, no X. Sometimes X, but not the way you’re using it. You need a nuanced approach.
Mark: I don’t like the word “nuanced.”
…
Mark: Also X.
Commenters: ARGH!
WOW! This thread has grown since I went to bed. I thought Mark was going to leave? He is still spouting his rape apologia crap, I see.
Girlande-I don’t get this mentality either. It is seriously like Mark expects everyone (women) to cater to his wants, while he thinks men can do whatever they like with impunity because penis. The level of entitlement is astounding!
Scented Fucking Hard Chairs -“Painted metal bowl. “Microwave safe” my arse. =P”
LOL!
Catalpa-“These dudes are so fucking privileged that they think being temporarily reminded of something they can’t immediately just TAKE whenever they want is a grievious assault on their mental wellbeing.”
Exactly!
@SFHC
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Metal bowl? A metal bowl.
METAL bowl that said it was microwave safe?
😐
There’s multiple people in that situation that need to be ask, “Is this a good idea?”
Also, the water wasn’t on fire, it was the bowl.
It’s actually possible that the water is the reason the on-fire bowl didn’t become an on-fire house.
@PoM
I also thought that.
Kirby has summed it up.
Wow, Mark was tedious.
Bread talk!
I’m celiac, so no wheat bread; however, I just made a garlic & rosemary cassava bread-type-thing that’s really good. Addictively chewy. Nice thing is you can’t over-knead the stuff… no gluten to break down. Course, you don’t get a rise either. It’s actually a little like ciabatta in that it’s pretty flat… but much denser. Would be a good dipping bread.
Poor rapists. They get so uncomfortable that they have to rape. Why are women so mean to the poor rapists? We just keep making them rape us by having bodies they want to put their cocks in. Shame on us.
Seriously? Uncomfortable? We shouldn’t make men uncomfortable by not hiding our bodies or else the poor dears will have to rape us?
Mark, how many women and girls have made you so uncomfortable that you had to rape them? You seem to have a dog in this fight.
I do too. I’d like to not be raped and blamed for it. That sort of violent torture makes me “uncomfortable”. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, Mark. It’s the size of the fight in the dog. How game are you, Mark? How badly do you need to believe it isn’t your fault because she should have tried harder not to be raped by you? yYou’re a man. You claim that is every man’s natural reaction to seeing women. You provide no evidence for this claim. So, what have you got if not personal experience?
I’m pretty game to win this because you are talking about curtailing my rights in order to make you feel less rapey. We all know you’ll just find another excuse if you manage to scare women like me into dressing in burkas. Rapists always do.
One of us wants an excuse to rape and one of us wants not to be raped and then blamed for being raped. Do you really think you are going to win this fight? I don’t think you want to rape as much as I want not to be raped. Am I wrong? Are you so dedicated to victim blaming and rape apology that you’ll go down fighting for them? Do you think we won’t?
You’re motives. They aren’t as opaque as you think they are.
It is uncomfortable for Mark to not have access to every female body he finds attractive. By “uncomfortable” he means “I know I can’t fuck her and that makes me angry”. It’s her pride in her body and her ability to ignore his boner that makes him uncomfortable. He likes seeing women humbled and afraid. That makes him comfortable. He thinks it is our job to make him comfortable by being humbled, controlled by men’s boners and afraid of the same. Every man who victim blames feels the same. If they cannot make women submit to them sexually, they want to make us submit to bodily control in a manner related to sexual submission.
Way back in our campus days Hubby used to say he loved spring. Flowers came out and heavy clothes came off. Blue skies and beautiful women are not cause for discomfort.
Unless you hate women.
Mark keeps walking like a duck and talking like a duck, but he sure doesn’t like to have it pointed out that we have every reason to suspect he is indeed a duck.
You know what I think of your comfort, Mark?
Men like Mark have been winning this fight at women’s expense for countless generations. It must be such a shock to them to lose it now.
We’re never going back, Mark. The power you want over us? You can’t have it. It’s going, going, gone.
I’m a big fan of this bread. simple, ample and delicious. It makes good pizza crust too. Not the best, but good. The best is Izza’s from Post Punk Kitchen.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/five-minutes-a-day-for-fresh-baked-bread-zmaz08djzgoe.aspx
Kirbywarp:
He’s watered down his argument, but he started out saying:
So by “uncomfortable” he includes those feelings, which he states are generated by the clothing.
