The idea that women regularly use their sexual wiles to gain control over men has long been central to the Men’s Rights Movement.
In the seminal MRA tome The Myth of Male Power, Warren Farrell famously declared that secretaries have “miniskirt power, cleavage power and flirtation power” over their male bosses; the latest edition of his book features a shapely female posterior on the cover, sans clothing, to illustrate what he sees as the immense power women can exert over men with, well, their butts.
In the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, one Reddit MGTOW takes Farrell’s argument one sickening step further, seeming to suggest that women use this sexy power of theirs to “intice” [sic] men to, well, rape them.
As High-Fruit-Trinity sees it, women have
used men’s nature against them.
They called men pigs & date-rapists. But they were the CAUSE
Of male piggishness and … rape?
They have entire industries just for women to be more beautiful, inticing and sexy. They’re taught everything about manipulating men. Men aren’t taught anything.
Women got away with this because they are the perceived victims, and you shouldn’t blame the victim. So who do you blame?
I dunno, dude, when a man acts like a pig to women, I blame him. When a man rapes a woman, I blame him. Who do you blame, Mr. High-Fruit-Trinity? Do you actually see rape survivors as the real “CAUSE” of rape, and the rapists themselves as the victims?
Apparently so. In a followup comment in the thread, High-Fruit-Trinity approvingly quotes a comment from a Washington Post reader about a famous political sex scandal.
“let’s acknowledge that women also play a role in soliciting sexual attention. Think about John Edwards and Rielle Hunter and how all the blame is focused on Edwards. She could easily cry “sexual harrassment!” as a causative factor; why isn’t a charge of “sexual enticement” just as accurately applied to the situation? “
It’s a bizarre question to ask about Edwards and Hunter, given that no one was accusing Edwards of sexually harassing her; the two had a consensual affair. But MRAs and MGTOWs seem to have some trouble understanding the difference between sexual harassment and mutual sexual attraction, as well as between consensual sex and rape.
In any case, the logic here is pretty clear: in High-Fruit-Trinity’s mind, whenever a man harasses or rapes or does anything sexual to a woman that she doesn’t consent to, it’s her fault, not his, because she must have “enticed” him into doing it.
Basically, this is blame-the-victim on steroids. And yet another reason so many people wish that the so-called Men Going Their Own Way would indeed go wherever it is they are allegedly going, the further away from the rest of us the better.
I remember when you could get a pint in London for under £3. I must be getting old.
@John Galt (If he’s still reading)
Thanks for the comment – I’m very impressed by the high road you took.
In answer to your question, I work in secondary education in the UK; I do some teaching (Key Stage 3 Humanities, so History, Geography and Religious Education), but I also cover a lot of other people’s lessons so I pretty much teach everything.
I also work with our school’s safeguarding officer, dealing with vulnerable children – victims of abuse, children who are being groomed, self harmers, children living in extreme poverty – and believe me when I tell you that the stories I’ve heard would keep YOU awake at night, because they do me.
I’m in a rare position that I actually live in the same area as some of the most vulnerable children, and have witnessed first hand the problems they have had – problems that have, more often than not, been inflicted on them by men with attitudes very similar to those the MGTOW mindset seeks to defend.
Not to brag, but I also volunteer with a local homelessness charity. I have the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service, which is a pretty little badge and that’s about it.
I’ve answered your question as fully as I can in this venue, I think – if you’re still reading, would you be kind enough to answer the question Alan Robertshaw has asked you a couple of times, and set out the details of what you are actually doing.
(Re Testicles, by the way – last week’s caving trip would have been considerably easier without them!)
@EJ
I was in Stoke recently to go down a drain, and I found a pub that did a pint for £2.50. I nearly cried.
On the other hand, I went on a trip to Reykjavik in the 90s, and had a pint that cost over £7.00. I nearly died!
I remember soap operas on the radio. And nickel candy bars. And open-hearth steel mills — the flames were especially visible at night.
