By David Futrelle
I‘ve got a piece up on Broadly today on how Jordan Peterson and Ross Douhat’s recent discussions of “enforced monogamy” and the “redistribution of sex” are helping to mainstream toxic ideas that have long been a staple of the manosphere.
Here’s a snippet:
You can’t solve the problem of aggrieved male entitlement by engineering some weird and at least semi-coercive program of “enforced monogamy” built on the assumption that men inherently deserve some sort of access to women’s bodies—regardless of what the women inhabiting these bodies want. You can’t rid the world of violence born of aggrieved male entitlement with a “solution” that reinforces that sense of entitlement.
No, the only solution is to challenge that entitlement directly.
You can read the whole thing (and it’s a long one) here.
Another fantastic article, David.
@Pie
The platonic ideal of conservatism is reactionary authoritarianism.
Oh, that’s definitely what Douchehat was doing. But the analogy fails because women are human beings, money is a thing. The objectionable part of sex redistribution is not the redistribution part, but the sex part, the violating someone’s bodily autonomy part.
The fact that he and other conservatives believe redistributing access to women’s bodies is in any way comparable to taxation or welfare was meant to gotcha progressives, but it wound up being an own goal because it reveals that they really do not think women are fully human and deserving of rights. This would be the real reason that they are anti-choice. It’s also clear that mainstream conservatives are practically indistinguishable from the manosphere with their belief that paying child support or alimony is ‘divorce rape’ but actual rape is not rape.
@WWTH Douthat’s analogy fails even further when you consider that sex is an activity, not a thing. How do you commodify a verb? It’s like proposing to redistribute skating. Not everyone enjoys skating, not everyone has the same amount of expertise, some people are more into curling, and some people don’t want to participate at all.
I just looked at the weather forecast. It’s going to be 99 degrees on Monday. In May. In Minnesota. Last month there was a winter storm that dumped a foot of snow on the ground. Now this.
@BQS
Not only that but he gets offended if you point out that he’s necessarily advocating for the redistribution of people. In your comparison it would be like getting upset when someone points out that if you want to redistribute skating, you have to first redistribute skates. Especially if the problem you’re attempting to “solve” is that not everyone wants to have to put in the time and energy to buy their own skates in the first place.
The idea that the way to cut down on incel violence is to provide them with sex is crazy talk. But it’s on exactly the same plane as saying the way to cut down on other crime is to restructure the world so people no longer feel the need to commit crime.
Let me be absolutely clear. BOTH are crackpot notions. On the one hand you have writers who think the solution is to give every incel a concubine. On the other you have social theorists who think the solution is to give every other kind of criminal a concierge.
So I was positively thrilled to see the word “entitlement” turn up so often in David’s piece. Because that’s just what it is: somebody has it better than I do, so I’m entitled to lash out in frustration. I’m entitled to take what I want, when I want it. Just like Arthur Chu’s excellent piece in the wake of the Elliott Rodger killings: https://www.thedailybeast.com/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds-1
weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee:
May 26, 2018 at 12:38 pm
“I just looked at the weather forecast. It’s going to be 99 degrees on Monday. In May. In Minnesota. Last month there was a winter storm that dumped a foot of snow on the ground. Now this.”
International Falls, Minnesota had a nationwide high of 99 on June 18, 1995. No, you are not hallucinating. THAT International Falls. It had the nationwide low of -39 on December 12, 1995. Six months later. On any given Sunday, any NFL team can beat any other, and on any given summer day, any spot in the continental United States can have the nationwide high.
It’s 91 at my home now in Green Bay. On April 15 we got two feet of snow, our all time record April snowfall.
…
The AMA Peterson did on Reddit was a real Rorschach test. His fanboys thought it was a triumph of the will, everyone else that it was a grotesque farce.
[citation desperately needed]
@Steven Dutch
http://i.imgur.com/SwUDPx4.jpg
(How does this one of his socks keep evading the banhammer?)
This isn’t Mark; Steven Dutch has been making an ass of himself on a bunch of blogs for years under this name.
I’ve seen the name Steve Dutch on other sites, never interacting with anyone else, either. On one of the other sites I saw this name on, he said he had been a professor. I wonder if this is the same guy?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Steven_Dutch
Sounds a fair bit like what I recall of him from over on FtB
Was he the one who was dispensing boner notes about how he doesn’t like huge boobs? Or was that someone else.
Whatever.
