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.
@sevenofmine
Because some people might be made uncomfortable by the clothes that they are wearing.
Sorry @sevenofmine, misread your comment – that isn’t reasonable.
Jesus fuck Mark. Why do we not say the same thing to men? If we don’t say it to men, why don’t we? Why the double standard? Why is it reasonable to expect anyone at all to consider every possible way someone else could be made uncomfortable by their clothing?
Do you actually think you’re making an argument here? You think just restating the same godsdamned thing over and over is an argument?
Oh for fuck’s sake Mark. If that’s not reasonable, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN DOING HERE?!
No. The article doesn’t say that. Mankinis were targeted because they were worn by disruptive people wanting to imitate Sasha Baron Cohen. The people wearing the mankinis were causing the problem. Are you saying women wearing shorts are the people doing the “excess drinking, public disorder”? Because it sounds like you are.
@sevenofmine – we do say to men “you can’t dress in this way if it makes others uncomfortable” hence the link at the top of the page.
I don’t think you do have to consider every possible peculiar preference of every other person – but I think we do have rules about the main preferences, and we should *try* to be considerate of more peculiar ones, though it won’t always be possible to accommodate them.
I don’t think you actually disagree with me, so I’m not sure why you’re getting so heated.
Holy shit, how is this guy still droning on?
The mankini ban? Get the fuck outta here with that bullshit. Seriously, for fuck’s sake.
Remember boys and girls, Mark is defending people who say it’s okay to rape.
Rape five-year-old children, in fact.
@Binjabreel
Isn’t that a cognitive bias?
@ Mark
They banned mankinis because they noticed a pattern that the people wearing them tended to be the ones being drunk and disorderly. It wasn’t the mankini that was the problem. It was the behavior of the people wearing them. They were cracking down on the excess drinking and public disorder. Men can still go around topless and such.
Pssst, Mark: Presuming to tell feminist women when they can and can’t get angry is a poor idea which will not end well.
A cognitive bias against rape and paedophilia apologists? You’re a fucking chatbot, aren’t you?
Mark read that article and came away with the idea that mankinis themselves were offensive not the behavior of the people wearing them? Or that the mankinis were a cause of the bad behavior and not just a symptom?
Okay, then.
I hereby propose, based on the super scientific research I did last weekend (AKA, people watching in a college town), that we make yoga pants mandatory. I saw lots of young women wearing them, and many of those women had books or were headed to class. Therefore the pants obviously encourage scholarly pursuits, and should themselves be encouraged.
“Let ME tell you what YOU think”
“And then chastise you for being angry about a topic which will only ever impact you and never me.”
ghilie –
That’s pretty rich given what several posters here have told me about what I think. Why don’t you scroll up a bit and unload your outrage on them?
Anyone for Numbers Ninja? I’ll start it off.
1
OK… perhaps mankinis weren’t banned because they cause discomfort to others (though I’d imagine that was a factor, otherwise why not ban baseball caps?), but we certainly have a case of male clothing being regulated by law, and we have cases of male (and female) nudity being regulated by law because of the discomfort it causes others.
@ Mark
There is a world of difference between “I don’t think you actually disagree with me” and “I don’t think I actually disagree with you”.
Sorry you’re too dim to understand that.
@Mark
If we go back to the OP, the dude is complaining about the general accepted dress-code.
How do we know that?
So if hundreds, if not thousands of women are dressing immodestly, at the same place, maybe it is NOT THE FUCKING DRESS-CODE THAT NEEDS CHANGING!!!
Ahem…
Maybe if you have a problem with things that everyone else finds perfectly normal, the problem is yours? We are not talking about running around naked, it is like complaining that women insists on wearing bikinis and bathingsuits when you are DIRECTLY ON THE FUCKING BEACH.
And you are still talking about that a moderate dress-code?
If I am following the decency laws and the general agreed upon dresscode for the specific occasion, why should I not be allowed to dress how ever I want within those constraints?
Mark
Are you actually just this dense? I’m not saying anything at all that anyone here hasn’t said. If you agree with me, you agree with literally everyone else here. If you think there’s someone here who has taken a position significantly different from mine, you are wrong.
What. Do. You. Want?
I used to live near Newquay and did some legal work for some companies in the town. It had developed a reputation as a place for rowdy stag and hen dos.
There has always been a tension between businesses that capitalise on that and the people who have to live there. No one wants to spoil anyone’s fun but people puking in the street ans shouting ‘tits out for the lads’ at local schoolgirls was becoming a nightmare.
As pointed out above the mankini ‘ban’ (it is of course a bit more complex than that) was a way of applying some control. It allows the police to identify potential trouble causers and gives them an excuse to intervene.
As it happens we had a ‘Race for Life’ recently and a few people did dress in mankinis and other daft apparel, but no one had a problem with that (including the police). The people running the race weren’t likely to get hammered and kick off and the mankini runners were seen as funny not threatening.
It wasn’t the clothing that was the issue, it was the behaviour of the people wearing the clothes.
The issue isn’t the clothing, Mark. The issue is the intent. Same with the flasher example. Same with any example in which a person dons clothing or lack thereof while intending to cause trouble of any sort. Which we are not talking about. We are talking about people dressing with their own taste and comfort in mind being forced to accommodate others because lord forbid we offend someone’s sensibilities, rather than that person averting their eyes or getting over it.
Is emailing David limited to really gross trolls, or should we report really tedious ones too?
@ Mark
And we’re saying that ‘discomfort of others’ alone is not a compelling reason for dress codes. There needs to be some other more compelling reason (safety, hygiene, etc). Are there places in the world that have stupid and restrictive dress codes that don’t meet that standard? Absolutely. Does that mean there SHOULD be? NO.
THE FACT THAT DRESS CODES EXIST IS NOT SUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION FOR MORE DRESS CODES.