Our cellophane Christmas wreaths finally fell apart, and inside them were Japanese newspapers — from the time immediately after World War II when Japan was rebuilding its economy.
My boyfriend (barely) remembers rag men — men selling (or was it buying?) rags. They had a horse and a wagon. In the USA!
@DanHolme
Very well done. It’s not fair, but it’s because of you and people like you that the rest of us can get some sleep. I’m grateful.
@Kat
Very kind of you to say.
I hope it didn’t come across as self-aggrandisement, that wasn’t the intention. I am one small part of a huge team of very different people who came in to teaching for a lot of different reasons, and who take on pastoral roles that they probably never imagined they were going to have to do. It’s a genuine privilege to be able to work with such amazing people.
Our head of safeguarding is also a very dedicated geography teacher and she’s working from dawn to dusk and beyond to help children with complex needs; I’m just happy to be able to help.
I wish I could say that I am surprised when you claim to have worked there, and with abuse victims, and not find abuse by female perps significant enough to mention.
But having known too many boys who went to those places for help, and girls who learned not to mention what their moms did to them, I know that it takes a sort of fanatical blindness and cognitive dissonance to work in those systems. After all, rocking the boat and talking about the things that you aren’t supposed to notice, could get you kicked out. Better to let a few boys here and there go unserved, and fall through the cracks, than question anyone’s world view and rattle their cages.
I’m not saying that you’re not a good man. On the contrary, centuries before feminism ever reared its head, a good man was expected to put females first, and boys last. If a woman’s beating the shit out of a boy, then by golly he must have asked for it. And if she’s molesting him, well then he’s just a lucky chap, and should shut up about his good fortune, eh?
If the MGTOW actually said that, that’s ghastly. On the bright side, no one’s brought forth an example of any actual rapist in MGTOW, let alone in its leadership or on its speaker list. To bad the Woman’s march on Washington could not make the same boast, featuring a speaker who had helped with the rape and murder of a gay man. She told the interviewer that she’d never been in the bed with the prisoner until they murdered him, but DNA told a different story …
@Petra Pumpkinhead
Look up Roosh V.
Does anyone know why my comments with links in them don’t appear?
@Petra
Let me clarify, by volunteering I simply mean that I work in the charity shop to earn money for the organisation. I sort old clothes, I work on the till, I hoover the shop at the end of the day. Not glamorous, but important in its own way.
If I read you correctly – and you’re not making that easy, by the way – you think I am glossing over abuse by women. I’m not; it happens. It is, in my own limited experience, much, much rarer than abuse by men. It is not just sexual abuse that I am referring to, but physical and emotional abuse as well. But it is overwhelmingly men who are involved.
I will not be going into any specifics here, it would be unprofessional, inappropriate, and illegal. However, if you want to see how we deal with safeguarding issues, without prejudice, I will find the web addresses for the last few mandatory online courses that I did and you can go to them for yourself and see how organisations like ours are supposed to handle disclosures, abuse allegations, etc.
Dan, Thank you for clarifying and thank you for the work you do. If you don’t work with victims directly, then it’s not your fault if you just believe what you’re told. You aren’t part of the problem.
To avoid divulging confidences, let’s stick to stories reported in the press (which do NOT represent the number of male abuse vics but do demonstrate the nature of the man-eating system. (Liars will pretend that “man-eater” is a slur on women, even though the judges I am about to shame are male and I am not imputing systemic fault to any woman).
In the infamous 2006 Nix strip search case, a mentally retarded male and an 18 year old female were coerced by someone impersonating a police officer to engage in oral sex together. Unable to convict the police impersonator, the court decided to charge and convict the retarded male victim of raping the female. Also of “false imprisonment” even though he had neither removed her clothing nor done anything else to keep her from leaving the room.
In recent US college campus cases where intoxicated students have had sex, males have been charged and expelled for rape, even though text messages and witnesses agreed and testified that both parties were equally intoxicated and equally consenting. The logic goes: you can be too intoxicated to consent, but you can’t be too intoxicated to rape. In at least one case, the woman indicated that she’d gone to the school counselor distressed of having lost her virginity and not remembering it, and that the counselor browbeat her into believing that it was rape (despite the chain of text evidence) and into supporting a rape charge.
