By David Futrelle
On Monday, porn star Ron Jeremy was hit with 20 new charges of rape or sexual assault involving 12 women and a teenage girl, on top of the charges he already faced for allegedly raping or assaulting four women.
As plausible as these charges against a man infamous for regularly groping women in public may look to you and me, the charges have been met with everything from skepticism to outright derision by Men’s Rights activists, who rarely run across rape allegations they aren’t ready to dismiss as false.
“It seems like a setup,” wrote one Reddit MRA in response to the original charges announced some two months ago.
[T]he man use to film three to four movies a day, no one would invite a man known as “The Ass Master” over to their house to hang out one on one without expecting sex.
“[H]e works in porn so he will obviously would have boinked some women,” added another Reddit MRA.
It’s like suing someone for groping you because he had to do CPR on you, and accidentally touched you on your breasts.
Well, no, it’s not like that at all.
But the strangest theory about the accusations I’ve run across in the Men’s Rights subreddit came from a fellow called omegaphallic, one of Jeremy’s most vociferous defenders. According to him, the accusations are part of a plot hatched by evil feminists who hate Jeremy because he’s not hot enough for their tastes.
“The Feminists have HATED Ron Jeremy for decades,” omegaphallic declared.
[A]nd the feminists in porn having been gunning for him, they wanted him out of the industry because he isn’t the gorgeous stud they demand out of Male pornstars,
Wait, what? I was not aware that the world’s feminists had a position on the minimum gorgeousness of male porn performers.
[H]e fuck above his Station, has gorgeous woman asking to have their boobs autographed, and yet he looks like your savage overweight working class Joe. So I’m not surprised about these BS accusations against him. They won’t rest until he is ruined.
Meanwhile, over on the Incels.co forums, one commenter has a similar theory.
“Ron Jeremy’s only crime is that he is not a Chad,” a regular commenter called Metabuxx wrote in a post today.
Ron Jeremy isn’t on trial for being a rapist. He’s on trial for having the audacity to fuck many women despite being a subhuman.
MRAs and incels, two sides of the same shitty coin.
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@Naglfar
A chef, on the other hand, might be a fun guest. Or a house cleaner.
Yes, there have been people who have made that argument seriously. The rationale is that, because getting fucked is her job, if you “rape” her, you’re just stealing her services, similar to doing a dine-and-dash, or stiffing a contractor on the bill.
I have legit seen this. And it’s not necessarily limited to sex workers, but also applied occasionally to any woman who has ever already had sex. Only virgins can be raped by this rationale.
@PoM
Do they not know that dine-and-dashing and stiffing bills are also crimes?
I remember the “sex workers can’t be raped” take coming up when a bunch of female porn stars reported being raped by James Deen. A surprising number of supposedly progressive people seem to think this.
I’ve also heard SWERFs push the opposite idea: that all sex with sex workers is rape.
Yes, but they’re not violent crimes, and waiters and contractors usually don’t end up with trauma after being stiffed. That’s the point – it’s not the rape isn’t a crime, it’s that it isn’t a serious crime worth pursuing to any degree. It’s about minimizing rape and making it NBD.
The idea that sex workers can’t be raped is very common. The usual brush-off is that she’s crying rape because the john skipped on the tab. Police especially hold this view.
OT: does anyone know what’s going on over at Freethoughtblogs.com? I’ve been getting instant “504 gateway timed out” messages from Cloudflare all day, and they say it’s the site. Did someone ddos them?
Dunno. There’s no detail given on isitdownrightnow.
Getting the same thing, been reading Crip Dyke’s back catalogue over the last few days. Today – guess not. 🙁
Looks like it’s back now (yay!), but no mention of the downtime or reason for it, yet.
But, but, but that makes no sense! Everyone knows that men age like wine! If Ron Jeremy was conventionally attractive when he was younger, then he obviously now should be at least as attractive as he was then, probably significantly more attractive.
@Catalpa
I know MRAs say that, but I can’t imagine they actually believe it. For one, if one of them started having honest opinions about which men are attractive I guarantee that their fellow MRAs would come down like a ton of homophobic bricks on them. And for two, I can’t think of any men for which this is true. There are good looking older men, yes, but most of them looked better in their youth.
On the other hand, however, it would appear that a significant number of cishet men are into older women, hence the popularity of MILF porn and the archetype in films like American Pie and The Graduate. So maybe the idea of men aging like fine wine is a sort of projection?
I don’t recall Ron Jeremy ever being considered attractive. I remember him being seen as a joke back in the early 80s. The only movie I saw him in, no one would have sex with his character so he performed an act of autofellatio.
@Battering Lamb
I know a few, but they mostly star opposite other men, so I don’t think they’re what the MRAs are looking for.
@Naglfar
I mean, I do think it’s worth questioning if a sex worker whose only option is to engage in sex work or starve can meaningfully give consent, but that’s more of a capitalism issue in general and it applies to basically any other kind of “unskilled” labor as well.
