By David Futrelle
There are a lot of guys out there who think that women generally don’t enjoy sex. But it’s rare for guys to say this out loud, because they’re afraid of the obvious retort: “Maybe they just don’t enjoy sex with you!”
But apparently Alyssa Milano’s misguided proposal for a #SexStrike has given more than a few men the nudge they needed to stand up and spout nonsense like this:
Aw yeah, fellow straight dudes, don’t you just love that moment during really great sex when she’s checking her messages and whispering “how much longer is this going to take, jesus fucking christ.”
Oh, but Scott wasn’t the only one telling the women of the world that, actually. they hate sex.
That’s not a sex strike, dude; it’s just a really, really, really long dry spell.
I’m hoping Melvin here isn’t suggesting what I think he’s suggesting, because we already hear too much of that crap from incel forums.
And what a lucky woman his alleged wife must be! (Especially since, according to his recent Twitter timeline, he also believes that Martin Luther King Jr. — MLK — was somehow part of an insidious Jewish plot involving the god Moloch.)
Wait, I thought House of Cards came tumbling down because the dude playing Frank Underwood couldn’t stop sexually assaulting dudes.
Hate to break it to you, dude, but not many women besides Alyssa Milano seem to think a sex strike is a good idea or that it would work.
That sounds … familiar. Do I smell a sockpuppet — or some sort of semi-organized MGTOW propaganda campaign?
In fact, a lot of the guys spouting the “women don’t like sex” line — including Scott, way up at the top — are connected in some way with the Men Going Their Own Way movement, or with the “Red Pill” movement more generally, and, like these last two cut-and-paste tweeters, they’re citing the #SexStrike as proof that women are evil manipulators who use sex to get what they want from men.
Not having sex is violence!?
But it wasn’t just angry MGTOWs and other male regressives who jumped aboard this train; some women used the #SexStrike to push their own backwards notions about feminism and feminists.
The fact that the #SexStrike can be so easily used as “proof” of assorted antifeminist and outright misogynst notions makes pretty clear why so many feminists are opposed to it: not only does it reinforce some pretty toxic ideas about female sexuality; it also just makes no damn sense logistically.
So far nothing I’ve seen captures the absurdity of the idea better than this video, so I’m just going to stop writing here and you can hit play:
NOTE: There was another “as a man I can tell you women hate sex” tweet going around that you may have seen; I’ve left it out of this post because it was evidently from a troll or an impersonator account. All the rest of the tweets I’ve featured seem to be utterly sincere, except of course for Eva’s.
H/T — Thanks to Talia Lavin, who posted screenshots of a couple of these tweets on Twitter.
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Nice of all these wankers to say (in more words than really necessary) that they’re unworthy douchecanoes and deserve nothing but to be avoided forever.
Even Mr. “DMs are closed — I’m married” (surrrrrrre, Jan.)
Did these MGTOW folks just completely forget what their group is supposed to be about? Nobody in the world has less of a leg to stand on criticizing this tactic.
@impudentinfidel – quite.
Also, these MGTOW really think that women and men are different species, don’t they? At least, this Scott person seems to think women are the sort of animals that go into heat in certain seasons, what with his “limited time frames” and “nature’s design.”
Men are bonobos, women are cats??
@David
I emailed this to you as well, but that Scott guy is a MGTOW. Because of course he is.
Of course Snotty Scotty’s a migtoe, because of course.
What’s hilarious is how few of them have yet actually gone the fuck away. And how many of them are basically waving their hands high in the air and screaming for all us yawning women to notice them.
I’ll toast to their self owns for brightening up our afternoons at their expense.
Whenever I sing “My Humps” at karaoke night, everyone boos, which proves that audiences hate singing.
I mean, if I weren’t already asexual and I lived in Georgia at the time that this legislation gets implemented, I would be avoiding PIV sex like the plague. The risk would be too high for me to take on.
I’m not really sure if that would count as a sex strike, but, eh.
The only reason I fantasize about a sex strike is that the people who support these draconian anti-abortion laws keep saying, “If you don’t want to have a baby, keep your legs closed.” I’d just like to see how they’d react if all women obeyed that advice. Or maybe I wouldn’t. We’re close enough to Republic of Gilead as it is.
But yeah, it’s not happening, and would be counterproductive anyway.
It seems she just read “Lysistrara”, ca. 400 BC, in which the dogs of war were defeated by the pussies of peace. But it is a bad idea. Aristophenes, incels, and the sex strikers all seem to agree that sex, for women, is just a commodity to trade for power or influence. With aologies to Aristophenes, who was after all writing satire.
These are the most pathetic, sad, miserable little sacks I’ve ever seen in my life. Jesus Christ up above they need to get a hobby and a life.
Knowing that Scott is a MGTOW somewhat spoils my enjoyment of the self-own, because it’s hard to find those guys funny any more. Though his “sex robots are already on the way” does make me think of him obsessively refreshing a delivery tracking page.
When I once threatened (jokingly) to pull a Lysistrata, my man just rolled his eyes and said “yeah, right…”
When we were recently planning the anniversary of our first date (after which I did not have sex with him) I said “We can go out to dinner and then you CAN come home with me this time, because you live there, too. But we won’t have sex.” He rolled his eyes and said “Yeah, right…”
I’m not very good at sex strikes. I’m the blackleg girlfriend. I’m the scab.