I’m not making an anti-woman argument nor an anti-feminist argument. Simply suggesting that men are people too, and that the women and men who try to bring these things to light, shouldn’t be silenced by people who claim to be about feminism and equality.
I don’t know how things are across the pond, Dan, but here in the USA, centers for women and children in crisis have the same policy towards male victims of age 12 and up that is employed by male polygamist cult leaders. Cut the boys off from the family and toss them out in the cold as potential threats. God bless America. And the band played on. That’s part of the story that some of our friends here are laboring so fiercely to suppress.
Dan, I just noticed that something I said was “mawderated”, so want to clarify that I thanked you for clarifying, and for the good work you do. And I apologized for my err in implying that you were part of the problem. Cheers
Ah, I think I figured out why my post got chomped. To restate part:
In the infamous 2006 Nix strip search case, a [sub-70 IQ] male and an 18 year old female were coerced by someone impersonating a police officer to engage in oral sex together. Unable to convict the police impersonator, the court decided to charge and convict the [sub-70 IQ] male victim of raping the female. Also of “false imprisonment” even though he had neither removed her clothing nor done anything else to keep her from leaving the room.
Given the way that most Americans misuse the term which correctly refers to persons with a low IQ (and having a son who falls into that medical category), I can appreciate why someone would put that word on the no-fly-list.
In recent US college campus cases where intoxicated students have had sex, males have been charged and expelled for rape, even though text messages and witnesses agreed and testified that both parties were equally intoxicated and equally consenting. The logic goes: you can be too intoxicated to consent, but you can’t be too intoxicated to rape. In at least one case, the woman indicated that she’d gone to the school counselor distressed of having lost her virginity and not remembering it, and that the counselor browbeat her into believing that it was rape (despite the chain of text evidence) and into supporting a rape charge.
I’m not making an anti-woman argument nor an anti-feminist argument. Simply suggesting that men are people too, and that the women and men who try to bring these things to light, shouldn’t be silenced by people who claim to be about feminism and equality.
Hi Petra.
I’ll preempt this by saying that I’m male; and while I’m fortunate that I’ve never been raped or assaulted, I have been subject to sexual harassment and stalking by an ex. As such, I fall into your category of cishet men abused by cishet women. I certainly haven’t suffered as much as some other people in that category, but then it’s not a competition.
If you want to talk about people in that category, then you’re talking about me. I’m happy to be your real-life example here.
I’m unhappy with the way you’ve portrayed me. I’ll explain why, and then perhaps you’ll understand why I have no choice but to conclude this post with the words “fuck you, you whataboutthemenzing piece of shit.”
In my experience, when someone says “you keep mentioning A, but what about B?” then they have one of two intentions behind it:
1. They believe that a conversation should take place about both A and B.
2. They want to silence any discussion of A.
The way to tell the difference between the two is to ask whether that person has worked on B outside of this conversation. If they have, then they evidently care about it and so are probably interested in helping a joint conversation about both A and B to exist. If they haven’t, then they are probably just interested in silencing A.
In the specific example of abuse, I’ve observed that the people who genuinely care about preventing the abuse of men by women – that is, of preventing cases like mine – are always very happy to help protect women too. They almost never interrupt conversations by asking “what about the men”; instead they’ll either listen quietly, or else join in. There’s no attempt at comparison and no attempt to introduce some faux-equilibrium. They try to reduce the amount of genuine human suffering in the world.
By contrast, people who talk about such abuse only when they can use it to interrupt other conversations usually don’t actually care about doing much to stop it. If they do care about it, it’s usually limited to being able to use it as ammunition against someone else. When I talk to them, their response is almost never “dude, I’m sorry, that sounds awful”, and is often along the lines of “See? Those women are terrible!” They introduce comparisons immediately, and attempt to use genuine human suffering to discredit other genuine human suffering.
