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.
@Mark,
Many have already explained, quite well, the problems with instituting a “conservative dress code” so I’m not going to address that. What I would like to address is your standing in this conversation. You have said that this is an intellectual discussion for you, some sort of thought experiment (I’m paraphrasing because I’m terrible at WordPress :/). This is not a thought experiment for us–the people who identify as women on this thread. Coming into a thread and suggesting taking away people’s freedoms as some sort of intellectual enterprise (and let’s be clear, it’s merely intellectual for you because you are not part of the group whose freedoms are under attack) is noxious.
You are not objective in this because you think of this as an intellectual argument only. Anger is a valid response to someone just suggesting that women should cover up more in deference to men’s feelings. Now I’m not suggesting that you said “I’m objective and you angry people are not, and therefore your opinions aren’t valid.” I’m addressing this because oftentimes, that’s the rationale behind such ‘intellectual discussion’ internet wankery.
Mark sez:
Quote anyone saying anything that can possibly be reasonably construed as arguing this. You fucking dishonest, asshat.
We’re not talking about a harmless, yet idiosyncratic preference here. We’re talking about a dude who wants to rape women for dressing in a way he disapproves of despite it being generally socially acceptable. We’re talking about how you apparently think it’s the women’s problem not to wear those clothes around him as opposed to his problem to learn not to fucking rape people. We’re also trying to pin you down on whether men should feel obligated to moderate their dress lest they inspire inappropriate desires in someone else. Do try to keep up.
Mark, you still haven’t answered the question both Alan I posed earlier.
Some white people are racist and are uncomfortable seeing people of color. Should POC consider the sensitivities of racists and avoid white neighborhoods?
If no, why is that different from misogynist men dictating what women do for their personal comfort?
Pants down, dick in hand, tears in eyes.
(Sorry. =P)
This article Libby Anne just posted seems really relevant considering how the conversation has changed thanks to Play Doh troll.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/05/sexual-purity-and-the-pool-battle-plan.html
“In order to understand what the author, Heath Lambert, is getting at, you have to understand that evangelicals and fundamentalists who enforce strict modesty standards and subscribe to what I call “purity culture” believe that even thinking about sex is sinful. To be more precise, thinking about sex with someone you are not married to is held to be sinful. But what this really boils down to is seeing sexual attraction as sinful.”
“people of all genders and orientations have sexual thoughts. Including sometimes about strangers. That’s normal and okay. If someone feels bad about that, it’s because they were raised in a toxic culture.”
OK, so there is a toxic culture. That can be changed. But simply identifying a culture as toxic isn’t enough to change the feelings of the people who have been brought up in it. It’ll take a lot of work (by society, not individuals) to institute it.
Perhaps, conservative prescriptions can act as simple “sticky plaster” solutions to deeper problems.
“tell women what to wear because of pants feels. Endorse one, you’re endorsing the other because you’re ultimately endorsing men controlling women’s bodies.”
But we can tell people what to wear in our society. We do. Men and women. There are laws about clothing. Laws about what we can say. Perhaps that is fundamentally wrong? Further, even before it reaches the level of the law most people consider the way other people might react to their behavior even in the absence of explicit rules…
“Some white people are racist and are uncomfortable seeing people of color. Should POC consider the sensitivities of racists and avoid white neighborhoods?”
No, I don’t think so, because racism is a bad idea.
So now we’ve conflated cursing, clothing, and racism. We’re off to a great start. So let’s get something straight; the reason racism, public or private, is wrong, is on account of its leading to the discrimination against and persecution of others, not because it makes people uncomfortable. For fuck’s sake. As for laws against cursing, they’re all but defunct and repealed for a reason; namely that making words illegal is stupid at best, repressive at the very worst. And you continue to circle back to socially unacceptable behavior when trying to justify your dress code, which just doesn’t work, as people who flash others are, as a rule, aiming to sexually harass. The illegal a aspect isn’t the nudity, it’s the action and the intent. And as has been stated before, we’re not talking about flashers. We’re talking about people who have the audacity to wear clothes that somebody else might just find distracting. And you keep ignoring the point that making laws against this are UNENFORCABLE because there is no one definition of modesty that can be adhered to.
Choose your own
adventureresponse:1. A “Bad idea”? Sure, like sewing a human-skin suit or sticking a leaky car battery up your ass is a “Bad idea,” I suppose.
2. And misogyny isn’t?
Your ‘conservative dress’ solution is just a smoke screen that the people who need to change the most can hide behind to continue insisting that the problem isn’t them or that there isn’t a problem. If something is fundamentally broken, and some people are not inclined to see the damage in the first place, applying a temporary (even if ineffective) patch is just going to further convince them that the problem doesn’t exist.
http://weknowmemes.com/generator/uploads/generated/g1332356573509493682.jpg
Also, holy crap, I just realised I’ve been awake for 27 hours. I take back what I said about Captain Boring, I might need to use his inane blather as an insomnia cure.
Several evangelical Christian groups have tried exactly what you are prescribing. And IT JUST DOESN’T HELP. It has been tried and it has failed for years. Why is the answer always to double down and try it harder? Oh, I know. Because to change this way of thinking is to inconvenience the dominant group. Wouldn’t want to do that.
@ SFHC
@fromafar2013
Thanks, now I’m going to have nightmares later!
Park trip ended early due to rain. Back into the fray with me!
@sevenofmine
I think Mark got that idea from one of my statements, which was this:
He’s just ignoring the “unaggressive” part. I’d argue that flashing people, while not physically violent, is still pretty darned aggressive.
http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620×413/s_v/town.jpg
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/28/newquay-credits-mankini-ban-with-drop-in-antisocial-behaviour
Mark sez:
But do we tell men they have to moderate their dress to stop others from wanting to rape them?
@ Mark
“They say a determination to tackle antisocial behaviour such as excess drinking, public disorder and the wearing of inappropriate clothing such as mankinis – skimpy male bikini-style bathing costumes popularised by the comedy character Borat – has helped reduce crime in the town.”
“People expected to come to Newquay to drink a lot, behave irresponsibly, a lot of really young people came to Newquay and knew they had a good chance of getting drunk. Certainly we have clamped down on that and the image of Newquay now has certainly curtailed some of that.”
You fell for the click bait. Imagine that.
@sevenofmine
No.
@fromafar2013
“I remember back in the 2000s you couldn’t walk the streets on a Saturday without seeing someone wearing a mankini or what have you. But now they’re not allowed in Newquay. The police will tell them to go home and get changed if they see them wearing one, and the guesthouses and campsites are pretty good at warning their guests about what’s acceptable,”
@ Mark
Are you even for real with that link? Fucking mankinis? Nobody is arguing that there aren’t any circumstances under which certain clothing is considered inappropriate. WE. ARE. NOT. TALKING. ABOUT. THAT.
We’re talking about a dude who has arbitrarily decided that the way most women dress is slutty and that they deserve to be raped because of it.
Mark sez:
Alright then. Why is it reasonable to tell women to moderate their dress so nobody will want to rape them?
Correlation does not equal causation, Mark.
I’m talking about people not having the right to dress however they choose and conservative dress codes therefore not being inherently evil, or wrong.
@ Mark
Yes. The mankini. Bane of Alcoholics Anonymous. Think you’re sober? Think again! The mere sight of one is enough to drive a person to drinking! And wearing one? Whoo boy, if you weren’t drunk already, you will be soon!
Why, just the other day I bought one for my finance as a joke, and when he tried it on, he turned into a hooligan and a public nuisance! Took the cops three hours to talk him down! NEVER AGAIN