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.
Goggling about, I found this article discussing Gothard’s definition of “defrauding”.
A commentator on the article hits the bulls-eye while pointing out the awfulness of this crap.
Definitively kindred spirits with many (most? all?) MRAs.
http://www.recoveringgrace.org/2014/02/defrauding-what-does-it-mean/
How many of the guys who make these “men become uncontrollable rape machines when presented with women with visible skin/suggestion of having a body shape” claims do you think are the same guys who complain about any criticism of sexual objectification of women? I think we all remember the “shirtgate” thing, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if plenty of the MRAs defending the shirt also argue that women should cover themselves. Even though, going by their logic, seeing that shirt should have made them want to rape that shirt, or the nearest woman. With these guys it’s like double standards are the only standards hey have.
All the time. All. The. TIME.
I just can’t wrap my head around these MRAs:
Women are mindless creatures of sub-human intelligence, and must be guided by men, their intellectual superiors….
….buuuut, it’s women’s responsibility to cover themselves so that men don’t become mindless animals?
I’m not even asking for someone to convince me of either of these bullshit statements–just explain to me how they can in any way coexist without contradicting each other!
Anyone want to start a betting pool?
Hammer. Nail. HEAD.
I’m half expecting the Quiverfullers (or the MRAs, same shit regardless of what asshole) to come up with “eye rape” next. You know, when a woman just looks at a man. We’re not supposed to look, only be looked at, y’know.
Another excellent post, David (yesterday’s Kleenex was the winner, too).
Not that the other ones are not, but some still stand out.
This morning, you know what I did? I went out of my front door, caught public transport to work and now sit in my office. About fifty percent of the people on the public transport were female. About 30-40% of the people in my office are female. You know what else I did? I didn’t rape any of them, regardless of how sexily they may have dressed. It’s not difficult.
Anyone who finds that they are compelled to rape women around them should probably seek to make sure they aren’t around women, possibly via contacting law enforcement or entering monastic orders. They should not attempt to generalise it to be a problem with the whole gender in an attempt to diffuse their personal responsibility. That’s misandry.
A box of kittens and the latest Maru video to the first person to accurately call, by name and website, a manospherian guilty of murder or incitement thereto.
To put it simply: Cognitive Dissonance is the unsettling feeling caused by holding two conflicting beliefs simultaneously.
More complexly, they have poor self-control and have grown up in an environment that encourages all their worst instincts (the endless dehumanisation and glorification of male sexuality) and can’t empathise with women enough to understand that they have feelings and lives of their own (or intelligence, as they find lacking control of women threatening).
This causes them to desperately try to rationalise the clash between their sexual desires and the knowledge that rape is a bad thing (see also how they try to convince themselves that rape is somehow ‘not rape’). The whole modesty thing is the result of them trying to remove the offending objects (i.e women they find attractive) from sight as a way to not have to deal with the problem.
Well, then I have no f***ing clue how male rape victims fit in with this philosophy. Are they being sexually provocative too? What about 2 year olds? 85 year olds?
Really, outside of it being vile, this philosophy has an awful lot of flaws.
Caroline – and these are the yahoos who constantly prattle on about how “logical” they are due to their maleness. Flatworms wouldn’t be fooled by this horseshit.
My vote’s for Colon Nolan. Dude gives off more serial killer vibes than Hannibal Lecter and John Wayne Gacy combined.
*slow posting*
The idea of male rape victims is purely a concept to them, unconnected to how they perceive reality. They fear the idea of being raped (their fucking semen-stealing obsession), but they also can’t understand the idea that a man would turn down sex from a woman, so that combined with the cartoonishness of their nightmare scenarios distances them from any real-life implications.
Regarding children or the elderly, they probably see rapists of them as practically a different species, evil for evil’s sake and unlike them in any way (else they may have to face the reality of how similar they are). Kind of how many men see rapists in general as inhuman monsters that neither they nor anyone they know could ever be like.