@Tessa:
Yeah, I remember that. The problem is that we kinda had to just guess what kind of clothing he was talking about, and what kind of feelings. Like, was it reactions at a short dress? A blouse with cleavage? Pants and t-shirt? Hot-pants and a bra? Were the feelings along the lines of attraction or was it physical arousal? The reason it was so unclear is because the only frame of reference we had was the feelings in the OP, where one guy was saying he could only think of raping the women around him, and the other saying that men can’t think straight when they’re sexually aroused.
At other points, he was saying that the people in the OP were “emotionally disturbed” and that the feelings they were talking about shouldn’t be listened to, so it wasn’t even clear what “extreme/abnormal” feelings he thought should be accounted for in clothing choice. For all we know, the first paragraph of that quote was not directly related to the second.
I’m with the people who don’t understand why these guys get unhappy when someone gives them pantsfeelings. When I see someone really hot, that makes me happy.
Do they also think hot women should never be in movies because they can’t bang the actress either?
As someone who has spent the greater part of her life with people breathing down her neck that her appearance is ‘distracting’ or might make people ‘uncomfortable’, and who has steadfastly refused to surrender her bodily autonomy to assuage the tender sensibilities of others, allow me to fire one last potshot at Mark; namely that he and his bass ackwards moral sumptuary laws can take a long walk off a short bridge straight into the Marianna Trench.
@Kirbywarp:
Eh, I think you’re being incredibly too charitable. After slogging through his stuff. It seems clear to me, he started out clearly talking about sexual feelings in general (First post was: (Are we saying that there is no biological component to sexuality?”), and even blamed the clothing for the feelings generated rather than on the men being “emotionally disturbed.” He just started watering down his argument to the most diluted possible form. So while early on it was “the clothing is causing sexual feelings and women should be considerate about how it makes the men feel” (the typical meat in front of a dog, or being taken to a wonderfully smelling restaurant and not allowed to eat), he’s now simply saying “uncomfortable” and keeping it as vague as possible, so no matter what you say, he can just say “I didn’t say that, I meant this other very vague thing”.
Katz:
Look at it through the lens entitlement. They feel entitled to access the women who gives them the pantsfeelings. When they don’t get the access… It makes them angry.
That’s what I’ve decided these people mean when they talk about “male sexuality.” Sexual attraction + entitlement.
This is a short but good article on ‘toxic masculinity’ and that it is taught to many boys at a very early age. There is nothing natural about it at all, this is learned behaviour.
Snippets:
“Benson Saulo recalls the day his best friend wound up behind bars. Drunk on a night out in Sydney’s CBD, his friend got into a fight with a bouncer. Before long, the towering former rugby player broke the bouncer’s neck, rendering him disabled for life.
“I asked him why he did it when he got out, and he said he felt he had no choice. All his life he was never able to back away, he never learnt how to step back and assess a situation,” Mr Saulo said.
Many of Mr Saulo’s friends from home, a rough part of Tamworth in New South Wales, endured what he described as a damaging cycle. They learnt early their value was measured by toughness. Starved of basic tools to put emotions into words, they resorted to rugby, violence and women, to find expression.”
“In a new program called Man Cave, which he co-founded with two friends, Hunter Johnson and Jamin Heppell, he is deconstructing “machoism” and encouraging emotional intelligence in classrooms of boys aged 14-18 across the country.”
“He discovered the link between hypermasculinity and mental health when he researched high rates of depression, anxiety and suicide among young men when he was Australia’s United Nations Youth Representative in 2011.”
“Mr Saulo said a mission to lower the rates of male suicide – the biggest killer of men under 25 – and to end domestic violence, was driving their initiative.
They practice mindfulness with the teens, and ask the boys to define masculinity, testing the common responses: “having facial hair, being buff, getting heaps of chicks, dealing with sh**”.
And they explore how even at 14, young boys objectify women.
Flicking through photos of their own Facebook friends, the trio ask the boys to air their immediate impressions: “Bitch. Slut. Fag.”
Co-founder Mr Johnson, 24, said they teach that just as masculinity does not equate with big muscles and toughness, being a woman doesn’t equate to weakness and vulnerability.
“We’re very concerned about violence against women. We try to get them thinking differently about girls by exploring the social construct of male power and male domination.””
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/teaching-boys-what-it-really-means-to-be-a-man-20150529-gh7z4p
I was saying that there are two elements in what the OP quotation says: (1) Women wearing certain clothes generates sexual thoughts. (2) They then want to do evil things.
(1) is relatively normal, whereas (2) is absolutely not.
The analogy with the person being stared at is a good one on this point. (1) Most of us would feel uncomfortable if someone stared at us (2) It wouldn’t be normal for this to make us want to kill them.
