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.
Well, here’s the thing. Your conclusions don’t follow from the premises you put forth. Your article suggested that banning mankinis caused a decrease in public disorder (mind you, this is a restriction on the people behaving in an illegal manner). You use this as support to implement a conservative dress code for women in order for men to be more comfortable. There is a missing premise here in order to connect these two articles! That premise is that “women’s dress incites men to public disorder.” So how do you connect these two things without that premise?
David booted redneckcryonicist for being tedious, so I think this is fair game. The Dark Lord can make the ultimate call.
@fromafar2013
And an even greater distance between that and:
“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…We all know you’ll just find another excuse if you manage to scare women like me into dressing in burkas. Rapists always do…”
Well, I don’t know how anyone else feels, but I actually find mankinis offensive, so I’m going to put that down as a definite on my personal list of prohibited clothing.
@ Mark
Awwww, did meany pants Lea hurt your feelings? I don’t know how that is a response to the accurate interpretation of your words above, since Lea was just pointing out to you that your arguments and justifications sound just like the ones rapists use. Which is also an accurate interpretation of your words. And since many of us have been raped, we have first hand experience with what they say and how they justify their behavior, and you have much in common with them.
Does that bother you? If so, good. Work on yourself.
Hang on, a moment ago I was being told that my idea for a conservative dress code was unmanageable because of the difficulty of determining what was modest. But now I’m being told we have to determine the intent of someone when they put on a piece of clothing. Isn’t that even more unworkable?
Oops not ‘Race for Life’; it was another charity thing.
I could put a link to a pic, but I don;t know how to do it to make viewing optional.
Mark, you have not answered my question. Do you think my friend should be forced by law to just stumble around and accept that she will have to hurt herself occasionally by running into something or someone, because many men find women with glasses very sexy and that might make them feel uncomfortable? because I guess it would be difficult for her to live like that and, you know, get to work and back, do her job, drive a car, care for her kids and so on. But I guess that wouldn’t be that important now, would it?
Also please adress what sunnysombrera pointed out, which was:
Why did you change your argument here? Because if you do, it seems like you now want to ban women from wearing clothes you don’t like. or maybe you want to say that women you don’t find attractive should have to stay home because otherwise you might be “forced” to look at them. Changing your goalposts like that doesn’t make you look any better.
Dude, if you are really arguing in good faith, please just take a step back, read aaaaaaall the comments that people have made when they tried to explain to you why what you are saying is a problem.
Ever have a conversation where you feel like someone agrees with every premise and then just randomly denies the necessary conclusion?
It’s like:
Mark: 2+2 = 5
Me: No, 2+2 = 4, here let me demonstrate. *place 2 apples on a table* Yo, Mark, count these apples.
Mark: Ok. *counts apples* There’s 2 apples.
Me: *places 2 more apples on the table, slightly apart* Ok, now count these apples.
Mark: Ok. *counts apples* There’s 2 apples here too.
Me: *shoves all the apples together* Ok, now count all the apples.
Mark: *counts all the apples* There’s 4 apples.
Me: So, 2+2 = 4, right?
Mark: Nope. 2+2 = 5
Me: *rips hair out*
Reading Comprehension.
F. See me in my office.
Right, I’ve emailed David to hopefully swat the buzzing mosquito.
Actually that crops up anyway.
If I’m wearing a ski mask on the piste people probably won’t bat an eyelid. if I wear one on a sunny day whilst entering a jewelers shop I could understand if the police wanted a word,
@fromafar2013
It didn’t hurt my feelings, though I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear that I found it quite disturbing.
My point was that it seemed to me to be a particularly egregious example of someone telling somebody else exactly what they were thinking, saying, and feeling.
No, because when a person puts on a mankini and gets drunk and disorderly, or a flasher dons a trench coat, or a streaker nothing at all, there’s a freaking action involved that makes the behavior unacceptable. Stop being willfully obtuse.
@ Mark
Here’s another example:
Nothing. You are thinking, saying and feeling nothing.
If only he were saying nothing, M. If only he were.
Alan,
In most cases would you be able to replace the aspects of the law related to intent with rules related to location?
@ghostbird
“No, because when a person puts on a mankini and gets drunk and disorderly, or a flasher dons a trench coat, or a streaker nothing at all, there’s a freaking action involved that makes the behavior unacceptable. ”
SO, how do we make the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable clothing?
Mark, would you just come out and say what bothers you so much about all this? Is it clothes you don’t like, or just you bridling at people having the freedom to act as they please within reason? Stop the prevaricating and get to the goddamn point or get out.
Mark sez:
You’re saying women should moderate their dress based on the apparently magical divination of the clothing preferences of hypothetical rapey dudes that might happen to look at them. That’s actually just impossible. We, on the other hand, are saying that, when someone dresses in a manner that is generally understood to be inappropriate to a particular venue, it’s reasonable to infer some things about their intent. Based on actual things they actually fucking did. You fucking shitwit.
Well the location could be an aspect that provided evidence of an intent.
So, in the ski mask example above the fact that it was a jewelers shop might give rise to a ‘reasonable suspicion’ (‘probable cause’ for our colonial friends) allowing the police to stop and question.
But it may be that there was no innocuous intention. The person may be a burns victim or something. So legislating by location would’t work.
Private businesses can of course impose dress codes for any reason they want. Banks usually make you take off crash helmets and Harrods won;t let you in in shorts. But legislation, especially with criminal consequences, would be unlawful (in England at least) unless the prohibition was “reasonable, proportional and necessary in a democratic society”
Telling women to burka up to assuage the feelings of potential rapists probably wouldn’t pass that test.
I think that if everyone had to wear loose fitting t – shirts and baggy trousers we’d probably all get a lot more work done.
Which is, of course, why rape is all but non-existent in Muslim majority countries.
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Hey, guess what I was wearing when I was raped!