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.
Play DOH not dog. Egads.
Hey Mark maybe you should consider the feelings of women whose freedom you want to take away with your draconian dress code. Oh wait the pantz feelz of men are FAR more important to Mark.
Sorry, Alan! Here is a mirror. Maybe this one will work.
@fromafar2013
Ummm…
“What you really need is a lot of studies. Baumeister and crew combed through over 150 of them for their review. Let’s look at some of what they found. Men want it more, succumb to it more, and pay more money for it. Most studies suggest that lustful tendencies — including spontaneous sexual thoughts, uncontrolled or unwanted thoughts and spontaneous physical arousal — are a lot more common in men than in women.”
Fuck off Mark, we’re tired of listening to a fuckwit who cares more about the feelings of men than the freedom of women.
@snuffy
I dunno, I’ve worn baggy t-shirts before and it wasn’t much of an imposition to be honest.
Reason #1 Mark Will Never Be A Scientist:
He’s too stupid.
You did that by fucking choice. You are trying to take away MY choice to dress how I want.
@isidore
We shouldn’t.
Wear whatever the fuck you want Mark, don’t try to take away my freedom because you think your feelings are more important. Fuck off.
I wasn’t allowed to wear my mankini.
Thanks Katz
Didn’t work either but found on [popular vid sharing site]. Unfortunately links to lots of other raccoon vids. Got a horribly feeling I might be at a board meeting on Monday making excuses as to why certain vital task haven’t been done!
Then why do you keep saying we should?!
Reason #2 Mark Will Never Be a Scientist or a Lawyer or a Mathematician or a Chemist or a NASA Employee or a Computer Engineer or a Programer or a Teacher or a Principal:
He’s too stupid and lacks logic.
From “other people might have a different experience” to “my experience obviously applies to everyone” in 13 minutes.
Mark that’s because of drunken conduct, not because of your feelz (which is literally to ONLY justification you have for trying to take away my freedom).
Reason #3 Mark Will Never be What He Wants to be When He Grows Up
He’s an idiot who wastes his time on forums being an idiot and lacking logic of any kind.
Mark, when you walk around in this great big world of ours, do you find that you are personally inconvenienced in some major way? If so, explain that personal experience.
If not, then do you have a particular (and specific) group of men in mind who’s plight in this clothed world you happen to be an expert on through second-hand knowledge? If so, explain that.
If not, then realize that you are taking a hypothetical problem that you believe might be an issue for men and arguing strongly that this potential issue would justify a huge imposition on the freedom of choice of women. This would be why you are having so much trouble justifying your ephemeral beliefs, because they have no real foundation beyond some vague feeling that it must be right.
So snuffy, are you saying that you should have the right to wear whatever you like in public no matter how anyone else might feel about it?
Mark you keep saying we should be considerate of others, but you won’t be considerate of the feelings of women whose freedom you want to take away.
Reason #4 Mark Doesn’t Understand Why People Back Away from Him Slowly When He Begins Talking:
He’s so obtuse he makes 240 degree angles feel acute.
Reason #5 Mark Doesn’t Understand the Joke Above
He’s stupid.
Yes, current standards of dress are fucking fine the way they are. There is no fucking reason I should have to sacrifice my personal freedom because of your feelings. Stop prioritizing your feelz over my freedom.
I hope for Mark’s sake that he’s fucking with us at this point. ‘Cause if this is serious, it is sad, sad, sad.
17
@ Mark
You are trying to interpret the data in a way that the research does not support. The article you linked to even says this. You can’t rule out the effect of socialization and the huge variability within genders and still insist that the affect is due to biology alone. The research that says that men experience uncontrolled or unwanted thoughts than women are based on self reports, which have the confounding variables of socialization. Men could be lying and saying they have more, women could be lying to say they have less, because this is the cultural expectation they have. THE RESEARCHERS SAID THAT.
Are you really this dense, or are you just doing this for fun?
Mark, you’ve made the same damn point over and over for about …. 6 pages of comments?
You’re not going to win us over into agreeing with you. You’re not going to recuperate any lost reputation, or redress some kind of fundamental misapprehension on our part as to your character. You’re not even having fun.
Go away and join a monastery if you want to be around people who only dress modestly.
Stop fucking arguing the same tired point after we’ve all roundly disagreed with you and told you to fuck the fucking fuck off!