From your behaviour this far, you seem to fall strongly into the latter category. I’m disappointed by this. It makes me suspect that you see me not as someone to be helped, but only as a footsoldier in your ideological conflict. I especially dislike having unpleasant events in my life trivialised in this manner. You may not know me, not yet, but I hope you can see why I hold this position.
Therefore, I hope you understand why my response to you is as follows:
Fuck you, you whataboutthemenzing piece of shit.
@Petra Pumpkinhead
More baseless bullshit.
In your dreams
The topic of this forum and of the OP, is men’s issues.
Per the comment policy:
If you cannot cope with open discussion of men being victims of rape, of people like you who cover it up, shame and silence those who discuss it, then I cannot stop you from crawling off to a safe space where you can happily sing:
“She can fuck a young boy and still get child support.
She can ro hypnol his drink and it’s still isn’t rape.
break a nail on his face, and then call the police,
she can fuck him at gunpoint; she’s still always the victim to me”
@Petra Pumpkinhead
Do you have ANYTHING to back that up or are you just regurgitating what you’ve been told?
There’s a big problem with leaping from “some male abuse victims are not helped by the system and in fact some of them are further hurt by it” to “therefore feminism is bad and feminists hate men.”
Actually several problems.
First Petra, you have not shown that the system as a whole is feminist. Second, you have not shown that feminists go out of their way to exclude male victims.
The third one is the biggie. You’ve neglected to mention that there are also a lot of female victims that have been ignored or further abused by the system. Most rape or abuse victims I’ve ever talked to didn’t see justice. The legal system is more geared towards protecting the wealthy and reinforcing white supremacy than with justice. The organizations that do actually help are underfunded and understaffed. So no, the system isn’t feminist. If it were, victims of any gender would actually be helped way more often.
Is Toysoldier known to sock? Because Petra’s particular brand of disingenuous wanking is pretty much identical to his.
That’s my experience as well.
Absolutely agreed. Are you pretending that this is a conversation exclusively about abuse of women, and that I’ve “interrupted” it to say what about the men?”
Seems to me that you and others are the ones who are jumping on groups who are talking about systemic abuse of men and boys (most of which does NOT originate in feminism), and saying whataboutthewomen.
I’m willing to bet that I’ve done more victim advocacy for women than you have. Spoken at take back the night, volunteered at a woman’s shelter. I can’t help men, but I think those that do deserve more of a hand up. If you’re honestly seeing the things you’re projecting onto me, then I suspect you’ve suffered more abuse than the stalking incident and that what you’re projecting onto me is your Stockholm syndrome talking.
Well that’s quite a fucking reach.
Agreed. There’s even a bigger problem when you project that bullshit onto me. I said no such thing and have explicitly denied it. If you leap from “destroying boys’ lives is bad” and “polygamist cult leaders who kick boys to the curb are bad” to “feminism is bad,” that’s your leap of logic, not mine. In my corner of the universe, polygamist cult leaders aren’t feminists. And I think it’s a sad thing that people who think they are feminists are basically enabling that kind of boy-eating system.
I Googled help for male sexual abuse victims and got a whole page of results
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-hms-tmobile-us&source=android-browser&ei=7F8UWe-vPKH-jwTvybXYAQ&q=help+for+male+victims+of+sexual+abuse&oq=help+for+male+victims+of+sexual+abuse&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp.3..0i30k1.4767.9424.0.10144.18.17.1.0.0.0.200.2318.0j15j1.16.0….0…1c.1j4.64.mobile-gws-serp..4.9.1239…0j35i39k1j0i7i30k1.q1iWnWpAPZw
It’s pretty easy to debunk the claim that there’s no help available for male victims.
@ Petra
Is this another Richard Parker thing? Because really that was down to hungry sailors rather than feminists.
Are these the same polygamist cult leaders that have been wiretapping Trump with the help of millions of illegal immigrants?