Now, personally I believe that there is probably *a biological element* to (1) – not saying that people couldn’t be trained to not feel that way, but I think it would probably take quite a lot of work to do so.
Anyway, I think I was probably wrong and you guys right for the following reason:
If there were a man who came online and said “All these people looking at me all the time… makes me feel so angry… I’m going to kill them all..” I thought it would be a bad response to emphasize people’s legal right to stare at you as much as they like and indicate that basic reaction (1) was somehow wrong, as everyone knows that (1) is very common. It would be correct to emphasize that (2) was wrong, and accept that he might have a point about (1).
But if I think about what I would actually say to a man who said those things, one of the first things would be – “they aren’t actually staring at you, it is all in your head.”
So, as you have been saying, maybe the clothing of women doesn’t actually play that much of a role in generating sexual thoughts.Perhaps the correct response to the guys in the OP would be to emphasize their ability to make a choice about their own sexual thoughts.
I do however still think that this is going to be *exceptionally hard* for some people, and we probably need to have some kind of society-wide training program to make it a reality. If there are certain types of clothing that for social reasons provoke a sexual reaction, a conservative approach would probably be easier to implement in the short-term.
Secondly, I still don’t think there is anything wrong with dress codes *in principle*.- and I don’t think that there is a general rule that we can dress or do as we please in public without concern for the reactions of others. All of the posters saying “I can dress as I please and damn your eyes” I think are wrong on this point, though I can understand why they are saying it if they are coming from a *fight against oppression* position. I’ve been a bit distracted by the specifics of which dress code I think should be implemented – personally I’m not particularly bothered by the system we have now – I just don’t think there is anything wrong with the principle of a dress code.
Thirdly, I don’t think it is sensible to conflate a feeling of discomfort at sexual feelings with a desire to commit violent acts. What about embarrassment? Maddening levels of distraction? Just because you don’t personally feel these things certainly doesn’t mean that other people don’t. It’s a bit like saying that someone who is uncomfortable with someone else looking at them is uncomfortable because they know they aren’t allowed to rip other people’s eyes out – a bit silly.
Thank you Lisa for sharing that article. I am also very pleased to hear about this awesome program. It proves that there is nothing misandrist about teaching boys not to rape and that the best way to get rid of entitlement is to teach self respect and respect for others. 😀
@Tessa:
Look at it through the lens of not only entitlement, but patriarchy.
Being a man under patriarchy, even a privileged white man, isn’t that easy*. You aren’t allowed to admit to your emotions, you’re expected to deal with things using a limited palette of acceptable responses, and socialising with men consists of being assholes to one another. Even worse, you’re expected to work hard every day in order that your shareholders may grow wealthier. You yourself will almost certainly never ascend to become a patriarch yourself and reap the vast benefit of this system. You’re a footsoldier, and like all footsoldiers you’re expected to be homogenous and disposable.
Why do people tolerate this? Because of The Deal. The Deal says that if you’re a good little footsoldier, you will be rewarded through the use of the patriarchy’s supply of objectified conventionally-attractive women; and the “lesser races” will know their place and will do the things you deign not to. This is what you signed up with the patriarchy for. The Deal, when it works, is a lucrative thing.
But The Deal has been broken. You aren’t getting the promised access to objectified conventionally-attractive women. Worse, some of those women are resisting their objectification or even choosing not to be conventionally attractive! Meanwhile, the members of the “lesser races” seem not to know their place at all. This isn’t what you signed up for! You were a good little loyal footsoldier, and now you aren’t getting your reward!
This was the point at which I personally said “fuck the patriarchy” because I realised that The Deal is a poor bargain to begin with, and that the things patriarchy was offering me were never its to give me. Many men, however, will balk at taking on the patriarchy and will instead persuade themselves that the people who are at fault for breaking The Deal are the women and the “lesser races.”
Mark is a good example of someone who still believes in The Deal. When he has pantsfeels, then they are the responsibility of a nearby objectified conventionally-attractive woman, just like litter in the street is the responsibility of some faceless ethnic minority in a janitor’s outfit. The prospect of his pantsfeels just being something he has to learn to live with is a horrible one because it implies that he was defrauded by The Deal, and that’s a frightening enough threat to his worldview that all sorts of cognitive biases kick in.
Men being entitled assholes is an awful thing. I will not disagree with that. I will, however, point out that in my opinion, raging against the entitlement is to see only the symptoms of the problem and miss its roots.
———
*This is not to suggest that being a woman under patriarchy is easier than being a man. It’s not. My point here is that being a man under patriarchy is harder than being a man in an open society.