I just got back from a lovely birthday dinner with my two besties. We had Vietnamese food and then went to a wine bar that had flights, including one with 4 different champagnes. I love champagne, so I was a very happy woman. Especially since we also got a cheese plate for dessert. Good times.
@Steven Dutch
Did you just crawl out of the woodwork to conjure up a ridiculous “both sides” argument? Which even if it were true, still neglects that fact that one of the sides is advocating for enforced sexual slavery?
Mediocre trolling. Nul points.
Got the chance to read the article at last – it’s excellent (oh, if only it were baseless! How much better societies would be for everyone in them, if this kind of entitlement weren’t being constantly generated and encouraged by the omnipresent patriarchal background noise plus ideologues (both inside and outside religions)).
Thank you David.
weirwoodtreehugger:
So basically Minnesota is turning into Oklahoma? I’m…sorry. Huge temperature swings, random weather, and very hot summers are normal here but my state hasn’t had a proper spring (or fall) in over 3 years. Summer is eating it all (and winter’s been mild; didn’t even have an ice storm this time) and we’re in a persistent, creeping drought.
This just in–
The 30-year-old man-child in New York whose parents had to go to court to get him to move, has asked the court for an extension because he CAN’T AFFORD PACKING BOXES. Anyone around Syracuse who has some old boxes can probably drop them off to the gratitude of his parents.
But it turns out he has an eight year old son. He’s nothing to look at and morally and ethically he’s a raging dumpster fire, and yet he still got someone to have sex with him. Has the bar for procreation ever been lower? It would be fascinating to know why he and the mother broke up. I’ll wager it was a heart-wrenching saga of female oppression. “She got sick and I had to take out the garbage THREE DAYS IN A ROW!”
Oh, and Pie, I’m not saying there’s anything legitimate about “redistributing sex.” Exactly the opposite. I’m saying that redistributing anything else that belongs to someone else is equally reprehensible.
Ah, so taxation is exactly morally equivalent to state-enforced mass rape. Cool, cool, good to know where you stand on these things.
It sure feels like it today. The humidity hadn’t been super high until today. 11 AM and it’s already oppressively hot and humid and it isn’t even June yet. I was just reading that MN averages 13 days above 90 per year and we’ve already gotten halfway to that number before even getting to the hottest time of year yet. I think we’re either in drought or close to it right now too. The large amount of snow melt made the water levels in the creek by my place really high until the last couple of weeks it’s receded drastically and looks lower than normal now.
No. Because there’s never been a bar for procreation. That’s not a thing.
No, taking FICA from someone’s paycheck is not equivalent to sexual slavery. Why is this something that has to be explained to so many men. I never again want to hear men complain about women being afraid to trust men they don’t know super well. This, guys? This kind of shit is why Schrodinger’s rapist resonated with so many women.
Seriously. Why is so damn hard to understand that women are sapient beings? Not like cars or money or wallets or flowers or sides of beef or keyholes or chewing gum or works of art or whatever the fuck else men like to use as analogies for us.
I wonder who Steven thinks that the “redistributed” sex “belongs” to. Is it the women, or is it the men who women actually want to have sex with? Personally, I suspect it is the latter. You don’t consider whether or not money “wants” to belong to Bill Gates or be used for welfare payments. It’s just an object, a means to an end, it doesn’t have feelings. Same thing with women for Steven, I bet.
Taxes are the equivalent of rent. You can imagine how much the “Taxes are theft!” crowd would howl if you decided you could stay on their property without paying rent.
The argument that “redistribution of sex is morally equivalent to redistrbution of money” argument makes more sense when you remember that to a libertarian, the ONLY real rights are property rights, which are “natural,” and all other rights are derived from those. Those rights that cannot be derived from property rights are totally made up and not real.
To this mindset, the only crimes are property crimes, and murder is in fact a property crime because it destroys someone else’s property (their body). Similarly, taxation and slavery are both “theft” because they involve taking away the product of someone’s labors, which is “naturally” their property. (This, of course, deliberately ignores how civilizations work in favor of how civilizations are “supposed” to work.)
So from this view, sex is just another activity like work, and forcing someone to have sex without consenting to it is no different than taxing someone’s earnings without their consent. (But only when the government does it. When a business does it, it is okay somehow.)
It is, obviously, an enormous expression of privilege to believe that having part of your earnings taken to buy civilization is exactly the same as being raped, but we are talking about libertarians here. They tend to be the sort of people who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.