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: Points for being consistent. Now… why should my personal lady-feelings about men’s clothing and bodies have any bearing on what you choose to wear today?
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50 isn’t a big sample size, for one thing.
For another thing, what if cis and trans people have different biology? You can’t extrapolate those findings to cis people. You’d need to give cis women testosterone and cis men estrogen.
Also, even if testosterone makes men’s sex drives higher, so what? That doesn’t mean men can’t control themselves and it doesn’t provide a legal, moral, or ethical justification for restrictions on women’s freedoms.
If men can’t deal with sexy women, they should be the ones to arrange their lives around that. Like working from home. Or becoming a monk.
“OK, so that is a discussion we can have – what should the specifics of the dress code be.”
Mark, literally nobody wants to have that discussion. Piss off.
Does anyone else see the bitter irony in this guy wanting to restrict passive behaviour like wearing clothing in public, on the basis that it *might* make someone “uncomfortable if they happened to look in the wrong direction… whilst actively getting all obnoxious up in this thread and being a tedious boor.
Mark, you are making us all uncomfortable, by being obstinately boring and sticking to the same point in bad faith, and we all just want you to shut the fuck up.
Also – ALAN! I live in the Midlands, and my friend had a raccoon in his garden – it wasn’t the first one the animal shelter had caught, either. 🙂 they are imported and get loose, and create problems, so don’t get one, but they are in the UK.
Context of the OP aside, the reason we can’t take rapists out of the dress-code equation is that rapists will always exist and therefore will always be part of the equation. If there were a legally-enforced dress code, rapists would see themselves as arbiters of justice.
*Grabs net, checks flights to Birmingham International* 🙂
And even that would only demonstrate whether there was a difference between cis women on testosterone and cis women who aren’t.
There’s, as far as I know, no actual way to test if this kind of thing between two different groups. It’s like the old questions “do other people feel pain as strongly as me?” or “do other people see the same colors I see?”
It’s actually one of the fundamental problems of psychology- it’s the basic flaw of every time someone does “brain imaging” and finds something they claim is a particular anomaly.
The truth is that every goddamned one is different. I remember an awesome set of sketches by a surgeon of all the different ways he saw the superior and inferior vena cava meet, join, and go into the heart. There were like dozens of them, many of which looked shockingly different from each other and absolutely nothing like what I remembered from physiology class.
Apply that lesson to the brain, and it’s clear we’ve got a hell of a lot more work to do before we have the slightest idea what’s going on in there.
14.
15
Mornington Crescent?
Mark?
Do you wanna make a dress code
For women to obey?
I think that there’s a problem you
Will run into
When choosing what will stay.
Some’r easily “distracted”
And most are not,
So how will you justify
What you put into your dress code?
Why do you even want a dress code?
*some time passes*
What’s the purpose of your dress code?
What problem does it try to solve?
Is there some major social ill?
“Uncomfortable?”
What does that word involve?
(Seriously, tell me what you mean)
You seem to think politeness
Implies a need for laws,
But you never tell us why!
(play-doh, play-doh, play-doh, play-doh, play-doh)
(Orchestral)
Mark?
Please, I know you’re reading,
We all know you have a brain.
Extreme examples aren’t an argument,
I’m impatient, so please explain!
What’s so gosh-danged important
That women need to
Change what they currently wear?
Do you wanna make a dress code?
I wrote a letter to Mark. I wrote one to him which I shan’t post here unless he posts again.
I will refine it in the meantime, but it basically boils down to “you are an idiot”. ANd I hope it hurts his feelings.
For Alan.
Well, it is useful to consider the fact that other people might have a different experience to us when making decisions on how best to be considerate of their feelings.
@Kirby
I also still think it should be flarp troll since flarp never retains its shape and farts if you push it correctly. Or maybe that can be a different troll?
Also, you’re amazing and should write musicals.
Welp, I said I would:
Dear Mark,
You are one stupid motherfucker.
This is why your grade point average sucks; this is why you’ll never get a job in a field that requires thought and logic, because you lack any.
If I ever met you on the street, I would have to treat you less than a child. I would have to talk down to you, I would have to simplify my every word because that is just how fucking stupid you are.
If I ever met you in public, it would take me every bit of willpower not to slap you just because of how stupid you are. The many violent thoughts in my head about you grow intensely with every word I seen you’ve written. By your own logic, maybe you should stop being so stupid so I don’t have these thoughts, huh?
But you know what, you won’t, because you’re the world’s most stupidest motherfucker who will never get anywhere he wants to in life because you’re so stupid.
You stupid, stupid motherfucker.
Fuck Off Forever,
Pandapool
@ Mark
From your link “Men across all cultures reported higher sex drives and less restricted sexual attitudes than women, but women were consistently more variable than men in their sex drives. Another important, if not entirely surprising pattern, suggests that these differences are not entirely biological, and are due in some part to social and cultural ideologies.”
The question wasn’t whether or not androgens can affect sex drive in individual people (they obviously do), it was whether or not men and women had different sex drives due to their gender alone (implying there was some biological reason for enforcing dress codes on women, to tie it back to the OP). They don’t.
I already said: “The things that make strength of sexual desire vary from person to person do not include gender. It is a separate spectrum (on which asexual is one end).”
Meaning that things can affect sex drive, but gender is not a reliable predictor of sex drive. And sex drive itself is hard to measure. From the article you linked, just to reiterate:
Boo! “Not available in my country” Bad enough you can’t get the raccoons; never mind the bloody videos.
“Everyone’s feelings are different. So to protect people’s feelings, we should make one universal law that applies to everyone.” – Mark logic
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@Pandapool:
😀
Well, I like play-doh a little better still, but to be fair flarp would sound much funnier in the lyrics.
But you never tell us why!
(flarp flarp flarp flarp flarp flarp flarp flarp flarp flarp)
Trying for a “check your privilege” gotcha there Mark?
Mark, why do we need to be considerate of the feelings of rapists?
My gods, kirby, it’s like he read your description of Play Dog trolls and was like:
http://makeameme.org/media/created/Alrighty-Then.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v145/Sephirajo/345fbdd4_Stephen-Colbert-Popcorn_zpsq8glphki.gif
Ahh, Mark, you’re so amusing in the ‘petulant child’ sort of way.