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.
Foo, didn’t embed. Here, have some bat-eared foxes.
http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/27/2796/IM7OD00Z/posters/ariadne-van-zandbergen-bat-eared-fox-pups-octocyon-megalotis-in-their-den-serengeti-national-park-tanzania.jpg
OK… as I have said, I think there are a wide range of dress codes that could be considered reasonable – the current system – banning nudity in almost all public spaces, but with no real general restrictions on the specific type of clothing that we wear, is reasonable. Is that the perfect system? I don’t know. Any social system is always going to have to strike a balance between the preferences of different people, which is exactly why there will always be a range of reasonable options. I can certainly imagine that a system in which people showed less flesh might be less distracting – personally I don’t want to be tempted to look at people I don’t know and am not interested in. It’s an inconvenience – and I don’t see why such a system would be categorically different to the one we have now.
I think that a system that allowed *more nudity* would probably be reasonable – though it wouldn’t be one that I would prefer.
Now your turn. Why do you think a slightly more conservative dress code would be so utterly appalling?
Maybe we should have a code-word that acts as a Do-Not-Feed signal to all regulars, so that after the code-word has been posted, everyone must only post number ninja or cute animal pictures until the troll starves and wanders off.
Good idea, or just too impractical?
Define conservative dress.
Ooh, Mark’s actually resorted to answering some questions and defining some terms, in an attempt to tempt us back into paying attention to him again…
Nice try, Mark. We already decided that dress codes are a bad idea, and why. And we’ve told you repeatedly, along with “FUCK OFF”.
@AltoFronto
Well, you can’t actually stop people from feeding trolls, and a troll that one person might find entertaining, another person might find tedious. I don’t know how anyone finds Mark entertaining, since he’s a broken record, but I’m not going to judge.
Your dress code is awful because you are demanding I give up my freedom to please YOU and the OP rapist. Obviously the majority of people don’t agree with you or that dress code would already exist. Fuck off Mark, you don’t give a shit about the thoughts and feelings of the women you want to control.
@Mark:
It is not reasonable to expect another person to make a drastic change in their life-styles because you personally don’t want to be “inconvenienced.” This is especially true when your “inconvenience” is not wanting to be “tempted” to look at people.
Do you understand this Humanity 101-level fact?
In fact, such a notion is appallingly self-centered, and has a long history of being used to justify the subjugation of women. Even more appalling when you consider that you think that even more permissive social dress standards would be “reasonable;” your “inconvenience” must be pretty damn small, and yet you’re trying to use it to justify a major imposition on others.
Done. Explain why it’s reasonable for women to change their modes of dress specifically because you personally don’t want them to draw your eye if you aren’t interested in them.
@ PoM
I’m mildly amused watching him fail like a dog running repeatedly into a screen door, but I don’t personally want to engage him on this bloody tedious discussion, and I think it’s a matter of principle that he shouldn’t get to maintain control of this comment section.
Post “Aye”, whoever wants Mark to stick around for more and is willing to be the one to engage with him.
We feed them till they burst. I expect David will either ban or put him on moderation once he gets online.
Personally, it’s a slow day at work and I’m bored. So I’m engaging him.
I’m willing to engage him. What can I say, I’m a glutton for punishment. But I’m not super invested in it.
I’m just glad he finally admitted to the jaw-dropping-astoundingly poor rationale for his dress code bullshit.
Because of that whole “freedom” thing. You know, that principle our country was founded upon? Women in short skirts neither pick my pocket nor break my leg.
Why would you be tempted by people you’re not interested in?
Because women aren’t really people to Mark, with rights and stuff. He admitted that pages and pages of comments ago.
I vote we spam the post with goatses and every post with goatse for the rest of our lives.
If that doesn’t work, we’ll take it up a notch and put up Sonic fan art.
No, no goatses.
I can’t get over this. “I don’t want to see people I’m not attracted to, so they should make themselves less noticeable. It’s inconvenient for my brain to have to process the light reflected off them into my eyeballs, so they should change themselves.”
Like… How can anyone possibly think this seriously? What… What mindset is this?
@katz – so why can’t everyone walk around in the nip?
@weirwoodtreehugger
Sometimes, there is a stimulus that you are not especially interested, might even find irritating, but that is difficult to ignore. That is how I feel.
How about you just outfit yourself in a pair of blinders, Mark? Much more efficient than making other people change their clothes.
@PoM
Joke, dear, joke, which is why I said to step it up a notch with Sonic fan art because both things are equally horrible.
@kirbywarp
It isn’t a massive inconvenience any more than it is a massive inconvenience for people in our society to put pants on before they go out of the house.
Because they’d be cold/get sunburned?
I, for one, would not care if everyone was allowed to walk around naked. It would not harm me any.
Mark:
Why again is that the problem of the person you find difficult to ignore?
“I don’t want to see people I’m not attracted to, so they should make themselves less noticeable.”
I don’t think that is unreasonable – I live in a city – I want to be able to ignore the people I don’t know.
If you weren’t interested you wouldn’t be tempted; by definition.
[I vote ‘Aye’ btw, as there may be more raccoon pics]