How long have the MGTOWs been threatening to leave now?! Can’t they finally go, already?!
As for sex strike… completely useless. And all kinds of misogynist.
A women’s general strike, however.. THAT would be a hard kick in the pants for everyone because NOTHING would get done.
An enby can dream.
Poor MGTOWs. All they want is to have access to sex with young, beautiful women who will do as they’re told.
Is that too much for a man to ask for?
Apparently so, in this topsy-turvy, mixed-up world.
“Sex robots are already on the way”
?
@ Anonymous
Incels have less a concept of women having sexuality than ancient Greeks, FFS.
One of Aristophanes ongoing jokes in Lysistrata was that the women’s sex strike was constantly in danger of collapsing because the women couldn’t bear to go without sex themselves, and Lysistrata (the women’s leader) kept catching them trying to sneak back to their men.
Doing without sex was portrayed as heroic self sacrifice by the women.
Wow, so much to unpack here. The projection regarding hidden motives (the right always have to hide their power level). The reinforcing of women as sexual gatekeepers. The complete lack of awareness that women being less forward is the result of centuries of demonizing women’s sexuality (sometimes literally, as the “succubus” concept makes clear).
This is a perfect example of how social media’s attention-based market has completely warped our sense of community and activism. There’s rank-and-file unsung heroes working phone lines and stuffing envelopes to get the word out about abortion fundamentalists and pushing back against extreme measures, yet Alyssa Milano well-meaning but patently absurd idea becomes what “feminism” is to everybody on Facebook and Twitter (at least to the laypeople on those networks). It crowds out Planned Parenthood and other activist groups that have a better sense of how to rally people to an important cause.
Reactionaries, shameless as they are, unfortunately have a knack for defining their enemies on their terms. However, I do think that feminists are far ahead of the curve compared to their intersectional compatriots at counter-offensive, as none of these clowns’ brands like “MRA” or “MGTOW” have pierced the mainstream in any positive fashion.
Our theater group has been wanting to stage Lysistrata. Costuming discussions were great, the external representations of genitalia getting bigger and bigger for both men and women as the story moves along. So that by the end, the characters are lugging around these huge things showing just how lack of sex dominated everyone’s agenda! Especially after the menfolk return from a long military engagement and the women are looking forward to everyone cleaning up and enjoying lots of sex.
These men have no idea- but that’s not news.
@Prith kDar
Actually, they think it’s great. After all, we’re finally taking their advice! And it’s not like a lot of those guys are getting laid regularly, anyway, as these tweets show.
So if women supposedly don’t like sex at all, isn’t it kind of wrong to “convince”(!!) them to have sex with you? Aren’t you going against nature? It’s like they really do get off on the idea that they are “taking” something from the women that they don’t really want to give!
The only people a sex strike would hurt are those who are actually having consensual, pleasurable sex. I have a feeling the incels would cheer at the thought of the drought extending to everyone else (especially Chad). The fundiegelicals would be smugly satisfied that women aren’t out slutting around anymore, and the alt-right would be happy to think there’s less incentive for white women to mix it up with immigrants. Maybe it would calm their raging sexual jealousy a little, but it certainly wouldn’t affect their daily lives.
Despite what these guys think, a sex strike isn’t about punishment or manipulation of men. It’s about self-preservation for women. If sex has the very real possibility of a death sentence hanging over it (not hyperbole in a nation that has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world), then women are naturally going to be much more picky and parsimonious about who they sleep with. Our lives depend on it.
There may also be a small element of “if you’re going to take away most of my bodily autonomy, I’m going to exercise what’s left of it, while I can”.
It’s not new, sadly, but seems like it got more extreme, from “they don’t enjoy it as much as men” and “they don’t need to orgasm”, to they only really like it with Chads and top 20% for others it’s a chore and dead beds, to the idea it’s always a chore and a reward, to this follie.
Sure it would be wrong, but I sometimes doubt they really believe this, but sort of get high by believing this, exactly because it would imply rape. Do they seriously believe most women don’t masturbate?
Reporting toxic views from Quora answers. These kinds of answers in quora seems even eerier because its layout appear that much more put together than Yahoo Answers, which makes for a scary contrast when you see people that confident and obtusely confident in the rightess of their assessment.
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-women-want-to-have-sex-as-much-as-men
-scroll at the bottom of the barrel 🙂 –
Despite lots of women stating they have high or at least reasonable sex drives, not to say anyone men or women have to.
Feeds
A fish…
I can well believe they have met many women who do not like having sex… with them.
Is it a bit odd that it didn’t occur to them? Or does that belong to the area of the brain reserved for yelling that all women are having lots of sex all the time with Chad, dammit?
I’m confused.
Adding to othering like “a man is the key the woman is a lock” and it’s a failure from the lock to be opened by many keys to “the man is a fisherman and the woman is a fish” and of course the fish doesn’t know.
We can see how such ways of thinking women assume they are passive object to sex that need to be tricked, but the lock idea also assumes that unlike men, the lock is expected to resist, it’s encouraged. And then they complain women are more careful with sex? ^_^
Because these are the same people validating what they complain about.