Fun (by which I mean kind of irritating) fact about The Graduate: Anne Bancroft was only 35 when that was filmed, while Dustin Hoffman was 29 and Katherine Ross was 26. So the “older woman” Mrs. Robinson apparently had a child at 9 years old. Or from a different perspective, Elaine (Ross) was in love with a man 3 years older while he was infatuated with a woman 6 years older. Not really much difference there.
bill nighy is a man who aged like fine wine but I admit he is an exception
@Prith kDar
I am aware of that, I was just giving the film as an example of the archetype of the MILF in a non-pornographic context.
@Talonknife
I think in that context it is questionable, but SWERFs say this for all contexts without any input from workers so I don’t think that really validates their idea. A lot of common objections to sex work do seem to be objections to capitalism in general, like how people are forced into many jobs because they have no choice but need to get money. In an ideal world, nobody would be forced into any job they don’t want, be that sex work or any other line of work.
Sex work and other types of work, even menial jobs, are intrinsically different. With sex work one is giving the client access to one’s body, which doesn’t happen for, say, shelf stocking. It’s more intimate, more emotionally dangerous, and just fundamentally different. I think that in a post-scarcity Star Trek world, nobody goes into sex work for funsies, or because it’s better to stay busy and engaged than to sit at home all the time.
@PoM
One of the worldbuilding touches I liked about Killjoys was that sexers (their term for a sex worker) held a status roughly equivalent to hairdressers or massage therapists: people who delivered a personal service according to professional standards.
There was one sexer character who was specifically identified as married, and this wasn’t treated as something unusual. Being a sexer wasn’t super-glamorous, but it wasn’t surrounded with a bunch of taboos.
@VP
I don’t think there should be taboos, per se, but an acknowledgement that sex work is different and not equivalent to being a massage therapist.
Being a sewage worker is different, too – not in the same way as sex work, but it’s a job nobody would go into if they didn’t need the money. Some jobs are not just jobs, but infringements on human dignity, and we all know that in a way because we don’t do them unless we are in a financial bind.
@PoM
I think you’re wrong, and I also think I have a lot more personal knowledge of sex work/workers than you do.
Oh, plenty of sex workers stay home all the time. That’s often no small part of the appeal.
@Vicki P
Bujold’s Beta Colony has Licensed Practical Sexuality Therapists, who do exactly what it says on the tin. They need an Associate’s degree in psychology, plus some specialized courses, and are considered quasi-medical practitioners in the dame category as nutritionists or physical therapists.
@Dalillama
Yep! The Killjoys sexers are the closest I’ve seen in TV SF to the Beta Colony LPSTs. The education wasn’t really touched on, but since the sexers were recurring characters at best, it was irrelevant to the plot. Plus the sexers we saw were working at a bluecollar establishment, so there could’ve been more educated sexers elsewhere in the Quad.
Sounds better than the treatment socialators got in Battlestar Galactica. (The original series – not seen the revamped one, even though it’s supposed to be goodish.)
@PoM
I am aware that sex work and other jobs are different in terms of how they affect people. But it is a job, and people do choose it. Many people are forced into it, and this is obviously wrong, but that is a separate issue than the work itself.
I’m not sure this is true of sewage work either, many people choose jobs others may find unappealing.
@Dalillama
So, similar to IRL sex surrogate therapists?
Plus there’s the issue that if somebody doesn’t do sewer work, you’re going to get cholera epidemics. And trust me, you don’t want to have a cholera epidemic. If you think covid’s bad read up on what that used to be like. If we lived in some sort of socialist utopia devoid of poverty, somebody would still have to clean the sewers.
Maybe there are better ways to incentives people to do the shitty jobs that some’s gotta do, like have popular culture glorify such jobs the way we do for soldiers or doctors or firefighters but yeah
I am not convinced that cleaning sewer is inherently degrading. It don’t seem worse than being a farmer or a construction worker.
I don’t think that all sex work forms are degrading, but what is usually thought as prostitution in the west is. And, of course, quite a number of prostitutes are effectively slaves, which is degrading.
@Naglfar
The Beta Colony LPSTs also served an educational need. There’s one character who is specifically described as having hired an LPST while she was a virgin, taking a course, passing an exam, and thereafter buying the particular pair of earrings that in Betan society signal “yes, I’m sexually active and protected by contraceptive implant, but I’m in a monogamous relationship, so don’t ask me for sex.”
@Ohlmann
I remember reading an article a while ago about a guy who did maintenance on sewage reprocessing plants in Australia which involved diving down into poop tanks to repair valves and stirring things. Pitch black, had to do everything by feel. He was all wrapped up in an industrial dry suit and a fully enclosed helmet so he stayed clean on the inside, and was thoroughly hosed down afterwards before getting dressed.
He described sewage as “brown gold”, because so few people want anything to do with it that the money was pretty good.
Even in the post-scarcity jam-tomorrow future, until robotics and AI get a lot better, there will be unpleasant jobs that need humans to do them. Its just that the nasty jobs will have to offer a lot more to persuade anyone to do them. Wiping asses down at the old folk’s home should be a lot more lucrative than boldly going to alien worlds on a starship… I guess Star Trek et al just forgot to mention that particular detail.