Beat me to it.
lkeke35:
Don’t ask questions you don’t really want to know the answer to. 🙁
Breaking news! Women are sometimes aroused and end up having no orgasm or even sexual contact! Often when this happens we choose not to take to the internet to opine about our lower brains or any other such nonsense but concentrate on getting on with our lives and maybe finding a suitable sexual partner! Many men do this too! Science, please research this strange and heretofore unknown phenomenon!!!!!
Oh yes. The shirtgate thing. My creepy husband got really aggressive with me when I said that wasn’t an appropriate thing to wear and that it was entirely appropriate to call it out. If the people depicted on your clothing are wearing clothing that wouldn’t be appropriate to wear to the office then your clothing is probably not appropriate for the office (or lab). But the complaints were detracting from the SCIENCE!! he said. Yeah, like the choice of wearing a shirt bedecked with fetish-gear wearing cartoon women wasn’t detracting from the science.
Anyhoo… yeah sure, flesh is distracting. So are neon colours. And big logos or clever sayings on t-shirts. My eye swerves when I see an attractive man with little on. But it’s on me not to touch or make an inappropriate comment.
The more covering we make people do, the more we place the responsibility of our ‘lustful thoughts’ and inappropriate behaviours on them. And it’s always women (almost always?, no always or at least always more) who have this responsibility placed on them. Therefore a woman in niqab culture is behaving sluttishly if she shows her face. In Victorian culture if she showed her ankle. These guys should be grateful there’s so much flesh on show these days or their shredded self-control might be pushed over the edge by a bit of forearm.
I’ve noticed the similarities between Christian patriarchy and assorted neo-misogynists, too. They even use the same evo-psych nonsense about gender–that men can’t help their sex drive, that women “tempt” men with their very presence, women have value by being young and beautiful while men have value by being successful and experienced etc. etc.
The irony is that Christian fundamentalists, the very same people who deny evolution until they’re blue in the face, use a distorted version of its ideas in the guise of God’s will. This is the perfect inverse of people who actually understand the relationship between science and morality–they accept evolution as a useful theory in the realm of science, but don’t accept it as a moral way to live. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, reject evolution as science but accept it (or rather a version twisted to serve oppressive needs) as morality.
In fact I read in Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal that the deistic concept of nature was the basis for the naturalistic fallacy underlying Social Darwinism*: If God made nature this way then it must be right. This is the missing link, if you will, between the fundamentalists who explicitly reject Darwin’s ideas and the neo-misogynists who pretend to understand Darwinism.
* Another repressive distortion of Darwinism that Darwin himself explicitly rejected, and really should not bear the name of that thoughtful and conscientious man.
I just love (wait no, not love, what’s that other word… Oh yes, deeply despise) how these guys go on and on about how women are responsible for not tempting men and how men “just can’t control Themselves” and then whip right around to talk about how men are CLEARLY the logically, morally, and spiritually superior gender and OF COURSE they should be in charge of everything. I mean, women get periods, and this causes them to become rampaging, out of control beasts that clearly cannot be trusted with any power or freedom whatsoever.
What i wonder is why in hell a family like the Duggers are even allowed to have a TV show, that would never happen here in Sweden.
Islamic fundamentalists do exactly the same thing. Misogyny is very similar regardless of where it comes from. This is an Iranian propaganda poster, roughly translated: “We ourselves invite [sexual] harassment: Girls who do not dress properly are harassed and targeted in the streets.”
http://i.imgur.com/aZk2X.jpg
Which society has this dating custom? In the parts of the US where I’ve lived, the dating custom is that you give the money to a waiter/bartender/barista or some other neutral third party.
And now that I think about it, which society has that sort of robbery custom? In the parts of the US where I’ve lived, robbers don’t wait for people to offer them money voluntarily; they extract it using threats or force.
Catalpa – it’s not just their rationalized inability to display the self-control of your average three-year-old. Petulant, entitled anger and maudlin melodrama somehow don’t qualify as “emotionalism” to these jackasses, either.
@Chaos-Engineer:
Nicely phrased. I lol’d. Please have one internet on me.